Welcome to Episode 5 of Leapfrog, a podcast about global entrepreneurs outside the American-centric tech bubble. Special thanks to Emma and Danny’s expert editing help!
Emma Meng always seems to be excelling as an outsider.
Raised in south China in the 90s, she became the first Chinese to be admitted by Cambridge to study French. After working in the fashion industry in New York, she returned to China and wrote a book about Elon Musk at the dawn of Tesla’s rise to become a household name. After riding her home country’s spectacular boom of battery-powered cars, Emma is now introducing Chinese EVs to the United Arab Emirates.
Aside from discussing China’s EV revolution and the UAE’s pursuit of energy diversification, I asked Emma what allowed her to flourish as an outsider in such wide-ranging realms. She harked back to something her sixth form college teacher said, that being Chinese wasn’t her weakness but an advantage.
“[My teacher] said she had the most fun reading my essay because my angle was always so different. So when I'm reading Shakespeare, when I'm reading Baudelaire, I'm reading from a modern Chinese woman's angle, which is different from the rest of the crowd in England.
I asked her, ‘but how about my grammar mistakes? I could never speak or write as fluently as native speakers.’ And she said, you know, Kate Moss is only 5 ft 7, and she's one of the most famous supermodels. So my teacher just kept telling me what I thought was my weakness can actually be my greatest strength.”
Timeline:
1:56 Why the UAE wants to learn from Chinese EVs
6:43 The UAE’s cultural openness was a surprise
8:42 How Emma built trust in her Middle Eastern clients
11:17 Going from French literature to the world of battery-powered cars
14:20 Why Elon Musk has many female fans, including Emma
16:58 Many Chinese are opposed to AI taking over their jobs
19:25 How Emma manages to thrive as an outsider
22:20 Marketing in the auto industry is still very “masculine”
24:20 But in China, women play an increasingly key role in car purchase decisions
25:57 Why the biotech industry needs cooperation between China, the UAE and the US
27:25 Recommendations
Mentions:
Emma’s Weibo account, podcast (大小马聊科技), and her book on Elon Musk (Chinese, 2018)
Emma’s book recs
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li
Tesla secures Shanghai site for $2 billion China Gigafactory (Reuters, 2018)
China’s EV makers want top oil producing nations to go electric (Bloomberg, 2023)
China’s push for autonomous driving, explained by executives from top players (TechCrunch, 2021)
China biotech scene, U.S. collaborations grow (AACR Journals, 2020)
Chinese women’s car-buying power (Chinese, 21st Century Business Herald and NielsenIQ, 2023)
#5 Emma's story: From French lit to Arabian EVs