Multiple Cofounders and Being a Young Female CEO with Nanxi Liu of Enplug and Nanoly Bioscience

So you can be the female Tony Stark.

I'm working on it.

Do you want to impact the world and still turn a profit? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to Growth Everywhere. This is the show where you'll find real conversations with real entrepreneurs. They'll share everything from their biggest struggle to the exact strategies they use on a daily basis. So if you're ready for a value-packed interview, listen on. Here's your host, Eric Siu.

How many of you have experienced making a bad hire or had bad hires on your team? I personally lost over $840,000 on just one bad hire alone. So that's why I'm doing a free class called the 5 Secrets to Avoiding Bad Hires That Can Cost You $50,000+ Each. All you need to do is to text BADHIRE, spell it out, BADHIRE, to B-A-D-H-I-R-E the number 500-500-500. That's 500 times. to 33444. That's double 3, triple 4, and you'll be registered. I'll see you there. Hi everyone, welcome to today's edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you personal and business growth tips. Today we have Nancy Liu from Enplug, and Enplug is actually a Chromecast for enterprise. Nancy herself has been— has a lot of accolades. I mean, her company's been one of the top 30 startups to watch. Enplug is actually one of the top women-led startups to watch as well. So Nancy, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well. How are you?

Doing well as well. And you have a really interesting background, so why don't you talk a little bit about your background first and how it led up to Enplug?

Sure. When I went into college at UC Berkeley, I actually thought that I was going to go into law school. So it was very much accidental to get into entrepreneurship. When I first started, it was building random gadgets with my engineering classmates my freshman year. And we would build these gadgets and I would say, you know, instead of just letting it die, why don't I just try and make some money from it? So one of the little things that we built freshman year in a weekend project, we showed it to the university and they gave us $10,000 for it. So that was where I think it kind of all started, where I was like, you know what, I think I can make more money doing these little side projects, building these random gadgets on the side than having like your typical job. And sophomore year, I just kept doing that. Helped build this biomedical device company with a couple of friends from high school. And then my senior year, I started a company called Nanoleaf Bioscience. That was completely accidental. Like, I met my co-founder at a bar. I don't even think I was 21 at the time. We met at a bar and immediately, I mean, I learned that he was a famous biochemist. So I said, let's work together. And during my senior year, I served as its CEO. We raised a bunch of money, enough that it's been funded for the last 4 or 5 years, and it's still operating successfully today. And all of that basically senior year. And right before I was about to graduate, I met my co-founders for InPlug. And it wasn't— we didn't really have an idea for mPlug. It was rather, again, I admire the people. I admire my co-founders, and we said, hey, if we can put all of our brains together and build something, I think we can do something pretty big.

Interesting, okay. And just for context, I mean, mPlug, I mean, in Los Angeles, whenever I walk to some— especially the Asian areas, you'll see these big TVs with like— it could be like social updates and ads and things like that. Is that correct?

Yeah, so what we do is we provide software for companies so that they can show any kind of content on displays. It's taking regular displays that only show one-way communication into two-way. So we have this app market where the business can choose whatever kind of content they want. They can show their own advertising, they can show their live Facebook feed, live Twitter feed, their Instagram photos, etc.

Okay. Now, how does growth look today? I mean, feel free to share whatever numbers you can share, you know, we're open.

Yeah, sure. We started selling our software last year. We sell our software, we played around with the pricing model quite a bit, but it's $99 per month per license, and each license corresponds to one display that they use their software on. And since September, we've had over 300 paying companies around the world, and we have Customers ranging from places in Nigeria to Australia, Japan, Slovakia. We're used at this 15,000-person concert in Slovakia. So, it's used inside of stadiums, gyms, shopping malls. Wherever you see a display, we're applicable.

Okay, got it. Now, what's the primary growth engine for you guys?

