Uncomfortable – that’s how Singapore-born entrepreneur Faith Teo describes the first foray she made into China, back in late 2016.
“I didn’t want to go to China,” recalled the 30-year-old, who had moved to Hangzhou in Zhejiang province at the time with her sister to grow their mobile fashion app Fashory.
“When I got there, everything was complicated, there was a lot of drinking in business-making, I didn’t really like the food. China was like another planet. I just wanted to go home [to Singapore].”
Six months in, the business had yet to take off and Teo was ready to call it quits. But a stint at e-commerce giant Alibaba Group changed everything.
“I stayed in China because I didn’t want to leave my sister, but I knew I had to do things differently,” said Teo, who joined Alibaba’s international user experience design team in December 2017.
For close to a year, she pulled 13-hour days at work, even on weekends, picking up what was “three years’ worth” of experience relating to the ins and outs of doing business in China – and regaining her confidence.
“I didn’t mind because I wanted to learn,” Teo said. “In my first week at Alibaba, one thing already stood out for me: what can be scarier than knowing that the people smarter than you are also more hardworking than you?”