Investing in your differences to become unique

Up until the age of 20, I had never lived outside of Germany where I was born. I had visited many countries, but had never lived in them. So during all the years growing up in Germany, my life was often about trying to “fit in.” Assimilation was my agenda, denouncing my differences was my goal. I was never in full denial of my Iranian identity, yet I certainly sought to find acceptance by trying to be more like the people around me. 

A turning point for me then was the first time I got to go abroad. In 2008 I went to Buenos Aires to study, and being there had a profound impact on me. The people I met found it fascinating that I was a Spanish-speaking, Persian-looking, German citizen. People wanted to be friends with me. During my time in Argentina, I realized for the first time in my life that being different wasn’t a bad thing, it was a great thing. That’s when I decided to not be in denial of my differences anymore, but to invest in being different. 

I realized that the more different I was, the more unique I was becoming. 

This, was a paradigm shift in my thinking. And it was the trigger that led me to make many of my life decisions. That’s why I invested in languages, traveled as much and far as I could, restlessly moved around the world, and continuously challenged myself to learn new skills (my ritual question here “when was the last time you did something new for the first time?” Don’t have an answer to it? Then it’s time to pick up something new). I made the world my playground, and pursued things that would add richness to my character. 

I am sharing this, hoping to encourage others – especially younger people – to not only fully own the parts of their identities that are different, but to also invest in all the parts of their lives that will allow them to be even more different. After all, why fit in if you can stand out? Why be one of many if you could be unique? Why follow others if you can be a trailblazer? 

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China Musings #10: Shanghai vs. Beijing

Ever since I embarked on my journey to China, I got to spend a lot of time in between Beijing and Shanghai. With about ~24M citizens, each of these cities is about the size of Australia. Yet the cities couldn’t be more different from another in their character and vibe. The following is my take on Beijing and Shanghai based on experiences I have had this past year. 

Beijing – think of it as the ultimate Chinese city. With all government offices located there, it is the seat of power and politics. It’s also all about culture and history: the city has an extremely long and glorious history with Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, The Great Wall and The Summer Palace. Beijing people live and love the history of their ancient city and are kind of set in their ways and lifestyles. They have almost an imperial love and facility with bureaucracy, politics and process. Because of that, Beijing people are people of the past and it’s “old money” that rules – also, it’s a city of relationships more than anything. With the best universities located in Beijing (think of Stanford, Harvard, etc. being in the same city), there is a massive output of talent and with that, entrepreneurship and start-ups. 

Shanghai – the ultimate cosmopolitan city. In a culture which stresses thousand years of continuous history, Shanghai is an aberration among Chinese cities. Development occurred almost entirely within the past 150 years from fishing village to a global modern city. Shanghai people love modernity and are proud of their rapid ascent. They adopt and embrace the change, thus making the city a hotbed for radical ideas, fashion, and money. It’s a financial hub with ultra modern state of the art infrastructure, excellent public transportation system, a stunning skyline and endless subway lines. Consequently, Shanghai is the city of “new money” and people are rather bottom-line-oriented. 

In my experience, foreigners who go to Beijing are very serious about China (language, culture, experience), whereas the foreigners that go to Shanghai are more cosmopolitan. It’s reflected somehow in the distribution of embassies (mostly in Beijing) and MNCs (mostly in Shanghai). Further, a major difference is the layout of the cities: Beijing is landlocked, while Shanghai is adjacent to the ocean. And while Beijing is dominated by highways cutting through it (there are six “ring roads” that circle around Beijing and people refer to those roads when they share their address “I live close to 3rd ring road North East exit..”), Shanghai’s highways are elevated and thus allow for easier mobility throughout the city. 

For me personally, my time in between both cities has taught me how your surroundings can bring out different sides of you. I feel different when I am in Shanghai compared to when I am in Beijing – measured in energy levels, creativity, lebenslust.

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China Musings #9: Learning Chinese

Learning Chinese is by far the hardest thing I have ever done. There is no alternative to rote learning – spending hours and hours writing the same character over and over again. For an English speaker learning French, there are prompts. “Police” becomes ‘police,’ and ‘garden’ becomes ‘jardin.’ But a foreigner has no such guide into Chinese. Police is ‘jingcha’ and garden becomes ‘huayuan.’ And for every word, you have to learn various components: character, tone, sound and grammar (or lack thereof).