It's actually been very interesting. 90% of the deals that we closed last month came in through inbound leads, meaning that they came to our website, they signed up, they requested info. This wasn't always the case. When we first started the company, it was literally the co-founders going around town knocking on doors of restaurants and asking the restaurant owners, hey, would you be interested in adding inPlugs software to your display and turning your kind of boring TV content into showing your restaurant's live social media feeds? And so we did that at the beginning, so it was lots of direct sales. But now, fortunately, we focused a lot on our SEO efforts, press, marketing, and so 90% of the customers come through inbound leads.

Okay, got it. Now, so it's interesting that you mentioned the social ads part. I mean, well, not the social ads, I mean the social feed sharing part. And, you know, looks like you're friends with Tim who runs TintUp too. So are you guys partnered up? Are you guys doing something similar? Like, how's that working?

Yeah, we do something similar. So they focus just on the social feeds, and they, you know, they're great for events. So how we differentiate ourselves is we're for companies that manage massive numbers of displays. They need more than just ways to show content. They need to manage all the content. So whereas TinTap only shows social feeds, we can show social feeds, we can show videos, we can show whatever. If you want to show a website, you can show a live website, you can show interactive games. So we have the largest number of content for digital displays through inPlug's app market. And many of these apps are built by third-party developers. So you can think of it, it's kind of like Apple's app market. You buy an Apple phone because you get access to their app market. Similarly, you buy inPlug so that you can have access to a wealth of content and marketing tools.

Got it. Okay. Now, I want to dive back into user acquisition a little bit. And you use— I'm going to assume that the first 100 customers or so, I mean, a lot of hand-to-hand combat, door-to-door, right? Can you go into a little more details as to what you guys were doing exactly?

We went through quite a few changes in our business model. When we first started, we were actually installing displays into the businesses. So if a business didn't have a display, we're like, oh, if you pay us $50 more each month, we'll actually install a physical display. And that was a learning experience for us to see how difficult it was for businesses to actually not only get displays up and running, but then to actually try to think about how to manage all of these displays. So then we shifted to just selling to companies that had big networks of displays. They are already using some kind of digital signage software to manage all the content, because they need to have real-time access to see which displays are up and running, What's the internet connection speed, etc.? So our software provides them 100 pieces of data points every single second on every display, exactly how much memory is being used, all the interactions that are happening, and we share that analytic back with our customers. And so it shifted from, again, working with hardware to now being pure software.

Interesting. Cool. And I'm assuming that's been a worthwhile change for you guys, huh?

Very much so.

Okay. You have, is that 5 co-founders?

Yes, we have 5 co-founders, but one of our co-founders is no longer with us.

Got it. So how is it being with 4 co-founders? I mean, how do you divvy up all the work? 'Cause you hear all the time people are like, 5 is too many, 4 is too many, 2 is ideal. What's your response to that?

I would probably have agreed with them if I hadn't been part of InPlug. I would've been like, yeah, don't have more than 2 or 3 people. But with InPlug, I think the reason, reason that we've been able to be successful is because we had so many co-founders. There were so many pieces to our business that we needed to have 5 equally dedicated people to be part of the business at the beginning. So now for the 4 of us, our roles have actually shifted to what we did. Before, we were just doing a little bit of everything, but we also did have a specific responsibility. For me, at the beginning, the first year, it was marketing, press, customers, finance, investors. For Alex, my co-founder, he started out as CTO and he built the first layer of our software. Now he transitioned to COO because we have somebody who manages the engineering team. One of our first engineers, Tina, is now our CTO. And Alex then transitioned to COO where not only does he oversee the engineering department, but he oversees All of the departments. Zach went from doing design to now product development, so it's more than just visuals and the marketing materials. He oversees the design and look and feel of our software. And then Navdeep, he's gone from actually working with hardware when we were working into hardware, now being very much our Chief Information Officer, telling us, okay, these are the internal tools and software that we use.

Got it. Now, so it sounds like, you know, you're at least the co-founders and everyone on the team is probably really talented. You know, you're able to switch people around often, but then sometimes you hear about, you know, companies that people that are like no longer a fit, you know, when Netflix switched from, you know, shipping out DVDs to now doing streaming. Have you ever encountered anything like that yet, or is it still pretty early stage?

