🏝️ American in Hong Kong

I logged into Facebook first time in a couple of years and was pleasantly surprised of my US friends sending birthday greetings and asking for how I have been for the last decade. “Bin, where have you been?”

So here is my confession:

😌🇺🇸 More than a decade ago, I was a deepwater subsea engineer deploying cute underwater robotics, ROVs and AUVs. I went offshore constantly, including a memorable stretch while pregnant, because there was usually something difficult, important, exciting, and crazy that needed me. That was a happy memory, plus I could eat four times a day in offshore trip.

🥲🇺🇸 Then the oil downturn changed the landscape in 2017. I rolled over to Wall Street to join an alumni hedge fund starting from zero 0️⃣ on options and futures - quote: “playing options and you will be left with no options, playing futures and you will be left with no futures.”

🙃🇺🇸 Anyhow after realizing I am no trader material and selling options futures in low volatility would not pay the Manhattan rent, I started evaluating blockchain and crypto early phase projects and I became an angel investor. 99 out of 100 projects died or rugged or vaporized, and 1 became a 250x jackpot! 🎰

🥹🇲🇴 In 2017, my husband accepted an offer to work in University of Macau, and wait, he brought our kids with him too! Reluctantly I started hunting for opportunities in Macau. Fun fact: as an American, I could not open a bank account. There were fewer than 100 Americans in Macau.

😎🇭🇰 In 2018, I airdropped myself in Hong Kong, Asia’s world city, accidentally became co-CEO and executive director of a publicly listed company. It was quite dramatic, yet not that shorts-kinda drama (不是短剧爽文） like from rags to riches, it is more like: I was blessed with a great foundation — Class for Gifted Young (中科大少年班）is well recognized in Chinese circle, and the board respects my American background as Rice alumni, Professional Engineer, PMP etc.

🤣🇭🇰 Hence starts: Cinderella’s executive career and startup adventure. The executive career included rebranding global energy resources to global token, as I believe token would be the smallest unit of value of exchange in trust and meaning. I was actually not too wrong at that time. Twelve things run parallel at the same time, personal wise, I officially started my executive career at 2018-06-18 and I received my HKID at 2018-08-18, seemingly great fortunes 🔮 are beaming at me. My friends started calling me “Robin” coz Robin is an American red bird singing the spring.

😇🇯🇵 What followed was a ten-year expedition across the U.S. and Asia, building and testing ideas across the fintech and digital asset frontier, such as exchanges, wallets, stablecoin rails, merchant systems, digital identity, cross-border payment gateways, and a fairly unreasonable number of experiments. My favorite memory was our Tokyo Roppongi office, the imperial hotel with an extraordinary teppanyaki, the business meetings with former Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei (出井 伸之) and Monex founder Oki Matsumoto etc…

😱🇹🇼 Yet, covid19 hits, followed by the cruel reality of startup failures and failures loop x multiple times. Out of approximately 21 startup ventures, 20 were killed, crashed, or simply taught me that a viable product is not the same thing as product-market fit. Most of those SAAS (software-as-a-service) projects were killed before product-market-fit PMF, some even before minimal-viable-product MVP phase.

😘🍀 One succeeded. That exit gave me the financial freedom, and the ultimate freedom to choose what I work on.  So naturally, I kept working.

😇🌐 Today, I invest and build around AI infrastructure, robotics, intelligent systems, and the capital systems underneath them. I am especially fascinated by physical AI: what happens when tokens become infrastructure, intelligence gets a body, and machines begin participating in the economy.