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Navigating the High Seas of Fintech: Caecilia Chu's Odyssey from Corporate to Entrepreneurship
Ever wondered what it takes to jump ship from the safety of corporate giants to the stormy seas of fintech entrepreneurship? Our latest episode brings you face-to-face with Caecilia Chu, YouTrip's co-founder and CEO, whose audacious switch from the world of Citi and McKinsey is nothing short of a high-stakes adventure. Her tale isn't just one of business acumen; it's a deeply personal narrative woven with threads of family legacy, cultural nuances, and a relentless pursuit of solving real-world problems. Caecilia opens up about the profound impact of her parents' entrepreneurial journey, the resilience it instilled in her, and the unique pressures that accompany a background ripe with 'tiger parenting.'
Strap in as we navigate the rollercoaster ride of Caecilia's first e-commerce venture, an experience that sharpened her resolve and her vision for the future of financial services. The conversation takes an intimate turn into the nitty-gritty of fintech innovation, revealing the allure of untangling the complex web of multi-currency transactions in Southeast Asia. From the importance of facing formidable challenges head-on to the excitement of pioneering accessible financial solutions, this episode is a treasure trove for anyone fueled by curiosity and inspired by the transformative power of entrepreneurship. Join us as we celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit with Cecilia Chu, whose story is sure to electrify your own aspirations.
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This is Ascential Audio. Welcome to The Money Pot. I'm Sheryl Chen, Head of content at Money/ 2020 Asia. For this series of The Money Pot, we will deep dive into the scary topic of career pivots. We speak to formidable women who have left their jobs to create their own fintech startups and discover the why behind what they do. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Caecilia Chu, the co-founder and CEO of YouTrip. Youtrip is a multi-currency travel wallet and money changer app. Prior to founding YouTrip, Caecilia worked at Citi, overseeing growth investments in the technology and consumer sectors. Before that, Caecilia worked at McKinsey, advising financial institutions across Asia on product and growth strategies. Joining me this week to explore this is none other than the engine behind Money Pot, Rachel Morrissey, who is the head of content USA and also Money Pot's executive producer. Hi Rachel, hey Sheryl, how are you? I'm good, Rachel. Have you done a career pivot before I?
Rachel Morrissey:have. Actually this is actually career number three, but in my second career I used to work with the sugar lobby in Washington DC and then I pivoted to covering fintech. So I'm not sure quite how I did that pivot, but yes I have. I went from sugar to fintech.
Sheryl Chen:That's a very sweet pivot. Anyway, we're sweet, nice, very sweet. Anyway, we're so glad to have you with us. So let's dive into the conversation. Caecilia, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what triggered the shift away from Citi into the startup world?
Caecilia Chu:Hi Sheryl and Rachel. It's really wonderful to be here and thank you for having me today. To me, I think, becoming an entrepreneur was a deeply personal choice. I remember, when I was five, my parents one day they told me they decided to leave their jobs and become an entrepreneur, but they had no business training at all. We don't even have much life savings. My father had been a postman for quite many years and my mom was a kindergarten teacher. So you know they. They weren't from that business background, but observing and witnessing their journey, I would say they have shown me so much courage Through those decades that they work as entrepreneurs and, and I think very importantly, they show me how to persist Under extreme pressure.
Caecilia Chu:Fast forward 20 years. You know I had the opportunity to attend some of the best business schools. I was a finance major at Warn at Warn, and subsequently I went to Harvard Business School for for my MBA and I also, on top of those, I had the opportunity to be trained at some of the best firms McKinsey city, as you mentioned. So about 11, 10 years ago I I asked myself Um, who am I if I don't take some risk with my life? You know, given all these great training and backgrounds, that is actually pretty amazing.
Rachel Morrissey:Um, I was thinking, Sheryl, don't you guys always talk about the expectations of Asian parents?
Sheryl Chen:I mean, isn't this sort of a?
Rachel Morrissey:thing that you guys have where, I mean in the us. Uh, there's a reputation of Asian pageants. Parents, especially moms beinga Bit of tiger moms is what they call it where they are just have really high expectations of their kids, give them a lot of training, give them a lot of opportunity, but there's really high expectations.
Sheryl Chen:Yeah, so we do have that In Asia. That that's seen actually quite frequently. And the thing is, cecilia, because you managed to get to where you were, where you are today, because of the hard work of your parents, they managed to put you through like business school, like foundational studies, business schools, and then you managed to find yourself into such Established firms like city and McKinsey. And I think, as your parents would have been so proud of you. So how is the conversation like Uh with them when you told them that, hey mom, hey dad, I, I know that I managed to get myself into such established institutions, but I also want to do the thing that you guys did so many years ago to Do my own thing now.
