Welcome to Episode 6 of Leapfrog, a podcast about global entrepreneurs outside the American-centric bubble. I apologize for my glitchy voice in this episode; my seven-year-old MacBook suffered from a water damage!
Lucy Gao had been studying and working in the US for over a decade before reconnecting with her homeland. Instead of moving back to China physically, she joined the US office of TikTok, the Chinese-owned short video app that was seeing a meteoric rise around 2020, to gain a sense of home.
In Silicon Valley, Lucy experienced China’s rigorous “996” culture—working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. She realized that TikTok's competitive advantage might not lie in its AI, but quite the contrary, in its large army of employees worldwide carrying out growth and user engagement tasks through highly manual work. This role, unique to Chinese tech firms, is known as yunying (运营), translated as “operation”, though it differs greatly from its Western definition.
Reflecting on her varied experience straddling China and the US, where she transitioned from software engineer to product manager, venture capitalist and now entrepreneur, Lucy also shared her simple rule for making important life decisions: listen to your heart.
Timeline:
2:17 Making life decisions the way Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs do
5:29 TabbyML as an open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot
8:18 How Lucy ended up attending high school in the US
11:07 Transitioning from software engineering to product management
13:27 Joining TikTok at the dawn of its global dominance
16:02 TikTok’s secret to success — yunying
20:06 Reverse culture shock at TikTok
23:58 To grow quickly, TikTok needed to rely on its China team early on
25:28 Moving back to China and becoming a VC during COVID-19
28:40 Lucy’s three life essentials
Mentions:
TabbyML, a self-hosted AI coding assistant
Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework
Steve Jobs on “connecting the dots,” from his famous commencement address at Stanford University in 2005
Rui Ma’s podcast episode on the “operation” aka Yunying (运营) role at Chinese tech firms, and how it works differently in Western countries
#6 'Working at TikTok gave me reverse culture shock'