What is the True Cost of Being Extraordinary? | Gene Yu | Tank Talks Asia

from Abu Sayyaf militants in: 2013

Gene: Thanks for having me. It's been great. Things are going great.

Manisha: I think what's amazing as we start to look at your background is just the extraordinary stories.

And I kept thinking about how I was gonna introduce you in this interview, and I just thought this really does deserve the word extraordinary.

Gene: Wow.

Manisha: Extraordinary because there really isn't anything ordinary about what you've done in your life, and a lot of it has come from how you've dealt with those Asian roots growing up in the United States of America because identity has been a big thing for you, right?

Gene: Yeah, that's right, what I've come to realize is that much of the overachievement, you know, and pursuit of, of all these type of, these type of accolades has been driven from a childhood that was characterized, learning that essentially to be loved, you had to perform.

And that is the quintessential definition of Asian culture, of hyper performance, right? And, you know, and I realized that continually chasing that as an objective, it's a never ending rigged game. And I was really losing myself actually even just the last couple years realizing like, when is this ever gonna end?

And having that insight recently and finally releasing that has given me a completely different outlook on life, but also now much more clarity about why I did all these things as well 'cause I was really becoming quite, quite contemplative and confused about myself as well, as why do I keep on driving forward for all these things.

Manisha: Let's talk about your background then. So you were born in Concord, Massachusetts, this high achieving Asian kid growing up in this predominantly white American neighborhood, right? And then you move to the west coast of America, Cupertino, where there are a lot more Asian kids.

Gene: That's right.

Manisha: So then?

Gene: So then I lost my identity. I mean, you know, I recently came across this YouTube clip that talks about the idea that America is actually 11 or 12 nations.

And it really opened my eyes a bit about this dichotomy of my childhood where I really spent maybe, you know, the childhood in Concord, Massachusetts, relatively a small town. It was all white kids, basically very inclusive, right? Very, very welcoming. It was an amazing, amazing childhood that I had there.

But also characterized by being raised in an Asian household where I literally did homework three to five times as dictated by either my parents or by the Taiwanese babysitter that I had. And so when I showed up to class, my recall was so much faster than the other kids and everybody thought I was a genius.

And when I moved from New England, right, a puritan culture essentially, moved to California, which is a very left, far left, you know, type of, type of culture in the Bay Area, Northern California, now suddenly surrounded by almost a majority of other Asian American kids who worked just as hard as I did, or studied just as hard as I did, if not harder. And suddenly I was no longer the smart kid in the class. In fact, I was average or, or the bottom, right? Because…

Manisha: And so suddenly everything that you thought you were and you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait up. What happened here?

Gene: That's right. And it dropped in a completely, it completely shook me in terms of my identity, and I had a hard time fitting in. I mean, the other thing I was gonna mention, in Massachusetts, it was a very inclusive community, right?

It's a small town, so you'd go out into the street and play kickball and then all kids would invite you to play. There was a new kid in school, everybody just included you. But in Asian American, Northern California, it was very clique-ish. And kids were much more reserved because they had been, in my opinion, raised by their parents in such a much harsher environment.

They just weren't as open and friendly and so it was very hard to fit in socially as well.

Manisha: Oh, what a shame.

Gene: And it was very lonely.

Manisha: That’s tough.

Gene: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It was tough. And particularly because now I was no longer receiving the love right from the performance because I wasn't performing.

I actually stopped trying as hard in academics because I wasn't getting anything out of it. The ROI was low. Right, I was working really hard and not getting any love out of it. And so I ended up diving into athletics. Right? You know, tennis was the only sport that my mom really let me play 'cause it was safe.

I've actually discovered today, as an adult, that I've returned to having some love for tennis, but I actually didn't like playing tennis as a child.

Manisha: And yet you wanted to excel at it?

Gene: Yes. And, because there was no other way for me to receive love. Right. It was out of performance. I ended up becoming one of the top players in the United States as a junior. Right. I played division one NCAA tennis, but I hated tennis actually.

