Alumni Profile
Facing the Social Media Frontier Life is full of unexpected turns, and mine has been no exception. As I sat on stage in my Jostens blue gown on graduation night, listening to Hubert Pan (98) and Akilesh Sridharan (98) joke in their grad speech about a future in which every man, woman, and child on earth pays taxes to Bill Gates and Microsoft, I could have never imagined that over a decade later, a huge industry called social media would overshadow Microsoft’s dominance and that I would be working at the center of it. I studied biomedical engineering at Yale, to my parents’ delight. I also met a wonderful girl named Suzanne, whom I married several years later. Preparing for graduation with engineering experiences at school and by working at a biotech company and a national lab, I found the work intellectually stimulating but somehow lacking. I realized I needed more (much more!) human interaction to be fulfilled in my career. My best memories of middle and high school at SAS centered around my friendships, and to this day, many of my closest friendships are the ones formed nearly twenty years ago at Ulu Pandan and later Woodlands. When college graduation rolled around, I took a leap and worked in sales for a portfolio management company, much to my parents’ chagrin as it didn’t utilize my technical skills or promise even a modicum of job security. However, armed with research that many senior executives come from sales (and watching Wall Street and Glengarry Glen Ross), I was determined to give it a shot. I could always go back to engineering, or even better, follow in the footsteps of John Matchett (99), who’s living my childhood dream of being a fighter pilot. (Go John!) It turned out engineering and sales weren’t always like oil and water. I spent the next eight years selling and managing sales teams, learning a lot about capital markets along the way. But with my first child on the way, I still felt something was missing. After deep contemplation and countless discussions with mentors, the answer became clear. As an engineer at heart, I always preferred TechCrunch and Wired over the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. My passion is technology. Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. Having grown up in Singapore, China, 32
S I N G A P O R E AM E R I CA N S CH O O L J O U R N E Y S
Rich Liu (98)
and the US, this mission hit home, as I imagine it does for many SAS alums. Until recently, keeping up with friends and family required flights, snail mail, or long-distance calls, which provided varying degrees of ease and intimacy. Having friends and family far away usually meant (at least for me) that they were not a big part of my day-today life. Facebook was the first technology that actually made me feel as if those I care about, no matter how far away or from how far back in time, could be a meaningful part of my life and I in theirs. How else would I share pictures of my new daughter with all my SAS friends?
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