Episode 70: An Unconventional Career Journey w/Susan Zhang
About Susan Zhang:
Leadership is not just about achieving success but about inspiring and empowering others to do the same. My next guest on The One Percent Project, Susan Zhang, embodies that. An exemplary business executive and visionary entrepreneur, Susan has a remarkable career spanning three continents. With an impressive legacy through her work with Google and ByteDance (TikTok), Amazon, and Canva, she effectively combines technical prowess with commercial acumen. Susan has an exceptional track record and has become a prominent figure in the global business, making her a powerful catalyst for positive change.
Susan's passion for driving China-Australia linkage led her to found her own company, assist UoW's 2015 rebrand in the Chinese market, and become a Technology Evangelist for the Australia China Millennial Project. She is a published author, a dynamic, inspirational speaker, and a valued mentor for young entrepreneurs worldwide.
Join me in this episode of The One Percent Project as I speak to Susan about her unconventional career trajectory, leadership style, her book ‘Life Outside My Comfort Zone: Hup Draak!,’ and her strategies for a successful career.
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Key takeaways:
Being open to opportunities and taking the initiative to explore them can lead to unexpected and fulfilling experiences. It is important to seek opportunities and adapt to new environments proactively.
The willingness to constantly experience new things and take on challenges outside of one's comfort zone while also learning and gaining new skills that can be used to create value in different positions. Additionally, the ability to interact with people and negotiate effectively is important in many roles and can be developed through experience and learning.
The culture of giving at Google inspired by the Burning Man event, where people give without expecting anything in return, has worked very well for the tech giant. It is about generosity and helping others without expecting to receive something in return. This culture of giving has been passed on from the company's founders and has become a part of Google's corporate environment. It promotes employee collaboration, teamwork, and empathy, increasing productivity and positive work culture.
Slowing down and enjoying the moment can be important because life tends to pass by quickly, and if one does not take the time to appreciate the experiences and opportunities that come their way, they might miss out on them.
Three of Susan's most productive tools:
Google Keep used personally with husband to share notes and coordinate calendars and to-do lists.
Monday.com used professionally to manage workflows for things like marketing or CRM, allowing easy collaboration among team members.
Canva used to create templates, such as the Priority Matrix, to help prioritise tasks and delegate responsibilities.
In this conversation, she talks about:
00:00 Intro
1:26 Her journey from China to working for Google, ByteDance, Amazon and Canva by age 30.
4:33 How did she navigate through different roles at different organisations?
7:22 Her book “Life Outside My Comfort Zone: Hup Draak!”.
9:46 Productivity tool.
11:48 Books & Blogs that have influenced.
14:22 Advice to her younger self.
Transcript:
Pritish: Welcome, Susan, to The One Percent Project.
Susan: Thank you. Good to see you.
Pritish: So, life for you started in China, and by the age of thirty, you had been to every continent, including Antarctica, worked for Google, Amazon, and TikTok, been an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, and now at Canva; can you unpack that journey?
Susan: I hope I can unpack in five minutes. For me, the first step was to study in Australia, where I am now. At that time, it was not really by choice. My university at that time in China, in Henan Province, had this educational program with the University of Wollongong. For UoW, which is really strong in engineering and computer science, I came here to study software engineering. That's how I started. And after I started, I really liked the climate here. I wanted to keep learning English and see if I can be independent. It's like my parents were flying the kite and one day, I take the scissors and say, hi, let me see if I can fly, have a free soul, and have this spirit. So that's how I started an internship in Australia as a software engineer for around three years in a local company. And during that time, I also helped them set up the first office in ?, which was very interesting, and it showed me the other side of the things I could do outside coding. So basically, I can also interact with people rather than just talking to the code behind the screen. And from there, I went to Google. I met the recruiter at a dinner called Geek Ghosts Dinner in Sydney. So, I socialised with a whole bunch of girls. They worked in different tech companies in Australia, and I was really intrigued by their experience, and the recruiter said, do you want to try and interview with Google? I saw that if I just applied by myself, I probably would never have had a chance. But then I thought, then let me try the interview. So, I went through all that, and that started my tech journey, I think, more properly in the past decade. Four years in Google, two years in Sydney, and two years in London, and then after that, I quit the comfortable bubble to ByteDance before everyone knew about it. And I went back to Beijing and China with TikTok and helped them with global public policy. And after that, I did my MBA at London Business School, Columbia University, and Hong Kong University together for two years. That's half of the time offline before Covid and half of the time online, unfortunately. But that was really fun, and that’s how we know each other. Then with the whole loop, I returned to Australia and joined Amazon to help them build an international presence, to bring international sellers on amazon.com.eu, so that you can have Korean beauty products like facial masks and Japanese drinks and a whole bunch of things into the Australian market. After that, I went to Canva, which is where I am at the moment, an online design platform to empower everyone to be a future designer or current designer where you don't need to worry about the complexity of the tools, where you can focus on your ultimate goal to create your business proposal, your logo, and the purpose of your business or NGO or education, things like that.
