In the MHV Podcast, we speak with leading founders, VCs and operators on their journey in Southeast Asia. In this episode, Jeremy Au, MHV Head of Strategic Projects and host chats with Shi Ling Tai, Co-Founder & CEO of UI-licious, one of MHV portfolio companies.
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Jeremy Au:
Hey, Tai Shi Ling. Really excited to have you on MHV podcast. You are a founder who is really building on something special in the UI space, and you have an amazing story that I'm excited to share. Could you share a little bit about yourself?
Shi Ling Tai:
Thanks for having me, Jeremy. Well, I am a software engineer. I founded Uilicious. I'm the CEO of Uilicious, and basically what we are very focused on is user interface test automation. It's something that I'm very passionate about after I started working as a software engineer and finding out how difficult it is to make good software. Building good software is really hard.
Jeremy Au:
Amazing. There's such a lot of amazing customer testimonials and I love, love your product, and of course, you're making it much, much easier as well, which is everybody's dream. But before we get and talk about the amazing company itself, I'd love to hear about you early on. They say engineers, do they start as kids or is it something that it captures them over time? Were you always destined to be an engineer?
Shi Ling Tai:
When I was growing up, I felt like if you asked me what I want to be when I grew up, I would have two answers. One is I want to be like Indiana Jones. I want to, but I also want to wear a lab coat like Inspector Gadget. I had this sense of curiosity and I really liked playing with... Lego was one of my favorite toys. I spent a lot of time playing Lego. I think maybe that's where it built my interest in putting things together and seeing... Just putting things together is a lot of fun for me. I think when things were broken in school, like if a friend broke a mechanical pencil, I'm always the go-to fixer. I'm the Fix-it Felix of the classroom.
Jeremy Au:
Well, since you're a founder and engineer, I guess you are Indiana Jones and a research person at the same point now. So you managed to fulfill both dreams.
Shi Ling Tai:
I just need a lab coat, thought, a white lab coat and it will be complete.
Jeremy Au:
Tell us more about that. So you had Legos and going on and obviously lots of people are problem solvers and doing little problems and mechanical. Even as a kid, I was also playing with Legos a lot. In fact, I also did a little bit of Micromouse and Lego Mindstorms robotics as well, and I even went to the computer club, for example. Is just that I never ended up becoming a computer engineer, I always end up being on the soft side of it. Whereas on your side, you actually decided to become much more of an engineer and deepen that practice of it. So what do you think was that part of it? Why did you decide to do that?
Shi Ling Tai:
I think a large part of it was because of my brother. My brother is six years older than me and it started out with all of us playing video games together. I think I was like a lot of kids my age, but obviously a lot of kids my age that played video games were boys and I was like, "I'm going to grow up and be a video game developer. That sounds like a great idea." Then I started with doing things that you shouldn't be doing to access video games when you don't have money.
Jeremy Au:
Okay. Were you running, cracking video games on wire or Kaza?
Shi Ling Tai:
Yeah. And then I figured out how automate my computer so that I can play video games with bots and automatic clickers, for example.
Jeremy Au:
Wait. Do you mean automated clickers on single player games or multiplayer games?
Shi Ling Tai:
That was New Pets.
Jeremy Au:
Okay. So multiplayer games. Okay. So you were a billionaire on New Pets, if you have-
Shi Ling Tai:
Yeah, I'm a billionaire on New Pets.
Jeremy Au:
I was a peasant. I was not even a billionaire. I was just going like a normal human person. Going to...
Shi Ling Tai:
In fact, I learned HTML from New Pets, because I wanted to tell everyone about my really cute cat in New Pets. So I wanted to write a story about my new pet and they had this feature called Pet Page, and that's where I learned HDML, and I tried to make my scroll bar.
Jeremy Au:
Wow. That's really amazing. I think the maximum of hacking I did was, I think I mapped my fire key on MapleStory to control on my keyboard and then I put a CD case under the keyboard so that I could just press shoot while I'm... I got lazy holding the control key. That's amazing. There you are, exploring the hacking dynamic and obviously your brother played a big part of it. Because my sister and I, we also game together. What was interesting was that it was not the world's happiest, friendliest place. I was always a bit... My sister was better than me at first person shooters, like everything. So she always got into all clans. Mp5 clan, the SOG clan. Then I was nowhere as good as her, but also, she got all the harassment on all the servicers. Because I was running around, going A/S/L. Right? I don't know. For those that don't know what it means like Age/Sex/Location. And as children, we will be like, "Oops." and answer that honestly and get harassed.
