MEET THE SPEAKERS

Larry Liu is the CEO and founder of Weee!, the largest and fastest-growing online Asian and Hispanic e-grocer, which provides exciting, high-quality products to consumers nationwide. Almost two decades ago, Larry came to the United States as an engineer; he quickly realized there was not simply a lack of Asian goods at local stores, but that a social and joyful aspect of shopping was missing.
 

Larry believes that people should celebrate life through food by empowering the shared discovery of delightful, food-at-home products and experiences. Founded in 2015 and valued at over $2.8 billion, today, Weee! has over 2,000 employees and serves ethnic communities with access to authentic and exciting food throughout the nation. Prior to launching Weee!, Larry worked at Intel, Brocade, and Atmel in various engineering and
finance roles. He holds a BSEE from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an MBA from UC Davis Graduate School of Management.

Luke Zhang is the Industry Lead at Google based in Shanghai. He is a highly accomplished sales and marketing professional with over a decade of experience driving business growth, spearheading digital transformation initiatives, and formulating strategic business plans across diverse industries. Expertise in managing high-performing teams, forging strategic partnerships, and leveraging data-driven insights to achieve ambitious targets. Proven ability to excel in both domestic and international markets. Luke has an MBA degree from Kellogg School of Management and bachelor of engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Lawrence has diverse expertise in Ecommerce, strategy, business intelligence and
building and scaling a different range of digital businesses. He is currently VP of K11, a new omni-channel upscale culture retail player in China, and is (Part of New World Development) responsible for Ecommerce, Digital Marketing and CRM. Previously he was the Head of Ecommerce, Strategy and BI for Sam's Club and Walmart China respectively.

Prior to this he worked at Alibaba and McKinsey, which he joined immediately after graduating from Kellogg. With an international upbringing, he completed his MBA at Kellogg and BSc at UCL. He
has experience in investment, consulting, and business development across the US, UK,
China, India, Australia and New Zealand.

Steven To’s expertise and experience cut across management consulting and tech startups. He is currently the Head of Asia Growth Marketing, Amazon Ads, responsible for advertiser growth and success in the fast-growing region. Prior to Amazon, Steven assumed the role of the Chief Operating

Officer (COO) of Onion Academy (洋葱学园), responsible for Series D fundraising (300M RMB),

CFO functions, international strategy and new BU growth. At the beginning of his career, Steven spent 8 years in the Greater China office at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he focused on financial services and the TMT sector. Steven graduated from the MBA program at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, majoring in social entrepreneurship. He graduated from the BBA (Global Business Studies) with first-class honors at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Yvette Zhang has fifteen years of experience in management consulting including at professional service firms and at corporate internal consulting teams. She has helped automotive and industrial players to transform the growth via strategy optimization and operations improvement. Now as a Director in the Automotive and Industrial practice at AlixPartners, Yvette has been involved in multiple transformational projects including, due diligence, post merger integration, growth strategy, organizational redesign, process improvement, supply chain optimization, etc. With her passion for cutting-edge technologies in the automotive industry, she has led projects for EV and AV suppliers, and drove C.A.S.E. topics on AlixPartners annual auto study in last few years, including ADAS/AD technology, international shared mobility consumer survey and study, etc.

Yvette has started her career at Accenture, and has worked at internal consulting teams at Alcoa and Cummins. She obtained an MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern University and BS in Economics from Fudan University. Originally from Shanghai, she now lives in New York.

Khanh is a Vietnamese Canadian tech strategy, business planning, and operations leader with over 11 years of experience in the tech and consulting industry across multiple geographies, including the US, UK, Canada, and Southeast Asia. He has a strong background in strategy, business development, project management, data science, financial modeling, and business analysis, having received an MBA from Northwestern Kellogg, an MSc in Finance from Boston College, and a BSc with focus on Philosophy and Finance from Babson College.
Currently, Khanh leads special projects for the business planning, strategy, and operations functions for TikTok's APAC and MEA regions, where he oversees the monetization strategy initiatives for TikTok's Ads business. he leverages data-driven operational insights and strategic partnerships to drive growth and revenue for one of the world's most popular and innovative social media platforms.
Previously, Khanh was a senior consultant at Analysis Group, a leading economic and financial consulting firm, where he worked on complex and high-profile antitrust cases across various sectors. He also has experience as a VC investor, a fellow at On Deck, and a mentor at The Commons, where he helps aspiring strategists and operators break into the tech industry.

A passionate global brand marketing and innovation leader, Yanchun Liu has spent 13 years with Mars Wrigley across continents, categories, and functions. Yanchun has led multiple Mars intrapreneurial Health and Wellbeing innovation initiatives via agile process across the globe. She’s keen to translate good ideas into a great value-added business model for the right purpose – for people and planet! Yanchun was born in China, worked in the UK and now lives in Chicago. She’s personally interested in how cultural diversity can influence business and create ideas.

