Phoebe Yang

And my father was diagnosed quite unexpectedly with late stage colorectal cancer.

And he was given four to six months to live.

He lived four and a half months.

And so that really changed the way I thought about my life, but also what I ended up doing.

He had said to me when I was 12 years old, I'll never forget it, he came, I still see his silhouette in my bedroom door.

And I was already in bed almost asleep and he came in and he had been thinking, I guess, and he said, standing in the doorway, if anything ever happens to me, you are to quit school, go to work and make sure your younger sisters can get through school.

Well, fast forward, you know, 15 years later, almost 50, 14 years later, that happened.

And both of, even though I had just graduated, I had two younger sisters, one of whom was in a

in a graduate program and the other who was still an undergraduate.

And so I decided I was going to go work and earn a living.

So I went to a big law firm.

The reality is my sisters are very accomplished in their own right and they didn't need me, but I didn't know what would happen and I was pretty dutiful at that point.

And at the same time, I did a lot of soul searching.

And I knew fundamentally, I don't actually enjoy fighting.

And lawyers, you kind of have to like the fight.

I like to compete, but I don't like to fight sort of adversarially.

I really like to build.

And so I did a lot of soul searching around that.

And I decided, you know what?

I'm not going to be a litigator, which means I'm not going to end up being a judge.