How I Built This with Guy Raz - Weee!: Larry Liu

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

If you told 19-year-old Larry Liu that his hobby re-selling used electronics “for fun” would someday help him build a multi-billion-dollar company, he probably would have laughed. He was an electrical engineering student in Shanghai at the time. His goals were to land a corporate job and go to grad school in the U.S. He did both, starting with a job at Intel. But his passion for e-commerce stayed with him through his MBA and other corporate jobs. And when he moved to Northern California, Larry noticed other Chinese immigrants using WeChat to source what they needed locally - even organizing in groups to buy familiar foods and products. Larry immediately saw this as a business opportunity. And in under ten years, after facing down bankruptcy and re-orienting his business, Larry grew his e-commerce platform Weee! into a company now valued at over $4 billion.This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei.It was edited by Andrea Bruce with research help from Katherine Sypher.Our engineers were Gilly Moon and Josh Newell.You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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We were running out of money, and I couldn't do anything about it. But like many things, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For the first time since I started, I had a lot of time to think. I try to replay everything in my head. What started as something really promising, how come it went horribly wrong. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,

and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Larry Liu went from being an eBay reseller to building the online Asian grocery platform, we, now valued at over four. billion dollars. Imagine you start a business and you pour your heart and your soul into it for a few years. You watch it gain early momentum and then shortly after you begin to see it spiral and flail. At a certain point, you have to come to terms with the reality of that failure. Now, if this

sounds like you or something you've experienced, today's episode might be particularly helpful because Larry Liu failed. He started a business that seemed really promising. And about three years in, he had to shut it down and start all over. But the failure of that business and the painful process he went through was almost like an act of God or fate or whatever power you want to believe in because it led to a much better and much bigger idea. And that idea is called We, that's W-E-E-E-E-E.

It's now one of the leading grocery delivery brands that specializes in Asian products. If you're looking for A5 Kobe beef or a pint of perfect white strawberries from Saga Prefecture in Japan, Wii is where you can find it. But you can also find staples like dish soap from Taiwan or vinegar from China. Larry started Wii in 2015 as a completely different company. The original idea was a platform to help people buy large purchases as a company. group and save money. But that idea nearly sunk the business, and it left Larry with barely a month of funding just before he made a hard pivot into grocery delivery. Larry actually came to

the U.S. in 2003 to work at Intel. It was always his dream to live and work in the U.S. In fact, as a kid growing up in Wuhan, China in the 80s and 90s, Larry was obsessed with American culture, in particular basketball in the NBA. which is actually how he got the name, Larry. My legal name is actually Min, M-I-N. Last name is Liu, but I go by Larry. I started learning English when I was 12 years old. So our English teacher asked us to pick our own English name.

So we got to choose. So I chose Larry because I was into NBA at the time. And I really like Larry Bird. That's why I chose Larry. Oh, as a Lakers fan, I really wish you would have loved the Lakers because I'd be talking to Magic Lou right now. You would have said, I want my American name to be Magic. And that would have been your name. You would have been Magic Lou.

So Larry Bird, the great Celtic. That's how you became Larry. I love it. And this was like right around the time when you were a kid and probably. So was the NBA American basketball? like, were you really obsessed with it as a teenager? Yeah, absolutely. That was the first years that China started to broadcast NBA.

So a lot of kids became really fascinated about NBA. And there was not other American sports broadcast it, right? There was no baseball, no football. It was just basketball. So that's kind of our impression of America. And we all felt like, oh, these. players were just so amazing and best in the world. And, yeah, a lot of people were like me.

We really admire those stars. Did it feel like, do most kids growing up in Wuhan dream of, like, one day living in Beijing? Like, you know, like a kid who grows up in Omaha might think of moving to Chicago or, you know, New York is, or obviously L.A. Growing up in Wuhan, is it like, I'm getting out of this place. I'm getting at this town and I'm going to Beijing or to Shanghai or something. Is that how you thought growing up?

Not really. I think most kids were not like the kids today. They didn't know what to do. When I was a child, I did not know what I want to do. So we all kind of followed this pattern. Our parents or teachers told us, right? You just be really good at school. then you apply for a good college.

Then it seems the past was drawn for everyone. So as kids, we didn't really think a lot about what we wanted to do in the future. If you really asked the kids, they all told you, oh, I want to be a scientist. This kind of generic answer, right? So it's very, very different from America, where kids from early age are encouraged to think about what they want to do. But from what I understand, you did really well in school, and then you end up getting a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. And I guess you were planning to go to the U.S. for graduate school. But I guess 9-11 sort of got in the way and sort of derailed your visa.

Is that right? Yeah. So 9-11 happened. So the year after the visa rejection rate was extremely high. I don't know if it's true everywhere, but in China, it was extremely high. So my visa application got rejected, like many other people in that year. So, all right, so you stay in China. This just coincides with the beginning of what in the U.S. became the dot-com boom and bust, right? But it was early days for things like e-commerce and like eBay and, and I guess there was a similar kind of site in China, or there might still be, called EachNet. And it was like an eBay. Right. And you started to sell things on, like you buy things and then sell them. Tell me what you would do. Yeah. So each net was created by one of the alumni of my university. So they went to

campus to recruit. But I didn't apply. Instead, I became a seller on EachNet. I thought it was fun. And so we didn't know what to sell. So we started by just posting, putting posters in those apartment buildings, asking people, oh, do you want to sell some used goods? And then people call us, for example, they would call us, oh, I have this microwave I want to sell, or I have this refrigerator I want to sell. Then we listed on each net and sold those secondhand electronics and appliances. You basically buy these things, whatever they were, secondhand microwave ovens.

What else would people sell? It was very small scale. We were just a bunch of kids. We didn't know what we were doing. We were just having fun. We thought, oh, this is interesting. We have never seen this kind of thing before. And there was no e-commerce in China, only each net.

Were you making money by doing this? Not much. We didn't make money. We didn't lose money. It was more like a hobby. We never thought, oh, we're creating a business or anything. It was more like, oh, it's interesting. Oh, you can sell things on the internet.

It's cool. So let's try it. At the time, three of us, actually now they are all the co-founders of we. So that was like more than 20 years ago. Three of us, we were just having fun. So, all right, so you're doing this on the side. And this is just something that you're doing. But meantime, you graduate, you finish university, and you couldn't get to the U.S. because of visa challenges.

