My story

In 2008, at the age of 21, I finished my degree in Psychology from the University of Florida and bought a one-way ticket to China. During my time at UF, I contributed to academic research on cognitive training in older adults, which was later published in peer-reviewed journals.

At the time, I had no marketable skills, no idea what I wanted in life, and no desire to work for a corporation, so I got a job teaching English because it was the easiest path to take that gave me enough money to live frugally and still travel often.

But I also knew that if nothing else, I needed to learn Mandarin, so I taught English during the day, and taught myself Mandarin after work.

Over the next 5 years, as I became fluent in Mandarin, I also learned to appreciate how Chinese people hustle much harder than Americans do, and that rubbed off on me (which became the first hints of my entrepreneurial bug).

What I noticed was that Chinese business culture is deeply relational in a structured, hierarchical, conscious way (they call it "face"). Everything people do causes one or more of these things to happen, and the vast majority of foreigners are completely oblivious to it:

• gains face (make yourself look good)
• gives face (makes another person look good)
• loses face (makes someone or themselves look bad)
• saves face (prevents the loss of face from occurring)

While this isn't so pronounced in Western culture, that doesn't mean it doesn't occur.

The fundamental truth is that people do business with people they trust, and trust is built through time, through presence, through showing that you understand their world.

And if you can figure out how face works, you can learn to understand how you are motivated (and how other people are motivated), you can use it to better understand how to work well with others in a way that is mutually beneficial.

My experience living across cultures was so transformative that I later wrote three books: "Succeeding in China," "Succeeding in America," and "China Survival Guide" to help others navigate the complexities of cross-cultural business and expat life.

After 6 years in China, I was an HR Manager for a private school (because I was fluent in Mandarin and tired of just being a teacher but didn't know what kind of business to do).

I was fired by my American boss in China after 10 months because a recent severe concussion had me avoiding going outside because of the dizziness, blurry vision, and constant physical fatigue.

After 6 months of suffering, I got tired of it and decided to change my life and go outside, so I went to a picnic arranged by friends.

At the picnic, I met an American expat named Glen who told me he was planning a live speech event in English (not one of those events to learn English, everyone had to be fluent in English to attend because he wanted to have a very high quality and high-level experience), and since I had nothing going on, I offered to help him organize it.

A few weeks later, our first event happened, and with basically no money spent, we had 100 people attend.

We were so excited by what we felt was just the beginning of something, but Glen decided to step back and let me take it over because his plate was too full already.

I asked my brand-new girlfriend to join me and work on it full-time, and she agreed.

Our second event had 250 people in attendance, and soon after, the city government got wind of us and asked to meet us because we were already the largest event in a city of 15 million people.

Because I was fluent in Mandarin (they didn't speak any English) and my partner was Chinese, and they could feel we were only trying to do something good for society, they decided to give us access to their private venue (a government facility only meant for government meetings). They also gave us a stipend for each event, free media coverage, waived our requirement to apply for a license to assemble (since that's a thing in China), and gave us free reign to run our event how we saw fit (let's be honest, they were allowing us to exist).

By our third event, we had 400 people attend in the new venue and it was like wildfire for us.

Soon after, I was being asked to give interviews by local news outlets in Mandarin, give interviews by local radio stations in Mandarin, go on national TV programs in Mandarin to share how I felt about specific current events (since they only ever had citizens on, and I could give a different perspective).

The government also paid me to privately organize events for them, as well as give paid speeches in Mandarin, and other non-profit and for-profit entities asked me to give speeches. The government even paid me to do cross-cultural communications training for their city level officials, and a few publicly listed corporations hired me to do the same for their boards of directors.

Over the next 2 years, we continued to run these events, maxxing out at 700 people per event because the venue couldn't hold more and it was the largest venue in the city we could access.

This was the best time of my life, and it was all due to networking.

By being the co-founder (and a fluent Mandarin speaker as a foreign expat living in China), I was incredibly unique, and everyone wanted to know me.