Pritish: Let's talk about different career moves. You were a Technical Creative Specialist at Google, Partnerships and Public Policies at TikTok, Country Development at Amazon, and Product Localization at Canva. These are diverse roles. So, what is the common thread among them?
Susan: Yeah, great question. I think I stand for constantly experiencing new things and taking a leap into new challenges outside of my comfort zone. I think that's probably one of the common things through all the different roles. Obviously, I studied computer science, C+, and Python, but I definitely did not know how to handle businesses or negotiate with difficult sales partners. No. I think I learned hard lessons while working, but I am curious to learn how to interact with people. We are living in a human society. Everything is negotiating. You are negotiating everything with everyone, right? Negotiating with your parents, negotiating with your kids to have the last bottle or go to sleep right now. You are negotiating with your boss for salary or with anyone or someone in front of you, in life. So, I found that quite interesting. So, I feel like my career trajectory isn't linear for a reason. I enjoy learning at different roles and then being able to use that to create value for different roles. So, when I was a creative specialist for Google, I helped the top company, for example, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Barbery in the UK or Booking.com in Amsterdam to help them to have this global campaign for Super Bowl, for some of the most, for the September fashion shows, that sort of thing. I feel I was able to help them to identify the hoardings and send the message out in six-second ads, not to annoy people, but to make people feel loved, feel special, and pass on that message super clearly in six seconds. That's magic. I want to be able to create that magic. I want people to appreciate advertising and see things through different lenses. So, I certainly enjoyed it. I wanted to put a fresh perspective on what I want to do so that I don't feel like working just for the money, but I feel like I'm trying something new. I'm trying to advance it and make it better for someone else. So yeah, I guess that's a backbone of how I hopped on to different roles and experienced and learned simultaneously.
Pritish: I think that has been a fascinating career journey across continents, across cultures, across people, and across teams. And I think what you probably bring to the table is Encyclopaedia, from technology to end consumer sales, negotiation, marketing, and even operations. You have even authored a book, ‘The Life Outside My Comfort Zone.’ So, what is that about?
Susan: So that book was published in 2019; it has been four years, and it's been a very interesting journey. At first, I thought, should I try to write a book in English or Chinese? And I thought, okay, I probably am not really good at English at all, but a lot of people ask me, how do you manage your time? How do you manage your career? So eventually, it became a book of twelve chapters, nine in English and three in Chinese; trying to push the English audience outside their comfort zone to read Chinese is very subtle but is probably a little bit hard on the readers. That's how the book idea came around, pretty much because of the demand. While I was writing it, I also went to Burning Man in the US where, you know, the CEO at that time at Google often went to Burning Man for two weeks, and that was the first time I experienced the temporary city, the culture of giving and not expecting something coming back. And I feel, oh, maybe this is how they developed the culture at Google, and funny enough, the first Google Doodle is literally from 1989, I think, the Burning Man event. That's the first Google Doodle. That's how inspiring it is for the founders to pass on that legacy into a corporate environment. And that makes me wonder, from a small company to almost 25 years old, the company is essentially an ecosystem as well. So, all of that linked together, I put it into the book. It is almost like how my life strategy came into play with professional working and then personal time management; how did I manage different projects simultaneously when I'm travelling, studying, or working simultaneously; how did I balance or have it all? Why can’t girls have it all? We can; if we dream big, we can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can do it, right? That's how the book idea came along, and I had editors rigorously help me edit it. I cried and cursed many versions, finally publishing it in 2019. Currently, I have the second edition with a hard copy. That's how the book idea came along.
Pritish: Tell us three of your most productive tools. What are they, and how do they help you?
