Holly Fang: Partnerships: From the Public Sector to Startups (#5)
Holly Fang is VP of Financial Partnerships, APAC for Airwallex. In her role, Holly oversees a lean and high-performing team that manages Airwallex’s extensive network of partnerships with financial institutions in the Asia Pacific region. From her early days at the Singapore Economic Development Board to her current leadership role at Airwallex, Holly shares her experiences, challenges, and valuable lessons learned along the way.
Discover what it takes to be successful in Partnerships, and how Holly made the leap from the public sector to startups. Through the stories of her personal journey of growing as a leader, and her approach to helping her team find their paths to success at Airwallex, we hope you’ll find nuggets of wisdom that might inspire you to explore this strategic yet creative side of the business.
Holly Fang’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollyhfang/
You can watch the podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QvF0e_EiYnI
Timestamps
00:00 Episode Highlight
2:21 The most useless interview question
4:29 From public sector to startup
7:45 Why get your hands dirty?
9:50 Certainty vs the Unknown
11:05 Luck and Managers
13:44 What it takes to succeed in Partnerships
17:33 The beauty of Partnerships
19:00 The perfect mix of skills for Partnerships
22:04 Growing as a leader at a startup
26:41 Evolving our leadership style
28:47 Generating momentum and creating impact
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We hope this episode will inspire you to take action today, no matter how small it may be!
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Quotes from the interview
"I think a successful partnership is always a win-win for us when you go out, you always try to work with partners that you want to work with, so you've already narrowed your scope. And then the next step is trying to broker something that works for both sides. Everybody has something that they want to get out of it. It could be the price, so it could be revenue, volume commitments, commercial terms. It could be something else that you can give. And I think the beauty of partnerships that's different from sales. It's that it is not one dimensional. You have many tools to play with, so I always find it very interesting, you know, that you can be creative, you can try to think out of the box to make something work."
— Holly Fang
"Oftentimes we take that for granted, right. We take it for granted, Okay if you're working for so long of course you know how to write an email, but of course you will know how to pick up the phone and go meet with somebody. But I think there is really a vast difference when you see someone who is professional and good at communicating versus someone who is maybe not so."
— Holly Fang
"But I think the thing is to just always be open-minded, and especially in having been doing partnerships for over a decade now, it's very easy to fall into a trap of thinking, I know what I'm doing and this is what it is. When you talk to a bigger organization, they come back and say, this cannot be done or this can only be done in six months, 12 months, or however long they're used to getting it done. In the startup world we never take no for an answer. And even though, I feel like, okay, I have pushed something to the best of my abilities and this is really the best deal that we can possibly get. My bosses are always pushing me harder because of that, I always have to go back and nothing is good enough right. And you will be surprised just by how much you, how much more you can get just by trying one more time or just by being a bit more persistent than you were before."
— Holly Fang
"Don't underestimate yourself. And the key to succeed in partnerships and also maybe with people's own career conversations is just never to take no for an answer. The first time could a no, but when you try again, it could be a maybe and then from you maybe say yes."
— Holly Fang
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