Shi Ling Tai:
Yeah. I remember, I think I was a kid, I borrowed my brother's account to play real-time strategy game and then people were asking me, "How old are you?" I'm like, "I'm nine years old." They were actually pretty nice to me, surprising. Or maybe I'm pretty dense, so all the insults just flew past my head, because I didn't understand.
Jeremy Au:
Maybe that time was a purer place. So there you are, obviously you're just learning all these things and what was it like, because you started talking about how you were learning and went on to learn engineering, et cetera. What was that like?
Shi Ling Tai:
I think at some point, after we finished all levels and everyone was thinking which JC they want to go to, which Poly they wanted to go to. For some reason I was very fixated on any of the JCs that had computer science. So every single choice that I put on my JC list of schools that I want for my JC, all of them had a computer science course. So I didn't care which one, as long as I got into one and I really wanted to learn computer science. I had this kind of mentality, I'm just going to try all the subjects and find out what I really like, what really stick to me. I never tried computerized before, but now I'm interested in it, so let's just give that a try. It turns out I really like it. It's super fun. I think the first time I wrote a computer program, I was like, "Whoa, this like magic." And if you ever play with me, I always choose the wizard.
Jeremy Au:
Oh, there we go. Now we know what's the correlation, equals causation. There we go.
Shi Ling Tai:
Yeah.
Jeremy Au:
Okay. So you are a wizard, you are learning coding, and then you actually chose to double down on it, at a university level as well. What was that like?
Shi Ling Tai:
I went to Singapore Management University and I took information systems. It was actually pretty refreshing, as compared to junior college. Junior college, you're just sitting in a lecture hall, listening to the teacher tell you what to do. It's just a very one-way street of teaching. But SMU was interesting, because it was super interactive. Even if the teacher is giving a seminar, they would forcefully ask students to answer questions as they are doing the seminar. It's a much smaller classroom as well. It's probably 100 people, is a 40% classroom. One thing that is unique about SMU, the information system course, is that its just a lot of projects. We infamously known... I know that they have changed the name of the school, but back then it was called School of Information Systems.
It's now called School of Computing, Computer Science, and Information Systems. I think SCIS. But back then when our student school is also SIS, that also stood for school of insufficient sleep, because we had so many projects and the passing requirements for the projects were so high that you always see information system students are staying back in school, even sleeping in school. Some of us went to the extent of bringing sleeping tents to school so that we could finish our projects. Then, it is always hilarious when some of the projects, they got stuck with a bug and then they're up all night. Sometimes we laugh at them, but sometimes we also go and help them. So, I really enjoyed my time at SMU and I did very well. The professors also really liked to ask me to be their teaching assistant. So I was also teaching assistant for four of the different modules in school.
Jeremy Au:
During this time, you've been learning a lot about engineering. Were there any particular themes about engineering that you particularly liked, or any projects that resonated with you?
Shi Ling Tai:
I think one of the things that I came to learn and appreciate about studying at SMU was also learning how important understanding business is to engineering. I think that's where being at SMU, they're very good at telling you, making you be focused on acquiring this business sense of why are we building an IT system? What is the outcomes that we're supposed to get for IT system? Now that I'm running my own company and managing my own engineers, I can see that there are engineers who are able to... We have a very long roadmap. There's always an infinite to-do list, but the really good engineers know exactly which features to prioritize and what the business really needs. And they will also give a feedback and say, "Hey, boss. I don't think this is what the users will do. Our users will actually try to use it this way instead."
So, actually, that is the soft aspect of engineering that I came to appreciate more and more. There's one particular course that I took, which is called interactive design prototyping, which in that course, I had to do a lot of paper drawings of low fidelity prototypes and show it to people. There's actually no coding involved in this particular course, and when I graduated, I thought, "That was the most useless course that I ever took. Anyone can draw. I could just ask the business team to do the drawings." It turns out, after graduating, the first company I joined, the boss gave me a feature with very abstract requirements to build.