But you did get hired by an American company by Intel to work in an office in Shanghai. It's actually in Intel's factory in the suburb of Shanghai. My first job was to write test programs for semiconductor chips. So, all right, so you're at Intel, and you start there in 2000. In 2002, within a year, you get an opportunity to move to California and work for Intel, which you, of course, you took out that offer. Paint a picture for me. It's 2003. You moved to Folsom, California, which is closer to Sacramento. You were 23. How was your English? I mean, you'd studied it since you were 12, but you'd never lived in the U.S. probably didn't have much interaction with English speakers until that point. Yeah, my English was pretty terrible. I remember going to McDonald, I just couldn't understand what they were saying.

They asked me a question, for here or to go. They said it very quickly, just for here to go, for here to go. I asked five times. They repeated at the employee repeated at the same speed for like five times. I still didn't get it. So I had to learn the practical English. And also when we were in China, the English we learned was like, I don't know, it was British English or something.

Just a lot of expressions were very different from the American English today. So when you got to Folsom, I mean, I'm assuming that Intel probably helped you out. They helped you find an apartment and kind of helped you get a driver's license. What did you make of it? I mean, this 2003, what was your impression of the place? It was very quiet and very clean. That's my impression. People were super nice and polite.

Intel took very good care of us, so I didn't feel like the generations of immigrants from China before me, right? They had to probably went in New York City and got into the basement on the first day. The only thing I felt a bit uncomfortable was about my initial. inability to find the food I like to eat. So the only thing, you know, remotely Chinese in Falsam is a single Panda Express. One Panda Express. One Panda Express.

Yeah, I actually had my very first meal there in Panda Express because one of my colleagues, the day I arrived, he said, okay, let me take you out to a Chinese restaurant. So we went to Panda Express. I actually like Panda Express food, but it's just different. And also the selection is very limited. Any Chinese restaurant, you're walking in China, they offer you at least hundreds of choices, right? Any Chinese restaurants. Hundreds.

Yeah. Then you walk into Panda Express, everything was pre-cooked, and you can choose from like 10 different options. It's just very different. And the closest Asian supermarket, Chinese supermarket to Fossum was in Berkeley, the 99 ranch. in Berkeley, which is about two hours away. There was a Vietnamese supermarket in Sacramento. It still took us 40 to 50 minutes to go there. So that Vietnamese supermarket became the place I went a lot.

All right. So you're working as basically as an engineer at Intel. And there's kind of a side project from what I understand that you started kind of engaging in. and while you were there, which was similar to something you did in China, but this time you did it with eBay. You basically became an eBay seller on the side to make extra cash. Was that the reason that you just were like, hey, I can make extra money selling stuff on eBay? I learned about eBay already when I was in China.

So when I came here, I started to sell things on eBay. I remember I went to Costco, and I saw this backpack, Jansport backpack. These backpacks were super expensive in China. And I saw, oh, it's only $15 in Costco. Then I look it up on eBay. Oh, the lowest price on eBay is around $40. So I just bought that backpack and I sold it on eBay for about $40. That was my first transaction on eBay.

Instant arbitrage. Yeah. Instant arbitrage. Wow. I remember after I bought the first one, I sold it. Then I went back to Costco. I bought like 10 more. And from backpacks to what else did you start to sell on eBay?

So I started to sell a lot of electronics. For example, digital cameras, even iPods, Nintendo Wii. I sold a lot of Dell computers. Where would you buy them from? And where would you buy them cheap and then sell them for more on eBay? So I bought them either online or in local stores. that's very early days of e-commerce. So a lot of the companies were not very savvy.

So they would give you coupons that can be reused many, many times. For example, I remember OfficeMax had this coupon 50 of $250 and can be used over and over and over again. I bought online. I didn't even need to go to the store. They had online. So I bought online.

I would, for example, buy two, cameras, that's like $130 each, right? So I would apply the coupon and then sold them on eBay. And the coupon can be applied to on sale items also, right? So when they were on sale, plus the coupon, you can make a profit. I love it. And were you making like a marginal profit or were you making significant profit? Because you still have to deal with the shipping and handling yourself, right? Yeah, I think it was decent. It was not insignificant. And I was pretty good at it. So pretty quickly, I became one of the top sellers in the Sacramento area.

And eBay even sent me a plaque, yeah. A plaque? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Top seller, that's amazing. Can you estimate, like, how much money you would make a year or a month from eBay? Like, like 50 grand a year, 25 grand a year, more? Like in profit for you?

It's probably between 30 to 50 grand. a year at the time. Wow. Wow. That's that's pretty impressive. I know I'm kind of fast forwarding a bit, but I know that, you know, eventually your girlfriend from China moved out to the U.S. and you guys got married and were together. And she, I guess, was a grad student at UC Davis. And you decided to pursue an MBA at UC Davis outside of Sacramento. And also in the meantime, the two of you, what would have a kid, which was probably going to change the way you start to look at life. Yeah, it was a scary thing because all of a sudden you are not just responsible for yourself. We're responsible for this human being.

I remember I was thinking to myself, what do I teach this child? That's the thing really got me thinking about my own life. Up until that point, I still felt like I was. pretty much following the playbook for a lot of Chinese immigrants, right? Just apply for a graduate school here, you know, find a job. But having the child really made me, make me think what I wanted to do for my life. So when you graduated, when you finished, when you get your MBA, you kind of, I think you kind of pivoted because you had really been doing engineering work at Intel.

But from what I read, you did what went and worked for a computer networking company initially, but you worked in finance, right? That was your job out of business school. Correct. I worked for two companies, three years each in the finance accounting function after I graduate MBA. I chose finance for the reason, which is I need to. have visa sponsorship if I want to stay in the U.S. So I could have chosen marketing, but at the time, if you chose marketing, your chance to get a job in the U.S. was almost nothing.

Because no one would sponsor visa for a marketing position. Meanwhile, you still continue to sell things on eBay, right? Like at a certain point, I'd love for you to explain how you do this. you started to automate the arbitrage, like buying things from one site and selling it on eBay or vice versa? Yeah, I kept this hobby up. Fast forward to 2012.

I had this idea that I realized, oh, how about just automating the whole thing? Because it's very easy to write programs to scrape the Internet. You can find the price on Amazon of the same thing, you know, on eBay, Walmart. Wow. You wrote a program that would scrape Amazon and eBay and vice versa, and if it found a lower price for the same product on one of the sites, it wouldn't buy it. It would just list it on the other site. Somebody would see it for lower, buy it from you. It would automatically order it from Amazon or eBay, depending on what it was ordering from. Ship it, and you would just get the difference after the commission was paid. That's brilliant. I wonder if you could still do that today.

