Expat Empire Podcast 3 | Entertainment Entrepreneurship in China with Alex Ronalds

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Episode Description

Today we will be hearing from Alex Ronalds. He was born in the United States, grew up in Hong Kong and France, and then lived for ten years in Beijing, China before moving to San Francisco. We discuss many topics including:

• How Alex developed his interest in China while in university
• What it is like to jump into the deep end in China by buying a one-way ticket to Beijing and figuring out how to build a career on-the-ground
• How to leverage your network into new jobs
• Navigating the murky world of Chinese visas
• What it is like to create a startup in China and experience the roller coaster of emotions that comes with it
• How you can leverage the skills, knowledge, and experience you gain abroad in other countries

Music on this episode was produced by Eli Hermit, please check him out at elihermit.bandcamp.com/.

Learn more about Expat Empire at expatempire.com!

Episode Transcript

Intro

Welcome to the Expat Empire Podcast, the podcast where you can hear from expats around the world and learn how you can join them.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining us today for the 3rd episode of the Expat Empire Podcast. Today we will be hearing from Alex Ronalds. Alex was born in the United States, grew up in Hong Kong and France, and then lived for ten years in Beijing, China before moving to San Francisco. We discuss many topics including what it is like to create a startup in China and experience the roller coaster of emotions that come with it, advice for making it as a young expat in a new country, and how to leverage your network into getting new jobs abroad.

Without further ado, let’s start the conversation.

Conversation

David McNeill:Hey Alex, thanks so much for joining the Expat Empire podcast.

Alex Ronalds: Thanks man, it’s a pleasure to be here.

David McNeill: If you could tell me a little bit about your background that would be great. Where you’re originally from? Where around the world you’ve lived so far? Where you live right now? And what kind of work you’re up to?

Alex Ronalds: Sweet! So my name is Alexander Ronalds. I’m an entertainment… I like to bill myself as an entertainment entrepreneur. Originally from, I guess I’ll say originally from California. My father is actually Australian and my mother was American, and actually spent a lot of my youth growing up in Hong Kong, the United States, and the south of France. So moved around a lot as a kid which kind of, I guess sets the stage for how I managed to, managed my life going forward.

David McNeill: Right! So in terms of your interest in working abroad, it sounds like, you know, you already have a lot of experience growing up in different countries, was that really the main driver in terms of going to see more of the world?

Alex Ronalds: So, you know, I think, we pretty much settled down in the states before high school and by middle school we were already settled in United States and didn’t, hadn’t been doing much moving after that. But I’d always had the bug in my head that I knew other stuff was out there but I didn’t really have a whole ton of interest in going to explore it until my junior year of college. I took a global strategies class at the University of Southern California taught by Carl Voight, who’s an amazing professor there. And he got it in his head that he wanted to do, to help kind of educate us for some global strategy in general, he wanted to do a trip to China over the Christmas holiday for anybody in the class who wanted to go. It was supposed to be this educational experience where we go out there, we’d meet with a bunch of companies and just learn like, “Hey, how does business happen in China?” This was 2005. And in 2005 at the time, like China was majorly on the rise, there wasn’t a whole lot of information out there about it. It was still relatively a bit of Wild West and this sounded like a… 2003, excuse me. And this, to me sounded like a great idea and I signed up to go on this trip with him. And he led the trip out there with about 22 students and we went around Beijing, met a whole host of expatriates out there who were doing business there. That trip really planted the seed in me, and as soon as I got back to California the week after that, I kind of started to plan my escape and what, how I was going to get out there and what I was going to do.

David McNeill: Wow! That’s great. And in terms of making the decision that it was going to be China, I suppose it was from that trip, from the experiences you had there and seeing other expats being successful in China that really drove that as the future destination.

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! You know, I think there was a couple factors in that decision. I was looking at my peers who were graduating from USC at the time, and many of them were taking consulting jobs at the big consulting companies or going into finance. And both of these jobs looked incredibly, incredibly boring to me. So part of what I was trying to do, like I was trying to find an escape from that road which I really didn’t want to do but I was also struck by the, by clearly the explosive growth that was happening in China and I knew that wouldn’t slow down in the short-term. So between those two things, that’s how I kind of plotted my course for China.

David McNeill: So did you have a job when you first moved there or did you actually land on the ground trying to find something once you were there and able to talk to people in-person?

