{"id":12328,"date":"2025-11-21T11:59:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T11:59:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pearllampodcast.com\/?p=12328"},"modified":"2025-11-25T12:05:52","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T12:05:52","slug":"%e3%80%8a%e6%9e%97%e6%98%8e%e7%8f%a0%e5%8d%9a%e5%ae%a2%e3%80%8b-%e8%88%87amin-jaffer-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pearllampodcast.com\/zh-hant\/%e3%80%8a%e6%9e%97%e6%98%8e%e7%8f%a0%e5%8d%9a%e5%ae%a2%e3%80%8b-%e8%88%87amin-jaffer-24\/","title":{"rendered":"\u300a\u6797\u660e\u73e0\u535a\u5ba2\u300b | \u8207Amin Jaffer"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0)<\/strong><\/a>:<\/strong> Hello, this is the Pearl Lam Podcast<\/a> and I\u2019m in London. I\u2019m 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? <\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> Thank you for having me in your home again, Pearl. It\u2019s always lovely to come to your place. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0):<\/strong><\/a> 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? <\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> 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\u2019m 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. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0)<\/strong><\/a>: <\/strong>I also have the similar experience.<\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> I\u2019m actually incredibly grateful. I mean, like today I\u2019m able to read Chinese and write Chinese. And I think that gives you really a perspective and really different perspective to anything else. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0)<\/strong><\/a>: <\/strong>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\u2019s 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\u2019s not about reading and writing Chinese, because, I mean, I know you, you know your Chinese culture. I mean, you\u2019re actually, although you are linguistic, you speak French, you speak Spanish, you speak English, you\u2019re multilinguistic, but then, you know, you understand Chinese culture. <\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> 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\u2019re a kid, you don\u2019t 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\u2019s where she felt it was the right accent, the right accent in Mandarin. So growing up, I mean, like at home, I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019m able to understand what is behind some of the behaviours that people have. And that\u2019s 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. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0)<\/strong><\/a>:<\/strong> Really?<\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0<\/strong><\/a>):<\/strong> And you have really highly academic credentials shows, and I read very impressive. So after Spain, you went to France? <\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> No, actually, after Spain I didn\u2019t go to France. My mom always wanted me to study in China. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0)<\/strong><\/a>:<\/strong> So you went back to China?<\/p>

Mei Chen<\/strong>: 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\u2019re not going to be international enough. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0)<\/strong><\/a>:<\/strong> Yes, absolutely.<\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> 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\u2019s General Electric or Google or, for example, any of the banks, most of those companies in the US don\u2019t really know Beijing University. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0): <\/strong>Agree.<\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> 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\u2019m interviewing with what Beijing University is and represents, that\u2019s actually wrong. Yeah, you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0): <\/strong>The French business school. But then you went to the number one Harvard Business School to finish your postgraduate. So because you\u2019re from there, that\u2019s why you could start working in America, starting with Google, General Electrics, because what you study, you never studied technology, did you? <\/p>

Mei Chen: <\/strong>So I studied finance and business, essentially. I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s not only theory where you go and study. Exactly. And I think that\u2019s really important because at the end of the day, you\u2019re 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\u2019re running a business, when you\u2019re 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\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0): <\/strong>Wow. So did you enjoy being in Google and GE? <\/p>

Mei Chen: <\/strong>So I was with General Electric in Paris. In France. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0): <\/strong>Oh, in Paris.<\/p>

Mei Chen: <\/strong>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. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0): <\/strong>Well, that\u2019s pretty far away to go there.<\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> 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. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0):<\/strong> Yeah, exactly. Most of them, strikes and demonstrations. Every time I visit there\u2019s either strikes or demonstration. So you\u2019ll be stopped from travelling to work. <\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> 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\u2019s horrible. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0): <\/strong>Yeah, and the traffic jam is terrible.<\/p>

Mei Chen: <\/strong>And that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0):<\/strong> Your Spanish speaking is perfect.<\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> 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\u2019m going to a Chinese company called Alibaba. And especially my Chinese friend said to me, you\u2019re crazy. Why are you leaving Google? Why are you going to Alibaba? <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0): <\/strong>But at the time, Alibaba hasn\u2019t gone IPO yet. And people does. I mean, did people know what Alibaba\u2026 <\/p>

Mei Chen:<\/strong> 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\u2019s. It was not a. How should I put it? It\u2019s not a company that is very well known in the Western world, right? <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0):<\/strong> 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\u2019t know whether Alibaba is like or Google, but obviously people will be a bit shocked. <\/p>

Mei Chen: <\/strong>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. <\/p>

Pearl Lam (\u6797\u660e\u73e0):<\/strong> But your mother must be proud.<\/p>