Is there still that kind of arbitrage between Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target? I wonder if that still exists. Absolutely. It must, right? Absolutely. You can still do that today. And you can do even more, right? So now they're cross-border companies.

You can actually scrape those companies and list down on eBay. Yeah, I mean, people must do this all the time. Yeah, at the time I thought my idea was quite original. But after I did that, I realized, oh, some people were doing exactly the same thing. How, I mean, I'm just curious, like, at its peak, like how much money were you making from this? So at its peak, we were doing about $2 million in sales and a little more than 10% net profit. And we say we, it was you and a couple of friends, right, from China. Remember those two friends?

I sold second-hand things in China. In Shanghai. Yeah, so they, I recruited them. So one of them came to the U.S. also to pursue PhD. The other one stayed in Shanghai, got his master in computer science. So the three of us, two were in the U.S., one was in Shanghai. We were doing this together. And what happened to the business?

So we thought this was a fun project, but deep down we knew that this was not going to be something significant. It's a good vehicle to probably make some money, but we fundamentally did not solve any problems or create much value. Larry, you were working in finance for a different company at this point called Atmel, which was a semiconductor manufacturer. And at what point do you remember thinking, you know, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to start my own business. Like, I want to do my own thing. Do you remember when you started to feel that way? Yeah, I did.

I actually remember exactly which date I had this epiphany. It was January 2nd of 2012. I had this epiphany that I really wanted to start my. own company and I wanted to pursue e-commerce specifically yeah I remember watching this video by Jeff Bezos it was a very early I think you can still find it very early TED talk Jeff gave right he he made the analogy he said oh now the e-commerce is like the electrical era in the early 1900s, right? So he just basically said e-commerce was in the very, very beginning. So I really believe that. So I felt like e-commerce would have a really bright future. And also remember,

I read this book, Good to Great. So it had this concept called Jim Collins. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It has this concept called Hedgehog concept. So the Hedgehog concept, yeah. Right. Like a business, you have to choose something you're passionate about and you're a good. good at. So for me, I think it applies to your personal career choice as well. I wanted to choose something I'm really passionate about. I also want to choose something I'm good at. And also the third factor is this industry I'm choosing needs to be so much bigger and has a really bright future 30, 50 years down the road. So e-commerce. Something you can make money from it. Exactly. I think that's a third principle.

Exactly, exactly. So the three things just converge to e-commerce for me. So basically, you came to the conclusion that just like doing this arbitrage thing, you could have a nice, small lifestyle business, but you couldn't really scale it. Like, you hit, you were making 200 grand in profit a year, you and your partners, but you kind of realized that you might have hit the limit of it. Correct, correct. We can probably 10 exit if we're doing it full time. Again, deep down, we didn't feel. like we created much value.

Yeah. So, all right. So you are searching. It sounds like you're searching for ideas. And reading, I mean, so clearly you were, and reading like business books, right? You're reading Jim Collins. And were there other books that you got a hold of that you started to read? Yeah, I started to read books when I was 25.

So in 2005, I started to read a lot of books. I actually listened to a lot of books. I like business books. I like entrepreneurial stories. So I also start to get interested in U.S. history. I really like Robert A. Carroll's The Years of Lyndon Johnson. That became my favorite. What was it about reading about or learning about him that was interesting to you?

I think Carol is just this amazing author. So he wrote Lyndon Johnson's life more interesting than a novel, right? And also the complexity of him is really fascinating. I felt like by reading the book, I felt like I was living the life. And also, I think Carol basically wrote the entire U.S. history from like the 30s to the 70s, right?

I remember any character that appeared in the book, it was a huge chapter about it, right? Sam Rayburn, Dick Russell, people I have never heard of and were not, like, known by probably non-Americans at all. But I was able to learn their stories as well. I don't think most Americans know who Sam Rayburn or Dick Russell is, by the way. It's really, like, most Americans don't even know who those guys are. It's just fascinating because here you are just like really, really curious about this new country that you have adopted as your home. And I guess you were still, even though you were now in the Bay Area proper, with a pretty significant Chinese population and a historic Chinese population, right? San Francisco, the center of kind of Chinese life in the United States for really arguably even to this day.

you had a hard time getting the ingredients and the products that you missed from home. Is that, is that right? So I was able to get Chinese food, but I had to drive like 20, 30 minutes to a Chinese supermarket. The closest American supermarket was always one minute away from me, right? But the closest Chinese supermarket was like 30 minutes away. quite inconvenient. I want to sort of, it's a bit of a digression, but it's important because there's some, there's a part of your life at this time and maybe even to this day that is almost uniquely

Chinese in that you were on WeChat. And WeChat is and was and is a huge Chinese-based like messaging platform. It's e-commerce sites. It's an everything platform, right? Which is, it's like everybody in China uses it. And in the U.S., fewer people know. But this was, I mean, you used it to communicate with people to, like, have, you know, sort of text chains with people. And WeChat was also a place where people, certainly like Chinese expats, would talk about, like, things going on in the area or, oh, you know, if you're looking for this product, you can find it at this store.

Is that right? Is that, am I kind of describing that accurately? I remember in 2014, early 2014, seemingly overnight, WeChat became super popular among Chinese immigrants. And WeChat in the early days, allow you to add people to groups without their consent. So not only I was on WeChat, I was added by my friends to so many different groups. For example, I was in this added to, like San Jose, Mom's Group by my friends. friends. And then I saw something really interesting. I saw people were trying to buy things together in those groups. I remember one night a mom in the group posted some information.

She said, oh, I went to this harbor called Halfman Bay. There was a fisherman's market, right? She said, I talked to this fisherman because I really liked the fish, the Pacific Black Cod. And if you guys want to buy it together, I can actually ask the fishermen to go out and catch the fish and then deliver to our local community. And then in one night, right, she got an order of like $10,000, like hundreds of people. So people were like, I want some of that.

So people, and she could have getting $10,000 to order to go to this fisherman and Half Moon Bay and say, hey, can you catch, we'll give you $10,000? Can you catch all this cod for us and we'll buy it? Yeah, so she named the price, you know, roughly how much per pound. And, you know, the Pacific Placos is like 10 to 20 pounds each. So she asked, okay, do you guys want any, right? So people just text in the group. I want one.

I want two. And just, you know, more than 100 people sign up. Very, very new to me. So I was very surprised to see that. It was like just incredible. And then after people got the fish, the whole Vichag group exploded again because everyone loved the fish. They said, wow, this is the best fish I've ever had in the U.S. When can we buy again?

