Hello, Mr. Garrison, could you please introduce yourself to our audience? Absolutely. Thanks, Christian.
So I'm Jonathan Garrison. I come from Boston originally. My China connections go way back to when I was a junior at the University of Utah. I was studying economics and just tried to fit in a study abroad before I graduated.
There's lots of opportunities as an undergraduate student that you may explore to, go on exchanges and have different experiences. And I was like seeing graduation come up. And a friend of mine in the math department at the University of Utah said, you should go to China. And I noticed our university didn't have a China program, but I found one that they would accept, a transfer of credits from.
So I went to Nanjing University for about a semester, and right next to where I was living was the Johns Hopkins graduate program. So that sparked an idea. I went back and finished my senior year, squeezed in two additional Chinese courses, and was able to test into and get accepted to the Johns Hopkins graduate program. And so that kicked off.
That whole program is taught in Chinese. So once you've gone through that, you have some groundwork for like some experience in China also. That was the year two thousand when I graduated. So we were right at this like a really interesting point in China's growth trajectory.
So I stayed connected with China. I stayed and worked in an e-commerce business after I graduated, and then with a consulting firm in Shanghai for a while. In two thousand and one, I moved back to the US and began what I think of as the start of my career, a normal nine to five working environment. I was working in a plastics manufacturing outfit, a Taiwanese company that had a really huge plastics manufacturing operation.
And so we were doing textile yarns. We were making pet chip for bottling manufacturers. So a lot of throughput, a factory that runs like a plant that runs twenty four over seven. I was a production planner, which is a really interesting, initial stop, on the career path because you really get to learn industrial operations.
And I would often give advice to like young interns or people that I've mentored over time. If you have an opportunity to gain like sales skills, so like in a sales team or industrial operations of some sort. Those will both be very valuable skills throughout your career because in industrial operations, one thing you really get a view of is just how tightly you need, to control quality and margins and that balance between sales and manufacturing and quality and customer satisfaction and efficiency levels. It really is in a well-run company of a well-oiled machine.
And you get a lot of insight into, what really is making it work. So I was a decision making hub in that position. We would have the moment I would arrive at work, my phone would ring from the sales department, from the manufacturing floor, from quality control, from someone out in the field and our technical support, all with product specification questions.
When can we, fit in this?
So yeah, so you're seeing the demands from all around the organization come to like one point in the planning department. Another really interesting lesson early on in my career, very fortunate, I think, to have like a really stern boss. So he was somebody that I think every other department in the company did not want to cross paths with.
You can sometimes leverage that. And I think that's just a lesson early in anyone's career. So that's a bit of advice I'll throw in. I'll jump on that point of this moment.
So a bit of advice I would throw in is, be aware of those relationships in your, in your career. And I wouldn't say like in a Machiavellian way, leverage them, but be aware of, the cost and benefits of those situations in my case, one of the costs would be if I was not well prepared, I was going to have a really hard time with my boss. So, you obviously want to avoid that. It's just reputationally just from a performance issue.
to me it meant really learn my process, know my responsibilities really well. So if he came by any time and had a random question, what's happening on this line? When are you bringing down this product? What's coming up next?
I would know the plan like backward and forward, and then he, after a couple of months even, he just trusted me. He really didn't bother me at all. But I could also leverage him if I was not getting progress with something I needed to have happen, whether it was a difficult transition, of production that the manufacturing engineering team was not very happy about. I could always threaten that escalation.
look, we can bring Andy in and he can come and sort this out. And they're, no, we don't want to deal with Andy. So, they would compromise with me. So, a lot of work is that it is compromise and understanding the motivations and, the drivers of the different departments.
I would think from that whole like manufacturing experience, I learned that our sales team wants to make a different product on every single line because they have so many interesting demands they want to pursue from clients. And the manufacturing team wants to make the same product on every single line, so they can really dial in their process and bring up their A grade percentages. Well, neither of those things really work for the business. And so the planning comes into that to understand what product is, has the highest margin and and gets like consistent high grade percentage output.
and so you're always dealing with that economics question in that role. So that was my position. That was at Nanoplastics in South Carolina. Got to move down to the South for a few years.
And then while I had been an undergraduate student at the University of Utah, I had a summer abroad, a summer semester in New York City, and I had an internship for the summer at Goldman Sachs. And I was not working on like the most interesting or important function during the summer. It was an interesting summer. I spent my my shift at Goldman ran from like the afternoon into the evening.
And so I work in the mornings and weekends at the American Museum of Natural History. So if you've ever seen those like night at the museum films that's the, that's the place setting for that. So yeah, so time at American Museum of Natural History, which was just a fun, adventurous summer job.
And then a more serious summer internship position. What came out of that was more important than any real skill set or exposure to the industry was just relationships. So I knew a number of people at the firm made some good friends. Some years later, while I was in South Carolina Goldman was opening an office in the Salt Lake City area, and they were moving a number of functions from technology and finance and operations to the Salt Lake City office.
So I went and joined when they were expanding that office. I think we had about one hundred employees when I joined Goldman on a full time basis. And now they have like two towers. I think they have several thousand employees.
And in Salt Lake. So it's really grown to be a pretty successful hub for them. But that was all on the basis of those relationships and people that I knew they. They knew that I knew the firm and I understood their processes, and I was a known quantity to them.
I had just come out of the Nanjing program and then had had this industrial operations experience and really the portability of what I was doing in industrial operations to the finance world was really along the lines of like problem solving and relationship management. I think when they saw like having that skill set, that would be a really good fit for what we needed. And so immediately I was on a desk that was we were handling the New York office. It was a two person job.
Most of our other offices that we were handling in that function were one individual could handle all of the issues coming out of Boston or out of Philadelphia or out of San Francisco. New York being the biggest and busiest office was an interesting opportunity. I really enjoyed getting to know all of the like the wealth management and the securities professionals, on those teams in New York. And really getting to understand all the workings of the business, everything from custody to clearance to pricing to asset servicing type of things, you can imagine as investors come in they have a portfolio of stocks and bonds and derivatives, and all of those things are doing something every day.
There's valuations that are changing. They may be borrowing money against securities to invest like trade on margin. There might be securities lending that's going on. They may hold positions that are being defeated, a bond that's being unwound and being reissued, or there may be stock splits and tender offers and acquisitions and mergers, all those kinds of things that will impact the portfolio.
And all of those require processes to manage so that you as an investor could at any time look at your portfolio and see like an accurate picture of, this is the real time picture of my my holdings and that's going to drive decision making and tax planning, processing. And so a lot of important issues for institutions and individuals. So a really interesting cross section view of, that whole part of the industry. I wasn't at Goldman very long when my partner on the New York desk had an opportunity to move to the Dallas office.
He took off and they didn't replace him. I think at first they were thinking, well, we'll just we'll look for somebody to plug in there. And then I just took the opportunity to just step up and handle all of the issues from the from the New York office. And So that's another lesson I would say in my career path.
