Success is not just a number, says prominent tech investor Jennifer Zhu Scott

I've been living in Hong Kong for almost 22 years. I love this city with all my heart, but sometimes Hong Kong can get a little bit overwhelming because the pressure of success and the money and status, etc., it becomes too much. How do you balance your entire life? My name is Jen Zhu Scott. I'm the founding partner of InCapital. We help large families to directly invest in AI and deep tech. Having a bit of a struggle when you are young is not necessarily a bad thing. It trains your mindset to prepare you to face some tough challenges in life. I was born and brought up in Sichuan, quite rural area in China. We were very, very poor. Sometimes we even struggled to have sufficient food and basic necessities in life. And today, I have been in the tech industry for 15, 20 years. Coming from nothing, I know how life could be very, very different. To have what I have today, I'm extremely lucky. So I don't want to take it for granted. So there are many ways to define success, and I think to me personally, it's not who has the biggest house or who has the most money. I found those superficial aspects not unimportant, but it's a very incomplete story. Success is very holistic. You have to have a healthy mental and physical well-being to be able to enjoy the success you have. I love to go just for run or hiking. Every step, your brain is telling you you should stop and give you excuse why you should stop, but you have to keep move one foot in front of another and push through. Every single step is a negotiation, but by the end you feel like you're so empowered. You're like, oh, actually I can go a little bit longer. You find more energy, and same in life as well. You feel like, okay, next challenge, I can actually meet the challenge now. So doing good is quite important part of my personal true north. With neuroscience, biotech, the genetics, artificial intelligence, a lot of those technologies that's kind of converging together. We are living in a particularly fragile moment of history. That's why having this intellectual discussion and guidance is extremely important. The point is to have the humility to create the space to have those kind of honest discussions, to make sure the output is positive to the environment, to the world, to the society, and humanity. To me, that is the balance in success.