Manisha: So I'm wondering whether you actually got what you were looking for because you went from trying to excel at tennis, not really pushing on the academics, but then you go off and what was it you did?

Computer science or was it computer engineering? I can't remember.

Gene: Yeah, computer science.

Manisha: Computer science at West Point. And your parents were not happy about the idea of you going in a military direction.

Gene: That's right.

Manisha: But you go off for this future where again, you're gonna be in the situation where you're proving yourself.

Gene: Yeah. I realize now and that I took an extreme jump of joining West Point and the military to try to recreate an identity again that could be respected. And I felt that if I went to West Point, that no one could ever look down on me again. And if I graduated from that university. And such a unique experience as the United States Military Academy, but when you go to West Point, they literally destroy your identity. Right. That's part of the military experience that I underestimated or just had no visibility on. And that was traumatizing on its own, and then also was made to feel inferior, insecure, et cetera.

The military is literally designed to strip you of your identity and rebuild you into a soldier, right? Which is very different from the type of person that you probably were when you were growing up.

Manisha: What was it like being an Asian American in a military environment?

Gene: Yeah, and I mean, not just in a military environment, but also add one that you're an extreme minority now, right? So, and again, growing up in Cupertino, my high school was over 50% Asian and then showing up to West Point, we were less than 2%.

Manisha: Wow.

Gene: And as a Chinese ethnic, Chinese background individual, there was maybe five other people with the same background in the entire school this is the late nineties, of course, at West Point.

And so that was, that was jarring as well. And then suddenly I had a different type of experience of understanding what wider America viewed, how wider America viewed Asians, right? And that was very eye-opening for myself as well in terms of just the various stereotypes of being weak, passive, unfit for leadership, all these sort of things that just inherently, suddenly I was viewed as less than.

And it became a huge chip on my shoulder, over the time at West Point to prove myself. And again, because of what is actually respected in the type of environment. At West Point, one of the things I was respected most was boxing. Right? So boxing is mandatory for all plebes. Now for both men and women, but the time I went, it was just men.

And I was actually knocked out in my first grade about, by one of the other better boxers in the class and sent to the hospital for two days and actually was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. And that actually still carries on of why I received, part of the reason why I receive disabled checks actually from the US government, from my time in the military.

And by the time I was my senior year, I won the academy wide Brigade Open Boxing Championship at the middleweight, defeated four formidable opponents, and won a starting spot on the national championship contending boxing team. So, I always joke around and say that technically on the CV I can say that I was a division one collegiate athlete in two sports, tennis and boxing.

Manisha: Let's jump a little bit because you end up, and you have documented this because you're an author, on top of everything else, you've written books about this, but you ended up being a Green Beret. That is no small fry, and you ended up being involved in some classified missions and stationed in Okinawa.

Gene: Yes. So when I was a Green Beret and an officer, I was stationed out of Okinawa. That's one of the Special Forces Battalion that's deployed for Asia. I was the commander or team leader of two Special Forces teams. The first one was technically a mountain warfare team, but because the Global War on Terror was ongoing, we just focused on traditional special force missions, and deployed for, in all for four combat tours, two to Iraq and two to the Southern Philippines.

Manisha: And wait, was this post nine 11?

Gene: This is post nine 11. After nine 11 happened, I changed my entire mindset from being, using the military for my own gains to becoming a volunteer. I really did want to fight at that point, you know, I do love America. I do love New York City. You know, I'm not gonna say I love the Pentagon, but you know, but you know when this actually happened, I was emotionally charged around it and wanted to fight. And that changed. That's why I ended up trying out for Special Forces. I think about it kind of like the sorting hat from Hogwarts.

Manisha: Right…

Gene: Where that…

Manisha: I'm surprised you were using that analogy, but nevermind.

Gene: Well, I always joke around is that I think of when I first, because I hadn't heard of West Point before I shoplifted a book. ‘Cause I was, me acting out in high school I was a big shoplifter and I had shoplifted a book that I thought was fictional talking about West Point. I had never heard about West Point growing up in liberal Northern California.

