This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lily Wu, a 30-year-old entrepreneur who quit her first corporate role at age 19 and spent a decade working in the startup ecosystem in various roles. She now works for a digital marketing agency.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I joined the accounting firm BDO at age 18, and it was just everything that did not suit my personality. I am a very artistic and creative person, and accounting is not.
I felt extremely constricted by the time and type of work. It was: Here’s how you balance your sheets. Here’s how you input this number and output this thing. It was very rules-based and very process-driven. So I quit after a year.
Everyone called me crazy.
A lot of people said to me: “You’re so lucky to get this out of high school. You don’t know how competitive it is to try to get one of these positions even in your penultimate year or when you’ve just majored in accounting.”
I didn’t know myself
My parents had always said, “When you’re 18, you’re going to be living by yourself.”
So when I got into college, I was thinking of ways I could support myself. I was interested in business at the time, and there were these paid accounting cadetships.
Those are basically accounting firms hiring you straight out of high school, where they basically give you a four-year contract and you work on a rotating basis, like full-time the first year and part-time the next.
A lot of it was also very vanity-driven, right? You’re 18, you get to wear corporate clothes, and you get to go to the office.
So much of that was driven by that image of how cool it would be if I were this person already working out of the office.
I think that, at that point, I didn’t really understand myself.
Testing my career
I felt like I really needed to explore and try out different options to see what resonated with me.
After that accounting experience, I co-founded an education startup at 19, running global career boot camps for university students. That ended up being a seven-figure business. I was 24 when I exited it.
At that point, I thought about whether I wanted to join a company like Facebook or Google, but something I really wanted to do was to learn five languages in a year.
It was 2019, there was no Covid, and there was no such thing as remote work, or it was very, very rare, and so working at Google or Facebook would limit my freedom.
I ended up choosing to work for a very young startup, and I helped them raise their Series A.
It was minimal pay, but it meant that for that year, I could travel and work remotely. I ended up meeting my husband at a hostel in Singapore.
We went together to 17 cities across 9 months, and I took Spanish and Korean lessons.
Finding freedom in corporate roles
When I returned to Singapore after Covid, aged 27, I realized that now every company is remote. I could now work for a Big Tech company.
I joined Stripe. They’re not humongous, but they are considerably larger than what I was used to.
In that role, I had so much freedom and creativity to design it how I wanted. Even though it was a completely different choice, it still matched my values of curiosity, creativity, freedom, and relationship-building.
Finally, I pitched my own role at a Chinese cross-border digital marketing agency — again, a completely different industry from what I’d done before. But it fulfilled my curiosity because digital marketing gives a lot of exposure to wider companies and people.
Values guide my career
I’ve definitely had periods where I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence, especially when I switched from a startup to a Big Tech company.
I didn’t know whether it was possible to get the job, scope, pay, and experiences I was looking for.
Whenever I start a job, I list all the experiences that I want to learn from it. Before I joined Stripe, a startup, or my current company, I knew there were certain skills I wanted to get out of those roles.
I left Stripe after two and a half years because I felt like, in that specific role, I had learned everything that I had set out to learn.
I don’t have any regrets.
I have no certainty about what I want to do in the future.
But, to me, understanding what my values are makes me feel like this is the person I want to become and will be in 10 years, regardless of what I choose to do.
I know that if I have this North Star metric and that is my compass — do my actions match up to those values — I know I’ll be OK in 10 years’ time. I’ll be a curious creative, and have a strong relationship with freedom.
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