Alex Ronalds: So my tactic was, I knew that I wanted to go to China. I didn’t really know anything else around that or what I was going to do. I’d met, through the trip I’d met one expat who was kind of like, well, look, if you want to come out to China, it’s kind of imperative that you learn the local language. So my initial trip, I was like, okay, I’m going to buy a ticket and I’m going to go out there and I’m going to sign up for a Mandarin class in Beijing and just go to school there. I went online and did some research and I found this one school that many people had gone to, many of the expats, that was pretty highly recommended for learning Mandarin in China called “Beijing Language and Cultural University” and tried to go online and sign up for it and completely failed. They had no real outward facing website that you could go on and make an application for, everything was kind of done by fax or done by mail. So I kept doing a little bit more research and I found some clever guy who had created a startup where he was just basically processing your application to the university for $300, so I had to use my credit card to pay this guy $300 and then I sent him the forms and then he’s the one who went down to the school and actually stood in line. I never was really certain if these forms got filed or what exactly what’s happening there. It was really hard to get any information. So my first trip out there, I was kind of a… I had a hotel near the university for a couple of days and I was like, okay, I’m just going to have to figure this out as soon as I get there. Luckily I arrived; I was enrolled in the school. It was China, so it was pretty chaotic trying to figure everything out but I was able to figure out I was enrolled in the school and then the next thing I had to do was find some sort of accommodation.

David McNeill: Yeah! So how did you find that accommodation? And how did you also find the Chinese lessons when you actually were able to take them?

Alex Ronalds: So I think that’s, my advice for moving internationally… Actually, this is my advice for pretty much anything — anytime you’re starting anything new, whether it’s a new country or a new job or whatever, is to build a community around you as quickly as possible. I was lucky in my China experience that when I arrived there, I arrived into a group of people who were as clueless as I was. And all of us kind of had… We didn’t really have much of an option but to band together to try and navigate the system, and in that process, you know, we all kind of helped each other out, getting registered for the school, and then we all kind of figured out how to find apartment together and then a bunch of us became roommates together also. So my first apartment we rented, I think I rented the second or third week I was there, was this three bedroom apartment and my, I had two roommates who were two of the guys who I’d met on the, through the Language and Cultural University program. And having that like, initial community that I can plug into, definitely led to the success that I had in China. If I didn’t have that community to plug into and I had just been kind of out there on my own, I don’t think I would have lasted for the 10 years that I did in China.

David McNeill: So would you say that, it sounds like maybe in the initial days your peer group and your friend group was mostly other expats, other foreigners looking to learn the language, looking to maybe build a career in China? Did that change over the time that you were there, in terms of getting more, you know, locals in the mix or did you stay pretty close with these expats?

Alex Ronalds: You know, those expats that I met in that meeting trip, I’m not sure if this is the norm, I kind of feel this is the norm but maybe it’s also a self-selecting bias like these are the ones I chose to hang out with and spend the most time with. We’re all people there who were kind of career-focused and had some reasons they wanted to be there in China. One of them had been an investment banker in the United States and he was just like, I’m tired of this, China’s next growth market, I’m going to go learn Chinese and figure something out over there. Another one was her family did textile with Savile Row tailor shop, and she came over there on her gap year between high school and college so that she could learn Mandarin so that she could help take over the family business interests in China. Another guy was a history major in the university and he was like, “Wow! I was a history major in university, I don’t really know what to do with this.” So he came over there to kind of figure out what was going on in the Orient and how he could turn that into a business of his own.

David McNeill: It’s definitely very important for you to find people that you can work really well with. How were you able to do that as you moved from studying Chinese at the university to actually starting to work in China?

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! So, I studied Chinese for about three months. And in that period of time, it just became very abundant that if I want to stay in China, if I want to continue to be there, I had to find some way to earn income. I knew kind of since I was a kid, something I’ve always been passionate about is video games and I, it was something that I’ve always been involved in, in some way, shape or form. I kind of, I built my first video game when I was 13. And it was probably, you know, being an expat kid, having moved around the whole bunch as a kid. I was just naturally kind of drawn towards digital entertainment, and I knew that China was also, had an exploding games market. So I went through my contacts and the people I’d met both through USC and while I’ve been living there, and started reaching out to people who were building games. And I luckily found this company who… It was a startup based out of China; it was about 50 people working for them. It was an American guy who had founded it, and they had just been acquired by this French company that wanted to use them to do development in China. And it was a perfect kind of mix for me because I wanted to get in the games and what these guys needed was, they needed somebody who is kind of bilingual in French and English, that lived in China to help them communicate with the new foreign company. So that was how I managed to leverage myself in there.

