Consulting, Digital Marketing, Digital Trends, Leadership, Modern Career
She is tech. The story of a Chinese immigrant and mobile app developer
Please – DO NOT READ this article about the utmost passion and the eternal struggle of an individual UNLESS you want to fully understand the complexities of being a woman in technology and see why only few females will thrive in this environment.
Why would you like to read or hear about someone’s story, anyway?
Because it hasn’t been told yet.
And because every story is like no other.
So, who is she? This tech lady.
Daijie Huang is a first generation Chinese immigrant in the USA. She founded the Boston-based startup, InnoTechnologies, that is creating the first marketplace for location based personal travel guides. The project was built on a passion for technology and innovation, but also traveling, since Daijie is an enthusiastic traveler herself. She is quite the global female entrepreneur, as well as successful and resourceful women and leader – but there’s more to her than that.
Behind every success, there’s a hard work. We all know that. Except that behind Daijie’s story there’s this extra effort she had to put into making her dreams a reality.
Daijie grew up in China, currently lives in the USA, and she visited countless countries all over the world, mostly with her daughter. Daijie’s career has spanned from engineering to product management and now to entrepreneurship. As we speak, she is now bringing her app to Kickstarter to bring travel experts from every corner of the world to share their stories. Today I want you to read about Daijie’s path to becoming a successful entrepreneur, her technical interests and how she fully embraces the notion of women in tech.
There’s a lot of press around women in tech and obstacles they face, but the story of Daijie Huang, the immigrant from China, is a must read. It’s the homage I pay to her after observing the sweat and tears she poured into countless updates of her app. She’s someone I can identify with since I am a Polish immigrant now living in Canada, working in technology. Also, I worked for three years in China in the mobile games industry, so most of the time while interviewing her I felt like we have the similar life stories.
Daijie, let’s talk about your background a little bit. What was growing up like?
I grew up in Xian, China. I have two elder brothers. Back in my young childhood, China was still closed to the outside world. The old city wall was our playground and gave us infinite joy after the boring school day. Catching bugs, climbing the brick wall, playing hide and seek, etc, you name it; the ancient city wall gave us all of our fun. I rarely thought about other places, but even if I did, I would assume that kids everywhere else were doing the same things as us. To me, the world was home and home was the whole world until one day, a few western backpackers showed up on our streets. Yes, I was one of the silly kids following them, finger pointing at them and wondering where the heck they came from. I started to realize that the world was something big, different and fascinating.
Then, flocks of foreigners came to Xian; they wandered around the ancient wall, the bell tower, the big goose pagoda, and of course, the Terracotta Warriors. Then, I started to learn English at school, and learn more about the world as China began to open the door to the Western World. Later, when I got into college, my mother, a CTO at a local company, started to work with western companies about potential partnerships. China was changing. After her business trips to the UK and the USA, she told me: ”The outside world is fascinating. Our generation has missed our chance, but, you still have one. Go further to see the world!” Honestly, it was a challenging goal during that time. Unlike Beijing and Shanghai, Xian was pretty laid-back and under developed. Although my parents were making an above average income in Xian, it was still too little to support my studies in the USA. The good thing is that I have been a very determined person since I was young, good or bad. Although it was a big stretch to compete for a good university in the USA, I got into Renssellaer Polytechnic Institute with financial help, after months of catching up on my English. Can you believe I memorized 800 new words in a day? I won’t be able to do that again honestly.
My mom taught me that a woman can do even better work than a man in technology and encouraged me to go outside to fulfill my dream – then my father taught me the entrepreneurial side of things. My father was a brilliant engineer in his field. He took a newly invented tech to a nice service business later.
Growing up under the influence of a high positioned mom and an ambitious dad, I set up my life goal before I even realized it: an adventure. To make life fun and meaningful, no matter where the road led me, traveling, or on the life journey. So, I went from a silly girl chasing after alien-like foreigners to an entrepreneur who believes that the sky is the limit.
What was your career path from engineer to entrepreneur? Did you have role models & mentors along the way?
