Lessons in Leadership: there was no safety net.

By Andrew Yeung

💡 A leadership lesson I learned from someone else:

The best form of leadership is identifying what people want and finding a way to help them get there.

Everyone has goals. Career goals, financial goals, personal goals. The job of a leader isn't to impose your vision on people. It's to understand their vision and create alignment between what they want and what you're building together.

When those two things align, you don't have to motivate people because they motivate themselves. The work becomes a vehicle for their own ambitions, not just yours.

I've found that when you invest in helping people reach their goals, they'll run through walls for you.

🔍 An underrated skill I look for when hiring:

Niche interests and hobbies.

I pay attention to what people do when nobody's telling them what to do. These seem irrelevant to the job. They're not.

Niche interests signal independent thinking and high agency. They show someone who doesn't need external validation to pursue what fascinates them. That's the kind of person who'll figure things out on their own, take initiative, and bring original perspectives to the work.

😤 What gets under my skin at work:

People who talk too much without saying anything.

I value conciseness. Direct. To the point. My pet peeve is the meeting that could have been an email. Or the email that could have been a sentence. Or the person who takes five minutes to make a point that needed thirty seconds.

Time is the only resource you can't get back.

🎲 A career move that felt like a gamble:

I left Google in my late twenties after only one year. While on a visa.

If my company had failed, I would have been deported. There was no safety net.

It was the riskiest decision I've ever made. It was also the most positively impactful. That one choice changed the trajectory of my entire life.

Looking back, the risk wasn't really a risk. The real risk would have been staying somewhere safe and wondering "what if" for the rest of my career.

🔥 An unpopular opinion about my industry:

I'm betting on anti-AI.

Not against AI — but on the things AI can't replicate.

I believe the pendulum will swing back toward in-person. As AI floods the internet with content and makes digital interactions feel increasingly hollow, the value of being in the same room with someone will skyrocket.

The most meaningful way to build your network, drive sales, make friends, expand your circle? It won't be through another app or platform. It'll be through showing up in person.

⏳ How I think about productivity now vs. early in my career:

Early in my career, I thought productivity meant activity. How can I run further? Do more? Put in more effort? I measured myself by how busy I was.

Now I realize there's elegance in doing things in fewer moves.

The goal isn't to do more but to accomplish more with less. To find the one decision that makes a hundred other decisions irrelevant.