American Dreamers is a series of conversations with leading Asian American entrepreneurs and business leaders in which they open up about everything from their startup stories and company building to confronting racism and making it in America.
This week, Susan Li became Meta’s new CFO. At 36, she’s one of the youngest people to occupy that role at a large public company. But, Susan is used to being different and a wunderkind. She moved to the U.S. from China at age 2 where she grew up as an Asian American immigrant in Oregon. She entered high school at 11 and went to college at 15.
Susan has made being different an asset, rather than a hindrance — as you’ll learn from our conversation. She told me that her experience growing up as an outsider forced her to embrace who she is, to be comfortable in her own skin, and to form connections with people she wouldn’t have normally sought out.
From her start as a 19-year-old banker at Morgan Stanley to the finance team during the early days of Facebook and her leadership role at Meta, Li attributes her success to a few different factors: the work ethic her parents instilled in her coupled with their unwavering belief that she could be anything she wanted to be, and her willingness to take on new responsibilities and grow, as well as fantastic mentors who challenged her in all the right ways.
Tell me a little bit about your immigrant experience. I was born in Chengdu, China, home of fabulous spicy cuisine and panda bears. I immigrated here when I was two, while my dad was getting a Ph.D. In fact, I didn't meet him until then because he started his program while my mother was pregnant with me. He eventually became a professor at Portland State University so we moved to Oregon. While there we lived in a suburb called Lake Oswego, which was beautiful and had excellent public schools. My parents placed a great emphasis on education.
My parents refer to me as a one-and-a-half-generation kid. Allow me to explain. They think of themselves as the first generation. My sister, who is much younger and was born here, they consider second generation. But, I'm somewhere in between.
I really stuck out in Lake Oswego because I was one of a very few first generation immigrants at the time at my school. My memories of sticking out are very visceral to me even when I recall my childhood today. For example, my parents were very frugal and my lunch was packed in the leftover plastic bread bag, which was embarrassing. I just really wanted a plain paper bag.
What are some of the most important things you’ve learned from your parents? My parents gave me two gifts. First, they made a tremendous sacrifice when they were young, moving in their mid-20s to an entirely new country with a different language and different culture. They worked in restaurants and they cleaned houses when my dad was getting his Ph.D. I knew we weren't well off at the time. In fact, for a while we shared a three-bedroom apartment with two other families. But they always made me feel like I had everything I needed, especially when it came to my education. When I think back on the enormity of what they did, it’s a harder thing than I’ve ever done and I'm blown away.
Second, they pushed me to work hard and to always believe in myself. As a kid, I loved Michelle Kwan, and when I was at a particularly impressionable age, I really wanted to be a figure skater. This was not remotely feasible since we lived far from an ice rink. However, my dad didn't want to deny me, so he instead said, “Why don't you start by practicing until you can do a single axle on the carpet?”
In high school, I was blown away when Madeleine Allbright became the first female Secretary of State. I remember talking with my dad about how amazing this was he said: “That could be you; you could do that someday.” Knowing that my dad believed I could be as important as Madeleine Albright someday and how that made me feel are still some of my most powerful, formative memories. I am very lucky to have my parents.
In addition to being a figure skater or Secretary of State, what were some of the dreams you had as a kid? I was easily inspired. I remember we used to watch the news at dinner every night, and I thought Connie Chung was so cool — she was doing something that was just really trailblazing at the time. Nonetheless, my parents were very excited about the possibility that I might be a doctor or engineer someday and they strongly advocated those careers in my household. However, in college I decided to pursue a career in finance. Despite not knowing much about that field my parents were very supportive. I was lucky as kid to have grown up during a time when so many people were doing cool things in the world, and there were so many doors that you could open.
Being the odd one out has served you well in your career. How did you develop that mindset? One of the funniest stories from my youth was when I was going into sixth grade and I really wanted blue jeans. I'd been wearing these funny mismatched sweatshirts and sweatpants sets from China for years and I told my dad that I really wanted jeans for my birthday. I never asked for clothes because I saw clothes as a need, not a want. However, my dad, really wanted to make me happy for my birthday, so he went to Costco and bought me purple jeans. This was not exactly what I wanted, but he was so excited. I always have those memories of what it's like to stick out a little bit growing up.