So I always say that I thought it was like Hogwarts for warriors instead of wizards. But, another analogy I used for, from the Harry Potter universe is that after nine 11, I decided that I should go wherever the Army thinks that I'm best to serve and to fight. And 'cause I don't really know, so you tell me, right? You give me the sorting hat and you tell me, right? Am I Hufflepuff?

Okay, I'll go be Hufflepuff.

Manisha: I don't see you as a Hufflepuff somehow.

Gene: And if I'm Gryffindor, then send me to Gryffindor. And so that's what trying out for Special Forces selection was like for me, was I went and just said, tell me where I'm supposed to go because I wanna fight and serve where I can best contribute to the effort.

Now, I tell you now, you know, as an older, wiser man, I think, and having gone through the experience of the global war on terror, I look at all of that as something that I grapple with, as all veterans do, of just being a pawn of something that we don't understand what the purpose of that was, right?

And, but nevertheless part of my story is that we're, I was part of the class of nine 11, right? And so my class at West Point is the longest continuous combat class in the history of West Point. 20 straight years. And that's not something that I understood when I signed up for West Point.

I don't think I would've went to West Point if I knew, if I knew that was gonna happen, especially who I was when I was 17. But because of nine 11, that's why I ended up ascending into the Green Berets or US Army Special Forces. Part of my story as well is that after my first time in the, my regular team, I guess you call it a regular special forces team, I was gladly promoted to a, now a no-longer functioning unit called the Commanders In-extremis force.

Which, we had five regional counter-terrorist teams across the world, part of what I would describe as America's nine 11 and less than 5% of all Green Berets end up serving at this level. So, even in the journey that I went on, eventually ended up ascending to some of the highest levels of American Special Forces.

And, a lot of it, again, I reflect now, right? It's easy for me to say now as an older, older, older man but it was driven again by this chip on the shoulder of just always needing to perform in order to feel that I always had any type of self-worth. And that persisted for quite a long time.

Manisha: From what I've read, where that changes is actually you leave the forces, you go off and you work in industry. I think Palantir, and this is a name, you know, Palantir, perhaps many people hadn't heard of it back then, but now everyone's heard of Palantir, haven't they? And you had to leave.

And then you sort of go into this lull and then something happens. In the lull, you get a call from your mother?

Gene: Yeah, a call from my mother. I mean, you're being quite kind because it is part of the story as well. But I was actually fired, right? I was retrenched.

Manisha: Yeah, I didn’t, you know, if you wanna say it, you can say it.

Gene: No, I'm completely open to it now because, I mean everything that I have in my life now wouldn't be in my hands unless that had happened.

Manisha: Is it okay to ask why?

Gene: I would describe it as earlier stage startup volatility.There's a lot of shifting ongoing in terms of priorities. As a business owner now and CEO, it really is, this is the truth, anytime anybody gets let go, it's because you're too expensive for the ROI you provide to the company. It's just that at the end of the day, right. And, I was too expensive, you know, so for what I was providing, to be clear.

So for me, when I left, I do need to tie this together because the extreme action of going and of what we're leading into, of coordinating the rescue of my Taiwanese family friend who was kidnapped by Filipino terrorists, all of that needs to be kept, needs to be framed in the aspect of where I was from a mental health standpoint. Right. Truly that's all I can describe it now is mental health.

And so after I left the army, actually I had a major loss of identity. One of the things that people don't talk about is that in the middle of the global war on terror, particularly me that I was considered, I was one of the top captains in all of US Army Special Forces.I was selected out of nine total special forces captains to be promoted early to major.

And when I decided to leave, it was met with quite a bit of exile and ostracizing. It was, there was a very much a feeling like of a, of being treated as a turncoat because the boys are still in the fight and you're leaving and you're one of the guys that we need, right.

There's, it was actually said to me, I realize that now of why I carried so much survivor's guilt afterwards, and particularly with what I was doing with my career, because I knew that I was in my prime. Right. As a special forces officer. Right. I always like to say that I was an average Green Beret, like as a operator.