David McNeill: That sounds like the perfect fit. Do you find that the network is the most important part about finding a role in China or going through the traditional channels works just as well?

Alex Ronalds: In my experience, like to be honest I have, in one time in my life… Actually, that’s not even true. I don’t think I’ve ever applied for a job and gotten a job, I just always been a friend of a friend who’s connected me. And I’ve never, yeah! I’ve never actually applied for a job and gotten a job. So I would say that’s not only just in China, my personal experience is coming back to the community thing, like it’s always so important to build a community wherever you are, and then you have something to leverage going forward.

David McNeill: Yeah! That’s fantastic. I think that’s great advice for folks around the world, whether they’re working abroad or not. How did you change your visa from, you know, being more focused on studying to more of a work visa? And what process did that entail?

Alex Ronalds: So when I was studying, I first showed up on a tourist visa and then after I got there, the University as part of the enrollment package, changed it into a student visa. What I discovered is that China is fairly grey back in the day when it came to visa-wise, and it was pretty easy for me to continually renew the student visa, even if I wasn’t attending class full time. I stayed on that visa until I found a full-time job and then the company that I took the full-time job with, transferred that into a working visa and I kept that the entire duration of the time I was in China, even for periods of the time where I was not working. China has some pretty grey areas on this, at one point we had just created a company and given ourselves visas through the company. It was, yeah! It was not always as straightforward as it sounds but there was always a way to navigate the system to be able to live there.

David McNeill: So how did that job develop for you? Was that the ideal position that you had in mind when you first joined?

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! So that job… Look it was a startup in a chaotic space. It quickly turned into… That company got acquired by somebody else and then we ended up pivoting the product dramatically. What that company did give me though, was it gave me my first kind of entry into technology; to be able to see what was going on around. And from there, I was able to identify another company in Beijing, which was doing something that I was really passionate about, which was a AAA quality free-to-play games. In that company which I joined was then… So it was my second company where I was really able to cut my teeth and kind of learn about the gaming industry as I would if I was in, you know, San Francisco or Los Angeles and acquire the same level of skill. That company was called Possibility Space. Possibility Space then lead into me meeting my future business partners for Balanced Worlds which was, we were a development shop based out of China doing AAA quality games for a large American publisher. We were, build ourselves as both like a AAA quality game company in Asia, which was pretty in China, which is pretty rare in itself but also we had developed our own proprietary engine technology which we were using to power our games.

David McNeill: What kind of games were you developing at that time?

Alex Ronalds: So at first what we were developing was, we were doing games for American publishers, large American publishers, world-class American publishers as development deals. And the way this works is that they own the intellectual property, and we would develop against their intellectual property for kind of multiplatform games. The one we were working on was that a third person shooter for a pretty relatively well known intellectual property that was free-to-play and going to be massively online. We did that for about two years and at the end of the day, the publisher that we had built this for, unfortunately, went bankrupt right before we were about to launch this, and we had to pivot into mobile games and free-to-play games. Which was, to be honest, the natural progression we had to take anyways but it was much more of a, “Hey, we’re doing this now because our publisher went bankrupt” rather than kind of a natural flow into it.

David McNeill: So how did you end up making a decision to pivot as opposed to, you know, close up shop and start something new? It seems like that would be a huge blow to have the publisher that you’re working with go under so close to the point where you’re applying to release your title?

Alex Ronalds: Well, I think, you know, with tech companies, the hardest part about the tech, about a tech company is building the team; building a reliable team that can build something actionable. We had that. We’d spent the last two years building that team. I think we were up to probably 45 or 50 guys at that point and we could execute exceedingly well. We were also in a position where we owned all the technology, we just didn’t own the intellectual property. So we kind of got given and like, okay, well look, we have the team. We have the technology. We should be able to make this work pretty quickly.

David McNeill: Yeah! That’s fantastic. And what was your role in this company?

Alex Ronalds: I was the COO and executive producer. I did a lot of the production work for the games themselves and then just kind of operational shenanigans as we call them in China.

David McNeill: That sounds like an amazing experience, do you feel like you were able to move more quickly in your career by working in China and being somebody that had those particular skill sets there and that new kind of wild west environment? Or do you think that you would have had equal success building your career in, let’s say San Francisco as well?

