From the alleyways of rural China, to the rough streets of NY, Joseph immigrated to the U.S. in 1979. Raised by a single mother, Joseph and his brother left for America, “the Land of Opportunity,” without any money nor a word of English. Joseph started working at age 9 and by age 14, while serving the wealthy patrons at his uncle’s restaurant, he discovered that Wall Street held the key to achieving his American Dream. The financial markets became his passion and he quickly taught himself how to invest and got his first brokerage internship at the age of 16. In 1994, he graduated from UCLA and realized his goal of working on Wall Street at Credit Suisse. He went on to have a successful 12 year career on Wall Street and received numerous industry awards while at Credit Suisse, UBS and Deutsche Bank (DB). In 2005, he gave up a seven figure bonus at DB to help start one of Asia’s largest home grown hedge funds of the time. In the summer of 2008, the fund returned all the money to investors months before the ensuing Global Financial Crisis (GFC). In the fall of 2008, in the midst of the GFC, he teamed up with new partners to start a small institutional brokerage named Aviate Global. The brokerage started with six people in a tiny office and quickly grew from zero revenues to $30mil in revenues in just over 2 years and the firm was sold to India’s second largest listed financial services company in early 2011.

He retired from the finance industry in June 2014 to travel the globe in search of the next big idea. In early 2015, Joseph started Oracle Strategies Limited (OSL) which aims to give back to the community by investing in transformational technologies that catalyze positive social impact. He has been a guest lecturer at PolyU HK, and has spoken on the topic of innovation and entrepreneurship at the top European business schools. Joseph also serves as Mentor and Advisor to Tsinghua University’s x-Lab and is currently working on revolutionizing education to prepare a new generation of youth for the careers of tomorrow through a transformative P2P learning startup that helps children discover their passions early, similar to the way Joseph discovered his passion at age 14.

He’s a co-founder of EXLHub, an AI-driven online learning platform for advanced computer science.

Favorite quotes:

“The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people.” -Peter Diamandis, SingularityU

“Education is what others do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself.” -Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab