Vivian Chen was always meant to be an entrepreneur. Growing up in an American Midwest immigrant family, Vivian discovered her passion for business at an early age coupled with a natural sense of urgency and ambition, channeling these traits to find work in the fashion and beauty industry. But when her friends started venturing into tech, Vivian found it immensely difficult to follow suit; during this period, she submitted over 150 applications with no responses. The challenges she encountered throughout her many job hunts led Vivian to create Rise and Heyo; two startups that help professionals across a variety of industries to make connections, showcase their abilities, and find meaningful work. In this conversation, Vivian talks about creating her own playbook as a woman of colour that has helped her to secure funding. We also cover the most important tips for increasing your productivity as an entrepreneur by embracing the freedom of working for yourself, and how to overcome unique challenges commonly faced by visible minorities in the startup space.
Vivian Chen was always meant to be an entrepreneur.
Growing up in an American Midwest immigrant family, Vivian discovered her passion for business at an early age coupled with a natural sense of urgency and ambition, channeling these traits to find work in the fashion and beauty industry. But when her friends started venturing into tech, Vivian found it immensely difficult to follow suit; during this period, she submitted over 150 applications with no responses.
The challenges she encountered throughout her many job hunts led Vivian to create Rise and Heyo; two startups that help professionals across a variety of industries to make connections, showcase their abilities, and find meaningful work. In this conversation, Vivian talks about creating her own playbook as a woman of colour that has helped her to secure funding. We also cover the most important tips for increasing your productivity as an entrepreneur by embracing the freedom of working for yourself, and how to overcome unique challenges commonly faced by visible minorities in the startup space.
Learn more about Rise and Heyo.
SPECIAL OFFER for our listeners! Companies, get 1 free job post on Rise. Email hello@joinrise.co
In this episode, we cover:
Quote of the Week:
“I've stuck to my guns in finding people who believe in me. [Securing funding is] about finding the unicorn who will want to be on my side." - Vivian Chen
Hosted by Katherin Vasilopoulos. Made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee.
Music by © Chris Zabriskie, published by You've Been a Wonderful Laugh Track (ASCAP).
Songs used in this episode include: "Air Hockey Saloon," "Cylinder Three," "Short Song 012323," "You Fiddle, I'll Burn Rome," "I'll Stay Here Tonight," "The Oceans Continue to Rise," "Out of the Skies, Under the Earth," "Pick Up a Convict On Alcatraz."
Used under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License
[00:00:00.020] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Hi, I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos. Starting my own venture wasn't easy. After a decade working in the corporate world, I realized that so many things were out of my control, like layoffs and changes in direction. I didn't like the instability. I didn't want that to define my whole career and professional story. And so, I left. I started my own company and achieved more than I ever imagined. Now I'm on a mission to share stories from extraordinary entrepreneurs who are changing the world and who never gave up on their vision. Some people casually step into entrepreneurship because they simply had an interesting idea that they wanted to see through. And then there are people like Vivian Chen. For Vivian, entrepreneurship comes naturally. She grew up in a young immigrant family and quickly developed a fierce sense of ambition and learned business fundamentals early on. She was determined not to squander the sacrifice as her parents had made to give her a better life in the American Midwest. But when Vivian eventually found herself in a successful career in the fashion and beauty industries, trying to make a sudden leap into the tech industry was not easy. At one point, she had even submitted 150 job applications with no luck, but plenty of determination. The experience of facing immense rejection was the catalyst Vivian needed to become the entrepreneur she was always meant to be.
[00:01:34.150] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
She's launched two thriving startups, the professional network Rise and more recently, the personal pitch platform Heyo. Both were inspired by her exhausting job searches. In my conversation with Vivian, we talk about her experiences in being repeatedly singled out as a visible minority and as a woman, how she wrote her own playbook for fundraising both in and out of the pitch room, and the core qualities of entrepreneurship that she's learned to embrace along the way.
[00:02:06.680] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Hello, Vivian. Welcome to the show and thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me today. From what I know about you are a fierce businesswoman and I'm so looking forward to diving into how did you get to this point today? Let's start with that.
