POV: Your Mom's a Serial Entrepreneur
If I got a tattoo it would say 虎妈虎子
"Tiger mom tiger son," a slight amendment to a Chinese proverb.
Her name is Helen Fu Thomas
If you know my mom, you know she's intense, but not frightening; strategic, but never selfish; and respectful, but never submissive. She emigrated from China to go school in Halifax, Canada, but transferred to UC Berkeley Haas for her MBA. My earliest memories are from when she was CEO of LeapFrog China. I starred in LeapFrog ads as a kid and had all the new learning devices.
Her work life has always been hard on our family. She was traveling for 2 weeks out of every month for most of my childhood. I never really understood what she did, but I knew when she came home she always brought presents. She always smelled like a United plane, which is why I'm fond of flying.
Entrepreneurship by Osmosis
I was lucky enough to have my mom for most of my teenage years on travel baseball trips. She was always on the phone and we were always taking detours to meet investors, which seemed annoying at the time. More and more I realize that listening in on all those board meetings and investor lunches was more valuable than anything I learned in school and anything my friends were doing. I'll never forget how my mom tore apart the supply chain economics of another companies P&L statement to prove why her company, Touchjet, was actually set up for far better margins in the coming year. From the time I was 11 to the time I was 15, I watched my mother raise hundreds of millions in funding, turn down the Y Combinator on the spot, orchestrate PR campaigns, and more.
When you get your chance, grab it with an iron fist
In 2019, she left Touchjet after a successful Series B to start Dark Matter Artificial Intelligence. She was approached by a UCLA professor who had designed an ML algorithm to teach phonics to toddlers. He had developed the algorithm for an autistic, non-verbal child who's parents thought couldn't be helped. They had gone to expert speech therapists all of whom said their child would never learn to speak. Professor Li Cai developed a an algorithm to deliver a library of songs and lessons which miraculously taught this child to speak.
Very rarely do you get the opportunity to instantly change the course of millions of lives, and this is my chance.
That's what my mother said to me when she left Touchjet to bring the Animal Island Learning Adventure Sit & Play to market, opening my eyes to the tremendous power entrepreneurs can have to disrupt or completely reimagine the things we do.
POV: Your Mom's a Serial Entrepreneur
If I got a tattoo it would say 虎妈虎子
"Tiger mom tiger son," a slight amendment to a Chinese proverb.
Her name is Helen Fu Thomas
If you know my mom, you know she's intense, but not frightening; strategic, but never selfish; and respectful, but never submissive. She emigrated from China to go school in Halifax, Canada, but transferred to UC Berkeley Haas for her MBA. My earliest memories are from when she was CEO of LeapFrog China. I starred in LeapFrog ads as a kid and had all the new learning devices.
Her work life has always been hard on our family. She was traveling for 2 weeks out of every month for most of my childhood. I never really understood what she did, but I knew when she came home she always brought presents. She always smelled like a United plane, which is why I'm fond of flying.
Entrepreneurship by Osmosis
I was lucky enough to have my mom for most of my teenage years on travel baseball trips. She was always on the phone and we were always taking detours to meet investors, which seemed annoying at the time. More and more I realize that listening in on all those board meetings and investor lunches was more valuable than anything I learned in school and anything my friends were doing. I'll never forget how my mom tore apart the supply chain economics of another companies P&L statement to prove why her company, Touchjet, was actually set up for far better margins in the coming year. From the time I was 11 to the time I was 15, I watched my mother raise hundreds of millions in funding, turn down the Y Combinator on the spot, orchestrate PR campaigns, and more.
When you get your chance, grab it with an iron fist
In 2019, she left Touchjet after a successful Series B to start Dark Matter Artificial Intelligence. She was approached by a UCLA professor who had designed an ML algorithm to teach phonics to toddlers. He had developed the algorithm for an autistic, non-verbal child who's parents thought couldn't be helped. They had gone to expert speech therapists all of whom said their child would never learn to speak. Professor Li Cai developed a an algorithm to deliver a library of songs and lessons which miraculously taught this child to speak.
Very rarely do you get the opportunity to instantly change the course of millions of lives, and this is my chance.
That's what my mother said to me when she left Touchjet to bring the Animal Island Learning Adventure Sit & Play to market, opening my eyes to the tremendous power entrepreneurs can have to disrupt or completely reimagine the things we do.