Alex Ronalds: I don’t know, my gut… I don’t know the answer to that one, David. I think that that’s a tough one because you use San Francisco as the example. San Francisco just had such explosive growth in such a short amount of time that possibly, possibly I could have achieved the same thing there that I achieved in Beijing, I don’t think anywhere else in the world, though, I would have been able to kind of jumpstart my career as quickly as possible as those two cities.

David McNeill: Yeah! That makes perfect sense. In terms of your day-to-day work, how much where you needing to use Chinese? Was it really, you know, where you’re talking directly in Chinese to folks or you had people, senior managers that you worked with that could communicate in English and Chinese well?

Alex Ronalds: So we had, because we’re building games for a Western audience, we knew that we needed a lot of English speaking staff who played Western games, who watched Western movies, who kind of understood what Western products are like. We had… our entire programming team spoke English, our art, the leads on our art team spoke English, our game design team spoke English and then for the other parts of the company that did not speak English, we had really excellent managers who helped us manage those portions of the company. On a daily basis, I didn’t have to speak Chinese while running the company, because of the way we had structured it and built it. I would say it all backs out from the product you’re trying to build. Like, if you’re trying to build a Chinese, a product for Chinese consumer in China, you better speak the local language because otherwise, you’ll never really be able to master what those products are supposed to look like and create that development culture that makes them successful. Again for me, we were creating products for the Western world.

David McNeill: Right! And given the, you know, the fact that you speak English and French as well, did you find it difficult to learn Mandarin? And did you take any further classes or lessons, work with tutors, anything like that after your initial three months?

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! So I did the initial three months at B.L.C.U. To be honest, you know, I was not the best student while I was there. It was a prime opportunity to get out and kind of meet people in Beijing, and I spent a lot of my time out at the bars and networking events and just kind of getting the lay of the land. I then continued to have tutors for most of the time I was in Beijing but I would never say that my Mandarin was excellent by any stretch of the imagination. The other side of this is my wife who moved there at the same time I did. She was she was 18 when she moved and I was 23 when I moved, she spent the next 10 years studying Mandarin and going to Chinese universities and then after she graduated, she ran a Chinese company in Chinese. And her Mandarin is now completely fluent, she can read and write but her level of depth and knowledge took her years and years to accumulate. So when people ask me like, hey! When people tell me like, hey! I’m going to go study Chinese for, you know, six months, I’m like, you know, this is just… This is not an undertaking worth doing unless you are just going to inundate yourself in the culture for years.

David McNeill: How did you find the cost of living in Beijing compared to the typical salaries that foreigners could expect to earn there, especially working at more Western style companies?

Alex Ronalds: So I think the… I guess maybe this is even something similar that you saw in the valley, around the same time period is that, I moved there in 2000…. sorry beginning of 2006 that I moved to Beijing and it was two years away from the Beijing Olympics, so the government was just plowing tons and tons of money into the city and the cost of living was exceptionally cheap, the environment was terrible. It was just highly polluted. It was hard to get around. There was only two subway lines at the time. So what I found is that most of the foreign companies lacked the ability to bring over foreigners for jobs, for like product facing jobs for foreigners. It was just like, nobody really wants to move to Beijing, double it, so if you have a family and kids, right? So I really benefited from that because it opened up a bunch of doors for me really early on where the job market was… Like the pool of talent for foreigners living in Beijing was very low and the demand was exceedingly high.

David McNeill: How do you think that that balance has changed over the intervening years? Do you still feel like China provides a great opportunity for expats that are interested to move there or has it, has the risk-reward changed?

Alex Ronalds: I think the risk-reward has changed dramatically over the years. I think that what you’ve seen is wow! You know, when I started doing technology in Beijing in 2006, finding a guy who had two years of experience writing code was impossible. Now, this is 10 years later, you can find guys who have 10, you know, 10 years plus experience writing code, and you don’t necessarily need to bring in foreign expats from other countries anymore. Like the locals have really kind of filled in the skill set that they didn’t have in 2006. So a lot of time what you see is the companies are now unwilling to have… When you used to have these big companies out there like Microsoft and Nokia, they would bring out expats. The expats will be kind of living in some cushy accommodation, making their Western salary plus like a hazard bonus for living there, you don’t see that so much anymore. Now, what you see is these, like local plus packages where it’s like, okay, we’re going to pay you more than the locals but you still have to pay your own rents and, you know, buy your own flight home and everything else. So I think the risk-to-reward ratio has really changed a lot over the last 10 years.

