STIMY Ep 77: Lily Wu [Co-Founder, WOW Pixies NFT & Startup Partner Lead, SEA, Stripe]

===

Lily Wu: It's crazy like how people over-complicate how they can make money. But honestly, I was just like trying to do what made sense to me.

So I was like, great. This guy wants to, I can clearly see is incentivized to promote to 20 people. And in order to collect the money first, I said if your friend decides to order, they have to give me a $40 bond. And when the shoes come and they pay the rest, you can give me the remaining 40 when we swap the shoes.

Just in case you order a size 43 silver pair of shoes that I can't sell to anybody else. And also main problem is I don't have the money to pay for upfront anyway. So that's the main problem, but you know, you just got to pitch it the other way. And then I went to nine, other friends, said the same thing, all dudes from private schools. Guess that was my market.

By the end of that week, these 10 people gave me 20 orders each. And so that's 200 pairs of shoes when which each I made a $40 profit, and that was $8,000 profit to like 16 K revenue roughly in that week.

Ling Yah: Hey everyone!

Welcome to episode 77 of the So This Is My Why podcast. I'm your host and producer, Ling Yah and today's guest is Lily Wu.

Lily is currently the startup partner lead for Southeast Asia at Stripe and the co-founder of WOW Pixies. The first DAO to invest in the women-led web three ecosystem. She previously bootstrapped to seven figure businesses and was also the head of programs for new campus. A series A EDU tech startup based in Singapore.

In this episode, we learn about how she started her first business at the age of 16.

Be cause she was really into hip hop and once a pair of Adidas, Jeremy Scott, moonshot shoes, and how she eventually start her second business, because she wanted to do an internship in China, a business that eventually generated over $1 million in yearly revenue. If you're into startups, growth hacking, and of course, NFTs, and DAOs, then this is the episode for you.

So are you ready?

Let's go.

You grew up in the unusually liberal Chinese family. Your parents came from China to Australia to study fine arts. I suppose that kind of culture really seeped into the way they brought you up?

Lily Wu: Yeah. So I guess like my parents were kind of like the black sheep of their family, which is why I grew up in a relatively pretty non Asian I dunno, just like, not that when you think of stereotypical Asian parents where they make you study or like they you know, are very strict or they're very overbearing, like my parents were none of those things.

But I grew up loving Chinese history. I actually did Chinese dance when I was young, like ethnic dance , like Tibetan, Mongolian. So fun fact, I actually grew up super Asian. Even if my parents didn't raise me that way.

Ling Yah: And you later top K pop dance as well., right?

Lily Wu: Oh, yeah. Uh, I was dragged into that by my friend.

My parents met in Australia . My grandparents were all extremely academic and unusually academic for that era as well. Both my grandparents in my dad's side were professors.

One started an aeronautics university with Beijing and the other one started at chemistry division and both were professors at Jing Hua bei da, which are the two top universities, even when my grandma was a woman as well, extremely educated.

So when my dad was like, I'm going to become an artist, they were pretty shocked. I feel like he kind of went through that hurdle for me.

Ling Yah: You said before that your parent's attitude is very much don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness. How did that translate to life?

Lily Wu: Yeah, I guess, I grew up with that kind of mentality. Just watching how my parents act and the stories that they tell me.

When they were younger and they were masters students in Australia, they would go to the world expo and just like do portrait drawings for people. And in a day they would make like a thousand dollars, which is crazy. And then like 1980s, right. That's like a whole person salary in a month.

But they were still very frugal and would still like walk every day instead of taking the bus, let alone like a taxi. They decided to do the same thing when they went to, there was a world expo in Spain.

They couldn't get a license in time to actually have a stall to do people's art.

So they bought a one-way ticket. That was it. $200 with them. And one night was already $100, like with a shitty hostel style, which is crazy expensive, even now is crazy expensive. It was during the world expo. So they were like, crap we don't make money. Like we just have to go home.

So they went into the world expo, bought an attendee ticket and then just like sat down, pulled out all their art stuff and then just started drawing portraits. And afterwards, a group of policemen that had come. And one of them was like telling them, Hey, you're going to be here tomorrow.

And my dad was like, no, no, no, no, no, we're not going to be here tomorrow. And then he's like, oh, I was going to bring my girlfriend. He's like, oh, yay, yay, yay we'll be here.

After like that whole expo, like couple of months, they went around Europe, went back, bought a car, put a down payment on a house. So that's how much cash they had made during that time. So I was like, wow, you know, you got balls to like do that. I guess that's where I came from.

Ling Yah: And were you inspired to follow in their footsteps and do art?

Lily Wu: I guess when I was growing up, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. My other half-brother, he is also a designer. And since my parents are in the art space, I grew up obviously drawing.

And so I thought maybe I'll become a designer. Maybe I'll do animation. I love Hayao Mizaki, like spirited away. Like I had all the, videos and watched his movie so many times. So I thought maybe I'll do animation in Japan or something.

Ling Yah: And when you 16, that was a pretty momentous year because your parents went back to China and only left you a hundred dollars.

Lily Wu: Yeah. That was just after the financial crisis. My parents owned a gallery at The Rocks. Obviously that is heavily reliant on tourists.

And so if no tourists are coming and they're paying expensive rent for prime location in a extremely tourist area, they have to shut that down. There was no money coming in.

At the time they left me a hundred dollars, I think they didn't want to give a huge amount of money to a kid.

And then I just like recklessly spend it. I think they assumed that I would just ask them for more once I ran out, but I honestly felt really bad. Also very non-Asian thing is my parents have always been very transparent with me on their money problems, ever since I was nine or 10.

They treat me like an adult. I'm responsible for the amounts that they give me. So I was always extremely frugal with even the pocket money that they gave me. So when they gave me a hundred dollars, I was like, okay, that's it for three months.

And I think my parents were just like so busy at the time. I mean, I'm not that young when I'm 16, you know. They just were like, you can take care of yourself. So I try to use that $100 as frugally as possible, maybe lasts like a week and a half.

And then I started using my red pocket money and I was like, you know what, I'll just look for a job. It's not a big deal. People after 13 and a half years old start working at McDonald's and KFC and fast food.

I can do that. Just go work after school. So I started applying for all these jobs. And for some reason I just couldn't get a single one.

It's not even a fancy job or anything. Everyone would get accepted except me.

Ling Yah: Yeah, but that was a good thing for you.

because

Lily Wu: Yeah, that was great. Well thank God because otherwise, if I had gotten that job, probably entrepreneurship wouldn't exist.

I think that you're much more creative when you have facing some sort of blocker. You walk around it or you go a different direction. I was like super obsessed at the time that I was really into hip hop.

My friends got me into it and I really wanted these Adidas Jeremy Scott wing shoes. They cost $300 in Australia, kind of like the Yeezys of the day and all the high school students were super into it.

Australia wasn't that much hit by the financial crisis. It was just one quarter of recession. So our currency was doing quite well in comparison to everything else especially to the U S dollar.

I used to do ballet and I met this girl a year or two before and her parents had owned an Adidas outlet in the U S. And I was asking her, Hey, for these type of shoes, especially the out of season, how much can you sell it to me for?

And she was like, oh, these shoes they're out of season, so these are $50 and I was like, whoa, from 300? That's crazy. When you convert it into Australian dollars, it was like 40 something dollars.

Because Australia is middle of nowhere, shipping is also going to be $40. And I was like, wow. Shipping itself is the price of the shoes. But she was like, if you can get a bulk purchase of 20, then we can do a flat fee.

And I was like, great. I'm going to ask all my friends if they want to bulk buy it with me. And So I told my friends, Hey, these are $40. Do you want to get it with me? And if we can get 20 people, like we can basically have like shipping for free.

When you're 16, you don't really understand the concept of shopping online or like, you don't really understand the concept of a wholesale and also currency exchange and out of season and, you know, Australia is always a season behind. All of those different factors that were just like, what, how can they be such a big price difference?

Like if you go to an outlet now you'll see Calvin Klein costs $60 for a pair of underwear in Australia, and you will see them in the U S four pack of three for like 12.

Ling Yah: Then you should definitely go to the States to purchase.

Lily Wu: Oh yeah. I was like, wow, we live in an expensive country. Jeez. I was like, wow, that's really interesting. Like the only problem that my friends have is that it's too cheap. So I went to another group of friends.

These are all dudes from private schools. And I was like, Hey, you know, I have these shoes for $80. Do you want to get them? My justification was that, oh, well, you know, if I don't get 20, like at least it covers my shipping. And actually one of my friends said to me, you know, I can get an order of 20 for you, but what do I get out of this?

And I thought it was just a really interesting change of mentality because I went to an all girls school and everyone was like, if you charge more than what it costs, you're like taking advantage of your friends.

But these guys came from very privileged families or like parents of business people. so they had that mentality of like, this is a win-win where if I can make money and you can get it for less why not? I thought that was really interesting. Like the difference in mentality that I saw and I was like, okay, I did this.