Tianhao Wu is Managing Director at Northwestern University Investment Office, responsible for all aspects of managing the endowment with a focus on Venture Capital and Asian investments. Prior to joining Northwestern in 2021, Tianhao was Senior Director at The Rockefeller University, where he focused on asset allocation and manager selection primarily overseeing public equities and hedge funds. Prior to joining Rockefeller University, Tianhao worked as a research analyst at an investment consulting firm, where he advised institutions on alternative investments.

Tianhao received his Master’s degree from Cornell University and dual Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Tianhao was part of the Northwestern team that won Team of the Year by Institutional Investor in 2023 and was previously awarded Top 30 University Endowment Rising Stars and Top 30 Investors at Next-Generation Leading Endowments by Trusted Insight. Tianhao is also a member of the Milken Institute Rising Allocators. Tianhao is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and Financial Risk Manager (FRM) charterholder.

Chen Zhu recently joined Meta GenAI as a research scientist. Before that, he worked at Nvidia and Google on large language models. At Nvidia, he focused on pretraining, and was a core contributor to the Nemotron-4 models. At Google, he was a core contributor to Bard, where he landed RLHF into its initial launch. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from University of Maryland in 2022.

John Rogers is an international attorney, educator, businessman and strategist who has spent the past 30 years commuting between his Chicago home base and Asia. Rogers recently returned to Chicago after six years in Beijing with an appointment as professor of law at the Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Prior to joining DePaul, Rogers held faculty appointments that include: China University of Political Science & Law, Tsinghua-Temple University Law School LLM , adjunct professor in global initiatives in management at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management , and at the Helsinki School of Economics/Aalto University teaching a program on China as an emerging market. 

Rogers is the former president of the Midwest US-China Association and a founder of TANA (Transforming Asia – North America), a consultancy engaged in US-China activities.

Rogers earned an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University; a JD from The John Marshall Law School and a BA in Economics from the University of Illinois.

John Hui is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of professional experience in the healthcare industry. John’s track records in entrepreneurship, business development, sales, marketing and operations cover a wide range of healthcare industry sectors, such as digital health, physician group management, clinical diagnostics, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals.

John co-founded Rendr, the largest primary care focused, multi-specialty physician group dedicated to providing value-based healthcare to the ethnic Chinese population in New York City throughout its more than 100 clinical locations. John is also the CEO and Co-Founder of Twiage, an award-winning healthcare IT company that provides novel communication technology enabling hospitals and ambulances to accelerate emergency care and non-emergency care. Previously, he co-founded and ran Reliant Diagnostics, a radiology practice management company that provides portable ultrasound services to physician practices in New York City. He also served as the Managing Director of BioSense Medical Devices, responsible for commercializing the company’s glucose monitor product in China. Prior to starting his own business, John was an accomplished sales executive working at several Fortune 500 companies, such as LabCorp, Abbott and Schering-Plough.

John is a Kellogg Executive Scholar and a past winner of the Kellogg Biotech & Healthcare Case Competition. He holds an MBA from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Christian Murrieta currently heads the initiatives on mobility concepts and partnerships at Audi of America. With over 20 years in the automotive industry, Christian has worked in Germany, the US, Latin America, and most recently (2016-2023) in China, were held several senior management positions in sales at the FAW-Volkswagen JV for both VW and Audi brands. He began his career in Germany with Audi AG in 2000 working across functional areas and geographies in sales and marketing. He has extensive experience in sales operations, and played a decisive roll in developing the Audi brand throughout Latin America from 2006 to 2016. In 2016 he transitioned to FAW-Volkswagen (一汽-大众), one of the two major JVs of the VW Group in China, as Sales Director of the South Region and later the North Region of country. He transitioned back to the Audi brand in 2020 as Sales Director for Audi Sport in the newly setup FAW Audi Sales Company (一汽奥迪销售公司) in Hangzhou. Christian has a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering from ITESM Monterrey and an EMBA from Kellogg School of Management (EMP95). 

Jenny W. Xiao is a partner at Leonis Capital, a research-focused VC fund based in Silicon Valley. Prior to Leonis, she was a researcher at OpenAI and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. With deep domain expertise in AI/ML, Jenny pioneers a research-driven approach to seed and pre-seed investing, focusing on AI, developer tools, and B2B software. Her research has been featured in WSJ, the Economist, and Foreign Affairs. She is also a frequent speaker at startup and tech conferences, including the Carnegie Endowment's AI Governance Conference and the Hong Kong Cyberport VC Forum.

Darren Liu leads global research, engineering, product planning, portfolio management, and program execution of batteries and related technologies for commercial applications. He is responsible for advancing commercialization of battery products, cultivating the right technology roadmap, and driving a culture of innovation and execution. Before that, he worked in Cummins Inc. as senior director and led acquisition and partnership projects for New Power. He also used to work in Shanghai Fleetguard Filter Co., Ltd., CITIC Private Equity Funds Management and Mckinsey & Company. He obtained an MBA from Booth at Chicago University, BS in Economics from Peking University and BS in Computer Science and Technology in Nanjing University.