People posted a recipe, posted pictures. It's just such an incredible experience. All right. So this happens. And she wasn't like making money off of this. She was just organizing the purchase, right? Correct. Correct.

But this, I guess, got you thinking about group purchases. Like maybe there's a way to organize big group purchases around big items and create a business around. Is that what you start to think about? So first of all, I saw this happening in many different groups, right? Not just this one group. And also I talked to my friends in other cities in the U.S. People were doing this in Boston. People were doing this in Seattle.

So Chinese immigrants were doing this everywhere. And my eBay experience taught me something about e-commerce. My understanding of e-commerce was always, it's going to be a search-based model. What I mean by that is, as the customer, you have to know exactly what you want. So I thought that is a completely different e-commerce model. This really intrigued me because this is something new. Like, no one was doing this. So I felt, wow, this could be a big opportunity.

So how, I mean, you're still working for this company, right, in finance at the time. You still have a job. But as you started to kind of think about it, how were you going to turn that in, like, it's not clear to me how you were going to make money off of it. You would create like a platform where people could organize, self-organize, group buying things. But then because it would be on the platform, you would get, like, dead. a 10% commission or something? We didn't know how to make money at all. So first of all, I saw a lot of pain points in the group buying process.

The organizers had a lot of work to do, and they didn't make any money, so they couldn't just do this as a volunteer for very long, right? So our initial idea was, okay, let's create a platform to solve these pain points, to make order super easy to find vendors for the group leaders to enable the group leaders to make some money. And by making the match, we can also make some money in the process. That's what we thought we could do. But we didn't think through the business model at all in the very beginning.

And it was when you say we, it was the same friends that you, your friends from China from college. Yeah, correct. So, all right, first of all, how are you going to finance this idea? Was it, I mean, could you do it with the money you had? So, you know, living in Silicon Valley, obviously everyone was familiar with, you know, startups and raising money. I remember at the time I knew that my background was not strong enough. I'm not this West kid from MIT or Stanford.

You know, my track record was not impressive enough to raise money. So we decided to run the business using our savings from the eBay days and to self-fund the business until we see significant traction. Then we can try to raise money. That was the thinking at the time. And at what point were you comfortable quitting your job to pursue this, this idea full time? How did you get to that point? I couldn't quit my job because I didn't have a green card. So in 2014, I was very fortunate that I finally got my green card.

So I quit my job in September of 2014. When I quit my job, we still had no product at all. We didn't write a single line of code yet for the group buying thing. But you also, your wife was still working at Yahoo at that point? My wife still had a full-time job. I think by the time she probably was. was working at eBay or LinkedIn. I don't remember which one. All right. So you basically, you were going to depend on her salary and her health insurance and all those things while you

started this thing. Were you nervous about it? Were you like, was any part of you worried? I think so. I think deep down, you know, by the time we had three kids already. So we didn't just have one kid. We had three kids. It's expensive to live in the Bay Area. But we felt like, I think it's important. My wife and I are very aligned. all the time is that we, what kind of life we want to live, right? What kind of adventure we want to have. So we were aligned that we wanted the opportunity to do something significant and meaningful. So we were willing to take the risk together.

When we come back in just a moment, how Larry, with a brand new green card but no job, leveraged his eBay and WeChat experiences to build a new kind of group buying online business. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So by 2015, Larry and his friends figured out how to leverage the group buying experiences on WeChat into a streamlined e-commerce platform. But they needed financing in a name. So we wanted to create a different type of e-commerce experience. We felt like there were two important components.

One is it's a social thing. Right, people didn't buy along. People buy it together. So that's why WEE means social. Then the second thing is people were super excited. And I have three kids. And whenever they slide down a slide, they were like, wee! So I thought, oh, that's a very exciting sound. So that's why we picked this name. So we want to create a company that's social and exciting. All right, so you've got this name. And by the way, when you say group buying, was it going to be for food only or was it going to be for anything? So for group buying, we didn't set to just do food because people were buying different things.

People were buying pianos together. People were buying mini vans together using our application. So we wrote the first version of software by using our own money that we made from the eBay business. So we gain traction very quickly. So we released the software. I remember it's January of 2015. By mid-2015, we had tens of thousands of users already using our software to organize group buys.

All right. Well, help me understand how you would connect a buyer to a seller. For example, let's say somebody wanted to buy a mini-stableness. with a bunch of people that they would share, right? Which sounds really complicated to do, but all right, people wanted to do that. You guys would find the minivan for them. You would find the deal for them? Yeah, for a minivan, for example, we just call all the Honda dealers in the Bay Area.

We just call, hey, we can have an order of 20 minivans. What deal can you give us? Oh, 20 minivans. Oh, so like a mass order of a bunch of minivans together, like almost like a scaled order to get a group discount. Yeah, exactly. Okay, got it. Okay.

So you call the dealerships and say, we can buy 20 minivans. What's the best price you can give us? Exactly. But for minivans, we don't make any money, right? We basically turn around and just tell the groups that, hey, you know, here's the deal. It's a way for us to attract users. So people, oh, see, oh, you can buy minivan in such groups. We did love pianos.

You know, we talked to like Yamaha piano. We talked to Kauaii piano. Chinese people like to buy pianos. So a lot of pianos that way. And you would basically source the deals. And then initially you weren't making money off of this. It was just to generate interest, right? We made some money when the wholesalers didn't want to deal with the group leaders.

For example, I remember one of the things we sold really well is pork belly. You wouldn't imagine we can sell pork belly this way, but you know, you walk into any American supermarket. You cannot buy pork belly. They just don't sell pork belly. Then during wintertime, you know, Chinese immigrants make sausages. They need a lot of pork belly. So then we talk to a wholesaler of pork belly. We say, okay, do you want to sell to these groups?

And they said, no, we don't want to sell to these groups. but we can sell to you. We said, okay, then you sell to us. We resell to the group leaders. That's how we got into, like, handling some of the products ourselves. So we started to have warehouses. We can just be the intermediary between the wholesalers and the group leaders. Right.

So you would store things at the warehouse. We started to have physical warehouses in later part of 2015. And this was entirely through, chat. You could promote it through WeChat and word of mouth. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And because we add value to the group leaders, so we basically pitch to the group leaders, hey, you don't need to organize group bias. You know, all the way, you can use our software. You can create a very simple HTML 5 page. Then you just send the page to the group chat and people can click your link.

