The Tim Ferriss Show - #584: Bo Shao — His Path from Food Rations to Managing Billions, the Blessings and Burdens of Chasing Perfection, Building the eBay of China in 1999, Pillars of Parenting, and Pursuing the Unpopular

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Starting point is 00:04:50 Now would have seemed like the right time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Why hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where each episode is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different areas to tease out the habits and routines, or maybe frameworks, decisions, approaches, who knows, that you can

Starting point is 00:05:26 apply to your own lives. My guest today is Bo Hsiao, B-O, last name S-H-A-O. Bo Hsiao is a co-founder and the chairman of Evolve, a philanthropic investment firm composed of a foundation, Evolve Foundation, and an impact investment firm, Evolve Ventures. With initial capital of $100 million from the Xiao family, Evolve aims to support organizations that relieve inner suffering and facilitate inner transformation. Bo's story is pretty wild, so let's jump into a little backstory. And we're going to go in reverse chronological order. Prior to Evolve, Bo was a founding partner of Matrix China, a leading technology venture capital firm in China, which manages more than $7 billion and has funded more

Starting point is 00:06:10 than 500 companies, 50 plus of which have become unicorns. That means valued at more than $1 billion USD. He is also a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded five companies that have either gone public or become leaders in their respective industries. Bo was born in China and was the winner of more than a dozen national mathematics competitions during high school. For those who don't know what that means, it is a huge, huge deal and a very significant feat. I'm going to leave the rest of his bio to our conversation and we will dig in very, very quickly. The website for Evolve is EvolveVF, as in Venture Fund, Venture Foundation. So EvolveVF.com. He has no social media. We will dig into why that is. And without further ado, please enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with none other than Bo Xiao.

Starting point is 00:07:16 Bo, it is nice to see you again, sir. And I wanted to perhaps set the stage by pulling from one of our very first conversations we ever had, and it involves ketchup. Might sound like a strange place to start for those people listening, but perhaps you could provide just a bit of context and that'll be a way we can jump in. I grew up in Shanghai, China. My father was a math teacher. I guess he's retired now. He had always been very strict with me. He had many, many good qualities as a father, which I won't go into here. But one of the things he did not do so well was he was angry all the time. And often for a certain period of years, he was angry. And also he would unpredictably get very, very angry and get very scary. So I think one day, maybe when I was maybe five, no, actually, I know exactly how old. I was around 10 years old. He brought

Starting point is 00:08:07 ketchup home in a bottle of a beer bottle. I remember it's a green beer bottle. And we never had ketchup before. We grew up poor like everybody else in China. And I think I stole a taste of it without his permission. And he flew into a rage. I do not remember whether he hit me or not, but it was very scary. And I'm sure I cried and it was a terrible time. And then a couple of days later, I came home and I saw him in a good mood. I think that somehow gave me courage to ask him again, can I try the ketchup? Which actually is surprising because after that episode, usually I would not have worked up the courage to do something similar. But in that case, I did because he looked so happy.

Starting point is 00:09:02 He said to me, Bo, you can have it. My Chinese nickname is Xiaobo. It's like, Xiaobo, you can have as much ketchup as you like. I was shocked. And not only I tried the ketchup and he actually bent down to hug me. I remember exactly where that happened. It was in front of the kitchen. I have a mental picture of that location right now.

Starting point is 00:09:26 And I don't recall too much. To be fair, I can't say he did not hug me ever. Yeah, he probably did. It left such a deep imprint in me of getting this kind of, I didn't ask for a hug, and he gave me a hug in a very tricky situation. And that left a very deep imprint on me. Then later on, I found out that I won my first mass competition. I think it was in fifth grade. It was a mass competition involving all the students in Shanghai. And Shanghai is like, at that time, probably a city of 12, 13 million people. And I was like clear number one in that mass competition.

Starting point is 00:10:06 And that's why he was in such a good mood? I think so. Could you paint a picture of what poor looks like and what it looked like for you? Because I remember you mentioned rations and things like that, just so people have a little more detail. First of all, I didn't know I was poor. Everybody was poor. So I didn't know I was poor, which is actually a good thing. But the way we grew up is, when I was four or five years old, we didn't always have meat on the table. Everything was rationed, including milk, rice, oil, cooking oil, meat, certainly. Very rarely any kind of seafood. I think vegetable probably was not rationed. I can't remember. And you get these

Starting point is 00:10:46 little tickets you have to carry to a grocery store in addition to the money. And they were making, I think my father was making maybe certainly less than $10 a month. My mother was also making $10 a month as well. So the tickets are like food stamps in a sense? But there's a ticket for meat, there's a ticket for cooking oil, etc. Got it. And you had mentioned your father was a good teacher and I'd love for you to pick up there. And also I'd love to hear how and when poker or cards may have entered the picture. Because we were so poor, we didn't have ways of, you know, setting up maths. These days, if you want to train maths, you have lots of

Starting point is 00:11:29 tools to do it. But back then, we didn't even have an abacus. He initially started just writing down arithmic problems like 5 plus 7 or 15 plus 28 on a piece of paper and asked me to add them. He has to write hundreds of these equations and I need to solve them. But then he said, oh, he sort of had, one day had an inspiration. Actually initially started with my sister who is three years older than me and said,

Starting point is 00:11:54 oh, why don't we use a deck of cards? And obviously ace is one and two is two. And then Jack is 11, the king is 13, et cetera. And you add up the deck of cards. Initially, you actually add up only 10 cards, and then to 20, and then to 40, involving one to 10, and eventually to 52, involving one to 13 times four. The total sum, I think, is 364. And then he would take one card from the 50 card, two cards away, and asked me to add up the rest. And he was set a time limit, so I have to get it right within a certain time limit. And I think I trained for several years

Starting point is 00:12:34 under this method. And I actually became so fast that I think I was able to add up 52 cards under 12 seconds or so. And actually, just to be able to show the cards so quickly. I was going to say, I don't even think I could show the cards in 30 seconds. I've developed a particular way of going through these cards. And I think I was doing basically more or less four or five calculations a second. And it turns out, actually, just later on, as I understood a bit more about neurobiology, is that actually it takes about 100 milliseconds for the brain to recognize an image,

Starting point is 00:13:10 to be able to see the card clearly and take it in, and then process information takes one-tenth of a second already, or sometimes depending, one-tenth to maybe one-sixth of a second. So to be able to add five quads in one second is probably close to the limit of human biology, I guess. What else did you absorb from your parents? And maybe it's worth also backtracking for a second and asking the question, what lesson subconsciously or otherwise

Starting point is 00:13:45 did you take away from that experience with your dad with the rage over the ketchup and then the have all the ketchup you want hug from your dad that seemed to coincide with winning that math competition? I'm still actually discovering how these imprints have affected me. You know, my experience is that, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:07 and my understanding is that I was so imprintable as a child. All children are very imprintable. That I carried away with certain things with me. And that's not his intention. I want to be clear about that. But it's nevertheless is what I carried away with. And one of the impressions that I received was that my value comes from my performance. In fact, specifically to be almost like number one, that's my value. And if I am not number one, then I'm a person with no value

Starting point is 00:14:46 and I feel heaviness as I talk about it because it's such a burden and it was a creative solution in some ways because indeed I became number one in many things when I was growing up, particularly math. I ended up winning first prize in dozens of national math competitions in China.

Starting point is 00:15:09 And I felt safe. That performance enabled me to feel safe. I think my impression is that, actually, I was treated better after that. My father had less of a rage. He was so proud of me. I felt my life changed for the better, significantly better because of that performance.

Starting point is 00:15:27 And then as I grew up, I needed to perform well in everything. It's not just math competitions anymore, not just college or the first job. But this kind of almost compulsion to perform, start to dominate everything, including driving. Like I need to be always on the fastest lane. More importantly, perhaps I always need to plot the most efficient route to a place. I remember when I initially got my Tesla, I needed to look at the Tesla maps. I need to look at Google maps. I need to look at Waze so that I can see which map provides the best route. And I can look at postmortem and see, oh, which indeed, which one was more accurate. The next time I will use this map for this route, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:16:20 Of course, I gave a lot of pressure to my wife, enormous amount of pressure to my children. It's one of my deepest patterns of behavior. You ended up going to Harvard at 17. How does a poor kid in China end up with Harvard on the map? I understand you won these competitions, but how did it end up that you were able to go from where you were in Shanghai to Harvard at 17, if I'm getting the age correct? I think I came to the US on my 18th birthday, if I remember right. This is largely thanks to my father. He saw it early that going to America for higher education will open up entirely different world of opportunities.

