Recognized as one of the world’s top 100 venture capitalists by Forbes for 11 years in a row, Singaporean venture capitalist Jenny Lee stayed in her hometown to raise money for four new funds launched by her firm GGV Capital at the height of the pandemic in 2020. 

For four months, according to Forbes, the veteran VC barely slept as she made 250 zoom calls and remotely raised $2.5 billion from investors around the world. Lee and her team raised the most capital in GGV’s 22-year history, boosting assets by 27% to $9.2 billion. 

Long before she became one of Asia’s most powerful businesswomen, she earned a bachelor’s and master’s in Electrical Engineering at Cornell in 1995. She became an aviation engineer at Singapore’s ST Aerospace, where she modified F-16 fighter planes.

In 2001, the company sent Lee to attend Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management where she earned an M.B.A., but she had wanted to be a venture capitalist for a long time, so she quit her job that same year to follow her hidden passion.

Lee paid ST Aerospace $300,000 for not finishing the 11-year scholarship bond that paid for her bachelor’s, master’s, and M.B.A., but she has no regrets. For her, it was the best move.

She got her start as a venture capitalist at Morgan Stanley and Jafco Asia, but she made her name in China after joining GGV to create its office there in 2005. One of Lee’s more successful discoveries was the mobile phone maker Xiaomi before it had sold its first handphone.

Today, Lee is one of GGV’s top-tier managing partners along with Singaporean Jixun Foo, an early Grab investor. Hans Tung, who’s been on the Midas List 11 times. And VCs who have U.S. investment, industrial, and entrepreneurial expertise.

GGV’s 354 firms are balanced between Asia-Pacific and the Americas (GGV claims its investments include more than 85 unicorns). With the U.S. having more investments, at roughly 130, and 77 in China.

The company’s assets under management have expanded more than 50 times since its founding in 2000.

More actors have joined the cast of Netflix’s live-action version of “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” including George Takei, Utkarsh Ambudkar from the sitcom “Ghosts,” Arden Cho from Partner Tracks, and Danny Pudi from the comedy series “Mythic Quest.”

Avatar: The Last Airbender unites the “four nations”: Water Tribe, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Air Nomads with a diverse representation of Asian and Indigenous talent.

Star Trek’s Takei voices Koh, an ancient predatory spirit. Cho, Ambudkar, and Pudi all portray Earth Kingdom characters, with Cho as June, a vicious bounty hunter; Ambudkar as King Bumi, the elderly and mercurial king of Omashu; and Pudi as the mechanist, an eccentric inventor and engineer raising his kid in a war-torn country.

Cast members include Gordon Cormier as Aang, Kiawentiio as Katara, Ian Ousley as Sokka, Dallas Liu as Zuko, Elizabeth Yu as Azula, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Iroh, and Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai.

Executive produced by showrunner Albert Kim, Rideback’s Dan Lin and Lindsey Liberatore, and Michael Goi, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is a live-action version of the animated Nickelodeon series of the same name. Directors include Goi, co-executive producer Roseanne Liang, Jabbar Raisani, and Jet Wilkinson.

Kim tells Netflix that the live-action adaptation creates “a chance to showcase Asian and Indigenous characters as living, breathing people. Not just in a cartoon, but in a world that truly exists, very similar to the one we live in.”

Constance Wu is opening up about her time on “Fresh Off the Boat” and saying that a senior producer of the 2015–2020 ABC sitcom sexually harassed her.

She tells The New York Times about a producer’s “controlling behaviors” in her memoir Making a Scene. “Fresh Off the Boat was my first-ever TV show. I was thrown into this world,” she added, “I don’t have parents in the industry. And because I was 30, people thought I knew what I was doing. It made me paranoid and embarrassed.” 

Wu also told The Atlantic she hadn’t spoken about this before out of fear of repercussions. “I kept my mouth shut for a really long time about a lot of sexual harassment and intimidation that I received the first two seasons of the show,” Wu said. 

Once the show got successful after two seasons, she was able to say “no” to the producer’s harassment and intimidation. And, so she thought: ‘You know what? I handled it, nobody has to know, I don’t have to stain this Asian American producer’s reputation. I don’t have to stain the reputation of the show.”

The actress addressed the infamous tweet in spring 2019 when ABC renewed another season of the sitcom. “I was punished for being ungrateful,” she said. Wu publicly apologized, but she received backlash. 

She then sought psychiatric help and quit social media for three years. Wu had started writing a book back in 2016 but had lost momentum.

In the fall of 2019, she went back to work at “Fresh Off the Boat”, the final season, where she apologized to her colleagues in person.

The next year, the world stopped due to the pandemic. And she finished the book she was writing. In her memoir, Wu talks about how she felt alone, how racism affected her career, and how she’s moving on.

“I try not to make myself out to be a hero,” Ms. Wu told NYT. “I try to make myself out to be a pretty normal person who has flaws like everybody else. I’m not really into the actor memoir where it’s like, ‘I overcame the odds, and I’m this person who was humble and just kept working. I was the victim.’ It’s less black and white than simply victim and perpetrator.”

The pandemic has devastated minority-owned businesses. Only 31% of Black-owned enterprises and 44% of Hispanic-owned businesses got Paycheck Protection Program aid, according to the Federal Reserve.

To raise awareness and support minority-owned companies across the country, major online shops and delivery systems are now showcasing Asian, Black, LGBTQ, and female entrepreneurs.

Amazon Launchpad enables vendors to identify on their “seller credentials” page if they are Black-owned, Latinx-owned, or women-owned.

DoorDash allows you to search for Black-owned restaurants in numerous US cities with “Black-owned” and “women-owned” tags on all company profiles. DoorDash Merchant Support can add the tag to a business’s profile.

Etsy lets shoppers search for Asian, AAPI, Black, handicapped, Jewish, Latinx, Native, female, LGBTQ, as well as veteran and military family-run businesses.

Google Business Profiles that are verified can add “Black-owned,” “women-led,” and “LGBTQ-owned” attributes to Google Search, Shopping, and Maps.

Macy’s Diverse Owned Brands section of its website features hundreds of items from minority-helmed brands, including those manufactured by AAPI, Blacks, Latinos and Hispanics, LGBTQ persons, and women.

The Intentionalist sorts for Asian-owned, Black-owned, Latino-owned, LGBTQ-owned, Native-owned, veteran-owned and woman-owned companies.

Uber Eats has partnered with the EatOkra app, which connects diners to Black-owned eateries, restaurants and food trucks in cities of Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Seattle.

Yelp allows businesses to self-identify as Black-owned. Yelp’s Ones to Watch series also spotlights top Asian-, Black-, Latinx-, LGBTQ- and women-owned businesses around the country. Businesses can also categorize themselves as “open to all,” which means that they welcome anyone regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, immigration status, religion or disability.