I did everything Chinese culture values — then quit to build a startup

I followed a familiar path: I studied computer science at Zhejiang University, went to Carnegie Mellon in 2016 for graduate school, interned at Google, and joined Meta in 2018 to work on Stories. In many Chinese families, stability and status are deeply valued; my parents and uncles ran very small businesses and hoped I could get a stable job and life.

At Meta I learned to scale products and work across cultures. My first project involved optimizing a prominent button in the app — a change that could affect millions of users and large sums for the company — and the career path there felt clear: promotions, bigger teams, higher status.

I started to feel that big companies focus on scale and metric optimization rather than frontier innovation, especially in the AI era. I returned to China in 2021 to work on AI at the Japanese startup SmartNews, and after ChatGPT appeared in 2023 I wanted to try different things.

China

zhejiang university, carnegie mellon, google, meta, smartnews, chatgpt, ai startup, chinese culture, computer science, product scaling