People can place order on the link. And we all. also help you find suppliers. So once one group leader sign up, hundreds of users in that group became our users. So we had this pretty strong growth engine in the beginning. All right. Tell me how you raised money from investors. I mean, was there enthusiasm for this idea?

It seems like a novel idea and interesting. This is 2015. There was a lot of money going around. Certainly in direct-to-consumer, the direct-to-consumer space, what did investors say when you brought then this idea? I didn't want to raise money

until we achieve some scale. So my first investment actually came to us, she reached out to me on We-Chat. She said, do you want to talk to my husband? He may be able to invest. I asked him, who is your husband? She said, he's one of the co-founders of Hotmail.

Of Hotmail. Oh, wow. I was like, yeah, hot mail. I grew up using Hotmail. So I was like, wow, that's huge, right? So I said, yeah, of course. So I went to his office. When I walked into the meeting, I felt like he probably wasn't very interested in the beginning. But two hours later, he committed to write the first check we ever received, $250,000

because he really liked the scrappiness and the creative way. that we approach this. I also asked him, I said, but Jack, his name is Jack Smith, but says, Jack, $250,000 is not enough. I want to raise more than $1 million. Then he taught me a lesson, right? He said, look, Larry,

raising money is one of the most important skills a CEO needs to have. So I'm not going to give you more money. You need to raise the rest to prove that. the ability to raise money. Just do cold email and cold phone call. That's exactly what I did. Huh. The cold email. Yeah. You just go on their websites of venture firms and just email their like, you know, information at whatever capital.com. Exactly. I just, I went to like all the early stage emester's website. I tried to find their email. If I couldn't find the email,

I tried to guess their email and just send a bunch of cold emails out. And I guess eventually you started to pitch some of them, including, I guess, one called Amino Capital. And you did, you were able to raise a little over a million dollars in seed funding. Yeah, seed funding. We were able to raise that. Amino was not from cold email, was also from a customer who used we. So you see, like our seed round was all from the husbands of customers. So we were very lucky.

All right. And tell me a little bit more. about what people were, what, I mean, pianos, minivans, but was it still mainly food that people were buying in large quantities together? Yeah, mainly food, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, restaurant food, some imported food, not a lot, but mostly food. And it was still mainly Chinese expats who were using it initially. Yeah, more than like 99.5%.

of the users actually use Chinese language on our application. So almost all Chinese immigrants. All right. So you managed to show enough momentum that by April of 2016, you raised a very big round, $7.5 million. And that was led by Goodwater Capital. And at this point, you know, just a year and a half in, you raised a $35 million valuation. So tell me about what that enabled you to do. I mean, this business looked like it was heading in the right direction at that point. Yeah, at the time, we thought, oh, it's not so hard to start up a company, right? A lot of stories were like, oh, you raise some money, and then boom, you became a huge success. That's what we expected.

So we just kept doing. We didn't really think a lot about the more fundamental thing. We just, okay, let's just keep doing what we're doing. But then all of a sudden, things start to slow down. It felt like we couldn't find enough group leaders and the growth just very quickly slow down to a halt. So by early 2017, we were really feeling the pressure that the growth was a lot slower. I would imagine that at this point, Like one of the things that you might try, right, is, okay, well, I mean, maybe we need to just expand beyond the Chinese expat community.

But clearly that wasn't, turned out that it wouldn't be enough. But what were some of the things you were thinking about on how to, you know, get the business back on track? Because you say two years in, it starts to grind to a halt. So how are you thinking about, I mean, were you panicking or were you just kind of calmly going through a list of like different things you might try? What were you doing? Now looking back, we were doing the exactly wrong thing, which is when something is not quite working in a smaller geographic area. We try to make you work in more areas, right, a wider range, right? So we were, oh, maybe we need to find more group leaders outside of California.

Maybe we should, you know, try to bring it nationwide. And even internationally, oh, maybe some people do group bias in Singapore or Australia, right? When we didn't know what to do, we just try to bring it to a wider audience, hoping to sustain that growth or momentum. But that didn't work at all. So, yeah, I was trying to raise money. Also, by the time, by mid of 2017, we were running out of money. We had less than $1 million left. Tell me what your costs were.

I mean, presumably you had to hire employees. You had warehouses. Where were you spending your money? Mostly people. So we had to hire business development people. These are basically people to recruit group leaders, right? We also had a small warehouse. We had people who have to deliver some orders.

And we didn't think hard enough about the business model. So we didn't try to make money. We just thought, oh, you know, we just grow the users, and we can raise more capital. And then with the more capital, we have time to figure out monetization. But meantime, that $7.5 million that you raised was, was you were burning through that fast. Right.

Because you're saying by the, by the middle of 2017, you were close to bankruptcy? We had, yeah, less than $1 million left. And we needed cash immediately. So I was trying to raise money. Again, you know, I'm good at cold email and cold calls. So I reached out to almost all the investors I could find in the Silicon Valley. I remember just driving up and down sandhill road like every day, right, meeting investors. But I had no luck to raise money in the U.S.

Investors were not interested in giving money to the business because it looked like it was about to go under. Is that what they were saying? Yeah, I think partly the momentum was slowing down a lot. Partly most investors couldn't understand. the phenomena, most investors couldn't understand why people would buy things in WeChat groups. It's just something sounded so absurd, right? So you could not raise any additional money. You were like, sounds like you were like on the precipice here.

Tell me about your own, the stress that you were feeling about this. Did you feel like this is not going to make it? were you convinced, absolutely convinced you could save the company? I was not absolutely convinced that much I know, but I wasn't giving up. Because from the very beginning, I started the business. I always told myself, I'm not going to be the one who shut it down. I will give my last ounce of energy to make your work.

So we were in danger, so I didn't give up. I couldn't raise money in the U.S. I thought, oh, maybe I can raise money from investors in China. So I flew back to China. I tried to raise money from Chinese investors. And what did investors there say? They said a bit different things. So U.S. investors said, oh, this is a social thing, a Chinese thing that we don't understand.

Right. Chinese investors said, oh, this is in America. We don't understand what's going on in America. Although it seems promising, but we don't know about America. So, yeah, I had no luck. I couldn't raise any money from Chinese investors either. Wow. So you're in Shanghai trying to raise money. No luck. Probably feeling pretty low. And then it gets worse. Yeah. So it was a real. rainy day, I probably had something on my mind, so I didn't pay attention, and I slipped and hit my back on the stairs. I couldn't get up for a few minutes, and it hurt really badly. But I didn't think much of it. I just went back to my hotel room. The next day, it hurt even more, right? So I went to the hospital, and they found I fractured three bones around my spine. So my co-founder then just took me to the airport, I was flown back to Wuhan then, because my parents lived in Wuhan.

