Smashing Through the Ceiling and Stereotypes
Jensen Huang is the first person to lead a $5 trillion company.
Asian Americans are told that they lack leadership qualities, and yet Jensen Huang just led NVIDIA to become the first company worth $5 trillion dollars in world history.
I just recorded a podcast interview with Vicky Tsai, CEO and founder of TATCHA who sold to Unilever for $500 million in 2019. Despite graduating from Wellesley and Harvard Business School and winning awards at Starbucks for her work, she continued to receive performance reviews from multiple managers that said she, “Meets Expectations” and “Lacks Leadership Potential.” When she would push back for more detail, they rarely had a response. She was even told that she wasn’t the right leader by her private equity investor, so she stepped down as CEO of her own company. The new leadership they brought in failed miserably and she was brought back eventually. Even when she returned to Harvard Business School to discuss the case study on Tatcha with a class, a male student had the nerve to suggest that maybe they were right. This is AFTER she successfully built and sold her company for half a billion dollars! But her climb to the top was far from easy.
Throughout her career she was gaslit to believe that she might not be a good leader, even after she proved herself time and time again. People even took credit for her work, including investors who lied and said they were operators that had a big part in the success of Tatcha. She had never even heard about the “bamboo ceiling” concept until 2021.
I did not know that this was systemic, so I assumed that they were right. I internalized it and had impostor syndrome. I felt that I really didn’t deserve to be in the places where I was and that it was only a matter of time before people found out that I was not capable. The more success that I had, and the better my resume got, the more I was worried that it was only a matter of time before everybody found out that I was a fraud.
I did not know about the bamboo ceiling. I did not know that Asian Americans are the least likely demographic to be promoted into leadership in America. Not to mention the Women’s Wear Daily update on how women are doing in the beauty industry. The answer: Not so great, not so many leaders.
- Vicky Tsai in Elle Magazine, September 2025
So many Asian Americans struggle with the disconnect of their stellar work and results, yet being told they aren’t exceeding expectations or good leaders. They start to internalize this negative feedback and self-doubt inevitably creeps in. My hope is that by sharing stories like Jensen’s and Vicky’s, that the false narrative that is being told by others is drowned out by the truth.
You don’t need the validation or praise of your managers to know if you’re a good leader or not. Many of these managers got to their positions in spite of their mediocrity, but because they knew how to navigate corporate politics or had the right connections, not because of merit. If your instinct is that they aren’t a strong leader, why should you take their feedback seriously? We’ve been so programmed to seek the approval of our parents and teachers since we were young, that we automatically assume our “superiors” know better. Ignore the haters like Vicky and Jensen did, and forge your own path.
That’s why I started Hyphen Capital, because I wanted to be on the underdogs who were told they weren’t leadership material. I wanted us to write our own stories, and not let them be written by others. Instead of banging our heads against bamboo ceilings, I wanted to invest in building our own houses. Houses like NVIDIA and Tatcha. You can build the ceiling as high as you want in your own house. In the case of Nvidia, you don’t have to build a ceiling at all.
If you are all too familiar with performance reviews like these, and believe they don’t fairly represent you, push back and say something. If you’re not satisfied with the answer, then leave, because they don’t see you and likely never will. Go somewhere you will be valued and not used. Don’t allow yourself to be taken advantage of. Go somewhere with a higher ceiling, where you see people who look like you at the top. Or better yet, go and build your own house with no ceilings.