Life Update - Leaving China

After 12 years in China, I finally decided to move back to the US. It was a hard decision. I became a professional in China. I grew my career and reached huge heights, but the global conditions changed, my personal priorities shifted, and I decided to take a new leap.

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The Why:

The catalyst for the decision was not so much any one thing, but a collection of various movements and changes. The most important of all was the decision by my partner and I to start a family. And the hanging question above us was whether China over the next few years would offer a kind of stability that would make it easy for us to do this undertaking.?

The next few years will be a deep forest of unknowns. A large part because of the enhanced pressure from the US and Europe on China has created an epistemic dilemma amongst Chinese firms about internationalization. There are new currents of thought. De-Chinafy is conceptually about building non-Chinese face, but this still has yet to be developed in practice. As a result, there is a lot of caution within the 出海 world, from investors to laborers. It will take some time for conversations to complete, for new modalities to be tested, and a new industry consensus to emerge in the face of US and European pressure. There is a lot of risk as a foreigner that specializes in China going overseas. ?

Raising kids in China as mixed-nationality gay?dads has a lot of complexity. The first of which is more related to juridical challenges that come with creating a family unit when it is not legal. The second is figuring out how to find time to raise kids with work situations that are less than friendly to parenting. (The sacrifice that Chinese parents make for their kids is something I truly admire. I was with HUI CHENG during a lockdown while he worried if he would be able to leave in time to see the birth of his daughter because he was in another city. He got there, but this kind of separation is common.) And lastly, it is more about the intangibles that come with raising a kid in the US that values more of a holistic experience and with public education that is much better, or at least a better value. (Imagine trying to move into Haidian just to send my kids to the best public schools in China, or paying through my eyes for private schools that can't recruit the best teachers.)

When the two combined, it was clear to my partner and I that the safer route, the better route was to emigrate back to the US. I am blessed and privileged to be able to make such a choice. Indeed, this was the hardest decision I have ever had to make. I had to disappoint people that I considered my family because unfortunately their path was not one I could follow at this time.

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Thank You:

Ultimately, my voyage over these years was the collection of luck that snowballed to me making critical decisions for 快手 , one of the largest tech platforms in China and a company that still has a larger Market Cap than DoorDash, Snap, HP and Twitter.

It began with Andrew Sohn and Michael J. Novielli entertaining my crazy idea to take a sabbatical from my PhD program to see China. I liked it so much I never went back to school. I helped build an incredible and still inspirational education company where I was able to work with hundreds of students that are now old enough to invite me to dinner. Along with John Beck , we created the gold standard in China for education companies. But I wanted to do more.

丁杰 believed in me. With his guidance and mentorship, I moved to vivo Smartphone where I did something that is extremely difficult to do - I jumped industries and functional roles all on the promise that I was smart enough to add value. Vivo sent me to Indonesia, giving me a chance to form a relationship with another country that I loved so much. It was a huge culture shock, but in some ways this pivot made everything after possible.

With the introduction of Anna Fang , I eventually moved to VIPKid where I was hired for what I thought would be a more international role but two days before I started, I was asked if I would take over the head office marketing team. It was another leap of faith. But in terms of personal growth, it was probably the year that I developed the most. I learned that I could execute at a high level for what was at the time a massively growing business. My initiatives turned around long-suffering business units. It gave me confidence that I could be more.

Earlier than I anticipated but in line with what I was interested in, I met Lucky Z. who was about to do a startup focused on Latin America, a chance to return home to the region in which I was born. I took the biggest leap of faith. I joined as an ordinary employee with minimal upside and a big pay cut. I guess I had faith in myself that I could turn this into a win. I was right. Within two months, Lucky’s trust was assured, and I was elevated to Co-Founder. Lucky is an incredible leader, mentor, and friend. Along with Michael C. , we engaged in frequent late-night conversations, where I learned about the internal logic within Chinese tech companies and how the fraternity of employees (cross pollinating across large companies and small startups) have developed, iterated, and reconstructed operational plans to scale companies quickly and profitably. Through this process, I began to contribute my voice, helping our company enter into Latin America, build a lean team, and nearly pull of a miracle until the pandemic happened. A few more days and we would have closed another round, but instead we had to go through the difficult experience of surviving as long as we could until we could find a viable exit.

When our company decided to close shop and take an offer to join ByteDance and focus on education, I felt my journey into content business was not over. I loved the challenge of building a content ecosystem, of working with creators, and thinking holistically about content. It reminded me in some ways of my initial career in admissions. How to develop a framework to explain what is good in both qualitative and quantifiable ways.

With Lucky’s understanding, I called up 邵凯 and asked him if he would be okay if I came over as a consolation for us rejecting Kuaishou’s offer. He welcomed me in. There are way too many words I would want to say about Kai that deserve another piece at another time. I moved from more marketing focus to general management/operations, another functional leap. But Kai mentored and guided me in a way that taught me how top tier Chinese internet companies operate and look at the world. He encouraged me to be aggressive, to be tactical, to be imaginative, and to be fast. Kai has made the biggest impact in terms of how I think about business problems, how I manage stakeholders from different cultures, and how to demand even more of myself. And I know that I changed how he thought about the West and how to do business abroad.

I rose to a completely new level as a leader at Kuaishou. The things that I was able to achieve at Kuaishou significantly transformed how the company did business and operated in outside markets. That I was able to do it with conversational proficiency in Mandarin and no previous experience working for top-tier Chinese tech companies, is my proudest achievement.

Kai asked me to join him and Hui (who has been my closest friend these last few years) on our most recent adventure, I looked forward to the chance to continue our collaboration and friendship. But it was toward the end of our first year working on this project that I confided in him my thoughts about the future. With heavy hearts, we parted. It wasn't like saying goodbye to a colleague, it was like saying goodbye to brothers. We shared incredible achievements and unbelievable challenges. We lived together for most of 2022, spending more time with each other than we did with our spouses or families. And throughout this, my nationality, my race was never at issue. But they understood the challenges I faced were different than their challenges.

What’s Next

I think as you have seen above, I have taken massive leaps of faith. Decisions to join companies in imperfect situations for the benefit of learning about new sectors and discovering my own capacity and potential. In the end, I had a seat at a table that few are given access. This is not to say foreigners don’t exist at these companies. Many do. But the real decisions and discussions happen in Mandarin over drinks, over food, after 11pm in the office. With my willingness to give up my body for the sake of work, I fit in quite nicely. And I would like to believe that I made an impact on how the companies I worked at think about doing business overseas but also how they think about working with foreigners more broadly.

The intrinsic drama of my own quixotic adventure has been the inspiration for things I have been writing. How can we de-mystify China, Chinese companies, and Chinese people? China has challenges, some self-imposed, some structural, some external. But often what is missing in narratives about China is the agency that people have to make decisions, to decide their own fate, and the consensus that is built around what choices make sense in that world. To foreigners, the logic is confounding. But how to present it in situ in a non judgmental way? That is something I have been wanting to do.

Writing is more an exercise to eulogize my experiences than the goal. In the end, I love working (in an office ideally!). The goal is to methodically go through a job search process for the first time in my career. To find a company, to find a leader that thinks I might add some value to their organization. I don’t feel any pressure about it. It will come in time. And I believe, wholeheartedly, I will figure out how to be successful. It can’t be any harder than learning about ranking algorithms in Chinese.