David McNeill: Yeah! So maybe it’s not quite the cushy gig that it once was, especially for the more adventurous, you know, international-minded expats among us.

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! I agree. I think that… Like if you’re, if you… Where I would go right now, if I would, just graduated from college is I would hit, go to Indonesia. I think that that’s kind of the next burgeoning marketplace but kind of still resembles that old China feel, where they’re just desperately trying to get talent in the door to try and build some of these systems.

David McNeill: What kind of companies have you seen pop up in Indonesia these days?

Alex Ronalds: So I think that Indonesia, it’s just growing so quickly. You hit a population of 260 million people, and they’re quickly all getting mobile devices and coming online. In the third world, like there’s not… Most people use mobile as their primary way to access the internet like they don’t necessarily have computers and it’s creating just like new businesses all the time.One of the ones that I’ve seen that grew very quickly here is called Go-jek and it’s basically an on-demand delivery service for anything you want, including yourself. In that, it’s the guy on a motor scooter and you can call the service and he’ll pick you up and take you anywhere you want in town, you can sit on the back of his motorbike. Or you can say, “Hey, go down to the Circle K and get me 12 Bintangs,” and he’ll just show up at the house with 12 Bintangs and you pay him cash. So very kind of simple business model, leverages the low-cost labor base, it is Indonesia, makes it’s exceedingly effective at what it does. And now you see Google just plowed in, I think it was 120 million dollars last week to it, bringing it valuation over a billion dollars. There’s tons and tons, like if you Google startups in Indonesia, the land is… There is more than you can imagine. It’s trying to find the diamond in the rough of which one of these is going to, you know, kind of explode into the next Go-jek.

David McNeill: Yeah! That’s always the big question with the startups and especially in more emerging markets is which ones are really going to break through and get that great traction. But to go back to your main story of your career in China, what was the experience like with Balanced Worlds and how things develop in that role, in that company?

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! So after, I think where we left off was I had told you that we’d piled together some money so that we could build games of our own, games that we own, mobile and web games that we owned. And we pivoted into kind of this…. Well, were like, okay, well, trying to do as low friction as possible. So we used our engine technology to build a browser plug-in which works similar to the way unities worked, whereby we could import 3D games directly into the browser. And we launched a game on Facebook called “Bomb Buddies” and it was a, kind of a swing back to the Bomberman games on the Super Nintendo back when you were kid. We had massively 8 player, multiplayer head-to-head and people could get into the ring and drop bombs all over the place in beautiful 3D using our fantastic Chinese art team. What we discovered is that the game went to gangbusters in Brazil of all places. We didn’t expect that when we launched the game, that was something that was completely out of left field. And it was a place where the game dynamics really resonated with the locals and they were spending hours and hours and hours in it, so much that we’d created this like 400 level curve that people had to climb to get to the top tier and we’ve designed it in a way that we’re like, nobody will ever be able to complete this. Sure enough, they did it in like three months. So we’re thinking about going gangbusters in Brazil and we are left with this situation where, as everybody knows, Brazil is not the highest monetizing country, so we were looking for ways whether we raise around to try and grow it in other areas or whether we partner with somebody else. And we actually identified a company called Kabam based out Silicon Valley, who at the time was Silicon Valley’s darling child, sporting like a billion dollar valuation, who offered to acquire us and have us build our games as part of Kabam, which was a huge win for us because we got to continue doing what we loved, building our games and we now had the financial powerhouse behind it that was Silicon Valley.

David McNeill: Yeah! It sounds like a perfect marriage of skill sets and opportunities there. How did things develop once you were at Kabam and certainly working for a much bigger company that had a, you know, foreign headquarters? It seems like quite a change from the role that you were previously occupying; a COO of a small company.

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! That was definitely a change. Not being able to be the master of our own decisions. Going from being, you know, kind of being boss being able to make decisions very quickly between the three of us to a situation where all of a sudden, we had, you know, a large Silicon Valley Corporation behind us and, you know, we were not so in charge of our own fates; was definitely a difficult transition. But again, what we gained was, we gained their understanding of free-to-play, we gained their financial backing and we gained a lot of their knowhow.