Starting point is 00:17:09 So he started working on that very early. And back then, going to America for PhDs were relatively known. Quite a lot of people go because you get research assistance or teaching assistance so that you actually get paid to study. But for college, there were no such things. So you needed a full scholarship. The reason it needs to be full is nobody in China back then could remotely afford a college education in the US. Remember, you know, when in the 1980s, when the China economy initially opened up, people who got rich first were called Wan Yuan Hu,

Starting point is 00:17:47 which means people who have 10,000 RMB. That's considered to be very rich. You don't get a special name. So like millionaires or billionaires that we use now, 10,000 RMB is a big, big deal. So actually, even when we started applying for colleges, we couldn't even afford the application fees, which is like $35 or $50. We actually had to get waivers of application fees

Starting point is 00:18:11 from these colleges. Really, thanks to him, I applied to 20 or so colleges in the US when I was in junior high school and got into a bunch of them. And a number of them gave me a full scholarship and couldn't Harvard and off I went. When did you start studying English? Chinese middle school and high school education have always emphasized English as a part of core curriculum. So we did study English in middle school and high school. Now the teaching quality wasn't very good because most of those English teachers never, no, actually not all of them, none of them have ever been overseas and their accents are, you know, atrocious, but you know, we would learn grammar and all those things. So I think I was able to probably read, actually no, I take it back. I don't think my

Starting point is 00:19:03 English was that good, but then I get some cramming school outside of the regular school to learn English. And that helped me. So the cram school, just for people who might not know what that is, that's like an additional night school that you would go to to strengthen your abilities in a certain subject? Yes, that is correct. And remember, my English was always, definitely I was very unsure and not confident about my English until one summer, maybe in somewhere in middle school, where I spent probably half the summer listening to a few tapes. It was a textbook called New Concept English, I think from the UK. And I listened to those tapes over and over again until I pretty much memorized it. I could even talk, not just the text of the lessons,

Starting point is 00:19:49 but also including the copyright, everything that the speaker was introducing the book and everything, you know, Oxford, Cambridge Press, whatever. All of those things I listened to so many times. I remember it was a little recorder. It was actually not a little, it was like probably the size of a laptop, kind of a, but several times thicker, a recorder with these plastic buttons. And I'll click rewind,

Starting point is 00:20:10 play, rewind, play, rewind, play, probably thousands of times during the summer. And I basically was able to mimic the speaker on the tape and memorized without trying to most of the things that he was saying. And then after that summer, my English just ceased to be a problem. It became something I became very comfortable with. What prompted you to listen to those tapes thousands of times? Was it the pending trip to the U.S. for college or was it something else? No, I don't know why. This is way before even going to the US appeared on the roadmap. There's a part of me that just really wanted to be excellent, I think. And this is actually a very important learning as I actually in the past few months,

Starting point is 00:20:56 you know, I'm starting to realize because we explained this is actually important. I have this sort of pattern of behavior that require me to be sort of want to be perfect in every situation, which is a burden. And one of the reasons that I was unwilling, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, to let that pattern behavior goal is that I'm afraid that if I don't follow this strict pattern, I will cease to be excellent. All the things that made me great or successful will disappear. And then I become lazy and all that. And I think subconsciously, I was holding onto that pattern for fear of that happening. But as I connect, however, now with, I was just talking about it, actually, nobody forced me to do this. And I did it because there's an innate drive in me, I think, to do a good job

Starting point is 00:22:02 by things I touch. And the more, in some ways, I get in touch with that innate drive, but it's not a pathological compulsion. Like in certain situations, it's appropriate. In certain situations, not appropriate. It's a great tool in my toolbox. It's a great trait of mine. But if I actually have more confidence this is within me, that's my inner quality, then the more willing I'll be letting this other pattern go.

Starting point is 00:22:31 Does it make sense? Yeah, it does make sense. I think that if it is your default and you are not aware that you have a toolkit with other tools. And if you don't have that developed self-awareness, then you're sort of sleepwalking through parts of your life with a hammer looking for nails. But as you develop more awareness of your capacities and also the side effects of misapplying the tool, both for yourself and other people, then you develop different strategies, right? And you can also be easier on everyone, including yourself in certain places. And like you said, there are times when it makes sense to pull out the big guns and focus on

Starting point is 00:23:19 something intensely, but it doesn't have to be figuring out how to shave 12 seconds off your trip to Starbucks by looking at 17 maps necessarily, right? You can even go one step further that if the reason I had developed this particular coping mechanism or pattern behavior or professionalism is because I have an innate inclination because people react to trauma. I use the word trauma, referring not to just say one time, big event kind of a trauma like abuse, but trauma could happen over a long period of time of a repeat exposure to certain stimulus that does not meet one's need. And I was exposed to a particular situation repeatedly. But however, my sister and I responded to that same situation differently because of our different innate inclinations.

Starting point is 00:24:14 And so it's not a surprise that I developed this pattern of professionalism that's always there that I couldn't control because I had innate inclination that's good. But then it became almost bastardized or misused to cope with a situation that was very, very difficult. And the situation was the just overall household dynamic? Is that the situation you're referring to? It's difficult for me to talk about a bit here. And we can always cut things out later. Partly it's because it's memory, but also I want to make sure that

Starting point is 00:24:47 if my parents ever hear this, they know that I love them dearly and they've done so much good for me. But there are certain things that simply when needs were not met. And one of the situations was, my father was angry and very demanding and very controlling to the extreme.

Starting point is 00:25:06 And also he was physically punishing as well. So I was scared. I was scared, I think, to the end of my wits, I think. Some of this rage becomes at very unpredictable times. So I think I was constantly vigilant and constantly making sure I was performing. And also another thing in the family dynamics was that there was very little attention paid to how I feel. So the feelings were, for the longest time, I treated feelings like an emotional evolutionary

Starting point is 00:25:39 waste product, like an appendix. Rationality and analytics is what I'm built for and emotions just gets in the way and it serves no purpose. So I think for a long time until I was probably my, maybe the first time I met my wife, I don't think I had many feelings. I didn't know what they were really. Just to speak to that, because I think part of the reason we bonded and ended up speaking for as long a time as we did when we first met is that that's, I think, some shared experience that we have in the sense that when you think emotions are a liability, you compartmentalize or dissociate in such a way to focus on the things that you feel you can control and apply like rationality right and becoming as vulcan like as possible but

Starting point is 00:26:36 over time and i'm sure we'll talk more about this things have a tendency to squeeze out the corners even if you think you've put them in a nice, tidy little box. I would love to come back to your chronology just a little bit, and we're going to dip in and out of a lot of these topics. When you first came to the United States, do you remember what things or any things that were very surprising to you, whether about the US in general, about the students you ran into, anything at all? Did anything jump out at you as incredible, unbelievable, confusing? There was too many things to count, really. I came from a country back then in 1991 where people didn't even have phones in their homes, most people. When I had to call home, I needed to make sure, arrange a time with my parents over

Starting point is 00:27:31 regular mail or over the previous phone call so that they can go to my neighbor who had a phone and they will wait by the phone when I call. But when I got to the US, I remember, I guess vignettes might be illustrative, was that when I landed in Los Angeles on my way to Boston, I needed to call home to make sure that they know that I'm okay. And by the way, it's hard for me to imagine that my oldest daughter is off to college, to imagine parents sending their kids off to college, knowing that they may never see him again. For them going to America, it was, it's a, it's not just getting in a fight. Seriously, they might never see me again.

Starting point is 00:28:19 The courage they displayed and the selflessness they displayed was is breathtaking when i called home from los angeles airport i was using a public phone which is the first time i've ever probably seen a public phone i remember having putting maybe several dollars worth of quarters into the phone but the phone refused to connect and i put more money in it would still refuse to connect. And I put more money in, it would still refuse to connect. So eventually I became frustrated and I switched to the phone next to it. And that payphone worked, I put in a couple of dollars or something like that and connected and told them I was okay. And as I was on the phone, a cleaning lady came by, was cleaning all the phones, and she puts her finger into the coin return slot, which I didn't even know existed, by the way, until she put her finger in,

Starting point is 00:29:12 into the phone that I was previously using. And she got out a whole handful of quarters, probably $10 worth of quarters. And she was so happy. She looked at me and smiled. And it took me several days, maybe weeks after I arrived in Boston to realize actually those quarters were mine. I think the phone must have been full or something was malfunctioning. So all the quarters I put into the previous phone basically went straight down into the return slot, but I didn't realize it. And it took me several days, at least, probably longer to say, oh, one day, oh, that's what happened. She was taking my money. What did that feel like to you?

Starting point is 00:30:05 And if you could describe also, as you've continued on your journey, what that was like. I think this is important connective tissue for some of the rest of the avenues that we'll be exploring. When I got to Harvard, my focus was on grades. I needed to be number one. So I remember taking as many classes as I could. The normal course loader was four courses. How many non-Chinese had you met before you got to the US? Had you met many non-Chinese? I think I met, really spent time with, was one non-Chinese person, and his name was Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist. And now I think he just announced he's running for the governor of Oregon. But back then he was living in Beijing as a journalist and he was interviewing for Harvard.

