From a Cancelled Meeting with President Zelenskyy to Co-Founding reSTATE

The train to Kyiv stopped in the middle of the night. A missile attack had shut down the line ahead of us, so we waited in the dark until it was safe to move again. That same week, a drone strike just outside the city killed a journalist and her husband in their own home. Before the trip, friends told me: “We know you’re going to see history. Just don’t become history.”

This is the story of how a gamification designer from Taipei ended up on that train, and why I co-founded the non-profit reSTATE to help rebuild Ukraine.

Speed Run Notes

• In 2021, President Zelenskyy’s circle invited me to Kyiv to explore making Actionable Gamification required reading in Ukraine’s schools. Omicron delayed the meeting. The invasion cancelled it.
• The mission came back bigger: I co-founded reSTATE, a Ukrainian non-profit, with Igor Novikov, Salim Ismail, and David Traub to apply behavioral design to national reconstruction.
• What Ukraine faces today, the world faces tomorrow: attacked energy grids, drone warfare, mass displacement, disinformation. Solutions piloted there will matter everywhere.
• reSTATE’s current focus: airport and port security, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recovery at national scale, restoring structures and businesses, and upskilling the population.
• Rebuilding is a motivation problem before it is a money problem: citizens deciding to return, veterans needing new missions, partners deciding to invest. That is behavioral design territory.

Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou created the Nationcraft Framework, applying behavioral design to the hardest motivational problem there is — getting an entire population to move through structural reform without losing momentum. As of 2026, the framework has informed advisory work with eight governments: Taiwan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Bahrain, South Korea, Singapore, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The same 8 Core Drives that have driven design at Microsoft, Porsche, and MrBeast now anchor nation-scale reform sequencing — diagnosing where motivation is broken, which Core Drives to lean into for each phase of reform, and how to sequence the political asks so the public stays bought in.

Published Nationcraft analyses include diagnostic playbooks for Venezuela’s post-Maduro reform window and Thailand’s reset-vs-cycle election dynamics, alongside cabinet-level advisory work on post-conflict recovery, reform-sequencing, and public-policy gamification. Chou also teaches the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Google, BCG, and IDEO — institutions where the human-systems lens applies whether the system is a product, a company, or a country.

His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.

A fan in the President’s circle

It started in 2021 with Igor Novikov. Igor ran the Kyiv chapter of Singularity University and later served as advisor to President Zelenskyy, handling Ukraine’s relations with the United States. Before any of that, he was a mentor to Zelenskyy from the Singularity University Ukraine community, back when the future president was still an entertainer building a media company. Their relationship was personal and one-on-one, from years before the presidency was even an idea.

Igor had become a fan of my work and the Octalysis Framework. And he reached out with one of the most surprising invitations of my life: come to Kyiv, meet President Zelenskyy, and explore making Actionable Gamification required reading in Ukraine’s school system.

Spend any time with Igor and you notice the range of rooms he gets pulled into: presidential delegations one week, curious Hollywood stars the next.

The reasoning behind the invitation stuck with me. “Ukraine is the second largest software country in the world by headcount,” Igor told me. Hundreds of thousands of engineers. But almost all of that talent went into outsourced work: building other people’s products, executing other people’s visions. Very little original intellectual property came out of Ukraine itself. Igor and his colleagues believed that if a generation of Ukrainians learned behavioral design and gamification, they could create original products that captivate worldwide audiences, instead of just coding them for someone else.

For me, this was beyond exciting. In my book 10,000 Hours of Play, I describe my life game as maximizing positive impact in two directions: width, where one action improves a billion lives even one click’s worth, and depth, where I change the entire trajectory of a single person’s life. An entire generation of students learning behavioral design checks both boxes at once.

The meeting with President Zelenskyy was scheduled for February 2022.

The meeting that never happened

Then Omicron broke out. The team suggested we push the trip back a few months, just to be safe.

We all know what happened next. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion, and the thread went silent. I assumed it was gone forever, and I understood completely. When your cities are being bombed, no one is thinking about gamifying the school curriculum. I prayed for the people I knew there and followed the news like everyone else, from very far away.

A couple years later, my phone buzzed again. It was the same circle of people, with a very different question: could the power of Octalysis help rebuild Ukraine after the war?