So I told them I'll charge $80 and if you get an order 20 by the end of next week, then you can charge whatever you want. As long as it's more than 80.

If you want to charge $250, I make $170 per pair of shoes , go ahead. And you should just see like these guys their eyes just like, light up.

My minimum viable product was completely free. Just one Excel sheet, one Word document with the different colors of the shoes and one Facebook page, which as you know, I quote it Crystals to Julie. I don't even know how to say it. I was like, what name should I call this?

And my two best friends at the time were called Crystal, Joy and Lily. So I was like crystal jelly. Okay. Converted into French.

You know, naming things is not a talent of mine.

Ling Yah: It all worked out though. It sounds like it scaled very, very quickly from there. So it sounds like it was word of mouth.

Lily Wu: It's crazy like how people over-complicate how they can make money. But honestly, I was just like trying to do what made sense to me.

So I was like, great. This guy wants to, I can clearly see is incentivized to promote to 20 people. And in order to collect the money first, I said if your friend decides to order, they have to give me a $40 bond. And when the shoes come and they pay the rest, you can give me the remaining 40 when we swap the shoes.

Just in case you order a size 43 silver pair of shoes that I can't sell to anybody else. And also main problem is I don't have the money to pay for upfront anyway. So that's the main problem, but you know, you just got to pitch it the other way. And then I went to nine, other friends, said the same thing, all dudes from private schools. Guess that was my market.

By the end of that week, these 10 people gave me 20 orders each. And so that's 200 pairs of shoes when which each I made a $40 profit, and that was $8,000 profit to like 16 K revenue roughly in that week.

And so what was really interesting was that at least five of the 20 people who had bought the shoes would come back to me and say, Hey, I know my friends sold me these shoes. Can I also sell it to like my friends, because I also want to make money.

So literally was network marketing to the T, except unfortunately I couldn't think of a recurring subscription model or something.

Too bad shoes are just one off. But I think network marketing, it works because people trust people that you know. And if you can create an incentivization model that works in the favor of the people, helping you promote it, then you can actually grow this really fast.

When I look back, the first one is that people keep asking me like, why did you only take $40. You could have easily taken a much bigger cut. I don't have those networks.

So in order to really instead of vice my 10 only contacts, I would rather go broad. It would motivate them much more than if I had taken like a 50, 50 cut or a majority cut, like most people would have done.

And I think that like me having the problem of no money really sought out, like, I need you to pay me that's like showing traction, right? Like you need to pay me in order for me to even order these shoes. Like, I'm not going to do shit if you don't give me that money first.

This is the only model that I knew because I had no money, but it was surprising to me. Like, A lot of people raise a lot of money or use a lot of their savings to build something that they don't know if it's something that people would pay for.

So I feel like I learned this couple of things and like business to me was really powerful. The way that you can impact the people around you, because all of my friends made a lot of money and then were able to like, pay off all their university school fees. or like I bought an investment property when I was 18.

So it was like crazy to me. Like Imagine if I had taken that McDonald's job.

Ling Yah: from there you made 8,000 the first week and you finished it having made half a million. So even though it was just $40.

Lily Wu: It used to, well, it's not.

It's like what volume can do, right. And also the power of network. The people around you to do that network for you.

I see a lot of similarities now with NFTs as well to make that kind of impact through the power of people spreading rather than a lot of money or advertising dollars to reach eyeballs. What's better than like a raving fan.

Ling Yah: Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans, you just need us or even a hundred.

Lily Wu: Exactly. .

Ling Yah: So why do you go from shoes to accounting? What happened?

Lily Wu: I dunno what was going through my head. So at that point I was 18 bought a property, pay my tax. Basically had a lot of things illiquid. Basically felt like I never made this money. I never went nuts.

. The other thing was that being with my non-Asian parents they had always told me when you're 18, you've got to pay for everything yourself.

Like you got to out, you got to pay for school fees, you pay for everything, your mobile, healthcare, literally anything that is related to you.

Like They've been telling me this since I was 12. They unfortunately told my brother when he was 18. My brother was like, what? What do you mean you're not gonna pay for my school fees?

So he um, really hated my parents for a while until he became independent. You know, He's grateful now.

Lucky for me they were like, okay, we need to do something different with that next kid. And instead of being like, we're going to still continue supporting our next kid. They're like, we need to start telling her when she's 12. So she's mentally prepared that when she's 18, she has to move out.

And so that has always been in the back of my mind. What am I going to do during university once I move out? And because I bought my property in Melbourne and not in Sydney and I had gotten into USW, I still needed her friends somewhere.

During that time I was just looking at, okay, you know what? I'm interested in business now, what can help me enhance my knowledge around business? Cause I had just started this thing and I wasn't that interested in shoes. I didn't really want to continue after high school. I honestly just wanted that one pair.

There was this girl who came to our school, who worked at KPMG, who went through a cadetship program. Basically it was a four year contract where they would pay for your school fees, your books, everything, they would give you a salary. You work for them full time.

The first year part-time, the next year full-time, part-time on a rotating basis. And when you graduate, you become a senior accountant. I wasn't interested in accounting before, but I thought, oh, wow Like, you get to work for a fancy looking company in the city and in a big building.

And I get to wear like office clothes and feel like an adult. When you're 18, you want to feel these things. And also that means I can move out. It solves all my problems and I get to kind of have a step ahead.

When I go to university, I can already have some work experience and then figure out what the hell I want to do. My plan was going to get my CPA. I have no idea what I'm thinking. I want to get my CPA. Then maybe I start another business because now I fully understand everything business-y. Looking back, I honestly had no idea what I was applying for.

Literally there'll be like, why do you want to join an enterprise advisory? I'll be like, oh, it sounds like I'll be consulting people. what I ended up doing is actually a ton of tax returns and financial statements. Nothing to do with advisory .

And it was really funny because the company that I joined was BDO. And At the time I had applied for PKF. So I went into the interview though, like, why do you wanna join this firm? And I was like, I really want to join PKF because XYZ. And they're like, you know, we got bought by BDO today. I was like, I want to join BDO, ABC. I got the job anyway.

It was just, um, really funny knowing that they had bought out PKS, which actually ended up getting bought out by Grant Thorntons, there's this whole, line of being bought out. they will also go through a lot of culture change as well. And so I joined this period and I think I just got like a huge shock of what the working world was like, and honestly I hated every part of it. I think it suits some people, but something that I hate is being micromanaged.

The quintessential nine to five, meaning if I was 9:01am to my desk, my senior would tell me, you need to be here by 8:59am so you can log in to start at nine. So I just was never going to thrive.

Not only that, but the nature of the work itself is extremely repetitive. So I absolutely hated it.

I don't know how I lost a year, but I lost a year and then quit right before the summer break my parents were back in China again. I don't know why I do this to myself, but I always say, Oh my gosh, my parents are going to kill me if they find out that I'm going to quit this thing.

My parents have never cared. I don't know why. Like, I think that they will care that I quit this thing. I did the same thing when I was younger, where people would invite me to a house party and I know there's going to be alcohol and, or that's going to be drugs.

And I would automatically be like, no, my parents would not let me. And then I'll ask my parents. They would just be like, yeah, why not? Go.

So naturally I was like, my parents are gonna to kill me if they know that I quit. I need to figure out what I'm going to do before they come back.

Julia Gilead our prime minister had just launched this white paper that was like Australia in the Asian century. I'll find myself an internship in China because I'm chinese right. Makes sense.

So I applied for ICIC, which if you don't know what it is like a global nonprofit organization that has chapters in basically most universities around the world. It's been around for like a hundred years and they do two kind of branches.

One is like internships and one is volunteering around the world. You know, It's a huge organization. A lot of students go through it. I was like, yeah, I'll just apply for this So I went to the interview and I was like, you have placements in China, right. They're like, yeah, we do.

But do you want to teach English in Hungary? And I was like, no.

Two weeks later I got an email that was like, you have been rejected from this process. And I was like, how the hell do you get rejected from a nonprofit organization? And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna go find my own internship then.

And then I thought for a bit, and I was like, I don't really want to find my own internship. I don't want to actually go by myself. So I ask all of my friends, Hey, do you want to come to China with me?

I'll organize all your internships for you. Chinese language, learning cultural activities, just pay me $2,000.

Like 20 of my friends said yes. But I was like, crap. Now that they all said, yes, how am I going to find these internships? Someone's studying like aeronautics engineering, civil engineering, all these random engineering things that I have literally never heard of. And there's a law degree person.

I was like, what city do I even start with? It's not like my parents have any connections. Just getting one internship for one person in one industry already me like countless numbers of connections to reach out to before you even get that one. So imagine doing that for 20 people.

I was like, what the hell did I do to myself? Why do I do this? So I always go back to this question. I like, how can you get the most amount of impact with the lowest amount of effort?

What's publicly available is university emails and universities hold the relationships, all the companies in one city. So if I can reach out to the right person in a university, they can help me look for internships because they already have the relationships.

