Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hello, this is the Pearl Lam Podcast and I’m in London. I’m at my home and I have the pleasure to invite my friend Mei Chen to have a podcast with us. Mei, can you very briefly introduce yourself?
Mei Chen: Thank you for having me in your home again, Pearl. It’s always lovely to come to your place.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Mei, you are Spanish born Chinese and your Mandarin is so much better than mine. Every time when I hear myself speaking Mandarin, I start laughing. But can you actually write Chinese?
Mei Chen: So I was born in Spain. My parents are both Chinese. And my mom, since I was very small, she always insisted that I should learn Chinese. And the reality is that when I was a kid, I hated it because all my friends, when they were coming back from school, they could watch Simpsons, FRIENDS and all of that, instead of I was, I had to study Chinese. I had to repeat the words essentially, you know, copy the characters in Chinese. And I never really understood that when I was a kid, when I was like six, seven, eight years old, and I was like, why all my friends get the chance to watch TV? Well, I’m copying the letters in Chinese, so I hated it at the time. I write Chinese because my mom pushed me so much when I was a kid.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I also have the similar experience.
Mei Chen: I’m actually incredibly grateful. I mean, like today I’m able to read Chinese and write Chinese. And I think that gives you really a perspective and really different perspective to anything else.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I would always bribe to write Chinese. My father said. My father gave me really basic pocket money. I was sent away when I was eleven. So it’s costing, you know, one Chinese letter. You know, I have to add my allowance, right? One Chinese letter is that much. Okay. And then calligraphy, if you do big calligraphy, is one price, if you do small calligraphy is another, is another fee. So you have to, you have to earn in order to have a decent allowances and the same thing. And because I was also had Chinese teacher that comes to forced me to do Chinese. And, you know, I really curse my parents. Why do I have to do this? Why do I same thing. But having been born in Spain, how do you know about Chinese culture? Is it through your parents? Did your parents have a lot of Chinese friends? Because it’s not about reading and writing Chinese, because, I mean, I know you, you know your Chinese culture. I mean, you’re actually, although you are linguistic, you speak French, you speak Spanish, you speak English, you’re multilinguistic, but then, you know, you understand Chinese culture.
Mei Chen: When I was in Spain, I was living in a really small city in Spain. We were not in Malaga, sorry, in Madrid or Barcelona, some of the major cities. And I remember growing up being the only Asian family in the city, which was quite shocking, to be honest. When you’re a kid, you don’t feel that way. But the reality is that that was before the times of Internet where you can have tutors over Skype calls or Zoom calls and stuff like that. So my mom, she went out of her way to hire essentially Chinese teachers from Madrid to come to our small city in Spain to teach us Chinese, because her feeling is that her Chinese was not good enough to teach me. So therefore she actually from Madrid, that essentially spoke Chinese from Beijing, because that’s where she felt it was the right accent, the right accent in Mandarin. So growing up, I mean, like at home, I’ve always been educated with Chinese culture. I mean, like, my parents at home never spoke Spanish to me. They do speak Spanish, but we always spoke Mandarin at home and in school, you could speak always Spanish to your friends. So I guess growing up, I always grew up in that intersection of Asian culture, or Chinese culture specifically, and also the Spanish culture. And over the years, I also got the chance to travel a lot because I love discovering new cultures, new countries and new food cuisines, to be honest. And that’s something that has shaped the way I see the world, to be honest. And it has actually helped me a lot with. Now, in hindsight, I feel like I fit very well in certain countries and also in certain companies, because I’m able to understand what is behind some of the behaviours that people have. And that’s very important. You want to have friends from different countries or even work for different companies, like Google. At Google, we had a huge Chinese community, actually.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Really?
Mei Chen: Yes.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And you have really highly academic credentials shows, and I read very impressive. So after Spain, you went to France?
Mei Chen: No, actually, after Spain I didn’t go to France. My mom always wanted me to study in China.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So you went back to China?
Mei Chen: I went to Beijing because she was convinced that I should study in China. And she was like, you should go to Beijing University. And initially I was like, okay, it sounds like a good idea. But then after speaking to some of my mentors and friends, that already finished university. One of the things I realised is even if I were to graduate from the best university in China, Beita, which is kind of like an equivalent of Harvard Business School or Harvard University in the US, is that at the end of that journey, you’re not going to be international enough.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes, absolutely.
Mei Chen: Because I was thinking to myself, once I graduate, I picture myself graduating from Beijing University, which is a great honour for most families in China. When you apply to international companies, whether it’s General Electric or Google or, for example, any of the banks, most of those companies in the US don’t really know Beijing University.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Agree.
