I worked with a developmental editor once a week who would read everything that I wrote and helped me structure the book and build our table of contents, where all these stories were part of the second part of that book, which is the keys to success as female entrepreneurs East Asian ones.
winnie wong
Today’s episode is with Canadian-born and Singapore-based author, Winnie Wong.
Her ebook launches today on Amazon, 9 June 2023. If you love books, Winnie is offering her ebook as a gift to you at US$0.99 for the first 200 readers.
In this episode, we talk about Winnie’s one-year book writing process and journey, and her key takeaways from her book titled “You Don’t Have to Look the Part: How East Asian Women Thrive as Entrepreneurs”.
Winnie is an educator and researcher and has had more than 10 years of corporate experience working with start-ups and tech companies. She is also a business leader, investor and philanthropist.
An advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in entrepreneurship, Winnie has mentored foreign domestic workers in entrepreneurship and advised social impact funds in granting $1 million to female-led start-ups.
One of my mentees actually started an ice business where she would make ice because a lot of the people in her town, they don’t have refrigerators. So they would use ice to preserve food. It’s a very sustainable model, actually, because these families need ice every single day.
In her book, she writes about Melanie Perkins of Canva who took 3 years to fundraise and who wrote a note to keep herself going despite the initial rejections. She also recounts the story of Vicky Tsai, the founder of Tatcha who was told she didn’t look like a CEO and was asked to step down from the business she started.
Her book is aimed at women considering entrepreneurship as well as venture capitalists and other investors looking to invest in diversity and advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion.
On a global scale, women-led start-ups get only 2% of venture capital funding, even though women own 1 in 3 businesses globally. Of that percentage, East Asian women-led startups only receive a small sliver of that 2%. Despite this disparity, women-founded businesses return more than twice as much per dollar invested than those founded by men.
IA lot of the times I’m the only woman in the room for a lot of situations and it’s not easy because the way that men communicate is just so different from how women communicate. And when I was in school, I remember I used to get interrupted a lot as a woman. I only noticed this when one of our professors would stop people from interrupting me. He’d be like, “Winnie, continue.”
In her book, Winnie unpacks the entrepreneurship stories of East Asian women such as Vicky Tsai, Vera Wang, Melanie Perkins, Hooi Ling Tan and many more while focusing on the systemic gaps that prevent women from getting access to the funds that they need to grow and scale their businesses.
Winnie holds an MBA from INSEAD, where she was a Forte Fellow, and was named a Rising Talent by the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society. A Canadian-born Chinese, Winnie has lived in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Singapore.
Outside of her work with entrepreneurs and underprivileged women, Winnie enjoys the outdoors, yoga, and French cooking. Her favourite book is The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson.
Winnie’s ebook will be available on Amazon starting today Friday, 9 June 2023. As her gift to our listeners, the eBook will be offered at US$0.99 for the first 200 orders of the book.