So I really didn't know what he wanted. So I don't want to write a lot of code, because it was so vague. So I decided to start drawing prototypes. Then I showed the prototypes to him and said, "Is this what you want? Is this what you want the users to be doing? From this screen, to this screen, to this screen. This is what you mean, right?" And then he would say, "Yes. No. Yes. No." He actually game a feedback and said, "Tai Shi Ling, you're the only engineer that did this." And that was amazing. I was like, "Wow. Okay."
Jeremy Au:
That's interesting. So you actually were already thinking about that flow from even that time. And there you are, and you chose to actually decide to continue being an engineer upon graduation. So why that? Because, a lot of folks from SMU, they choose, even though they did an engineering major, they choose to go into business, for example. More that side versus the engineering side. So why?
Shi Ling Tai:
I think I really like programming and I just really, really wanted to still do hands-on programming. I didn't really want to always be talking to stakeholders, understanding requirements, and then talking to engineers and telling what the stakeholders want. I think maybe it's also because I'm an introvert, and then talking to people all day. I know that's my job now as a CEO. I have learned to accept that and embrace it, but in the past, when I first graduated, I was very, very introverted. I just want to code and not talk to people all day. Best if only once a day. At most, one meeting a day. Now I'm okay with it, though.
Jeremy Au:
Okay. Well, I'm glad you're one meeting today, at least. What was it that you learned upon your first job? Because there you are, a lot of people, they have that transition from the academic side of engineering towards more of that practical job training and hands-on experience. So what did you learn from that experience personally?
Shi Ling Tai:
I think what I learned from the experience is process. Well, one thing is process is really, really important and that's something that... The first job that I joined is advertising technology startup. There were already 30 employees in the company when I joined, but I think the problem that I start to realize after one year into the job is that the startup still ran a little bit cowboy style. So there's not a lot of process in place. The QA process was really informal. As engineers, it wasn't the managers telling us what the process is. Its us figuring out how it should be. It got really, really confusing when they changed people to other teams, and the other team have their own cowboy style of project management.
The lack of process, it affects the product quality, one thing, because there wasn't a review process. Then the second thing was that it also affected morale, because the schedule started sleeping. And when the schedule was sleeping, the manager started to find people to blame. Like, "Why is the feature not done?" So that really had a negative impact on moral. So I think that's the learnings I took into building up Uilicious. When I started speaking with my co-founder CTO, one of the earliest things that we talk about was as we scale from five engineers to 10 engineers, or maybe even two engineers, me and Eugene alone, coding in the early days, what is the process?
We had some hard rules about when can deployment be done and when can it not be done. We were very clear about no weekend deployments, no Friday deployments, because we don't want surprises. We had too many fire fighting in our cowboy days, which we want to stop at Uilicious. Also, I think we want to also be the... What's it? At least in the Singapore developer community, we want to be a role model for other Singapore engineering teams of what's a good way to do engineering, to build good software products.
Jeremy Au:
Well, that's actually a nice heroic Indiana Jones in a mission, I guess, because it's tough to be a good role model for this, because engineering is tough and to do that in the startup environment, especially for a new product and a new category, can be tough. On that note, obviously, you met your co-founder and talking about your strategy and thinking behind it. So talk us more about why you decided to leave your company and join Entrepreneur First? What was your thinking behind it? Was it because you wanted to be a founder at that point in time? Is it because you want to explore something? What was the rationale for why you were exploring?
Shi Ling Tai:
To be honest, I never thought about being an entrepreneur, but I think my parents were doing subliminal messaging, because my mom would sneakily put business books into my bookshelf and say, "Girl, I think should read this. Rich Kid, Poor Kid." I never gave it much thought until it was maybe one firefighting night too many that I thought, "Why am I working so hard for someone else's money." I was ranting to my mom and my mom was like, "Exactly." I think it's just maybe the stars aligned. I had this random email from the director of EFSG at that point of time. They were just setting up the first cohort in Singapore and then he reached out to me to have coffee.