I always like to say that it's like I could see that half of the guys were better than me and half, I was probably better than them, so I would say I was in the middle, not mediocre, just that I was in the middle, but I was a good officer. Right. I was relatively a good officer in terms of what I brought to the table.

And so I had a lot of survivor's guilt or a sense of that when I came out. And so I was sharing that I spent a year studying Chinese intensively in Taiwan. I went to grad school at Johns Hopkins. I spent a year at Credit Suisse as a trader, equity swaps trader. But all of this just, I just couldn't repair or recover the identity that I had as a Special Forces team leader, which was the strongest institution that I had been part of.

And so, when Palantir retrenched me, that was literally the action of killing my identity that I was rebuilding, 'cause Palantir was the one that I finally found, thought that I'd landed and said, oh, this is an amazing company.

Manisha: This is who I am now.

Gene: This is who I am now. Right. Coolest mission. I just couldn't get behind Credit Suisse's mission. The mission was literally, let's be the biggest flow bank in Asia, right?

I'm like, why do I care about making rich people richer, right? It's not just something I could get outta bed for. I mean, literally my mission in Special Forces was to defend the Constitution of the United States or De Oppresso Liber, to free the oppressed, right? It's something you could really get outta bed for in the morning, right?

And, at Palantir, I remember when I was attracted to the company I was at training in New York for Credit Suisse in the summer and I went to the website and it just said in bold letters, and the mission on the landing page, our mission is to solve the world's most difficult problems.

I was like, that's so cool. Right?

Manisha: That's me, that's what I wanna do.

Gene: I can get behind that. Right, and so went down, met some folk through network, Palantir, New York, and then told the guys at Credit Suisse I'm not coming back, and then stayed in the states for Palantir for a bit.

So when they actually, when all this disruption and I got let go, that was devastating for me from an identity standpoint. It literally killed the identity that I thought I was actually rebuilding after a kind of wandering around for several years after leaving special forces.

So when my mother called and let me know that her best friend's little sister had been kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf terrorists, when people ask me like, why did you do that? And they think I'm this big hero, I have to be honest now and tell the story that I was struggling so deeply with my own self identity that I went forward to do these things because I was trying to recover my identity in some sense and have some sense of self worth.

Manisha: I heard you in an interview say that you actually felt quite embarrassed about the situation that you put yourself in? Because, and I'll bring it up now, you were at the time the nephew of the president of Taiwan. And actually, you are the kind of person who would have dollar signs on your back and yet you picked up a backpack, got on a plane, went to Manila, put yourself in a situation of a classic kidnap for ransom in trying to rescue this lady. Without thinking.

I mean, obviously there's been huge learning that's come from that.

Gene: I was never used to operating on missions where I had to take into account my family status, right? In fact, when I did bring up my uncle's status to my commanders the first time around, now granted he wasn't the president at the time, but it was, the reaction was very much like, hey what's with the name dropping? And so I kept quiet about it generally. So I never thought about it until this moment that I'm operating now as a singleton in the Philippines and realizing that I'm exactly the person that they would want to kidnap.

There was a Taiwan paparazzi trumped up connection from Evelyn Chang, which is the name of the family friend who was kidnapped back to my uncle Ma Ying-Jeou, the president of Taiwan. She went to the same girls, prestigious girls high school that the first lady, who also is my classmate of my mother, who also went, and that's how they all know each other. It was connected. They tried to make a connection with that because it seems so random and discriminate. How is it possible that a Taiwanese national is kidnapped out of an eastern Malaysian resort and taken back into this lawless, jungle terrorist area of the Southern Philippines?

People couldn't really compute that it could be that random, but it really is that random. Life can be stranger than fiction, but this group of Abu Sayyaf terrorists are essentially just bandits and just kidnappers, in terms of what they do as a business and they really were just fishing and just hopefully getting lucky with picking up a foreigner.

The reports that we had was that after they kidnapped her and then the news was released in Taiwan, and trumping her up as somebody just a heartbeat away from the Taiwan presidency, was all night they were firing the AK 47 celebrating and having a huge celebration 'cause they felt that they had just hit a major payday. Right.

It was not something that they had planned. It was a, sorry, it was a major surprise. Right. And, now if they had really known who was on the other side of the negotiation operating, the person who was actually the blood nephew of the president.

Manisha: Of the president.

Gene: And so for me, I was very embarrassed. Right. I was like, I can't believe I put myself at this risk because this is a country at the time, and I think now still the going rate for an assassin on a moped is a hundred US dollars.

Manisha: Numbers like that always. I mean, they're hurtful. This is what we've reduced human lives to. This kind of, I don't even want to go there. And what I'm gonna say is that you've written a book about all of this, so we still have much to talk about, so I'm going to tell all of our audience, you know, that they can read the book. Remind me of the title?

Gene: It's called The Second Shot: A Green Beret’s Last Mission.

Manisha: Well look, it is an incredible story and I would encourage anyone listening to this to go out and get the book and read the story and it's very much out there 'cause I know that you've talked about it quite openly, but I wanna get onto what you're doing now. Tell me about Blackpanda.

big boss at Credit Suisse in: 2015

So we found it in 2015 and because of the Evelyn Chang crisis and the minor notoriety that had given me, suddenly there's a lot of attention around me in the region here in Asia, and I started meeting people. People were just literally at, banking chiefs were just asking to meet me. And then at first I just went and then just like told 'em the story face to face and then just took a photo with them and then I left. And after like this happened two or three times, I'm like, what am I doing with my time?

These are like literally the most powerful men in the country. I should do more with this opportunity and this attention I'm getting. And so we came around with the simplest idea, which is to build a security company, and particularly around crisis consulting. And because of the Evelyn Chang incident. And now myself having a bit of a profile as a kidnap and ransom negotiator, et cetera. Right.

So we actually originally built a company as a crisis consulting company and ended up building a nice business around that, but it's just consulting, so can scale. So we started thinking about building it into some type of methodology or a product that could actually be a larger business and discovered an entire industry, which is colloquially known as the kidnap and ransom insurance industry.

I would say that the official name is more like special risk insurance. I think the best way to describe this insurance product is actually high risk physical security insurance. It's for executives, like in oil companies that are going to dangerous areas like let's say Afghanistan. I mean, there's real business there, right? People are still going there for business.

Manisha: What about the nephews of important people?

Gene: Those people shouldn't go. They'd be really dumb if they went. So these type of insurance products cover losses around political violence, terrorist attacks, kidnap and ransom. Right. As well as emergency evacuation.

Manisha: This, so this is still a thing.

Gene: Oh, yes.

Manisha: So this is not Hollywood movies. This is real.

Gene: There's actually a really good Hollywood movie that talks, that portrays this called Proof of Life.

Manisha: I've seen this.

Gene: Yes, with Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Right. And so they're depicting the most famous crisis consulting company in the world called Control Risk Group, which is filled with typically British Special Forces types, and the insurance product that they sell us with Hiscocks, which is one of the top Lloyds of London special risk, it is the top, Lloyds of London, special risk insurer. And so we got into this business and became a Lloyds of London insurance broker. And began selling this insurance product with us, Blackpanda, as the crisis consultants here in Asia.

ed at Resorts World Manila in: 2018

And in the aftermath of this crisis, they started getting hit by cyber attack, taking advantage of the chaos and they started losing a lot of money from that getting stolen out of their funds. And because they trusted us, they just asked us to put together a team. And what I discovered was that there was no specialist Cyber Emergency Response Company in Asia. But from my background in Palantir, I'd come across that space and knew there were several specialized companies like this in the US.

And so I saw that it was Blue Ocean out here in Asia and realized that the crisis response interest that I had as a business, that there was a larger problem to solve in the digital space than the physical one. And so we ended up actually doing better on the contract on the cyber side, than the physical side with the Resorts World.

And so what people are, I realize the cybersecurity industry is missing 'cause it's driven by engineers, right, is that cybersecurity is not an IT problem. It's a security problem, right? It's not a computer after script that's hacking you, it's a human being. This is a human on human adversarial problem.

Manisha: So that security has to come from the most foundational aspect of the product? Is that what you're saying?

Gene: What I'm trying to get at is that our ancestors who have built the physical security world and model, right, were not dumb. Okay like they figured out the system as best that we can today in that sense. And that model needs to be replicated in the digital world.

And that aspect is missing in the cybersecurity space. And that's where Blackpanda was able to become a venture backed company and we built a profitable, it's a response business very quickly.

So the company continues to grow very well, 60% year and year over the last three years, I think we've hit upon something very unique in terms of looking at the business model of cybersecurity, and in particularly in terms of post attack, which lends again back to my background, as you can see, that I've tried to tie this all together.

I mean, we started talking about why I got into this from childhood trauma essentially, but essentially my entire career has now been built around crisis response. And I've led into that, leaned into that leading from the physical space now into the digital.

But that's what my company is, Blackpanda. I've been running it as a CEO for the last 10 years. We're headquartered here in Singapore with offices across the region.

Manisha: Why'd you choose Singapore?

Gene: We were actually originally headquartered in Hong Kong, but with the political headwinds and everything like that with the protests, et cetera, we saw that it would be a bit more stable to move to Singapore.

And we also saw that the Singapore government was giving a tremendous amount of support to cybersecurity and developing the ecosystem here. So we wanted to lean into all of that and move the headquarters down here and relocated myself and my family here about seven years ago.

Manisha: Asia's got you back. You may have been born in the United States of America, but with an Asian background and you saw this gap in the market and you've come back.

Do you see yourself saying here, what's gonna happen next?

Gene: I realize that my life is here now, right? I've lived in Asia for over 25 years. I've lived in seven countries out here. And I've built amazing friendships and communities in every one of these countries. And, you know, I've been pining about like, oh, I gotta go back, I gotta go back.

But recently I just had the clarity of why would I leave all this behind that I've built? And I have an amazing life here, an amazing community. I'm very happy out here.

Manisha: You feel comfortable. Do you feel at home?

Gene: I feel at home here. Yeah I do feel at home here in Singapore, you know, very comfortable out here. It's just, I mean, ultimately I think home is when you can truly say that you're comfortable with yourself, right?

It's your own identity. And actually from that aspect, it doesn't matter as much where you are in that sense, I realized, right. I think there's a part of me of wanting to go back to the US to find that childhood identity again. I literally left home when I went to West Point. I was in New York, right, from California and never went back. Right.

I've been on this long journey and I thought I would always return like the son would return home, so to speak. But now I've realized that I found myself overseas.

Manisha: Yeah, and that reminds me 'cause you talked about the son returning home. My one last question is, what does your mom say about your achievements after, or, you know, in the second half of the show.

Gene: She won't be happy if I, if she sees me say this, but I'm gonna tease her a little bit. When I raised my series A and I said, mom, I did it. I made it to the series A after all this struggle and got the $15 million and this valuation, blah, blah, blah.

And she said, oh, my friend the other day said her son, or knows somebody that raised a hundred million dollars. And I was like, I just started laughing so hard. 'cause it was just that classic, you know.

Manisha: Classic Asian.

Gene: Classic Asian mom. Right. And it's like you wonder where the trauma comes from, all this that we all share.

But as an adult all I could do is just laugh and I just hugged her and just said, I can't believe you just said that. But that's so funny.

Manisha: And on that glorious note, Gene, thank you so much. Thanks for joining us on the show.

Gene: Thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

Manisha: Likewise. I'm Manisha Tank. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode. Thank you for listening. And please don't forget to subscribe and follow Tank Talks Asia. That way you'll be supporting our mission to bring you the real story of what's happening in Asia to the rest of the world. And of course, you'll never miss an episode.

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