But I've mentioned a couple of these from like industrial operations when it came to like career growth, and procession look for those types of opportunities. I saw that as not necessarily an opportunity. I figured they would backfill somebody. I would soon have additional help coming on.
But when I showed that I was capable of handling that whole desk, that really stood out to management as, this is an individual that has not to necessarily praise myself at that young age, but, I think I really was, had that initiative to, I can, I can handle this, I can grow into like further responsibilities. And from there really my whole time, at Goldman then turned into like a series of special projects that we had that, this is a, this is a big issue. We're founding or we're opening an industrial bank, for example. We need somebody to put together a team to design the product, to work with technology, to make sure that the design of those products perform as they're supposed to in the, in the online trading space.
And so yeah, I had an opportunity to put together teams for a variety of projects that. And and which was really good at opportunities for like leadership for advancement and to just be in a special and unique position. That continued up until was twenty ten when they, knowing my managers and management in the, in the region in general knew that I had China connections and I'd had some China experience within Goldman because I'd taken on some responsibilities for several functions from Hong Kong and Singapore. And so I was traveling to Hong Kong and Singapore a couple of times a year and knew the offices there and all of their functions.
At some point they came to me and said, we know you have this background and capability and language, skill and education in China at the Johns Hopkins program. Would you be open to going to one of the offices in the region? And so I came to Beijing in twenty ten. So that was these are some interesting transition points, changing industries, changing locations, and definitely going from an office at Goldman Sachs in the United States to the office in China is like a total different career change.
It's really an entirely different regulatory environment, really. The business was so different in the still on the security side of their business, but just different interaction with exchanges with custodians, with banks, with regulatory agencies. So quite a learning curve. And though I'd had my securities licensing in the United States, so passing like a series seven, series sixty six, those exams as a registered securities professional coming to China, I was not necessarily required, but strongly encouraged to get the China Securities license.
And so a really rigorous test, if China Chinese testing, it's really condensed time frame, I think was we were under two hours and had like two hundred questions. And it's all in Chinese. So your ability to read and absorb, and decide, on not necessarily overly technical, but still, you would have to like read a five hundred page book to know the material. So the preparation and then just the speed getting through the test.
I did not pass the first couple of passes or attempts at the exam and frustrated at that. I really doubled down my efforts and then passed by like a pretty significant margin. The last time I'd been told that, I was like the first non-Asian person to pass that exam when I when I took it, and which made sense, there wasn't really a need for most foreign professionals, to have taken that exam in China. And there were a number of like Taiwanese and some, I think some other people from the region who had taken it.
but yeah, that was a bit of a milestone. That brought me up two and a half years at Goldman in here in Beijing to a point where really just a a headhunter relationship, a friend of a friend, somebody that I met at one of the local golf driving ranges, said he knows of a company that's really looking for someone like me with my background. Bilingual can work in both environments, but really understands the international investment space as well. And that was when The Wyandotte group came knocking.
And so this would be late twenty twelve. In twenty twelve, the Wyandotte group was starting to invest outside of China, acquiring like a cinema chain in the United States. And soon we were looking at some real estate assets and a yacht manufacturing company in the UK, just a variety of things that were complementary to what their core business was. I think of Wanda as like the heart of that business was a real estate developer developing multi-purpose projects, large scale projects with office space, with residential towers, with shopping, with cultural elements to them.
So that would grow to include, of course, the basics of like a cinema chain and a KTV and those aspects. But yacht clubs and film production studios and things that. So I joined right as that transition and the support for those new and more like expansive projects at Wanda were coming on board. And which gave me, the culture industries like portfolio.
They had hired a couple of international, professionals, most of them either with private equity or real estate background. That left this whole culture industries space is a little bit of a blank space. And one day my boss, who was the CFO of the group, approached me and said would this interest me? And of course it's a very interesting space.
It's motion pictures like film and television, For example, a theme, parks and themed attractions, travel and tourism related. Ultimately, sports would become part of that portfolio. So really a lot of the initial touch points that Wanda was doing in that space came through my office and my team that I was managing. So interesting days at the Wanda Group that led to a motion picture production and led to a lot of really interesting and unusual assignments, including a board director seat on the yacht manufacturing company in the UK, which was really great.
That brought me into like a whole different circle of professionals. These were like a lot of like older, seasoned professionals, many of them from the automotive industry. So these would be past CEOs or chief operation officers from companies like McLaren and Lotus and Rolls-Royce, which is a really interesting group of individuals. And here they were at like a a top tier luxury yacht manufacturer in the south of the UK, owned by a Chinese firm who, as I understand really the motivation, was in part, the chairman of the Wanda Group was a fan of their product, but also he was interested in strategic positioning of Wanda, in addition to other developers who were vying for a lot of coastal developments in China and being like the one company that owns a yacht company, when you're pitching, we're going to build, a yacht club in Marina here as part of this development, gave the Wanda Group a lot more credibility than anyone else who'd be pitching for the same project.
We were in that industry in a sense. How effective that what that strategy worked out for them. I'm not one hundred percent clear. I wasn't always watching what was happening on the real estate development side, but I understand there were a couple of projects that was it was advantageous for so that you learn a lot of interesting lessons, in your, along in your career and sometimes things that you may think, what would a Chinese real estate company have any interest in?
what interest would they have in owning a yacht manufacturer in the south of the UK? There's generally, some really good thought has gone into it, whether it's been you've been able to execute on that. Is it another story sometimes, but strategically thinking like there's a lot of a lot of interesting thoughts that go into some of the strategic positions these companies take. So keep your eyes open, I would say is one of the things along the career path.
you might from this story up to this point, catch, a through thread of that is building relationships along the way. So from as early as having like an internship experience and having some friendships and relationships and having left some impression and then maintained that contact led to a whole path of my career that was quite different from that industrial operations time. And then from there, once I stepped into the watchdog group, then I was suddenly like on the, on the front lines of a major company that's doing a lot of investing outside of its own traditional home market, which just brought a lot of interesting attention from from people from all over the world would come into town and I would find that there's time on the chairman's calendar for the owner of the Golden State Warriors or the former chairman of Sony Pictures or the former Treasury secretary from the United States and the former head of Goldman Sachs, for example. So those relationships were were available at that time.
And I would get the knock on the door quite frequently that today someone's coming for lunch. I don't know who it is, but the chairman wants you to be there. And I would show up and it would be this real interesting array of individuals, everyone from Jeffrey Katzenberg at Dreamworks animation to the head of Fox Motion Pictures or something that. And in turn, I was the one person that they could connect with, and communicate what would their relationship with the group be?
And that's something that I could help sort out with them. And they just obviously the language and culture barrier was enough that they couldn't just pick up the phone and call the chairman. But they could find me any time. And so from that, my network really grew.
