About Me

My Story

 

I’ve always been drawn to the path of an outlier—someone who does things their own way. I loved growing up in Hong Kong, but traveled to the U.S. for high school, determined to discover what lay beyond my horizon. Later, at UPenn, though I shared the same intention to enter business as my classmates did, I studied philosophy, reading Descartes while my friends built financial models. On Wall Street, to the chagrin of my mentors and peers, I chose equity research over traditional investment banking, eager to deepen my knowledge in a specific industry, tech. After Harvard Business School, rather than becoming a strategy consultant or a private equity investor like the majority of my cohort, I joined a sales team at an unproven startup to learn how to operate the hard way.

 

In retrospect, these early outlier decisions all prepared me for my past 12 years in tech leadership, starting at Dropbox, where I joined as an early business executive.. As the company’s first Head of Online Sales, I was part of the team that pioneered a nontraditional outlier approach to selling software to businesses. That approach turned out to be the future of how SaaS software would be sold—now referred to as Product Led Growth (PLG)—where software is first directly sold to individuals and teams as opposed to a centralized enterprise buyer. At the time, this approach made Dropbox the fastest SaaS company to reach $1billion in revenue.

 

The PLG model, however, limited Dropbox’s success in the enterprise space. When I became the first CRO of Asana, I took my learnings from Dropbox and we pioneered another model: building a business that incorporated both PLG and enterprise sales. It required innovation in terms of organizational design, talent management and GTM approach. This hybrid approach worked: in my five-year tenure, Asana saw nine quarters of accelerating growth rate on a YoY basis and revenue run-rate grew from ~$20mn to over $500mn. 

 

I'm incredibly proud of being a part of an executive team that built an enduring company culture; Asana is consistently recognized by organizations such as Fortune to be one of the best workplaces in technology. What I’m most proud of during my tenure at Asana is assembling the talent we had the honor to nurture and develop. They are now much sought-after leaders of the next generation of software companies.

 

From the outside, my professional journey in the past 20 years may look like a straight line, but in reality there were many ups and downs. Many times I questioned whether I belonged. When I was in finance, I often asked myself whether someone who studied philosophy belonged on Wall Street. As a revenue leader, I wondered whether someone from finance could lead and inspire global sales teams. As a CRO, I questioned whether an Asian immigrant could lead a large US-based company.

 

In the course of my journey, I realized that my ‘outsider’ status is what made it possible for me to lead outlier companies. Of course, these experiences would not have been possible without the counsel of others, and I’ve had many mentors throughout my journey. Some helped shape my leadership approach, some helped develop my strategy and others simply gave me the support I needed for my confidence. But the biggest leadership lesson I’ve learned is that there is no playbook for leadership, except for your own. 

That’s why I developed an approach to coaching leaders that is comprehensive, based on self-understanding and leaning in to your own strengths and principles, designed to help you become the best leader you can be.