Asian Tech Leaders

Faisal Abid is a serial entrepreneur and currently the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Eirene Cremations, a direct-to-consumer service that helps families plan affordable and high-quality cremation services. Faisal is also currently a Google Developer Expert, CTO at Bitstrapped.com and Instructor at Brainstation. Prior to founding Eirene Cremations, Faisal was the CTO at Zoom.ai where he led engineering including overseeing its machine learning infrastructure. Faisal has also held senior software engineering roles at health-tech platform, League, and e-reader platform Kobo Inc. (acquired by Rakuten).

On this episode, you will learn about:

Learn more about Eirene Cremations at https://eirene.ca/

Follow Faisal on Twitter at https://twitter.com/faisalabid

Lakhveer Singh Jajj and Traci Cheng are the Co-Founders of Moselle, a tech platform that helps small-medium businesses to create stable, sustainable, and scalable supply chains. Lakhveer and Traci launched Moselle just a couple months before the pandemic hit in 2020 and quickly adapted to help SMBs adapt to the surge in e-commerce. 

In this episode, you will learn more about:

Learn more about Moselle at https://www.moselle.io/. You can also find Lakhveer and Traci on LinkedIn.

Lynne Takagaki is the Co-Founder of Welcome Aboard, a start-up that finds the perfect fit between job seekers and companies with strongly aligned missions and cultures. In addition to leading Welcome Aboard with her two co-founders, Lynne is also a business development leader at AnyRoad, an enterprise relationship management platform. She also spent time as a Sales Manager at PepsiCo and a Sales Lead at ContractRoom.

In this episode, you will learn about:

Links:

Danni Pi is the COO at Rowan, a venture-backed health and wellness company re-imagining ear piercing. Prior to joining Rowan, Danni led operations at Uber where she helped grow ridership and reliability of the ride-sharing service in New York and also helped launched UberEATS in several cities. Danni starter her career as a consultant at Oliver Wyman and obtained her MBA from the Harvard Business School and undergraduate degree in economics from Columbia University.

In this episode you will learn about:

Learn more about Rowan at heyrowan.com

Kane Ma is the Co-founder and CTO, at Kamo Digital Solutions a full-service digital agency for start-ups. Prior to founding his company, Kane played junior varsity basketball at the storied University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill which was also former home to NBA legends Michael Jordan, Vince Carter and many others. After playing professional basketball in Asia for two years, Kane started Kamo Digital Solutions with his friend and former teammate Kanayo Obi-Rapu.  Kane received Bachelor's in Computer Science and Economics at UNC and was recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal sharing his personal experience with anti-Asian hate crimes.

In this episode you will learn about:

Just a heads up - you will hear my son in the background near the end of the recording. He was ok and just a bit moody during the podcast recording :) 

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.

Learn more about Wattpad at https://www.wattpad.com/.

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.

Learn more about Paxos at www.paxos.com

Follow Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrandrewchang/

Raphael Chow is the CEO and Co-Founder at Wevat, a platform that helps travelers get tax refunds on purchases made in the UK. To date, Wevat has helped travellers from 88 countries get tax refunds on purchases amounting to more than £16 million.

In this episode, you will learn about how Raphael’s upbringing in Asia and Canada shaped his worldview, how he made the transition from studying biochemistry at Oxford to working as a consultant, and the lessons he has learned from building a start-up over the last four years.

Learn more about Wevat at: https://www.wevat.com/

Dr. Paul Bhatti is CEO and Founder at Sowingo -  a cloud-based eCommerce and inventory management solution for dentists. Founded in 2012, Sowingo's mission is to transform healthcare by offering dental and medical professionals with tools to more efficiently run their practices and improve patient outcomes. The company helps save dentists time and money through their robust marketplace that carries over 50,000 products from the best suppliers in the industry. 

In addition to running Sowingo, Dr. Bhatti is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon with over 15 years of experience in the United States and Canada. In this episode, you will learn about Dr. Bhatti's beginnings as a 6 year old immigrant taking ESL classes, how his father shaped his desire to devote his career to healthcare, and why he is taking more risk now than ever.

You can learn more about Sowingo at: https://sowingo.com/

You can find Dr. Paul Bhatti on LinkedIn at  https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-bhatti-51289966/