002: Tiffany & Bryan

COVID-19
Written By Tiffany Yu

TIFFANY & BRYAN | #HATEISAVIRUS, Racism & Xenophobia Against Asians Fueled by COVID-19 (coronavirus) ft. Bryan Pham (Asian Hustle Network)

Listen on: Apple // Spotify // Google

In this episode, we're chatting with Asian Hustle Network's Bryan Pham on #HATEISAVIRUS, a movement to combat racism and xenophobia against Asians fueled by COVID-19 (coronavirus).

We discussed:

  • Why he and Maggie Chui created the Asian Hustle Network

  • The growth of Asian Hustle Network and its programming and events for the community

  • How the Asian community has been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak

  • Why he, Tammy Cho, and Michelle Hanabusa started the #HATEISAVIRUS campaign

  • How #HATEISAVIRUS is planning to tackle misinformation and hate through the power of influence

  • Raising $1 million for the Asian Hustle Network COVID-19 Relief Fund through donations and merchandise

SHOW NOTES

ABOUT BRYAN PHAM

Bryan is the founder of Asian Hustle Network (AHN) and Crushing it in Real Estate (CIIRE). He is passionate about bringing together communities of like-minded individuals through growing AHN to over 40,000 members in a little over 4 month and managing an active CIIRE group of over 2,000 investors.

Currently, Bryan is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at StartUpGrind, Berkeley that brings together an ecosystem of VCs, angel investors, and aspiring entrepreneurs. He is also an active angel investor and real estate investor with 16 rental units and 25+ rehab projects. Outside of investing, Bryan has been featured on Bloomberg, CGTV and LA Times. In his leisure time, Bryan is the podcast host of the CIIRE Podcast where he interviews real estate professionals across the industry.

FOLLOW

Bryan Pham:

Asian Hustle Network:

#HATEISAVIRUS:

TRANSCRIPT

[Opening Medley by RootHub]

Tiffany Yu: Hi everyone, it's Tiffany here. And I'm excited to be with my friend and the founder of the Asian Hustle Network, Bryan Pham. Hi Bryan!

Bryan Pham: Hey, thank you for having me on the show, Tiffany.

Tiffany Yu: So I wanted to provide--I always like providing a little bit of background as to how we met, which is last year--late last year, Brian had started this Facebook group called The Asian Hustle Network. And I ended up getting added to it by one of my friends. And I'm part of tons of different Facebook groups, so didn't really pay that much attention to it until I started seeing a lot of people posting their introductions on my main news feed. And the introductions were really beautiful and thoughtfully shared--sharing vulnerabilities around what it's like to be an Asian entrepreneur or own a small business. And it really inspired me to want to share my story there. And then Bryan and I got connected through that. So I just wanted to say thank you, Bryan, for creating this community for us. But interestingly enough, here we are in the middle of our social distancing, shelter-in-place period here in the San Francisco Bay Area. And one of the projects on my list for a really long time has been to start a podcast. And so I had posted on Instagram Stories seeing if there was interest in having me start a podcast. Bryan was one of the first people who responded who said, “You should definitely have one!” So of course, he needed to be one of my first guests. And he said yes.

Bryan Pham: Awesome, I’m so excited.

Tiffany Yu: So I know you have a couple of other job titles in addition to the Asian Hustle Network, so I wasn't sure if you wanted to chat a little bit more about that.

Bryan Pham: Sure.

Tiffany Yu: And then a little bit more about the Asian Hustle Network.

Bryan Pham: Of course. About my background, I come from a software background. So I still work as a software engineer at a startup in San Francisco. But my main hustle besides Asian Hustle Network is as a real investor. So I fix and flip houses around the San Francisco Bay Area. I currently am invested in two different apartments, one in Los Angeles, and one Columbus, Ohio. But nowadays, my main focus is on Asian Hustle Network, and creating the best community that I could for everyone who is a part of it.

Tiffany Yu: And as part of some of the real estate work that you've been doing, I know you have your own podcast and also host a meetup.

Bryan Pham: That’s right. I host a podcast called “Crushing It in Real Estate,” along with a Bay Area real estate meetup that I’ve been hosting for about 2 years now. Those are two things I do for real estate.

Tiffany Yu: That's amazing. And Bryan has provided a lot of advice about this podcast as well, so I wanted to just -- any question I ever have about anything in my life, I know I can call up Bryan and he picks up the phone and it's amazing.

Bryan Pham: [laughs] I live by my phone nowadays.

