Reality Bites

The women and girls were kept in the stifling lower deck all day to make the boat a less appealing target, but they were allowed some fresh air late at night. On the fifth night, when the boat was out of fuel and passengers were down to their final rations, Tan, though she had been warned not to speak while above deck, couldn't resist remarking to her mother on the sudden appearance through the clouds of a wide patch of brilliant stars. "Those aren't stars," her mother gasped. "Those are lights." It was a British tanker steaming alongside. They were rescued and taken to a refugee camp in Malaysia. Three months later, they were given a choice of countries that were accepting refugees. Tan's mother had heard that Australia was a young country with a big future, so that's where the family ended up.

They settled outside of Melbourne, where Le's mother, still in her early 20s, picked vegetables and struggled to learn English in night school while raising her daughters. It's not hard to see why Le grew up with an unshakable belief in her ability to accomplish anything. Her mother, who went on to get a bachelor's and then a master's degree, started a cosmetics business and then a consultancy aimed at facilitating Australian-Vietnamese trade. In 1997, she became mayor of Maribyrnong, a suburb of Melbourne, becoming the first Vietnamese woman to be elected mayor anywhere outside of Vietnam.

Grateful that her family had been able to find a comfortable place in Australian society, Le grew up wanting to help others do the same. At 15, she joined an organization that aids Vietnamese immigrants. Smart, ambitious, and disciplined, she was elected the group's president at 18. Somehow, she also found time to complete her schoolwork and entered Australia's prestigious Monash University at 16. In 1998, Le, then 20, was named Young Australian of the Year, a highly publicized government honor that made her a national celebrity and put her on a speaking circuit, where she hobnobbed with prime ministers, scientists, and international captains of industry. That same year, she graduated with a combined degree in business and law.

Le took a job at one of Melbourne's most prestigious law firms, seeing it as a natural extension of her community service work. But by the time she was 22 and a full-fledged lawyer, she found she couldn't stop thinking about the successful entrepreneurs she had met. In particular, she was captivated by the high-tech moguls, some not much older than herself, who had the ability to forge new types of electronic ties that left people better connected to one another and to the world. "There was a technology revolution going on, and I didn't want to just be a facilitator," Le says. "I wanted to be part of the creating."

In 2000, as her restlessness was peaking, she delivered a speech at the University of Melbourne. Afterward, she was approached by a young Vietnamese student who was studying business and information technology on a scholarship at the nearby Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. This was Nam Do, like Le newly aspiring to high-tech entrepreneurship. The two hit it off so well that they decided to try to start a company, one that would give Le a chance to make her contribution to the connectivity revolution.

Their idea was for small bar-code scanners that could be built into cell phones so that consumers could aim their phones at products and get a text message back with product information and price comparisons. Telcos weren't interested in the bar-code part but were impressed with the high-speed text-messaging capabilities -- these were pre-American Idol-voting days, and mass text messaging seemed a novel idea. Le and Do sold licenses for the software and stuck in a clause that would allot them a modest-sounding five cents for every message handled by the system. Within a few years, their software was handling 150 million messages a month; you do the math. In 2003, Le and Do sold the company, which they had owned outright. They were 26, rich, and looking for a new -- and bigger -- idea.

Le knew where the pair could grab a little inspiration. A few years earlier on the speaking circuit, she had been at yet another dinner event, feeling a bit overwhelmed as a young Asian woman in a sea of suits, when she spotted another misfit -- a middle-aged man in cargo pants, with wildish hair tucked under a sideways baseball cap. This turned out to be the scientist Allan Snyder, who had a prestigious award of his own to boast about: the Marconi Prize, a near-Nobel-level honor he had been awarded for his role in the development of fiber optics. Snyder and Le got on well and stayed in touch. Le and Do went to dinner at Snyder's home, where he enthralled them with his work on using magnetic fields to stimulate human brains. He went on to bemoan the fact that the computer revolution had shut out emotions, which are, after all, what drive us. The industry had thrived on digital signal processors -- chips and software that could handle images and sounds. What was needed, insisted Snyder, was an emotional signal processor.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT