Lily Wu is Southeast Asia Startup Partner Lead at Stripe, a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet.
When life throws her a curveball, Lily seizes the opportunity to forge a new path to create something incredible.
Growing up in Sydney, she imagined pursuing graphic design or animation, but everything changed at 16 when her parents travelled to China to revive their struggling art business.
To make ends meet, Lily tried applying to work at fast-food restaurants – only to be turned down everywhere.
Undeterred, she created her own income by arbitraging shoes from the US – taking advantage of the favourable exchange rate and the fact that Australia was always a season behind.
“My MVP was a Word doc, an Excel sheet and a Facebook page,” she quips. “In one and a half weeks, I made $8,000. By the time I graduated from high school two years later, I had earned $500,000 in profits.”
Applying lessons from art to entrepreneurship
While she may have left her artistic dreams behind, Lily has never forgotten the lessons she learnt from its practice. “Art taught me a lot about entrepreneurship,” she says, “that you need to keep training the muscle of doing and getting started.”
“Whenever you hit a roadblock or blotch your paper in fine-liner pen drawing, there’s no erasing or going back – you have to creatively work around it,” she explains. “By the end, that initial mistake becomes a beautiful part of the artwork.
“You have to start somewhere. When you are too afraid to fail, your sheet will always remain blank.”
