Tricia Tran, BS 99 – Empowering Women in Leadership

(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)

[00:00:00] Sean: Welcome to the OneHaas Alumni Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Li. And today, we’re joined by Tricia Tran.

Tricia is the senior field marketing manager of the financial services and fintech group over at ServiceNow. She’s also the founding co-President of the Berkeley Haas Women in a leadership Alumnae network. There’s so many more things that you are beyond that title, Tricia. So, we’ll let you fill that in later. But first off, welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:30] Tricia:, thank you for having me, Sean. I’m thrilled and grateful to be here with you, and it’s especially meaningful for me to be speaking with you during Women’s History Month. Lots of respect for what you do in creating this platform to spread the awesomeness of Berkeley Haas. Go, Bears!

[00:00:50] Sean: Thank you. Well, Tricia, we like to start off these conversations with learning about your background — your origin story. So, let us know where you’re from, where were you born, how were you raised, just the whole nine yards.

[00:01:05] Tricia:. This question, actually, I struggle with a little bit. I know it’s pretty easy to talk about where you’re from and your background, where you live, et cetera, but when I think about where I come from in the context of what we’re celebrating this month, it’s a story of incredible resilience and self-discovery that’s over several generations.

My grandparents immigrated from China to Vietnam in the 1930s because of the economic and political instability at the time. And while I don’t have any recollections of my own journey from Vietnam to San Francisco because I was too young at the time, I can really imagine it and feel it. It really is something I’m affected by because my parents had these big dreams for themselves and for their family. And it paved the way for who I am today.

My parents’ first attempt to leave Vietnam during the war failed. My parents had commissioned a large boat to take several hundred families out of Vietnam. And it was my mom who raised the capital, with my grandfather’s help, to fund the boat. And my dad organized the operations and logistics. And they were a pretty good team.

The plan was set with the date and time for them to depart. And when it was time, as my dad onboarded each family and checked them off, he realized his own family was missing. My mom and I were lost at sea in the pitch dark on the smaller boat, and we just kept drifting. We could not find the boat that we needed to get on. The window of opportunity to set sail was closing, and the family’s livelihoods were in the balance.

This was one of those moments where the decisions you make will alter your life. My dad had the choice of either keep waiting and risk the months of planning to get caught and not be able to escape or leave for freedom and risk never seeing his wife and his daughter possibly ever again. My dad made up his mind in that moment. He authorized the departure of the boat. But he jumped overboard and he swam to shore. He was found passed out on the shores of Cambodia. And meanwhile, my mom and I had made our way back to my grandparents’ house.

There was so much emotion swirling with her. Would she ever see my father ever again? A couple days had passed, and she saw a warm figure approaching, and it was my father. He was exhausted, but he had found his way back. They tried again; and this time, we made it together as a family.

So, we ended up in San Francisco, which is where we settled. And that’s where my journey began. So, I see my parents with nothing and four kids, and they hustled and they grind their way to everything. They took lots of risks. They bet on themselves because there was really no other alternative. I didn’t really have the traditional ways that I think about how I help my daughter today. She’s 13. She’s been blessed with tutoring and camps and club sports. But I knew, the way that I grew up, I didn’t have that, but I had the mentality of the hustle and the grind. And all my focus was put on education. And growing in the Bay Area, my dream was to go to Cal. That was always the intention and the focus. And I had my parents’ sacrifices in the back of my mind, as I was trying to do that.

[00:04:43] Sean: That’s amazing. I can’t imagine. Just to try to even understand the beginning of that story, I’m just picturing this boat, obviously, a big boat, that’s off the harbor out of shore. And then you have to take these small boats to get out there. And it’s crazy to think the risks that people, families have to take to escape to freedom. Where were you born in Vietnam?

[00:05:09] Tricia: So, I was actually born in Saigon, which is a Ho Chi Minh City. My parents, after they got married, they moved from… it’s almost like more of a village area to the city. They were both entrepreneurs like you. They’re serial entrepreneurs. They’ve never really worked for anyone else. And they had a textile and fabric business that they had set up in Saigon. And so, it was a nice, rich, healthy, happy life until they were faced with the dilemma to leave where they’re from, for something that they knew would be better for their family.

