Vince Chan
speaker
6,989 appearances
347 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Vince Chan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This is a very special episode. I've never had a guest with the same first name as mine. And you are the first. Groundbreaking, really. So, Vince, let's start with your story. Share your history and career path with us. Then we'll talk more about different aspects and elements of your experience. Let's begin by getting to know more about you.
Got it. Thank you. Yeah, so Today I'm an entrepreneur, but maybe I'll start from my origin. I was born in South Korea and I grew up there until I was 12. Then I immigrated to Canada and then I came to the US for college and then navigated to different parts of the world and came to where I am today. I would say there are a few things that have really marked my life.
The first thing is definitely the immigrant experience has been a really big component. Moving from South Korea to Canada when I didn't really speak much English at age 12, I think really forced me to really discover myself again at age 12 and really invest in learning and education as a way to adapt to a new environment.
The second thing that has really marked my experience is just post-education, going through a lot of different professional experience across consulting, international development in different countries, and just really learning what is it that I really care about, about the world, which for me, sort of the thread was people development, capability building, and talent development.
And so present day, I'm working on a startup that is an education technology company that helps people, so professionals learn together in group.
SparkWise, that's your baby. But before we dive into SparkWise and all the exciting new initiatives, let's talk about your journey. You mentioned moving from Asia to Canada and United States. which is somewhat similar to my own experience. I moved from Hong Kong to Canada and studied in the United States.
While you studied engineering at Princeton, then you transitioned into public administration at Harvard, focusing on economic development and eventually moved to different parts of the world. What drove you to make those transitions? How did these experiences enrich your character? Or perhaps it was the other way around. Wasn't your character that drove all those moves?
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I would say the thing that comes to my mind is, so first of all, I've for a long time been on a quest to find what is it that truly motivates me intrinsically. And today I feel like I've found it, especially with the work I do in Sparkwise. But that journey was very long.
I think the part of the reason why it was a long journey is that growing up, I would characterize my young self as a people pleaser. Getting a lot of validation and enjoyment from things that others tell about me. And which means for a long time, I was very much driven by extrinsic things, whether it be compliments, like awards or prestige or things like that.
And I always felt like that wasn't the sort of the thing that really fulfilled me. And I was constantly looking for what is it, the thing that motivates me. So my winding sort of career path reflects that journey. Now, I would say There are maybe two things that guided my process. One of which actually comes from my background in engineering. So I studied in operations research.
And one of the things I learned in that discipline is that when you are trying to optimize a mathematical function under a lot of uncertainty, What you do is you actually double down on the areas of the function that you just have no data points on. So you actually gauge whether those parts of the functions are high value or not for you. So I apply that principle to my career, which means I...
When I first started undergrad, I went to McKinsey and that was honestly just me not knowing what I wanted to do at all. And McKinsey just sounded like a cool organization that everyone said was prestigious and good to work for. So I just went into it blind. But
Beyond that point, I was chasing things that I just hadn't experienced, where things were uncertain, so I can learn more about them and letting my intuition guide me. For instance, right after McKinsey, I went to Tanzania and worked at an NGO. I had an inkling that I cared about social impact, I had an inkling that maybe nonprofit could be a really interesting kind of organization to work for.
I obviously had no experience working in Africa. I had no experience really working as a project manager in an NGO. And it felt like an opportunity that was very far away from what I knew. And by going there, I would discover. After that, I went to a year in Tanzania. I realized I really like high impact work, but they didn't really like the
NGO model and the incentives around what that environment creates. And so I actually ended up going to Colombia in Latin America and working at a startup. My first time in Latin America and my first time in a startup, but it was a way for me to really discover, again, a very different environment where I can experience that setting. and see what I like.
So those are a couple examples of how I chase uncertainty as a way to really discover what is it that really motivates me. There's the second sort of thing that I use a mental model I use is the idea that you can only really discover and learn your true preferences by gaining firsthand experience.
I think a lot of times people spend a lot of time theorizing what might be good and then apply after theory. I think the other way around, I feel like you're better off
leading with experience and then distilling and creating mental models around yourself and defining your principles from actually putting yourself in situations where you feel the real constraints of realities and then you realize, okay, this is what I really care about versus this. I don't really care about this.
And for me, that's the reason why I was jumping into these very different environments. And from that, learn what is it that I really care about.
And as I mentioned earlier, briefly, through all these experiences, I learned the thing that I always thought about and found enjoyment in was doing things around people development, talent development, thinking about how do you unlock people's potential and so on. And once I got enough of those data points across settings,
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