[00:02:23.840] - Vivian Chen
Yeah. From a very young age, I knew that I was interested in business, whatever that meant to me as a Asian American growing up in the Midwest. I actually studied business with a concentration in marketing management and operations management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. I think growing up, my exposure to business was really you have a product or service and you sell that to a set of consumers. So very traditional sense of what business is. I didn't have any of the exposure to the common institutions or industries of the Coast. So for example, the West Coast with technology. I had no idea what tech meant, Silicon Valley, any of those things. After university, I stuck with what was interesting to me from a business perspective, and I joined L'Oreal, which is the world's largest beauty company. And what intrigued me about L'Oreal was not necessarily the category of beauty itself. I don't even wear makeup. But what I really loved was this idea that it's changing constantly. And whether you sell one tube of lipstick for $65 or for $6, at the end of the day, it's about how it makes people feel when they're using your product.
[00:03:42.270] - Vivian Chen
Fast forward a few years, I've worked at Lancome, Kiehls, Garnier, Garnier Fructis, and I could see a very clear path of what my life would be if I stick around to corporate. This is also when my friends started to head West to Silicon Valley, and they were joining these startups where they had unlimited vacation, kombucha on tap, ping pong tables, and all these things which were so foreign to me working in a cubicle in a Fortune 500 company where I had 10 days of vacation. So the young and hungry part of me, I call it millennial FOMO. I said, I want a piece of that. I want a piece of that innovation and disruption. I want to move into tech. Unfortunately for me, people started to typecast me as a beauty and fashion girl. And it was very difficult to actually transition and pivot into a new industry. I applied to over 150 plus positions and I kept on getting rejected or ghosted. That feeling of not good enough was something that stayed with me. I remember so vividly of getting rejection after rejection and how it felt to be, frankly, fetal position on the floor sometimes, feeling so broken by a system that felt like just didn't see me through who I was and the potential that I knew that I had.
[00:05:06.880] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Did you find that that rejection somehow created a form of resiliency, though?
[00:05:12.590] - Vivian Chen
For sure. When I left L'Oreal, I gave myself some room to think and to prepare. So I actually took the time and learned to code because to me, I realized that if I wanted to prove to this new industry that I was serious about the transition, that I was dedicated, that I was committed, and I had the chops to be able to compete and be accepted in this industry. I spent about eight months taking various online courses, learning to code. As an entrepreneur now, even though I don't code as a founder and CEO, but it has prepared me to be able to have those technical conversations. How I think of it is it's like learning a new language, it's learning the structure to think. Now I'm able to communicate with my engineers, with my product managers, designers in a way that I could not before learning this new language and framework. And it's made me a much more effective leader and CEO.
[00:06:13.300] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
That's great. So you actually got more skills under your belt to be able to transition from one industry to the other because coding is universal, right? And being able to talk with technical teams is very important because they speak a whole other language than themselves.
[00:06:25.860] - Vivian Chen
Yeah, I think it was this idea of how people kept on positioning me as like, Oh, well, what does this woman from the beauty industry know about tech? I wanted to prove to people that I can and I will, and let me show you.
[00:06:38.350] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Let me go back to that moment where you were applying for about 150 jobs, and then you're not hearing from people. At that moment, did you have this thing inside of you that said, Okay, I really do need to succeed. There's this urgency right now. Can you talk a bit more about that?
[00:06:53.760] - Vivian Chen
I kept on repeating this thing in my head, which is, you just need one. You just need one job, one company, one person to believe in you. You don't have to find a million, you just need to find one. I think that urgency is always in me. Growing up as an immigrant with parents who gave up pretty much everything to come to this country, that sense of achievement was instilled in me. And in some ways, the pressure is there because I didn't really have a safety net. Figuring out how to navigate the career ecosystem, how to create a resume, how to write a cover letter, all these things are things that my parents couldn't share much with me, so I really had to explore by myself.
[00:07:30.940] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
I very much relate to that same situation. Child of immigrant, did homework by myself, didn't have bedtime stories, didn't have any of that. For me personally, I just felt like I had to make it count. I had to make sure that my parents felt like, Okay, it was worth it for us to come to another country. For me, the pressure was incredible to please them and to make sure that I did well and that I represented well and made sure I never embarrassed my parents. It's a very huge, huge driving force. Even today, I still want to be able to impress them with anything that comes up.
[00:08:07.570] - Vivian Chen
What you mentioned about making it worth the sacrifices and the sufferings is something that I think about every day. This idea of knowing that they had given up so much, how can I make it worthwhile for our family so that we come out ahead despite the suffering, despite the circumstances?
[00:08:26.850] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Yeah, make it count, right?