It was actually a really random email. I didn't know why I said yes. I guess I was really curious. I'm as curious as a cat. I'm really, really curious. So I went for coffee, talked with him, and then I got convinced to join EF and try... I think another part of it is because I was young. Back then I was 25 and not married, no kids. So the risk for me is low, to quit my job and start something new. So I though I'd just try. Why not? And if it doesn't work out, software engineers are super employable, so I'm not worried about finding another job.
Jeremy Au:
That's a nice way actually think about risk, which is that you have a low downside risk, because you know you can get a job, but there's also high upside in terms of exploration and just learning about the space and curiosity scratching. So there you are. What was it like? Because a lot of people go through accelerators and programs and they also start going through the co-founder matching process. And also you're going through the product market fit process as well. So talk us through a little bit about what was it like to, not necessarily within Entrepreneur First, but overall, the whole process of finding a co-founder and finding the right idea that worked toward both of you?
Shi Ling Tai:
I think me and Eugene, we are quite different people. When we first joined EF, they had us write our idea in the idea board. I didn't really have a lot of ideas that I wanted to try. I know what things that I like, like education or environmental things. So that's what I'm interested in, but then there's this one very specific problem I wanted solve, which was, I had a concept in my mind of how to fix user interface test automation, which we can talk about out later on. Those were the three things I put on my idea board, or things that I'm interested in board. Then Eugene has 20 things on his list. A lot of very specific things. If you speak to him on any day and bring up any topic, he will tell you a lot of ideas he has for that one particular topic.
But anyway, it just so happened that on his ideal board, he also has this one particular thing that he's super annoyed by, which is interface testing. Then he said, "Hey, do you want to try working on this together?" So I showed him what I was thinking of a prototype might look like. Then he thought it was like, "Yeah, I think that should be the way how it should be done. Let's do it." EF has the founder matching thing, but I was lucky on the first try that this stuck for five years and ongoing.
Then I think the next part of it was, we went to EF to present our idea to Anne Marie, one of the directors, and then she's like, "Fantastic. That's great. I know you guys like to code because you guys are engineers, but don't put your butt on the chair. I don't want to see you in the office. You've got to go out and get five customers." She was really fierce about it. I protested, because I say, "But Anne Marie, we don't have a prototype. How do we go and get customers?", "You sell them your idea." I was like, "Huh? How do you sell ideas?"
I think that's something that people were quite interested to hear how did we get our first customers. What we did was we wanted to test whether there was actually, the problem that we face, is it a problem that a lot of software teams are also facing? So we created a survey to ask and then sent it out to 40 of our friends to ask them to meet us, either face-to-face or virtually, to answer some questions about how do they test in their company. Is it manually, automatically? Who is involved in testing? How long does it take to test? Do they find it, process that needs to be improved? The last question, the most important one, if we have a prototype, are you interested to be a pilot or a beta pilot?
We actually got 30 yeses out of the 40 people who responded. From there, the 30 yeses, we actually got there the betas and we promised them that we will build a prototype in two months, but they need to pay us $500 for the pilot. It was quite cheap actually. From there, we got 11 yeses. I was like, "Wow, nice." So when we got our first five yeses we ran to Anne Marie. "Anne Marie, we got our first five yeses. Five people signed, their decision makers signed and said yes to paying us $500 for a prototype. We are going to do code now." And she was like, "Yes, go do code." And we pumped it out in two weeks.
The reason why we rushed to bump it out in two weeks was because, in two weeks from the day when we got our five contracts, was we were going to attend JS conference. Eugene actually was a speaker there. Then I snucked in. I bought a ticket. I didn't sneak in illegal. I bought a real ticket. They had these lightning talk sessions, so I wrote a proposal. I want to talk about user interface test automation and demo my cool little, neat little thing. That's where things started to get more exciting and people were actually excited. Some of the signed contracts were from there later on. I guess, from then on, after getting a signed contract, we were very committed to do it. It suddenly become very serious. It wasn't a fun game. We actually want to deliver on this.
We got feedback after the prototype that the concept was quite refreshing and it was actually useful. It helped them with productivity and it helped them to catch bugs much early on and improved their product quality, and they will continue paying us. That's how we end up doing this for five years.
Jeremy Au:
Obviously, the benefits are clear, like you mentioned. It's easier, it's more convenient, you catch more bugs, and obviously it's a problem, because both you and your co-founder were irritated by the problem enough to write it down as one of the top five things. Just for a layman who didn't do Lego, didn't do coding and engineering, why is it such a pain in the rear?