But I didn't understand how to take more advantage of the situation and get myself into the real rooms I wanted to be in.

Not until I met Meir Simhi, one of the audience members from my event who decided to mentor me without me asking.

Meir spent the next 6 months teaching me how to understand my value as a connector. He said that since I had the position at the top of that community of 13,000 followers I built, naturally everyone was attracted to me and how I could help them benefit from the network, but because I didn't realize what I had built, I wasn't able to get my foot in those doors.

He said that if I figured out what the people who came to me wanted, and what they had to offer, I could find the other people in my network who needed those things. If I could put them together and make sure things happened, I could earn a piece of the pie.

Finally, I understood what I was missing to become a real entrepreneur, and it was only because I started the event with Glen and grew it with Lisa that I met Meir who taught me what I needed to blow up my career to the next level.

From the middle of 2015, I threw myself into trying to understand what the people in my community wanted and needed, and got involved in many different opportunities, of which 100% of them ended in no deal.

Meanwhile, one of my British expat friends Uri had begged me to check out Bitcoin, and after ignoring it for 4 years (that was the first time I heard about it), I decided to figure out what it was.

I spent hours a day, every day, for 6 months researching Blockchain and Bitcoin in English and Mandarin at the same time, and 4 months in, Uri got us an opportunity to give a speech in Macau for a Blockchain company that was looking to raise funds from investors (which came with 2 nights in a 5 star hotel and casino and all expenses covered plus a generous speaking fee).

Since Blockchain was very early, and I was one of the only people capable of speaking to its value after spending so much time going so deep into it, I used that experience as a launching pad.

After the speech in early 2016, one of my closest friends, Stan, who I hired to come work for that private school back in 2013 introduced me to an American founder who wanted to raise money for a Blockchain project in China.

The founder couldn't speak Chinese (neither could Uri or Stan), but was living in China and was only going to get Chinese money, so he needed me since I was the only Mandarin speaker who understood Blockchain and could speak about it in Mandarin.

After 2 months, I successfully raised $150K for him, and he paid my commission and offered me a full-time job providing him with industry analysis and developing an ICO (initial coin offering) launch system so we could help other founders raise and take their projects public. I did my job really well for a few months and I was just about to complete the system when I found out from the investor I brought that he had given the founder another $150K, which meant I was owed more commission.

So I approached the founder to tell him I discovered he had gotten money but didn't tell me. He told me plainly to go to hell, so I quit the job and took the system I was building.

Bad luck for him, because if he had paid what he had owed me, I would have never quit, and I would have never used that system to start a new business: the one that earned me $15M.

By now, I had gained fame in China because of my huge event and work with the government and corporations, and now I was making a name for myself in the nascent but fast moving Blockchain industry in China because of my speech, fundraising, and industry analysis.

It was time to use the system I had created.

I had signed a Western client who wanted access to Chinese investors for his ICO about the time I had a random conversation with a Chinese friend who had been using all of his salary to buy bitcoin for the last 2 years.

He had joined a group of other young Chinese people that had made incredible amounts of money from the industry (one guy was 24 and had made over $100M from mining and buying into ICOs), and because I was like them (but I was still kind of broke), he got me invited to join them for a private dinner event: 10–20 people, $1000 per person, 1 guy pays for everyone, and every other week it switches to another member.

I went there and they loved me, and I walked away with $100,000 for that Western client ($5K commission for 90 minutes of hanging out with guys I liked, and I didn't even have to pay for that expensive meal I ate), and they loved the returns, so they invited me again to their next event.

At the next event, I met a new member who happened to run a fast-growing media outlet covering different upcoming ICOs. We became fast friends, and after a few weeks, I had convinced him to start covering my Western clients since his community wasn't directly aware of them nor had any access to them.