[00:08:28.260] - Vivian Chen
Yeah.
[00:08:29.090] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Did you ever feel separated from your peers? Did you feel like you were not included or there was something else? Because I know I felt like that.
[00:08:37.260] - Vivian Chen
Well, I grew up as one of the only Asians growing up in the 90's in my elementary school. I used to be pulled out of class to go to take photos, for example, for the school newspaper. It's like, Oh, Vivian, come join us in the library and pretend to read a book here. And it would be me and all the other diverse kids. And initially I just thought, Oh, they really like me, or because I'm well behaved, so they want me to be in these photos. And then later on, I realized that it was about representation. I think it's good because it's important for people to see and to see that representation. I was picked out to represent, but I'm okay with that.
[00:09:18.960] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Tell me about how you started your company or companies. You actually have multiple things going right now. Tell me more about that.
[00:09:26.520] - Vivian Chen
Yeah. W e have two products right now. One is called Rise, R I S E. Rise is a leading, diverse, professional focused job community and platform. A lot of the philosophies in Rise stemmed from that feeling that I described earlier of the overwhelm, the self doubt from my own job search in pivoting to a new career in an industry. When we built Rise, a lot of what we did was to reimagine the experience to make people feel instead of a cold or very impersonal job board. Rise is like a friendly, small, intimate gathering of friends and Rise is the host. The second product that we have is called Heyo. Heyo really grew out of the needs of the community that we saw within Rise, which is now we have the support of community. How do we help people tell their stories in a more dynamic and personal way? The inspiration of it came from when we were searching for community manager for Rise, and we had over 3,000 applicants. And some folks actually sent in videos of themselves introducing who they were, why they were interested in our company. And it really spoke to us.
[00:10:41.950] - Vivian Chen
And we turned to each other and said, Hey, why are more people doing this? Is there a way that we can help people talk about themselves, tell their stories in a way that is engaging, personal, authentic?
[00:10:54.060] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
It serves as a great ice breaker, too, in terms of you getting to know the person and getting to see what they're like instead of just reading about them on paper. What stress did this bring into your life? I mean, you're a CEO of these major endeavors, and you came from a corporate world. What did that look like in terms of stress level for you to make that transition?
[00:11:13.640] - Vivian Chen
So I get to make decisions every day that I am accountable for. And I wake up every day very excited by what I get to do and who I get to do it with. And that's been really energizing. So the stress is definitely high. And I pretty much had to unlearn a lot of the things that I was used to incorporate, which is, write up these lists, you have these reports, you have these decks and PowerPoints and these analyzes. When you're a founder of an early stage company, when there is no one telling you what to do, it could be very overwhelming to know where to start. So when I first started, I would just draw these lists of to do's of what I think I should do. And then I spent most of my time planning. I didn't actually spend my time doing things because I was used to that emotion that felt like it was work. But as a founder, what you create is what you put in. So I actually had to stop thinking and just focus on doing. It's like, okay, pick one thing. It doesn't even matter what it is today.
[00:12:12.300] - Vivian Chen
Just get that done.
[00:12:13.600] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Wow. Stop thinking, start doing.
[00:12:16.250] - Vivian Chen
Yeah. So the stressors of an entrepreneur is that there's tremendous amount of freedom, but what do you get to do with that freedom? How are you actually going to turn something from nothing into the first building block? And then what's the second building block? And how are you going to create something from those little mini building blocks that you've collected over the days and weeks?
[00:12:36.920] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Wow. And so how do you juggle multiple ventures now that you're working on?
[00:12:41.370] - Vivian Chen
For us to have really clear goals, it has been very effective in knowing what to focus on. We talk about what is our North Star goal? So literally just focusing on one thing. This has been something that over time I have learned to do instead of thinking about what is the three year plan? What is the five year vision? It's like, no, let's just focus on what we're going to get done this week, this month. As long as we all know why we're marching forward, what is that North Star goal that we're all marching towards? It makes the decisions that we make and the actions that we do, the tasks that we take on much, much easier.
[00:13:19.840] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Tell me more about this shift in perspective that you had to make as well. But many people do it when they move from a corporate environment to then becoming founders and startups and et cetera. What's going through your mind during those doing instead of thinking moments?