Caecilia Chu:That's a very great question. You know, my parents knew entrepreneurship was very, very tough. They experienced it firsthand. So I would say when I told them, hey, I'm leaving the corporate job and go to strike out on my own now and I would say they were not the most enthusiastic persons at first, to be most honest. But my parents also know me very well. I'm terribly stubborn, generally determined, which is a better word for it. You know, I would say when I set my mind on something, my parents also know that I'm going to stick with it. And so I would say they were supportive.
Caecilia Chu:And I very much remember the first day that I actually left my finance job and really start to be on my own and really running my own company. Well, at that time there was no company. I remember my mom came to me and she said you know, hey, cecilia, you know this journey is going to be difficult and you are going to fail a couple of times before you get it. But you know one thing when you fall, don't quit, double down. Frankly, I couldn't understand what she meant. You know, at that time, early on in my journey, but I guess 10 years on, having ran two company on my own.
Caecilia Chu:And I think I guess I could guess what she meant now.
Rachel Morrissey:You know that's really interesting. I mean, I think it's kind of fascinating that your mom was like you know, when you trip and fall down, double down, don't get scared, don't run for safety, don't you know? Just get a brush off your knees and do it again. It'll be, you know it'll, it'll happen. That is. It's pretty fascinating because that was not the reaction of my parents and my parents are not sky high expectation parents. They were a little bit like are you sure you're not losing your? Like, what are you doing? So I understood, I can understand the fear of your parents and I think this is sort of interesting because you obviously were well prepared for this kind of pivot. I mean, I love the, the stubborn determination coin, that streak that is definitely needed when you are being an entrepreneur.
Rachel Morrissey:But I also think about transfer of skills. A lot of people thought my skills. It's not easy to see how skills transfer. You know, when you were going from one thing to another, you're trying to raise money or you're trying to build something. You have to convince people to work with you. There's all kinds of things that have to happen, and when I was transferring my skills people were like what could working in Washington DC in policy, possibly have to do with you working in fintech conversations and media, like I don't understand where those connect at all, and so I was just thinking about this. When you look at your experience in the institutions, what kind of skills did you obtain? You know, working in a city, working at McKinsey. This is translated into this, you know that, translated into what you actually did as you were starting off in your entrepreneurial journey.
Caecilia Chu:Yeah, I think that's a very interesting perspective.
Caecilia Chu:And when I think about on my own journey, I think running a startup also has its phases.
Caecilia Chu:So when I think about the very, very early stage, when we're just about a few people, less than 10 people, it's never about fancy presentations, powerpoints, big strategy talks these things just don't work. And at those times it's really just about keeping your heads down day in, day out. We try to get something going and believing that you will get somewhere someday. But I would say when the company actually started to scale, when it started to grow, naturally the organization becomes much more complex. And I think those big company experience really comes in handy because you have seen how very large scale, complex organization spreading across multiple continents and countries, how they organize their teams, their people, their work, their business lines, their P&L, and I think having seen that would really allow the entrepreneur, say at my stage, to backward engineer some of these processes and policies into our own organization and really guide us to design our own roadmap on that growth trajectory. So I thought some of these experiences actually extremely helpful, but more helpful in the growth stage than the very, very early days.
Sheryl Chen:That's really interesting because when we talk about transferable skills bringing your experience from one company to the other we also have to talk about baggage, right? Because people, we do come with skillsets, habits that we need to unlearn when moving from one place to the other. So what were some things that like skills habits that you had to unlearn from when you were in city, when you were in McKinsey, to when you were starting your own companies?
Caecilia Chu:I think the biggest thing at that time was strategic thinking and execution not the same thing. They're easily mixed up and the distinction is not so clear at the outset. If you think about a professional consultant or banking professional, we are very analytical, our strengths is generally in analytics strategic thinking, but that is not execution and in the early days that's most of the time what you do. So I think distinguishing the two was my biggest unlearning I need to do in the early days. But the good news is, as you actually scale the business, your strategic thinking is so critical you can no longer rely on just yourself implementing new things to make it work for a large organization and growing organization. So I think it's a really interesting startup journey where I discovered that the two sets that I collect through the different points in my life would actually connect the dots on its own. Sorry.
