Gene Yu is the co-founder and CEO of Blackpanda.
Courtesy of Gene Yu
At age 46, startup founder Gene Yu seems to have lived several lives in one.
Before he started his own company, he was a Division 1 tennis player, graduated with a computer science degree from the United States Military Academy, commonly known as West Point, served as a “Green Beret” in the U.S. Army Special Forces, led the rescue of a family friend from a hostage situation and authored a book.
Today, he is also the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup Blackpanda which has raised over $21 million to date, according to an official company announcement.
While he’s undergone extremely rigorous military training, served on battlefields and led major counter-terrorism missions, he said his hardest battle was internal.
Growing up Asian American
Yu was born in Concord, Massachusetts, where he says he was the only Asian kid in his town. He then moved to Cupertino, California when he was 10.
His family background is unique and, in some ways, high-profile: his uncle is Ma Ying-jeou who served as the president of Taiwan from 2008 to 2016.
Growing up as an Asian male in America, he says that he often internalized the messages he was told by society that “you are inferior, you are unattractive, you are not desired, you are not equal.” This took a toll on Yu’s self-esteem.
These feelings of inferiority were, at times, amplified at home. He learned early on to prioritize achievement. “In Asian culture, what we learn is performance equals love, right? Or even better yet, lack of performance equals the absence of love,” Yu told CNBC Make It.
Yu says his early experiences led him to chase achievement as a way of protecting a younger version of himself. “It’s like you are a wounded child, and you’re wearing the Iron Man suit,” he said. “You’re armoring yourself as a traumatized person.”
“I hated my own identity, because it was wounded, right? I wanted to create a new one, and that’s what the military does for you,” he said.
So, at age 17 after graduating from high school, he left home and went straight to West Point, which is known to be a highly prestigious and selective military academy. After that, he joined the U.S. Army Special Forces where he served as an officer and commander.
From his high school years to his time at West Point, he was working approximately 16 to 20 hours a day. That intensity shaped his work ethic which he still carries today.
“At West Point, you’re up at like 5 a.m., and then you’re down at like [midnight] … And it’s six days a week of school, no summer breaks,” he said. “So I definitely know how to work hard, that’s for sure, which I think [helped] at Blackpanda.”
From special forces to startup CEO
In 2009, Yu’s military career came to a crossroads when his uncle, Ma Ying-jeou, was elected as the president of Taiwan.
“There was [an] investigation around … the fact that my uncle was the sitting president of Taiwan, which had occurred while I was in Special Forces,” said Yu. This period prompted difficult questions about his future.
Ultimately, Yu made the decision to leave the army, which left him feeling disoriented and exiled.
“I had a massive loss of identity,” he said. “I had waves of deep survivor’s guilt, because I knew that I was in my prime as one of the best Special Forces captains the U.S. Army had, and that our boys were overseas, dying and fighting, and I was just chilling out.”
In the years that followed, he struggled to find a new sense of identity. He spent a few years studying Chinese and going back to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where he was recruited to work as an equity trader at Credit Suisse.
Eventually, in 2012, he joined Palantir Technologies which he grew to love, only to get retrenched in 2013. “After Palantir let me go … that was the hardest time in my life, by far. And I was also broke…so financially stressed, and couch surfing,” he said.
Then, a crisis involving a family friend named Evelyn Chang pulled him back into action.
In 2013, Chang was taken hostage abroad by terrorist group Abu Sayyaf. Yu helped orchestrate the rescue: He put a team together, went into the Philippines and rescued her after 35 days.
Notably, this mission was what helped inspire the idea for Yu’s company today, Blackpanda.
He realized that companies or entities facing cyberattacks needed the same kind of fast, 24/7 support that crisis insurance and services provide during kidnappings and ransom situations.
“So the same models that are [used in] the physical safety and security world need to be copied in the digital world. That’s what’s missing in cyber security,” he said. He teamed up with some former Green Berets and they all went on to build Blackpanda, an idea shaped from Yu’s unique background.
Today, in reflection, Yu says that attaching identity to accomplishments is “a rigged game.”
“Because every time that you strive for the next achievement, you think that … Everything is going to be all good, right? But the problem is that if you never heal the original trauma wound, then anyone can still come hurt you from a different angle,” he said.
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