Chapter 7: Team AppWorks
I left AppWorks!
It’s been over a month since I left my job / role at AppWorks (I am currently funemployed and not looking), and if you’ve been following me on social media these last 5 years, you'll know that I’ve been working there and that I’ve posted tons of content to highlight the team and mission:
Making the decision to leave was really hard because my role at AppWorks was at a stable and safe place. There are many reasons I decided to move on and it would be too long of a post to share all the details here, so instead, I wanted to focus on my time at AppWorks and the valuable lessons I learned there. This is my version of a public love letter to a community that helped me evolve into the person I am today 💌
Please note that all thoughts / opinions expressed in this piece are my own and I am not speaking on behalf of anyone.
For those that don’t know, AppWorks consists of a bunch of things that are impossible to fit in one category:
AppWorks is a startup ecosystem-builder based in Taiwan that primarily includes:
A global community of 1,000+ entrepreneurs and growing since 2010;
A venture capital firm deploying its third fund of US$ 150 million investing across startups working on new technologies such as blockchain and AI, and across vibrant regions such as Southeast Asia, now raising their fourth fund;
A coding school that re-skills local talent as junior software developers with courses such as front-end / back-end, iOS / Android, data engineering, smart contracts, and more, where graduates are matched with startups and tech companies.
AppWorks was founded by this guy called Jamie Lin (no, we are not directly related, but maybe our ancestors shared a bloodline at some point since we both have ties to Yilan). Jamie is the reason I joined AppWorks in the first place (I had my first AppWorks job interview with Jamie and within 5 minutes I knew I had to work with him), he’s been my biggest inspiration these past few years, and I’m lucky that in the future I can always call him a mentor and a friend. I’m grateful I got to work closely with him for the last 5 years, and let me share why you might want to get to know him better too.
Ever since I’ve been alive, Taiwan’s global presence has been around hardware and semiconductors. I was born in the early 90s, and throughout my adolescent years, Taiwan enjoyed the continued growth in manufacturing capabilities. I got this chart below from Crunchbase showing the # of investments made in Taiwan’s startup ecosystem (you need Pro to see this chart) and you can see that at some point around 10 years ago, people started paying attention to startup tech. Although correlation ≠ causation, it’s a curious coincidence that when Jamie moved his whole family and life back to Taiwan from the US and kicked off AppWorks’ first accelerator batch in 2010 and its first VC fund in 2012, things started moving along in the startup space as well. Can’t deny the good timing~
Since then, we’ve seen great growth in the ecosystem with plenty of other accelerators, VCs, and startups building in the space, and I believe the web3 wave will bring an advent of new opportunities to Taiwan and the world.
In more recent years, Jamie has been spending a lot of his time running one of Taiwan’s largest telecom companies, Taiwan Mobile, as its CEO. But still, his focus and discipline allow him to balance working on AppWorks (early-stage initiatives) and Taiwan Mobile (conglomerate-level business), with both having a sizable impact on the overall economy and ecosystem.
How does he do it? From what I’ve gathered, it’s because he’s one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met in my life. He wakes up extremely early (around 4am) and goes to bed early, allowing him to have quiet time in the morning to think about the most important things while his mind is rested and refreshed. He runs 3+ times a week and trains for annual marathon races to balance his physical and mental health. He hosts public and open office hours every Friday, mostly for founders but anyone can sign up to chat with him (ping me for the link). He makes time for the people that matter to him including his family, his coworkers, and of course, founders. When he has free time, he’s digesting interesting content to write insightful posts for founders and the local tech scene (check out his posts on Facebook or LinkedIn). And this is all just on the AppWorks side, he’s probably more intense on the Taiwan Mobile side!
Watching Jamie work and seeing someone this inspirational gave me the drive to work hard and make an impact myself. And while it does seem sad that I would leave AppWorks, it’s actually the place I’ve willingly committed the most time to in my life (5 years!!), and I feel like I’m ready to move on to the next chapter of my life. In the meantime, I wanna share the biggest lessons I learned working at AppWorks and maybe inspire you to do more in the ecosystem too 🙂
Year 1 at AppWorks: How leveraging technology can significantly improve lives
In my first year, I was mostly observing, absorbing, and learning from founders, my coworkers, and the rest of the startup space. I come from a digital marketing background and had worked at a relatively established US tech company prior to AppWorks, so everything was pretty new to me in the startup space and I wanted to get up to speed on things like reading term sheets and how to run a regional accelerator program.