So I looked for a specific person. And this is the Dean of international education. I know that their KPI is to get more international students. Great. I'm an international student. They want me, I need them. Win-win. Scraped like 400 different emails of Dean of international education or whatever, similar title.

Ling Yah: You wrote to 400 universities?

Lily Wu: Yeah. I mean, it was just copy paste . And I say, Hey, we are 20 Australian students. We absolutely love your university. We would love to visit for the holidays. And here's all that profile. Can we pay you a lump sum? I just gave him the whole $2,000.

Can we pay you a lump sum and you organise this for us, including accommodation and language, learning at your university, some cultural tours and an internship, that's all I ask.

Most people didn't reply me except maybe like four people. Luckily one was interested. It was the Dean of international education for Liaoning University in a city called Shenyang. And at the time I was like, where is this place? And then I Google it. It's like an hour away from North Korea. And I actually went to the border.

I was like, okay, Hey friends, like want to go to Shenyang?

Shenyang is the capital city of Northeast China. It used to be the capital city before Beijing. So it has an Imperial palace. It's a great historical importance, you know? We can go skiing, we can go to Harbin nearby and see the ice lights, and you don't want to go to a first tier city.

You don't want to go to a second tier city because then you can actually practice your Chinese, your shitty Chinese and become fluid in two months. You go to a first tier city, they're just going to speak English to you. You want to become, you know, make your parents proud, become fluent.

A lot of Australia's business is with Chinese clients. And when you apply for jobs, they're going to see like, wow, this person actually knows how to work with Chinese people.

So we're going to put them in front of our clients and that's an advantage when you job hunt. So I pitched it like that. I think my friends just want a good time. They were like yeah, sure. Cool. Let's go.

Ling Yah: So you ended up going then I heard that there was a bit of drama as well, right?

Because the accommodation they gave you wasn't great. And then you have a friend who tried to call the police on you after all that?

Lily Wu: Yeah. I started this thing with this girl. There was a lot of drama because her mom initially promised to organize all of these things and it didn't work out. And so I was like, okay, you can find accommodation for us.

I'm managing all of the students and getting them on board. We would get to the accommodation and it's just rooms. Five people sleeping in a room with beds squished together. We had promised hotels.

This is not a good situation. Especially in the apartment that we stayed at. We had this toilet door and high frame fell off. So we were using like a curtain to cover the toilet door. If someone's like showering, you can just like, see it bright, clear day.

The group was 20 friends, 10 of them came in one month and then the other 10 came in the second month. The day before I arrived to China or the day after I arrived in China, I came earlier, I noticed majority of the money had been funneled out into another bank.

so, I mean, It's something that I don't really like to talk about because she was my friend and I thought I trusted her. I think that that's why I had to be resourceful because, when you're facing this kind of emergency blocker, you need to find all ways to resolve it.

Because when we were switching to hotels and the accommodation I had to pay it all out of pocket.

I paid for everyone's accommodation, all of the activities that we did with the universities and I also refunded a whole bunch of money back to my friends as well. And so it was like a whole year of salary gone. But it was a really great learning lesson as well.

Anyway, long story short, it was like, after I came back to Australia I was like, Hey, what did you do money? Because I basically wrote her this email that was like, Hey,, what did you do with this money?

You have two options. One is to give me all the receipts, we can analyze what you've spent. And then the other thing is put all the money back and we can look at your expenses and reimburse, you get an auditor or something.

Her mom wrote to me and said, Hey, return this $5,000 immediately or I'll take legal action against you. I was like, what? You took that amount of money and you're gonna call legal action and get me for 5,000?

I clearly wrote in this email that I'm only taking this as like a leverage so that you can tell me exactly what spent.

Anyway so The next day a police knocked on our door and I told him what happened. He was like you need to actually like, get a lawyer. It's a civil thing and not really to do with the police. They were just doing it to blackmail. But it just made me really sad.

I didn't even blame my ex friend, but to have like a 50 year old full adult take advantage of someone who's 18 at this point, it was incomprehensible to me. This is such a small amount of money.

We can clearly make this so much bigger, but if you want to take it now, like I just couldn't believe that they wouldn't want to cut it off now. without trying to make it bigger when the return would be so much more. So I was like, okay, I mean, your loss.

Ling Yah: Were you not jaded where you're not thinking, oh, even though you didn't start out intending it to be business. In a way it was. Were you not jaded?

Lily Wu: I wasn't jaded as such. I was just disappointed in this particular person. I actually have a tendency to trust people too much to a fault. The only thing I've done better is that, if I go into business with someone, I make sure that I write a contract.

Ling Yah: How'd you end up starting Austern International then?

Lily Wu: I started Austern International because I was doing this with this friend.

And so she basically thought I can do this by myself. I just needed you to like, bring the students. I don't need you anymore. So she wanted to take the name. I was like, fine. We'll just make something else.

Basically, the timeline of this trip was that halfway through, she went back to Australia and that's when she started telling everybody in the first trip, we're not going to do this anymore with the Lily.

So I was still in Shenyang with the whole group of students as well. And so I just was like, okay, like, why do you want to do this? I'm still in China. You're going around telling everybody, you already don't want to do this anymore.

I went to The Dean and I was like, okay, you know, she said to me, I would love more of your students to come back to China.

What's your business name? On the spot, I just said, Austin. Australia and intern squashed together. Just like how I was like crystal jelly.

So.

Ling Yah: Makes perfect sense as well,

Lily Wu: Austern means oyster in German So the world is your oyster. Like the more oysters that you open, the more opportunities that you take, the more likely you'll be able to find your pro.

Ling Yah: And I mean Austin was international. It was in seven different locations. So you could argue that as well.

Lily Wu: Yeah, exactly. The second program So the one without my friends, I ended up getting 40 students.

How I pitched it was that this was Yaoning University's program. I'm an ambassador to bring more students to China and Liaoning University has the top 10 business school in China. Just try to find every merit that I can get because I knew that if I created my own program and said, I'm running this program, who's going to pay $2,200 to an 18 year old where she's younger than everybody else in this university.

So I have to kind of leverage like what I have at that point in time, what resources I have and pitch it to my advantage.

It was my first time running a program with three of my high school friends. And that program honestly was kind of a disaster because we didn't account for the fact that the internship was so far away.

We had the schedule where it's half day internship, half day Chinese language learning. They have to come back to university to learn the language, do Chinese classes and people who just couldn't come back in time.

It wasn't even like program iteration. It was like daily iteration. We would allocated two hours every night to interview every single student. We do this daily, like three weeks. So we got instant feedback every single day. And we would change the program like every day.

So by the next day, the whole schedule changed and the next day something else changed, you know? So I learned a lot from that process and I also refunded half the people. I just feel like I can't take people's money if it's not a hundred percent really great. The main thing that people are going for is not great. The internships that the university had organized, And it doesn't matter if I organize everything else really awesome. You know, all of these activities that people can do, if the internship is not great. And it frustrated me that I couldn't control that experience because this problem was extrapolated in China where you would go into a room and people would basically like you'd go to like bank of China or something and they would sit you in this room and you would do nothing.

I was like, do you have photocopying you on them?

I was like, oh my goodness. I had this one company. Totally random. It was a factory. And he was like factory owner and he was really young though spoke fluent English. The only one that spoke fluent English and he owned a company called Best Composite. And I was like, what? The crap is a best composite.

And he was like composite material doing microfiber stuff where you can build like bumper cars, like 3d print bumper cars, like, airplane stuff. And so you was working with a lot of like the military, but also Ferrari and like all these brands to create different parts.

And he gave these true awesome challenges. Like one was an HR one and one was like build design his holster room for like Ferrari and they could 3d print all this stuff. And everyone was having so much fun by the end, everyone who was working in a bank was like, oh my God, can I switch to this? This that looks so much fun.

And I got my first inkling, like, oh actually, maybe it's not the brand that is important. It's the experience. Right? Because initially my impression was, if you get an internship, it's about the brand. And then once you can get the brand, like you can get a job easy up.

I had to question a lot of assumptions through this process.

And I was like, okay, maybe it's the experience like the, how can I control this experience? And so I saw what he did was like, you know, give them a challenge, right? And then you have this set period of time in order to complete it, and then you have to present it to him. So eventually we changed it. Once I go on my clothes and found a dreamy, we changed it so that it was every single company, so they could do it less work and we could make a more consistent, we will ask them, Hey, give us a challenge that you're facing.

And then we would run a whole week design sprint, where they would go through the whole ideation. They'd go out interview people. We would teach them like how you can easily create a prototype and then test. Sometimes the company gives them some budget to test and then pitch it back to the executives of that company.

Once my co-founder joined in 2016, I was like, first thing, I was like, we're not doing China. Let's get out of here.

So we went to Singapore and Hong Kong first. We worked with carousel in 2016 when they were still at block 71. At the time they wanted to expand overseas and so the challenge for us was come up with a expansion strategy.

The winning team actually got to roll out that solution and was hired by Carousell to expand into Australia.