Starting point is 00:30:55 He was an alumnus who was interviewing folks. Yes. Got it. And I think I took the first train ride alone to go to Fumshang, Beijing to meet him, to be interviewed. So I think he was the only non-Chinese person that I met. I might have met a cousin who was born in America who came back to China. But as far as a white person who was concerned, I think he was the first one.

Starting point is 00:31:30 So then you get to Harvard and you're like, oh my God, there's so many Lao Wai. And then you're like, wait a second, I'm Lao Wai. I think I was so out of it. I was so unsophisticated that none of these thoughts much occurred to me. I was just so focused on studying. I just needed to study. You just had blinders on. You're like, people from all over the world, whatever, distraction. We'll focus on grants. One of the first classes I needed to take was expose, which is a writing class, which is supposed

Starting point is 00:31:58 to be a hellish, difficult writing class for college entrants, the first freshman. And I did very well. I think my first essay was read to the class, which is pretty amazing because I'd never written an English essay before until that point, not counting the application essays. The first essay got an A, but eventually my whole grade for the course was A-. And I was very unhappy about that. I remember calling the professor and complaining that how he could give me an A-. How dare, how dare that professor. And he was very confused. He said, A- is really good.

Starting point is 00:32:42 It's amazing that you're writing so well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I said, well, but I write well. Why aren't I getting A-? I was so focused on grades at the time. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients, you'll be hard-pressed to find a

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Starting point is 00:34:05 and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. I want to flash forward and I'll often bookend things like this because I want to, in part, flesh out the picture in the mind's eye for listeners of China, because it's very easy to look at the other, whatever the other is, and be like, well, all people in Afghanistan, X. The Chinese, Y. The Americans, Z. And I'd like to humanize a bit also Chinese people, because China is not, as much as people might think so in the Western world, it's not uniform top to bottom, east to west. There's a lot that happens in China, many differences regionally, and so on. But you're helping, so present day, in the last few years, you're helping bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to China. I would

Starting point is 00:35:11 like to hear you describe why you are doing that and why you think it's important, why it applies. And this will just be a way of also edging into a couple of different topics and then we're going to go back to your bio and begin to talk about bcg in 1999 and consulting projects for the singaporean government we're going to go there but first i want to just ask why mdma assisted psychotherapy in china or to china we're trying to work on it, though, and I'm not sure how much progress we are making, but it's a very worthwhile effort for us because in some ways, people everywhere share most of the similar aspirations, and regardless of their color or social economic status go through very similar traumas in some ways. As I got to know many of my fellow countrymen over the years, particularly the successful

Starting point is 00:36:13 ones, actually, as they share some of the stories about themselves that they never told other people, that we all have so much hurt inside of us and everywhere. And these hurts could be, some could be very easily felt. Some of it is deeply buried and maybe even subconscious. So many people, and I would say so many of us, because I'm certainly one of them, develop certain views of oneself that we somehow think there were something wrong with us, that we are not worthwhile, that we have no there were something wrong with us, that we are not worthwhile, that we have no value other than the things we do. And it's just breathtaking how much

Starting point is 00:36:52 suffering there is. And I use the word suffering in the Buddhist sense, even though I'm not a Buddhist. And so MDMA and other psychedelic medicine that have huge healing potential, that I feel really passionate about bringing that to the world, helping it. And certainly I'm not the main person doing it. I like to contribute where I can to bring that to the world, including China. And in China in particular, China went through some very tough periods after World War II. There's a period called the Cultural Revolution. And prior to that, there's a rightist movement, anti-rightist movement that lasted more or less for 15 years that really

Starting point is 00:37:38 traumatized an entire generation of people. Can you speak to what that trauma looked like? Because I think a lot of folks listening will not have, they won't be able to conjure any sort of images of what happened during either of those. I could start with something personal, was in my family, my grandparents' family were relatively well-to-do. So when the Cultural Revolution came,

Starting point is 00:38:07 Red Guards will come from house to house to search for all the valuables. You have to give them up. Every single thing you have, if the Red Guards want it, you have to give it. And there are stories of people as I was growing up heard that some people bury some treasures in the backyard because they don't want to give it up. And then Red Guards will come and pour water on the backyard.

Starting point is 00:38:31 And when the water sinks in a particular place, they will dig it up. You know, obviously they will confiscate that and probably either torture or kill the people who try to bury it, imprison the people who try to bury it. So it was this incredible terror that happened to people. And then there was also this race to show your purity, your ideological purity toward the sort of proletarian, what do you call it? Proletarian? What's the right? Proletarian? What's the right... Proletariats? Yeah, proletariat revolution. So you have to chant the right things, and you have to, in every turn... Yeah, the proletariat, the workers of the working class people, regarded collectively. Yes, that's right. You have to chant, you have to follow all the dictates of Chairman Mao.

Starting point is 00:39:22 In the middle of the night, you might be forced to get up and you cannot complain. If you complain, you are disloyal to go on the streets at two o'clock in the morning to march and to shout slogans at the top of your lungs. There's a real story that my father

Starting point is 00:39:39 actually tried to help somebody, somebody who was a good teacher was denounced of not being loyal to the party. And he spoke up for this person and then he got in trouble for it. And later on, much to his dismay and disappointment and anger, this person made up stories about him. Instead of being grateful and helping him, the other victim actually made up stories about my father to protect himself. Because the more you denounce other people and tell secrets about other people, the more

Starting point is 00:40:11 protected you are, you show your loyalty. So during cultural revolution, many children were forced to tell on their parents. And that created, you can imagine the amount of distrust that creates amongst everybody. Terrible. They were so scared. And my father was put on for a few times because he came from a rich family and also because I think he helped this other person. He was put on on a platform in front of hundreds of people denouncing him, spitting on him. He would wear tall hats that could be very heavy for hours while standing in front of hundreds of people denouncing, shouting things at him. He didn't get the worst deal.

Starting point is 00:40:56 There were people who got more or less lynched. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. And millions, I think it was millions of people were sent to the countryside to do manual labor, to reform their thinking. It was really, this is all from secondhand because I was too young. I was only a few years. Some of it happened before I was born, but other times I was maybe one or two years old.

Starting point is 00:41:20 So this is all through secondhand. But there's so many stories. And this is a period of time that is not often discussed, but I would say this whole country has PTSD. It's very hard to imagine going through that. I mean, war, of course, can be very traumatic in a physical form, of course, and very scary. But when a country goes through this kind of internal convulsion where people are betraying each other left and right every single day, it's hard to imagine the impact on the society of a generation of people. Thank you for sharing all that context.

Starting point is 00:42:01 I think this is really important on a number of levels, I think, for people to gain an appreciation of. And I say people, probably referring to those who haven't had firsthand experience. One film that may be interesting to folks, and I don't know if you've seen it. I'd be curious to hear if you have, but there is a Chinese filmmaker named, I don't know if you've seen it. I'd be curious to hear if you have. But there is a Chinese filmmaker named, I don't know the tones on his name, but Zhang Yimou, Y-I-M-O-U. And he made a film called To Live, which is, I guess, Huajia, that was initially denied theatrical release in mainland China, but later, I believe, was made available. And it covers the working class experience through a number of very difficult periods of modern Chinese history from the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s to the Cultural Revolution. And Zhang Yimou has a beautiful cinematography style. It's usually very color-saturated and stars a number of folks who have appeared in many of his films, like Gong Li, who I had a crush on when I was in China in 1996. Oh my god. also an option for people who might want to. This film, To Live, was made or released in 1994,

Starting point is 00:43:26 so people can try to find it. I'd love to come back to your experience in the US. So we flash then to, say, and you tell me if this is the right place to start. Maybe there are things that happened beforehand that are worth noting, but it seems like you have your first job, sort of real official job, BCG, where you're giving your mandate is to give advice to these big companies and we're paying you guys a fortune. And at some point, I don't know if it was BCG, but you had a consulting project for the Singaporean government. Is it fair to say that was an important turning point and milestone for you? Yeah, that was definitely a turning point.

Starting point is 00:44:10 I think I made a few big decisions in my life that all worked out. And there's a general theme of getting closer to who I really am versus what I was made to be by the environment. But one decision was starting a company. And that was inspired by a field study that I did with a couple other students at the end of my business school, studying what internet models worked at the time and which of those

Starting point is 00:44:43 can be successfully adapted to Asia. And this is in 1999, really at the height of the internet boom in the US. And what we discovered was that most business models didn't make a lot of sense. There was a lot of hype, a lot of bubble, but we thought the eBay business model really is incredible. So I looked into whether anybody was doing that in China and the answer was no in 1998. So I said, oh, okay, when I graduate, I will go back to start the online auction website in China. And that was a huge step for me because up to that point, I was this steady person.