[00:05:49] Sean: The amount of resilience that your family had to endure is almost unimaginable. It’s just two generations, right? Your grandparents escaping China and then your parents leaving Vietnam.

If you don’t mind sharing a little bit more, was it growing up, initially as a refugee, right? How did your parents raise you? Do you mind me asking, how old were you when you first came to the U.S. with your parents?

[00:06:01] Tricia: I was a baby. So, I actually don’t remember my journey to the U.S. My earliest memories were, really, starting preschool and starting kindergarten even, in ESL class? And so, at home, I don’t actually remember how I learned to speak English, but probably naturally through going through the school system. And my parents were very much trying to adapt and assimilate. And it was always the number one thing. While they worked very hard, they expected a lot from us in terms of education. And that was the priority for us — to have an education and to do the best, because that was, in their eyes, a way to have success in this country.

I had a lot of independence. I was the eldest. And I was very much a part of their adult life in terms of their assimilation? So, I was exposed to the good things and, also, the struggles of raising a family and working. My mom, I still remember how she was able to do all of this, but also take care of her own life and take care of her work as well. packing all four of us, it was my youngest brother in the stroller, my sister and my other brother holding on either side of the stroller. And I was… because I was the eldest, walking alongside her and, packed in tightly, trying to get to our respective daycares. And then she would go to work, but somehow we all got taken care of. I helped a lot. My sister helped a lot. And it was really a team effort.

[00:08:10] Sean: Were your parents able to continue their work or what they were passionate about? Or, did they have to pivot and do something new?

[00:08:18] Tricia: My parents, I’ve seen them reinvent themselves. They always stay true to their values and who they were. But I learned so much from watching them pivot and reinvent themselves to whatever the challenges or the change that they might see coming.

My mom, she actually came from a very well-off background. This is not an exaggeration, but she didn’t even know how to boil water because she had help. So, when she came to the U.S., it was a big shock. I recall stories of them saying that they would take us to eat out because my mom, and my dad, apparently, did not know how to cook. But that is very expensive to do with four kids. So, she learned how to cook, and she learned it by memory. She remembered the flavors of the dishes that she had in Vietnam, and she recreated those from memory. They both had several careers in restaurant, in condiments, in the steel business, in jewelry. There was several businesses that they had. And I saw them pivot and try new things and have success and, sometimes, failures. But they always learned from that. They made calculated choices and decisions to be able to, both realize their dream but also support their families.

[00:09:58] Sean: That’s an amazing story of just resilience and entrepreneurship at its core.

[00:10:04] Tricia: Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s amazing.

[00:10:07] Sean: So, is that what ultimately inspired you to go to Haas and study business?

[00:10:12] Tricia: I studied business and I focused on marketing. Berkeley and just being in the Bay Area and being so close to such an amazing school, Berkeley is one of those universities that not all of them offer an undergraduate business degree.

So, I definitely felt like I was able to take advantage of that. And really, in terms of marketing, being close to brand and what that looks like and the consumer, that’s something I really gravitated towards. And when you are at Berkeley Haas, there’s just so many options and, also, connections in terms of other companies that are around us. The first company that I joined was the Clorox company, which is right in Oakland, California.

[00:11:04] Sean: And I noticed, after that, you had a stint, a period of time overseas. Can you tell us about that experience and what made you go, work overseas?

[00:11:16] Tricia: I am so grateful for that time overseas. I felt that, sometimes, it can be harder to proactively and intentionally make changes to your life when you feel like things are on a good path. But I also feel those are times where I have decided to disrupt or pivot from the path that I was on, which at the time was working at a really great company like Clorox.

But after a couple of years, I thought I really want to expand my career globally. And I had my sights set on Asia. We moved to Hong Kong and Singapore, ended up being there for about 10 years. It was an incredible, amazing experience. But when I arrived in Asia, one of my biggest challenges, and it continued to persist as a challenge through my whole 10 years being in Hong Kong and Singapore, but it was navigating around some of the biases and assumptions around my identity, Asian American, being a woman working in Asia. And in theory, it seems like it should fit a glove, but it actually was very contradicting.

