Joe Lu: From Meta Layoff to HeyMax, Rebuilding Value, Miles & the Future of Consumer AI – E644
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
53 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 18 days ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
How did Joe Lu’s early life in Shanghai and education in the U.S. shape his tech career?
the biggest driver is not trying to have a huge financial outcome. To me the biggest driver is the amount of new learnings and experience. I'm a very experiential person. I'm like the person that you throw me into a city that I'm interested in, I will walk every single street to see what's on the next corner. I will complete the map light by light. And be very serendipitous at the same time. But being a founder, suddenly there's ten billion things I can do tomorrow. There's all these choices suddenly be throw into an open not great for everyone, but I think with the right support structure. Like I have a good gr amazing wife, family supporting me to do this. And with the co-founders, founding team working together, that pushes me through the toughest part.
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS on Success. I'm Jeremy O, Venture Capitalist, Sarah founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesa.com. Stay well and stay brave. Hey Max.
People call me Max.
It is
a good
thing now.
Because I was hey Max, okay. All right. So could you introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. My name's Joe. I co founded a company with other three co-founders called Hey Max. So our company is based in Singapore. Right now is approaching a series A stage company. We started about just about almost three years ago. I'm personally I born and raised in China for 20 years and grew up in Shanghai. And at year 20, I went for a college program that gave me a dual degree, went to US and University of Michigan to be specific, to experience winter for the first time, for real. And then after that, I stayed in about Seattle for about eight years, working for a pretty cookie-cutter job, working for a big tech company as a software engineer.
If we get our histories right, this is like probably like one of the best time in history to be a software engineer. You get companies throwing perks, eesop, we can graduate university, get like six-figure cash jobs right after the bat, all the fang companies are like hiring like crazy, right? Before AI is taking all the software engineering jobs. So life was pretty good, but it became somewhat boring. So I thought hey Asia is where everything's happening. We decided to look into move to A to Asia. Actually specifically we didn't really want to I think first of all, I think what I was thinking about it it's already two thousand fifteen or two thousand sixteen. So it already missed the waves on the initial China wave.
So I think before maybe before that, if you have US educated Chinese background, go back to China, it's a pretty good advantage and then you can like really build something really interesting that you see in US, right? Using your
What lessons did Joe learn while building Facebook’s first engineering hub in Singapore?
technical background you can do something really interesting. After that, I think the path diverged so much. The progress happening in China tech seem also so different. So it became a more of a disadvantage. Increasingly more of a disadvantage. Oh, you've been like very comfortably living in the US big tech. You have nothing, you know nothing about the Chinese tech. And this is like how I feel so we never really had urge to say like move to China, do Something like catch up the wave in China. We were thinking about some pretty unique opportunities. One, 2016, I look into starting a company in Japan. That's where we all went to TechCrunch event in Tokyo, know a bunch of founders, and I realized that it's probably like way too big of a jump.
Yeah, we're
And then Japan Texi at the time was also really not a lot of like very friendly to foreigners. Not very Anyway, 2018 or 19, so I was lobbying really hard. Hard within Facebook, emailing our CTOs and a bunch of people who are making like location decisions. And I think just about also that time, the context was within Facebook at the time, then called Meta.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Joe Lu’s early life in Shanghai and education in the U.S. shape his tech career?
0:00–3:11
2
What lessons did Joe learn while building Facebook’s first engineering hub in Singapore?
3:11–9:54
3
How did the 2022 Meta layoffs become the catalyst for founding HeyMax?
9:54–16:36
4
Why did HeyMax pivot from AI‑for‑money experiments to a merchant‑category search tool?
16:36–23:02
5
What did Joe discover about the “miles community” and its high‑engagement niche?
23:02–28:50
6
How does HeyMax envision a consumer‑first value model where AI returns value directly to users?
28:50–39:18
7
What challenges did Joe face launching a startup during a funding drought while raising a family?
39:18–53:07
8
How does Joe predict AI will reshape loyalty, value distribution, and the future of consumer finance?
53:07–53:28
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
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