Yeah, I mean, I think us getting rid of having anything to do with actually installing hardware was a great learning experience for us. At the beginning, we needed people to just use our software, and so we would just give out TVs so that people had our software running in their business. And we shifted away from not doing any of that. So that was probably the biggest shift in our business model to date, and it's been really good, and I'm really glad we did it. Of course, you know, I always wish— I wish we did that transition faster and sooner.

Wait, so is it— okay, I'm imagining you going out and installing TVs. So is it the actual— did you guys hire people outside to do the installing, or were you guys actually doing installations yourself?

We did both. We did both. I had done a couple of installations. Actually, all the co-founders had done like actual installations, and we would work with certified technicians to go out and install these physical displays. It was a grueling process.

Wow, sounds like—

And I'm so glad we do not do that anymore.

Yeah, sounds like a logistical nightmare.

Yes.

But, okay. Now, can you talk about a point in time where the company was on the brink of failure? Was there anything like that?

I'm kind of like the believer that if you don't want something to fail, you just won't let it fail. I'd say the closest that we've ever had to that was probably a year and a half ago. So, a year into building our company, I guess we made a hire that just wasn't a good fit, and this person could have just totally destroyed our culture and had basically threatened to take all the team. Actually, basically emailed half the team and be like, hey, join me. And it was such a great learning experience for us to change our hiring practice. So instead of having only one co-founder interview somebody, we learned no, no, no, all co-founders have to interview a person, especially if it was— for a leadership position before we hire that person. And that was such a great learning experience for us. And since then, it has just totally, after that experience, because we survived that experience, it just totally made us stronger, and our growth totally just skyrocketed after that experience, because we figured out what to do, and we realized the most important thing is certainly the people in your company.

Totally agree with that. I think we had one hire last year that cost us about $840,000.

Wow.

And cost another employee too. So I mean, these bad hires, they really compound. So I think there's a lot to talk about there. But I mean, can you walk us through like what your hiring process looks like? Because I always think that's interesting. Everyone has like an interesting process.

Yes. Before, I think it was actually myself putting out the job posts. A lot of the people, like half of the people that we have on our team are just through my personal network. People that I knew in high school, people that I knew in college, people that I was part of organizations with while I was in college. And it was me posting the jobs, and then we had my chief of staff Brenna do the first round of interviews. And if they went through the first round well, then they went and met with the department head that that person would work with. And then after the department head, like for example the marketing director or our director of engineering or our product director, then they would meet with all the co-founders in person and then have an interview. And so that was a— we started doing that after our hiring goof-up a year and a half ago. And it's been working out really well. So much so that Brenna is now formally our Director of HR and Culture. So she does everything related to bringing on new teammates and making existing teammates really happy.

Okay, cool. Yeah, we'll have to— maybe I'll get a template from you sometime down the road. Cool. So I read somewhere that, you know, you guys have some really interesting company activities. You talked about LAN parties, especially something that really hit home. I mean, when you guys played Counter-Strike, so something I used to play a lot. So talk about your company activities. You know, let's hear about the LAN parties and all that stuff.

Yeah, I think we have a very unique company culture, and you can kind of tell our company culture because we just got a We didn't really have a logo before, it was just our name, but now we actually have a logo. And half of the team is getting the logo tattooed on them. So you can tell, like, there's this very— I don't know how many other startups where half the team go and get the company logo tattooed on them.

Real, real tattoos?

Real tattoos, real tattoos. It's because people are so dedicated to Implug, it's crazy. We're so fortunate. Like every day I think my co-founders and I are like, oh my gosh, like is this for real? Like just how—

Are you guys all doing it?

Yes, yes. Oh yeah, absolutely. So we do a lot of team activities together, but we have this very family-oriented culture because we started the company in a house where everyone lived and worked out of a house. And even when we started hiring people that lived outside of the house, they came to the house to work. Obviously now we've grown and we have an office. But a third of the company still live in the house together. We have breakfast together, we have dinner together, we see each other literally 24/7. And that means you really have to like the people that you work with, and the culture has to be set that you're happy to see these people 24/7. So the people on our team, they're not just our coworkers, they're not just our teammates, but they really are like our family and our best friends.