And then having some interesting assignments early on we were looking at a co-finance of some motion picture deals with one of the major Hollywood studios. And that gave me an opportunity to talk with attorneys and talk with advisors, people that. So whether they were like investment bankers in the TMT, the telecom and media and, technology sectors talking to like a TMT banker, I could pick up the phone and talk to someone at Goldman or at another one of the specialty or boutique advisors and have an hour long, master class on the phone just because they knew that we were active in this space. Those people probably also wanted to have some involvement or relationship with.
With the Wyandotte group. And so where that would be pretty hard to like pick up the phone and say, I'm going to talk to a well-known entertainment attorney for two hours about questions I have and things that I should be considering when looking at this type of deal. So I really got an instant education in a lot of that, media and culture industry space. It was a lot of fun.
it's a, it's a challenging place to be from an investor standpoint, but the Wanda group did do quite a bit of a bit of business in that space and ultimately acquired legendary pictures. So, they were a pretty significant player in the market for a while. My career jumps off from, the Wyandotte group.
I I look at that as the end of a, of a normal career path, or job trajectory. So going from like industry to finance to really a mixture of things in a real estate conglomerate that was involved in investments and was involved in post acquisition management. And so there was an element of operations, there was elements of finance.
some of the interesting lessons I would say I draw on from the time, at the Wanda group, and it's probably more pronounced there than any place I had worked previously was the interaction of multiple different departments. So I'd mentioned that from my time in like at the, at the Nanoplastics group. It's understanding different groups motivations and what is important to them to like move, your processes forward. At the Wyandotte group, it was much more I would get a top down directive, go get this done.
And that's generally how things work in a company that. So rather than being having a role and then thinking, I have, my own mandate and I'm going to go explore like opportunities and I'm going to pitch them, and get support. There was an element of that, but really, the culture of that whole place, and this is true with a lot of Chinese enterprises was a, much more like, the top guy the chairman is going to he's going to pick a direction. He's got something he wants to accomplish.
And you find you're part of that and say, all right, this is my piece to go deliver. But you have to get coordination with the finance department, the human resources Services department. The cost control, it's they build processes in a lot of these companies. So that responsibility is spread out across all of these groups.
And to get it done, there's every one of those represents an obstacle, to like to the progress of this. And people will identify risk, and feel, look, I don't want to be a part of this. This might be a jeopardy to my own position. And so finding things that will work for them or give them an opportunity to like to it may give, it may give, some of those people giving them an opportunity to, showcase like what their contribution to the project can be as well.
And since we were dealing, at, at Wanda, things if you're building a shopping plaza and you built one hundred and fifty of them, those processes are going to be pretty like pretty clearly defined. But when you're talking to like a Hollywood studio about financing two years or three years of motion pictures together, it's not something that anyone has ever done before. And so it looks very risky to most of the other parties who have to take part. And so finding a way to translate like the mandate from the from the top into something that's meaningful for these guys to deliver and then give an opportunity to like showcase this is a significant contribution from the legal department to help move that forward.
this is how our human resources got involved, whether we were bringing on consultants to advise on a project and went through them or any of those touch points finding ways to have them involved in meaningful progress on the project and get them to feel comfortable. And then ultimately execute on those things was that was a really rewarding part of, that time. And that was a point where the company was very, very active and serious about international engagement and cooperations and investments. And so my, I would say, my portfolio of responsibilities was not just let's go close a deal of some sort, but also I would get all of the unusual assignments, a certain high profile individual had just stepped down from a position in like the motion picture industry.
We would like to hire that person to be an advisor to the firm. And so I would find that person, deal with their attorneys, negotiate terms of our engagement with that, with that individual. And then I would be the touch point for like deliverables from that consultation. So I had a couple of high profile international advisors working for the firm that were reporting in to me and that I was, that I was managing in addition to board responsibilities and other other actual investment related deals.
So when that came to an end a number of years ago, I had an opportunity to step into the entrepreneurial world. And that's led to this latter chapter in my career.
So on the entrepreneurial front, again, it was just came down to relationships and opportunity. This is still a really valuable lesson.
Like the partner of my business partner. Ultimately, that catalyzed our entrepreneurial venture with somebody that I had recruited at Goldman. He's from China originally. He was studying at the in Hawaii and had recruited him to come to Goldman before he joined Goldman.
I had the chance to move to the Beijing office. So we never met for a number of years, but we're always in contact, really knew each other. Quite well. And so when we had this opportunity, and I think at some point during my time at tenure, we had like run into each other, and had a chance, to meet up.
But but he contacted me about an opportunity and in-flight entertainment and that grew out of a relationship he had with a technology company in southern China, that was working with a few airlines on. They were developing tablets and on the tablets they were putting content. So when you think in-flight entertainment, it's movies and mobile games and music and documentaries, that thing. So you notice if you've flown in China very often that there are some limited options on many flights.
Some will have the seatback like installed screen units. That's always nice to pass the time and catch up on some films you haven't had time to squeeze in. I think I do more like movie watching on airplanes than anywhere else, but there are many planes that don't have that equipment on board. And so, this solution was like an intermediate step.
Our ultimate goal was we knew that like Wi-Fi being available in cabin was a next step that would be available in China. So people would bring their own devices. You would have your own tablet, your own laptop, your own phone even, and could get on to like an in-flight like intranet and just see like preloaded, movies that we would have on the server on board. And so we were initially responsible for like the ad sales on the platform.
And ultimately when we were signed up with China Southern Airlines to handle their content as well. So, that led us to like content and that space, whether it's mobile games or it's music, which is a very complicated content environment rights wise and and movies and TV series as well. Those all come down to like intellectual property rights. So distribution rights for those things.
So we had formed a joint venture with a company that has a large library of both international and domestic film and television product. So that was perfect for like the, our next step in the growth of the venture. So from just ad sales to now getting into content management, and that was all coming together for us from, I would say, our inception in twenty eighteen, roughly into twenty twenty. And of course, we had such an unusual, series of events, in early twenty twenty.
I'd say almost, yeah, right around early twenty twenty is when it really impacted us. So with the Covid pandemic, our advertisers, a lot of them in the travel and tourism space disappeared essentially, you couldn't really be promoting international travel at a time when no one was encouraged to travel internationally. So there we were, it did crush that business for a bit. But we had a lot of great lessons out of it.
Again, it was a lot of relationships that came out of it. And really, as I mentioned connecting dots throughout your career, one of the reasons that we chose to pursue it was right. As I was leaving the Wanda group, I'd been contacted by a group in the United States that manages in-flight entertainment assets and probably the biggest player in that whole space. And they were interested in talking with Wanda about China access and investment.
And I think a smart choice for them to look for a partner that. But in the course of that, I really got to understand that business and what was, their model? What were they, what were they doing? Where had they come from?
What other branches off of their business had they grown into? And successful name in that business. So having that opportunity coming from Wanda to suddenly have like a former colleague from Goldman contacted me and say, hey, is this a space that's interesting to you?