It was more of a genetic accident. Using my husband’s words: it’s my restless genes. Repetitive work just bores me to death. So, instead of climbing the corporate ladder like most smart people do, I quit my engineering job from a high tech but slow growing company to start on my own journey. It wasn’t easy and I learned a lot in the process. I also have a very supportive husband, which hugely helped me stay float through the hectic life change.
Role models and mentors? I would be lying if I said successful entrepreneurs, though it is in most cases a more rational answer. To be honest, I think that we can’t simply duplicate other people’s success.
I am more inspired by free spirits who are not confined by social standards and travel around the world to seek a life that is full of surprises.
Do you notice a lack of women starting companies in the tech industry? If you do, why do you think that might be the case?
I agree, women in tech are very rare in the USA. Growing up in China, I was very used to seeing women playing important roles in tech companies. It was to my surprise to see very few women engineers when I worked for GE, my first job. I think girls are prepared to a non-tech career path consciously or unconsciously by parents in their early age here. We see that many more boys are encouraged in science and engineering activities, while girls are more encouraged to pursue cooking, dancing, and other lady-like activities. In other words, girls are being left out of the tech world from the beginning. If girls and boys are trained the same way, the results could be very different. I am not saying that we should train girls and boys the same way, as I did see its drawbacks from my own experiences in China. There should be a way to open the door to girls without ignoring the gender differences.
So you’re saying it’s the upbringing that holds women back?
I think our society has an expectation for a woman. Women are supposed to take care of the family and other merits are not essential. So, we see that women are more praised for being a good mom and wife by the society.
A high authority woman is not really that popular, because it is supposed to be a man’s job. So, society confines a female’s potential by its hidden definition of a female’s responsibilities.
Have you ever faced discrimination or different expectations in your academic or professional career because you’re a woman?
Yes, inevitably in my career. By saying that, I have no complains about my academic path. Actually, women are pretty encouraged in the engineering major today. I think it is a great step toward enabling more women in the tech industry in the future.
However, in the industry, there is still a long way to go. My two previous employers are both in the tech industry and both have very few women as engineers. It is very rare to see a female manager in these types of companies. To get to a higher level, a woman has to work much harder than a male. One of my managers was even puzzled by my request to become a senior engineer. In his mind, staying at a job with less responsibility was a blessing for a young woman who was supposed to have more time for her family.
What do you perceive as being the biggest barrier for women entering the tech industry and what are your ideas to overcome these?
The expected role defined by the society is quite a challenge for women in general. I still remember when I wanted to take a more important role in my work; my boss was surprised that a woman wanted to take more responsibilities from a men-dominated job instead of family. I would say, not letting the social perception confine us is pretty critical for women to thrive in the tech industry.
The other solution for entering the tech industry might be… to create your own company or app. How did you come up with an idea for LeafCanoe?
The idea behind LeafCanoe was more so from an accident. A few years ago, I took my daughter to Angkor Wat, which is a huge temple complex that you can easily get lost in. I was wandering around and had no clue what I was looking at. The tourism was not very well developed there; there weren’t any guides available at the entrance and no digital guides were available. So, I spent $20 on something for a $40 face value guide-book that turned out to be useless. Let’s cut it short on the tourist trap talk about how I spent 20 dollars for something that was selling at 2 dollars outside. The whole point is that even with a guide in my hand, I was still lost. For such a huge place, extracting the relevant information for a point of interest is not easy. So I started to think -What if the piece of information I wanted could be grabbed easily at the right spot and the right time? I started the LeafCanoe project. The vision of the app is to become a crowd sourced smart guide that gets people the relevant information at the right time with a platform that rewards experts who provide high quality guides.
So how is LeafCanoe different from other travel apps?
LeafCanoe is a travel community for travelers who love unique experiences. We started it as an app where people simply share the details of their travels, but it occurred that it’s so much more fun if they actually can sell them and buy from each other instead. The quality of guides become different and the whole experience is more expert-like now. It gave the app a whole new level of purpose: experience what other travel experts have experienced.