Got it.

So the activities that we've done, we do a lot. So last week we did rock climbing. We all went rock climbing together, and that was really fun. We did a Mammoth ski trip together where we rented a 3-bedroom place and we crammed everyone in there. We've done a Laguna Beach trip where we had a condo on the beach. That was one of our teammates' grandparents' condos, and we all stayed there, went to the beach, What's also unique about the culture, we go to our teammates' weddings. So we've had so far 2 weddings, and both of the weddings, they, our engineers, it was 2 engineers, they invited everyone on the team to their wedding. So it kind of speaks a little bit more also about our culture and how family-oriented it is.

Nice. You know what I really noticed? You emphasized the word teammates and you don't say employees. What's the story behind that?

Yeah, all of the co-founders, myself, Zach, Alex, we've all been part of team sports and we really value people who put team first before themselves. I think the success of a startup, it's not going to be because of one person. One person will not make our startup successful. It is really a team effort. So while we give personal recognition to people when they do well, we always emphasize that it's It's always about the team. When people join our company, we always ask them, you know, like, what kind of team sports or team activities have you been a part of in the past? Because we found that people who are very team-oriented work the best for our company culture.

Totally agree with that. I use that question for sales especially as well. It's like a must-have. You know, one thing that's really interesting too, I mean, a lot of people that are probably going to listen to this, especially girls too, they're wondering, you know, how does a young girl become like a startup CEO? I think more of that, more and more of that's going to be happening, but what's your advice?

You have to be thoughtful that you will have less time than your male counterparts to make an impression, especially if you're pitching your business. It's unfortunate that it's that way, but I have noticed that. I've noticed even when sometimes we've caught people when we interview them, it's the co-founders, myself and my co-founders, which are all men. We've noticed that even though I'm the CEO, some of the interviewee candidates, they'll look at my co-founders way more than they'll look at me, even though I'm the CEO and they really should be like talking to me. So it's kind of funny, these underlying psychological things that happen. So for a female entrepreneur and a young woman who wants to start, it's tough. It's definitely tough, and that means that you have to be tenacious. You have to be working even harder. But it also means that you have a lot of opportunity to stand out. I'm thankful for the opportunities I've gotten because I've been a young female entrepreneur, invited to speak on panels that I probably otherwise wouldn't have been invited to speak on. A couple months ago I was in Italy and I was on a panel where I sat next to the Prime Minister of Italy, the Prime Minister of Finland, CEO of New York Times, CEO of Chrysler. Those kind of things actually happen pretty frequently. And I think there's a lot of opportunities for women entrepreneurs to kind of find those niche opportunities. And I'll also say for female entrepreneurs, it's all about helping fellow female entrepreneurs. So for me, I actually, the people I spend the most time with are fellow female entrepreneurs that I've become really good friends with. For example, yesterday I went to the Grammys with 2 other female entrepreneurs. way more successful than I am. I mean, they've— one of them sold a company for half a billion dollars and the other has sold a multi-billion dollar company. They're my mentors. They're the people I look up to and spend a lot of time with. So I'd also encourage female entrepreneurs to find people that they admire and spend lots of time with those people that are more successful than they are and smarter than they are, because those are the people I learn the most from.

I agree with that. So the point is, you know, you should punch higher than your weight class, right?

Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

That's a good way to put it. I love the quote, you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.

Who's that by again?

I'm not sure, but I heard it somewhere and I just thought, that is so smart. It's really true. And it's really, you know, I've said this on a couple of, like, when I've given speeches, and some people in the audience are like, Dang, I need to change who I hang out with.

Yeah, I got to find out who says— I mean, because I repeat that in my head all the time, but how do I not know who said that? Anyway, we'll figure that out later. Okay, now what is another— I know you talked about the brink, you know, you had that one bad hire. I mean, is there any other big struggle you faced while growing this business or another one that you can talk about?