And I just had a I would say again, a bit of a master class in it because I got to see the documentation, the pitch and, the numbers and the mechanics behind the business. And we had an opportunity, to work on something within China that would have been really impossible for that party to do in the way that they were contemplating it, as well. So I say that just conscious, we weren't really necessarily a competitor to them. We were working in a place that was like a real green field within China.
But but yeah, it grew out of those relationships. So another lesson I would say career wise is you may have opportunities and you may encounter, different industries, especially if you're in the field of finance, at some point, you might be touching, even if you're focused on one specific sector within that sector, there may be a whole variety of players I'm focused on culture industries and particularly a lot of like media related deals, and opportunities. And so either investments or partnerships in, that space. And who would have thought that this niche of like the in-flight entertainment world would squeeze in there and then that would open up like an interesting career opportunity as an entrepreneur on the next step.
So that's a bit of that, getting through Covid included, going back into banking for a little while and then coming back to China at the tail end of Covid, I guess was pretty much considered like having passed at the time that I came back. So we came back in twenty twenty three, and at that point I found or was found by the Jing Dongfang so Bo group under the B o group, there's the Oasis International Hospital. And in talking with the CEO about some needs they had for some management in their international market, that seemed like a pretty natural fit as well. Because that's in here in Beijing, that's the diplomatic community.
And so we're talking about providing health care services for these communities, the diplomatic, the education and the commercial, and have had touch points with all of those from way back from Goldman days here in Beijing through all of the Wanda years into the entrepreneurial segment of time. And so having a broad network really made this opportunity open. I'd never worked in healthcare or studied anything in the healthcare sphere before. So it did remind me a little bit coming on in a place like Oasis.
when I joined the plastics manufacturing company, I the first like two months of work were, just go out into the, into the factory and learn all the processes. Even though those aren't my responsibility to operate, I need to understand, what's happening there. So I know like how big of an impact, a change that I'm recommending is to like all of these parties involved, taking down machines remastering or refitting machines for a specific product run. All of that comes with cost and time and different cost of materials, time and materials, I would say.
so yeah, similarly coming on to the medical field, the first couple of months were just getting to know all the departments, the personnel really the important like business workings, the insurance providers and patients and individual plans and packaged products and memberships that we do with corporations and with embassies and with institutions. And then really could focus on, what are our marketing efforts look like? How are we connecting with the community? What are those touch points?
And where are we not looking where we may be finding more more individuals, that need to know about Oasis as a, as a health care resource. So I manage Oasis now the international market. And so that is our marketing and our branding, marketing and our patient services for that A whole segment of the business.
So about half of the business of the hospital connects with my office. It's an important from just the as an international hospital here, to have that from both our brand positioning as well. That said, I would say other bit of lessons learned throughout all of that time is, I would recommend to any young listener, have an entrepreneur's hat on at all times. You might find, you, you're a person who's really suited perhaps to just get a really good steady job and maybe, manage career progression and advancement and that may take you into some parallel paths along the way.
it might be a very traditional line. They're going to be really unexpected things that will happen in your career. And one of the best ways to I would say like build in resilience into your career would be to have an entrepreneurial mindset from an, early stage. Some of that may mean, it's looking at relationships, and resources.
where where you have expertise or you can add value. And how that connects with your network that you're building throughout your career can be valuable in some entrepreneurial ventures, but also you're going to learn a lot of things throughout your career. I give one example, one of the engineers that worked with us on the in the plastics manufacturing firm. He had just observed like some of the processes that people were doing manual rethreading of like textile yarn machines.
And so he left a business school and within a year had developed like a new hand tool to like rethread these machines and developed a a minimum viable product, developed a prototype essentially and sold his product for some reasonably good amount of money. And that's probably not the last good idea, that he ever had in that space. And I noticed when I was looking around that place, at Goldman, there were, there were people around the industry that are providing services. And whether it's like a SaaS type product or it's a software platform or it's or it's data that they're using, think of Bloomberg, for example.
these come out of people's experience because they're dealing with like challenges each day, and they're seeing things that are maybe gaps in the workflow that require them some real like some manpower to like resolve so it's going to be human resources used to resolve that issue, whether you're reconciling breaks that get created in certain processes in the financial space. But people often would like leave their position at some point or maybe even while they're working. Start working on some solutions to those problems. And then they find, hey, we've really developed something very interesting here.
I'm going to step out of my role and I'm going to pitch it back to my former employer and to other members on the street. And really, you'd find, if you look at, the, the vast amount of like hedge funds and limited partner funds and private equity and venture capital and these various funds that are active in the market. So many of them are people that came out of roles, I would have it at Goldman, you saw that there's an opportunity, there's like a, there's a product niche that's not being like filled very effectively, or there's room for competition in a space that. And so people leave and the next thing they're now like selling assets back to to manage portfolios in a place like Goldman.
So, you'll learn and observe like gaps, in like processes, you'll identify efficiencies that could be improved optimization opportunities. And those can take on a whole variety of things. Everything from, I mentioned, a hand tool to like a whole suite of software solutions for something that. So while you're working, it's always, I think, interesting to think, all right, what is not really working very well here?
And what are the solutions to that? And maybe that's something that, I could put together myself at some point. So I think that mindset is, always really helpful to me. That's, that really was, it's a very similar lesson to like enroute global that my partner Jim and I had started was, came out of that confluence of one, the relationship that we had connections he had to people who were, who were like getting active in that industry and were put together the technology platform, but didn't have the more business plan element of it, of how are we monetizing this?
What is the value of our audience to like an advertising, market, how are we going to progress that ad sales space? We had a really good strategy and direction. We were on a great trajectory, when Covid hit, we wrote off about eighteen months to twenty four months of forward looking contracts. So it was a pretty significant blow to a company at that stage, of growth.
And now we both moved on. I have my responsibilities at Oasis. I'm also a partner in a in an investment management company in Hong Kong. So yeah, I would say at this stage of my career, there's probably plenty of questions you may have that we can drill a little bit deeper on individual elements, but that brings up to date on my career path.
I think I'll throw in one side note in there, in the middle of my Goldman career, I also left to get my MBA in business. So I went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. And a really interesting educational challenge, I would say, when you're considering your educational opportunities at the end of your high school career, there's a lot of options, and paths that, may open up to you. I would say probably, the first bit of advice I would give on in terms of that education is look for interesting opportunities.
I mentioned, a study abroad really changed a lot of like my career trajectory and thinking and opened a lot of doors for me having the opportunity to come to China early on which I really didn't expect would be anything more than just a semester abroad and not like a twenty eight years of engagement with China. So look for, look for those opportunities, whether they're like scholarship opportunities or they're there's just a lot of resources available. And so spend the time to go find those things, and take advantage of them. I even spent a semester at the University of Montana while I was in my undergraduate studies, because there's a program in the United States you can apply to any if you're at a state university I was at the University of Utah, you can apply to any other state university.