I asked him to cover the ICO fairly, and if he truly believed in the project, to tell his community of 250,000 Chinese investors how to invest in it. Since I was already working with the company, if he helped bring in investors, I would share my commission with him, and over the next few months, we brought in over $5M from his investors, and we were both very happy.

At the third dinner, I met a Hong Kong investor who was living in Vietnam (this is the man who became a good friend of mine, one of the reasons I moved to Vietnam a year later, and who invested in my now dead startup).

How's all that for networking? Every opportunity so far in my story came from having the right knowledge and skills at the right time so that when I met the right people, they took me seriously, and because I was introduced to them by people they trusted, I gained their trust and we all made money together.

But that's just barely scratching the surface.

In the early fall of 2017 as ICOs were heating up, I left China to travel the world, and while I was doing that, my name was following me around.

I started getting asked to do advisory, whitepaper development, community development, and from all those interactions I realized there was a massive market for exchange listings, most notably among Chinese clients looking for access to Western platforms.

I brought in a few friends to do contract work on the things that paid the lower amount so I could focus on this new demand that was so immense I was struggling to handle it all.

I immediately started looking to build relationships with exchange platforms, and found a few I really liked and who did things transparently and quickly.

I also found a few people who referred clients to me and saw I executed well and did what I promised (unfortunately during this time, most people were scammers, so being a Mandarin speaker who was also trusted in the industry inside China and now outside China, I was a gem of a service provider).

I negotiated the prices down hard with the exchanges, and added sometimes a fairly large amount for myself and if I had a referring partner. Sometimes, those commissions could reach $20,000 for the referrer.

Naturally, this made people flock to me and throw every lead they could at me.

Over the next year, this is how we generated so much money.

And then, the crypto winter of 2018 came into full swing and my business was dead within a few short months.

Within a few months (August 2018), I started my tech company Sidekick (which became Nerv in February 2020), and in August 2020 I started We Live to Build as a marketing tool to build a waiting list for Nerv in the form of a podcast where the guests became my future potential clients. I had fantastic conversations, got to know them, learned a lot from them, and even told them about what I was building.

While this was going on, my team of 16 was building everything with a tremendous amount of input from myself (I hired my first person from a Telegram group about travel, he happened to have the technical skills I needed to build this company, and from there he brought on other developers he trusted until we had to hire outside out network).

I had used my relationships from previous clients in the blockchain industry and their friends and a Swiss VC I cold outreached to and flew to Geneva to meet in person in 2019 to raise $600K for my company (on top of the $650K I invested myself from profit from the previous business).

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, we ran out of money and weren't able to save it, so we shut down in August 2022 with 200+ founders with over 5000 employees desperate to try our software because the only competitor in the market was horrible to work with.

When I launched We Live To Build, I did it under a different name so that if I ever had a successful exit from Nerv (or Nerv was shut down), I would still own the IP behind it and no one could fight me for it (and that's what happened, I own it free and clear 6 years later).

The people I met on the podcast became friends, confidants, and I reach out to them once in a while to share something I've learned, or introduce them to someone else I've interviewed.

Interviewing guests has brought me investor relationships, and startup clients too!

After living in China for 10 years and Vietnam for 5 years, I moved to Portugal in 2022.

I went back to Vietnam to discuss some things with my former investor, and ended up reconnecting with an old Vietnamese girlfriend, and we ended up getting married in October 2025 and she moved to Portugal with me.

I'm still focused on growing We Live To Build so I can help founders better understand how networking done right can change their life like it has for me.

And I'm constantly tinkering with new business ideas, even though I don't really "build in public", although I know I should.

But building a business has always meant more to me than just money. One of my most meaningful commitments right now is donating $50,000 per year to Pencils of Promise — a nonprofit that builds schools and delivers education programs in Ghana, Guatemala, and Laos. After years of watching how access to the right people and information completely changed my life, supporting organizations that give children access to education feels like the most direct way I can pay that forward.

Thanks for listening to my story, and I know you'll love this: