Female Disruptors: Tongtong Gong of Amberdata On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
The first came at a dinner with Shawn right after our series B funding round. The weight of the pressure behind the money we had raised started to settle in and I began wondering if I had what it took. It was the imposter syndrome. As I brought this up with Shawn, he looked at me and said, “Remember this: nobody has any idea what they are doing. They are all faking it until they make it.” Running a company of this magnitude is a once in a lifetime opportunity and it can be scary and challenging. But Shawn’s words reminded me that I was just as capable as anyone else in my position. The key was to remain humble, procure resources, and work hard.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tongtong Gong, COO.
Tongtong Gong is Co-founder and COO at Amberdata, the leading provider of digital asset data infrastructure and market intelligence to financial institutions. Tongtong has an extensive background in building and managing distributed systems at scale for enterprises and has led advanced development teams focusing on incubating new businesses for major software players. Her teams have successfully built high-performance computing platforms and marketing analytics software for both offline and digital markets. Prior to co-founding Amberdata, Tongtong served as VP of Engineering at Unified and a variety of engineering and leadership roles at Acxiom, including establishing a Global Service Center in China. Tongtong was named one of CloudNow’s Top Women Entrepreneurs and has been featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, and Nasdaq.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Thank you for having me! I grew up in Beijing, China, and came to the US when I was 17 as an exchange student. I felt self-conscious about my English as it wasn’t great, and I thought if I chose to study anything related to English or journalism I’d be at a big disadvantage to compete with my peers. My advisor suggested I consider a computer science degree and it was very interesting because I realized I’d be learning a new language along with all my peers, so we would all be at the same starting point. I’m very competitive, I like to win, so I said, let’s try this computer science thing. Long story short, I got my degree and started my career working for Acxiom as a backend data security engineer.
I’ve always worked with data and data integration products, trying to figure out ways to provide value to end users. Fast forward to 2016–2017 when the blockchain/crypto space started picking up, and I was intrigued by the space. I found myself opening Chrome tabs one after another and going completely down the rabbit hole. I wanted to jump right in, so I quit my job and started exploring opportunities. I realized there was this huge gap in collecting data, insights, and analytics in the ecosystem, and that just happened to be a space I was very familiar with. I was happy to be able to start participating in the space I wanted to be involved in and that is how Amberdata was born.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
I think being in digital assets, by default is disruptive because it really challenges the current status quo: The centralized control over the financial system today and reliance on government issued fiat currency. I think crypto and the origin of Bitcoin came about right after the financial crisis because of corruption and various degrees of security breaches. People have a hard time trusting centralized entities. So, a mechanism to have an open, decentralized, interoperable, transparent, and immutable system of record is what, I believe, the general public is eager and yearning for. The very existence of digital assets is disruptive to the entire financial industry. They challenge the way we think about ownership, value, and different financial privileges. I remember attending a talk by Bobby Lee and he was holding up a $100 dollar bill and asking people what gives the piece of paper value? Was it the paper itself, or is it the backing, or is it the reputation? That was really thought provoking. The bottom line is… being in the crypto industry means providing transparency, data, and insights to allow the general public to gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on. I guess I’m helping the disruptive force.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Oh I make mistakes every day, and they’re often funny. But one example I can think of is when I first started working. I was programming with a very senior engineer sitting next to me and we were trying to troubleshoot something. I don’t know what led to this, but we just decided to delete one of the databases to see if that helped. “You sure I should delete this,” I asked. He said, “Yeah, sure.” So I hit delete, and it turns out I deleted the live database! Well, it wasn’t funny at the time, but now I can laugh about it. The lesson learned, however, is that number one: always have a backup. Number two: don’t listen to someone just because they’re more experienced or are older than you, always use your own judgment. And number 3: human error happens. You’ve got to design systems and processes that don’t need to rely on an individual to make the perfect decision every single time.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
For the longest time, my co-founder, Shawn Douglass was my mentor. We met in 2006 when I was working for Acxiom as the lead engineer. Shawn was the executive sponsor, basically acquiring the Grid software division for EMC (now Dell/EMC) and I was part of that acquisition. I started working for him for a while before eventually leaving EMC, and there was a period of time where we didn’t work for the same company and I was always calling him up asking for advice. He was always so encouraging and would see things in me that I didn’t and he’d encourage me to take on responsibilities that I didn’t think I was capable of. So when he called me up about starting a new company, my first reaction was, I’m not a startup person, I am not a founder, and I wouldn’t be helpful to him… but he was persistent. He believed in me and proved me wrong. Now, I’m really glad I joined him on this journey. Mentors are an incredible resource to have throughout your career and I wouldn’t be where I am today without mine.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
