Asian Tech Leaders

Jae Lee is the Founder and CEO of Twelve Labs, a video understanding platform that uses AI to help developers and companies search and understand videos quickly. Using its state-of-the-art multimodal foundation model for videos that can accurately and instantly search exact moments within petabytes of video archives, generate coherent text summaries of videos, perform prompt-based video generation, and many more. Jae and his co-founders started the company in 2021 and has secured funding from prominent VCs including Index Ventures and Radial Ventures, and has been recognized as one of CB Insights' AI 100 companies.

Prior to starting Twelve Labs, Jae was an award-winning cyber security leader for the South Korean army and he previously spent time as a software engineer at Amazon and Samsung. Jae graduated from UC Berkeley where he studied computer science.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Where Jae is seeing the highest value from multimodal GenAI applications

• Why Jae believed that multimodal AI was the future and decided to start Twelve Labs

• How building Twelve Labs with a geographically diverse team is an edge

• Jae’s upbringing in Seoul and moving to the US with his uncle who sparked his imagination in math and statistics

Francois (Frankie) Le Nguyen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Staging Labs, a startup that secures crypto and NFT assets by intercepting dangerous transactions in real-time. Frankie previously built and launched startup incubator Entrepreneur First in Canada and served as GM in both its Toronto and Singapore location where he helped build 50+ venture-backed startups valued at over $400M. Frankie started his career in product management at software companies LightSpeed and Holmusk, and is an angel investor on the side.

You can follow Frankie's latest work and thinking at:

Jaclyn Ling is the Co-Founder of Hatchways, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that is modernizing the technical interview process for start-ups and developers looking for their next great job. Prior to starting Hatchways, Jaclyn was the co-founder of a fashion bot company Blynk which was acquired by Kik Interactive in 2016. Jaclyn grew up in Vancouver, Canada, studied finance at McGill University, and had her first taste of success as a YouTube fashion influencer that had thousands of followers.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How Jaclyn’s love for competitive nature was first sparked as a kid playing board games 

• How Jaclyn knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur at a young age

• How Jaclyn translated her dislike for interviewing into building Hatchways - a company focused on making interviews better 

Ivan Zhang is the co-founder and CTO of Cohere, a leading GenAI startup that provides natural language processing models to help developers and companies build new products and unlock business value with language AI. Cohere’s models power interactive chat features, generate text for product descriptions, blog posts, and articles, and capture the meaning of text for search, content moderation, and intent recognition. Cohere recently closed a $270M series C round and is valued at over $2B. 

Prior to co-founding Cohere in 2019,Ivan founded FOR.ai, an independent AI research group and worked in the biotech and MLOps space as a software engineer. Ivan dropped out of his undergrad University of Toronto and he is a proud Torontonian, Chinese immigrant, and League of Legends player.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How Ivan first fell in love with computer science in high school

• How Ivan made the mental calculation to drop out of university (and convince his parents it was a rational idea)

• Where Ivan thinks we are in the GenAI hype cycle and why Cohere is here to stay

• About Ivan’s favorite Chinese restaurants in Toronto 

Thomas Park is a leader in global venture capital and is a Partner at the BDC Deep Tech Fund and the Co-founder of Asian Canadian Ventures Collective. Tom has been at the BDC since 2017 and currently leads a $200M venture capital fund that invests in Canadian startups developing cutting edge technology including quantum computers.

Previously, Tom served 5 years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and McKinsey & Co., where he had the opportunity to oversee numerous special projects across both the public and private sector. For the first eight years of his career, Tom put his law degree to good use as a consultant to the International Criminal Court (aka The Hague), and at the United Nations Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia.

Tom is a graduate of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and McGill University. He sits on a number of boards at McGill, Ryerson University, and as chair of the Banff Forum. He was recognized for his leadership when he was selected as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 in 2017. In 2022, Tom co-founded the Asian Canadian Venture Collective that helps bring together Canadians of Asian heritage working in tech.

In this episode, you will learn:

• How Tom's upbringing as the only minority in his neighborhood made him more resilient and resourceful
• About the Christmas Day revelation that motivated Tom to leave his early success in corporate law
• Where Tom's thinks we are in the GenAI hype cycle

Percy Hung is the co-founder and CEO of Choco Up, one of the largest revenue-based financing and growth platforms in Asia that provides funding to fast growing start-ups. Choco Up utilizes data analytics and third party integrations to automate funding decisions and provides companies with growth capital in as little as 48 hours. Prior to starting Choco Up, Percy founded two other ventures and also held various engineering and venture capital roles in the APAC region. Percy was born in Hong Kong, raised in Singapore, and is an alumnus of Georgia Tech where he studied Aerospace Engineering. 