Susan: Yeah. On top of my mind, definitely Google Keep. So, I use Google Keep with my husband and myself personally. It's much easier to share and think. We have this family account where you can take notes and go shopping. It always has the latest copy. It's much easier for us to coordinate the calendar and the to-do list so that we can share the responsibilities for our daughters between us. So that's one. Professionally, I use monday.com. Monday.com can create any workflow to manage something like marketing or CRM. A lot of HR or software environment companies, I think they're using it. Or even video production like this. So, it's very good for the team to collaborate. Basically, everyone can drag and drop their different tasks into the week, and then you can have a view of what my team achieved in the past week, past quarter, etc. You can set seasonal strategic goals. I think that's very important for companies with year-round planning phases where you can pick what is in progress, what has been done, or what is about to be done. Another one, of course, is Canva, because you can create any templates. One of the favourite templates, you must have heard of it, is the Eon Power Matrix or the Priority Matrix, right? So literally, my wallpaper has this great matrix to show you how you prioritise a list of tasks or agent items by first categorising those items according to their urgency and importance. So essentially, urgent, non-urgent, important, not important. And with those four categories, I have four actions to do immediately, schedule it, delegate to my team or another team, or delete it. That is a template I made with Canva, and on a desktop, you can just drag and drop each day and rearrange it. So those are the three tools I use.
Pritish: Books and blogs, as you said, are your passions. Obviously, you're an author yourself, so three books or blogs that have influenced you the most?
Susan: I recently finished two because, literally, I can't put them down. The first is ‘How to Raise Successful People’ by Esther Wojcicki. She's a mother of three, right? She's the mother of the CEO of YouTube, who is also called Susan, the founder of 23andMe in the US, and also a Health Research Scientist. She has three successful daughters, and so she has written this book to tell people what her principle is and how to raise someone when they are growing up. There's no Nobel Prize for parenting or education. Maybe there should be. So, the book discusses the principle of how she raised the daughters, teaching them, for example, problem-solving, exploring their passion, developing resilience, and enjoying working as a team. And there's one particular tool called Trick, which is short for trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness. I really like that principle. So, I will try to use that for Ida later on. The second book is called ‘Stories of Your Life and Others.’ It's a sci-fi short story by American Writer called, Ted Chiang. One last book I’m currently reading is ‘The Happiness Industry’ by William Davis. So that's for my Ph.D. research, I’m an educational influencer at the moment. So basically, it discusses why many successful corporations have a Chief Happiness Officer. And also, in the past decade, governments and corporations became increasingly interested in measuring how people feel. For example, the Happiness Index, Girls National Happiness, etc. So, the book shows how well-being influences all aspects of our lives, including finance, marketing, and smart technology, and how government and big space businesses build the well-being concept. So that's for my Ph.D. study.
Pritish: All three books are great recommendations. Actually, the first one is on my reading list. I haven't gotten there yet. I think it'll be fascinating to read how she's been able to raise these amazing three children. What is your advice to your younger self?
Susan: Maybe slow down. As also the question you asked me, I feel like I have lived my life, especially from 20 to 30 years old, I really hurried. I lived life twice, as is the speed. I think I was really eager. I'm afraid of missing out, but I think we can enjoy it a bit if we can slow down. Eventually, we will try so many different aspects and experiences; you never know whom you will meet or what opportunities lie in hiding. Maybe you can create your opportunities yourself, so maybe slow down a little bit. Just enjoy the moment is what I'm going to tell my younger self, but I know she will hurry and be eager to run. But anyway, that's my advice.
Pritish: Before we close, what is the nicest thing anybody has done for you?
Susan: Oh, I think a lot of people showed me kindness. I think my husband knows I really like bubble tea, and when we were still dating in London, I had a project that I had to finish probably by night and send to the client. So, I was working really late, probably until nine or ten in the evening, and when I went downstairs, I saw my husband, at that time, still boyfriend, sitting in the lobby holding this tea in hand and still waiting. I totally forgot about it. I think that's really struck me like someone really cares about you. Especially since we are all overseas, we are like international students. We study somewhere; we always feel we must be independent and care for ourselves. And that moment really touched me a lot, and I felt like I had someone to care about me and it's not just a bubble tea; it’s like a genuine heart. But many people have done a lot of kindness for me along my travels and all the journeys I took. I think I wrote some of them in the book as well. They made me who I am today and passed on the kindness to others. If there's a choice between kindness and right, I always choose kind first.
Pritish: Brilliant! Susan, that's a great place to close the conversation. Thanks for being on the show.
Susan: Thank you.
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