‘I was a very bad lawyer’ but ‘banking suited me’, says SparkRaise founder Yeone Fok
- The Taiwan-born former banker behind ethical crowdfunding platform SparkRaise reflects on her peripatetic childhood, which included stints in Japan, Beijing, Hong Kong and the US
- Having attended Wellesley, Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard, she says, ‘I basically kept studying because I didn’t want to work’
On the move: I’m very mixed. My mother is an artist and is American Chinese, my father is Austrian, and they met in the United States. I was born and spent the first year of my life in a rural mountain village in Taiwan where my parents were doing anthropological fieldwork.
After my father completed his PhD in anthropology, he went to Harvard Law School. We moved around a lot when I was young. From Cambridge, Massachusetts, we moved to Japan for a year when I was four. I remember people asking where I was from. It made me realise that in this world people want to categorise other people and think about ways in which they are similar or different.
When I was five years old, we moved to Hong Kong for a couple of years and I went to Kellett School. In 1982, we moved to Beijing, which I loved. It was soon after China had opened its doors to foreign trade and most of the foreigners living there were journalists or diplomats, neither of which my parents were. My father was a lawyer.
We lived in the old Belgian legation. When I think back, I think of the walls that form the boundaries of the hutongs. There were enormous, thick walls that formed part of the city walls. I went to an international school attached to the US embassy. I remember when we were concerned about the US relationship with Libya, learning how to get underneath the table in case there was an attack.
The inbetweeners: In 1986, we moved back to Hong Kong. It was such a contrast to go from Beijing, where the streets were buzzing with grey- and blue-clad people on bicycles, to Hong Kong with all the glittering labels and brands that people cared about. I was 12 years old and went to the German Swiss International School.
In anthropology, “liminality” is in-betweenness and is often thought of as a rite of passage. For me, Hong Kong in those years was a liminal place, a period of transition.
In 1990, I went to Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire, in the US. It’s a place for people who aren’t just academically rigorous or intellectually curious but are also well-rounded, or that’s what they encourage. It provided a lot of opportunities in terms of sports, extracurricular activities and leadership roles.
The students sit with the teacher around an oval oak table – a system called the Harkness method – and the class size is never bigger than 12 or 14 pupils. It encourages discussion and a large part of your final assessment is based on your class participation.
Perpetual student: I did eight years of higher education. I have been fortunate to have parents who are supportive of letting me pursue areas that interest me.
I did my undergraduate degree in international relations at Wellesley College, an all-women’s college in Massachusetts. My focus at the time was on peace, war and security.
In my first year in college I went with my father to Mongolia. We were doing some research in Ulan Bator for a business guide to Mongolia, which was published under the auspices of the US-Mongolia Business Council.
I graduated in 1997 and pursued an MPhil in anthropology at Cambridge University. I was especially interested in reincarnation. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after that. I threw out some feelers and got accepted by Oxford University to study law. I basically kept studying because I didn’t want to work. After that I did a master’s in law at Harvard, where my dad studied.
Twin towers: I got a job at an international law firm in New York. My first day of gainful employment was September 11, 2001. My office was in midtown, quite a distance from the World Trade Centre, where the attacks took place. We were released from work at about noon.
“I wasn’t cut out for law and didn’t make it past a year in the law firm. Partially it was personality, but I was just a very bad lawyer.”
It was surreal walking home. When I got to Times Square, not quite halfway between my office and my home in Chelsea, I was going against the swarm of people who were walking calmly and slowly in the opposite direction. Later that afternoon, I went to the roof of my building and could see in the distance a third much smaller building close to the twin towers, which ended up collapsing. It was a very strange period.
I wasn’t cut out for law and didn’t make it past a year in the law firm. Partially it was personality, but I was just a very bad lawyer. I went to Brussels for a few months and in 2003 spent some time at a financial solutions start-up in New York.
A few months later I was lucky to get a job at a global investment bank in the city, CSFB (Credit Suisse First Boston). It was interesting in the interviews explaining about my long-standing interest in finance having studied international relations and social anthropology.
Numbers game: Banking suited me and my personality at that time. The thing that interested me was the team work, the competition, the excitement of doing the deals. It brought me to different parts of the world – I spent a brief time in New York and then I moved to the London office while it transitioned to Credit Suisse (the “First Boston” name was retired in 2006 as part of a rebranding exercise).
My 10 years with the bank gave me the chance to go to places like Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Vietnam and Japan.
Secret love: I met my husband, James, at work. Our bank didn’t allow workplace relationships and we had to keep it a secret for a while. He’s British – English, Scottish – and Hong Kong Chinese, and like me, he grew up in Hong Kong.
In 2008, we moved back to Hong Kong and married the following year. Somewhere along the way, the work became repetitive. It was hard work with long and unpredictable hours. I was doing equity capital markets syndicate, so I was part of a team that decides the final price of a company before it lists on the exchange and which investors receive shares and how much stock they receive.
It’s exciting and fun to see the impact of the stock trading live before your eyes and in different markets. But the human element wasn’t there and over time if you are not fundamentally interested in the material the thrill is hard to sustain.
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Sparking joy: I started looking at different kinds of fundraising and was inspired by the crowdfunding platforms JustGiving in the UK and Kickstarter in the US, to look at what we had in Hong Kong and whether there was a new way to raise funds for creativity and social good.
The thing that appealed to me about crowdfunding was how it can level the playing field. You can use the platform to build an audience and appeal directly to people. I left the bank in 2015 and launched SparkRaise the following year. It was a busy time because at the end of 2015 I gave birth to twin boys, Peter and Harry.
SparkRaise is focused on social entrepreneurs and non-profit organisations. Our pilot campaign was a hydroponics unit for urban farming on your balcony. Earlier this year, I started a platform called SparknShop. It’s an ethical marketplace and we’ve got about 250 products. It’s for people who want to be more thoughtful and conscious when making purchases.
360 Degrees of nothingness: Hong Kong is home, but I’m comfortable anywhere. I love being in the desert and in a place where you can look 360 degrees and not see any human interference. I enjoy the silence of the desert.
In 2005, I spent a week walking through the Sahara with two guides, and in 2010, I hired a guide and a driver and spent a week walking through the Gobi.
Through SparkRaise I get first-hand experience of the challenges communities within Hong Kong are facing. I admire people who are doing so much with little reward to help people in society live better.