In this episode, you'll learn more about:

• What sparked Percy to start his own company after starting his career as an engineer
• How Percy's experience as an foreigner in America and Japan shaped his worldview
• How Percy optimizes his time between being a CEO and father of two young kids

Amelia Lin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Honeycomb, a private social app for families. Honeycomb offers families a way to curate and share their favorite moments and memories in a private and secure way. Prior to starting Honeycomb, Amelia was previously a product leader at Udacity and Optimizely. Amelia obtained her MBA degree from the Harvard Business School and studied physics during undergrad at Harvard.

In this episode, you’ll learn about:

• How Amelia made the decision to leap into the start-up world and build Honeycomb
• How Amelia’s parents’ reacted to her seemingly high-risk decision
• How to rethink the word “aggression” in a more positive and productive way

Judy Lai-Norling is the COO at Carbon Mapper - an organization developing a new way to locate, quantify and track carbon emissions from air and space. Prior to joining Carbon Mapper, Judy spent 14 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion lab in both business and engineering roles. Judy holds Master’s Degrees in Math and Economics from the University of Texas and University of Wisconsin respectively.

In this episode:

• You will learn more about Judy’s early childhood migrating from Taiwan to the US and how her parents restaurant shaped her goals
• How Judy spent the first few years of her career experimenting with different jobs before landing a job at NASA
• Judy’s advice on how to create more opportunities in your career

Vivian Shen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Juni Learning - an education platform that helps connect kids to expert mentors to help empower them and learn topics like Coding, Storytelling, and Investing. Prior to starting Juni Learning, Vivian had a variety of experience including being a software engineer at Google, consultant at McKinsey & Company, and product leader at a start-up called Operator. Vivian has been featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, Fast Company, TechCrunch, and Fortune. Vivian earned her undergraduate degree from Stanford University where she studied computer science.

In this episode, you will learn more about:

• Why Vivian left prestigious and well-paying jobs at Google and McKinsey to work at start-ups
• How Vivian made a career goal pivot from politics to technology
• How Vivian’s past experiences culminated into the genesis of her creating Juni Learning.

Rob Chang is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gryphon Digital Mining, a company focused on sustainable Bitcoin mining. Rob has deep experience in the cryptocurrency space including previously being the CFO at Riot Blockchain where he helped turn around the company during the midst of the last Bitcoin bear market. Prior to working in crypto, Rob had a successful career in capital markets where he led equity research focused on the precious metals and mining industry. Rob obtained both his MBA and undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto.

In this episode, you will learn more about:

• Why Gryphon Digital Mining has a head start over most bitcoin mining companies
• How and why Rob made the leap from traditional finance to crypto space
• The importance of mentorship and why Asians should be less humble

Jeanne Lam is the Chief Business Officer at Wattpad, a global app and entertainment company that is used by 90 million people around the world and recently acquired by South Korean Internet giant Naver for $600M.

Jeanne has over 15 years of experience in tech with a focus on high-growth consumer startups. Prior to Wattpad, Jeanne led growth and user acquisition at Shapeways, the world’s largest 3D printing service. She has also worked in ad tech at Yahoo!, led marketing at mobile payments company GoPago in San Francisco, and spent three years as a management consultant at Accenture.

Jeanne is a board advisor for Women and Color, and serves on her alumni boards in Toronto. She has an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School and a B.S. in economics from Cornell University, and is passionate about helping young professionals find fulfillment in their careers.

This episode was recorded in the summer of 2020 as part of an Asian Googler Network event I hosted, but it was such an inspiring talk that I wanted to share this with more people. Jeanne kindly agreed that I could publish this talk so here it is - I hope you enjoy it and walk away energized and inspired like I did.

Andrew Chang is the COO of Paxos, a fintech company that builds infrastructure on blockchain to facilitate the movement between physical and digital assets such as cryptocurrency. Before joining Paxos, Andrew had an array of experience including working in business development at Google, serving as COO of video technology company ConditionOne, and starting his career at Morgan Stanley. Andrew earned his MBA from New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business where he was President of the Student body and a BS from Boston College

In this episode, I chat with Andrew about how to figure out what to do with your career, the importance of distinguishing between security and prosperity, and why being a COO is like being a decathlete.