Shi Ling Tai:
The thing is, where we use applications, or let's say even mobile application, we use software these days. We don't just use it on Chrome, on IE, like 20 years ago anymore. We use it on Firefox. We use it on Chrome. We use it on Safari, and all the other small, random browsers that are on the market as well. Then there's also the mobile devices, which even if you have Chrome and Safari on the mobile device, it's not the same as the desktop based version one. Plus there's also different resolutions that you need to test. For one screen, it needs to be able to display correctly on the desktop resolution and a mobile resolution. Meaning, every time you build a single page, we need to test it across the browsers, across the different resolutions, the different devices. Sometimes you get very funny quirks, like this bug only happens on Safari mobile device, maybe exactly at version 10.13 and we need to somehow go and procure the device for it, which is another difficult pain, and then we go test it and try to debug it.
So it's a huge, huge pain to make sure that the software that you're building works across all browser. That's why, if you spoke to most engineers, or that's why actually you see a lot of companies, they sometimes put a banner that says, "We don't support Firefox." In fact, I take this app, this Riverside FM app that we are using right now for the podcast. My default browser is Firefox. I opened it on Firefox. It says, "No, we only do Chrome." And as the state of browsers right now, is that we are on this monoculture of Chrome browsers, simply because testing across browsers is so difficult. So I wanted to automate it. We had humans automating it, but at some point, as you add more features, the number of things that you need to test just grows exponentially, because there's more permutation of user actions to do. So it's definitely not scalable to do it with humans alone.
We felt that we need to make it automated. There were actually ways to automate browser testing. The technology existed 12 years ago. I think more than 12 years ago, actually. It was created for the purpose of automating browsers. However, in order to use it, you need to be an engineer. If you speak to most engineering managers, they will tell you, "Hi, you want me to put an engineer on software testing to write test automation script." I don't even have enough engineers to do features. I cannot spare any engineers to write scripts for you. I think you better hire some interns to go and press buttons and check for us. So, a lot of companies are stuck in this state of, they cannot automate because they don't have the skilled labor to write the automation, but manual testing is not scaling and they're not able to... So they release products that are minimally tested and then we get a lot of buggy products on the market because of that.
So we wanted to create this Uilicious, because we want to make creating this automated test script as simple as possible. What we notice is that, if the designers, the marketing team, the business stakeholders, they're already writing things like user stories, which is something like, "I go to this website URL. I fill in password. I click on, sign up. Then, finally, I should be at dashboard." So why can't we make this user stories into a test script? The test script itself, why do we actually need to get an engineer to script the actual, wire it up to the actual UI to automate it? So, the concept of Uilicious is such that you can turn all these user stories that are written in a higher level, like pseudo English language, and just have that run against any kind of UI and it will work, and will tell you whether your UI works or not.
Jeremy Au:
Amazing. I think it's quite clear, because what you're basically saying is, the world sucks because there's so many devices, so many browsers, so many different features, and engineering costs are so expensive that when there is a problem, it's hard to trace down, it's hard to replicate, and it's hard to even identify and fix within a time constraint. It's quite amazing that you're able to tackle all of that. One interesting thing is that, obviously, you've been doing all of this in a context of not only being an engineer, but also as learning to become a founder. I don't think you did that just by reading Rich Dad Poor Dad. So what did you learn along the way? I know that you've been working closely with Justin, one of our partners here as well, but I'm just curious, what is it that you've been learning along the way as a founder over the years?
Shi Ling Tai:
Over the years, I think I had, besides Justin, I've also worked with a number of our engineer investors who were very good strategic advisors. I really didn't know much as a first time founder. I was just jumping into the deep end of the pool and just trying to find my way to swim up to the surface. I had this naive thought that, "Oh, if the product is great, people will talk about it and that's my marketing strategy." It's a sucky marketing strategy. Two years in, some of our investors was asking, "Do you guys do marketing? I say, "Yeah. We go to conferences and then we go about it." Like, "No, paid marketing." I'm like, "What pay marketing? Digital marketing? Yeah, we did. We put one ad.", "One ad? One ad only?" I say, "Yeah.", "No, that's not the way to do digital marketing. You should do 20 ads, collect data, and optimize. Then repeat every month. 20 ads, collect data, optimize." I say, "What? Okay."