Ling Yah: Didn't that also happened with Uber as well because they wanted to launch Uber eats?

Lily Wu: Yeah. So that happened with Uber as well, where they wanted to launch Uber eats and the winning team would have launched nationwide.

It was a really great way for people to build a portfolio in a very short period of time and to gain that experience. And then to also feel like, Hey, what kind of environment do I like? Do I like the corporate environment or do I like a startup environment? So we would usually partner with one corporate and then one startup.

That would mean that in the three week period, they have two companies that they have worked for. They can leverage that for the next experience or if they did really well, the company would use this as a hiring process.

Ling Yah: I noticed that you were running this physical boot camps simultaneously in seven different places. Looking back, do you regret expanding so quickly?

Lily Wu: I don't regret expanding, but it was quite stressful because if you can imagine like the demographic of people are like 18 to 21 year olds. I facilitate d so many of these programs and I would select the best of the best people who are on these programs and say, Hey, I can give you this honor of becoming a facilitator, the next program.

We'll pay for you to go to these locations, but we'll also train you to become a leader.

So that was really, really fun creating the whole program for facilitators alumni to increase that leadership skills as well. But overall it was very stressful because you have a bunch of very young adults living together for three weeks and you control like the experience of the program nine to five.

After that they go out, literally I would watch someone jump off a statue drunk and I was like, oh my God, stop.

I was like, surprised no one ever went to hospital. I made everybody sign a death waver before they went overseas. I was just so scared something would happen. No matter what you still feel responsible, even though they're adults. It happened under your watch, right.

So that is the problem with physical bootcamps, but it was also extremely fulfilling. And I think a lot of my really close friends now all came from Austin.

Ling Yah: You grew into a seven figure business. So what was the way in which everyone was getting to know about Austern. How are you growing it essentially?

Lily Wu: We were extremely frugal with marketing. Basically we had no budget for marketing. I didn't want to spend it on things that way I couldn't really like test a return and I didn't know how much money I would have to spend with digital marketing and Facebook ads and stuff like that to properly see a return.

So I did a lot of growth hacks. I started off with sticking stuff in the back of a toilet and having those pull out tags. And I was like, I need to think of a better way to get this to more people instead of going around sticking on the back of the university toilets every single day, cause it gets pulled down, clean up the end of the day.

I realized that my own university had a university email that could join through Facebook that specifically required a university URL, and then it gave you a code in your email in order to enter.

And so you would have these university groups that were private and you needed to be a verified university student in order to enter.

So I went around and asked every single person that I knew who went to a different university who went on exchange and who got a university email. So I was getting emails from every single uni in Australia to the entire U S west coast, literally every UC school and also Canadian schools.

People always thought I was a student there because that's how I could enter the group. And so I would post , Hey, these are in the jobs and internships groups, that's it. And each of those groups had 10,000 people to a couple hundred thousand people.

In the first year I would post every couple of months the next program. And we got like thousands of applications that way. And that's how we got international students to join. A lot of people from the U S and Canada and UK joined.

Because of, that all through like me posting on these groups and a lot of associate, some people would come up to me from USID like all the universities that I did not go to and be like, oh, you're that girl who is from our school, right. You like post on now. I was like, I actually don't go to university. So that was one of those things. And then I started working with different societies

when I'm working with the society, I wanted them to blast to the entire email database about Austern. And a lot of the times I would say, Hey, this is our sponsorship package.

And I was like, I'm not interested in sponsoring or giving you $10,000 to do this. So I set up a Facebook group called 'presidents and executive of Sydney and Melbourne'. And basically I was the director of something in the entrepreneurship society at USW. So my excuse was I'm going to create the space for all the presidents and executives of societies as an exclusive Facebook group, so that we could learn from each other and like introduced to each other.

And like, maybe we can collaborate between the societies and also maybe do some inter city or like into university events, that kind of thing. Right. So I asked all the other presidents to invite other presidents and in total had around like 200 presidents.

Then I went to Sydney startup group and I posted, Hey, I have 200 students. I want to host this event. I have 200 presidents of these societies that can give you access to 200,000 students. And also these 200 presidents cream of the crop of students, right? Because if you are a president, you're probably a really popular and a really good student.

And so, who wants to sponsor space and give a talk. So we ended up getting a space at freelancer like the office, and then we've got some speakers, et cetera. And so in that one go, a company go talk to the students and potentially like have a hiring process for grads.

And for me, I can just meet all of these 200 presidents in one go and use that as a way to showcase, like, I'm the host.

You all know who I am now. So when I go and reach out to you later, I'd be like, Hey, can you email to your entire database? You know, I already know you, we'll do this as a collab kind of thing rather than my 10 K sponsorship package.

And so it really reduced the amount of time because I don't have time to reach out to 200 different people separately. This is like all at once. Thank you very much.

Ling Yah: That's incredible. It sounds like you had an amazing thing going. So why was it that you decided to quit Austern after 4 years?

Lily Wu: Yes, My business partner actually moved to Singapore and joined Carousell and I just felt very stagnant in my own growth. And also I graduated after five years finally. Cause I used to enroll in all four subjects and then unenroll in all 4 by the time it was like that week cause I couldn't make the compulsory attendance.

In this time where there was COVID I probably would have graduated faster since there was remote studying. But because back then you have to have 80% attendance in all your lectures and I'll be in another country. Like there's no way I'm coming. I had to unenroll.

And so I unintentionally took many gap semesters and graduated. Everyone was like, wow, you graduated like finally thought you would never do it. Also when I graduated, I thought like, do I really want to keep doing this for university students? And I just felt like it was like on repetition over and over.

Even though I was making good money, I just felt like I needed to learn from other people as well. I'm too young to like already be staying in the same thing. And doing the same thing over and over again. No.

Ling Yah: So how you you end up finding about New Campus? I mean, the role that you had was head of learning programs. It sounds quite similar as the way you already doing at Austern as well.

Lily Wu: It was a little bit different, but at the time I had met Will and Fay who are the co-founders for what was called QLC. So that was actually even more similar to Austern it was like Austern, but digital.

And so I just thought, you know what, it's great. We talked about acqui-hire kind of thing. Didn't work out. We ended up only selling parts of the IP to other people.

Anyway, we ended up shutting down Austern itself. And then I joined what was called QLC, which stood for quarter-life crisis.

It was a different stage from what Austern was doing. but more for like mid 25 to 30 year old career web people were starting to have a quarter-life crisis. Right. And think maybe I need to switch my career.

What QLC would do was that it would match you up with a startup globally, where you could do a project with that startup and build a portfolio so that you can showcase that and change your career.

We don't have those great too. But they decided to change the business model, the company name, the branding, everything four months when I was in and I was about to go on this massive one year trip where I was going to work remotely because I haven't had so much freedom in a long time.

I was going to work remotely, learn four languages in that one year. And I had been very upfront about that. Korean, Japanese, French. Spanish. I don't know if you know, but I had watched this Ted talk a long time ago. I was obsessed with this Ted talk by Scott Young and his friend where they had basically spent one year abroad, not speaking any English to each other and see if they could become fluent in four languages.

I think they did Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Korean. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I need to do this. And so this was my chance to do this. So work for a startup remotely, but then also just travel and learn languages. So 2019, I was about to go to Korea, my boss calls me.

Do you want to move to Singapore because we're going to re launch this entire business from scratch called new campus. And I was like, I'm just about to go to Korea. So I was thinking like, do I either quit? He was like, you can come just six months. You'll be the Singapore country manager, help us operationalize, roll this out.

And then you can go be a country launcher in another country. So you can learn your language then. Right. I was like, fine. I'll come for six months. But first I'm going to do one month in Korea because I booked everything already. So I'm just going to go and I'll come the next month. So that's what I did.

I went to Korea study at SMU and then lived by myself in Korea for a month, had so much fun. And then I came to Singapore.

They put me in a hostel, right? So The first day I was at this hostel.

I met my boyfriend. So really serendipitous because if I had quit, like I would never would have met him.

And if I had gone the month, when I was supposed to, I also would've missed him altogether. So that was a good thing. Came to Singapore and met my boyfriend. And he used to work in the States. He got burnt out after working in Silicon valley for seven years. And so he was on a travel sabbatical.

And then when I talked to him, he was like, I'm going to do six months Asia, three months, Europe, three months, south America. And I was like, you gotta be kidding me.

Why you copying me?

We kept talking.

We started dating. Whilst I was in Singapore for six months helped start the new campus brand. I was doing a lot more like BD, branding, PR and operation. I mean, it's a startup with like five people, so you kind of do everything. And then when I had told my boss, Hey, I'm actually thinking about traveling again after the six months, that's when I transitioned into a programming role.

So actually someone else was doing programming before, but that girl had quit. So now they were like, we don't have instructors for next week. So I have to go and create all of the instructors. Then slowly I went into learning design.

This was definitely like different to Austern in that this was more like designing like a learning pathway from individual contributors to first-time managers. It's very different topics.