Starting point is 00:45:30 I was a mass geek. And then even when I got a job, it was from one of the most established and prominent firms. It's all very understandable. It's like a very steady thing. And I also left my back door open. There's a way to that because I actually got a deferral in a PhD program in physics when I initially took my job

Starting point is 00:45:54 at BCG. So I had a backup. So all was very safe and steady. But going back to China, not getting a green card from the US in 1999 to start a company whose business model I couldn't even explain to my parents. I think I'm convinced to this day, they do not know what that business is. I don't even sell things. I didn't even sell things. I was building a platform for other people to sell things. I didn't have a store even. No department. It's mind-boggling what that platform really means. So that was a big, big step. And I didn't know what the hell I was doing whatsoever, despite business school. So I want to, well, ask a couple of things. So how did your parents respond to this? Well, to their credit, they didn't say a thing.

Starting point is 00:46:49 I was living at home when I got back to China in 1999. I had an office in another apartment, really. It's not an office, it's not an apartment building. I couldn't find anybody to work with me, really. I didn't know anybody, really, other than my high school classmates, because I was out of the country for, what, by then, eight years. So the only people I knew were my high school classmates. So my first recruit was a high school classmate of mine who was trading stock at home.

Starting point is 00:47:18 So he didn't have much to lose. So he joined me. You know, I couldn't find even programmers back then building an internet website is not a thing it was not a thing yes yeah 1999 china it was all dial-up modems back then by the way there's some internet access but all dial-up modems my kids don't even know what dial-up modems are these days and yeah it's the only guy who found two part-time programmers who were used to work for the Shanghai Electricity Bureau.

Starting point is 00:47:49 They never built a website before ever. They were IT maintenance people, but they knew some Microsoft ASP programming language. They didn't want to quit their jobs. And so they, they will go to their regular bureau jobs,

Starting point is 00:48:01 government jobs, and work from 6 p.m. to like midnight every night to build the website and then they'll go back to their regular jobs good thing the job is not very demanding so they could sleep during the day in the office and at night they work for us and work for me i guess so we have these basically four employees three employees and me then they built the website after i think two months surprisingly i just finished the website. After, I think, two months, surprisingly, I just finished the website. Of course, as soon as they launched it, it probably crashed.

Starting point is 00:48:30 So it was a long... But the thing is, my parents didn't say anything. They just said, oh, okay. Really, to my father's credit, particularly, he knew that he didn't know what he didn't know. And he trusted me to make my own decisions. Do you know, this is a leading question, of course, but is there any element of you already having sort of brought honor and reputation to the family through winning the competitions, going to Harvard, where effectively you had already passed any tests that you might need to pass in your father's, from his perspective? Or do you think

Starting point is 00:49:11 that's not a factor? I think he was incredibly proud of me, for sure. Winning so many mass competitions in China was a big deal. When I initially was thinking of going overseas to study, we even got a call from the Shanghai government saying that, oh, we wish that I do not leave before my senior year because in senior year, I have the chance to participate potentially in the math Olympiads and win gold medals or whatnot for the country. And that will bring honor to the Shanghai government and all that. So he was very proud of me from that. And of course, going to Harvard is a big deal. I was one of the earliest,

Starting point is 00:49:50 I think another student from Shanghai and myself got the whole foreign student thing directly coming from China started. That was the first year. I think after that, every year was two, three students getting full scholarships. So he was very, very proud. Though putting myself in his shoes, like imagining my own kid giving all of that up,

Starting point is 00:50:14 even including a green card in the US, which is this incredible, valuable, you know, unattainable thing most people view. To go back to China to start something in the startup thing that entrepreneurship is unheard of in china more or less in china back back then you know if you're an entrepreneur you usually i guess you start a food store you don't start companies really back then so for them not to say anything to me to question we're not i think it's still a big deal i really still a big deal yeah yeah i really really value them for it so it's still a big deal. I really, yeah, I really, really value them for it. So let's take a look into your experience during that time, because it does seem pretty wild.

Starting point is 00:50:52 Given all of the factors, BCG can pay well, consulting certainly can pay well. You're coming out of Harvard, your parents previously making $10 to $20 a month, suddenly you're in a position to get a green card, to take any number of jobs that would pay you who knows how much money. I have no idea, but $50,000, $100,000, who knows, more maybe. What was going on internally in your mind or otherwise that gave you, you're certainly highly rational person. So I don't believe the decision to go to China to be an entrepreneur was an impulsive move that wasn't thought through. So how did you think through the pros and cons and risks of doing that?

Starting point is 00:51:40 Because from the outside looking in, without any explanation, it does kind of look crazy. Well, I was very rational for sure. Actually, for a while, I was deciding between going back to BCG versus going to work for Goldman Sachs. And we're at some intern doing the middle of my business school. Yeah, both known for paying more than minimum wage generally. That's right. I think I definitely could have made more than $100,000 a year at age 25. But I was preparing even a spreadsheet, sort of listing the pros and cons. And I think one person I met who was a senior person at BCG in China asked me a question. It was like, what do you want to do? Putting aside all these pros and cons, what do you want to do? Putting aside all these pros and cons, what do you want to do? And that sort of stumped me actually, because I didn't really know what I

Starting point is 00:52:31 want. I want it. And all my life, frankly, nobody really asked me that question, what I wanted up until that point. I think one big decision I made for myself was to be with my now wife, then girlfriend. That was a huge thing for me, which we can go back to. But in terms of career, I was just going through whatever the most popular thing was. BCG, when I graduated from college, was the most popular career choice. BCG and McKinsey. I got an offer from both. Then after BCG, going to business school was the most popular choice after two years.

Starting point is 00:53:10 So I got an offer from both Stanford and Harvard Business School. That was the career choice. Going back to China, however, was not a popular choice. And I think about 12 Chinese students in the Harvard Business School graduating class of my year, I think I was the only person going back to China. Actually, a few years later, I think 10 of the 12 eventually all went back to China. That's a different story.

Starting point is 00:53:35 But that was not popular back then. And starting a company certainly wasn't popular. I guess, well, take it back. I think starting internet companies in 1999, 1998, 1999 might have been a popular choice. But I don't think I was driven by that. I think I was driven because I really saw an opportunity. And I felt that it's such a good business and it should be created. I think there was this kind of belief that this is a business worthwhile to be created. And since nobody else is doing it, I should be doing it.

Starting point is 00:54:06 Now, of course, I didn't know that back then several other companies were preparing to launch. So I definitely wasn't the only or even the first one to launch, but I felt like this is something that should happen. If we look at that decision, you had this conversation with a BCG partner in China who asked you what you really wanted. And you saw this opportunity. Did you also have a contingency plan in the case that it didn't work out? Oh, yes, I did. Actually, I told BCG, their senior partner in China, that I will start the business for a few months. After a few months, the business should be in good shape. Then I'll go back to BCG.

Starting point is 00:54:50 We'll have it all figured out in a few months. I'll figure everything out. It will be steady. It will be autopilot. And then I can go back to BCG. I have no idea what he thought about my... I think his name is John Wong, and what he thought about what I said at the time. But he was very generous. And he said, okay, that's okay. And he agreed to

Starting point is 00:55:15 it. I think he held my place for at least a year. So this is really important. And I know I've said that about a number of points, but it's so common for, I think, I would usually, as you were talking about dial-up modems, I need to stop using the example of people on magazine covers, because now the only time you ever see magazines is in the airport. It's not really a thing anymore. But the profiles and so on that you read about entrepreneurs tend to be turned into these romanticized action movies. And there's certainly a lot of action. But when someone says, Zuckerberg dropped out of college, right? And people hear that and they think, oh my God, he threw it all away, burned the ships, bet it all. And it's like, actually, that's not what happened. Because in many of these schools,

Starting point is 00:56:07 you have the ability to defer graduation or come back over a certain period of time, or maybe at any point in time. And it's, I think, helpful for would-be entrepreneurs to hear that oftentimes, the best entrepreneurs do take calculated risks, but they also mitigate risk, right? So you had had this conversation and you had, in a sense, a safety net of sorts so that you could do this experiment and see what would happen with the company. And I think that it's really helpful to kind of peek behind the scenes. That's a good point. So if we go back to the company, at the time when you were first getting started with the IT guys who were sleeping in the office during their day job and working at night, what was the name of the company? It's called EachNet.

Starting point is 00:56:53 Like each and everybody's net. Okay, EachNet. Yeah, in Chinese means interesting exchanges. Interesting exchanges. How do you say that in Chinese? What was the name? Yi Qu. Yi means exchange. Qu means interesting or fun.