Sheryl Chen:I just wanted to double click on the point you made about strategic thinking versus execution, because sometimes we do think a bit too much, we overthink, and then we start thinking to a point where we basically fail to execute. We want to think to a point how can I do this? That this is perfect. So do you have like a story to share, an example to share, where you have to just go ahead to execute without reaching perfection first?
Caecilia Chu:Well, you actually hit it right on. I think it's not going for the perfection. Strategic thinking in nature is really about being comprehensive and you have things through, all the different options and you pick the best one. It's really about perfection, but execution is not. It's really about action. It's really about taking that action, even though knowing is not perfect and you may need to fix things along the way, but you want to do it first. So I think you got it right. To me, that's the biggest distinction.
Rachel Morrissey:You know that's so interesting because I was thinking about how, in large organizations, you have to kind of make room for how other people are thinking, and when it's your own venture, I think you kind of feel a little bit of ownership. This is going to be the way I want it to be, but as you grow again, if you've got the right people, then you have to re-assess and make space for them to contribute, and that is a different kind of strategic thinking. That isn't necessarily in that. I think that's why you see so many startup people who are very good at like launch and they'll get to a certain place, and then they find that they're not actually the founder to continue the journey. And then you see other ones that that's the place where they can really take over, because they understand that second phase of the business. Or you do see certain entrepreneurs that come and they go.
Rachel Morrissey:Oh, I know how to pivot my role so that I'm back to exercising a little less micro management and a little more macro thinking and macro strategy. So when you were thinking about this as you guys grew, obviously you guys had probably a couple of different flubs, as your mom's anticipated, you probably bruised your knees a few times here and had a few nice little things called failures, learning experiences. So are there any that you would? You would think about now and you're like I'm so glad that I failed there because I learned so much that it actually contributed more to the success. Because I failed, because I screwed up, I actually learned so much. I now understand something I could never have understood a different way.
Caecilia Chu:Yeah, well, as I, as I share earlier, youtube is actually my second startup. The first one was something I did about 1011 years ago. It was plain vanilla e-commerce, but you know I work very hard at it I at least. I put in 15 hours a day, six, seven days a week, and you know we stay put for two years. So I think there are the learnings there that really drives us to be YouTube the way it is, and my biggest learning there was don't do something that is easy to do.
Caecilia Chu:And I think at that time, when we started the e-commerce website, you know that space was already very mature it has been around for 20 years and also the entry barrier was very low. So when we had any meaningful traction, we see copycats left and right. It was actually difficult to succeed when you do something easy to do, and I thought that was one of the counterintuitive points that we took with us when we started YouTube. This time on FinTech, as you know, has to navigate the complex compliances, regulatory licensing landscape, along with technology and also the changing customer behavior. So choosing something difficult to do make us realize actually this is the place we wanted to be.
Rachel Morrissey:Well, I think the other part of that is that so in the e-commerce space, you were doing something that you kind of understood was possible, but you weren't necessarily solving a problem for anybody. Because it was a more mature space, that problem had been solved for a lot of people and then, as soon as you kind of did make headway into a problem, like you said, there were copycats everywhere, because they're like oh, it's easy, this isn't a hard problem to solve. Fintech problems, and especially the one that you've solved with U-Trip, they tend to be hard to solve and they tend to be real problems, which are always harder to solve. I think that that's really interesting, because you're like I need to find an actual problem and then actually solve it, and then this will fly. I think that that's entrepreneur 101, if you could just say well, let's look for a real problem.
Caecilia Chu:Yeah, I think that was really a great insight. Then we realized we really love solving tough problems. For both my co-founder and myself, we actually spent a lot of time in China Six, seven years ago. That was where we were working. We were working in some FinTechs in China and, of course, both of us spent a lot of time in the US for education, for part of our work experience. But we love working in Southeast Asia.
Caecilia Chu:I remember when we first came up with the idea of U-Trip, we were both working in China. My co-founder was working at Tencent, the Super App VChat. For myself, I was working at a retail personal finance platform called Lufax. It's now listed in the US. At that time we saw all people and all businesses already using mobile phones to manage money exclusively. That was China at that time. It was really ahead of many other economies.
Caecilia Chu:But having experienced our startup where we used to be, our dream is to be the first mover in a space. We would much rather be early than being late, at least for once. That's why we moved to Singapore. We love Southeast Asia. The multi-currency, the ethics problem is much more relevant here because how fragmented this region actually is. We saw how this multi-currency problem is so much more profound compared to places like the US, where you can use US dollars and you basically can grow your business just operating in one currency and same, with Roman bees in China and, to some extent, euros in Europe, and here we need to keep changing and using and tracking the rates for different currencies from time to time. I thought that was really a tough problem to solve, but one that is extremely deep and one that is worth solving. So we moved to Singapore and be based here and started a business from here about five, six years ago.