Funny story, before I moved to Hong Kong, I had secured a three month job to teach English. And when I arrived in Hong Kong on my first day, it was a face-to-face meeting with the principal of the school, and she looked completely shocked to see me. She said she was actually expecting a Westerner, meaning someone who was white.

[00:12:54] Sean: Right.

[00:12:55] Tricia: She had imagined because we had only had phone conversations. She imagined that I was White the whole time. And she was so shocked that she said, “I can’t give you the job. You can’t start on Monday.” She said, “These parents pay good money for their kids and they expect a White teacher.” And she said she had never hired anyone that looked like me before. So, once I got over my own shock of hearing all of this, I convinced her that I could do the job. I said, “I can’t change my appearance, but I know I can wow these kids and their parents. Maybe just have them close their eyes while I’m teaching.” So, she said, “Great, I’ll give it a shot.” And then she said, “Wait, one last thing. Can you, when you show up on Monday, can you please dress more Western for the first day?” And I said, “Sure,” but I was very confused. I walked away. And the whole weekend, I was racking my brain, thinking, what does that even mean? Do I put on a cowboy hat? Do I wear a t-shirt and shorts? I was really not sure. And I decided I’m going to show up as me. And it worked out fine, it was fine.

But I tell that story because then I transitioned into banking. And I also noticed that there was no one in leadership that looked like me. And even though I was working in a key hub for Asia like Hong Kong, you looked around and there was a lot of people of Asian ethnicity working there, but none in leadership. And in fact, when I interviewed with the head of our group, who was a Westerner from the UK, she remarked in awe. She said, “You speak beautiful English.”

So, it’s just an interesting background, right? When you feel that you are Asian, but you’re also American, there’s all these facets of you, you’re a woman, and you go to a different country with a different background and people have these biases and they have these assumptions. And it’s hard to call those out, right, for our daughters and for the other women, for yourself and for the other women in your lives.

[00:15:18] Sean: Yeah.

[00:15:19] Tricia: Yeah.

[00:15:19] Sean: Having this conversation just really made me aware of how polarizing Asian culture feels to me sometimes. Because I grew up in China. And all my family’s still in China, except for my immediate family. I rarely observe much overt oppression of women in our family, even the friends that I know, in the sense that, culturally, we don’t change. Women don’t change their last names when they get married, for example.

[00:15:48] Tricia: Right.

[00:15:50] Sean: And even from an education standpoint, I feel like girls are encouraged to go to school and study and these things. But once they get into the workforce, totally different story. It’s almost like, do these people not have families? Like, do they not have daughters or wives? And it’s just, it’s so weird when I think about it. I don’t know if you ever noticed that.

[00:16:17] Tricia: That is a very true, in my opinion, true description of what you talked about just now, with, you don’t necessarily feel that overtly. At least I never felt that until I entered the workforce.

The other thing that I found challenging when I was working in investment banking in Asia, I was in marketing, I was surrounded by a lot of women but none of them had families yet. So, I was at the point where I wanted to start a family. And it was seen as you were choosing, right? You’re choosing to have a family, and that means you’re choosing to not focus on your career.

Now, I was equally focused and passionate about both. It was equally important to me to have my daughter and be there for her. And I also had ambitions to grow my career within the bank. When I was on maternity leave, it was three months, not long, but not as short as some people’s maybe one week. I heard stories of people returning after a week or so.

Sean: These two questions tie together. What are some of the proudest moments in your career, would you say? Or what motivates you to get up every morning?

[00:19:19] Tricia: I think the proudest moments just have been those moments where I talked about previously, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and took, maybe, the riskier path, something that I know would stretch me. An example of that is, sometimes getting to where you want may also mean taking a pause. So, between my pivot from after moving back to the U.S. from banking to tech, I wanted to take a short break and spend some time with my daughter. She was fourth grade at the time. And just the thought of doing simple things like eating breakfast with her and taking her to school without a hurry, like shove out the car and goodbye. And I was fortunate to be able to do that.