Starting point is 00:57:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. The sound actually works. The translation works. That's cool. So it's a transliteration, but you also have the meaning, which by the way, anyone listening, when you ask someone, if you ever ask a Chinese person to write my name in Chinese, part of the reason it's so hard is you have to think very carefully about what the characters mean. You can't just grab the phonetics and throw something on paper. You have to be very careful about what the actual meaning is. And, you know, I actually, I don't know if I ever told you, Bo, when I first went to China and was studying at the Beijing, what is it in English? Can you remember? The Beijing Capital University of Business and Economics. And I had been given my name, my Chinese name at Princeton, which was Fei Ting Cheng. And Fei Ting Cheng was Fei, which is like Xiao Fei de Fei. So it's a sort of expense in a way is the meaning. Xiao Fei would be like a tip, like in Spanish or whatever. But funny enough, you were saying that your parents would call you like little little bow right yes if people use

Starting point is 00:58:26 that with me my name meant tip but so that was problem number one with my chinese name so fei was for my last name ferris right and then ting cheng so the t sound was tim and they they used cheng with because i was always so blunt in class. It was like, I see. Tim, very honest because I was a pain in the ass. But the problem with that name or one of the problems, I'll give two examples of problems when I got to China and you're telling people your name and it's a strange transliterated foreign name. It's not always clear what the hell you're saying. And so some people thought my name was Fei Jichang, which is airport, right? So that was a problem. They're like, your name is airport. That's strange. Other people heard my name as Fei Ting Chang instead of Chang. And so Tim Very Long also has problems. So ultimately, we changed my name to Fei Yu Cheng.

Starting point is 00:59:25 And Yu is like a library book, but without the zhi at the bottom. It's a pretty rare character. But anyway, so this is just a long way of saying you have to

Starting point is 00:59:36 think very carefully about how you name things. By the way, for the listeners who do not know Chinese, I would say your Chinese is actually really good. Your Chinese pronunciation

Starting point is 00:59:44 is very good. Oh, thanks, man. It's very rusty. But I hope to get back at some point, get back to China, because the China I know is 1996 China. I mean, this is like People's Liberation, green jackets, Silk Road with DVDs, burners inside jackets, and bicycles. I mean, that's the Beijing I know. I've got to take you back to China. You will be just shocked.

Starting point is 01:00:12 Your jaw will be on the floor. Yeah, visit the sci-fi future. So coming back to each net, when did you actually feel like it was working? Or you thought to yourself, oh my God, this might actually work? When was that moment? Or what were some of the signs, any signs where you're like, okay, maybe this is the thing? It's a constant roller coaster. So there are many moments I would say, oh, this is working.

Starting point is 01:00:42 But then the other moments, holy shit, this is not working. It goes up and down. There'll be times when we raise, initially we raised, I think I'd raise a small angel around at like 300, 400K, but then we raised $6.5 million, I think in October of 1999.

Starting point is 01:01:02 And that was a lot of money back then. These days, a series a of six point five million is really very small but back then it's actually a fairly substantial amount of money so definitely i thought oh things are going well but then it turns out five months later i spent it all five months and thing is i didn't even know I spent it all. At one point, my financial controller came to say, do you know that we have no more money, that we're not going to pay a salary next month? I said, really?

Starting point is 01:01:32 I didn't even know. Because that's how little I know about really running a business. It's actually really thinking back. It's pretty embarrassing for a math champion. That's right. That's clearly things were not working. then we need to to i guess what we call in chinese will be which means that you have to tighten your belts i guess tighten your belt yeah what did you spend all that money on advertising ah we were one of i think we might

Starting point is 01:02:00 be the old the first internet company in China to do TV advertising. Oh, TV. Wow. Yeah. So we had commercials made. It was very exciting and all that. And we got a lot of users. And of course, our website crashed all the time. And at one point, I was afraid to go onto my own website. The thinking being that I might be the last straw that breaks the camel's back.

Starting point is 01:02:28 I don't want to add any load to our servers. That's amazing. Wow. Just give that valuable opportunity to somebody actually who will find the site useful. So quick question. The TV commercial, I bet you still remember parts of that TV commercial. What did you say? Do you remember any of it in Chinese? And then you can explain what it is in English. Do still remember parts of that TV commercial. What did you say? Do you remember any of it in Chinese? And then you can explain what it is in English. Do you remember any of it? I recall that our logo looked like two E's facing each other. Two E's with the other one being a mirror image of the other E facing each other. And I remember the TV commercials around sort of like, I remember this logo of two E's. One is orange, one is green, sort of talking to each other

Starting point is 01:03:06 or playing with each other or something like that. That I do recall. But other than what they actually said to each other, I do not recall anymore. What was your tagline? Did you have a tagline for the company in Chinese or anything like that? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:19 The fun in exchanges. 交易的乐趣 Which in English means the fun in exchanges. That交易的乐趣, which in English means the fun in exchanges. That's good. I like that. All right, so awesome TV commercial. You're not even on your own site because you don't want to crash the servers.

Starting point is 01:03:36 And you've run out of money, and your controller's like, oh, we have a small problem. We're not going to be able to make payroll. What happens? Well, we were able to get everybody- Tighten your belt. That's right.

Starting point is 01:03:49 I think I actually got the team in play to get and say, okay, we have no more money and we all need to take a pay cut. So I think we all took like a 50% pay cut. Existing investors ponied up a few million dollars to bridge us. They were ultimately willing to do that, which I'm very grateful for.

Starting point is 01:04:07 And then we went on a fundraising tour. And of course, I think it was around February or March in 2000, the market crashed. The initial reception was very positive. People, without knowing the companies, said, we're going to write you a $50 million check. But then the market crashed and all of it basically went away. Just evaporates. I remember Credit First Boston was our banker to try to raise money for us. And we had a lead, which shall remain unnamed.

Starting point is 01:04:38 Actually, I was willing to write a... Initially it was 50 and then became 20. The one day I looked at, I read Wall Street Journal and on the front page, it says this firm is in trouble. When I read that, I said, oh, that's not good news. They're probably not going to honor their commitment. So I thought about what I'm going to say if the firm calls me to renege on their verbal commitment or their term sheet. I decided to ask them for $5 million instead of $20. I said, if you give me $5 million, I'll first guilt trip them saying how much trouble they got me in

Starting point is 01:05:15 because I was counting on their money and all that. And then I'll make a request. I need $5 million, not $20. If you give me $5, I will raise the rest of the 20. So lo and behold, the next day, indeed, this person from the room called. Good thing you saw that newspaper. Right. And he said, they need to just withdraw together. And I gave him my prepared spiel. And he said that he will go back internally to see what he can do now if i had said that thank you i understand or this is so if i didn't make a specific request and they didn't

Starting point is 01:05:53 prepare this would have been over yeah instead i made a specific request that has a chance of being honored and then i had a very good friend who went to the boss and tried to reason and try to cajole. So eventually we did get five million. And then I begged many people to put in half a million or a million or whatnot, and eventually we were able to raise $20 million. Wow. And that's how the company survived and thrived. Did you have a backup plan in case the immediate answer was no? Did you have, say, if they say no to 5 million,

Starting point is 01:06:33 I'm going to come back with this other request? That was plan B. Yeah, yeah. No, there was no backup. I think it would have to dissolve, I think. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know what I think it would have to dissolve, I think. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know what the existing investor would have done, but I think it would be hard pressed for them to put a lot more money without profitability inside. I have to ask you, Bo, because I've noticed this in many of our conversations. You have an

Starting point is 01:07:00 incredibly broad English vocabulary, like cajole, right? I mean, you have a very nuanced English vocabulary, which is not always the case. It's actually rarely the case, I find, with a lot of non-native speakers. How did you accumulate such a vocabulary? I guess I have Harvard to thank. Was it Harvard? Because I know a lot of native speakers I went to Princeton with who do not have your vocabulary. So what happened was when I was applying for

Starting point is 01:07:32 college in the US in 1990 when I was in China in my junior year high school, I couldn't provide standardized testing results because SAT was not offered in China at the time. Now I think it is.

Starting point is 01:07:50 So I can take the TOEFL, which is the English test for foreigners, which I passed and did very well in. But the school still wanted some kind of standardized test results, just like the SATs. And in fact, I couldn't apply to MIT because of it, because MIT was not willing to give a waiver of SAT. If I got into MIT, I probably would have gone to MIT given my orientation at the time. But I was able to convince Harvard and other schools to take the GRE. And GRE being the Graduate Record Examination, which is for PhD programs. And that was offered in China. So I took the GRE test and aced it.

Starting point is 01:08:31 I think I got 2260. I think it was like the third highest in the country at that time or something like that. And that helped the application process. But one of the GRE, I don't know if it still does or not, but it has had a verbal section, which is basically testing your vocabulary. And I remember it was much harder than the SAT verbal sections. It's much harder. Yeah, much harder. So I remember getting this huge book of words that I needed to remember. And I just spent several,

Starting point is 01:09:06 probably one or two months just studying that book, remembering every word. What happens internally or what do you do when you need to focus for an extended period of time? Because you, you have that as a superpower when you need to say, sit down. If you had a new test coming up and needed to sit down and study something,

Starting point is 01:09:26 what does both studying look like? And that could be things that you do or how you prepare, but it could also be your internal state shift or internal monologue or self-talk, anything. I think it turns out that I learned how to meditate when not knowing that it was meditation. I have a very good ability to focus because of that. And I think the meditation I did was when I tried to add the poker cards together when I was very young.