CHARACTERS – Chinese characters are core to the language and provide a rich link with the past. The characters represent complete ideas rather than just sounds, like letters. Pronunciation of Chinese words might change over the centuries, but the written character remains unchanged. The character for ‘fragrant’ may be pronounced ‘xiang,’ ‘heung,’ or ‘hong,’ but the character always means ‘fragrant.’ Characters keep history alive as they remain recognizable across thousands of years.

TONES – The pitch of each word affects its meaning. ‘Mai’ for instance, with a falling tone, means ‘to sell.’ But ‘mai’ with first a low falling and then a rising tone means precisely the opposite, ‘to buy.’ Even Chinese people find it confusing. At the Shanghai Stock Exchange brokers use slang to make sure to not mix up buy and sell words. There are four tones in Mandarin (and nine in Cantonese), so imagine how much difficulty this adds.

SOUND – Many words sound exactly the same or confusingly similar. Often Chinese people have to go to great lengths to define a character taken out of context. For example, it would be perfectly normal for someone to introduce himself with “Hello, I am Li – that’s the ‘li’ with the sign for tree on top and a seed underneath” or “Hi, I am Mrs. Wang – that’s the ‘wang’ used in ‘boundless oceans’ not the one that means ‘king.’”

GRAMMAR – The link in China between daily language and the past is strengthened further by a lack of tenses. “Mao Zedong is a good leader” and “Mao Zedong was a good leader” are not distinguished. Things that in our language are extinct, remain alive in Chinese. Imagine the confusion when you want to order boiled water (past tense; to make sure it’s clean), but then get boiling water (because it’s hard to express the past tense). Without the separation in language or thought between what ‘was’ and what ‘is,’ China’s past seems to merge into its present.

Chinese language is extremely sophisticated, representative of its rich history and profoundly tied to Chinese identity. Being part of that exclusive five-thousand-year-old club gives the Chinese a sense of separateness and self-esteem. It can occasionally develop into a sense of superiority, but no more than anywhere else. The language provides a permanent rigid connection to a past, while the society is changing and adapting at a pace never seen before.

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Some take-aways from my first-year GSB reunion

A couple weeks ago I attended my first year business school reunion on our beloved Stanford GSB campus. Now, being one year out of school, it was an experience that helped me gain some perspective on my time “on the farm” (that’s how students refer to their time at Stanford). In particular, five thoughts I took away from the trip. 

One of the very first things I realized in the months after my graduation was that I really wasn’t that happy during my time at Stanford. I never really felt I fit in, but was just swimming along without orientation. Sure, there were things I pursued with a lot of determination (like f.ex. I knew all along that I didn’t want a standard job offer), but particularly socially, I felt lost throughout my entire MBA experience (I made many friends, but never felt I belonged). In many ways I graduated with a strong desire to escape my dissatisfaction. That desire is what allowed me to take a big career risk and change geographies. If it wasn’t for that dissatisfaction, I would have not dared to plunge into such a risky and challenging new chapter in my life. 

The second thing is something I realized the moment I set foot on campus. The thought that was on top of mind during those three days was that “this is for life.”  It was just a two year experience, but that affiliation to Stanford, the pedigree, the class of 2017 which is the class I will belong to – even beyond my physical time on earth – is for life. It’s for life and no one can ever take it away from me. And as challenging and dissatisfying my Stanford experience was at times, it’s all being compensated by always having a home in the form of the friendships I was able to form, the amazing faculty and staff that is always one email away, and the institution Stanford that I am now affiliated with which continues to push the boundaries of research and innovation. 

During those nine or so months that I was admitted but had not started school yet (this is December 2014 to September 2015), I remember how may alums would tell me: “I am so jealous, you are going to have the two best years of your life”. Literally every single alum said that to me. Now that I am one year out of the experience, when admits or other people ask me about my experience, I tell them honestly that it was a good experience, but that I didn’t love it. My time before business school was definitely better, and during my time after graduation I have certainly felt more aligned than during those two years. Folks react surprised, but appreciate my honest take on it. I fundamentally believe that I will take much more value and “joy” out of this investment in the years following it (from graduation to my death), than I during those two years. It was like an upfront capital investment, whose returns I now get to reap.  

In the many conversations I had with my classmates, I realized that many people had either quite their job or were thinking of doing so – some voluntarily, others forced. I think there was a good 15-20% of people who were in that bucket. I knew already that about 60% or so of MBA graduates change their jobs within the first two years, so it should have not surprised me, but it was refreshing to see how many people had the courage (or were given the opportunity) to make “course corrections” to their careers early on. It was a great reminder of how fluid our careers will be going forward. How we will move from one thing to the next, and how our degree has become a very high safety net that allows us explore freely. 