And so of course, a lot of people want to go to the University of Hawaii. They want to go to the University of Florida, or they want to go someplace like warm and wonderful if they're if that's not their home campus situation. I found my way into the University of Montana and I went just for a summer semester. I wanted to study really specifically with an economics professor that was doing a lot of environmental economics and regional economics studies.
Thomas Power. Really interesting guy. And this was still fairly early internet days, but he was findable by way of this program. And once I had his contact, I reached out, to him in the school.
I got accepted into the program. And part of what I wanted to do was just put together a directed study and universities a lot of them, you can design your own classes when you're in your like your last couple of years of school. And so I reached out to him and said, this is what I have in mind and model it on a course that I know he had taught, but maybe make it a little bit more instead of like the Montana environmental economics, a more regional Western environmental economics. And he said, great, we have a number for a course that we can customize for that.
And here's what we'll do. And I was really ambitious. So I prepared the syllabus and said, I'll write three papers and it'll be this big. He's, calm down.
It's the summer in Missoula, Montana. You're gonna want to be out like fishing, rock climbing, exploring. Write one paper at the end of the summer. And how about this?
We'll just meet once a week, every Wednesday. Come by my office, we'll have a one on one session for about an hour. And it was really good. I had a great reading list that I put together and look back on that whole summer really fondly.
In addition to a couple of other courses that I was able to like squeeze in, and then all of those transferred as credits back to my degree at the University of Utah. So be creative when you're taking these next steps and, whether you go a really traditional route, you go into like a four year program and you just stay that course or you find some other opportunities along the way. I think yeah, that's at least consider all, those options and opportunities. There's a lot out there.
There's probably even way more now than there was back when I was in school. So historically speaking, obviously when hiring people or, when you were recruiting people you obviously had certain qualities that you were looking for, but now in the age of AI, right? Have those qualities changed?
Are you looking at people who are more technically sound still, or are you looking more people who are able to interact with others? What do you guys really value in terms of the recruitment process now, or what do you predict will be valuable? So recently, most of the recruiting that I've been involved in has been in with international doctors.
So, it's a totally different skill set. But I would say it's important to me and I, and I think about it from for like the sake of my own children and for, And for like young people that we're interacting with is we have like student interns come into the hospital and work with us from a variety of international schools here in Beijing. That technical fluency and AI fluency, I think is a huge bonus. It's a huge step up.
And, I get a little bit cautious when I talk to a lot of educators who are who are wary of AI and generally from the lens of like students are using this to avoid doing work or they're having this tool do work for them that previously our system was built to assign them work and then evaluate their performance on that work. And now they've got tools to circumvent that. And so we want to like suppress those tools. You just really can't be in that environment.
You can't imagine like if you're in a school and they're, we don't want you learning and becoming really conversant, and functional with a lot of these really interesting and useful new tools that are going to absolutely be part of your life in the professional world. And to say, we want you to avoid them and you're going to you're going to come out of school years behind peers that are that are getting really engaged in that space. It may take a little bit of time for our educational institutions to like catch up to that and adapt. Hopefully they will, because it's just now the, the, the creative opportunities, and applications of tools and combinations of tools are it's so exponential at this point.
I think we're at this inflection point of it. There's going to be the pre AI world and the post AI world and work will change really significantly. And hopefully as part of that, a lot of things become like more efficient, more accessible. Of course, there's a whole economic tie in to all of that.
And so there's a way people find to price in, the additional benefits, that we're getting from the application of technology. But certainly that's a focus at the hospital when I think of like Oasis, and what we see generally trends in the medical field is how do we make use of these new technologies to make healthcare more accessible, more affordable? To really optimize things that previously, were slowing down the movement of that whole process. Yeah, when looking at I was just talking last night with a friend of mine in the, in the banking space as well.
I think technical proficiency is a really important thing. And then I think really huge part, of recruiting is people would often say like fit is, a good way that I think that's a euphemistic way of saying, is this someone that can take instruction well and can take even a simple assignment and make something meaningful out of it. Number one, execute well on your assignments, but also come back with like even some learnings from that experience so that you're contributing to maybe improved processes or new ways of thinking about how we're approaching something like customer acquisition, or those types of issues. One of the issues we were talking about, I just think this is valuable for anybody early in their, in their careers and contemplating like their education spaces like interaction and managing manager relationships is important.
I made it a note early in my career just to be conscious of this. I don't ever want to really approach my manager with problems and say, I'm, this is something I need you to solve. I might go to them and say, I'd like some advice on this, but really, I'm not handing it off to you. I'm still in my hands.
But I would, your input on a complicated issue. That's totally fine. But in general, I would want to approach my manager always with a solution. If I have an issue of some kind, I would go to my manager and say, this is what's happening.
It is a, it is a problem that needs to be addressed. Here are like a couple of options I've considered. This is what I'm planning to do. Do I have your support on that?
I might need you as leverage to move other parties in that same direction. It was often pretty conscious, of like managing that relationship effectively and not just throwing things back on my boss's desk that I'm, this seems it's too hard for me to manage. And so I want you to handle it. That will never, leave a good impression.
So for the most part, I feel like, for large parts of my career, I haven't been overly like managed by anyone and which is good. I don't think you for me, my personality, I don't think I would really enjoy that having somebody really micromanaging or that active. There's probably one rare exception in my whole career path, of that interaction. But a lot of that came from just my attitude about like about my work and my responsibilities.
I mentioned, really enjoying. And I would add that as well. This is another point that you'd like to see in a candidate that you're, that you're hiring, but also just for your, yourself, for your own, mental health and for your own, and for your own satisfaction. I think more important than, say, mental health is, look at your work opportunities as real learning opportunities.
from the outside, someone might look at it and say, managing a specific project I had at Goldman Sachs or managing a production of polyester textile yarns does not look that interesting. Maybe that's not my career aspiration, but I guarantee when you get into some of those things, now you're connected to the supply chain of raw materials that go into it. We had an explosion at the plant where I worked like the first week that I was working there. Not a pleasant event.
a tragic event, but it happened because someone had come in, and some highly flammable liquid had been cycled through a huge reactor tank. And someone came in and didn't check like, the fire tag on it. And so they didn't follow the right procedure and immediately climbed up onto this tank. And they had something that they were working on that day and began to weld a bracket on the top of this container.
And the heat of that had a very low flashpoint, this material, and there wasn't very much in it. So a lot of it had already gasified and it blew, the welded bead off this enormous, larger than this room that we're in and taller than like three stories. This welded bead on this canister, peeled back and toss the guy way off the top of the thing, and it blew windows out on vehicles parked in the plant and in offices like way down in the lower part of the plant. I heard it while I was out on the floor.
Everybody was, what was that? And like immediately all hands on deck. Now you hope for safety issues to not occur that. But the point being, you will encounter all kinds of interesting things because you'll realize, this is a really intricate operation and it involves this raw material combined with that raw material and running through these various like reactors and having a really temperature and pressure controlled environment to get the right quality output of product.