Tiffany Yu: I love it. I wanted to chat a little bit more about the Asian Hustle Network. What was the inspiration behind you wanting to get it started? Let’s go ahead and start there. What inspired you to want to start it?

Bryan Pham: I created a real estate meetup. I thought to myself, that if I could bring together a thousand people with different backgrounds, ideas, ethnic, race-- to work together, to communicate with each other, and make deals happen, I wanted to bring together the Asian community. And to my surprise, as I was researching around, I realized that the Asian community doesn’t have this centralized group to unite everyone. There’s groups for Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and so on. But there wasn't this group that united everyone, that created this positive atmosphere for people to work together. And I wanted to be that missing link. At the time--this is around March of 2019, I didn't know what that was. I kept talking to my co-founder Maggie. I wanted to do something more for the Asian community, but I couldn’t find the right inspiration. So I began talking to a lot of my friends that have their own personal communities. And I realized that the Jewish community, the Black community, they each have their own community to support each other and when I saw that, I said, “Wow, we need that for the Asian community.” And it wasn’t until we went to Japan around April of 2019 last year, that we really started to get the inspiration for this group. As we were in Japan, we went to the Meiji shrine, and we saw people write their stories on wooden tablets. And Maggie and I spent 2-3 hours reading everyone’s story, and we were just like “wow, this is awesome. We want to bring that component back to whatever we’re going to create.” But at that time, we didn’t know what it was. We got back to the US in April 2019 and we started getting invited to different Facebook groups, particularly “subtle asian traits.” We realized that Facebook has Facebook groups and we could start utilizing that, but we didn't really think much of it because we thought that “subtle asian traits” was just all memes. And we got invited to a bunch of our other friends’ groups that we realized, “hey we should leverage this to create something great for our community”, so we did. So on November 8th, 2019, we created this Facebook group called “Asian Hustle.” And when we did market research on “Asian hustle,” we realized that “Asian hustle” meant something else very inappropriate. [laughs] So we decided to add one more word to it, so we called it “Asian Hustle Network.” From there, it's been a crazy journey the last four months, watching the community grow so much and take on a life of its own has been absolutely amazing.

Tiffany Yu: That’s beautiful. I think what has really impressed me with the community is that it is online first, but there is--well probably not now--but there is a desire to want to meet in person as well. I think the last number I saw, and you can update me if it’s incorrect, but it had grown up to 11000 members or is it more than that now?

Bryan Pham: We’re at 42,000 members.

Tiffany Yu: OMG, just multiply that number by almost four. That's incredible and I think what that is showing you is that there's this real desire to want to come together as an Asian diaspora community. Tell me about some of the meetups that have been happening.

Bryan Pham: Definitely. So our first meetup was in San Francisco. It was a “no network” event where we had about--we sold out of 250 tickets in about 30 to 40 minutes in San Francisco, which is unheard of for us. We thought, “OMG, there’s so much demand for this.” So the first meetup was a “no agenda” meetup where people met up, we talked, we had Andrew Chau as our guest speaker. We had multiple guest speakers, we did a raffle to showcase people's products. It was a great event but it was missing some components that we wanted to improve upon, which is to create a more collaborative environment. So we had an event in LA, which blew it out of the water. It was crazy because it was completely formatted and completely structured. We had proper banners and signage that came in.We had proper networking group breakouts--we organized people into different industries, categories. And we had two awesome speakers too that really set the tone that, “Hey, this is what we’re about. We’re about giving you free education and providing you the right network for you guys to succeed.” And every other event followed that format. So after that event, we had an event in Melbourne, Australia, we had a smaller event in London. We have events all over the world. We had a lot more events coming up, but because of the coronavirus outbreak, we had to cancel most of them. So now we’re switching over to more of a virtual format to see if that works really well. So starting next week, on Tuesday and Wednesday, we have Patrick Lee of Rotten Tomatoes and Eric Ly, the co-founder of LinkedIn come on to Asian Hustle Network as an AMA. So whatever questions you guys have, please go ahead and ask them and we’ll make sure that they get asked to Eric and Patrick.

Tiffany Yu: For sure. So I know I haven't been able to make a meet-up yet. And part of it is, I find large group events very scary as an introvert. But you Bryan have made me feel very welcomed within the community. And I think to that point, I’m still waiting for a sticker, but I have hopes that maybe one day. [laughs] But one thing that you and I have chatted about that I think is really powerful within the Asian Hustle Network is this desire to democratize success. And this whole idea that when one of us succeeds, the whole community succeeds. And let's see how many others we can continue to lift up. That said, I think I guess I'll say two things. One is, part of the reason that I wanted to have you as a guest on the show so early, is I do want to chat a little bit about how the Asian community has been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak and this global pandemic we're experiencing right now. But I think number two, is also just seeing how you've been able to pivot the community to focus on more virtual spaces but still at the idea of wanting to democratize success and provide these opportunities for people to connect virtually.

