Cultural infrastructure for the Asian diaspora.

My parents came to America believing they could build a better life for our family.

They worked multiple restaurant jobs while going to school at night to learn English. They did whatever they could to make ends meet and give my generation opportunities they never had.

Growing up, I learned pretty early that we were seen as different. I saw it in the way some people treated my parents and in the racially motivated fights I found myself in at school.

But inside our home, being Chinese was never something we were taught to hide. My parents held onto their culture and remained proud of where they came from. That pride was passed down to me.

In 2013, I started NextShark with $3,000 of my own money. It began as a site about business and success for young professionals. But whenever we published stories about Asian people and culture, they kept outperforming everything else.

So we followed our audience.

The more we covered those stories, the more NextShark stopped feeling like just a business. It became personal.

My story is Chinese American, but NextShark has never been about only one kind of Asian experience. It grew because people from different backgrounds saw parts of themselves in it and kept telling us what they wanted more of.

Our core will always be Asian American, but our audience is no longer limited to the United States. Singapore and Japan now rank among our largest sources of traffic, and our audience across Southeast Asia continues to grow every year.

That tells me something simple. Asian stories do not stop at borders.

I have also always believed that Asian stories should be told in full, not only through tragedy or discrimination. When anti-Asian hate surged around 2020, circumstances pushed us to spend much more time covering it. We did that because we believed the community needed us to.

That work mattered, but it was never the entirety of what NextShark was meant to be. The vision has always been broader. Our culture, entertainment, businesses, achievements, humor, debates and everyday lives all deserve to be covered.

Here is something I have always told the creators, filmmakers and founders we work with. Do not let the word “Asian” become a ceiling.

If you are making a film, make a great film. If you are building a company, build a great company. If you are creating a product, make something people genuinely want to use.

It can be rooted in Asian culture. It can be made specifically for Asian communities. That does not make the ambition any smaller. But it still has to be good.

That is how I think about NextShark, too.

I do not want to build something that is only considered good for an Asian media company. I want NextShark to become one of the best media and entertainment companies in the world, period. And I want Asian stories, talent and ideas to be at the center of it.

Asian culture is already global. We should not have to wait for someone else to decide that it matters.

We should think bigger and build something of our own.

That is the future I see for NextShark.

Thirteen years in, we are still learning, still listening and still building.