Mei Chen: And that was when I was 17 years old. I was thinking, if I need, in an interview of 1 hour, spend 10% or 20% of my time explaining to the person I’m interviewing with what Beijing University is and represents, that’s actually wrong. Yeah, you’re spending time explaining the wrong things, or, you know, like you should be talking about your experience and what you can add to the, to the company. So that actually was, you know, like, in hindsight, it was a wake up call for me and I thought it’s great to be able to potentially graduate from Beijing University, where I spent one year. But then I decided to go back to Europe because studying at French universities will give, give me a much better international.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): The French business school. But then you went to the number one Harvard Business School to finish your postgraduate. So because you’re from there, that’s why you could start working in America, starting with Google, General Electrics, because what you study, you never studied technology, did you?
Mei Chen: So I studied finance and business, essentially. I didn’t study the hardcore engineering, but I think, you know, like in French business schools and also in American business schools, you get to study the real life cases. It’s not only theory where you go and study. Exactly. And I think that’s really important because at the end of the day, you’re not applying theory to the business world, and that actually prepares you so much better to the real world, to the real problems that you need to face when you’re running a business, when you’re expanding into a new country, and all of those things that, you know, like, you can learn this theory, but you need to learn how to best apply that theory to make it true and a reality. I’ve been for the last 20 plus years in the intersection of technology, digital, and most recently also digital platforms and marketplaces, mostly worked for American companies in the past. So General Electric, Google, and I’ve been with Alibaba for the last ten years. Joined right after the IPO in September 2014 to really lead international and really venturing into international markets and diversifying the revenue streams outside that. I also spend a lot of time teaching at universities like INSEAD, Cambridge University and LBS. And lastly I spent quite some time with startups and one of my last kind of like journeys in the more formal board of directors role, it’s with a real estate company chaired by Philly Haven here in the UK that does real estate construction and beyond that. So try to always balance myself with all the things that I like.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Wow. So did you enjoy being in Google and GE?
Mei Chen: So I was with General Electric in Paris. In France.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, in Paris.
Mei Chen: I was not with them in the US. And that was a bit of a dream come true because, you know, like, as a young girl I always wanted to live in Paris and I remember General Electric was not based in down, you know, in central Paris, it was based in a place called Buc, which is in the south of Versailles, south of Paris. And I decided to leave on the 8th, around this one, which is, I know, very central in Paris.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Well, that’s pretty far away to go there.
Mei Chen: Incredibly far away. But as a dream that I had, I really wanted to live in republique in, you know, in Paris. So every single morning I had to take a really long commute of one and a half to cross the whole Paris, take the train, and also back then we had a shuttle bus to go to Buc. And as you probably know, in France, another thing that is very interesting is that French people love strikes.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, exactly. Most of them, strikes and demonstrations. Every time I visit there’s either strikes or demonstration. So you’ll be stopped from travelling to work.
Mei Chen: That was quite an interesting experience for me because that was before the times of Zoom and working from home. So that essentially meant that sometimes I could need to go leave my apartment at 05:00 to get to work at nine because, you know, like, it takes so much time to get to Buc. And then with Google I was actually based in San Francisco and Mountain View, that was a totally different experience. And I lived in San Francisco for around a year. But again, the commuting was killing me because going up and down the 101 in California, it’s horrible.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, and the traffic jam is terrible.
Mei Chen: And that’s true because every single tech company is based in Mountain View, Palo Alto, so everybody is. And rush hour getting down to the south of California, so it’s a very different experience. I got the chance to work in the most interesting things at Google from advertising at the time, mobile advertising, when it was before a thing. Then I got the chance to work for, to lead, essentially a strategy for our loan tell business, which was a multibillion dollar business for Google at the time. And with that job, actually, I got the chance to travel around the world. So India, Europe, which I already knew, Latin America, went to Argentina.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Your Spanish speaking is perfect.
Mei Chen: So that was incredibly interesting up until the day I told my friends I was leaving Google, and they said to me, where are you going? I said, I’m going to a Chinese company called Alibaba. And especially my Chinese friend said to me, you’re crazy. Why are you leaving Google? Why are you going to Alibaba?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But at the time, Alibaba hasn’t gone IPO yet. And people does. I mean, did people know what Alibaba…
Mei Chen: They did know about Alibaba, especially my Chinese friends, right? A lot of my engineering chinese friends, they knew about Alibaba, but essentially they, you know, like, it’s. It was not a. How should I put it? It’s not a company that is very well known in the Western world, right?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Not just that is the benefits working in Google. And also, I think, you know, American culture, American technology company, they really take care of the staff and, you know, Chinese company treats its staff very, very differently. I don’t know whether Alibaba is like or Google, but obviously people will be a bit shocked.
