Confessions of a scrappy bastard — 4/4/21

I wanted to start blogging about my stories as an immigrant, New Yorker, a founder, and a VC on top of my day job in critical infrastructure protection.

Just a little bit of background about myself. I was born and raised in Burma (Myanmar). The country is sandwiched between India and China in Southeast Asia, so we are ethnically Chinese but culturally influenced heavily by Hinduism from India, given the Buddhist majority.

Right now, things are quite bad there with the revolution led by GenZ and the military regime backed by Russia and China, sadly — over 500 and 50 of them young children have been killed so far.

Anyway, since this is my first blog, I wanted to focus on where I am in life as an intro. So, growing up from an upper middle class (sort of) in a third-world country is not as bad as growing up in the slums but hey, it also has a lot of crap by default. Let’s say, I only learned how to use a credit card to fill gas or top up my phone bill until I was in Melbourne, Australia in 2009.

Luckily for me, I got some scholarship and ended up in the Midwest, US for college (Augustana College), and my college adventures began (2010–2014) at Rock Island, IL (also known as Quad cities due to 4/5 towns congregated across the Mississippi River in that area.) It’s a 3-hour drive from Chicago so just like any other Midwestern small town, it does not have much diversity and amenities of a metro region. But!! What it lacks in amenities was made up of people who have beautiful souls and I am quite glad I was fostered by the Midwest which taught me classic American values on family, community, and friends. I actually ended up staying one more year in the area and got my Masters at St. Ambrose Uni in Davenport, Iowa.

Now, it’s time for big city life after spending around 6 years wearing that infamous red flannel and sipping Milwaukee best ice (also known as the Beast, according to my fraternity brothers). So I moved to Chicago, got a job at Exelon (nuclear energy) first, then at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and eventually at Goldman Sachs which prompted my move to the big Apple back in late 2018. The 8 years Midwestern Rob died there and the harsh New Yorker life has begun!

There is a saying that your first year in New York is real tough, well I concur with that statement because I had a mini career crisis and left Wall Street for a family office job back in Burma in early 2020 (was lucky enough to dodge the NYC Covid outbreak). Nevertheless, COVID-19 was a macro event which kinda screwed up my initial plans but hey, thanks to the pandemic I am back in New York and narrowly avoided the coup and the subsequent revolution back in Burma (I got double lucky, in a way I guess?). I jokingly called myself I am the blessed child of God after this double dodge (no shame to this)!

Anyway, thank you for reading this far. I have a meeting in which I will be the moderator for some political discussion around the new federal United States of Myanmar (Burma). By the way, it’s a story for another time. I did not want to do this but kinda ended up in this due to some circumstances, haha. Hoping to write more on here going forward.

Thank you!