Bryan Pham: So ever since the COVID-19 outbreak happened, it helped our community grow really quickly, because a lot of people are now working at home. So we’ve been seeing our community grow about 1000 people every two days now. But on top of that, we’ve been seeing a large increase of people submitting their posts about Asian crimes increasing, about their small businesses not doing really well right now, and it's coming in at a very alarming rate. We  get about 120-150 posts that come in every single day and a lot of them are quite negative. And it makes the Asian Hustle Network team feel like we have to do something more to support our community. Some of the initiatives that we were planning out is to combat a lot of the Asian crime that's increasing out there. 

So one of our new campaigns is called #HATEISAVIRUS and we’re working together with Tammy Cho and Michelle of UPRISERS, so we’re creating this new campaign to really combat all the xenophobia that’s coming out because of the COVID-19 outbreak. And the whole purpose of that is to bring awareness and we want to add a very interesting component to make people feel more normalized is that we’re trying to host a virtual called concert on top of our message that, “Hey, just be safe, be aware of all the crimes that are going on in the world. Protect each other, be prepared to support each other.” And not just that. We are also grouping it with a donation campaign that our goal is to raise $1 million to support all the small businesses that are struggling right now due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Tiffany Yu: That's amazing. I am actually going to take a little bit of a break. I want to come back and revisit this because I know it's such a hot topic right now. So we're just going to take a break and then we come back, we'll try to little bit more about the #HATEISAVIRUS campaign and some of the things that are going to be happening over the next couple of weeks.

[AD]

Tiffany Yu: Hi and welcome back. This is your host Tiffany and you're listening to Pioneers. We are chatting with Bryan Pham, who is the founder of the Asian Hustle Network, also a software engineer, also a real estate developer. We’re chatting a little bit more about a campaign that he has launched with Asian Hustle Network, the founder of Better Brave, and Michelle from UPRISERS to help combat some of the xenophobia and racism that’s been happening around the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. Before the break, we were chatting a little bit about a social media campaign, a fund, a concert that’s happening. Full disclosure: I am participating in the campaign, and I will share that over the past couple of days, I have been a little afraid to leave my house. And it is less fear around the public health situation because I know that I can wear a mask, I can wash my hands, use hand sanitizer or wear gloves. And more so around fear of if someone is going to harass me or attack me. Bryan, I don't know if you've been hearing similar stories like that.

Bryan Pham: Yeah, I've been hearing a lot of stories like that, and it's been coming in at a very alarming rate in the Network. I see it so much that I know this movement is going to make a difference and we need to spread this movement even quicker. The news is coming in and it’s pretty darn alarming how fast it's coming in. Seeing other Facebook groups who are centered around Asian crimes. So there’s a Facebook group called “Crimes Against Asians.” I watched this group grow from 1000 members to almost 10,000 in one week. That’s very alarming to see how unsafe we feel as Asian Americans. And not just Asian Americans, but Asians around the world about the situation is going on right now. 

Tiffany Yu: Why do you think it's become so exacerbated? So I will share that about 5 weeks ago was the last time that I had travelled by plane. And on the way back, I had gotten flagged by the CDC as someone who had traveled back from mainland China. And I got questioned by the security people, sent to a quarantine room, and given a mask. And at that point, I had spoken out about the fact that, this is a really hard time for everybody but it is not an excuse for us to be violent against people based on their race. Curious to hear your thoughts on what has happened and why is this still happening five weeks later?

Bryan Pham: Especially given all the lockdown that’s going on around the United States. I picked up some news today from my property manager in Ohio. He told me that the governor of Ohio has now locked down the state because of the coronavirus outbreak. And that’s very alarming to hear, because states like Ohio don’t have a large Asian population and yet they’re still on lockdown. And so places who are affected by lockdown, who have a large Asian population, it feels very very unsafe right now for us walking around. I’m very concerned about my parents too because they live in Los Angeles. And they can’t speak English that well, so I’m highly concerned about their safety. And this is the reason why we want push out #HATEISAVIRUS so soon because we want to be able to combat racism and xenophobia against Asians right now and we noticed a large amount of Asian-owned businesses aren't doing that well right now. A lot of them are heavily impacted because people are now spreading untrue facts about how the coronavirus is spread. Unfortunately, a lot of non-Asian people believe that by eating Asian food, you have a high chance of getting the coronavirus, which is not real at all. That’s a lot of misinformation that is hurting a lot of our community. And seeing a lot of news come out about all these Asian-owned businesses having to layoff a lot of their staff to get through this tough time. It’s the reason why we’re pushing out this campaign so hard. We want to have a unique component to it too. We want to embrace the online culture, embrace being virtual right now. That’s the reason why we’re pushing hard for the online conference to happen, where we can still be productive and still bring the community together, and have artistic talent, while still keeping everyone safe and really practicing social distancing. We are now leveraging our network, between Michelle, Tammy, and I to really get the attention of the masses. And how we do that is, we reached out to a lot of influencers like Tiffany--