I was getting really into this idea around interdisciplinary learning. I was really fascinated of this idea around how can you take mental models and frameworks from one discipline and apply it to a completely different area whilst talking about this learning pathway of becoming a manager.

So you have like these pillars of like communication and relationship building and whatnot. I would invite instructors who are say, designers. Designers are really good at asking great questions. They're really good at questioning assumptions. They're very good at finding out what the problem is.

And so why don't we learn from these people who do this as a job who learn all of these frameworks and apply it to like how you can question your own assumptions when you're managing people And product managers are great at prioritization and decision-making, so we can also apply these mental models on how you can present.

So that's kind of like what I was doing in Campus.

Ling Yah: So you ended up going on this trip and you were in south America as well. And so how do you end up landing your role at Stripe?

Lily Wu: So I was in Europe and south America for eight months, came back to Singapore and I was still working for new campus for a whole year during lockdown.

During that time I was also like, kind of looking what else there is. And, helped with new campus. They raised series a and so Ashley initially had gotten a job at Apple and the role of Apple was a head of programs role, where it was teaching people how to be more creative.

And it was a mix of my creative background and mixing it with education and very much related to this interdisciplinary kind of factor of applying a lot of different things. And making people think in a more creative way using Apple products.

Anyway, the job didn't work out because my visa couldn't get approved and because during the time it was at the height of lockdown and the government is very strict about visas.

Naturally they want to give specific roles to local citizens, which is fair, but I waited for three months for it to get rejected. So I was like, is this going to happen or not? I then became four months, like fun employed. And during that time I was just exploring art.

I was doing a lot of commissions. I was trying to do an experiential dining kind of thing with like projection mapping and stuff. And then I was also trying to publish a coloring book. I was honestly just really bored and tying to look for another job so I could stay in Singapore.

I was really close to giving up and maybe I was like, oh, I'll just start my own thing again. But I have no idea what to start.

I was really fortunate that one of my mentors in Australia who works for a VC actually introduced me to this role. And I was like, wow, this is a perfect role. I don't think I've ever come across a role in a big company that fit me so perfectly.

Cause I had a lot of issues with finding jobs just because when it becomes a lot bigger, it becomes so much more specialized. And I was like, what skill do I specialize in? It felt like I was cutting a part of myself and only applying that very small section of me. So this was finally a role where it was like a blank slate.

It basically only had one person in this team for APAC so they're growing the team and I would be working for startups like my specialty. And I wouldn't have to like, kind of take a step back in order to fit myself in a little box, but I could actually leverage all the strengths and experiences that I have to it's like full advantage and meets all of my values.

So I feel super fortunate that I found this role. Super lucky.

Ling Yah: And I want us to shift our conversation because one of the things that you did last year was to launch WOWPixies NFT. And that's really, really huge. I think a lot of people, even though we've heard about it a lot in the media, most people still don't know what NFT is.

So how would you define NFT?.

Lily Wu: Yeah. I actually launched WOWPixies this year, not last year, but I got into NFTs last year, mostly because I was never a super interested in the crypto space until I saw NFTs. And I was like, well, pretty pictures. I think it was just something that I could really relate to.

And I think it is kind of confusing for people to see, like, why is this picture of a monkey worth a million dollars? Like how does this make any sense? And I think you need to understand fundamentally what it could be and what this technology is first.

I think very simply, right, it's just a token on a blockchain, which is a unique one. So it differentiates from everything else it's different from every other token.

The way I see is kind of like, when a business wants to create a web page, a web page itself is just a tool it's like empty.

You can design it however you want, and it will be whatever you want it to be. And I think that this is kind of very similar. It's just kind of like a webpage, but with ownership attached to it. And so I think fundamentally what NFTs represent is something that is a change in a business model.

Because the fact that when you create a series of NFTs, it requires a smart contract, now you can track the NFT as it goes from person to person. And so with the use of a smart contract, you can allocate in advance how much money you can get when it gets transferred to the next person, to the next person.

And a proportion of that royalty will go back to you. So this is a huge business potential for a lot of people, because if you imagine brands even like, let's say like a luxury brand, like OMS, which hates the secondary market, because basically they have cultivated this cult, right?

You can't even go into a store and buy a book and you need to be on a waiting list, then you need to buy a bunch of all this other stuff before you even get remotely considered to buy what you want. And maybe you don't even get what you want, but you buy anyway because that's all you can get.

Like they have created such a smart model. The issue is at the moment they sell it, that's it. You can't track where this bag goes. But now with an NFT, you can see exactly how something gets transferred. To this person, to this person, to this person.

So if you can imagine if Hermes launched an NFT as a token of authentication alongside a physical bag, maybe it has like something in it, the token in it where you can scan it and you can showcase that this is the real bag. Now, they have a way of tracking where this bag goes, and also deteriorating the fact that it's forged, right?

You can easily forward a piece of paper to say that it's real. People do that so well with like Chanel bags and stuff like that should know authenticate card. And unless you take it into a physical store and like analyze, you probably can't even tell the difference.

So this is a way where not only do they potentially can solve that problem, but also they can capture hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue that they could not capture before.

Because every time if I, in my smart contract say 80% or 90% of this sale to you initially goes to me, right? That's normal, 10% maybe goes to supplies.

But in the smart contract, every time this person sells it to another person, I take 10% of this transaction because you need to transfer the NFT to them in order for you to prove that it's real.

So every single transaction you take 10%, you can get a hundred billion dollars just from that, that you could not realize before. And this applies to a lot of different things. And it's kind of just started off with the art scene because, you know, my parents are artists.

I never thought it was a viable option. I always thought he was, poor starving artists. So this is a way where you can quickly fundraise, crowdsource through a vision through your art and people can rally around and build a community around it, and you can have control over that narrative, like why would that not be an appealing thing?

And especially it became viral through memes and things like that that have a social standing or status. That's only the starting point. But really NFTs can be anything that requires a unique token. So I think there's so much potential from supply chain to identity and stuff like that.

Ling Yah: So we have established what NFT is, but WOW Pixies is actually a Venture DAO, so what's a Dao?

Lily Wu: A Dao is a decentralized autonomous organization. How I kind of see it is that a traditional organization is centralized where everybody at the top makes that decision for everybody.

Like you have businesses that make decisions on what your product is going to be, where this decision is going to go. You have the CEO, COO whatever. They make a majority of the large decisions. Everyone else is a consumer. I think the concept of a Dao is that you are giving away your power to everybody.

So it becomes like a decentralized a way of making decisions as an organization. Kind of like a co-op and I think this is the first one that invests into women projects as a way to use NFTs to fundraise the amount of money so that a DAO could then make decisions on which projects to invest.

And so it's one of the first few that have done that because traditionally Daos are Daos NFTs are NFTs where Daos would issue like coin tokens. And so in this way, an NFT is a token, so we issue that. But then you're purchasing to get this token first which means that we get that initial capital to actually crowdsource it.

I don't need to issue it for free and then try to have the supply and demand kind of thing going.

Ling Yah: It sounds like a decentralized VC essentially.

Lily Wu: Yeah. Kind of like a decentralized VC, but there's also issues with calling it a VC because anyone can purchase into it and it's not kind of like vetted syndicate.

It can easily become a security because you cannot promise. Like say if I sell something from our vault, like we can not promise everybody gets a portion of income. So we have to think more creatively on how we can reward our holders in various different ways.

Ling Yah: You say it's the first Dao invest just in women led projects. What was the reason behind that?

Lily Wu: Yeah. I think it comes from when I was first buying in the NFT space. My friend, Wayne, told me you should buy as Cool Cat. And I was like, what is this cat but I'll buy one full 1.5 Eth. And I actually had at the time made a LinkedIn post, went like, I just bought this Cool Cat for 1.5 and I took it down cause I was like, actually, that's kind of stupid.

People are gonna think I'm dumb for buying this thing for $4,000. But I made my boyfriend buy it and I made like three, four friends buy it. Thank God it went well. it did well. though, Went up to like 10, 11 Eth. My second one was Robotos and my third one was World of Woman. Lucky for me, those three things also all worked out.

And my friend at the time, I said, oh, I saw this thing called World of Women like, should I get it cause she's like very experienced in this space. And she came from a DeFi space and she was like, I don't recommend you getting that because I legitimately don't think it's going to do well.

And I was like, why don't you think it's going to do well? And she said, well, because 90% of the space are men and they're going to want to buy things that they relate to. I was like, hmmm,, that's fair, but I'm going to buy three. So I dunno, I really like it. I'm just going to buy it. It was quite cheap at the time.

So I didn't really care that if it wasn't going to do well, it's not going to do well. But the next day actually went up to two Eth or 2.5 Eth.

And I actually accidentally sold both of them because I had listed it at two and 2.5 and I thought it would take me like two years to sell. Because I was like, oh, I just bought a 0.4, you know? And then the next day I wake up and it's sold and I was like, what the hell happened?