I would say probably in the first, after the 3rd month or 4th month, maybe sometimes 5th month that you've been operating your business, that's a critical moment, especially when you're the CEO or you're one of the founders, because you kind of plateau. Like the first 2 months is exciting, everyone's building things, there's lots of momentum, but then you get to the 3rd and 4th month is when people are starting to think, I'm running out of my savings. I need to be paying the bills. I'm getting poached by other companies. I could— I have alternatives that I can do now. And so that's when it's really important to keep that momentum going. And so for the co-founders, it was saying, okay, we need to have some milestones and we need to have product out. We need to have a beta product and we need to get some investors in to fund the next year of growth. And so that was a pivotal point. Fortunately, we were able to, you know, just get past that point and get to another ramp-up period. But I would say those are like 4 months into building a business is a key point.

Okay, great. We'll probably need to dive deeper into that some other time, but we're going to leave that for now.

Sure.

Okay. Now, how do you— I mean, you've done all these things already. You're talking with— you're sitting with the Prime Minister of— did you say Italy? Whoever it is exactly. CEOs of these big companies. People that have sold their companies for millions, close to billions, right? How do you stay humble?

Oh, well, it's very easy to stay humble when the people you're surrounded with, you know that you're the least cool person in the room. Most of the time, the places I go to, I am the least interesting person and the least successful person. So, that's quite humbling. I think it's also remembering the— I mean, we live— I share a house with my teammates. I recently just bought a bed for the first time last month. I never— I didn't have a bed before. And the reason I have a bed now is because my room got flooded.

Hmm.

And so, this little, like, Like the sheet and padding that I was sleeping on got ruined. And so, our landlord was like, oh, I'll like reimburse you to buy a bed. So, I bought my first bed. Nice. That works out. I mean, I've always had a very scrappy mentality. My parents were immigrants. When we first moved to the US, for the first 6 years of my life, we lived in subsidized housing. So, I would say it's— I don't think it's Like, I think because my family, half my family is still in— most of my family is still in China and they don't have running water. I visit them all the time. I think it's a reminder that I'm very fortunate to be where I am now, but because I'm in the position I am, I want to make sure that I make the most out of it.

Got it. Now, do you think there's any difference? I mean, when you're with, you know, hanging out with your entrepreneur friends, you're kind of in entrepreneur business mode, but then what about like your home friends? You know, like let's say people from Berkeley, people from high school, there's a different dynamic there, right?

It's funny because many of my friends from Berkeley actually are with InPlug. In fact, I lived with them in Berkeley in a sorority. So, you know, I've kind of kept the same friends. I would say I'm pretty much the same. I'm a really goofy person, even though like I'm CEO, like in the house, I probably just like make the most inappropriate jokes and I end up being like the one that pulls the most pranks on people. So I'm pretty like a jokester in that way.

I guess that's what you need.

Yeah, yeah, because I have to be professional like 99% of my life. The time that I'm with really people I know well, I'm just like off the rockers.

Got it, that makes sense. Maybe that's the secret. One other really— one other thing that I saw yesterday was that it seems like you guys all work your asses off and you hustle 24/7. And there's a lot of people talk about, especially the Tim Ferriss of the world, there's like, oh, how do you balance? How do you disconnect at a certain time? Whatever. And I remember when I was at this company Treehouse, we only worked 4 days a week. When in reality, I was working 7 days a week. Do you guys think you can keep that going, or is that just like for right now?

I don't think it's healthy to be constantly thinking about your business. So I would say for the founders and everyone on the team, we do a lot of extracurricular activities. We do team sports together. I play the cello, violin, and piano. So whenever I'm home, which ends up being about half the time, I will spend at least an hour playing the piano and cello. Like 2 weekends ago, I composed a song with a Grammy-winning songwriter. I mean, I'll do these things on the side for fun. I snowboard. We went on a skiing trip together as a team. My co-founder Alex is a big runner. Like, he will every weekend do, like each day, do a 6-mile run wearing a 25-pound lead vest.

Wow.

He's really like uphill. He's very intense. So we do a lot of—

Disgusting.

Yeah, yeah. A lot of sports activities because I think it actually helps you to not— to actually have diverse kinds of activities because it makes you a little bit more creative and expands your critical thinking.