And on top of that, you're going to be dealing, with people that are making your favorite, like North face jacket using your product. And people using antimicrobial and UV resistant new products that we were working on and talking with the tech support team who are or the R&D team on what are new combinations they're working on in fabrics and what will these mean for like sustainability issues and for health and safety related issues to like apparel? Just a fascinating space to be in and dealing with salespeople who are then talking to you about this is the story of this customer, this is what they're using, and here's how they're applying, our product. And before long, you're starting to see that your work is like visible to you in the world all around you.
And, you're going places and finding, oh, the carpet in this place. The fiber from this was generated from our plants, the largest like output of this type of product in the whole country.
in any field that you find yourself in, you're likely to find some of those connections. So yeah, I would say that from me, that technical back to the question on like recruiting and skills and attributes that would be interesting, that curiosity and the ability to be a team player. You'd like to see independent thought and people have a lot of initiative and not just be an order taker and and a task doer thing, you'd like to see a desire for growth personal and and professional. So additions of skills, application of, of knowledge they've had from other experiences, whether it's from your academic background or your prior jobs.
I think those are always really interesting elements. And more and more, I would imagine going forward, in the future, the technical capabilities are going to be a big part of it, but also it's going to be throughout your career. What network have you put together? What resources might you have available to you that might be valuable to your employer?
As I mentioned, stepping into to, the hospital here, a real appeal, I'm sure, from their standpoint was that I had like quite a bit of extensive engagements with different embassy personnel from a variety of countries.
One day I was opening a new project in Wuhan one year and I got again, I mentioned I get the odd knock on the door every once in a while.
could I invite ambassadors from multiple embassies to go attend this event? And that's an unusual request from in a commercial setting is to go like knocking on ambassadors doors. But we ended up getting inviting nine ambassadors. We had the ambassador from Spain, Russia, New Zealand, the UK, Tunisia.
We had a whole variety of folks from Belgium. And so getting to know a lot of the staff and folks in that diplomatic community, just even through that outreach and maintaining some of those relations and connections, knowing how to access, those people that was certainly, I think, appealing to the hospital to have me join with that skill set. And and then again, chambers of commerce and internet and the education system here as well. That was another Rwanda outgrowth.
There was a project in Qingdao where at one point they were looking at for this to be a real international film production facility. We may need to look at international schools so that we could have some international staff supported out in that region. And so that brought me into contact with a lot of like the school administrators and ownership here in Beijing. So even though that was going back a number of years, I've had that experience and that was something that would be hard to replicate if they were to if they were looking at me versus some other candidate.
I think it would be pretty obvious that, wow the avenues and connections were very clear with me.
So when you apply to Goldman Sachs, what were some of the traits that you think helped you get the job. It could have been academics, but even outside of academics, we're assuming that everyone that applies to Goldman Sachs is roughly the same grades. What do you think differentiates people and allows them to gain the job?
I think the first thing that was that was helpful for me. I look back on that time and have evaluated it over the years, but thinking of my interview process over the course of a few days with several managers it was a little less intense than I thought it would be. And I think for certain programs, if you're you're in the investment banking lane in an analyst class in New York, it's going to be like very competitive. And you were mentioning, a lot of resumes are going to look very similar in terms of academic accolades and so forth.
I was interesting to them for a number of reasons. I think one I had had experience studying in China and studying international economics in a, in China at that time was like not that common. So that really, I think stood out. So I tip my hat to the Johns Hopkins program at Nanjing University.
Great experience there for the year. Having the additional language was always interesting. I don't know that my direct managers at that time had too much of an eye on China. That would not be their mandate ultimately, anyway.
But I think that did really make me stand out. I think the second thing was that I'd had a couple of years of experience professionally before joining. And that professional experience was really focused on like real world problem solving. And a lot of it was also like proficiency with like the basic products.
So things like spreadsheets, we ran our whole production plan when I was at Nanya Plastics, we ran our production plan on Excel, which you would not advise. I'm sure that has changed this time. It's just too easy for somebody to, if I was out of the office one day, someone to open up and type over like a cell or something that.
And there's always ways I had backup to like, to fix anything. But but it was an Excel spreadsheet full of really lengthy, complex formulas. And so it's a little, it's a little bit of like programming almost it's, it's its own language, but logic wise, that thing. And I think that was another thing that they really saw.
they really needed problem solvers in those roles. And so yeah, that was probably like the two things. And so I would say like having that like mindset, knowing how to like navigate different personalities and different divisions to reach a certain goal because that's what we would be doing in our roles in like in what they call like the federation.
We were supporting the business, which means we had to be the place that, any team member as I mentioned, covering New York, any team member from any of the desks in New York could call me and I would be able to explain to them, here's how, performance calculations work, because they're dealing with clients all the time. And so their whole role is just sales, essentially. But how does all this translate into like actual actual, an actual portfolio that's tangible to, their client And explainable in terms of commissions and fees and performance calculations and tax reporting outputs and all the things that are important to any investor because they're making decisions based on a lot of this information. So yeah, the ability, I think they saw early on that in the interview process, even that I had done things that probably were even like higher stakes than some of what they were doing when I was at at, in plastics in the industrial operations, my boss had warned me like early on, he's if you make a mistake here, he's explaining you bring a line down too early, you're overproducing something this or you or you mix up product in some way.
Every one of those like mistakes is going to cost the firm a of one hundred thousand dollars to two hundred thousand dollars. He's, you won't make many of those mistakes before you're gone. You won't have another opportunity to make mistakes that.
So he's, so it is important to stay on top, of your stuff. I think it also was a good testament to me. I did have good references from my former employer. That's always a really important thing I think have that in your mind from like day one, when I leave this place, I want to be able to reach back out and say, look, I'm looking at this opportunity.
Would you be willing to write like a recommendation, and and have that backing. So that was really helpful for me to have like solid references from those those points as well from both the education and, the work experience background. But they saw that, yeah, I had operated in like a pretty high stakes environment. In terms of accuracy and knowing my process really well.
And that's really a skill set that they needed in that space. And so really early on in my tenure, even I found, it's a very competitive space. I loved my experience at Goldman. I would just say, from an overall of it, I would, my general advice would be certainly to my younger self, if I was advising myself, I would say, don't stay too long.
That's one thing. You'll have other opportunities that are going to be really interesting. Unless you're going on to like the senior partnership and and in some area of the firm don't let it take too many years out of your career, you're going to learn a lot and you'll have some really good work habits out of it. One thing that's really great about that environment too is I wouldn't say it's just complete ambition, but everyone is like very motivated.
if you have an assignment I had with a variety, as I mentioned, of discrete projects where like management would come to me and say for the next year to like year and a half, this is a thing that we really need to have happen, have done. And so we're giving it to you. Can you put together, you let me know, you need a couple of vice presidents, a couple of associates you need, what do you need from analyst support, just budget your team for us. And then here's going to be the reporting structure and here's your counterparts in like the technology department nowadays, so much of a company like Goldman is technology.
even more than just economists and finance really technology is really going to be like the core of a lot of those businesses. And I think in really high quality technology programs you'd find at like a Carnegie Mellon, for example, they're integrating like finance, and technology, in all of those courses. And in the MBA program I was in, we were constantly working with data mining and optimization software and scenario running scenario type systems like crystal ball and these things.