This is an interesting question because I think for anything to withstand the test of time is a credit to it being disruptive. It has to be fluid and adaptable. Times change, people change, society changes, economic situations change. Ideas and concepts from 20 years ago are not necessarily accepted today. I believe time itself changes and you have to be able to adapt to change. And what is change? Change is disruption. Change is always good, it pushes and tests us and lets us know whether our existing systems are strong enough. Being a startup, I am the agent of change. I am challenging the status quo and creating value that didn’t exist before. I think there is so much value in accepting change and I don’t think anything can withstand the test of time without changing and being disrupted in itself. In my perspective, change and disruption is always good.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
The first came at a dinner with Shawn right after our series B funding round. The weight of the pressure behind the money we had raised started to settle in and I began wondering if I had what it took. It was the imposter syndrome. As I brought this up with Shawn, he looked at me and said, “Remember this: nobody has any idea what they are doing. They are all faking it until they make it.” Running a company of this magnitude is a once in a lifetime opportunity and it can be scary and challenging. But Shawn’s words reminded me that I was just as capable as anyone else in my position. The key was to remain humble, procure resources, and work hard.
The second came at cocktails with one of my friends Lisa Xu. She’s the founder of NopSec, another enterprise security software company. When we were just a seed funded company early on, while we were both lamenting the challenges of running a company she asked me who my “ICP” was and I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained it’s my ideal customer profile. She told me that to build a company, I needed to understand who I was serving. That idea stuck with me because no matter what you do, you should never forget who it is you are seeking to help.
The third piece is similar to the second, and it came from the framework Lisa gave me. Amberdata became fully realized when we understood that we served financial institutions with transparent access to data. Early on, we were busy satisfying so many requirements from developers and our open source community, that we became spread too thin across the map. When we were able to articulate clearly who it was we were specifically serving, it allowed us to focus on the right work making everything else noise. Sometimes as a startup you get so distracted by what’s in front of you, you forget what got you started in the first place. Never forgetting your audience allows all the work that follows to become natural.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Yeah, far from being done. We’re just getting started. We are going to shake up the financial services industry by helping financial institutions usher in the next trillion dollars to DeFi. Based on our DeFi primer, we found that all it will take is a one percent increase in participation of financial institutions to do so.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
This might be controversial, but I believe our tendency to over-analyze situations and outcomes as being tied to our gender is a challenge many “women disruptors” face at some point. More often than not, our male counterparts don’t tend to correlate their wins or losses to their gender. They don’t actively think about whether their maleness had something to do with them getting a piece of feedback of the outcome of that meeting. As women, we need to protect our mindspace and overcome our tendency to overthink, over-question, and over-index on the basis of being women. Focus on what’s valuable and what moves you forward.
Everyone has to navigate some level of discrimination or prejudice in their life; the key is to not let that define you. Overcome it. I want to be known as a badass founder building a successful company, I don’t want to be known as a badass woman founder.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
I am inspired by interviews of other entrepreneurs who built amazing companies. I find courage from listening to founders share the stories of their struggles. It is a welcome surprise to me that nobody knows what they are doing at the time, everyone has hustled. Everyone has struggled to raise money, find someone who believes in them, and then catch a break only to find that more money means bigger problems and more mouths to feed. Ever since I started Amberdata I’ve enjoyed finding a community of like-minded founders who share their experiences so we all can learn from each other.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
For the past 10 years my husband and I have sponsored the Amazing Maasai Race for the Maasai tribe in Kenya. It originated as a destination marathon in Kenya where you run to raise awareness and funding for the secondary education of young women in the Massai tribe. This offers them a better chance to get out of the village and into the city where they can pursue their dreams. The race evolved into a global run because not everyone had the resources to travel to Kenya. Plus, that is money we would rather spend on education. We do this every year. We all wear the same T-shirt, go on a run, take a selfie for social media, and participate in fundraising. No matter where you are, you can pledge from walking a mile, to running a full ultra-marathon for these girls.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.”
~Mark Twain.
I have always lived by this. Whenever I’m in doubt if I should act, I usually act anyways.
How can our readers follow you online?
Follow me on Twitter @Gongt2 and keep up with what we’re doing at Amberdata @Amberdataio
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Tongtong Gong of Amberdata On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.