[00:13:37.270] - Vivian Chen
I think all of this came over time. When I started Rise, I didn't really know how to build a company. I didn't know how to have a minimum viable product and an MVP. I didn't know how to work with engineers, designers, how to talk to investors, any of those things. And all of it came over time. And it really was about breaking things down and focus on one thing at a time. And I'm of the mentality now that everything is learnable and Googleable. So when I didn't know how to build products or how to think about building products, how to talk to people, how to talk to customers, how to talk to advocates, I would just read blogs, articles from other people who have been through their own journeys, watch YouTube videos. And over time, a lot of the knowledge and insight that I have now came from both incorporating other people's knowledge but also trial by error by making my own mistakes. That transition was definitely not smooth and my pace of learning has accelerated a lot more from when I first started. But it was all about just knowing where to get the information.
[00:14:43.110] - Vivian Chen
And when you don't know something, who do you turn to? Whether it's one on one conversations, online resources, or other ways of supplementing the knowledge that you have to be able to execute.
[00:14:55.330] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Who do you turn to?
[00:14:57.060] - Vivian Chen
Well, it's great to have mentors who succeeded and are titans of industries. They're so far ahead of you that sometimes the day to day struggles that you have, they can't relay to anymore. So for the people that I have to help me on the day to day journey, it's really other founders who are at or slightly ahead of where I am so that they know intimately the struggles that I have and the challenges that I have day to day.
[00:15:22.760] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
I love that you're saying that you are, I guess, echoing and reiterating what many of our guests have said in past episodes, which is it's important to surround yourself by the right community, people who understand my process, who understand what I've been through, and can offer some pieces of wisdom or some insight when things are going wonky.
[00:15:44.150] - Vivian Chen
This is something that I experienced intimately. For Rise, I attempted to fundraise the third week of February 2020.
[00:15:52.050] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Oh, my God.
[00:15:53.500] - Vivian Chen
I had tons of amazing conversations with investors, actually in person, out in Silicon Valley. I came back to New York, my apartment, first week of March, and all the amazing conversations that I had just died. Initially, in the first few months, I thought, This is great, because Rise, initially when I first started it, the premise was around independent work for women. So this idea of working when you want, where you want, how you want. Pre-COVID, this was a very novel concept. I remember walking into companies where people would literally laugh out loud at what I was saying about remote work, about flexible work, and they said, No, that's not us. No, thank you.
[00:16:39.950] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Right.
[00:16:40.400] - Vivian Chen
When COVID happened and it shifted the conversations overnight, I think very few companies go through such a dramatic transition or dramatic change overnight where the vision, the world that you're building to overnight becomes the reality. I experienced that. I know what that's like. And initially I thought, this is great because everyone is on the same page now.
[00:17:05.100] - Vivian Chen
See, what I said all those years, it's true. It's here. But what I didn't account for was that it's now, instead of being this movement, this thing that people banded behind, is now table stakes. Towards the back end of 2020, I really had to reevaluate. What did I want Rise and the company that we have to be when we grow up going forward? One of the ways in now bringing it back to community was for so long of 2020, I was just at home alone in front of my computer. And the months sort of blurred together of what I even did then because it felt so lonely to just open my email, my inbox every day and have that list of things that I wanted to get through. And I lost sight of the world. I lost sight of others around me. And beginning in 2020, I made a pledge to myself and I said, I want to join other communities. I want to talk to other founders. I want to put myself out there and just be around other people. And so I joined all these different founder communities, I no longer felt alone. I still, some of the closest founder friends I have are from those communities.
[00:18:08.130] - Vivian Chen
As well as my first check, an investor. It came from being in one of these communities when I inadvertently attended a practice pitch. And after that pitch, one of the other attendees reached out to me and said, Hey, I'm an accredited investor. I'd love to invest. Which was one of the pivotal and turning moments in my company's journey.
[00:18:33.960] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Tell me more about your experience as a fundraiser, because when we work in corporate and we have our cubicle job, we don't do fundraising. So how did you learn to do that? And what did that entail and did you have any challenges?
[00:18:45.440] - Vivian Chen
Yeah, I sucked at it at first. I had no idea what I was doing. And I pretty much made all the mistakes in the books. I showed up to these meetings initially. My natural instinct was to be friendly, be likable, and say things that pleased what I envisioned the other, the investor wanted to hear. And I came across as unsure of myself, not confident and overly eager. And I didn't realize that I was doing this until much later on when I started to have conversations with actually male founders, I realized that it really was about finding that inner confidence in myself and to be able to hold court with the investors, level the playing field so that recognizing the conversations, like, the investor is unequal. It's about finding someone who wants to create a future together with you, who believes in your vision, not someone who has doubt from the beginning. In the business world, people want to invest in people who are mentor backable, who they can see as leading a major corporation. Are you the type of founder who can build a billion dollar company? And I needed to exude that energy.