And I want to buy another one, but I think like Gary Vee and like Logan Paul at the time, and like bought a whole bunch the next day, like after I had bought it and I was like, wow, this space is nuts. But then I was like, wow. You know, with my new found purchase, you know, I just sold my first thing. I was like right in the rabbit hole.

And then I heard about boss beauties and I thought at the time there's no way that this project can not do well. Because if you look at boss beauty's launch, before they even launched, the founder, Lisa, has a business called my social canvas and had been running it for 10 years.

So I was like, wow, she's been doing this for 10 years. Like she's going to stick around. They had already promised six of the boss beauties was going to be hung on the New York stock exchange art hall before they even mint it. I think no other project has ever had such an impressive achievement before even mint.

I was like, wow, with this level of execution, the fact that they can get it in the art hall before it even starts. That means she's so connected and she's like really good at execution. And I was like, there's no way that this won't do well. And this is when I went nuts and I made like 30 people buy it, including our head of sales at Stripe.

Ling Yah: re really good at convincing people to join your vision.

Lily Wu: And then he was like, oh, well, I'll call my wife. And then I would just post it on instagram. so that was a lot of people's first purchase. But for the longest time, I would say like three or four months, the price of boss beauties, didn't go anywhere and I'll just hold it, like, do not sell it.

It's fine. Like I had so much conviction in . And, recently in January, suddenly it just spiked. And now boss beauty is now at two or three Eth. So now people are like, okay, fine. I was like good thing you didn't sell.

I realized what the power I had was in the VC space. With my day job as a stock, currently, I work with VCs every single day. You see firsthand how little money goes into women's hands? The statistic is like really absymal, which is only 2.3% of women are funded in VC.

That's not even close to parity, it's a long way. And then if you're talking about women of color, that's even more depressing. But actually when you do invest in women, they generate a hundred percent more return and that's like a BCG research now.

You know, it's a smart thing to invest in women. And I truly believe that, especially in the NFT space where the money is not gatekeeper by VC, by a certain demographic, I have the power to invest in what I believe in what I value. And I want to put more money in women's hands. Then why don't I purchase more things that are led by women?

Like why would I buy this random monkey toad or whatever it is? Sure maybe they might be a good purchase, but if I can't even bring myself to do that to make money just because I'm like, you're just making these dumb people richer. I refuse to do that when they're way more hardworking people in the space who would upbuilding longevity who will need this money.

I had a lot of conviction in a lot of women led projects. I was like, why aren't more people paying attention. Me and my co-founders, and they're both men, by the way, once native American, but he's like very into diversity.

One's another, another dude, but they were both mentors of World of Women. And they were like, I don't understand why people aren't taking World of women seriously. It is like the historical women project. And also they're innovating at a completely different level. Now they have all these sandbox partnerships. Twenty-five million dollars sandbox already invested in a lot of women and the price went down.

I'm just like WTF, you know? but it's just so undervalued even now at six Eth. Crazy low price compared to whatever ADE that Bored Apes Yacht Club is. The space is so male dominated.

As it becomes more mainstream though, you have Reese Witherspoon, you have all these women celebrities who are promoting NFTs and as more women come into the space and get educated, then they're gonna want to find things that they can relate to as well.

That's when we're going to see a mass adoption of women projects, and you're going to see these prices go nuts.

That's why we started WOWPixies.

It's more to amplify and invest in putting more money into women's hands and having a way for when people do onboard into this space, having a way to get a variety of exposure to all of the women led projects and making an informed decision later on if they want to actually invest in it themselves.

Ling Yah: So how does it actually work? I mean, you're a holder.

How do you decide on what to invest in and what not to invest in?

Lily Wu: How it works is that when you buy a pixie, what it does is it's kind of like a governance token. It gives you a voting right. On Discord, we have a proposal channel where everybody can put their proposals in we have kind of a research form and a research done on each of the projects that people propose.

And then we have a curator club, which is a pixie with a rainbow purple hair. That is a specific only 10 Pixies out of the entire 5,555 collection. And basically, they help narrow down what everyone has generally nominated. And then finally, with the final proposal, we put up a snapshot, which is a tool that can identify. It connects to your wallet and sees how many pixies you hold in your wallet. And that will determine the number of votes that you get.

It will kind of determine the final direction.

That's the power of decentralization, because even if I wanted A, but the options at ABC and the majority is B, we have to go with B. So I don't hold that power to say, this is the final decision that we make. It's up to everybody.

With the mint money, 80% goes into the Dao wallet. And 75% of the secondary transactions goes into the Dao wallet. The Dao wallet is a multi signatory wallet that is controlled by four to six people.

So aside from the founders, we also did a nomination of community members, and everybody had to vote their top three choices. And those three people became multi signatory signers. And so in order to make any transaction, you need at least four of the six signatures .

So we can't just be like, Hey, we want to make a decision. Let's just take money out. That's not possible unless you have at least one or two more people who agree. It's an extra kind of security and protection for the wallet funds as well.

Ling Yah: I noticed on the open sea, you have around 2000 holders.

So that's quite a lot of voices. Is everyone very active on Discord, actively participating in this? Cause I was also looking at snapshot and you have some which are quite, time-sensitive like selling the Crypto Chicks checks and you really need this to decide very fast. What is the response like?

Lily Wu: if it is like a normal proposal, it'll be 24 hours. So it gives everybody a chance to vote.

If it's an emergency vote It will be a two hour vote and everybody would go nuts in the proposal channel, like to debate which one they should do. And so in regards to the crypto chicks one, actually the consensus, even though in the beginning, everyone was like kind of panicking and saying, we should just sell.

But in the end, actually the consensus was to hold until there was more information. So I thought that was a really great outcome because if it was just me deciding, I'm like, oh my God, panic sell it. But actually everyone had really healthy debate and they were like, we shouldn't panic sell and hold it until the team comes out and says, addresses this issue, then we can decide.

So actually we ended up doing another 24 hour vote on whether or not to actually sell it. I think that's like the power of the Dao as well. It has the ability to like challenge everybody's assumptions on. and then for people to make a more informed decision.

But also we are like learning adjusting, because then it's kind of like what counts as an emergency. What are the criteria? And so these are all the things that you kind of have to work out as you go along.

Ling Yah: I want to talk about the launch as well because it's sold out within five days, right?

And the last 50% actually sold our within two hours. What were you doing prior in order to have such a successful launch?

Lily Wu: To be perfectly honest, we actually did nothing. We actually set up the Twitter account a week before we launched the mint. And we had like 20 followers in which the 20 were our co founders, like friends.

I feel really bad that people also spend like months and months and months up to the launch which is what I actually thought we needed to do. But we were just like, okay, whatever. We didn't have time to delay the launch just because what we wanted to do Dao the first thing we wanted to do was buy the Royalty World of Woman because we thought of this way before when World of Woman was two Eth.

It was two Eth for so long and we were like, okay, this is great time to buy it. And then suddenly you went all the way up to 10 and we'd be like stop increasing in price. I was like, we need to launch it right now otherwise a lot of other people are going to start creating these things before we do.

So we were like, okay, we're just going to launch next week with 20 followers. but You can do a lot in one week. So one week we did like a giveaway, we started the discord, we did like a sneak peek.

On the first day of men, we had maybe had 200 people in discord, which is kind of really small.

But that actually, that's all you need. We have maybe 15 people on our discord live chat as it's launching. We were like talking through our vision but those 15 people have such evangelists. And I think that that's really important at the beginning. Can you just read, need really strong evangelists that really believe in you to help spread it.

And then I post on LinkedIn and I don't know what it was about that LinkedIn post. Cause it was very basic. It was just like, Hey, over the weekend I launched this thing called WOWPixies. Here's the link. Literally that was it!

But it got like a thousand something likes and like 130,000 views. And I got blocked by LinkedIn cause they thought I used a bot.

Yeah. And actually my post got taken down cause they were like, it does not meet professional guidelines. I was like, what about it doesn't meet professional guidelines?

Luckily a lot of people saw it before it got taken down. Actually a lot of people got onboarded and bought wild Pixies through LinkedIn.

And then the next day, something we did unintentionally, in marketing is called a Thunderclap.

And It's where you time everything so that all comes out all at once. And even with the small number of people is, seems like a lot. Typically a mint, they would just do kind of like a rolling mint where it will reveal as you mint. So you would like kind of come up on Twitter like, yeah, it's like rolling.

We only sold up to like maybe a thousand. So we were like, okay, when we hit a thousand, we're going to just all reveal at once. So we held a Twitter space party of like first reveal of up to a thousand. And so on this Twitter space, we were like, okay, it's revealed now. Like everybody click refresh.

And then suddenly everyone posts their WOWPixies on Twitter. So that generated more people buying it until the next reveal. And then we were like, okay, at 2000 and we'll do our next reveal end of 2 days.

Did the Twitter Space, everybody reveal. And then, ah, hi.

And then the third day I wrote out our white paper. Just like smashed it out in two hours.