Mei Chen: I think it was more around the fact that Google was growing. I mean, at that time, Google was thriving. Alibaba, in a way, was an underdog, like just IPO in the US.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But your mother must be proud.
Mei Chen: I really enjoyed my time at Google. It was an incredibly great. It’s still an incredibly great company.
Pearl Lam: It was your first technology company, right?
Mei Chen: It was, yes. For me, I mean, like, the reality is that when I applied to Google and some of the tech companies, they were not my. I mean, I was not. It was not my dream to get into a tech company. I always thought it was interesting, but I could not die to get into that company. When Alibaba reached out, I thought to myself something that I had been thinking for a long time and is, you know, like, I’ve always been educated in that Asian Chinese culture and also Western culture. And I always knew that at some point in my life, I could work with something that will connect both worlds in one way or another. I didn’t know with which company and when and how. That’s true. So when Alibaba reached out, I felt like the stars aligned. I didn’t really know what Alibaba was doing, to be very honest. I mean, like, I knew about the company, but I didn’t know what was.
Pearl Lam: The business job was building the retail. Right. Internationally. Isn’t that really exciting?
Mei Chen: It is very exciting.
Pearl Lam: Very exciting to take, because, I mean, I think a lot of audience did not realise that how big the turnover of Alibaba by e-commerce. And in China it’s billions, right? Billions, much higher than Amazon. I don’t think the west could understand this consumption power. And in China, and I think a lot of these tech companies in China, they feel very comfortable because the high consumption power. But to truly, to make a company global, especially Alibaba, had the IPO in Nasdaq, right, in New York. So your job is to bring a Chinese tech company globally. So was it difficult? Because that dream wasn’t exactly this international dream, right.
Mei Chen: I think it’s a journey because the reality is that as I was trying to learn more about the company and I was meeting executives at the company when I was joining, is no one actually had an answer to what international globalisation really means, especially globalisation from China to the Western world. You know, there’s a lot of companies that actually went from the US to China and there’s best practises, but not the other way around. And I remember doing that process. I did ask a lot of people and most people couldn’t give me an answer. And I thought to myself, that’s very interesting. No one actually has the black book or the playbook to make this work. So for me, that unknown, in a way, was incredibly exciting because I get to do a challenge that no one, in a way, has done. I may fail, I may succeed. And even if you fail, you learn a lot out of that process, because it’s a unique process. There’s no other companies that have done it and there’s no precedent. So I think for me that was change is always challenging, but if you can embrace it, you can grow ten x or 100 x, much more.
Pearl Lam: Yeah, but the whole mentality is that just China market is so big already, they have a higher turnover than Amazon, like Taobao. I mean, it’s incredible. Just three days, I don’t know how many billions they already is, the turnover. So obviously they couldn’t see the reason why they have to invest to grow internationally.
Mei Chen: But I think from that perspective, our founder, Jack Ma, really had that vision at the very beginning, in the sense that right after the IPO is when we started looking at international because if you think about any companies going public in the US, you then have investors. And the first thing that Jack Ma said when we IPO is my most important partners are my customers, the second most important group is my employees, and then third comes my investors. You know, that’s a very bold statement to say when you’re IPO. Exactly, because essentially you’re getting money from your investors. So I think that has stayed true to the company for a long time. And the reality is that with that mentality, Jack Ma really wanted to diversify the revenue streams. 99% of our revenues were coming out of China when we IPO the company. Fast forward today, it’s a much more diversified business.
Pearl Lam: Really? What is the percentage there?
Mei Chen: It’s, you know, like at least 40% is coming from international.
Pearl Lam: Wow, that’s fantastic.
Mei Chen: So from that perspective, it’s really about making a very robust business that can counter any changes that we may have in the economy, you know, with COVID for example. So when you’re preparing your business for every single challenge, you’re going to make a very robust business.
Pearl Lam: So how do you see the future about Chinese tech and tech companies? Especially today, you have US China trade sanction and all these difficulties. How do you think that Chinese tech company can grow when America is not sharing the tech with China?