Why this is important?
It gives you an incredible injection of travel ideas, knowledge and expertise. It’s a great social learning experience but also has a practical value – get the best local tips and tricks in the shortest time span possible from the best source, directly from the local experts. As we speak we are adding a large amount of categories on how you can travel, including traveling on a budget. The second way we will be categorizing travels is according to the type of local experts we have, from brave and bold adventurers to family or fancy luxurious travelers. In case you still don’t find what you’re looking for, we will create a voting channel exclusively for LeafCanoe backers where you can vote who should become LeafCanoe experts and what destinations you want experts to write about. We have those mile-stones in our pipeline as we have recently launched it on Kickstarter. Next, with the help of our supporters, we are going to add more useful features and extend the support across platforms.
What do you find exciting about your current role?
Pursuing LeafCanoe is like an adventurous journey, full of surprises, good or bad. The experience is the most rewarding thing that helps me grow and keeps me motivated. For me, nothing is more exciting than exploring and experimenting new ideas first hand. No matter if the idea works or not, I have the opportunity to search for solutions.
What’s the hardest problem you ever solved being LeafCanoe’s project leader?
The most challenging part of what a start up is facing is its limited resources. I believe that implementing a lean strategy is the key to resolving the dilemma for our bootstrapping start up. Being lean is not just about a home office and hiring contractors. In fact, the core concept of a lean strategy is to try small things first, get feedback, then adjust it and try again. This strategy has been keeping us afloat and we are looking for a great year in 2016 as our marketing message and product roadmap has become clearer through the past year’s experiment. If we did all the design work before the market test and put tons of money on the launch, I am afraid that the project would have died because of the huge cost.
What’s a mistake you made in this role, and how did you overcome it?
Only one? Hmm, this is tough. Ok, I will come back to the lean start up top then. Because it is the most important factor that I learned and practiced along the LeafCanoe development. It is easy to say keep lean and develop the minimum variable product, but it is really hard to execute.
I had been pushing lots of unnecessary development work for the first release on the App Store. Some features were overkill and nobody really cared. Learning from it, I kept reminding myself that my understanding of urgency is just my opinion and not the market’s.
More features doesn’t mean better. In fact, it could hurt the product instead. I think I have done an okay job to remind myself of this strategy in the following releases.
Can you name the number one thing you learned about your product by working with an external monetization consultant while developing LeafCanoe?
The number one thing that I learned from you is that our product was not as beautiful as I thought. Imagine your baby is said to be not pretty. What a depressing message! But, this is indeed good for us. LeafCanoe app has kept improving with your great feedback.
If you had to choose one characteristic what would you say is the most important trait to being a good leader?
The passion is my choice. A leader who has the passion will have the strong will and positive attitude to keep the team motivated towards the success. The positive attitude will lift the energy up and lead to more creativities and productivity.
How do you strike your own life’s work balance?
Work and life balance? Honestly, it had been quite an issue for me in the early career days. Then, I realized that I had lost the real meaning of work and life. Being busy and stressed out only means that I am working in a very inefficient way, which is an alert by itself even without the pressure from the family duties.
Since there is no person that can matter enough so that they can let the world stop for even one second, why not relax and just let things flow, which is the philosophy of Tai Chi? I have practiced Tai Chi for a few years now; it is very helpful for me.
You have kids. How long did you take off after having children before returning to work? Were you worried about returning to work due to the speed technology evolves and your skills being out of date?
When I had my first child, I took 3 months off from my work. For the second child, I took about a half year off. Since my absence from work is relatively short, getting out of date is not really my concern. However, I can imagine the situation of returning to work after a long term absence from the industry. I would say that keeping a part time job would be really helpful.
What advice would you give to the women starting their career path in technology?
Although there will be many obstacles along your career path, there will still be opportunities when you are well prepared. Take your time to make a difference. When the opportunity does come, you will shine!
Thank you for the interview!
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