[00:19:51.840] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Did you find that there was some visible discrimination because you were a woman or Asian American?
[00:19:59.360] - Vivian Chen
It's something that... I didn't... There is a difference between understanding something philosophically and then understanding something viscerally. In the back of my head, coming from my immigrant background, it was always, Well, I work hard. I will work harder. I will put in more hours. I will be smarter. I will be craftier. I will do more with less. But it wasn't until I started fundraising in this world where people literally reward you with a check or not, that I started to have doubt on whether or not as an Asian woman that I could become the type of CEO and leader. Because when I looked up, Katherin, I don't see many people that look like me.
[00:20:49.290] - Vivian Chen
And even sometimes when I hear friends or other founders who say things like, Well, every founder I know does X, Y, and Z. And my response to that is, That's great. But most successful founders that I know don't look like me. So the playbook that's worked for them might not work for me.
[00:21:07.410] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Exactly.
[00:21:07.870] - Vivian Chen
So I need to build the playbook for myself and also open the door for others to succeed as well.
[00:21:15.630] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
It's such a difficult thing to wrap your head around if you haven't been in that position. There is a separate struggle, I think, for people who come in here who are visible minorities, who don't have the generational clout or wealth or whatever else is needed here to have already pre existing success. When you're building it from scratch, from the ground up, it's a whole other ball game.
[00:21:41.030] - Vivian Chen
People don't tell you that when you walk into a room. But what happens after the fact is very telling. And I've been very lucky that I've stuck to my guns in finding people who believe in me. It's about finding the unicorn who will want to be on my side because it's not an easy journey. And it's okay if you don't. And it's okay if you want to support white dudes in hoodies, the prototypical picture of success of Silicon Valley. That's okay. But I just need to find the few who want to make a difference and the few who will believe in me. And if it means having hundreds of conversations, then so be it. So my process now is about accelerating the conversation so that I can vet and quickly identify who's going to be a supporter and who's going to be a doubter. And it made it a lot easier for me. I don't really take it personally anymore when within the first few minutes when people start to express doubt, I just pause the conversation and say, Hey, it sounds like you have some doubts around my company or you're not sure about me as a founder, and it's okay, let's talk about that.
[00:22:52.000] - Vivian Chen
Is this a conversation that we want to continue having or would it be a better use of our time if we just part ways? And I'm not afraid of saying that anymore because my time is valuable. And I now understand that it's as much of an opportunity for me to get a check from an investor as an investor to get to invest in me.
[00:23:11.500] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
So what would you say are the top three or top five points in your playbook now?
[00:23:16.330] - Vivian Chen
Be yourself. Be unapologetically yourself. I oftentimes see people mimicking the behavior of others. It doesn't come across as authentic. So think deeply about how you want to represent yourself and how you want to show up and embrace that. Two is not be afraid of asking for what you want. When I started fundraising, it was always really hard to ask people and to get a sense of whether or not they were going to actually give me the money. And so I wasted so many meetings in which I'm like, Okay, maybe the next meeting, they'll offer to invest in me. And I realized that if you want something, you should just directly ask for it. So for me, I started to make it a point to ask at the end of the meeting, Hey, that was a really great conversation. Are you going to invest in me? And I think lastly is to have fun. The whole point of doing something different and starting your own business is to have a bit more freedom to do things that you otherwise would not be able to do. Whenever I will get a rejection, I will almost have a rejection celebration board.
[00:24:29.950] - Vivian Chen
I've created these tiers of like, okay Vivian, when you get five rejections, you're going to treat yourself to, let's say, a movie.
[00:24:38.380] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
I love it.
[00:24:39.840] - Vivian Chen
My rewards actually ramped up. It's like when you get to 10 rejections, you get to go to a spa. And I remember at the 50 rejection point, I think it was something like take a mini vacation. I actually got to 48. I only talked to 48 investors. And so I made it a game of game, I gamified something that otherwise would be really crappy, made it fun and turn it around. And I was talking about I got rejected for 150 jobs. And I was thinking back and thinking about people who are considering transition careers, make it into a game, make it playful, make it fun.