In addition to being one of the few immigrant Asian kids around when I was in primary school, I also started high school when I was 11. I started at Stanford at age 15, and I was on the trading floor working for Morgan Stanley at age 19. So, I was always in environments where I was very clearly not like everyone else. But I’ve embraced that feeling of being the odd one out, because I know it's something that lots of people feel in many ways.
So how did you make the leap from being a trader at Morgan Stanley to Facebook? Morgan Stanley was an incredible first job after college. While I received excellent training, I looked at the career ladder at an investment bank and it seemed like being a managing director was more of a sales job. I knew I needed to do something else.
While I was working for Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong and in the midst of job searching I decided to go on a vacation with some friends to Southeast Asia. During a long wait at a bus stop in Malaysia, we started talking to other people and had a great time. When the bus finally arrived, these complete strangers who we just met on a street corner in Malaysia, said, “Hey, find us on Facebook!” This was early 2008. I was just blown away by how this product, which started at a college, was very clearly changing the way that people connect with each other around the world.
I had a lot of friends from Stanford who were at Facebook; they were really excited about what the company was doing. It was still smaller than MySpace at the time, but it was growing very quickly. The people who I knew who were working there were just so vibrant and so enthusiastic and really dedicated to what they were doing. As a young person, I thought that it just seemed like a really exciting move.
How has the company (now called Meta), and your role there, changed in the past 14 years? When I joined the finance team, it was very small. I joined on the revenue-planning side and one of the first big challenges that I had was finding a way to forecast revenue around this newly built online sales model that we have for ads on Facebook. Finding a way to simulate the results of this sales model to get different kinds of supply and demand dynamics — that was really where I found my stride. It was a place where I could develop a lot of expertise, and I loved that feeling.
Over time, my responsibilities grew. So, for a while, I worked on the launch of every new monetization product, like Facebook games payments. Moving into 2011 and 2012, I spent a year-and-a-half working intensely on the initial public offering. It was very exciting.
After the IPO, I took on broader finance responsibilities such as resource-allocation, expenses, and headcount management. Eventually, I was running the entire planning business operations. My journey at Facebook has really been a story of lots of incremental growth opportunities at the right cadence and, every one to two years, adding new skills and responsibilities to the set of things that I was already doing.
Who’s been your most important mentor? I've had really great managers and mentors in the course of my career who have helped shape my career path.
I’ve been tremendously lucky having both David Wehner, our previous CFO, and David Ebersman, the CFO before him, as mentors. They have been the most critical mentors of my career. They put the right challenges in front of me, even if I would not have imagined taking on those challenges for myself. So many of those opportunities that I’ve had at Meta and where I took on a new responsibility, I can recall Ebersman or Wehner saying, “I think you're ready to do this.”
I'll also say, although I haven't worked with her as directly, Sheryl Sandberg has made Meta a tremendous company. So many employees – myself included - are real beneficiaries of the work that she has done. She’s made Meta a great place to have both a career and a family, in whatever way works for you. Different people obviously have different models for this, but I think she's made a lot of things possible for our generation in a way that I think was much harder even one to two decades ago.
How do you feel about taking on the role of CFO? I feel like there's a lot of work ahead of us, especially as a finance organization – and I am really excited about the opportunity. I feel like I've learned from the best in this industry in Ebersman and Wehner. Moreover, I've been lucky enough to work with a world-class finance team and learn from great colleagues every day. To that end, we're moving into a juncture where there are lots of important decisions to be made and I feel a tremendous amount of excitement and absolutely some anxiety. I am always thinking to myself, “I can't believe this is happening to me.” I can't wait to get to it.
Do you have any advice for future Asian American executives? For anyone who has grown up with some of those same feelings that I did — of being an outsider in different environments, of trying to find your way — anyone who didn't feel like they had lots of role models who looked and sounded like you: I do think it's so important to learn to embrace who you are and be comfortable in your own skin. Find ways to build those bridges with people who aren't obviously people that you might have immediately hit it off with.
One of the things that I'm always surprised by is just how interesting people are when you start building connections with them. There are so many unexpected connections with people that I think are so delightful when you find them, and they can go a long way.
What do you love about America? There’s something that feels uniquely American about the journey that my parents have had here. The things that they were able to do and do for their children here, the opportunities that they had here, and the ability here for them to convert their determination and hard work into something that became better opportunities for them and their children.
What do your parents think about what you do? They probably have come to peace with the fact that I'm not a doctor.