David McNeill: Were you actually able to bring the entire team with you or was it sort of on a person-by-person basis?

Alex Ronalds: So we would actually… When we had lost our publisher, our American publisher that we’re doing AAA games with and we were like, okay, we have the team going forward. We’re going to raise some money and do this on our own, we, unfortunately, had to let some people go in that process, just because we knew we had to be lean and we had to be mean. That was a really difficult, difficult thing to do and it was something we were all dreading horribly and… Like, when it’s, something like that is over, there’s like a major sense of relief but it also just continues to sting.

David McNeill: Yeah! Yeah! I can imagine, especially with those strong relationships that you built up in the community that you were describing. But I’m sure as it is with any startup these are, this is part for the cause and one of those things that you have to go into that job opportunity knowing it might be a possibility down the road.

Alex Ronalds: You know, it was tough, because all of the people we hired… Like, we clearly were not in a position to pay the most amount of money, so all the staff that we had, everybody believed in the vision and they believed in what we were trying to do; bringing, you know, AAA quality game production to China, and having to just leave some people behind who had made that sacrifice, it just wasn’t, it was not easy.

David McNeill: And so how did things end up turning out with Kabam? Were you, you know, how long did you sort of work for them and in terms of your projects, how did they develop? And what did that lead to ultimately?

Alex Ronalds: So we got into Kabam, I can’t remember the exact date that we arrived in there. I want to say it was like November of 2011, and Kabam’s strategy was like, “Great! You guys have this platform on web but, you know, where all the money really is? All the money is right now on mobile.” So we spent the next two years building Bomb Buddies, which later became Blast Zone on mobile, so that we could be in that marketplace. We launched the game, must have been 2013. Sorry, my dates are getting a little bit fuzzy. But I think it was around 2013 that we launched the game and what we discovered was, wow! We had this huge demand for people who wanted really high-quality AAA Games on mobile but we were one of the very few games on the store that was doing synchronous gameplay. And that’s not a super popular mobile concept. Like, if you think of all the major games that have done really well on mobile, think of “Clash of clans”, it’s asynchronous where, you know, I play for a little bit and I can come back to my device whenever I want. I’m not sitting there waiting to play with my friends at the exact same time. And I think that that’s, that and the fact that we had a joystick in the game itself, because it was Bomberman, right? So like a slight control system, we had a slight control system but it was not… It was a little bit more difficult to use and like a controller, made Bomberman on mobile not the perfect choice. So after iterating for a little while, we decided that just the monetization numbers weren’t there and they, we didn’t pursue the title. At which point I kind of decided that, “Hey! This is great working for corporate America”… My wife and I were kind of interested in leaving China at that point and I was just kind of looking for, like what the next thing I wanted to spend time tackling was.

David McNeill: What made it so, that you and your wife were both considering leaving China was, you know, I guess it had probably been about 10 years at that point, was that just sort of the moment that you’d reach and you want to try something different or was there anything in particular that drove that decision?

Alex Ronalds: The decision was driven by this; we had been there for 10 years, we had a lot of expat friends at that point and as we’ve been there longer what we noticed is that we were, our expat friends were people who’ve been there for about 20 to 25 years plus and it became quickly apparent to me that if I were to start another company there, it might be another 10 year slug by that time making us 20-year expat and then, like the point you’re a 20-year expat, like you’re a lifer.I wasn’t sure I wanted to make that commitment just then. So I started looking at other opportunities in different kinds of countries, even looking back and going back to California to see what was around and that’s kind of how this, how our move out of China after 10 years transpired.

David McNeill: What were some of the main areas that you looked at? Obviously, the US, China, but as you were looking abroad were there other countries that interested you as well?

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! So I was looking for, I guess at first I approached the problem with, “Hey, I’m going to look for a way to kind of use my kind of Chinese knowhow to go to work in… To navigate my way to the United States,” I explored that for a while. I also explored, “Hey, Indonesia’s the next growing, burgeoning economy.” Like, how can I get to Indonesia? Like, how do I set up shop there? And then also through friends of friends, I had just kind of started to try to poke my head into American companies and be like, hey! What is the, you know, like what is the value for an entrepreneur like myself that is interested in moving back to United States?

David McNeill: It sounds like you were open to a lot of different interesting opportunities around the world. How did your job search end up turning out?