The last realization from my reunion is how close I feel to the people with whom I got to live together during those two years. My first year I got to spend with Benji and Sud, my second year with Chris and Bryce. It’s two circle of friends that I have felt very connected to ever since graduation. And I think that this phenomenon isn’t just limited to me and my experience, but something I have seen happen with other people too. It’s the people with whom you talk in the evenings and share all the highs and lows that you experience – so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Yet it’s funny to think of how randomly I ended up with each of these circles (Benji/Sud I had never met; Chris/Bryce I was never close to before we decided to share a house). 

Despite all my ups and downs during those two years, I am eternally grateful for the experience and excited about all the ways how Stanford will change my life going forward. And I know it will, because it has ever since the day I left campus.

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China Musings #8: How Didi took over Uber China

To most, ride-hailing company Didi is known as “the Uber of China,” a description that conveys the notion of Didi being a mere copycat of Uber. Yet the first time I felt that there was real innovation coming out of China, was the day I got to visit both companies back-to-back.

This was two years ago, and I remember starting the day feeling disdainful towards Didi, “the copycat,” yet sympathetic towards Uber China, “the original.” By the end of the day, my emotions had completely flip-flopped: I was deeply impressed by how Didi was building a ride-hailing experience with the Chinese user in mind, but doubtful about how Uber was trying to take a proven US product and push it into the Chinese market.

As so often, any company’s ability to succeed internationally largely depends on the degree to which they empathize with the needs of the local users. Take Beijing for a example, with 22M citizens it’s among the world’s ten most congested cities (8 Chinese cities in the top 20). From 2002 to 2017, in just 15 years, the number of cars quadrupled (!) from 1.5M to 6M, leading to a wide range of regulations (limited supply of vehicle licenses, exorbitant prices, long wait times, certain days you are not allowed to drive, etc.).

During their war with Uber China, Didi had launched a total of six or seven different services, ranging from carpooling and car rental to inter-city buses – all services that were addressing the actual transportation needs of the Chinese beyond just ride-sharing and thus giving them a perceived and actual edge. Even Didi’s name was empathetic towards the commuting pain that locals felt: in Mandarin it means “beep beep,” like a honking car (note: it also means “little brother”).

Now the truth is that there were other factors at play like for example that Didi was a homegrown company. For Uber, burning $2B in China was a big deal, yet for Didi (and for their investors TenCent and Alibaba), spending $2B to win at home was nothing. For Uber, China was a big opportunity, for Didi it was life or death.

In the end, Didi beat Uber China, and acquired their China business in exchange for $1B and a stake of 17.7%. Since then, Didi has grown to 400M registered users and 4M drivers, and delivers 25M rides a day in 400+ Chinese cities – roughly TWICE as many as Uber and all the other global sharing apps COMBINED. The acquisition further cemented Didi as the planet’s most valuable startup (for now), with a $56B valuation, speeding past Uber, whose most recent round saw its worth fall to just $48B.

Despite Uber’s stake in Didi, the two companies are in a fierce battle on global stage. Didi’s recent acquisition of 99 Taxis in Latin America was a provocation of Uber whose two largest markets are Mexico City and São Paulo. While still loss-making in China, Didi is poised to enter this battle with about $20B raised (more money than any VC-backed startup ever) and cash reserves of $12B.

A personal anecdote: our meeting with Uber China started with their off-the-shelf “from bits to atoms” PR story, and then ended with a picture of four women in miniskirts advertising open roles on their team. What actually did arouse us (non-sexually) was seeing CEO Travis continuously run back and forth hectically. About 18 months later, during my interview with Ofo, its co-founder asked me how Ofo can be successful outside of China, to which I responded with a lot of the aforementioned empathy points while also trashing Uber China. Clearly I had not done my homework, because he was actually an ex-Uber China employee and considered the “rising star” of the organization. He still hired me and we both found out later that he was actually supposed to host us at Uber China that day, but that Travis was in town and had pulled him into meetings.

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China Musings #7: Dealing with Pollution

The first time I experienced the infamous Beijing pollution was during a 2-day layover on my way to North Korea. As we were were leaving Beijing, I remember asking a classmate who had previously lived in Beijing: “if you knew today that those four years of living here were going to shorten your life expectancy by 6 months, would you still do it?” The question led to a lively discussion as we were headed to the airport, yet we never really reached a conclusion.

Little did I know that two years later I would find myself asking the very same question as I go in and out of Beijing. While the overall situation in China has become better (NYT: Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, China Is Winning – https://nyti.ms/2GhlOll), Beijing still far from being a welcoming and easy place to live – environmentally speaking.