So so the application of technology and finance those two are like completely married at this point. But I would say like for all of those like assignments I was given, each one of those is like a huge opportunity. And anybody I would think that I was working with for the most part, I would think any individual would respond the same way they would like, really want to like show their capability, and their ability to work within the team and the company culture. It's fairly selfless.
I know there's a lot of really just individual ambitious folks, but my experience, with the culture was like incredibly positive. So it was, it was such an interesting shock to leave like a really well established like company with in terms of like process and corporate culture and direction and then join like a Chinese company. It was a really interesting, I don't know that will be applicable to everybody here, on in the audience, but you never know.
There's more and more Chinese companies that are prominent, that have opportunities that will be investing abroad. And I think the interaction of Western economies, and China, that'll continue to be a story for a long time, I'm sure into your careers as well. If you were preparing an application nowadays and you were applying to firms like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or any of the big firms, how would you cater your application or your CV towards that or what things have changed? What else would you want to have in order to be more lucrative to the employer?
I think as much as you can find out about what specific role that they're looking to fill, and then I would really look to like build a story around that role in particular. When I went, when I went, to Goldman I think they were looking to fill because it was such a new office and they were they were, look, we're expecting this growth trajectory. We could have somebody on like a trading desk.
you're working with like asset servicing related issues and someone on the valuations or client reporting or the tax team, I think it could have been a variety of those. So I didn't really know, I would say looking back, had I known the role that I landed in, I probably couldn't have prepared my interview any better because it was really like my skill set from what I had been doing previously, was the perfect fit, the ability to deal with people who are, not my boss, but were my internal clients within the company. And all of our clients are like the firm's clients, but I'm really having to respond to like the demands of particular teams or deaths. So I mentioned like New York, which was, which was huge.
that was like a dozens, of different like individual management, investment management teams. And then within those teams three layers, the professionals, we call them at this top level, the financial analysts and then a client analyst at the bottom part. And often people would get into one of those roles and move up through those ranks within those teams. But the ability to manage from that top level within those teams and even the overall management of all of that layer.
and then down into my own organization to like partner groups that I would need to work with very frequently with technology as well, where we're finding this is something that we're just not managing, we're not able to capture very effectively in the space that I was working in. There's a lot of very complex financial instruments. So a lot of investment schemes in a way that there won't be like a system that really captures accurately what is this product doing? And so it's up to like the sales team.
And who often then would move back to me and say we have a client who's really interested in this product, but we don't know a couple of things about it. And then how is it going to show up in terms of impact on market value? Is this also contributing to portfolio valuation, which has a lot of implications for additional lending that the client may be doing? They may be using their portfolio to leverage or to even secure like an aviation loan or something.
You never know. There's a you get into those spheres of like individuals and institutions. There's a lot of creativity that goes into that that financial management space and investment management space. But I would say, yeah, my approach to my to my like interview was a lot of just drawing on, these are like issues that I had to address as in the role that I came into.
And when I, when I came, also letting them know my mindset I think that's a really effective thing to do, in an interview. And so that should set you a part in an interview process is to explain like when I came into like my prior role or as I matured in that role, what did I come to work thinking about every day I had my eye on, what is happening with my inventory situation? Do I have a product that's aging? Do I have anything that I need to move out?
am I producing something that's not going to be needed? What are the margins on these different products and what is the cost of me switching some things over? And it sometimes even having myself like the right like the right line in my mind of this is cut off for this production line. And at this point, I need to bring down a line and just not have it run at all.
it was also, I think, helpful to let them know, the some of the positive responses I'd gotten from my former employer. So, keep track of those positive feedback that you've had. I would say from both the academic side and also on into my career, we would have, we had a team of planners, and if one of the planners went left on vacation, we had a couple of other guys who had like quite a bit less responsibility, than I did. They were managing smaller plants and like smaller, more limited processes.
But when like when somebody would go on vacation instead of having like their responsibility to one of these guys with like lesser responsibility, it would always come to me or one other individual on the team. And so that was a real vote of confidence. And so that's something that's valuable to share with an employer to say, I was, I was always in a position where they could stretch me. And of course as I mentioned early on in my time at Goldman, that was my experience.
I was on the New York desk and it was a team effort. My partner had an opportunity to move on to another role. And so when he did that, they were, we're gonna backfill this. And then they saw I was capable of handling it.
And they were pretty satisfied to leave me in that position for a while. And at some point, not too long afterward, they approached me and said, look, here's another opportunity. We have some functions that are being currently managed in Hong Kong and Singapore. If you'd be willing to adjust your schedule a little bit, we'll move all those functions back here and you can add somebody to your team and the two of you can manage Hong Kong and Singapore.
And so I took that opportunity, which meant, I worked from like seven in the evening until about three in the morning, which sounds rough, but when you're much younger, I just think, man, it was ideal because you go home when it's still dark, get some sleep, and I'd wake up and I could go golf like every day before I go to work. And there's no one on the golf course in the middle of the afternoon. So yeah, so it was, it was a pretty interesting opportunity. I was generally pretty eager to say yes to almost any opportunity that came my way.
I can't think of maybe there was one time I was pitched something that I just knew was not going to be the right fit for me, but was able to steer that in the right direction. What I find interesting is that the I've interviewed a couple of CEOs or also managers that have been successful. And the common denominator in all the responses are that you have to say yes to almost like any opportunity that you get, they're always willing to explore new things. How important do you think that is also for students now, our age, seventeen, eighteen years old, just taking as many learning experiences, saying yes to different opportunities that you may get.
And how is that even shaped your career? Because you weren't just working at one firm always, right? You've worked in different domains. So how do you think has that shaped your career and how do you think it's important for us?
Yeah, I think one element, it's like one side of that is like saying yes to like opportunities. The other side I would say is look to create opportunities. So yeah, at Goldman, a lot of those opportunities came to me when I was, when I joined The Wyandotte group, it was really an eye opening experience because a lot of the conversation while I was at Goldman was about in terms of managing your career people would say like having exposure to important people within the organization was really important. And I had a lot of exposure to people who were at the, the managing director or the partner level, not infrequently.
And so, and had some of that network. It would have been helpful for me if I was staying like in that lane of my career trajectory when I left and went to, the watchdog group. My network opportunities were like exponentially greater. I had no idea before making that move how big that change would be.
But I mentioned my phone would ring and it would be the head of a movie studio, or it would be just a really interesting wide array of different individuals and opportunities that came up. So some of it is saying yes, and some is so when I, when I would have an opportunity, someone came to me and said my boss came to me at Wanda and said, hey we're doing a big event and you need to go bring a bunch of movie stars, to China thing. That's not my core like function at the group, but it's important to the boss.
It's important to like, the big boss, our chairman. So let's get the team rallied behind this and we put about two months in two and a half months in, and got it done. And out of that came a lot of other interesting opportunities, some of which I had an opportunity to deal with and interact with, some of the motion picture people that we brought to China and say, look, there's a real desire within. There's demand within this company to, get working with some of these guys.
So they should come with some projects ready to pitch. And it was interesting to see the response to that really only like one company came very prepared, followed up with an actual pitch and that turned into the film southpaw, directed by Antoine Fuqua, a pretty pretty sizable box office hit, for us and from the Wanda group, good foray to get into like international cooperation on the motion picture front. Not something that they kept up too much beyond. Of course, the acquisition of legendary was really big for them, but this preceded that even.
but it grew out of, that opportunity. So that's you look for opportunities to pitch ideas and things, even like when it was we had folks focused on real estate. We had people focused on a little bit more like private equity type of transactions, but this big space of culture industries and motion picture and theme park and that space. When that was open, I really, I approached my boss and said this looks open space.
Can I manage that? It was very happy that I was like taking that off of his plate and somebody who had been partially responsible for it, but was not really enthusiastic about how much risk it seemed to entail. Was happy to see it go. But then that was my mandate for the next like three years.
So yeah, and especially I would say in student years, I mentioned, make your own opportunities in some cases, go knock on the doors that are, for me, it was the International Student Exchange Center. Go find out. They're, oh, here's all of the international study abroad programs.
Well, if I'm not finding something I, is there, can I go find the program I like? And they're, yeah, you can, and you can, you can, you can find that program, get the courses like pre evaluated and approved for transfer of credit. And so even though you'll enroll, at Nanjing University, but through a university in New York City we'll just transfer all of that back here, to your, toward your degree.
So I won't lose any of that time. And there's also a scholarship over here that's particularly for study abroad purposes. And there's a limited number of them. But I was awarded that scholarship.
And I think in part because all of the other applicants were going to like the places that same committee had seen every year they were going to Mexico City. They were going to there were a few other destinations where they had really established lanes of probably London, a couple of other spots. And so they weren't seeing a lot of variety. And the fact that just that Nanjing, China showed up on their desk immediately excited them.
I think probably had they dug deeper, they would have found, well, this student is enrolling through another university. We should probably keep this for somebody that's like here at our school, paying tuition to our university at this time, they must have overlooked that detail. And I was awarded this scholarship. So yeah, take your swings is what I would say.
apply for things like talk to professors and advisors about opportunities and openings. As it is right now, and some of you may be aware, we do host international students, at the hospital for like a short duration internship, but just a real. The objective of that is like. Students will leave that experience with a pretty comprehensive understanding of like all the interaction of all the different departments and specialties and skills, and even to some extent, like the finances of how a hospital operates.
pretty valuable experience, I would say. Stack some of those up, those opportunities up as you can, as young as you can. It just makes going out into the world that much more interesting. I always find it a real really, an interesting conversation when, I mentioned, a friend of mine in the banking industry, we can, we can travel almost any place in Beijing.
And he can point out, oh, this development over here, was done by so and so and who financed it and when did it come about? And so I always have questions, what's going on with this building that, seems completely empty and maybe constantly under renovation. Oh, that's here's the story behind that project. And, the world is a really interesting place full of unexpected stories.
and when you're young, people really want to invest in you. So the more you ask, the more like the more response and positive feedback you'll get from that. So you have to be willing to take initiative, ask questions, take the big swings, all important skills. And I would say, especially when you're young, this is also a good time.
If you're, if you have any of that feeling, well, that's not really me, my personality, maybe I'm not that extroverted or something that. Youth is something that people of greater age and experience are, are pretty forgiving of. We recognize you're at a, at a young age that you're going to go through a lot of changes you're going to be developing.
you may not be entirely aware in your later teen years well, what are you going to be like at age thirty? You're going to encounter things that will mold and change you. And now is a good time to get people invested in you. And that's you have counselors at your schools, no doubt.
and you'll have like even look at like parent friend groups. I think if I were to advise myself going back to your stage and age of like coming near the end of high school careers and getting into university would probably be, I would tell myself do a better job of like connecting with my parents network. Even people that were, either in like a church community or were related through like work things. And you had opportunity for conversations in certain like community gathering settings or something to have a moment and say, hey, I'm interested in something of this nature that I know you have some experience or expertise in.
Do you have some advice? You find people are really responsive to young people who show that initiative, and if they're not, then you don't need to spend time with those folks. The people who will really add value will recognize that game and respond with game as well.
I think probably the one point I would encourage throughout is that entrepreneurial mindset, because that's still with me today where I'm looking at like opportunities, and people still contact me all the time.
I'll relate one quick story that I find interesting. There was a partner from Goldman came to our office once and he was asking everyone like for us to tell him, how did the firm make money? He wanted to know like what our understanding of what we were the firm was about. And people have all kinds of answers.
Well, we make fees from advisory and we make commissions on trading, and it's a whole mixture of a lot of that stuff. And so it really boils down to something fairly simple. We're the hub of like of information. So when something is happening, maybe it's an oil transaction and we've got somebody who's selling somebody else in this community of Goldman is in contact with the buy side on these things.
And so we're like, the place people come, to say, I'm looking to do this, I need, I have this specific need. And we generally can identify the other party. And then there's opportunities through that to be like managing accounts of these like institutions. There's you're their trusted advisor as well as your like an ongoing service provider.
And then, and then it's just up to the firm to get creative about what are other needs that we might meet for this client. In fact, we were, we were only dealing with like institutional clients for quite a long time. And a lot of the senior executives in those firms were saying, look, we know Goldman, we're comfortable and familiar with Goldman Sachs from our from our corporate side of things. But we have executives here who have major stock options or they're wealthy, high net worth individuals, and they want the same level of attention and care.
And eventually that persistent drama at the door, the Goldman gave in and said, all right, we're going to explore this. And then that became like a really important and profitable part of their investment management business. So it was not something they were really pursuing, but the firm as a whole itself was willing to say yes to that opportunity. But also like for yourself as you're thinking of your own career, be thinking entrepreneurial, that can be something as simple as hey, I see like there's especially in China, you often notice like there's a bit of a gap in the marketplace over here.
And you may not need to be like the biggest company in the world, to fill that, but it can still be like a really good lifestyle business. It might be a business you would, you would build up and then it's really attractive to some other party who's looking to aggregate some of those assets. So you sell that business. And then in terms of building wealth, if that's an objective, there's no other path that's more proven than that is small business, start a business sell a business is really, that's the wealthy class in America, by and large.