I didn't know that was how it was supposed to be done. So that was one of the most insightful things that I learned, was that marketing was actually data science. I always thought marketing was a creative thing. You need to be an artistic creative, like a poet, to be able to draw people into your website and convince them to buy your product. Actually, it's a science. There is a lot of science behind it. I think Justin was pretty helpful. He's also a pretty data oriented person. So that's where he helps us to look at what we're working on and give us directions, more like guiding questions, to help us on things that we may have overlooked.
That's my learning point as a founder, was that, actually, a lot of things that seems like art was actually, there's a lot of science to it. Even pricing is a science and we experimented with pricing a lot as well. In the past, we were priced super cheap, and then we realized that, that wasn't healthy for us, because we were getting users that were not the serious business users, until we raised the prices. And we found a lot of serious businesses will still pay for it anyway. And we were less stressed by the volume of customer support tickets that we had to handle. That's another learning point, that pricing is also a science.
Jeremy Au:
One interesting thing that we were discussing in our early conversations over time is that your reflection that you feel like you're one of the few female founders and engineers there, and that you're in this awkward position of being a leader, and representative, and role model to other folks in the space. So how do you feel about that and why do you think that's happening?
Shi Ling Tai:
Well, I feel quiteto be honest. When we were at EF, between me and Eugene, the early days, we didn't have official titles, like CEO and CTO. Until we had to do a demo day and then we actually then had to figure out who's going to be CEO and who's going to be CTO, because the CEO has to do a demo day. I was an introvert, so I was like, "No, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to be a CEO." Then the winning argument for him was like, "Tai Shi Ling, there's not enough female CEO and software engineers. You need to be a representative." He knew how to push my buttons, because I've always been talking about how there's not enough... Growing up, I feel quite lonely that there's lesser and lesser women in my class, software engineering classes.
Even joining the EF cohort, there were only four women and we were the only team that consisted of one female founder in that first cohort. So that cemented my decision. "Okay. I'm going to be CEO and I know it's uncomfortable, but I'm just going to go face it." Hopefully that inspires more people. I actually did. I was quite surprised. Subsequently, I got invited to coding on the panels and then, many months later, two women came up to me and told me that they were actually inspired by what I was doing. One of them actually founded her own company, had the courage to found her own company after seeing that I was being successful. I can do it, basically. Women can do it. So I was quite proud of myself.
Jeremy Au:
Amazing. That's awesome. I'm glad that you did that, because it's something that we need more of. What do you think that people could do more, to be more supportive of the environment for, at one level, obviously women engineers, and another level, women founders as well?
Shi Ling Tai:
I think for women engineers, I think it has to start from young. Well, one of the things that, I know this when I was growing up, was that if you watch a lot of children's TV show back in our time, they are very gendered. Like spinning toys are only for boys and cars are only for boys. So what about the girl who really likes car and wants to be a F1 driver? You'll feel very out of place. So, I think play time should be, or anything, it has to start from young. I think we shouldn't be assigning genders to toys. That's one thing. Children should be free to do any kind of activity that they are interested in. I think any one of the things that I heard when I was growing up was, "Tai Shi Ling, why do you like video games so much?" Or, "Why do you like computers so much? It's very tomboy. How are you going to get a boyfriend? All the guys will think you're not cute."
Good thing I didn't care, so I just did my own thing anyway. But there's a lot of women who care about these kind of comments. I think that's what turns some women off in pursuing... Even if they are really good at science or really good at engineering, that's what turned people off from, being perceived as a nun. Stop being interested in nerdy topics. I think that's where we can start, as a parenting culture or maybe as a society. Stop telling each gender what they can and what they cannot do. I think, how do we get more women entrepreneurs. Maybe we just need more role models. We need more success stories to help inspire more women to be entrepreneurs. But then there's also the reality that there's a lot of who are still burdened by duties at home. That's one of the things that is still a big, big challenge for women. It's a very hard problem to solve. There's no simple solution to that. I think that's something that, over time, things will change.