The picture is from two weeks ago during a sandstorm when AQI levels hit 1,200 – which is ranked hazardous (the “green zone” is anything under 50). Eye infected, lungs filled with dust, and just generally feeling shitty. Now I wasn’t going to write a rant about the pollution, but I wanted to share the ways how I have seen people adapt and become creative around this issue. A few anecdotes from my many visits:

• There is a brewery in Beijing that offers a discount on one of their beers depending on how high the AQI level is (the more polluted, the higher the discount).
• I have seen real estate agents offer air purifiers as a way to rent out their properties: “rent this unit and get a complementary XiaoMi air purifier!”
• There are plenty of bars and restaurants that advertise with "we have clean and purified air!" on their internet listings as a way to attract costumers.
• The company I work for recently launched a new line of merchandise products... among them a branded respiratory mask (apparently some restaurant chains sell branded masks too).
• Our employee kitchens have respiratory masks stocked right among all the snacks and drinks (...Snickers, potato chips, respiratory masks....). Ours cost, but other companies offer them as free perks.
• Just as you would expect, some beauty brands have released entire pollution-dedicated product lines like face masks or "Anti-Pollution Emulsion."

While I still don't know the answer to the question I asked my classmate back then, I remain naively optimistic about the regenerative capabilities of my lungs.

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China Musings #6: The American ignorance towards China

The one moment that really stood out to me during today's Senate hearing on Facebook was when Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan asked Zuck about China.

Sullivan: “Mr. Zuckerberg, quite a story, right? Dorm room to the global behemoth that you guys are. Only in America, would you agree with that?”

Zuckerberg: “Senator, mostly in America.”

Sullivan: “You couldn’t — you couldn’t do this in China, right? Or, what you did in 10 years.”

Zuckerberg: “Well — well, Senator, there are — there are some very strong Chinese internet companies.”

Sullivan: “Right but — you’re supposed to answer ‘yes’ to this question. OK, come on, I’m trying to help you, right? I mean, give me a break. You’re in front of a bunch of… the answer is ‘yes,’ OK, so thank you.”

The room erupts in laughter, everyone writes it off as a joke.

But what really strikes me is the arrogance of question and even more the ignorance with which the Senator insists on wanting to hear a Yes. It’s this surreal echo-chamber-esque moment where all the Senators want to feel good that only in the US – and nowhere else in the world – such success story would be possible. He could have equally asked: “aren’t we just fucking amazing and simply better than the rest of the world?”

It reminds me a lot of the many conversations I had with VCs in the Valley after I returned from my first trip to China two years ago. I would ask them: “what’s your China strategy? The most ridiculous answer I got was “oh, we all have WeChat accounts.” But even the best answers weren’t enough (“we are thinking of taking all our partners there on a trip” or “one of our portfolio companies is opening an office in China”).

The US has an arrogance and entitlement problem. And so does Silicon Valley. This notion that “if it’s not from here, it’s no good” (SV) or that “only in the US this could have been the case” (US) are harmfully reinforcing messages that create a massive blind spot which will continue to lead to the long-term decline of both Silicon Valley and the US.

To be clear, the FB success story as we know it is unique and could have only happened in the US. We simply don't know what FB would look like if Zuckerberg had started it in China, but as he pointed out, there are some very strong Chinese tech companies, some of which – take Tencent f.ex. – have even managed to surpass FB in market value and are even more integrated into every-day life.

So no, China would have not spat out the version of FB as we know it today, but if these senators had the slightest idea of what's going on beyond their boarders, they would understand that the US isn't the only place where successful companies can be built.

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China Musings #5: The Starbucks Success Story

In a country in which so much feels foreign, Starbucks has surprisingly turned out to be one of the few places I feel … home. The look and feel is familiar, the menu is well-tested, and the music could be from my own Spotify – it’s my oasis amidst an ocean of uncertainty.

After hearing about the opening of the world’s largest Starbucks store in Shanghai, I put it high on my to-do list (see the pic below). It is a 29,000 square-foot temple staffed by 400 employees – it comes with its own bakery, roastery, augmented reality program, 100+ drink options (including nitrogen-infused tea) and to no surprise, crazy-long lines. This one store alone makes 15x the revenue of the average US store.

Now Starbucks’s story in China is truly one-of-a kind. While other brands had to often retreat (Google pulling its servers, Coke closing its bottling unit, McDonalds selling its business and licensing its brand), Starbucks is one of the few American companies that got China right – by understanding the importance of building long-term relationships, working with the government, and investing heavily.