Instead of the term sheets and programming, it seemed like my role consisted of seemingly simple tasks like:
How to take effective notes for collaboration
How to communicate through docs, meetings, and other channels
How to write and organize emails efficiently
Etc.
A glorified intern / assistant! Or that’s what I could have thought. I decided to trust the process instead and over the last 5 years, I really honed my ability to lead and be helpful for other leaders too. Now I’m confident in my ability to support any type of project and be able to collaborate effectively with others, whether that’s professionally through work-related groups or personally for gatherings and friend groups. I’m always still learning and trying to be better, but I think I’m in a pretty good place now.
Today, I realized this helped me understand one of AppWorks’ most important core values: Founders First. It’s pretty self-explanatory that AppWorks would always prioritize founders above all else, but learning how to collaborate well meant that I was able to provide the best for the founders, and give them a smooth and effective experience as they went through the Accelerator program throughout the years. By the end of my time at AppWorks, I had accumulated years of knowledge and wisdom on how to make magic happen through leveraging tech and helping founders.
Year 2 at AppWorks: The halo effect of building communities and strong relationships
In the past, I used to think that relying on relationships and communities was considered “cheating” if I ended up benefiting from knowing someone, like getting a job referral through a friend / family member. A bit arrogant and naive to think like that haha.
Working on the Accelerator program helped me understand the true power of how focusing on relationships and community-building can create beautiful, spontaneous moments. Just making sure the setting was right and the attendees were in good company with each other would result in wonderful conversations and connections, sometimes even forever friendships. And this is really what life is about. Meeting people and getting to know them on a deeper level, because that kind of knowledge and insight can’t be found anywhere else. And the more you understand people, the better you can navigate this human-focused world.
Hopefully being older and wiser, I now understand why AppWorks highlights Build Community as one of their top values as well, because with the community that AppWorks has built this past decade, the ecosystem is more robust and the members can help each other much more easily than without having a community. Less work for me ;) I also learned the valuable lesson that there are many people I will disagree with, but maturity comes from working with those people by finding some common ground for each others’ goals (side note: highly recommend reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu).
Year 3 at AppWorks: Growing leaders through character-building and accountability
By the third year at AppWorks, I had comfortably been through a few batches and tried my hand at some early-stage investment deals, so I was ready to take on more leadership responsibilities. There’s this core value at AppWorks that focuses on being a good DRI: directly responsible individual. For every project, task, or team that we work with, AppWorks will assign a coworker to be the DRI of that project, task, or team.
Ultimately, this makes the DRI in charge of the decision-making and own the results, and allowed me to break out of my comfort zone to take on bigger and more challenging responsibilities throughout my time at AppWorks. I became the DRI of every following accelerator batch till I transitioned out of the role this year. That gave me a ton of responsibility to be able to manage a team of event curators, interns, and coworkers to make as good of an experience for the founders and community as possible. I think I did good work, and based on feedback from founders, I think they think so too! Or maybe they’re just really nice, which is also a very true possibility.
Year 4 at AppWorks: How communicating effectively can positively affect the environment
One of the most important lessons I learned from AppWorks is the idea of Thoughtful Over Communication. Pretty self-explanatory also, where over communicating > under communicating, but being thoughtful about it so it’s not spammy. Though just because it’s easy to understand doesn’t mean it’s easy to actually execute. It took me years (and I’m still trying to improve this skill) to get better at it. I think most of the world’s problems come from miscommunication, so the more we practice this kind of mindset & communication style, the better we can come up with solutions collectively.