The question had grown far beyond a school curriculum. Ukraine needed to restore homes, industries, institutions, and millions of traumatized minds, and they wanted to know whether behavioral design could help. I said yes.

What I saw in Ukraine

Reading about war and standing inside it are two different kinds of knowledge.

Between 2025 and 2026, I traveled to Ukraine three times. Each trip started the same way: fly to Poland, then ride a train for sixteen hours because the airspace is closed. And on every visit, the drones and missiles came nightly.

On my first trip, in February 2025, I stood on the carcass of a Russian tank outside Kyiv. I walked through Borodyanka, where apartment blocks stand hollowed out like broken teeth, and where Banksy painted a gymnast balancing on a pile of rubble. Other artists answered with their own murals, including a violinist playing against a shattered wall. Snow covered the debris piles. People still lived across the street.

What surprised me most was the people running the country.

Across those visits, I met senior officials throughout the government.

At the ministry responsible for rebuilding Ukraine’s communities and territories, I sat down with then–Deputy Minister Andrii Bratus, whose full title was Deputy Minister for Digital Development, Digital Transformation, and Digitalization. Yes, that is a long title. The job is exactly that big: dragging an entire reconstruction bureaucracy into the digital age so that recovery decisions run on data instead of paperwork. Alongside him were Artem Husak, Director of the Investment Policy Department, whose team works to turn instruments like the EU’s Ukraine Facility and financing from partners like the European Investment Bank into projects that communities can actually build, and then–Deputy Minister Artem Rybchenko, who focused on creating the conditions for millions of displaced Ukrainians to come home.

I met Tymur Tkachenko, Head of the Kyiv City Military Administration, the office that runs the capital’s defense and wartime operations. Tymur is a Kyiv native, born in 1989, who served as Deputy Minister of Strategic Industries (the ministry behind Ukraine’s weapons production) before taking charge of the capital’s security at the end of 2024. Under his leadership, Kyiv has directed hundreds of millions of hryvnias into housing for veterans and the families of fallen defenders. Talking with him, you get the sense that defending a city and rebuilding it are the same job described at two moments in time.

And I spent time with Mykhailo Fedorov. When Fedorov became Minister of Digital Transformation in 2019 at age 28, he was the youngest minister in Ukraine’s history. He then built Diia, the app that put passports, licenses, taxes, and government services for over twenty million Ukrainians inside a smartphone, a level of digital government most countries still only have on roadmaps. Two days into the full-scale invasion, his public appeal to Elon Musk brought Starlink to Ukraine. He went on to drive the Army of Drones program and the BRAVE1 defense-tech cluster, later serving as First Deputy Prime Minister and then as Minister of Defence.

One meeting deserves its own section. Oleksii Kuleba was the governor of the Kyiv region when Russian forces drove toward the capital in early 2022. Bucha, Irpin, and Borodyanka, the towns whose names the world now knows, were under his administration through their darkest weeks and their liberation. He then served as Deputy Head of the Office of the President before becoming Deputy Prime Minister for Restoration and Minister for Communities and Territories Development in September 2024. That made him the main champion of Ukraine’s rebuilding: the strategy, the de-occupied and frontline regions, and the ministries and agencies that execute it. In Ukraine’s government, restoration is a full deputy–prime–minister portfolio. That alone tells you how seriously the country takes it.

I sat down with him alongside Rick Smith, the billionaire founder and CEO of Axon, the public-safety technology company behind the Taser. Rick and I hit it off immediately. Partway through our conversations about security and motivation, I noticed him taking a photo of the cover of Actionable Gamification. So I autographed my copy and gave it to him. It felt like the right home for that book.

Many of these leaders came from successful careers in the private sector. When the invasion started, they stepped up, took government salaries, and now work brutal hours under air-raid sirens to secure and rebuild their homeland. These are problem-solvers and builders, doing the least bureaucratic government work I have ever witnessed.

I also joined economist Andrii Dligach (founder of Advanter Group and the Center for Social Change and Behavioral Economics) for a panel in an education project for the Cabinet of Ministers’ communications teams, alongside Darina Marchak, Iryna Tuliakova, and Tetiana Lomakina. The topic was behavioral change: how do you build a human-centered state out of a society that Soviet rule trained into paternalism? Their answer involves communication strategies for ten key state policies, and they wanted Octalysis in the mix. These conversations convinced me that Ukraine’s reformers think about motivation more seriously than most tech companies I advise.

At the end of one meeting, they gave me a folder of commemorative war stamps from Ukrposhta’s “Cities of Heroes” series, honoring Volnovakha, a city that was almost entirely destroyed. On the cover, a steam train rides through burning sunflower fields. I will never use these as stamps. They sit in my office as a reminder that behind every framework discussion is a city where people lost everything.

reSTATE: rebuilding as re-stating

Out of these conversations, we founded reSTATE, a Ukrainian non-profit: Igor Novikov, Salim Ismail (founding executive director of Singularity University and founder of OpenExO), David Traub (award-winning producer and venture catalyst), and me.

The name carries the thesis. Most nations update themselves slowly, patching old systems decade by decade. Ukraine doesn’t have that luxury, and strangely, that is also its opportunity. The war wiped the slate clean in the most horrific way possible. Rebuilding means Ukraine can re-state the rules: design its infrastructure, its institutions, and its citizens’ experiences from scratch, with everything we now know about technology and human motivation.

reSTATE works as a think tank and incubator. We identify a nation-scale challenge, convene local and global expertise, incubate a solution with partners, pilot it in Ukraine, and then export what works to the rest of the world. And what Ukraine faces today, the world will face tomorrow. Energy grids under attack, drone warfare, millions displaced, disinformation flooding public trust. Ukraine is the live case study of the future, and its solutions will become everyone’s solutions.

Our current focus areas include securing airports and ports so life and commerce can return, PTSD recovery at a national scale for a population where trauma is now the baseline, restoring destroyed structures and businesses, and upskilling the population for the economy Ukraine deserves to have.

This is purely humanitarian work for me. Nobody at reSTATE takes profit from Ukraine’s reconstruction. I do it because I have spent twenty years arguing that human motivation is the most underused resource on earth, and there has never been a place that needs motivated humans more.

Why a gamification guy belongs in a war zone

I get this question a lot. I’ve asked it myself.

Part of the answer is family history. My grandfather fought against the Communists in China. He was captured, imprisoned, and scheduled for execution before he escaped. My family became refugees in Taiwan. I have never lived through what Ukrainians are living through, but I come from people who did. When a nation of ordinary people suddenly finds itself defending its home against an overwhelming force, that story is not abstract to me. It’s the reason I exist.

My family pushed back before every trip. You can make money anywhere in the world, they said. Don’t keep going to a place where you could lose your life. And they’re right about the first part. But I told them: “I’m not trying to make money. I’m trying to make a difference.” In 10,000 Hours of Play I argue that everyone needs a game worth playing. Here is the uncomfortable extension of that idea: a game truly worth playing is also worth taking risks for.

Fans of Jujutsu Kaisen might remember the lesson Megumi Fushiguro eventually understands: risking your life is different from sacrificing your life. I have a wife and three kids I fully intend to come home to. But refusing all risk means refusing the missions that matter most, and that trade never made sense to me.

Rebuilding a nation is a motivational design problem. Millions of displaced citizens deciding whether to come home. A diaspora deciding whether to invest. Soldiers returning from the front, needing a reason to wake up tomorrow. Global partners deciding whether Ukraine is a cause or an opportunity. Every one of those decisions is a motivation problem before it is a money problem, and motivation problems are the ones I know how to design for.

In 2021, Ukraine invited me because they wanted their next generation to build original things that the world loves. That vision is still the vision. The war only raised the stakes.

That February 2022 meeting never happened as planned. What happened instead was years of working alongside the builders, in the ministries and the ruins, on the night trains. If reSTATE helps even one city come back stronger, or gives one returning soldier a genuine new mission, that cancelled meeting will have become the most productive cancellation of my life. And the conversation with President Zelenskyy? Still coming.

If your organization works on reconstruction, security, mental health at scale, or education, and you want to help shape what Ukraine rebuilds into, reach out. The foundation stage is exactly when partners matter most.

WOULD YOU LIKE YU-KAI CHOU TO WORK WITH YOUR ORGANIZATION?