Okay. What is— I mean, so first of all, which Grammy-winning songwriter was that?

Yeah, his name is Pascal Guyon. He's written Grammy-winning and multi-platinum songs for Artists like Leona Lewis.

Okay. Tell us the story behind that.

Yeah. It's very— I would say every time I meet somebody really interesting, I immediately grasp onto that opportunity because cool people get approached all the time about people saying, oh, let's work on XYZ together. And 90% of people don't follow through. So, I make a note that if I want to do something, I have to do it immediately. So, Pascal, had actually kind of oddly heard about me through some friends. And so he sent me a tweet of him playing this ridiculously crazy piano song that was very hard. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Some random guy just tweeted me this. And I didn't really think much about it. And literally a week later, I was at a dinner hosted by a successful entrepreneur. And I meet him at this dinner. And he was like, hey, I'm the guy that tweeted you that piano song. I was like, no way. And he And at that dinner, everyone had given their backgrounds, and he's French, and he gave his background about how he came to the US, and he's contributed many Grammy-winning songs and multi-platinum albums. I was like, wow, this guy is amazing. So I immediately pulled him aside. I was like, Pascal, I want to write a song with you. And he's like, yeah, yeah, sure, of course, of course. And I'm like, no, no, no, seriously, like next Saturday, what are you doing a week from now? Can we get together? And he's like, okay, sure. So we get together the following week and it's like 4:30. We go to the studio and basically I was like, all right, I want to write a full song in the next 4 hours and I don't want to leave until we finish writing the full song. And so we write the full song in 4 hours. And in fact, I think he wasn't even planning on finishing the song there. And I was like, no, no, no, I want to finish writing the entire song.

Your Chinese roots kicked in.

Yeah. Yes.

Cool. Can you— can we drop that song? Do you have a link to that?

I do. Yeah.

Okay, cool. I'll drop it in the post when it goes live.

All right.

All right, cool. All right. Last few questions here. I mean, so I'm going to change this question up a little bit. What's one piece of advice you'd give to your 21-year-old self?

This is—

I'm like a really candid person. So this is going to sound really funny. Focus on the cool stuff you're building. Boys in college don't matter that much. Focus less on relationships in college, like boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, and actually use that time and just spend it more with your friends and building cool stuff.

Oh, I like that. I like that. Thanks for being candid. Who's your idol and why?

My idol. Okay.

Don't tell me Elon Musk.

It is Elon Musk. I actually have answered this question before.

Have you?

Yeah, I have. I've been fortunate enough. I've met him a couple of times. I just think he's fantastic. I love the fact that he's been able to build so many successful companies in very different industries. I think that's extremely impressive, and I tried to actually do that myself with my biotech company, and with InPlug, and then with music. I want to be able to do really cool stuff in lots of different fields.

Right. That's interesting. You should do that, because there's nobody doing that right now. So you can be the female Tony Stark.

I'm working on it.

Cool. Let me know when you get there. We'll redo it. We'll redo this interview when you get there.

Alright, okay. You've set the bar high for me.

What's one productivity hack you can share?

Ah. So this is something I read on somebody else, on Mark Schuster's blog, where he said when you look at an email, lots of people have the tendency to like read it, think about it, and then not respond to it. And so he said instead, no, you need to either like delete it or immediately respond to it, even if it's like a really short response. I used to not respond to emails and think about it because I wanted it to be like this fully thought email. I was like, no, no, no, it's actually better in the business world. People appreciate fast answers, even if they're like short and not super formal, over like you wait like 2 days and you write this like nice formal response back. So that's something that I've gotten better at, which is like if you see an email, like just instantly respond to it. Or like delete it or do something about it instead of letting it linger in your head because it's just taking mindshare from other things.

Got it, so brevity.

Yes.

Okay, what's one must-read book you'd recommend to the audience?

I recommended the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things to everyone on the team. We got the book and we got the book for all of our team leads, our team captains. I love the book because I think it's one of the most honest books I've read about building a startup. It really shows how difficult it is, not just the first year or the second year. It's that things don't get easier, it actually gets harder. And I really appreciate that kind of honesty.