In my 4th year, AppWorks assigned me a 6-month task: to take acting classes! It was actually quite difficult for me to find something suitable in Taiwan with my average Mandarin-speaking skills, but luckily for me, my high school classmate Gorby Shih was in Taipei during COVID and offered to share his theater / acting / director knowledge with me. He set up a whole course for me to learn about different concepts like Uta Hagen’s acting technique, and I definitely learned how to be a better communicator through these lessons. My biggest takeaway from learning acting is that it’s not about pretending to be a character, but digging deep within myself to see how I would truly react if I were in this character’s situation. Being able to vocalize my vulnerability allowed me to be a better leader and be more thoughtful about my communication.
Year 5 at AppWorks: Why I / we have to continue to build and grow Taiwan
My favorite take-away from my time at AppWorks, and it really took me 5 years to fully understand the bigger picture, is learning how to truly appreciate Taiwan. I’ve never had much of a close relationship with my motherland, even though I’ve come to Taiwan every year since I’ve been born and spent high school here. As a Taiwanese living abroad for most of my life, I took it for granted that I come from this beautiful island country.
Today, I have a much deeper appreciation and now I fking love Taiwan. One of AppWorks’ most important missions is to Make Taiwan Better and if you can see, from building a large startup community of founders helping other founders, to sharing resources & capital with innovators of the future, and to helping local talent find more lucrative roles for their careers, many initiatives that AppWorks takes can directly or indirectly help Taiwan’s overall ecosystem grow. I’ve fully embraced this value by now, and to the point where I feel like my output for helping Taiwan would be more beneficial if I did more in the overall ecosystem, not just within AppWorks.
5 years ago, I left my previous role at Zappos based in Las Vegas and moved back to Taipei. At that point, I had been living in the US for 7 years and unfortunately it did take a toll on me. During my time there, Donald Trump became president and as an immigrant, Chinese-looking young woman, I realized that it would be an uphill battle to be considered a first-class citizen there. Before I left Zappos, I had a very intense schizophrenic episode, which was a surprise because I had previously not been diagnosed with schizophrenia. If you don’t know much about it, schizophrenia is easily triggered by environmental considerations, so a big reason I came back to Taiwan was because I needed to surround myself with support from loving people (most of my family is based in Taiwan), a decent government (Taiwan has some of the best healthcare services in the world with its accessibility and affordability), and the general community (Taiwan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world).
Since then, I’ve been able to heal and make progress on myself and my mind. During these past 5 years, I’ve also become even more bullish on Taiwan and I think we have so much to offer to each other and to the world. Despite the shortcomings, it truly is an honor to call myself Taiwanese and to have the privilege to live in Taiwan. Including the reasons I mentioned about moving back, Taiwan also supports democratic values; we elected an intelligent and capable woman to be president; Taiwan is the first and only East Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage; people are generally very nice and educated; there’s a good mix of modern metropolitan cities and small towns surrounded by nature; we have a rich and complex history; and of course, tons of great food, nightlife, and entertainment. In more recent years, there’s been more direct hostility coming from outside of Taiwan, but we keep our spirits up and continue to live our lives peacefully, comfortably, and with an optimistic attitude. I am proud to be Taiwanese and I want to continue to support and build in Taiwan because I think Taiwan deserves to play a role in the global space.
There’s still a long way to go, and a lot of obstacles to overcome, with different perspectives on the problems that Taiwan is facing and will face in the future. Leaving AppWorks allowed me to contribute more time to helping the ecosystem grow in a way that worked for me, for example, I’ve been volunteering my time with SparkAccel and Bu Zhi DAO, with the latter hosting the inaugural Taipei Blockchain Week in December 2022.
I ran the AppWorks Accelerator program from recruiting to program design, and it took up a significant amount of time and energy, to the point where I wasn’t able to do much outside of this role. Now, although I don’t have an income and am not taking a salary anywhere, I can dedicate my time to getting physically and mentally healthier, while also learning how I can help Taiwan better.
I love the AppWorks community and it will always have a place in my heart. I’m still close to the team, the founders, and others in the ecosystem, so hopefully with all of us working together to make the future brighter, we can make anything happen. If you’re interested in getting in touch with them, let me know. Otherwise, let’s all of us fking go to the moon together 🚀