She’s in eighth grade now and she still remembers our walks to school each morning. To me, it was important to show my daughter, the working mom, that I could do both, but it was also important to show her it’s okay to take a moment and to pause. This was the proudest, but also, the hardest decision I made in all of my career. I’ve always worked my whole life. This was different. And also, COVID happened when I decided to do that. But because of this, it actually prompted me to create the Women in Leadership Alumni Group. So, something good does come out of those challenges, for sure.

[00:20:51] Sean: Yeah. I’d definitely love to hear more about the WILA Group. But something that you just talked about really touched a nerve with me. And this is something that, especially I feel like business majors, MBAs, a lot of the people listening, just the go-getters, the type As, as we call them, find it hard to stop, to take a break. Because you feel like, the moment you stop, you’re not as productive. And a lot of times, we tie our worth, our personal self-worth and purpose, to our productivity, so much so that I was just talking to, actually, a fellow Haasie about this this morning. To your point and to your example, sometimes, we should take that pause, because it’s not that nothing happens, but we create space for something different or something new to happen. And there’s always beauty in that. And a lot of times, we just think we have to keep going, when there’s more to life than just that, than just work.

[00:21:55] Tricia: I totally agree.

[00:21:56] Sean: On that note, tell us why and how you started Women in Leadership, the WILA.

[00:22:04] Tricia: Yeah, I’d love to share the work I’m doing around WILA. I co-founded that about two and a half years ago with a lot of support from our Haas Alumni Office and my friend and co-founder Abha Bhagat. But as I mentioned, it was during the pandemic. I decided to make this choice to take a short break. And candidly, I was struggling professionally and personally, and I wanted space where I could seek out other Haas women who I knew could understand and provide some perspective. I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling this.

And today, WILA is thriving. And we continue to serve our mission. And it’s really around the power of bringing the Haas community alumni community together. And I’m so lucky to be a part of that. We focus on our full self. And we do align to the Haas defining principles, which I know we’re all familiar with. We were awarded the Chapter of the Year Award, particularly on some work that we did to create a concept called Dinner Connects, where we highlight the journey of the Haas alumni and we bring together other women in an intimate form that allows for them to connect and share and support one another.

So, we were very lucky. We got the CEO of TATCHA, Mary Yee, to join us on our first Dinner Connect, and Sonal Sinhaa partner at PwC. We had the VP of internal audit at Instacart, Danielle Ritter. And our next one is actually with one of your former guests, Christine Tao, CEO of Sounding Board. So, we’re really looking forward to that. And these are all women that I admire, but also good friends as well.

[00:23:56] Sean: For WILA, are mostly events and things happening in the Bay Area? Or, are they elsewhere as well in the country, in the world?

[00:24:04] Tricia: We’re, primarily in the Bay Area. We do have the bulk of our Haas alumni still in the Bay Area, but we are always open to partnerships around the world. When I was living in Asia, anywhere I went, India, Thailand, Singapore, et cetera, there was always a Haas community that would welcome you with open arms. And we feel the same way with WILA, is if you are in a different country, please reach out to us and we’d be happy to support something for our women living around the world.

[00:24:43] Sean: That’s wonderful. How can people find out more about WILA?

[00:24:46] Tricia: We have a website, wila.haasalumni.org. We have our events on there. And you can always feel free to reach out to me as well. I’m always looking for inspiring Haas alumni to join us on either a Dinner Connect or other events or someone you want to be connected with.

[00:25:07] Sean: We’ll definitely include links to those in the description for the episode. Tricia, I like this question a lot because it points to what’s next, but what can people expect from you next?

[00:25:19] Tricia: I’m always thinking of how I can learn and grow. I’ve worked internationally, been part of great companies and teams. Along the way, I’m always thinking about how to help others. So, definitely, WILA is on what’s next in terms of continuing that mission and bringing women together, through that organization.

[00:25:44] Sean: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much, Tricia, for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It was really a pleasure having you.

[00:25:52] Tricia: Yeah, it was amazing to be here. Thank you for having me.

[00:26:00] Sean: Thanks again for tuning in to this episode of the OneHaas Podcast. If you enjoyed our show today, please hit that Subscribe or Follow button on your favorite podcast player. We’d also really appreciate you giving us a five-star rating and review.

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OneHaas Podcast is a production of the Haas School of Business and produced by University FM. Until next time. Go, Bears!