Asian Founders Club

Asian Founders Club has come a long way since our very first event EVER during TECH WEEK by a16z in 2022 when we had no idea if people would even show up. Now we've just wrapped up our third annual Tech Week! Out of the 739 events last week (197 of which were on the same day as us), we received 500+ signups and double the turnout rate of other events! We were not just the only AAPI founder-focused event, but also the only event focused on the next generation. It's clear how crucial it is to niche down when building a community. For us, that means bringing people together who simply get it - not just from an Asian American standpoint (see my last post on this) but also from a founder standpoint (i.e. high agency, ownership, and risk-profile). Lastly, we're all still so young and figuring ourselves out, and going through it with people in the same boat makes it so much better. Back then, I didn’t even know if people would be excited about a community like this. But now, I’ve connected with so many people who resonate with our mission, I feel confident that Asian Founders Club can keep growing with the same level of excitement it started with. Feel free to send me a DM or comment below if you'd like to get involved! Our partner for tonight - Novo - has also done an incredible job of building community. They’ve been our financial platform for the past two years & partnered with us for this event to show support for their customers - special thanks to Gesy Lynn Rangel for leading this initiative. I’m excited to see Novo grow their presence in NYC and continue to support founders and small business owners. Thank you to Janet Ho from Hume AI for being our incredible speaker for the night (a separate post on those learnings later) and Company Ventures for hosting us at their space.

Starting the week with a burst of inspiration from last week's event co-hosted with one of our incredible Novo customers, the Asian Founders Club. We gathered the newest generation of AAPI founders and creators for a NY Tech Week Mixer & Fireside chat with Janet Ho from Hume AI - a NYC-based startup and research lab building artificial intelligence optimized for human well-being. It's always special to meet our customers in-person, hear their fresh perspectives, and understand how Novo can support small business owners in achieving their dreams...The event was truly remarkable! Witnessing so many young people embracing entrepreneurship, especially while navigating diverse cultural backgrounds, fills me with hope for a brighter future! A huge thank you to all the attendees and a warm shout-out to Jessica Shen, co-founder of the Asian Founders Club. Her dedication to empowering Asian entrepreneurs truly shone through, and I am so grateful for her partnership. Thank you to Perry Ya, another Novo customer, for bringing his delicious flavored sojus from Neat Beverages. We love connecting our customers with each other! And, of course, much appreciation to our amazing Novo NYC team, especially Roger Liu, Amber Liu, Yohana Tanjung-Alfaro, Aghya Naresh Goel, Daniel Rangel, Danielle Komondorea, Sumati Mehta, Derek Leung. Thank you for showing up and collaborating to create meaningful experiences like this for our users and partners. Here's to many more events that bring us closer as a small business community and help us grow together. 📸 Credits: Daniel Huie #NYTechWeek #AsianFoundersClub #GenZ #community #tech #smallbusiness #community

NY #Tech Week kicks off today, and we look forward to continuing to host NYC’s premier tech events and seeing new and familiar faces - register below ⬇ 💸 Where is all the money going? Capital Constraints in Healthcare Delivery | Moderated by Margaret Davidson, our panel discussion with Ethan Schwarzbach Flychain, Christophe Rimann Juniper Behavioral Health, Anirudh Sathya Teamwork Healthcare & Brittany Wadhwani Northwell Holdings will explore one of the most hotly debated topics in healthcare - ever-rising costs of care & shrinking provider budgets. | https://bit.ly/3V5RuB1 🏥 The Future of Home-Based Care | A wave of demand for home-based care will hit over the coming decade - our panel with Mark Rosenblum, Lee Hudson Teslik Reverence Care & Jessica McGlory Guaranteed will examine leading innovations in the space & what it will take to make home-based care & care operations work at scale. | https://bit.ly/4aKQnN4 🎤 Founders & Funders the Gameshow | Do you have the chops to be a part of the next unicorn? Get ready for a trivia event hosted with MGV.VC where founders, funders and operators will compete in a battle of knowledge on health, AI, fintech, & enterprise SaaS! | https://bit.ly/3Vrumi3 🌆 Asian Founders Club Fireside Chat & Mixer | https://bit.ly/3X7nOWR 

To wrap up AAPI month, I hosted a banquet for 40 venture-backed founders for the Asian Founders Club community, all in their 20s. I didn’t go up and make a speech about how we’re underrepresented, because we’re not. In fact, Asians actually make up more of YC’s most recent batch than white founders (43% vs 36%), and many of us have gone to high schools or universities that were over 20% Asian, among other statistics that indicate overrepresentation. While our parents generation’s biggest problems were discrimination and lack of representation, that meant we got to ride on their shoulders. The largest problems we face now come from our internalized cultural beliefs: low self esteem, parental expectations, and poor mental health. Low self esteem leads to poor leadership; parental expectations leads to risk-aversion; poor mental health leads to dysfunction all-around. That's why it's uniquely hard to be an Asian founder. Especially being part of the newest generation, where we care more than ever before about pursuing our passions and creating impact at scale. This is why Asian Founders Club exists. It has never been about representation, but about creating a space where everyone just gets it and can support each other. Huge thanks to Phil Chen at J.P. Morgan and Neil Toomey at Gunderson Dettmer for supporting this community. And of course, much appreciation to my team Jason Zhu and Shihua Wu!

This time, two years ago, I was sitting in a college apartment, with a full-time corporate job lined up in NYC, uninspired about my future. Today, I run a community for some of the most ambitious young Asian founders and creators across NYC and SF while heading operations at a fast growing seed-stage startup. I started off just writing a weekly newsletter, really out of frustration towards the college education system, a system designed to set people up for financial stability, but not so much for taking risks and pursuing your passions. So I started interviewing people who had done just that right out of college. Through my newsletter, I befriended some incredible founders and ended up living in a hacker house in SF over my summer. That's where I learned about the importance of community, especially navigating a journey as lonely as being a founder, and at such a young age. It was also the first time I had a community of people who shared the same values as me, and I got the urge to provide the same for others. When I moved to New York a few months later, Jon Wang hit me up to host an event together for New York Tech Week. So, only three days after moving to New York, while still sleeping on a mattress on the floor, we put together an event with over 500 sign-ups despite only having enough space for a fraction of that. Towards the end, several people approached me to express they never felt so at home at a tech event - where everyone shared the same type of upbringing, same stage in life, same challenges, same goals - where everyone just felt understood. That was the proof I needed to scale this up into something bigger. It’s insane to see how far this thing has come - I’ve hosted 20+ events, raised 5 figures in sponsorships, brought together hundreds of full-time founders and creators, and left my job in management consulting to work at Bloom, a consumer fintech startup whose founders I met along the journey. I’m thrilled to announce that we’re hosting our biggest event yet, Asian Founders Club’s second annual Lunar New Year Gala in just two weeks from now. Huge thanks to my team Jon Wang Jason Zhu Tim Tan Shihua Wu for helping put this together, and the generous sponsorship of J.P. Morgan, Ramp, Yuzu, Impact Food, Pokeworks. Thank you to Prad Parthiban, Emily H. Cindy L. and Kelly Pan for your support. And thank you, dear reader, for listening to my story.   If you’d like to attend or if you know any young AAPI founders or creators who might enjoy attending, please message me or comment on this post!