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! So, at the end of the day, I think I narrowed it down to three things that I wanted to do. I was… One was; I was interested in coming down into Indonesia and kind of replicating what I’d done in China down here. It a new burgeoning market. It’s, you know, just ripe for disruption. There’s tons of opportunity in Indonesia. The second one was going to work for a large Chinese conglomerates, kind of helping… Who is doing a sizable amount of investment in the United States and needed somebody to sit on the board of a number of their companies and kind of like act as a liaison between all the different corporate interests that they had. And the third one that came up was kind of a friend of a friend introduction; was actually at Facebook, working in their web games business and managing that business. Leslie and I kind of sat down and had this conversation, it’s like, okay, well, where do we want to be in the next 10 years? Because what we’re basically saying is one of these is going base us out of China, one is going base us out of Indonesia and the other one’s going to base us at a San Francisco. And, you know, we kind of went back and forth on this for a while. And, she and I both, our entire careers had been in Asia, so it was kind of like a bit of a tough pill to swallow but at the end of the day, we thought that probably spending a couple of years in the United States wasn’t going to be a bad thing and working for Facebook, because it would also allow Leslie the time to get her green card and her US citizenship.

David McNeill: So you move back to United States, was that into San Francisco?

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! We moved to San Francisco. Basically, what happened was, once I signed the offer letter with Facebook, they sent a relocation team out to… They had a relocation team in China that packed up all of our belongings, including my two cats and shipped everything to the United States. My wife was an Ecuadorian citizen, I was an American citizen and my wife was an Ecuadorian citizen, and from the get-go, like it was clear that Facebook hadn’t… Like this was a unique situation even for Facebook, where they were relocating an American into United States who had a foreign wife but wasn’t, like it wasn’t like an H1B situation so they were actually having to file for the American marriage visa rather than, you know, through the H1B visa. And it was just like, immediately when this whole thing started, it was a bit chaotic trying to figure out how fast it would move. Leslie and I had this one meeting with the relocation company, they’re like, okay, we’ll send somebody by the house on Tuesday to pick up your stuff. Here’s some stickers, put them on what you want, what stays in the apartments. Like okay, so Leslie and I woke up one morning and we put the stickers on everything in the apartment that belonged to the landlord and didn’t really think anything of it. And about noon, you know, we’re sitting down for lunch we hear a knock on the door and this very nice Chinese guy shows up and he’s like, “Okay, are you guys ready to go?”And we were like, yeah! I guess we can start packing now. And Leslie and I are envisioning, okay, well, there’s going to be like three days of packing that’s going to transpire where we’re going to push all of our stuff out. He’s like, okay. And it was almost like a Benny Hill comedy sketch where he blows his whistle, and all of a sudden, 20 people come running into our apartment and just literally picked up everything that didn’t have a sticker and walked away with it in a span of 30 minutes, leaving Leslie and I just like shellshock sitting in our empty apartment. Like, okay well, we didn’t realize you’re going to take everything, right? And immediately, we’re like living out of a suitcase but we hadn’t, like it happened so fast, we hadn’t packed for the next couple of months and then they put it on a boat to San Francisco and there was the Oakland port strike. So we didn’t actually even see our stuff for another four months after they walked out of our apartment with it.

David McNeill: Wow! Well, that was the first shocking experience as you were making your move back to the US. Once you were back in the States given that, you know, that’s where you spent a lot of time growing up, you also went to university there, but this was the first work experience that you had in the States. You know, going back from 10 years in China, what were some of the biggest surprises you had in terms of reverse cultural shock?

Alex Ronalds: Man, there were so many. So I went back a month before my wife did and I left her in Beijing because they still need the process some of the visas and everything. So I also went back to the California with my two cats and I was put up in a corporate apartment in Menlo Park, and it was great. You know, Facebook was awesome, got me the first-class tickets, showed up with my cat at the United Airlines office in the morning, they took the cats and off I was on my way to San Francisco drinking champagne along the way. I show up in San Francisco and I get a rental car at the airport and drive to this Facebook corporate apartments and get up there, I let the cats out, I kind of take a shower and I’m just like sitting on the couch watching TV and I fall asleep. And the next thing I know is I just hear this horrible like siren in the background, like what is that? And I wake up, you know, I wake up terrified because I haven’t heard one of these in a long time. I guess it’s the fire alarm. I’m like, holy lord I don’t, you know, this is going to be terrifying. So I jump up and then grab a bathrobe that was on the back of the door. I put on, robed a bathroom robe over me and managed to have the foresight to grab my passport and put it in the side of the bathrobe and then I grabbed my cat carrion, shuffled my two terrified cats into it and we ran out the door into the streets of Menlo Park. And I get out the door and I’m standing out there in a bathrobe and sandals and I’m, in freezing cold and I’m looking around and there’s a bunch of, kind of Facebook tech workers were just standing on the side of the road while the fire alarms going off, drinking martinis, chatting calmly, and I realized that what had happened was, this was some sort of fire drill that happened on like a monthly basis. And me having been in China for the last 10 years, like I heard a fire alarm, I ran for my life into the streets with my cats who are now screaming at the top of their lung, and no keys to get back into the apartment of which Facebook had provided for me. So that was like my first night back in California. Meeting all of my Facebook co-workers, other people who I’d be working with at Facebook and I was the bathrobe guy with the cats during the fire alarm.

