On October 31, 2000, William Wang was one of the last passengers to board Singapore Airlines Flight 6 in Taipei — flying out that night instead of the next morning so he could get home in time for his daughter’s first Halloween. The plane took off on the wrong runway, hit construction equipment at 165 miles per hour, and split apart. Eighty-three people died. William was sitting in the front row of business class, right behind the restroom. He doesn’t remember the last few seconds — only that he was pushed out through a gap in the fuselage by fire and smoke, landed on his feet, and ran.
That night could have been the end of the story. Instead it was the middle of it. Decades before the crash, thirteen-year-old William had landed in Honolulu with a green card pressed into his hand before he’d even cleared customs, then spent high school as one of the only Asian kids in a nearly all-white Huntington Beach, eating lunch alone in the cafeteria. He’d go on to call himself “a loser” for barely graduating USC and failing to get into grad school with his friends — before working his way up to director of sales at 25, only to walk away and start over on his own. This is a story about resilience and perseverance.
In this episode of Hyphen Nation, Dave talks with William about all of it: the crash and the debt collector waiting for him back home who forgave the timeline out of guilt, the two thousand plasma TVs he talked Costco into betting on that sold out in a week and helped found VIZIO, the near-collapse when a $2 billion acquisition fell through in 2015, the 2021 IPO that peaked at a $5.2 billion market cap, the 2024 sale to Walmart for $2.3 billion, and the belief he had to unlearn along the way — that the company was still his — in order to let it grow past him. It’s a conversation about survival, relationship building, and what it actually costs to build something that outlives your ego.