Yeah, there's not a lot of stories out there like, and for the audience, the author is Ben Horowitz. You're actually the 20th person to recommend that on the show, so I mean, that just shows how important the book is. I mean, I've made people on the team read it as well. I mean, you know, to get an idea of what, like, the shit that really goes down and like it's not easy at all, especially the struggle. I mean, that's what really goes down. It's not all like sunshine and flowers. So yeah, I second that.

And gosh, really? Oh my gosh, so many people are recommending the book. Okay, how about a couple of other funny books?

I love funny books.

At any given time, I'm usually reading 3 to 4 different books. Another book that I actually just really liked a lot is Battle Hymns of the Tiger Mother.

You're like the 30th person— no, I'm just kidding.

Really?

I'm just kidding. No, no, what is it?

All right, okay, so that's the book by Amy Chua that's about how Asian parents, or Asian moms specifically, raise their daughters. It's not so much like the tactics, but it's more— it's about when you do things and why people kind of accomplish things, it's less about luck, it's really self-created. Like you make things happen. And I really appreciated the book because my parents came here as immigrants. They definitely were like, we didn't get here because we got lucky. We got here because we got scholarships to go to grad school and it was really difficult. You make things happen. You can either pursue things or you just think that things will just happen for you, which it doesn't. And the other part that I really appreciate about this story is, for example, the main author, she made her daughters feel very confident. She would push her daughters really far because she knew her daughters could do that, even though her daughters didn't think that she could do that. I really appreciate that because I think when I was growing up, and this is for any, I guess, woman that have young daughters or just daughters in general, my mom only told me stories of successful female women. She didn't tell me stories about the successful men, the Bill Gates of the world or Steve Jobs She told me stories about Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Amelia Earhart. Those were the stories that I grew up hearing, and I think that makes an impact, particularly for young women, because you're already in this very male-dominated world, especially if you're going into tech or starting companies. So I really appreciated that book for that. Okay.

Do you think growing up, listening to those stories, we had another guest on our show, Emerson Sparks. His dad made him read 4 biographies a day, and he said his mind was just blown doing that. Do you think that had a profound impact on you?

Reading biographies?

Not reading biographies, but your mom giving you these stories all the time. And do you think that really helped shape your mind?

Completely. I think it— I used to think that the reason I was like really hardworking or whatnot was because my parents are pretty hardworking. But I think it was actually my mom really pushing me to like feel like I could accomplish anything I want. I did a lot of piano competitions growing up, and every time I lost, my mom would make me feel really bad about it. Not because I lost, But because she said, you could have won. There was no reason for you not to have won. The reason you didn't win is because you didn't practice harder. It was not because of any other reason than something that was totally controllable, you practicing harder. And I think her telling me it's all in your control gave me the confidence to know like, oh, if I really want something, I can make it happen. And I think it's, Confidence when you're young and as you get into, I think, middle school, high school, college is really important to think that, to not be scared to fail. Because oh my gosh, I've lost so many competitions. I failed many times. Like, when I was in college, I started so many different companies. Anyone who was in my sorority or my business fraternity, I think they were just bombarded with like beta codes every semester. I'd come up with like some new app that I built and I'd tell everyone, hey, beta codes to like this new app I built, try it out. Most of the time. Those apps didn't go anywhere.

Cool. So wait, what's the title of the book again?

Battle Hymns of the Tiger Mother.

The Tiger Mother. My God, so that's where Tiger Mom comes from.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, it's funny growing up, I mean, this is probably just an Asian thing, but the attitude that's been instilled into me from my Tiger Mom was it's never good enough. So I think I'll need to check that out. Good recommendation. What's the best way for people to find you online?

They can go to nancyliu.com, N-A-N-X-I-L-I-U dot com. They can check us out at Enplug, www.enplug.com.

Okay, cool. So everyone, this is Nancy Liu, CEO of Enplug. Make sure you go check it out. Nancy, thanks so much for doing this.

Thanks, Eric.

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Thanks, Eric.

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