Professor Ellen Wu is the Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington and Director of the Asian American Studies Program. She is the author of the book “The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority”. Her commentary has been featured by a number of outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and NPR. Professor Wu obtained a PhD in History from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. at UCLA.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Professor Wu and I highly recommend you read her book, The Color of Success. In the book, Professor Wu does a superb job of weaving together the complex and changing attitudes towards Asian immigrants in the United States from the 1800s when Asians were outcasts of society to the mid-20th century when they were labelled the “model minority”.

In this episode you will learn about:

• How Asian Americans progressed so much over the last 100 years
• How World War II was the catalyst that accelerated civil rights and socioeconomic opportunities for Asian Americans
• Why the term “Model Minority” isn’t as positive as you might think
• How Asian Americans can do a better job of supporting African Americans
  

Especially in light of all the social injustice that is happening in the world right now, I believe it is more important that ever to better appreciate the arc of Asian Americans in history to recognize our privilege and be emboldened to bring more equality in the world.

Follow Professor Wu on Twitter: @ellendwu

Jiaqi Pan is the CEO and Founder of Landbot - a no-code chatbot platform that empowers businesses to acquire, engage and monetize customers in messaging channels. Landbot has over 50,000 customers including Uber, L’Oreal and LG. Prior to founding Landbot in 2017, JIA-CHEE was the CEO and founder of Helloumi - a B2C messaging platform for businesses to engage with their customers. In this episode, I chat with Jiaqi about his journey from China to Spain when he was young, how Iron Man and Robert Kiyosaki inspired his career path, and why being Chinese in Spain has its advantages.

Buck Gee is a pioneer in helping to improve Asian representation in business and technology.  

Buck retired in 2008 from Cisco Systems, where he was Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Business Unit. He joined Cisco with its 2004 acquisition of Andiamo Systems where Mr. Gee was President and CEO. In 2010, he co-founded the Advanced Leadership Program for Asian American Executives, an executive education program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; and he is also a co-founder of the Corporate Executive Initiative, a national network of Asian American executives. 

He teaches executive leadership workshops for Ascend, a pan-Asian professional organization. He is a board member of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and co-chair of the Donor Advisory Board of Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Mr. Gee is a co-founding board member of the Chinese American Community Foundation and serves on the board of Ascend/Northern California, the advisory board of the Asia Society/Northern California, and the advisory board of the Asian Pacific American Leadership Institute. 

Previously, he held management positions in engineering, marketing, and business development at Hewlett Packard, National Semiconductor, 3Com, Crescendo Communications, Com21, and Iospan Wireless. He has also taught computer and electrical engineering courses at Stanford University and Howard University. He holds BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. 

On this episode, I chat with Buck about how his upbringing as one of the few Asians in his community shaped his life, the one thing that has motivated him throughout his career, and the top skill that Asians need to develop to be more successful in their career. 

If you are interested in learning more about Buck's pioneering work be sure to check out: 

Donna Litt is the Co-founder and COO at Kiite, a B2B AI platform that serves as an intelligent sales coach. Before Kiite, Litt co-founded TribeHR, which was acquired by NetSuite in 2013. On this episode, I chat with Donna about her experience growing up in a mixed race household, how her background in archaeology led to a career in technology, and what drove her to writing and publishing her first novel in 2018 called 'Where the Sun Sets'. 

Links:

Sobhan Etemadi is the CEO and Founder of Sobie Systems, a Canadian-based startup that builds smart-product solutions using advanced sensor technologies for monitoring of residential HVAC systems. Sobie Systems’ current product, Everest, monitors the energy efficiency and performance of the HVAC system in real-time and prevents homeowners from exposure to deadly carbon monoxide leaks. Prior to starting Sobie Systems, Sobhan worked at aerospace leader Pratt & Whitney, and transportation manufacturer Bombardier. Sobhan holds a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Ryerson University and was also selected to join the prestigious Next 36 accelerator program in Canada.

On this episode I talk to Sobhan about his upbringing as an immigrant from Iran, how his parents shaped his career journey, and his love for the outdoors and rock climbing. 

Xiao Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Boundless, helping families navigate the complex legal immigration system more confidently, rapidly, and affordably than ever before. Prior to Boundless, he held leadership roles at Amazon Go, Providence Equity, NYC Department of Education, and McKinsey. Xiao holds a BA/MS from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

On this episode, we hear from Xiao about his upbringing as a Chinese immigrant raised in the suburbs of Seattle, how training for endurance races has made him a better founder and executive, and advice he has on how to find your passion.