When she entered her 40s, Christina felt it was time to slow down and settle down.
Throughout her global tech marketing career, work had taken precedence over her personal life.
At 23, she joined Acer in Taiwan – helping Chairman Stan Shih with speeches and presentations on top of a role in regional sales – before postings in Paris and Milan. Apart from two Singapore stints with IBM and Yahoo!, she spent most of her subsequent years based in Hong Kong.
“I used to be very career-focused,” she shares. “I worked seven days a week, except for an extended break at the end of each year.”
As she now considered leaving corporate life behind, Christina was of two minds. She loved her job and enjoyed the thrill of launching smartphones at UK telecommunications firm O2 in Hong Kong.
Hearing her dilemma, her CTO said, “Christina, it’s just another phone.”
The pithy reply spurred her into action. “The next day, I resigned,” she says.
Rediscovering herself in New York
Inspired by the hit TV series Sex and the City, Christina moved to New York City in search of love.
Not only did she meet her husband, but life in the Big Apple was transformative, bringing out a social side that she had not explored before. The old Christina cared more about getting things done. The new Christina was keen to connect, eager to share, and could speak with anyone.
“For the first time, I felt like a young person. For the first time, I could let loose,” she says.
After New York, Christina moved back to Hong Kong, took up one last corporate role as Chief Marketing Officer at CSL, Hong Kong’s largest mobile operator, before retiring. Then, in 2016, she decided to return home to Singapore.
“My mother, who had been living with me in Hong Kong, was getting older,” she explains, “and I felt it was more prudent to be closer to home for more effective healthcare.”
Around this time, the word ‘startup’ kept popping up in conversations and in the news. It was a domain that piqued her curiosity, yet one that she knew next to nothing about.