And I was like, okay, I got to launch this white paper because people kept asking me the same questions anyway. So I was like, I'm going to write it out so I can just link them this way and you can read it. And that helped actually a lot of credibility in around the project, because the expectation is so low that they're like, wow, a white paper..

Yeah. So now every project needs the library.

Ling Yah: Yeah. I was really impressed when

I saw a link to the white paper on your LinkedIn post and I thought, oh, you have one. I click through it and there's like a roadmap 2.0. And I thought she really thought about this.

Lily Wu: Yeah. And then I think when the ball gets rolling, it goes out super fast because in the NFT space you would have someone like buy it and maybe that person is a very prominent person in the space. Maybe you got lucky, you got an influencer and all these bots watch this wallet.

So when they know that this person minted like 10 wild Pixies, he will suddenly alert all these people. Actually that's how my colleagues at Stripe they heard about it is through this bot that followed this particular wallet.

And then when they get loaded, they started buying and then it started trending. So we actually became number one trending on open seat with the most volume. Within that two hours, we got on Twitter. I was like, WOWPixies is number one. I'm Al who's number one.

And so that's how in one hour and a bit when I was having dinner and I was not watching this at all. I look on Instagram cause I was trying to share my Instastory of my food with my friends.

And my friend say, Hey, I was going to meet another one, but it sold out congrats. And I was like, what? It was less than half, like an hour and a half ago. What do you mean? And I had to go an OpenSea and their friends actually took a video of me looking on open OpenSea and all of a sudden it's sold out.

Ling Yah: Now that you sold out what's next?

Lily Wu: So it's been seven weeks since we sold out. 14th of January is when we launched. And we finished room at 1.0 in the first day, three weeks. And then we kind of worked on building web 2.0 during this time. I also immediately look for a lawyer and we have this bad-ass lawyer.

She's this black woman who grew up in the states, but she's actually worked half of her life in Singapore where she was the VP of legal compliance for Marriott international. And then she was also head of data compliance for standard chartered bank. And she was also like a professor in a Chinese university.

She now lives in Dubai. So this really international woman resonates with what we believe in. In diversity and women, and also understands web three and DAOs and NFTs .

So It took me three weeks to find her.

We were kind of on our roadmap 2.0, we were waiting to get her on board and then approved the roadmap. And also she was helping us with a lot of like communication stuff before we launched road map 2.0.

Roadmap 1 w as most around first setting up the Dao, the proposal methods and also, you know, voting and buying up all these projects first and also finding different ways of liquidity.

So when we first bought the water of women royalty, wow. Which is just 19 World of Women that have a specific trait, a coin necklace, coin earrings, and they take, 2% of royalty transactions and split across 19 holders every month. So we bought it for 135 and the first month we already got January payment, 23 Eth.

Ling Yah: That's amazing.

Lily Wu: It kind of pays itself off in six months and we still have 12 months of royalties. Plus we can still resell this World of women, as it increases in price. So it was a no brainer for us also because it meant that we can tie our success to World of Women and not just our own secondary royalties, because we didn't know like how well it was going to do, but at least we would still get consistent liquidity cashflow.

Even if we didn't do that well, at least where a woman is going to still do well. So at least we have some more money every single month to go and buy up more women projects. So we bought like 10 worth of women. We bought 15 Eth of Curious Addys, which is an education NFT, like amazing founders like Boss Beauties, women rise.

Or basically like a lot of the blue chip ones. And then that was kind of the road map 1.0. Roadmap 2.0 was really around first of all, how do we engage more of the community? well, I realized that everyone is so talented and today we had a Forbes article released of WOWPixies. The marketing director of decentral land posted about it.

It was only then that I realized that she's been with our pixie since the beginning as well. We just have like, totally crazy, like our multi signatory wallet Sinai. She became the crew founder of group hug, which has accelerators just running with Randy's Zuckerberg now. Now that we're a part of it, Deb she was on multisig wallet signup. She just started in web three as well.

So there's a lot of brain power. We have a crazy number of lawyers, maybe they were all attracted to the fact that we hired one. So now they're like, oh my gosh, I'm a lawyer too.

Let's talk about legal compliance and web three. and I just want to get more people involved in decision making. And also when you get people involved, they become more invested in the success of this project. And so you want more people involved. It's kind of like the shoe thing, right?

Like you want to give them more so that they are incentivized to really contribute more and also like showcase their skills. A lot of people were saying, I want to transition full-time into web three. Like, I had a career 20 years in marketing, like how do I apply these things into web three and find a new career path?

Those are the two areas for contributing to the Dao. We've built out seven workstations. We have Dao governance. We have research around the proposals, like a due diligence group. We have legal think tank of all the lawyers who meet up once a week now to talk about all of these people.

This is a great way for me to see like, what are we missing then going to my lawyer and be like, we need to like fix all of these things. We have you know, like marketing and growth community, dev and tech. And so what we've done is that we've opened up nominations for leads of these groups, and you have all these amazing people who've come up to become lead two or three people to come leads.

And then once we selected that we can create these working groups where people can contribute. We ought to also want ways to be able to funnel some of the money that we get back into people who contribute to the Dao.

And that way it doesn't become a security because these are people who are working for it rather than just as a royalty.

The second aspect.

So in that case, for this one I'll talk about like how we're going to use DeFi options and also maybe proposal to fund the contributors. But also we're using this tool called proved where you can meet your contribution on the blockchain. So this is a way for people to actually showcase, Hey, I've worked for this project.

Like I was the communications lead for wild Pixies. We build our brand and get associated with all those brands, they're going to be like, oh, Lily has verified with this minted NFT that this person contributed as a marketing lead for WOWPixies.

That acts as almost like a web three resume that you can verify that you've done this work and now you can go and apply some web three jobs and prove that you were part of this. So that's one thing.

The second thing was like, how can we bring more value back to the Dao? And a big issue was how can I fractionalize what's in the DAO and actually have a pot in it?

And at the moment, that's not really possible, no matter whether you're using coin tokens, it doesn't really match with what the items . There's no way to actually fractionalize something without it becoming a security. Even if it wasn't security, you still couldn't really do that.

And so The problem with a lot of Daos is that the floor price has nothing to do with what's in Dao. That's really common. That's why we were also discussing with our lawyer. We didn't want to say anything which would overstep, over promise or even promise anything that was not legal and would come and bite us later.

We came up with a new way which was inspired by Gary V's book games. It's an experiment right now. We're going to see in a few months how it's going to actually work out. So we're going to set up a proposal for this, which we call pixie market.

Looking at the market value of the NFT that we hold in our vault, say like a world of women and pricing it, maybe at a premium of like 30%, for example. So let's say like right now, Pixies 0.15, we say a hundred Pixies. You can swap for World of Woman.

World of Woman worth seven to 10. Pixies worth 15 Eth. It doesn't really make sense to swap at this point in time. But then what if suddenly what a woman went up to 10 to 15, like it did before. Then suddenly everyone would buy up Pixies to hurry up swap with a World of Woman. Or if pixie suddenly decreased in price, it will stop the floor price decreasing because the moment you do that, people are going to mass buy up Pixies. If it becomes like 0.05. They're going to mass buy a hundred Pixies because now the whole thing is only worth five Eth. They're going to easily swap for a 6 Eth, 7 Eth, 8 Eth .

It will always even out to where it doesn't make sense anymore and the swapping would stop. So we only ever allocate like say 10% of the vault until everything is swapped out and whilst that's happening anyway, the royalties that we get we'll go and buy more items in the vault.

So it will keep replenishing as we keep swapping, but it will keep the prices stabilized, at least minimally the value of what is held in the vault.

Ideally as we bring more value in, everyone wants to hold their Pixies and they see a lot of value in the Dao and the supply also decreases from the stock Pixies. It will always remain above what is in the vault as well. So that's kind of a thing that we are experimenting.

I guess The third thing that we're doing in our roadmap is building our Pixies as a brand. Because we're WOW Pixies we're a derivative of World of Woman. So a lot of people don't take that seriously because obviously it's a derivative and which is fine to start with because we were inspired by them to buy up their royalty.

Wow. And we really believe in them, but also we want to build out our brand as well. So we're going to create one of the first Dao created NFT projects by the Dao. So what that means is that we're going to internally host a competition where all of the artists within our Dao can submit their versions of their Pixies.

Then the Dao can vote on which artists we're going to go with. So this is a life-changing opportunity for someone in our community. We pick the artist and then, we work with the artist. But the Dao also will, propose these other traits that we should do here are the, and we can also vote on which traits and which versions and which, whatever.

And It's all voted on as the process happens. So everyone knows, or has a say in the, end result of what this NFT project looks like, which I think is very different to how NFTs are usually created. When it does get launched, then we would launch a 10 K collection.

Maybe we would even have both women and men Pixies, like 5,000 women and 5,000 men Pixies. Every single person who holds a WOW pixie will also get that will be your access to mint, a free pixie world. So we actually incorporated on the pixie wall, PT, LTD, because it's kind of like a play on wild pixie, pixie, well, sounds kind of similar.

