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June 30, 2023

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Olivia Chow has emerged as Toronto’s first Chinese-Canadian mayor, ending over a decade of conservative rule and ushering in a new progressive era for the city.

Olivia was 13 years old when she first arrived in the country as an immigrant. Now, at 66, she has achieved a remarkable feat, surpassing 102 candidates to become Toronto’s first Chinese-Canadian mayor.  During her campaign, she focused on addressing the housing affordability crisis and pledged to raise the city’s low property taxes while providing support for tenants.

Upon taking office, Olivia faces opposition from Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, who had warned that her victory would be an “unmitigated disaster.” Ford’s brother, Rob Ford, previously served as mayor of Toronto but faced controversy due to a video showing him smoking crack cocaine and a cancer diagnosis.

Throughout her career, Olivia has served as a member of parliament for the New Democratic Party, a Toronto city councilor, and a school board trustee. She also campaigned alongside her late husband, Jack Layton, who ran for mayor in 1991 and later became the leader of the opposition in Canada.

Olivia assumes the role of mayor at a challenging time for Toronto. The city, with a population of 2.7 million and a metropolitan area of nearly 7 million, is grappling with surging rents and a budget deficit of approximately $1.5 billion. Public safety concerns have also grown, particularly following a series of violent attacks on individuals using the public transit system.

According to The Guardian, Olivia is expected to be a champion for transit, as well as for walking and cycling – she does not have a driving license – and has promised to turn the tide on years of low-tax austerity politics enacted by her conservative predecessors.

Featured Image Source: The Toronto Star

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29-Year-Old Wedding Guitarist Made A Pandemic Pivot To Real Estate Earns $245K A Year

The best part is that playing weddings “doesn’t even feel like working. We’re just partying.” Moses Lin told CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series.

Early in Lin’s career in 2016, he played at a coffee shop for three hours and got $3 tips. Today, his work takes him from New York to Hawaii, even to Cancun, and earns $175,000 before tips.

In the last two years, Lin has invested most of his wedding earnings into real estate.

Before becoming a real estate investor, Lin left college with just one semester left to pursue music full-time back in 2017. Several months later, Disney saw his YouTube videos and hired him to play in Disneyland’s hotels and restaurants. He took the job and decided he was never going back to college.

In the same year, Lin played a friend’s wedding as a favor and enjoyed it. He then charged $250 for his first wedding booking. After learning that wedding musician rates are $1200, he doubled his prices. Despite raising his rates, clients kept coming. Now, he charges $4,000 to $6,000 per wedding, depending on when the couple wants him to play. 

Lin became interested in real estate investing in 2014 and bought his first property in May 2020 as a “pandemic pivot” when Covid restrictions slowed his wedding gigs. He found a 4-bedroom house for $120,000 online and put down 20% plus $10,000 to renovate. His wedding earnings helped him buy a $40,000 home in Little Rock, including closing costs.

He rented the house for $1,425 and quickly found a tenant. He liked the process so much that he decided to buy a second property before the end of the year.

Today, Lin owns and rents out four properties in Little Rock. Lin didn’t turn a profit on his rental properties in 2021, but is in it for the long haul.

His goal with real estate is to get to a point where the passive income from his rentals pays all of his bills.

Lin pays a property manager to handle things on the ground, “so I’m able to focus 100% of my attention on weddings [and] on music, and real estate just makes money on the side.” he tells CNBC, “My whole master business plan is make money in weddings, dump it into real estate and let that grow itself.”

CONNECT WITH MOSES LIN

Instagram: instagram.com/moseslinmusic
Website: moseslinmusic.com

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GGV Capital’s Jenny Lee: From Jet Engineer To One Of World’s Best Venture Capitalists

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.

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Netflix’s Star-studded Series Avatar: The Last Airbender Includes George Takei, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Arden Cho, Danny Pudi

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.”

 

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Constance Wu On Surviving Twitter, Producer’s Sexual Assault On Her New Memoir

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.”