So I stayed in my parents' house for, for a whole month, laying in bed and couldn't move. Wow. Because there's really nothing you can do. There's no like, you can't, you just, you just have to lay there and rest when you break a bone in your back, in your spine. Yeah, exactly. It's probably the darkest moment of my life. We were running out of money. I couldn't do anything about it. But like many things, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For the first time since I started, I had a lot of time to think. I tried to replay everything in my head.

What went wrong? What started as something really promising. How come it went horribly wrong? I also read some books. You know, I reread Sam Wharton's book. I read the IKEA story during that time. And all of a sudden, I don't remember which day, but I started to realize what was wrong about our approach

was that we try to make this group buy thing work better. But the fundamental reason why people were doing these group buys in the U.S. was actually not because it was fun. It was not fun. The fundamental reason people were doing this was because they couldn't have easy, affordable access to the food they love. I remember that's what I felt like the fundamental problem.

People were trying to solve using these group buys. But it was not the right solution. It was not the best solution. The best solution is to address the issue at its core. which is to give the Chinese immigrants easy, affordable access to the food they love. That's the most fundamental problem we need to solve. And when you say it was a low period of your life or maybe even the lowest period, because when your health is affected, of course, that can really, I mean, that takes over everything.

I don't know, did you just think, were there moments during that period of time where you, you just kind of wanted to give up entirely and just fold the thing and start over, start something different? After I started, we, I start to understand this word, faith, the meaning of this word. You know, China, most Chinese people don't believe in God, right? So when we grew up, we never spent, you know, it never occurred to us or nobody taught us, about this word. But I started to develop my own sense of faith. So I felt, okay, since this is something I'm just really passionate about, I started it. So I'll do my best. I'll give my all

and let the outcome to show itself. But I'm not going to question so much every day whether I should continue or not. So I started to develop this faith. And also, I didn't know this. I knew this later from a very wise mentor from me. I asked him the question. I said, when should I give up? Right. What's the criteria? If I pursue something. He said, it depends on whether it's the right thing to do or not. So he said there are two ways to look at things. One is, is this the right thing? The second question you ask yourself is, are you doing it right?

So if it's the right thing and you are just not doing it right, you should not give up. You should try to find a way to do it right. However, if it's not the right thing, you should not try to make it better because it's not the right thing. You should stop right away.

You can never make it right. I think deep down I knew that I couldn't summarize as well as he did, but deep down I knew that it was the right thing to keep up. So, all right. So you are thinking about what to do. And you realize that you're not really solving a problem that many people have. Because the group buy was interesting and maybe fun, but it wasn't really the problem. The problem was access to the things that you needed. And how did that translate in your mind to, okay, we need to completely change the business model here. We need to completely change what our business does. Yeah. So once I realize making group buy better is not the solution. Then I ask myself, what is the ultimate solution?

So I think the ultimate solution is to deliver the food to people's home. and we have to dramatically expand the selection to cover not only the hard-to-find exciting products, but also the more staple products that can be found in Asian supermarkets. But it's very, very different from what we knew, how to do. So we have to, like, completely change the business and restructure the team, everything. When we come back in just a moment,

How Larry reinvents his business to save it, even driving forklifts and delivering orders, all while serving as the CEO. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017, and Larry realizes that on top of having to completely reorganize and change his business, he also needs to offer more food and products, free delivery, and the best prices around. We believe that to become the go-to grocery shopping app, we cannot be more expensive than brick and mortar stores. We had that belief very early on. Maybe because, you know, the Chinese communities,

people in that community is very price sensitive. We knew that no one wants to pay 20, 30, 40% more to get the price delivered to their home. So we couldn't follow the INScar model, because that model will be more expensive than you buy from brick-and-mortar stores. Right. So we had to create a new model. So the idea was you had the warehouses, but you would basically have a bunch of products, food products in those warehouses, and then people could go on a website and order what they want and then you would deliver it.

Correct. That's the new model. All right. So you still have not raised the cash to save the business. I mean, you're still teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. This is the summer, because in the summer is the summer of 2017 when you break your back. Right. You come back to the U.S. I have to imagine the first thing you need to do is get more money just to stop the business from going under. So how did you do that?

Right. So I think I tried a couple new pitches to new investors. Obviously, I expected no one believed me. because the old idea didn't work. We had no credibility that the new idea would work. So my only hope was to turn to our existing investors. I pitched this new direction. Our investors were highly skeptical, of course.

And I'm really appreciative that they decided to put in some capital, partly because they want to give us a try, partly also because otherwise all the investment they put in just went down the drain. The three co-founders, we also put in some capital to show that we had faith in this new direction. So with that, we were able to raise a little bit of capital from existing investors. So this was one of your investors. It was Goodwater Capital, right? Yeah, Goodwater Capital.

They agree to give you more money. But I think that you, in exchange for that, you had to give, there's a major dilution, right? You had to give up a significant percentage of the company to them. Yeah, yeah. So by the end of 2018, they ended up owning more than 50% of the business. Wow. And that was your only option. You had no other choice.

That was the only way to save we at this point. Yeah, we had no other choice. So I'm really appreciative what Goodwater did to us. That's kind of the cost we have to pay by not able to realize our ideas the first time. Yeah. But it was still risky. You also put in your own money, right? Like, can you explain this to me?

I guess you guys had like a investment property that you rented out and you sold it or something? Yeah. Yeah. So we had two houses. We lived in one. We had another one. So I was making very little money still from wheat even after I raised the $7.6 million. I still made very little money from week. What was your salary? Under $100,000 or under $200,000? Yeah, definitely under $100,000. Okay. So I discussed with my wife. And she was very determined. determined. She was very supportive. So she, you know, with her together, we said, okay, let's do this. Let's sell the house. And so we can we can have our personal finance in order for some time. So this was a, there's a lot going on in your life at this time. And with this new model, what did it mean for, like, you had people working for a company. that was designed for group buy. So did you have to reorient everyone around this new direction,

or did you have to basically lay people off and find new people? Yeah, we had to lay people off because all the people whose job was to recruit group leaders, we had no jobs for them. Yeah. So that was pretty tough. I remember flew to L.A. and I had to deliver the news, I said, I'm here to close down this site. And it was, it was really, really tough. Yeah, I'm sure. Because obviously, you know, you were reorienting the company. So when you, when you, you know, when you began this, this kind of massive pivot, how many, once you had to do the layoffs and restart the company, how many people were working for WE at this after the layoffs. We had about 30 to 40 people, including all the warehouse workers and drivers. So very small already.