Starting point is 01:10:00 And to add 50 cards, 52 cards together in 12 seconds, I needed to get rid of all thought. If I start worrying, if I start trying to consciously add it, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be that fast. So I need to get myself out of the way. I remember looking up into the sky or into the ceiling and just, there's a particular way I blanked my mind. Mind can still see, of course, but there was a particular process of suppressing thought, or getting out of the egoic kind of self and with no attachment also.

Starting point is 01:10:42 Another key thing was no attachment to the result because the more attached I became, the more agitated and I was thinking that wouldn't work. And then I fail. And it actually there'd be times when I was basically cried because I could do 20, 30 times in a row. And either they were wrong or it took too much time so that it doesn't count. I need to get 10 times right under the right limit every day. And the limit kept decreasing as I became more successful. And my father said it that way.

Starting point is 01:11:10 So sometimes at the end of my rope, and I needed to blank my mind and also not to feel any kind of attachment to how I do. And that's when I did my best work. And to me, that's in some ways just meditation. And I think I was able to develop that muscle without knowing that it's actually really a form of meditation.

Starting point is 01:11:34 Yeah, it certainly strikes me as meditation. And I think a lot of athletes also enter meditative states without calling it meditation. Thank you for answering that question. I've actually always wondered that about you. So if we come back to EachNet, how'd that turn out? Just so people kind of know how the movie ends in a sense. We can do a whole session on this, but I want to be very short about it. But you know, it's basically, it became successful, became the largest e-commerce company in China. We sold it to eBay for a price I couldn't say no to in 2003. And I retired after

Starting point is 01:12:14 that. And unfortunately, I was planning to run it, but a family tragedy prevented me from doing it. I needed to be with my wife to support her. So I ended up not running the firm a couple months after I sold it. And then eBay did not do well. I still feel sad about it because it was my baby. And for many reasons, a multinational company like eBay couldn't do well in China. So we went from 80 plus percent market share in e-commerce down to 5% in a matter of a few years. Jack Ma at the time was in the B2B business e-commerce, but he launched the e-commerce B2C, C2C e-commerce business right around the time when I sold my company. And the company is called Taobao. the new company started called Taobao, which became the biggest e-commerce player in China after about 10 years or so.

Starting point is 01:13:13 Well, eBay really struggled despite having a huge head start. People say the rest is history. You mentioned your wife and you mentioned also earlier in the conversation how important it sounded like meeting her and committing to that relationship was. Could you expand on that? Especially because you also confessed earlier that you viewed emotions as distractions. I'd love for you to say a bit more about all of that. I think I met her and I just simply fell in love with her head over heels. A truck hit me and I didn't even know what happened. Where did you meet? I was in business school and she was in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. So she was the last year, the last few months of her time

Starting point is 01:14:05 there. And I was doing my first year of business school. And I fell in love, became very irrational. I started just basic things. I believe that she is meant the biggest mystery in some ways is that she loves me back. She loved me and loves me back, even though I was very flawed at the time. But I guess in front of her, I was emotional. I was extremely passionate. I was extremely passionate. I was considerate. I let all the things I suppressed, I think, show up in a way that was not conscious. It was out of my control. And without her, I don't think I would be the person that I am today.

Starting point is 01:15:01 So it's not only I have a live companion and my best friend, but also that being with her enabled me to blossom. Whatever that was hidden deep and buried, blossomed. Now, to be clear, I only was that way with her. For the longest time, I was still the same cold, unemotional, analytical, judgmental me with everybody else for many years. So there'll be, you know, very incongruent jackal and hide kind of scenarios where I will be just lecturing my employees in a very kind of analytical and judgmental way. Then my phone would ring. I'll pick up. I became like a little kitten talking to her in small voices. I love you and I miss you, blah, blah, blah. And I went back straight to the old straight faced robot that I was.

Starting point is 01:16:05 Many people have commented that I was not going to die. So you retire. Well, how old were you when you retired? And I'm going to put that in quotation marks. I was 29 years old. I was surprised actually, because after the first few months of a first really for first week of ecstasy i was famous on tv all the time and everything life was the same as before funny how that happens yeah and it was a disorienting because i think i built a picture

Starting point is 01:16:43 that most people probably do, that somehow when you reach that level, your life will become different. In some ways, I wasn't even sure what I was searching for, but whatever I was searching for, I felt like, well, if you get that kind of success, whatever you searched for, you would have found it. But actually, it didn't happen.

Starting point is 01:17:02 I was still the same old me, and very little changed. We may just have to have a round two at some point. And obviously, we talk a lot separately, so maybe we can figure that out. But I know that we have, let's just call it, how much more time do you have, Bo? Like 20 minutes? I have another 30 minutes or so. Yeah, okay. So we have another 30 minutes, and we may dig into this separately.

Starting point is 01:17:24 You ended up doing many things after that. Yeah, okay. So we have another 30 minutes. And we may dig into this separately. You did, you ended up doing many things after that you're a founding partner of Matrix China, which manages more than $7 billion and has funded more than 500 companies 50 plus of which become unicorns. There's more to the resume, obviously. And you continue to be hard charging in a lot of ways. Yeah, and the resume is not the most important part about me, which I want to. Right. So this is the segue,

Starting point is 01:17:53 which is the way we met was in part around the discussion of inner journey and turning the eye and attention inward, right? We didn't meet at a business networking event. We weren't doing a joint venture together. We met in a very personal context. How did that start for you? How did that process, and I know process is a broad term, but when did that become a priority and how did it become a priority for you? First, I would say that I had no interest in any kind of inner work for a long, long time. In fact, I would look down on people who go to retreats or meditations and say, what the hell are these people doing? They have better things to do in life.

Starting point is 01:18:42 I found it almost disgusting, despicable back then, actually. So I had no interest. But life, I think, has a way of, if one pays attention, I guess, to send little reminders. So the first reminder I got was, hey, I was still the same me with some of the same kind of patterns of behavior, the same level of happiness and joy that I had before this big success. And looking back, I realized that compared to the life I have today, the life back then was more of a black and white television, and today is more colorful television. It's hard to describe the difference if I only watched black and white television all my life. The reason I use this example was because I grew up with a nine-inch black and white television, which felt totally fine for all my life. And without having seen a 80-inch color

Starting point is 01:19:48 television, the 90-inch black and white looked completely adequate and comfortable. And I think that's where I was back then. My life didn't have a lot of color, didn't have joy. I never cried, really. I never laughed, never smiled, really. I never even felt lonely, interestingly. I felt alone, but not lonely. But I think some of these things showed up a little bit, like, oh, I sort of started wondering, what am I missing? There's little, little, little things that I think, but very small. On that alone, I don't think I would have embarked on the journey. Another reminder was how different my life was with Jenny, my wife, versus with other people.

Starting point is 01:20:29 And also I see how she behaves with other people in a way that's sort of beyond my comprehension. I remember like one time she was, we were having dinner with a friend and the friend started talking about how he lost his father. And my wife just stood up and went to hug him. And I was dumbfounded. It never would have occurred to me to do it. She's telling a story, I'm listening,

Starting point is 01:20:57 but I was not in touch with the emotional content of the story. And my wife clearly was, and she is one of the most empathetic person alive that I know. So some part of me started wondering what's going on? What am I missing? And also I noticed that I could work with people for a decade and not become friends with them, but she would then go to dinner with their significant other. The four of us will go to dinner or lunch, and then she becomes friends with them. But not me. Even though I've known them for 10 years and she knows them for like one day.

Starting point is 01:21:33 So that sort of started something like, you know, am I missing something? Is friendship something I value? Because up until a few years ago, I didn't consider myself as having friends, but I always told myself I don't need friends. I want to ask actually just to follow up there. Why did you not consider yourself to have friends? Is it because you viewed getting close to people as having little upside and a lot of potential downside? Why did you see things that way? It was not a rational decision. I think deep down, if I were to answer honestly, is because I think I don't deserve a friend.

