Why Pursue Investing?
Like many who lived through the Cultural Revolution, my family lost more than they gained. In search of a better life, my grandparents escaped to Hong Kong with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Remarkably, it can be argued that Hong Kong, from the 1970s to the 1990s, featured the purest form of capitalism that ever existed in modern times. In this era of extremely low regulation, business and entrepreneurship thrived. In turn, a new wave of economic activity started in Hong Kong and eventually spread to the rest of the country, lifting millions out of poverty over the course of just a few decades.
My grandparents, having never completed any formal schooling, tried to make money any way they could to support their growing family. As luck would have it, they ended up in the textile manufacturing boom, starting a factory that produced everything from jeans to jackets for brands in the West. The business was moderately successful, and my family was eventually able to immigrate to Vancouver, BC. As a child, my grandparents were in the final stages of winding down the textile manufacturing business and had just started a restaurant.
Being exposed to small businesses at a young age, I became interested in startups while in high school. Through a fortunate turn of events, I ended up shadowing the founder of a business who was also a customer at my grandparents’ restaurant during the summer before my senior year of high school. That summer, I learned about both startups and the network of investors that support the aspirations of founders—my first foray into the world of business and investing.
Pursuing a career in finance and investing was not what I was initially interested in when I entered university. I was interested in entrepreneurship and starting a business, not investing in them. However, seeing as startups and businesses are inextricably linked with the finance and investing industry, I didn’t end up too far off from where I originally envisioned myself.
I love what I do today because it requires constant learning, critical thinking, and brings new challenges on a daily basis. Investing is truly a liberal art, one that (amongst many other things) requires an understanding of the intersection of people, innovation, and industry. Investing is unique in the sense that almost everything you learn, even from seemingly unrelated fields of study, can be incorporated into a thesis, idea, or insight. Moreover, at the core of investing are the underlying businesses. I believe that businesses have done more to improve the quality of life around the world than anything else (my own family stands as a testament to that), and that the investment industry plays a key role in supporting those improvements.