Simon Loong Pui-chi is the founder and group CEO of fintech company WeLab. He reveals how it all began and why his bad grades never stopped him from succeeding.I was born in Hong Kong in 1977 and was a sporty, naughty and rebellious kid. My dad was a civil servant, an engineer, and my mum worked in human resources for a bank.
The admissions officer accepted my brother and then looked over my parents’ shoulder and said, “What about the one at the back? OK, we’ll take him as well.”At Sydney Grammar, my housemaster was the head of the art department. He suggested I take art as my elective and I really enjoyed it and took it for three consecutive years. For the university admissions exam, in addition to English, maths and science, we had to choose an elective and I took art.
I decided banking was a lot more fun, so after I graduated, in 1998, I joined the bank. I did a year of training on rotation and then got a job in risk management. I started to get bored and talked to some friends about a start-up. Usually in these regional departments everyone is very senior, either a vice-president or senior vice-president. I was just a manager and the most junior. Because I was the most junior, they invited me to sit in on every meeting and I got to see how senior people think, talk and present themselves. I learned a lot.
I did classes on managerial skills – organisational behaviour, managing growing enterprises and how to do leadership – and I decided to take classes in something I thought I’d never use but would be fun: entrepreneurship.I was in the US for two years and Frances and I had a lot of fun. We travelled to South America and around the US. A week before graduation, we got married in the church at Stanford. It was efficient for the parents – they came for the wedding and then the graduation.