Mei Chen: I think from a technology and innovation perspective, when I was at Google, when I was living in Silicon Valley, I always thought that I was at the best company with the best technology ever. I only came to realise that was not true when I joined Alibaba. Because I mean, the reality is that I didn’t spend that much time in China. And with Alibaba, things in China, infrastructure are so much better built for technology. Everything moves 10, 20, 30 times faster. And there’s this concept called the China speed. And I think the China speed is applied to tech companies, to the way entrepreneurs think about building companies, and also the way they think about scaling. And one of the most interesting things that I remember back in 2016 is there’s this multi billion company from Europe that is in the fashion industry and they are third generation. And every single year this company, which is publicly traded, they take the chairman of the board, the non executives and also the CEO’s of the different companies they own to the US. And I remember asking the chairman of the board and group CEO, why do you take everybody to the US to visit Google, Microsoft and many of the other tech companies? The answer was because we want to learn about innovations and technologies. And I was like, listen, come to China one time, bring your executive team and I’ll show you as a company things that we do, and you tell me whether you want to come back or not. So I hosted them for the first time at the Alibaba campus in 2016. The following year, they came to our campus three times.
Pearl Lam: Wow.
Mei Chen: To the point my team was like, can you ask them not to come that often? Because it takes a lot of time to hold sports. Right. But the reality is that they were so impressed by the innovations and the technologies available in China.
Pearl Lam: But the thing is, I mean, I don’t know tech. I don’t profess I know tech, but when you read from a newspaper, read the news, is there as certain elements in the tech world in China, they need American elements, like nano chips. Without the nano chips, you cannot do anything further. So how is China going to overcome all these challenges if they don’t have this collaboration with and with America?
Mei Chen: Yeah, I think at the end of the day, what is really important is, as you said, rightly, the collaboration piece and the partnership. And I think that’s if you don’t have that, the only group of people that are losing are the consumers.
Pearl Lam: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Mei Chen: You really need to, you know, it’s good to have competition, but at the end of the day, it’s good also to have collaboration.
Pearl Lam: I think collaboration and competition is as important as anything. So let me ask you, in Alibaba, do your colleagues or do most of your staff talk about work life balance as in the West?
Mei Chen: I think differently, because I think in the West, you know, in Asia, work is a very.
Pearl Lam: So do they actually say that we will only turn up to work maximum two days a week? We want to work remotely? I never. I sincerely never heard it. In Asia.
Mei Chen: I don’t think so.
Pearl Lam: And in China or in Hong Kong, of course there’s a reason, because Hong Kong housing is really small, so obviously they don’t want to stay at home. But in Singapore is much bigger. I don’t hear about it, nor in China. So does this thing call work life balance works living or work life balance, does it exist in Asia because it all started with your tech people?
Mei Chen: I think. I personally think there’s a concept of work life balance in… And for me, the concept of work life balance is that sometimes in periods of your life and your work, your life will take more percentage of your time, and your family will take more time of more percentage of your time. And sometimes when you do projects and launching new things, the reality is that work will take more time of your life. So in a way, there’s never a 50 50% balance. That’s impossible. I mean, like, even at Google, the reality is that before COVID before this work from Hong Kong, said, all of my colleagues, myself included, we always thought, especially because we were based in the West Coast, we always started working the week on Sundays, because you had one day behind and Google had a global business. We had colleagues in Japan, colleagues in India, and all of those colleagues were at least twelve to a day ahead of us. So that’s one of the reasons. I mean, like the US is slightly different in that sense, but that concept of work life balance, I think it’s really about sometimes parts of work will require more of your time, and sometimes your personal life will require more.
Pearl Lam: And remember, we Chinese has a very high working ethics. I really have not heard about work life balance in Asia. So this thing really, I mean, I recently have a conversation with some friends and in Europe as well as in US, and they were just saying to me that younger people nowadays, they said we all suffered, we all work like dogs when we first working. And he said, nowadays young people is talking about work like balance, right? So they were asking me whether Asia has. For me, I never heard of it.
Mei Chen: I think in Asia there is less about work life balance per se. You know, like a lot of when you go to work, it feels like you are essentially with your family. In a way, there’s a great level of trust across things, and that’s what makes collaboration so much easier, I think, especially in the Western world, what has happened in the last couple of years is that division between life and work has become very apparent and very obvious about you need to work from home. And those are concepts that even during COVID most of our colleagues went to the office. We were working from home in the UK, in the US, in Europe, because regulation didn’t allow us. But the reality is that in China, most of our colleagues actually went to the office. They were wearing masks. So I think that comes.
Pearl Lam: Ethics is very, very different. Very different. Okay, so Mei, now you are an expert in global retail. So let me ask you, does AI help you 100%? You know, like, how much AI, you know, how in Alibaba, how much AI has played a role in Alibaba?
Mei Chen: A lot, I could say the influence of artificial intelligence in any industries, Alibaba or any companies, is massive.
Pearl Lam: And how do you see this AI is going to play in the next ten years?