To give you an idea, every 15 hours Starbucks is opening a new store in China. It has already 3,000 stores in 130+ cities and is planning to open another (!) 5,000 stores over the next four years – creating 10,000 jobs every year. In Shanghai alone there are 600 Starbucks stores, which is 2x of what New York has.

What is so remarkable is the long-term mindset that Starbucks applied to China. The journey started some 20 years ago and had the seemingly insurmountable task of bringing coffee culture to a country famous for its tea.

Over the years, Starbucks has invested heavily, paid significantly higher wages than competitors, offering housing allowances, health care benefits, extending its employee ownership benefits to Chinese workers, and offering critical illness injuries to the parents of their employees. Starbucks is further discussing with the Chinese government the prospect of turning coffee from the Yunnan province into a global coffee brand.

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China Musings #4: When a game takes over life

Wherever I go in China, I see people playing the same game on their phones. Be it security guards, couples over lunch, or kids on the street. While I am zero into mobile gaming, the popularity of this game really blew my mind.

The game is called Honour of Kings and was released by Chinese internet giant Tencent (it’s the same company that runs the social messaging app WeChat which has a staggering 902M daily active users).

Now the game itself has pretty remarkable stats, too: there are 80M daily (!) active users (that’s about 6% of the Chinese population) who play the game an average of six hours a week – with $1.76B of revenue in Q1 of 2018, basically making it the world’s number one mobile game.

The game became so addictively popular, that a Chinese newspaper called it “poison for young people” – which triggered a market cap loss of $14B. Tencent later reacted to the criticism by 1) imposing a daily cap of one hour for kids under 12 and by 2) announcing a lineup of “serious” video games with “positive social value” (traditional culture, and engineering exercises, parent-child interaction, etc.).

Interestingly enough, Tencent recently overtook Facebook as the most valuable Social Networking Company with a market cap of $540B. The kicker in the comparison to Facebook however is the fact that only 18% of Tencent’s revenue comes from advertising, compared to 98% for Facebook. Tencent has plenty of profitable revenue streams, especially at the intersection of gaming and subscriptions. Which only means that there is a lot of revenue upside once it decides to tap more into advertising (WeChat currently shows only one single ad per day in your feed).

The scale of these tech trends in China and the way how they have shaped society is really fascinating.

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Swimming against the tide

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of "Power – Why Some People Have It and Others Don't," recently wrote about me, trying to illustrate some of his career advice. 

More specifically, he looked at my decision to join a Chinese tech company and compared it with what my alternative would have been: "simply put, Stanford MBA graduates, like many people from all over the world, find themselves doing a) what is sort of expected of them and b) following the crowd – succumbing to the enormous social pressure to do what everyone else is doing. Often following the crowd is wise. But for career success, it almost always is not.

The decision was to turn to China in the pursuit of new professional opportunities. The prospect of competing with 240 classmates for small start-up roles in the Bay Area was depressing to me. So, 10 days after graduation I was sitting on a plane to China – one-way, two bags. No job, no friends, no network, no language, no housing. Simply the aspiration to find a company that is on the verge of going international and the belief that I could help them do that.

I ended up getting a job at Ofo which has pioneered the concept of "dockless bike sharing" with 10 million plus bikes across China, and several hundred thousand bikes overseas. They are about 3 years old and have raised $1.3 billion. As their only non-Chinese employee among a staff of 3,200, I am now building and running their global business development unit – an opportunity I would have never been able to find in the Bay Area."

Jeffrey went on in his article and tried to highlight four pieces of advice: 

1. go where there is less competition (Omid: Chinese companies were surprised to see a foreigner like me offering them help to go global)
2. find a job where you can add unique value (Omid: note that as the only non-Chinese I can help link my company to the rest of the world)
3. be willing to find your own path – and not follow the crowd or do what is expected (Omid: which is something that is already in my DNA); and
4. perhaps most importantly, just like finance teaches there is a trad-off between risk and return in the financial markets, there is a trade-off between risk and return in careers as well. Playing it safe may be – and certainly feels – comfortable. But if you really want to accelerate your career, implementing a higher-variance, riskier strategy is the way to go (Omid: I think there are times where it makes sense to take that risk, and other times where it's better to play safe. Graduating from business school gives you a big safety net, so how far do you dare to jump?).

For me personally, it was the right thing to do. By no means to I want to argue that it's the right thing to do for everyone. If I hadn't lived/worked/studied in the Bay Area for six years prior to my decision, I would have certainly made a different decision. 

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