In this story, Dandan Pan shares her journey as a Chinese American entrepreneur and founder of two successful companies, including Haddee Education (https://haddee.com), which works with thousands of teachers to provide students with online educational resources. She also expresses her hopes for unity within and among Asian American communities.
I grew up in Hangzhou, China. I was born with a genetic disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, so I broke bones 35 times and spent much of my childhood in the hospital.
In college, I studied Foreign Languages and met many great teachers and friends from the U.K., America, New Zealand, and Australia. They shared their Western part of the globe with me, and I was interested in exploring it. After graduating, I came to America to study political science and consumer economics. I arrived in Bellevue, WA, in October 1992. My first impression was, “Oh my gosh, there’s no people!” The streets were empty, and I saw more boats than anything else.
For graduate school, I first attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, then transferred to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. English was my first foreign language, and I had learned it in college, so language was not really an issue for me. However, I did face financial challenges. The University of Michigan waived half of my tuition, and my parents borrowed $100 from 50 friends and families, a total of $5000, to pay for a quarter of University of Michigan’s tuition.
After I graduated from Cornell, I moved to San Diego for a job at Qualcomm. I worked as an analyst for their product management department. In 2016, I started working with my brother, who is a founder of alo7 (a company funded by Qualcomm, Legend Computers, and many other top VCs). We were one of the first companies to teach on Zoom before transitioning into our own platform. I served as alo7’s Chief Growth Officer and recruited thousands of English teachers through social media (ad campaigns, a blog site, etc.). Many schools in China used our in-house digital curriculum software app to teach English as a second language. Our GeniusEnglish curriculum was also a CODiE Award Finalist for education software.
Unfortunately, as of last year, China no longer allows private K-9 tutoring. All of my teachers lost jobs with alo7. My goal in founding Haddee Education was to transfer all of the teachers to Haddee so they could teach American students. We launched Haddee officially on January 23, 2021, and the main website was launched in August 2021. Our main clientele is high school students in primarily AP and STEM subjects, and we now have about 100,000 teachers in our database.
In terms of future goals, I envision us implementing a more effective marketing strategy to reach students and parents who can benefit from Haddee’s services. I have a centralized approach to recruiting teachers, but students are all localized, which makes outreach difficult. Additionally, most teachers are online, but after COVID-19, students want to be taught in-person, which poses more challenges.
“Asian American” is a broad term because we really speak different languages. As a Chinese American, I think we could unite more effectively, but it’s hard. Even though we come from a very homogeneous society, a lot of us have different views. I sometimes see cyber-discussions turn into cyberbullying incidents on Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat.
I believe that we can create a more healthy, productive discussion environment if we learn how to look at any problem from both sides, keep a level head, and empathize with other people’s perspectives. It’s not possible for everyone to have the same view, so I think we should agree to disagree. A view is a view, and we should not bring that to a very personal level with attacks or labeling.
To unite is not to agree on every single issue. Uniting is sitting down to understand each other and have a meaningful discussion that integrates different opinions, allowing us to pursue a common goal.
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