Who is Eric Su?

1993

Illinois -> Taiwan

I had no idea why I had to leave my childhood friends behind and move to my parents' home country...Taiwan. I couldn't communicate with kids at my kindergarten for a year while I learned how to speak Mandarin Chinese. Started playing a lot of basketball and video games... :)

2004

From Science Park to Trailer Park

I went from walking home and picking dinner up from 7-11 after school in Taiwan to driving through cornfield to get to my school in Indianapolis. I faced one of my biggest life challenges. I had to overcome language barriers, start a new social circle from scratch, and assimilate into a new culture as a teenager without my family around, and in the mean time get study hard in an unfamiliar language so I can get into a good school.

2012

Ditched IU graduation ceremony for NYC

"I'm going to work in investment banking and then change the world." as I told my professor and my class. I graduated with a Finance and Economics degree at Indiana University because well I wanted to make a lot of money. Also, finance and accounting were something I was very good at. I finished my last class and packed everything into a van and drove to NYC hoping to break into finance. No I did not go to my graduation ceremony. adios. :p

2012

Cold-calling and ABC

I cold-called and cold-emailed alumni and strangers for about 3 months and eventually interned at two very small investment banking firms. The internships didn't lead to a fulltime as the market was still recovering. I started selling payment products such as POS systems, merchant accounts, and credit machines with cold-calling and door-to-doors. I wanted to take on new challenges and wanted to be an entrepreneur one day so learning how to sell seemed like a great skill to acquire.

2014

NYC or nowhere

I lived in Chelsea, Manhattan and managed my own sales team. I became a New Yorker. Hustling. Networking. Climbing to the top. Working hard and playing hard. My team and I acquired a lot of merchant accounts and I was promoted to be a junior partner.

2015

Shoes and Europe

I took a 6 months off from my 9-5 job and started to validate my shoes business idea. I had issues with my dress shoes and wanted to make more comfortable and also fashionable dress shoes. 3d printing and digital mapping have improved dramatically, so I wanted to utilize them to customize shoes for people. I went to London to learn how dress shoes were made. My Europe trip changed my personal values and perspectives in life. That's a story for another time.

2017

Leadership

I joined a brand new payment startup as a sales executive. As I talked to customer and learn to sell the product, I developed the sales training, funnel, and strategy and participated in product design. Eventually, I helped them recruit and led a sales team. It was my first true leadership role at work. We grew from 4 people to 70+ people in 2 years.

2020

Javascript, React, Data Structure, and Algos

I can do it

Knowing how to connect with people on an emotional level and motivate people to take action is cool, but I also want to be able to build useful things for the world. I joined Hack Reactor coding bootcamp and used the 2020 covid lock-down to learn how to code and build apps.

2021

Crypto and NFTs

BUIDL and Degens

My first bitcoin was in 2013 but I never saw crypto as something for the future and with real use cases until 2021. I got sucked into the crypto hype and jumped into the rabbit hole. I read everything and tried everything web3 and crypto related. Got a frontend dev job at Jet Protocol on Solana which began my first bull market. I learned about how a DeFi protocol was built from scratch, how a governance inspired by MakerDAO was set up, and the importance of product market fit. NFT and crypto pumped as we know it. We were high on Fed's monetary policy. Lock-down eased. Life was great...