Starting point is 01:22:18 And I think, I thought, and there's still a part of me probably still thinks that there's something wrong with me, that I don't deserve any friends, that nobody will really take an interest in my feelings and in what I have to say, unless what I have to say is useful. So when I'm in a position, I'm a board member, investor, or somebody who could educate or whatever, or help, then I feel comfortable. Like this relationship has substance. But if it's simply a friendship, a part of me doesn't understand it. Like it doesn't feel that why would you or other people take an interest in the inside of me? And I didn't have that trust. Of course, this has a lot to do with how I was brought up and I'm still in the process of understanding and feeling it fully. But I've told myself for the longest time, I don't need any friends. At least

Starting point is 01:23:25 that's the conscious thought. The deeper down realization happened much more slowly. And I think it's still happening as we speak. It's a continuous journey of discovery and being free from those patterns I developed. So that's the second thing that in terms of friendship and relationship with other people, I see myself with Jenny in a different way. I see Jenny with other people in a different way. That's all got me thinking a little bit. Is it okay if I continue on this,

Starting point is 01:23:53 right? Absolutely. Of course. And then, and the third, which I think is probably the biggest one that I couldn't avoid looking at was being a father. I was a terrible father,

Starting point is 01:24:07 you know, for a while on the Chinese Twitter, We father. I was a terrible father. For a while on the Chinese Twitter, Weibo, I was very reasonably popular and a lot of people followed me. And my model, I guess, whatever I wrote right under my name was a perfect husband, but a so-so father. And I think I was giving myself too much credit. I don't think I was a so-so father. I think I was a terrible father looking back. I didn't know how to be one. I knew how to be a teacher. I knew how to be a disciplinary, but I didn't know how to be a father the way I understand it now. And I didn't know how to spend time with them. I did not know how to give them love and attention. I didn't know how to give them support when they need it, emotional support in particular when they need it.

Starting point is 01:24:53 And I also just did not enjoy being a father. I remember my wife would remind me to go spend time with my kids when it's eight o'clock at night or something like that before they go to bed, before they went to bed. And my thought at the time was, why should I? And I felt some kind of resentment being called to do my job. It was really funny thinking back, but back then I really didn't enjoy it. And that got me thinking a little bit, hey, there's something missing here that people talk about being a father, being enjoyable, but I really didn't enjoy it. And also, I know that I knew that I was doing something wrong because I was repeating some of the mistakes that my father made. That was sort of shocking because you would imagine that you would never do what was done to

Starting point is 01:25:48 you that he didn't like. But I was repeating the same thing. And if my wife didn't stop me, I would have been worse, far worse. So one of the things that my father, for example, did to me is if he got really angry, he would threaten to throw me out of the home. And I did that to my son. And that was very traumatic for him. He still remembers it today. Even for like two seconds, closing the door on him. It was so bad, but I didn't know what else to do. That was all I knew. When I got desperate as a father, when something happens outside of my control, I got desperate.

Starting point is 01:26:29 So I guess I resorted to what worked because from a short-term perspective, what my father did to me worked. I became obedient. Thank you for sharing, Beau. I'm really glad that we're having this conversation. I think it's going to be meaningful to a lot of people. And I'd love to hear, as you began observing these behaviors, as perhaps Jenny called things to your attention, and you decided to try to change or at least become more aware, what are some of the things that you found helpful? What are some of the tools or modalities that end up being helpful? Because

Starting point is 01:27:13 I would imagine in the beginning, certainly I had this experience myself, it's hard to know where to begin. And it's kind of like a chimpanzee with a mirror or something. Like you're looking behind the mirror. You're like, am I supposed to see something over here? Am I supposed to see something over there? And I would just love to hear, because I know that you have tested many, many, many different things. What are some of, say, the tools, modalities,

Starting point is 01:27:43 or otherwise that you have found to be personally helpful? I definitely try many different things. In some ways, I'm like you, Tim, that when I get on something that's important, then I would want to get to the bottom of it. I want to learn the best or form the best. First of all, I would say that there are three components to being a good parent that I've learned. And these are not necessarily, they might be orthogonal to each other, meaning they're, you know, being good at one component doesn't mean necessarily going to be good at the second component. So the three components in my view is one is understanding what's going on inside of our children's heads and what's going on in their biology, in their psychology.

Starting point is 01:28:26 And the main thing is we are, children are so different from us. We assume that they should have executive control of their body or of their mind or their actions. But the reality is, for example, for a boy, their prefrontal cortex doesn't fully develop until they're in their 20s. So when they are 12, expecting them to behave in a disciplined way is simply not right. So understanding what's going on inside of them is hugely, hugely important. From a developmental perspective, you mean? Right, from a developmental perspective, you mean? That's right, from a developmental perspective, both from a physical neurobiology

Starting point is 01:29:08 as well from a psychological development perspective. And there's a huge amount of science out there that unfortunately hasn't been made available and accessible to parents, which is one of the things one of our companies is working on. And the second is, as parents, why do we get triggered? Why did I get triggered in certain ways? My reactive patterns, which were usually formed very early

Starting point is 01:29:33 on in my own childhood, maybe my own insecurity gets reflected in certain things. And then that's why we get triggered. So for example, if a parent always wished they went to the best schools and they were feeding down on themselves for not having gone to the best schools, they're probably going to be more demanding of the child. And if the child has bad grades, they probably tend to be more triggered. So there's all sorts of things we need to understand about our own self and our own childhood that would enable us to be a better parent. And so in some ways, I went into a lot of these workshops thinking that I just need to learn a tool or a trick or some kind of way like positive discipline

Starting point is 01:30:13 or whatever it is to be a better parent. And to a certain extent, those tools and modalities help. But foundational wise, I needed to become a better person, quote unquote, in some ways to become a better person, quote-unquote, in some ways, to be a better parent. And that has everything to do with our inner journey as an independent person and has nothing to do with us being a parent, actually. It's something that's really, really foundational. And then the third is what's in the relational field between a parent and a child. And becoming aware of that relational field at any moment in time is really critical.

Starting point is 01:30:51 Because when that relational field is not right, no amount of teaching on the rational side and analytical side will help. Because the kid's brain is underdeveloped. So when they don't feel safe and connected, they can't listen. When a typical parent sees a child, children not listening, maybe their reaction is try to say things more clearly,

Starting point is 01:31:13 you know, repeat things. It doesn't really help. And what's needed is for the children to feel safe and connected. And then they will listen a hundred times better. So these three components, understanding the children inside of them, understanding ourselves, understanding the relational field, for me, that's the foundation. Then on top of that foundation, there are lots of

Starting point is 01:31:35 tools that's actually very useful. I find it to be so important. It's shocking to me that now looking back that being a parent is probably the most important job in one's life. There's nothing more important. It's probably the most difficult job and we are least prepared for in our lives. We go to school for teaching math. We go to get driving lessons to get a driver's license so we can drive. But to be a parent, there's practically no preparation. So if we look at those three foundational pillars, and I think it's a really good reminder to sort of look at the first principles, at least as you've arrived at them as these pillars, so that you don't get lost in a sea of tactics without any elemental discipline about how you approach them. Because you can just end up

Starting point is 01:32:33 with this Frankenstein's monster of approaches that doesn't really have any focus to it. I know that, for instance, you've explored nonviolent communication. I know you've explored the work, so testing beliefs that you have in certain ways. People can find more on that if they look up the work in Byron Katie. What are other books or resources or tools that you have found particularly effective for you in helping any of the pillars that you described? Any of those three? Yeah, well, we're working on it. And when I say we, that means we are starting, I've started a company three, four years ago

Starting point is 01:33:19 that will have done now three years of research and development, trying to collect the best parenting tools, the best research around child psychology and development into something that's accessible and easy and customized for parents to understand. Now that's ongoing and we have a product, but I think we'll get better in the next couple of months when we launch the full version. But one of the things I find, and the reason it's taking so long is I feel that there are so many different kinds of kids. And the parenting challenges can be very different.

Starting point is 01:33:57 And there are certain ways of parenting works for certain kids in certain situations. And there's no one-size-fits-all. So it's really important to collect all the tools out there and develop a framework, a knowledge graph, so that the right tools and modalities and tricks can be recommended to the right children, the right parents, the right situation. For myself, as we work on this, one particular thing that has worked for me is something called hand-in-hand parenting, started by this lady, Patti Wiffler. And there's a website called Hand-in-hand. I think if you search for hand-in-hand parenting, I find their tools to be very useful for me. It have a particular emphasis on the relationship between children and parents.

Starting point is 01:34:46 That's a particular emphasis. But I'm not sure they would necessarily help everybody. But I think they can help a lot of people. So I think there are other ones that I don't want to mention because I don't know them as well. But I think in the next couple of months, our app should be ready for prime time. And then I think I'm hoping that will help a lot of people. So hand-in-hand parenting. I believe you have also, correct me if I'm wrong, spent some time with the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, but a lot of those commitments, I've had Jim Detmer and

Starting point is 01:35:25 Diana Chapman on the podcast apply to personal relationships, not just leadership. And this is actually something my girlfriend and I are spending a good amount of time on right now is trying to make implicit agreements, which really aren't agreements, they're assumptions. Implicit assumptions, explicit commitments so that there's cleaner understanding, less misunderstanding, etc. We can go in a number of different directions. And I know that you're doing certainly a lot with Evolve, both on the foundation side and on the Evolve Ventures impact investing side. People can find both at EvolveVF. That's V as in Victor, F as in Frank. So EvolveVF.com. I would like to ask you, because I know that you have supported research and have developed quite a bit of familiarity with the field. What do you think is missing right now from the discussion around psychedelics or therapeutics related to psychedelics at the

Starting point is 01:36:32 moment? I think psychedelics is one of the most powerful tools that we are given, both for healing of trauma, as well as opening ourselves up to a certain aspect of reality that has profound love and unity and safety that's inherent to us and to reality that we normally do not see. And those experiences simply just can be profound. For me, these experiences are the starting point rather than the end points of one's personal journey. I think they play an incredible role to motivate people. It's almost like, hey, let me take you on a helicopter tour of the terrain so you can see what the big picture is, you can see what the destination looks like, but then the helicopter will lend you back more or less where you started, but then you need to do the personal work so that you could

Starting point is 01:37:32 experience that one-time insight more regularly in life. And then also to apply it in one's life is really difficult. I think spiritual experiences tend to be overvalued. Oh, I had this incredible breakthrough. I saw whatever God, Buddha, or Guan Yin, or this incredible vista of reality. But these are so clear, and our culture values these kind of milestones or things you can talk about so strongly, so highly, that the hard work almost, you know, there's this kind of myth of medicine doing the work for us, which is almost this model of Western medicine. If it takes medicine, it cures you. And psychedelics sort of can fit into that kind of conversation or framework. But for me, it's an incredibly, maybe the most important tool we have for healing and for opening up.

