Hi, I’m Michelle Lai. I go by ML or ml_sudo.
I’m professionally 50% Tech and 50% Finance, culturally 50% American and 50% Asian. These days, mostly crypto. 100% direct, 150% curious.
doing
(written in third person, because long descriptions in first person are weird)
ML grew up in Asia, where she developed a strong desire for people to live freely. As a technophile, she believes technology is a primary tool with which people can do this.
She fell in love with business as a teenager and started working with C-suite execs as an M&A banker during the Global Financial Crisis (~ 2008 to 2009), and then as a private equity investor across the Asia Pacific region, where she also helped to manage the board of a publicly listed bank.
She is currently a board director of the Electric Coin Company, makers of the Zcash protocol; in 2021 she was on the first Zcash grant organization, the Zcash Open Major Grants Committee, where among other things she helped make a large grant to the Tor Foundation. She’s a member of the Spartan Council, the 8-person governance DAO of the Synthetix protocol, one of the longest running and highest fee-generating DeFi protocols. She is also helping to establish the Universal Privacy Alliance, an alliance of the leading privacy projects in crypto whose goals include negotiating the difficult divide between technology and regulations today. She organized a 4-hour privacy special at ETHDenver 2023, with participants including Roger Dingledine (cofounder of Tor), Frances Haugen (Meta whistleblower), speakers from the EFF, ACLU, Fight for the Future, a professional hacker called Alien and many others.
Previously, she was the Head of Business Development at the digital bank Anchorage (anchorage.com), and as the first business hire she worked on partnerships and sales, product, customer experience and other matters, helping bring them from pre-product to $1bn assets under custody in 8 months. She has also worked with Bitpay, the leading crypto payment processor (bitpay.com), and Copper (copper.co), the digital asset custodian. She was Chief Strategy Officer at Prenetics, a health tech startup that is today a leading DNA testing and wellness company across Asia (prenetics.com).
She’s run an independent consulting business since 2015, working with conglomerates at the intersection of tech and finance. She’s helped a multi-billion dollar insurance company explain their machine learning platform to investment analysts during an IPO; created analytics dashboards to measure AI application penetration and digital traction; and launched a remittance partnership between an Asian financial conglomerate and the Stellar Development Foundation, which included successfully convincing the regulator that a crypto license was not required (the company had failed to do so 3 times before).
She codes occasionally at https://github.com/ml-sudocode/. She graduated in 2007 with a BSc in Economics from the Wharton School and a BA in Economics from the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
interests
freedom tech. cybersecurity. robots. growth. consciousness.
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skills
I’ve deliberately done a lot of different things in my career. Some people like to specialize and become world-class experts at certain things. My brain works better when I’m tying together different domains and doing new things all the time. I like adding value in the gaps where emergent problems are found.
I’ve done strategic finance (M&A, fundraising), early stage business development, started a sales team, product (crypto and insurtech), high stakes negotiations and litigation (private equity), managed the board of a publicly listed bank, operations (including factory manufacturing), and regular finance (management accounting, budgeting). I also did a full-stack web dev bootcamp and a machine learning course.
I’ve been #2 to number of successful #1s. I’m not a yes-man. I’m opinionated about what should be done and how, and I don’t entertain ego trips.
If you ask me what my strongest skill is, it would be asking the right questions. I’ve transitioned careers and domains a few times, and the way to go up steep learning curves is to 1) frame the best questions, and 2) ask shamelessly.
thoughts on certain matters
Culture: my dream is to create a culture where someone can be anything they want to be. If the secretary wants to be a salesperson, I want nothing to stand in her way. If she wants to take a course on sales, sit in on sales meeting, she should have the time and resources to do so. All she needs is to bring her dream to the forefront, and her contributions to the table.
Principles: Be kind but direct; care deeply and give real feedback. Servant leadership: no bosses, only leaders. No-asshole rule. No entitlement: demand ownership and maturity. Everyone’s motivations are different - respect that and harness energy intelligently. Laughing often and laughing hard are important ingredients for workplace happiness!
Reluctant feminist: I don’t get overtly bullied because I have a strong personality. I’m grateful that I don’t suffer the same sort of harassment that other women face, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t suffer from the effects of entrenched sexism. And so you’ll sometimes hear me talk about this.