So far, as an entrepreneur, I did find that I received quite a lot of support from the entrepreneur community. Maybe this is where women need to help themself also. I also volunteer in junior Singapore. One of the things I notice there is the difference between my female mentees and my male mentees, is that my male mentees ask me for help all the time. They always come to me for help. Whereas female mentees are very, very shy to ask for help. I don't know how to help you if don't know you need help. You see? So that's one thing about maybe female entrepreneurs. They also need to learn to ask for help or help themself and find their people that are willing to help them. I think there are people that are willing to help them, they just don't know it. So perhaps setting up mentorship circles could also be something that would help women entrepreneurs.
Jeremy Au:
Wow. That's a lot of good advice, both on a structural level and a personal level. On that note, you yourself were one of those people 10 years ago. Still learning about what it meant to be an engineer and also evolving yourself, not just as an engineer in terms of skillset, yet also in terms of whether to choose to be working for someone else, to working for yourself. And also totally also, moving from an introvert to choosing to have more than one meeting a day. So, on that note, if you could travel back in time, 10 years ago, that would be back in 2011, what advice would you give yourself back then, if you had a time travel machine?
Shi Ling Tai:
Also, I had a lot of imposter syndrome in my early days of being a startup entrepreneur. I keep worrying that I'm not enough, that I don't know enough, and you need to be a much older person to be a very wise person, to start an entrepreneur. That was the first me that I want to clear to my younger self. You don't need to know that much. Actually, a lot of things about starting a business, you cannot learn. The only way to gain experience is to actually just go in and do it. There's no way you can work in a company, a startup company... Even if you're working in a startup company, you never get the experience you need to start your own company. You get some experience, but then not... The only real way to gain experience is to actually start a company yourself. So don't worry about not having enough experience. You'll never have enough. That's the truth.
The second piece of why I had imposter syndrome was, I had this misconception, again, back to not enough role models, that all CEOs, because I've only ever seen Steve Jobs and all the other male technology CEOs. So I always thought, "To be a CEO, you must be a tall, white guy in a business suit, or at least a black shirt and blue jeans, like Steve Jobs." That's why I keep thinking, "Okay. Nobody's going to take me seriously, because I'm a woman." But actually people do, so don't worry so much.
Jeremy Au:
Wow. I love that. I love that frank truth to yourself and, honestly, I think, just the frank to all of us today. On that note, I'd love to summarize the three big themes that I got from this conversation. The first of course is, thank you so much for sharing about your time growing up as an engineer, who happens to be a child, happens to be a teenager, gaming with your brother and hacking New Pets. Now we know who the billionaires, the income inequality, on New Pets were. Then going on to obviously learn computer science at junior college and university, and actually learning how to put that together in terms of your early career as well, from a skills perspective. There was just a tremendous amount of insight, actually, in terms of that, over evolution.
The second is, thank you so much for sharing your overall perspective as a founder. What it means to transition from an engineer to becoming a founder and CEO, and what that meant as the product market fit, in terms of it being a problem, and then you also explaining why it was such a pain in the rear for so many folks, and why it was a pain for yourself and your co-founder and how you two, both matched. And also, actually, why you should step up in the role together and how you both worked together and how you both eventually went out to find your first customers before coding and then eventually coding, and then eventually finding many more sales contracts by hacking your way into the conference, and all those learnings about how some things are less of an art and more of a science actually. So it's actually a lot of learnings there about that maturation as a founder and CEO.
Lastly, actually, I think we go to hear about your reflections in terms of representation from a gender lens, in terms of your own personal learnings, about what it meant for you to be able to have this path yourself, and also what it means, how you would encourage people to raise their kids in the future, as well as how you would encourage people to be more structural in terms of either helping other women. And also I think your reflections on how women chose to help themselves, in terms of peer mentorship and support as well, to help them to get to the next level as well. So I think it's amazing that you are a role model, and as I said, I do think you are indeed, actually did make your dream come true in your childhood. You are both a lab coat engineer. No white lab coat. You can always wear the black turtleneck now, if you want. And you also are Indiana Jones, as a founder and CEO. So I think dreams do come true.
Shi Ling Tai:
Thank you so much for your time and for having me here. I think it was a fun conversation for me as well.
