Dave Liu, CEO @ Liucrative Endeavors and former MD at Jefferies
Dave is currently the CEO of Liucrative Endeavors, a strategic consulting and investment firm for high-growth companies. He previously spent almost 25 years at Jefferies, where he progressed from Analyst to Managing Director, co-running all Digital Media and Internet investment banking activities. Dave is also an artist and writer who publishes a career advice column called “Breaking Bamboo,” and a cartoon series called “The ABC Life.” Dave recently published a book, The Way of the Wall Street Warrior, a humorous and irreverent guide where he captures the lessons he’s learned about conquering the corporate game from his time on Wall Street.
In this episode we spoke with Dave about the following:
Experiences early in his career that compelled him to unlearn some of the Confucian values he grew up with
How behavioral economics, and prospect theory, in particular, influenced how he approaches his career
Why thinking about himself as a unique durable good helped him advance to Managing Director at Jefferies
You can listen to him below, on Spotify, or wherever else you get to your podcasts.
On growing up as the majority in Hong Kong, and then being a minority in the US
“The inherent biases that we all have as human beings affect the way we think and look at the people we meet. Unfortunately, race is one of the most obvious ways that we judge one another. Growing up as the majority in Hong Kong, there’s an assumption that because you are the majority, you are the customer we are targeting. You are probably the boss, and you are the person I need support from to get ahead.
When you come to the US, you see that it is completely flip-flopped. AS an Asian American, you are the minority. In many ways, you are the least powerful minority in a lot of situations. You go from a position where your customer looks like you, your boss looks like you, to where it does not. Being able to jump from a situation where I was the majority to know where I am the minority allowed me to be very emphatic.
One of the tips I give Americans is to leave. Go somewhere else and see what it is like where you are not the majority, where the majority of people do not speak English, and you are the foreigner. I know what that feels like.”
The difference between being great at a few things versus being good at everything
“The following is a piece of advice I give a lot of Asian Americans. One of the challenges being raised in Asian American culture is that you are taught from day one to be good at everything. In reality, in my view and my own experience, the way the business world works is that if you are good at everything, you are not great at anything. It is actually a recipe for disaster. That is the time when senior management at companies starts to ask themselves who they really need.
When the time comes to promote someone or give someone compensation, what I have found in my career is that people that are really great one or two things are aligned with the profit-making part of the company, they always get ahead faster than people that are only good at everything else. People may be actually good at the one thing that matters, but if someone else is great at it, that person generally wins out. Particularly if they know how to lobby and politic their way up the ladder.”
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Until next time,
Jay and Angie