David McNeill: Did you get people coming up to you, saying, oh yeah! I think I’ve seen you somewhere. Were you the guy in the bathrobe out in the street?

Alex Ronalds: You know nobody ever, like while I was working at Facebook, nobody ever came up to me and talked to me about that specific event but I’m sure that people must have recognized me in the hallway, going, hey! Look, there’s that freak, right? There’s that guy.

David McNeill: Right! Maybe a little whisper in the corner but no big deal. As you think about your time in China and the experience that you built there over those 10 years and you try to, you know, bring that to bear in terms of working at Facebook and other companies around the world, outside of building your own company, do you find it useful to have that experience or difficult to actually use in another environment outside of China?

Alex Ronalds: I think what China taught me and what I think is probably the most important skill set that I’ve acquired, is how to be scrappy and how to keep driving things forward. Like in China, we’d often hit these end paths where it was like, okay, well, there’s no way to do this thing and, you know, after asking questions around it or figuring out… There was always some approach that we could go to get it done. Our visas were a case in point in this. Like, there was always a situation that would come and it’s like, Oh! We can’t renew your visa because they’ve changed the laws around this. And it, you know, a lot of expats just kind of gave up and went home over the years, but there was always some sort of way to push through it and just figure out what the problem was.

David McNeill: You and Leslie were actually some of the folks that managed to find the route to make it work. I think that’s really impressive, because it takes a very entrepreneurial, very adventurous, someone who likes the chaos, you know, type of person to actually head to China in the first place but even among those folks, there are people who threw in the towel far before you guys did.

Alex Ronalds: Yes. Far before, yes! This is, I think that’s absolutely true. I think that a lot of the situations that I encountered in China, kind of just made me learn how to just kind of grip through situation and find solutions, even if it’s not like the solution that you’re expecting to be the norm.

David McNeill: Right!

Alex Ronalds: I think that that was the number one thing I learned from China. Whether it was like dealing with the local fire department to get permits for the office, or whether it was the visas for the foreigners who worked for us, or whether it was the social system and how do we pay into the social system and the retirement system for the local employees. Like, so many things, people came back to us all the time and said, “Oh, it’s impossible for you to do this thing.” And we’d be like, well, it’s probably not impossible and then we’d, you know, we’d find some way around it.

David McNeill: What sort of resources, tools, and services would you recommend to folks that are interested in living in China?

Alex Ronalds: Yeah! Man, I think the thing is this. I think the thing is you have to build a community wherever you’re going and whatever you’re doing. Your community may be different because of what your interests are. Let’s say you’re a photographer and you’re like, hey! I want to move to China. Start looking at meetups in China for photographers. If you don’t speak Chinese, I’m sure that there’s a wealth of photography meetups in English for English speakers in China or a wealth of Chinese photographers that speak English and you just have to seek them out. Don’t be shy. Just get out there and kind of push your comfort zone so that you’re meeting new people and that you are developing a community because if you do not develop a community of people you can rely on and people you can talk to, you won’t be successful in what you’re trying to do.

David McNeill: How can our listeners find out more about you and what you’re currently doing?

Alex Ronalds: You can catch me on LinkedIn; feel free to add me there. I’m pretty social in general.

Outro

Thanks to Alex for sharing his story with us. You can find the show notes for this episode as well as a full transcript at expatempire.com.

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Music on this episode was produced by Eli Hermit, please check him out on Bandcamp and Spotify.

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Originally published at expatempire.com on January 7, 2019.