And everybody had to do everything. I remember every day around 11 a.m., I would come to the office and would say, okay, everyone drop everything we're doing. Let's go to the warehouse to pick orders. So everyone picked orders for two, three hours every day. And in the afternoon, we do deliveries. So I deliver a lot of orders. I delivered more than a thousand orders myself

because I had to figure out how to do delivery, how to write the software, how to design the driver experience, and how to figure out the delivery part. So it was a very, very tough. period of time. I worked in the freezer, in the cooler. Sometimes, you know, I was in meeting, for example, then someone in the warehouse came in and said, hey, Larry, we need you to receive the order because you are the only certified forklift driver still on site. Everybody went out to deliver. So I had to like stop the meeting, go drive the forklift to get the palace

from the truck and receive the goods and then come back for meeting. And how did you know what to keep on site? Like, how did you know what the most, I don't know, 500 or 1,000 most popular products were? This is when our own experience as Chinese immigrants comes in, right? So every day we just gather everyone say, what do you guys want to buy? You know, what other people are selling, but we don't have, right?

What do you guys want? We basically just ask our employees, what do they want? And we felt like if we serve ourselves well, we actually serve the customers well. So I think that is a very important advantage for us. Like we are serving people just like us. So you had a sense of what the most popular products would be and what you could store. Now the question is, how were you able to offer it at a lower price? I mean, there were Chinese markets around places that presumably had some scale and could offer pretty good prices.

How could you compete on price at this point? We compete on price by being more efficient. Our purchasing price was definitely higher than these larger supermarkets pay for sure. So we could never compete on the purchase price. But what we could do is we could run a more efficient operation. So your markup was lower. Yeah, markup was lower. Our warehouse operations, we were very few people.

And from day one, we knew that we couldn't do the on-demand delivery. Because on-demand delivery is so expensive. So we did what we call scheduled delivery. That way, we can aggregate a lot of orders, and we can do the route planning. In the beginning, we only deliver once a week. Then as the demand pick up, we started to do twice a week, three days a week, five days a week. Until 2019, we finally was able to do seven days a week delivery. So this pivot really happens.

It starts in the fall of 2017. I imagine it didn't turn around right away. You still have to get users. You're still targeting mostly Chinese expats. right, that was still the target market at this point. Correct. So the thing that did keep us motivated and hope very high is the moment we pivoted to this new model, the business started to grow and started to grow very steadily.

Even once a week delivery, people start to embrace that. And also couldn't really have any hiccups in the process, right? Every month, we had to rise to a different level. Otherwise, the capital would dry out. You had to grow. You had to grow every month. We had to grow every month. And our model did work.

So our model did work. So the growth did happen. I remember summer of 2017, we were only doing $100,000 a week in sales. Not bad? A year and a half later, we were doing. half a million dollars a week in sales. Wow. So you basically are hitting $2 million a month in sales,

which is pretty great. I mean, that's, so that, and that growth is fueled almost entirely by Chinese expats, or was it, did you start to see it growing beyond the Chinese expat community? I don't think there are aspects. They are, they're Chinese, mostly first generation, immigrants living in the U.S. A lot of people have been here for some time, but their most comfortable language is still Chinese,

and their diet is primarily still Chinese food. So in terms of language of choice, right, almost all the customers we had at the time prefer Chinese language over English language when they order food. And was WeChat mainly the sort of the platform on which people learned about, or were there other places that people found out about it?

So WeChat was our main user acquisition channel. We did not have money to do any of advertisement. So we had to rely on word and mouth. So the foundation we built during the group by days paid off because we still had those groups, right? We still had those group leaders who in each of the groups, there were hundreds of people. So they just help us to advertise,

to those customers say, hey, now we does delivery. And so we developed a feature, we call order share feature. So for example, if I place an order, I would be prompt to share the order with my friends. Usually people share into WeChat, right? So Guy, you are my friend. You saw in WeChat that, oh, Larry just purchased these products. Click the link to get a coupon. So after you click the link, I would get a little bit of the link.

I would get a little bit of money back as incentive. So what you're saying is people, you would get a, if you made an order, you'd get an email that said, hey, if you share your order on social media or WeChat or wherever, we'll send a coupon. Like people who click on it, we'll get a coupon to basically order and save money, and we'll give you a refund of your purchase if you do this. Yeah, we call it Wii points.

So we give you some we points that can be used. as cash for your next order. Basically, this is a way to acquire users. People, other e-commerce companies, spend probably $50 to $100 to Google and Facebook to acquire a new user. Right. So instead of giving the money to Google and Facebook,

we leverage our communities. We give our benefit to our customers. And it's much more authentic, and our customers appreciate this kind of incentive and they genuinely recommend we to their friends. And I guess around this time, that momentum allowed you guys to expand, really for the first time outside the Bay Area. Yeah, we expanded to Seattle in 2019, early 2019.

So 2019 compared to 2018, we grew 2.5x in one year. And that year, I know that at 2018, you were doing about $2 million in revenue a month, you know, $24 million in revenue a year. But not, I have to imagine you were not yet profitable. We were not profitable, but we didn't burn a lot of money either. So without burning money and grow $2.5x year over year, it was a good result. All right. Now comes 2020, which we know what's about to happen, which was the pandemic.

And I guess even before the pandemic kind of started or became clear it became clear that it was a thing in the United States. You already knew it was happening in China. You were following that. But I guess you even started to see an uptick in purchases by Chinese Americans or Chinese first generation Chinese in the U.S. who already before the pandemic were kind of started to avoid going to the markets. Is that right? Yeah, so lunar new year every year was always the pick for us every year. But the week after Lunar New Year was the really worst week for the first half of the year.

Because it would slow down. Everything would slow down. Exactly. But that year was really surprising. The week immediately after Lunar New Year was even higher than Lunar New Year week. So we were like all surprised. How could this happen? Then we knew just, by reading the data that, oh, our community, people in our community is probably worrying about the virus. You could see that. You could see in how people were using the... We could see that clearly from our data, yeah.

And then since then, every day, sales just went higher. I mean, I read that. You saw 700% revenue growth year over year, that pandemic year, which is... seems just unsustainable. I mean, how did you manage that? So it was very hard. So we had to add capacities constantly, meaning warehouse capacities.

