In every startup, or any project that makes an impact, there is a great team that make these things happen. I am a firm believer of the concept of, instead of coming up with great concepts and having great execution, get people with great concepts and great execution on the board. As a leader, my biggest job is to get great people on the team and make them even better. With a strong vision of making society better by connecting people to the careers that they are passionate about, I am blessed to have an extremely qualified, passionate, execution-focused team that has complementary skills.
Jun Loayza: My CMO (Chief Millennial Officer) Jun is completely Godsend. Jun and I met at the Business Fraternity of Delta Sigma Pi in 2005, and had since talked to him at least two times a week on average. Jun has a few natural talents. He is a natural speaker, and is extremely personal with all his engagements. Being one of the most presentable people I know (haha), Jun impresses people the moment he starts his first sentence. There’s been moments and Jun starts to talk, whoever listens goes “whoa, this guy speaks so well.” I remember the first time I met him, he was doing a presentation, and as soon as he started speaking, I made a determination to become friends with him, which happened 25 minutes afterwards. Many times when I or someone else makes a presentation, with Jun just making an introduction, there would always be a group of people swarming around Jun, asking him questions regarding the presentation, and the speaker might just have 3-4 people talking to him. It is even to the extent that whenever the programmers had an personal issue, instead of talking to the CTO or me, they would call Jun, the furthest removed CMO, and ask him. Jun is that good at being personable.
MORE importantly, Jun is extraordinary in execution skills. I have met and worked with a lot of people, ages between 14 and 55, many of them highly intellectual and successful, but Jun definitely is one of the top top among them when it comes down to execution skills. If the goal was to meet as many recruiters at a career fair, Jun will go around the room for 2 hours, meet ALL 55 recruiters while making a personal expression with each, go home, and send a personal followup email to all of them within an hour and half. On one Friday he decided that Future Delivery needed to have a whole series of podcasts (4 hours of audio), an eBook on making yourself stick out to employers (30 pages) and 6 videocasts all by Monday. On Monday, he had it all finished. The eBook received a lot of great compliments from people who downloaded from the site, and the audio series became very helpful for those who recruited.
Finally, Jun is essential in creating the right culture for Future Delivery. Jun created the Premiere Business Organization in UCLA called Bruin Consulting that took UCLA by storm just in 1 quarter. As president, he created a culture of “fun-loving people who want to do good work.” In FD, he remains to support that culture of combining work and play. Every meeting with him is not dull but full of laughter, and our brainstorm sessions involve the “trash/genius” model, which creates a lot of idea synergy and moves things quickly. Future Delivery can never and will never be what it is, or what it wants to be, without Jun Loayza.
Jason Wei: My CTO Jason is one of the top top people in the programming industry. After getting his double-major in computer science and business administration in China, he was the first employee Xerox hired in China, and he set up the whole Xerox system there. He also started his own medical device company with a few other partners, and for 2 years there were no technological competition. In 2001 (7 years later), he sold his shares, and it still operates today. When he moved to the US, both Microsoft and Toshiba wanted to give him his green card, he chose Toshiba because of their flexibility in projects. He also teaches at UC Irvine as a extension lecturer and has built up a fan base among his students. What’s interesting is that he became a lecturer because he was taking a class there, and his professor was so impressed, that he proposed that Jason should teach the class. In addition, the reason why Jason chose to come to the US, is that in his whole career in China, he has only met 1 other programmer who is just flat out better than him. When he came to the states, at the top level at these top tech firms, he already met a few people who was better than him. That excited him and made him want to live in the states.
Jason, due to his green card issue, has not been able to work for FD fulltime yet. He has done a lot of solid research on all the resources out there and made a lot of planning, but I look forward to the day he can commit fully and create the most value in FD and this world.
Cat Sze: From the beginning of our company, we had troubles finding the right Art Director. We felt that there are a lot of designers, but there are very few truly creative artists who also understands user-friendiness. We looked for a long time, covering a lot of places, including Taiwan, and had trouble finding a good one that has played with virtual worlds. We worked with another excellent artist/designer, but due to high loans, he was stolen to help out Guitar Hero 4 (FD should boycott it :)) And then we got Cat. Cat graduated from the Art Center of Design in Pasadena, one of the most prestigious design schools in the US. Cat has been an avid gaming and virtual world fan since the beginning. She is a hardcore player of World of Warcraft, and is a moderator for Gaia Online, another virtual world company. She also studies a lot of business content.
Cat is the perfect combination of being a creative artist/designer, familiar with virtual worlds, understanding the target market, and having good business sense.