So this one will have like wings on it and they earn NFT and that can have its own utility as well. But the wild Pixies will never decrease in value because it's still the only access point into the Dao. That's the only way you can contribute to the Dao and have a voting right is through while Pixies.

Ling Yah: Have you thought in terms of what your metrics of success would be because everything is so new right now.

Lily Wu: Honestly, no. I think for me intuitively though, like what people are saying about WOW Pixies, especially in other discords as well and how people usually like respond to it.

And I think mostly like everything that I've seen. So if honestly everyone has been like really supportive and like I'm surprised with the amount of execution or like how fast it's going.

Generally like that has been my metrics whether or not we're doing well or not is like whether or not other people saying in other discords or like what people are really talking about.

It has been generally like super positive.

Ling Yah: You mentioned briefly HUG by Randy Zuckerberg and Deb Soon. What is that? And how do you get involved in it?

Lily Wu: So HUG is a accelerated program that Randi started and Debs soon they started, basically running this accelerator program for women led projects.

And the first cohort was with four of the biggest projects aside from World of Women, it's Boss Beauties, women rise, women and weapons and Curious Addys.

All extremely great projects all which I have. and I was talking to them since the beginning and they really wanted us to be the first Dao.

They just needed to figure out how they're going to do that and invest in something different. They just announced yesterday that we were going to be part of the cohort two, along with Salad Girls Bar, which I have been following for so long as well and I love like lambic art too.

I think it gives us a lot of credibility and exposure. Also you know, even relationships, externally in the brand space. You know, obviously Randy has a lot of networks and relationships as does Deb, and that can help support us as we also onboard more non-web 3 people into the space and exposure to like conferences or media events to help build out our brand.

I think third thing is that I also want to tap into the other projects that are within group hug, which also established like, getting to talk to Lisa from boss Beauties and all of those other projects and collaborating with them on a much deeper level than you would be able to as any other project in this space.

Ling Yah: Obviously you have invested in a lot of different types of NFTs. You clearly have a very good eye. Do you have some kind of a checklist in terms of what you are looking for when deciding what to buy? What not to ?

Lily Wu: Honestly I kind of look at it kind of like early stage investing. And if you look at early stage investing, they only basically look at the team because fundamentally that's all it is like how well that team is going to execute.

The reason why invest in boss beauties is because of what they stand for. The mission and vision is so clear.

World of Women, you know, first women project they have amazing art, they innovative in this space.

But boss beauties is like women can be anything that they want. And it's very differentiated like career, all the traits are to do with different careers. And she's been doing this for 10 years. Like she obviously knows her mission very well, has already established so many actual brand relationships with Verizon, Target now with Marvel rolling stone Neiman Marcus, literally every day, she's like announcing a new partnership and those brands actually posted up Boss Beauties as well, Bobby just crazy stuff. The fact that it's this cheap, like you should go and buy it. So this cheap right now, it's actually crazy.

And Curious Addys like Mai and Ben, they're engineers, Mai's husband Ben was a Thiel fellow work. We did like, you know, what was part of the fellowship with Vitalik in Ethereum like Dylan Field from Figma. They have a lot of really established relationships and built countless tools as well for the web three space before.

And then they set up a partnership with NAS academy and build out three courses in this few months I built out three courses where NASA daily has posted about Ben like eight times with eight videos about him. And he has 46 million followers.

They are obviously doing really well in terms of going to onboard more people through their courses, like NAS dailies courses, and then funnel them straight into Curious Addys. Like why would I not invest in something like that?

It was like stupid how low their prices right now? Because I'm like, just you wait when a million people go through this course. Like the first step is Curious Addys and it's like 0.2 right now. It's crazy. And then like Metta angels, it's like the founders. Let me actually look at the, company.

Metta angels founder was a YC founder, was g Growing businesses for the last 10 years. And she actually founded this company, which I used to follow during my Austern days, religiously. And I was like, oh my gosh, she's making an NFT project.

And the execution was just flawless. Also quite innovative in like their lending ability for in the smart contract. So now they have built this new mechanism where you can lend your NFT to somebody so that they can get temporary access for something I really wanted. But you have to build in the spot contract to begin with, but I was like, that will change how other people stop building this small contracts as well.

So I have a hundred percent conviction in this team too. So that's kind of like what I look at.

Ling Yah: And how do you find these people? Because they're not at the top of the list on OpenSea, so you have to really dig down.

Lily Wu: It's all on Twitter. I never look at what OpenSea is recommending. I actually never looked at open sea unless it's just to purely search for the, project itself.

But Everything is on Twitter getting a pulse of what people are talking about. I'm seeing what is being recommended by different people and then going to the discord and looking at the communities. It's all Twitter and discord. Like that's the true place.

Ling Yah: Do you have any particular profiles that you would recommend just in terms of people starting their journey in, but they have no idea where to even start into ascend discord?

Lily Wu: I honestly can't recommend it cause I have I'm in a very small niche and there's just so many things with NFTs. Like PTE, play their own games. There's music NFTs, video NFTs, women NFTs. The people that I follow out with like project people, and then I generally look at what people are talking about and I look into those projects and see how I feel about them.

If I look at a project and I, like what it's doing, then I would generally look at who started it, what that profile is. There are a lot of educational courses, like she fi is really good.

We three they're all like women communities that help get you educated in all aspects of webs free, like DFI and NFTs Dows et cetera, let that uh, all aspects rather than just purely NFT. So I would recommend those starting points. And also obviously WOW Pixies.

Ling Yah: And before we wrap up one final question, what is the craziest thing that has happened in your crypto NFT journey?

Lily Wu: One week after I minted, I had a call with Randy Zuckerberg.

I was like, that's crazy. Who knew that it was just one degree connection away ? I think the space is just crazy as well, because you would literally have something, you know, that you bought for $400 now worth 50, $60,000.

And you're like, ah, it seems a bit low, you know? And then you equally have really crazy stuff on a regular basis, like getting hacked. I had my whole wallet drained. I lost maybe like 20 Eth. So that's pretty crazy overnight. You realize how much you should value security because if you get your Facebook hacked, no one cares. You just reset your password. You're not losing much.

But if you get your wallet hacked, you're losing a lot of money. The more sophisticated hackers get, the more important cyber security is. you know, you really have to reeducate yourself on how not to not survive in this new wild west era.

Ling Yah: Well, Lily, I really enjoyed this conversation. do you feel like you found your, why?

Lily Wu: So. like how I think about my, why is, tend to look at my journey as like, first of all, the direction that I'm heading into whether or not they fit my values and if they fit my values, then I will head towards that direction.

for the first time, I've felt a really strong why, in terms of all of the things I am personally super passionate about has come into one thing, because I've always felt like I have to segment parts of myself where I am creative, but, you know, that's just one part of me.

I am a business person, but also when I am a, with other business people, I feel like I'm not as business-y as them. And I still am very creative and more like, out there or I go into tech and I don't feel like I'm fully like a technologist either. you know, and I always felt like you know, I was very passionate about women because I was helping, I was an ambassador for feature females and helping women entrepreneurs.

But that was also kind of like another thing. And so finally this is one thing where I'm combining creativity, community technology, business, and women empowerment all-in-one. And I think that the ability to create impacts for helping others and fulfilling, like what I really like enjoy and really believe in is a strong enough why for me.

Ling Yah: And what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?

Lily Wu: I don't place too much emphasis on a legacy. I think as long as I'm doing something that can potentially impact someone at some level, that's good enough.

Actually I've been working on kind of shrinking that idea of a legacy, that egocentric perspective, because I think that sometimes people think that everything that you need to do has to revolve around you leaving some sort of amazing impact. You have to be kind of like the DaVinci of your time.

I was actually listening to this podcast, which talks about the universe is so big. Human history is probably only like 13 generations old and, you are just like a tiny blip.

You're just this tiny little thing. And I think that's actually quite relieving because you just do you. Whatever you believe is meaningful to you, like that's enough impact.

It doesn't have to be like changing people's . lives. Like Even if you find enjoyment in drawing it's already valuable. So that's kind of what I think.

Ling Yah: And what do you think are the most important qualities of a successful person?

Lily Wu: I would deem success when you really are able to be true to yourself and actually do the things that you really want to do Um, and you feel meaning and fulfillment in the things that you are doing.

Ling Yah: And where can people go to connect with you, find them what you're doing, what WOWPixies is up to?

Lily Wu: You can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. NFT Lily is my handle WOW Pixies. WOWPixies NFT on Twitter.

And you can find me on Instagram as well.

Ling Yah: And that was the end of episode 77.

The show notes and transcript. Can we found thatat www.sothisismywhy.com/77.

If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to send a tweet at, @sothisismywhyp1 to let us know.

And stay tuned for next Sunday, because remember groupHUG, the NFT accelerator that Lily was just talking about?

Well, we will be meeting one of the co-founders to dive even deeper into the world of NFTs, DAOs, community building in the web three world, and so much more from the perspective of an investor. So don't forget to subscribe to this podcast and see you next Sunday.