And wherever there's a warehouse, we just couldn't wait. We have to get the warehouse and move in to that larger warehouse immediately. And by moving the warehouse, we actually did not shutting down. the business, not even for a day. We ship today's order that we put away the inventory, we disassemble the shelves, that overnight we move the shelves and inventory to the new warehouse, we reassemble the shelf, put the goods on the shelf, and deliver from the new warehouse next day. And people from our community, they really appreciate what we did because they were like, okay, this is the only place we can actually get the products.

And I guess at a certain point that year, you started to notice that it wasn't just Chinese folks who were buying from you. It was many other Asian communities and even non-Asian communities, Latino Hispanic populations, communities who were ordering. How did you start to notice that? Actually, in the process, I asked myself why nobody was doing online Latino food delivery. So I start to remember I'm a student of U.S. history. I learned that actually there was a very important piece of legislation passed Congress. It's called the Immigration Act of 1965. So that Immigration Act actually changed the demographic shift of the U.S. completely.

Before 1965, only people from European countries can more freely immigrate to the U.S. For example, people who were born in China, before 1965, the quota was 100 per year to immigrate to the U.S. So that's why before that, there wasn't many immigrants from Asian descent or Latino descent in the U.S. Right. But that Immigration Act changed everything. So people from Asian countries, Latino countries start to come. And by about 1980, all these offline, brick-and-mortar, ethnic break-and-mortarer. motor stores start to emerge because there were enough immigrants to support some offline ethnic

stores. So after I read the history, I realized that the problem Chinese immigrants were facing was not unique for Chinese immigrants. It's actually the same for every immigrant group. They're the same. They are even more underserved than Chinese, right? For example, you know, Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indians, they face the same thing. It's a very, very diverse group of people. They're not just Latinos. They are very diverse, and they all want to eat their own food. They all want easy, affordable access to the food they love.

That's when I started to feel like, oh, this actually can be a lot broader, much bigger business and can have much broader appeal. So we start to expand to other ethnicities to solve the problem. problems for more than just the Chinese people. This really, I think, in a sense, kind of was a third pivot in it, because it was, what had begun really as a Chinese-focused brand. I mean, not only were you starting to understand that you had this huge opportunity to serve all kinds of communities, it was almost like you start to think about making

this website hospitable and familiar to any ethnic group that can. came there. I think it's a very important expansion of the concept. I think for a startup business, one of the biggest challenges you can have prior market fit among a small group of people. But how can you have a power market fit with a bigger group of people, right? Eventually, any startup that wants to grow to a bigger company, you have to consistently tweak your offerings so you have the bigger and bigger product market fit. So for us, we accomplished that by expanding to more ethnic communities that share the same struggle, same problem as the Chinese. All right. After that COVID year, even during that COVID year, you had to raise tons of money

to fund the expansion. And I think you actually hit profitability in 2020 for a period of time. Yeah, correct. I know that you probably, I mean, anyone doing anything, I mean, you know, most of, I think most of us are focused on, or where we've been, where we've come to. Most of us are focused on where we are at the moment and the anxieties ahead. I think that's just normal. I have anxiety all the time about things coming around the corner or unfinished work. But I wonder if you ever did that by 2021, you raise $315 million that year. I mean, your valuation that year was $2.8 billion.

Did you breathe a sigh of relief? Were you like, ah, now we're good. We're in a good place. Or did you still, as a CEO and a founder still feel anxiety? I used this analogy when people asked me that question. I said, when we were small, we were kind of like, like, let's say a basketball team, right? We were playing with other regional basketball team. then when we get a bit stronger, we start to play, say, national college basketball.

Then we become a bit stronger. We play NBA, which one is harder, right? Is it harder to play NBA? It's harder to become NBA championship, or it's harder to play a regional player. I think it's always, it's probably harder when you raise your game to the next level. So all the success we had basically only earned. a ticket to play the next game. And the next game is going to be harder. That's how I felt. I felt it's definitely harder than the early days,

simply because we have bigger vision, we have bigger dreams, and we are competing at a different stage with much stronger players. Tell me about, I mean, when you kind of reflect on your story, right? Here we are in 2024. You got here a little over 20 years ago.

to the U.S. And he built a billion-dollar brand. I mean, I guess he was a multi-billion-dollar brand. And here you were a kid from Wuhan who really didn't speak much English when you got here 20 years ago. And now you're running a company that is very successful and could go public. I mean, I don't know, do you ever reflect on that? Or do you just feel like everything's just moving forward? And I just have to keep my head down and keep grinding.

It's very amazing that we were able to do what we did. Guy asked myself this question. When I listen to your show all the time, I said, okay, what made these people successful? Right. My summary, after listening to so many episodes, is I think each of them were used. uniquely positioned to see the opportunities that they saw. It doesn't mean that they were the smartest people or, you know, they were the best problem solvers. They were uniquely positioned to see the problems and they did something about it. So in a sense, you can say they chose to do those

things or you can say history chose them to do those things. So it's kind of how I feel, right? I feel like looking at me, right, an immigrant coming to this country, I had no idea what problem I was going to solve here in the U.S. But it's kind of this thing chose me to do it. And I was lucky enough to assemble a team that are passionate about solving this problem. So it's an amazing feeling. It's the feeling that you felt like your life is meaningful. you were brought to this world to do something that's meaningful. That's a really good feeling.

So when you think about where you are now, how much do you think it has to do with the work you put in and how much do you think has to do with luck? My dad once said, I'm the luckiest person in the world. Because he went through cultural revolution. He didn't have the opportunity to study, right? So he felt like my generation was the luckiest generation in China.

And among those people, I was the luckest person in the world. So I think luck has a lot of impact. Or maybe it's the destiny. You know, hard work is a given. So to me, I feel like maybe the hard work and the talents are just necessary. But how high you can go, how far you can grow. really has a lot to do with the situations you are in, what happened to you, what people you met. And you can loosely say those are all luck or fate or destiny.

That's Larry Liu, co-founder and CEO of WE. What's your favorite thing on WE? I love dumplings. I love dumplings. You get the frozen ones? I get the frozen ones. although they're not as good as the ones my mom made. Unfortunately, you cannot buy my mom made. No, you can't ship those out.

But those frozen ones are pretty good. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Carrie Thompson with music composed by Ramtin Arablewe. It was edited by Andrea Bruce

with the research shelf from Catherine Seifer. Our audio engineers were Josh Newell and Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Eva Grant, Sam Paulson, John Isabella, and Malia Agadello. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.