Starting point is 01:38:33 But then one needs to do the hard work to integrate those experiences into our daily lives as a father, as a wife, as a spouse, as a friend, as a CEO, as an investor, as an executive, you know, as an employee, all of those things. And we have so many patterns of behavior that's deeply ingrained in us over our childhood and growing up that one or two or 10 one-time experiences do not erase them. So a teacher might talk about waking up and waking down. And waking up is actually not easy, but it's easier than waking down. And when I say waking down, it means integrating the waking up experience, what you see, back into our body, back into our daily lives and work

Starting point is 01:39:26 and practice it and then overcome the patterns. And that's the hard work that maybe do not get much attention, I think. Yeah, it's easier to spin a colorful story about the waking up and it's very understandable and it's compelling and it's often fleeting if we sort of return back to all of the invisible scripts that run each and every one of us like you said. It's very easy to step off of the helicopter and just turn around away from the terrain you just surveyed and walk back to where you were. That's right. If anything, it sometimes can even add to your ego.

Starting point is 01:40:14 Oh, I had this experience. I'm enlightened now. For certain personalities, having some of these experiences actually could be negative. Yeah, this is true. It's perhaps surprisingly common how Messiah complex is. And it's good to be cognizant of.

Starting point is 01:40:32 Now, if people go to the evolvevf.com website, they can see on the for-profit side, they can see your investments, which I think is actually, it's a fascinating read. People can look at the investments on the for-profit side. They can look at the grants on the foundation side, certainly learn more about what Evolve does and what Evolve doesn't do, the leadership team. Is there anything else that you would like to say or share about Evolve or any

Starting point is 01:41:08 requests you'd like to make of the audience or suggestions or anything really that you'd like to add to the conversation? I guess I will say one thing, which is, I think I'm coming from a rational point of view, going back to rational. Okay. And what I find is we spend a lot of time optimizing our lives, particularly our work, finding the right job, negotiating packages. You know, we think about doing, you know, if we assign a task and work, we prepare a lot for it. We spend hours and days and weeks on working on particular things. If we need to learn a skill, Excel or whatever it is, we spend a lot of time learning it. However, when it comes to internal work, whether it's to understand ourselves or understanding ourselves as parents, parenting

Starting point is 01:41:58 skills, finding a meditation teacher, all these things, What I find is most people don't spend nearly as much time finding the right teacher, finding the right material. It's almost like this kind of latch on to the first one. If it works great, if not, I give up on it or whatnot. It's not the approach one normally takes in other work. But for some reason, when it comes to inner work, there's a bit of almost casualness, maybe because they don't know there are better resources out there. So one thing that I would encourage everybody to do is when it comes to inner work, whether it's meditation or trying to become a better parent or whatnot, really spend the time,

Starting point is 01:42:42 at least as much time as what you spend on doing external work. Yeah, it's very good advice. It's really, really good advice. It's so easy to become attached to the first teacher you find in a given discipline with respect to inner work, which is very understandable, right? Because you are sort of on some level shown a side of yourself or a side of reality with or without any type of pharmacological intervention that is so unusual, perhaps so compelling, so beneficial that you can attribute that experience and the value of that experience to the person who helped facilitate it. And sometimes it's well-founded, but sometimes it's misplaced and you can become attached to an external agent who is acting upon you, which can be disabling in a way. Yeah. One more thing, Tim, if I can say. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:43:46 Is that we started this conversation, I think talking about, I find people who are dedicated in a work like despicable or disgust or whatnot, right? And it's so funny that my views are so different now. And for a long time, I didn't want to commit myself. And for me, inner work has always been

Starting point is 01:44:04 kind of afterthought. Like I fit into my schedule, my calendar, I would do it maybe once a quarter, once a month or something like that. It was never my priority. And at one point, I think maybe three, four years ago, I said to myself, you know what, for the next quarter, three months, I'm going to place as a priority my inner work, whether it's therapy work or different experiences. I said, that's finding the right teacher. We're not going to retreats. That's my priority, but only for three months

Starting point is 01:44:37 because I wasn't ready and willing to commit too much. And once I made, however, even that temporary commitment, my progress changed. So if there's one thing I can say, one more thing I can say, it's around that is giving yourself the space to make a commitment, at least a temporary commitment. See what happens. Can you say, well, this is only four months. I'm going to do this regularly or whatnot and place as a priority on top of everything else I do and see what happens. Excellent advice.

Starting point is 01:45:13 Bo, it is so nice to see you and hear your voice, my friend. It's nice to reconnect. You know, I want to say, 好久不见好久没有见到你呀 which by the way folks if you've ever wondered

Starting point is 01:45:32 where long time no see comes from it comes from Chinese and people can learn more about Evolve I recommend people check it out evolvevf.com and I love that in your bio, there is no social media. And that's a rarity. You're one of, I guess,

Starting point is 01:45:57 two guests. Are you active at all on social media or is that something you have deliberately removed? I deliberately removed myself on Weibo like 10 years ago or something like that. When I noticed that I was posting to please other people, it became something that added to my ego and then started to grab me. And I started tracking how many people replied, how many people forwarded, how many people applauded. And it was not a source of happiness. Good for you. Good for you.

Starting point is 01:46:25 Good for you, man. So good. That is inspiring. I may need to pursue that myself. And Bo, is there anything else you would like to say before we wrap up this conversation? One company I didn't mention, this parenting thing, which I thought wasn wasn't quite ready yet it's called parent lab lab is a laboratory i hope that company will help a lot of people and in the next month or two depending on what this podcast gets out there hopefully people find it useful wonderful and i will also for everyone listening

Starting point is 01:47:00 provide show notes for this episode so we'll have links to everything we've discussed. And if that is live, we'll have a link to that. And you can go to tim.blog.com to find all episodes. But you can go to tim.blog.com. We'll create a short link and that will forward directly to the links and resources and so on from this particular episode. Well, Bo, thank you so much for carving out the time today. It's my pleasure. That was fun. Thank you. Super fun. And to everybody listening, be safe, experiment often, be easier on yourself than you think you should be, at least at times, give exception and be merciful with yourself. And thanks for tuning in. between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter my super short

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Starting point is 01:51:28 First of all, zero sugar, zero calories, half the caffeine of regular coffee. It's easy on my stomach, tastes amazing. And all you have to do is add hot water. I use travel packets. I've been to probably a dozen countries with various products from Four Sigmatic, and their mushroom coffee is top of the list. That's number one. I travel with it. I recommend it. I give it to my employees. I give it to house guests. So if you're one of the 60% of Americans or more who drink coffee daily, consider switching it up. This stuff is amazing. That's part one.

Starting point is 01:52:04 That is the cognitive enhancement side, easy on the up. This stuff is amazing. That's part one. That is the cognitive enhancement side, easy on the system side, energizing side. The next is actually their chaga tea, which tastes delicious. It is decaf, completely decaf, and some may recognize chaga. It is nicknamed the king of the mushrooms. It is excellent for immune system support. So needless to say, I'm focused on that right now myself. And so I will often have that in the afternoons. They make all sorts of different mushroom blends. If you are doing exercises, I am on a daily basis to keep myself sane. Cordyceps, excellent for endurance. They have a whole slew of options that you can check out

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Starting point is 01:53:04 I literally have a mug full of it in front of me right now. And this is just for you, my dear podcast listeners. Receive up to 39% off. I don't know how we arrived at 39%, but 39% off. It's a lot. Their best-selling Lion's Mane coffee bundles. To claim this deal, you must go to foursigmatic.com slash Tim. This offer is only for you and is not available on their regular

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #584: Bo Shao — His Path from Food Rations to Managing Billions, the Blessings and Burdens of Chasing Perfection, Building the eBay of China in 1999, Pillars of Parenting, and Pursuing the Unpopular

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