Built By: Millie Liu of First Star Ventures

It wasn’t until 2011, when she arrived at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, that Millie Liu heard the word entrepreneurship, much less considered it as a future career.

Now, years later, she is the founder of First Star Ventures, where she and her team invest in technology-centered startups. Looking back, she’s realized that a huge part of her entrepreneurial blood came from her roots, back in Shenzhen, China.

“A large part of my character consists of experimenting with new things, and this has made me fearless in taking on new challenges,” she says. “If no one had done it before, it wasn’t a problem. Because where I grew up, not much had been done by the people before you…ever.”

Shenzhen is a city right across the river of Hong Kong, in the Guangdong Province of China. in 30 years, the province grew from a small village to a metropolitan city, which now has roughly the same economic output as Singapore and Hong Kong. The average age is 28, Liu says.

One of her earliest fond and formative childhood memories takes place in a six-story bookstore in Shenzhen. Every other weekend, her parents would bring her to the book shop with a grocery cart, and she’d come home with around 20 to 30 books.

Yes, you read that correctly- 20 to 30 books, every other weekend. She spent countless hours reading, all while watching Shenzhen continue to develop into a springboard for trailblazers and business owners.

“It’s not that unusual, the people I lived around were always hungry for new stuff, whether it’s new knowledge, or a new venture. That’s the city I grew up in,” says Liu.

Unlike many entrepreneurs who immigrated to the US, she found that the place she came from was very similar to Boston, categorizing both places as “highly intellectually driven, and nerdy, but in a good way.”

“At home, it was entrepreneurship in a really small scale,” she said, referencing her early observations of the local small businesses. “But when I came to MIT, I was dragged into all these entrepreneurial activities. I joke that I got brainwashed by MIT, in a very natural way, to become an entrepreneur.”

Liu considers her favorite part about Boston, and the states in general, is how much it reminds her of home in its vibrancy and openness.

“At one point, Shenzhen was underdeveloped, but the government let it become a starting point and experimental zone,” she says. “They said ‘this is a blank piece of paper, use your imagination, use the young energy, and do whatever you want’. That’s the kind of city I grew up in.”

Written By: Natasha Mascarenhas

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