Mei Chen: If you take a step back from an AI perspective, there are things that you can do with AI that are very repetitive. That’s reality. The next level up is really on how do you, you actually use AI to take your task to the next level and you then, as a person, customise that to the real world. AI is here to stay. And I think companies that are embracing that to everything that they do, whether it’s advertising, whether it’s retail, whether it’s offline, whether it’s chip manufacturing, I think it’s. These are the companies that are going.
Pearl Lam: The thing, because with AI, the problem is it manufacture a very homogeneous taste thing, because they take them the maximum view as the right thing, as this is the right look. This is so there is no, you know, there’s nothing which is edgy, which is, you know, fun. I mean, of course, when we talk about you doing retail in a mass, yes, this is important. But when we talk about if you want to have something edgy and something.
Mei Chen: With more personality, then AI won’t work. I think my potential area of concern with AI is the people behind it. And what I mean by that is that that group of people that is designing AI at this moment, artificial intelligence, it’s quite similar. And that will drive AI to think about things in a slightly different way. You know, like, if you look around the world, there’s not that many AI companies led by female entrepreneurs.
Pearl Lam: Yes, you’re absolutely right.
Mei Chen: And the world is homogeneous. Right. And you have.
Pearl Lam: And it’s not many women who’s in the AI community, I mean, directorship as well.
Mei Chen: And I feel that’s a challenge because if you think about it, you know, we have women and men around the world, whether you buy products or you interact with friends, and you don’t have that. You know, the diversity in the Artificial Intelligence world. I mean, like, how many, how many friends do you know that have something to do in AI that are female versus male?
Pearl Lam: No, honestly, I think I only know, I don’t know enough people on AI. But the person I know in AI, I think, is less than 5%. Right. You’re right. You pinpoint it rightly. So if we say that AI is going to play a big role in the retail industry, then I would presume that we are also saying that there is going to be really homogeneous tastes and views because they always take the maximum.
Mei Chen: I think there’s two things, right? AI can be a tool to enhance. And the reality is that in any industries, a retail industry included, there’s 80% of the market that kind of, like, thinks similarly. That’s the reality.
Pearl Lam: As one of my most cleverest friends. What are you seeing in the next ten years and next twenty years? When you use technology combined with business, how do you see the growth and what are you seeing the weaknesses?
Mei Chen: I think the biggest, for me, from a technology perspective, the biggest areas that we should pay attention are industries don’t have a lot of competition. What I mean by that is, for example, if you look at the global landscape of marketplaces and platforms around the world, you have a global company, which we all know, Amazon, but it’s one way of doing business. Now, if you look around the world, Alibaba, obviously we’re incredibly strong in Asia. If you look, for example, at Europe, you also have platforms that are very strong in Europe. Europe like Asos and Zalando and many others. And if you look into Latin America, you have the likes of Mercado Libre, for example, and in the US, you have Walmart and a few others. But the only global, true global company potentially is Amazon. And I think that is an area where sometimes I grow concerns, because when there’s only one player that is global, the only group of people that loses is the consumer. So I think that industry is up for disruption at this moment. I see incumbents that are well and are doing well already and will be the disruptors, because I don’t know if you remember, but back in the days, do you know, you know, like before the iPhones, there was a company from the Nordics that was incredibly big. Do you remember that?
Pearl Lam; Nokia,
Mei Chen: Right?
Pearl Lam: Yes.
Mei Chen: No one remembers that company today.
Pearl Lam: They were used to it in Finland, and they contribute very high GDP of Finland, correct? Yes.
Mei Chen: And I think where I see the future is industries that had for the last, say, five to ten years, companies that, in a way, have taken a lot of the market. But when you take a lot of the market, the challenge is that you don’t innovate enough. And that’s usually what happens with companies like Nokia. Obviously, they had other challenges when they go irrelevant. And I think there is an opportunity to make this industry much better with more competition and potential collaboration, because there’s different ways of doing business. So that’s definitely one. I think AI is going to accelerate a lot of those trends, like companies and industries that we could have never thought of, that could be startups, and we can use technology and computational power these days to take it to the next level much faster. And then the last thing I could say is there’s a lot of disruption in the world as we see these days. And I personally think that technology is the one that is going to bring everything positively together, whether it’s through blockchain that these days is becoming even more interesting than ever. And it’s going to democratize a lot of the technologies and accesses to people that, you know, in Africa, banking is not a thing. Right. So it’s not as micro banking. Exactly. So I personally think technology is a great enhancer for positive change, and that’s where the future with AI technology and innovations will take us.
Pearl Lam: Thank you, Mei, at this point. Thank you.
Mei Chen: Thank you.
Pearl Lam: We can go for dinner.