[00:25:17.080] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
That's brilliant. Oh, my goodness. I love this so much. It is because, oh, my God, the word rejection, it's such a dark black hole for me. And rejection is part of life. It certainly is part of being an entrepreneur because you will hear a lot of noes. That's an amazing coping mechanism. You've made it into a fun thing with rewards. Amazing. You came up with this?
[00:25:41.880] - Vivian Chen
Yeah, I did. I think it's the need to make peace with a situation that I have no power to change. I want to move the needle for others, but I still have to accept the reality that I am just one person. And sometimes how can you work within the system in order to break the system.
[00:26:01.710] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Interesting. Wow. I don't know. I'm just sitting here with this new concept. It's like I'm soaking in it. I'm like, Oh, I think I'm going to do that, too. Thank you. You just taught me something.
[00:26:12.540] - Vivian Chen
Yeah, of course. Yeah, be playful, have fun.
[00:26:15.750] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Well, that's it. Having fun. We need to do outdoor activities. We need to go sing and dance and paint and do all the things that make us human. And if we can integrate that in our businesses, then so be it. Let's try our best. I have one question for you, and I'm really curious about this. Do you find that as an entrepreneur, your business becomes you, or you become your business? And do you have a difficult time splitting your personal from your professional life? Can you make the distinction between that?
[00:26:45.590] - Vivian Chen
Yes, this is a great question. My business is not me. And this is something that we actually discuss a lot as a team internally. Rise is about a community of people, and it's a celebration of people. It's not a celebration of me. A lot of the building blocks for the company came from my personal experiences, but it also came from the personal experiences of the rest of my team, too. For example, I'm a career pivoter from beauty to tech. Our product designer used to be an acrobat in a circus. I can't make this up. This is all true.
[00:27:19.210] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Oh, wow.
[00:27:19.700] - Vivian Chen
Yeah. He's a self taught UX designer, and everything that you see on Rise and Heyo came from him. Our head of marketing, Lucy, she actually used to be a dancer. She used to be in food. Our engineer is a college dropout who has been coding since he's been 16 years old. So all of us, by the traditional sense, are outsiders. We look very different. So my company is not a reflection of just me. It's a reflection of all those lives that it touches, whether it's the people that are building it or the people who use it every single day.
[00:27:55.390] - Vivian Chen
Now, the day to day blur of work and life sometimes is harder as a founder, of course. Do I think about it on vacations, on the weekends, at night? Yes, it's hard to turn off my brain. I haven't figured out how to do that yet. The work does spill into my life. But because I love what I do and I love the products and the company that I build and the team that I work with, it energizes me. I love building. For me, it's really about this freedom to create and to make things, whether it is something entrepreneurial or otherwise. You mentioned play in terms of dancing and art. Those are things that I embrace, too. It's the act of creation. To me, that's what makes me an individual. That's what gives me the feeling of aliveness. In five years, who knows? I mentioned earlier that it's hard to predict the future, especially in such rapid hype cycles these days. But one central tenet that I know for sure is that I will never stop creating. And the medium might be different, may or may not be different, but I just can't stop making things.
[00:29:11.440] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
You have such a richness to you. I listen to you speaking and you sound happy. I think that it comes through and I hope that our audience hears it too, because it can be very stressful. It can be very lonely. It can be a lot of stepping stones and failures and challenges. And I just find you have such an amazing attitude.
[00:29:32.560] - Vivian Chen
We'll see where I am in two hours.
[00:29:35.940] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
It's still early, right? Anything can happen today.
[00:29:39.210] - Vivian Chen
That's right. Who knows what's going to break later today.
[00:29:42.780] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
It's okay. You're equipped to fix it. Whatever comes your way. And if you can't, you know someone who can.
[00:29:50.010] - Vivian Chen
That's right.
[00:29:51.440] - Katherin Vasilopoulos
Many thanks to Vivian Chen. You can learn more about Rise and Heyo through the links in the episode description. We hope you loved hearing what Vivian had to say as much as we did. And if so, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen. And So, She Left is made by Cansulta and Ethan Lee. We'll be back next Wednesday with a new episode. Our music is by Chris Zabriskie, edited for your enjoyment. You can find a list of all the songs you heard here in the episode notes. I'm Katherin Vasilopoulos, and thanks for listening.