Sheryl Chen:You know, I really, really love it because you talked about looking for hard things to solve. You really wanted to like look for problems to solve. And then you went to Southeast Asia insanely fragmented, so many regulations, so many various currencies and you're like you know what I'm going to do a multi-currency wallet.
Rachel Morrissey:Yeah, that's nice to add, a nice hard problem to solve. I sometimes wonder, like when you're thinking about that, you're like, oh, I'm going to go to Southeast Asia where, as Cheryl pointed out, regulatory differences are not small or easy to navigate and where you are dealing with lots of different currencies in a pretty, in a relatively small geographical area and I was thinking about, like what did you? Like what became kind of the central knot, what was the idea? That was like, oh, there's a way to kind of pick this knot and kind of get to the guts of this that makes this highly usable. Like what was it about a wallet? What was it about the nature of that to solve, help solve the problem? I'm always curious about how entrepreneurs think in a different. You know, not even outside of the box, but just even in the box, how they redraw things.
Caecilia Chu:I think there are a couple of lessons that you know I learned personally when I was running the FinTech product, actually in China, years ago. There are a couple of things, a few of the philosophies that really resonate with me. I was the head of product strategy, so what I do day in and day out is to study these FinTech products across different companies and what stood out to me was the central theme at that time was really about serving the everyday customers. I remember I was told why and financial was called and was because it is there to serve this hardworking everyday customers and it really resonated with me. Just, you know the way I was brought up, where I was, you know, certainly in the mass market segments, and I always felt the banks, you know, do not build a lot of products for me when I was growing up. And what some of these FinTech has shown me how to do is, you know you can actually develop a business model sustainable, profitable and you can serve these everyday segment very well.
Caecilia Chu:The product is extremely easy to use and I think the definition of intuitive product is one where you do not require any instructions. You do not need to teach them how to use. Somebody opened the app would naturally know how to use it, and they make sure the ticker size is always very small and very accessible. You can invest, you can ensure yourself, you can pay somebody as little as one yuan or even less, and I think we really took some of these lessons. Where we started U-Trip, we aim to be a mass market focused product where you know, no matter how much or how little money you can show in your account, we always treat you all the same Always the best product, always the best price point, and I think that is, you know, a mission that resonates with many people in the community, and I think the love for our product and the love for our brand really starts growing from there.
Sheryl Chen:That's yeah, I really really love it too, and also the idea of building for the people. I really really loved the mission. So, as we begin to wrap it up, maybe one last question could be, cecilia, what's your advice for other FinTech Well, it doesn't have to be FinTech right. For people who are also considering a similar career pivot or are contemplating launching their own FinTech startup, what is one piece of advice you would offer?
Caecilia Chu:Yeah Well, as I reflect on my own journey, I think U-Trip is a story about never stop believing. We have gone through some, you know, very volatile times over the last five years since launching the product. You know, right after 2019, we have had almost two and a half years of COVID hitting us, and right after that we have the funding winter with a high interest rate. We have, you know, tough capital markets. But I think this is the journey. The journey is not meant to be easy, so I would encourage all fellow entrepreneurs to keep going, no matter what is to come, and ultimately, I believe, as long as you don't give up, you will eventually all become very successful.
Rachel Morrissey:Yeah, I love that. But wow, what a time to launch. What a time to launch Right before a pandemic. And then I know we're still allowed to say the P word on here, but we're pandemic. And then into the, into the maelstrom that followed it. How fun is that? Wow, it's impressive that you're able to just deal with just that. The outside world was was challenging enough. I think startups are hard when, when, conditions are lovely, so that is a particularly brave and actually really impressive.
Sheryl Chen:I'm really glad that it's still impressive and also, despite the funding winter, actually, you trip recently just close the funding round as well. Yeah, yeah, extremely impressive, thank you. So, yeah, congratulations, that's it. Yeah, okay, that's it for this episode of the Money Pod. We want to thank Cecilia for gracing our show today. If you want to hear more from Cecilia, cecilia will be speaking at Money 2020 Asia in April at Bangkok, thailand. We hope to see you there.
Rachel Morrissey:You can be part of the Money Pod at the Money 2020 show. Please send us pitches to podcast at money2020.com and don't forget to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you so much. We love our FinTech nerds.