Tiffany Yu: Community leaders--

Bryan Pham: --community leaders. Tiffany is everything, all and above. Having people like Tiffany speak up about this cause will help us create a bigger voice and eventually a bigger movement to stop all the hate that's going on in the world. And that’s our goal.

Tiffany Yu: That’s beautiful. For me, I know that a lot of small businesses are struggling right now, and I don't want to discount or discredit the fact that that is happening. But what has been happening in local Chinatowns and with a lot of small Asian-owned businesses is that, even before “shelter-in-place” or lockdown happened, these businesses were suffering because exactly as you said, some of the misinformation around going to Chinatown. So when a lot of these businesses, and a lot of this is based on things that I read, when a lot of these businesses were expecting their biggest business to happen post-Lunar New Year, and then the news around the first coronavirus cases to come out, and that creating a sense of racism and xenophobia and not wanting to go in a local Chinatowns when they were expecting all of that business and it didn't and then it's just been perpetuated for weeks up until now. Then I think the second thing that's happening is our country's president is tweeting. This isn't even fake news, is tweeting and calling coronavirus “Chinese virus.” I remember seeing on the #HATEISAVIRUS Instagram, a tweet from Mark Ruffalo, who is a great ally, about how when someone who is a leader shares rhetoric like that, it gives permission for everyone who follows that person to follow suit. So I think it goes both ways right and so I think it's really powerful that you are reaching out to Asian community leaders and having them share with their followers that this behavior is not okay, and what I'm noticing as well is that a lot of my friends are are joining in and supporting. And unfortunately or fortunately, a lot of my followers already know that that is not ok. And so I am curious to learn a little bit more about how you're thinking this campaign is going to combat some of this misinformation. Is it sharing of the facts, is it watching this hashtag go viral?

Bryan Pham: It’s a combination of everything you just said. We want to make sure that we straighten out the information. A lot of information we post to our Instagram is a lot of tweets. It’s going to be facts. We’re going to have a newsletter that will come out soon to help combat all the misinformation. At the same time, we want this hashtag to really go viral. So we’re having people share this on their Facebook and Instagram. On Facebook, we want them to use the #HATEISAVIRUS frame to be used over the profile picture to bring more awareness. On Instagram, we’re really big on having people wear facemasks, which says our message #HATEISAVIRUS and a little description pointing back to our cause. And the reason why we’re having this campaign is because we believe in the power of influence, the power of the internet during this modern time period to be more effective than the press. Tammy, Michelle, and I-- we’re not the type of people who can sit back and watch this unfold onto our country without making a difference if we could. And right now we’re pooling our resources, our minds, being resourceful, finding the right people to really spread this message because we’re sick of this. We hate seeing this happen, we want to put a stop to all of this. As you mentioned, businesses are impacted by this but you know there's also a high tick in crime as well.

We saw a lot of Asian-owned businesses being vandalized right now, being destroyed. People are getting harassed in the street. Asian people are now being called “coronavirus.” So much hate going on in the world and we just want to straighten things out.

Tiffany Yu: The other conversation that I had was with my friend who is a psychotherapist, Gina Moffa. And she and I chatted a little bit about how, when you are in a state of panic, or in a state of stress, it makes you do jerky things, unfortunately. But it can also be an opportunity to spread compassion and community care.

One of the things you guys shared was a video, where someone had said, “let's be proactive about positivity.” In a time where there's just so much uncertainty, having people like you and Tammy and Michelle taking the lead on this really provides a beacon of hope for all of us to be able to follow. So thank you for that. I am really excited about the social media part of this campaign. I know you’ve mentioned some of the virtual programming that’s going to be happening, you mentioned a concert that’s going to be coming up. Do you have anymore details about what that’s going to look like yet?

Bryan Pham: That will be our surprise coming up. As soon as that unfolds, we’ll start announcing that to our Instagram. Stay tuned for that, we’re very excited.

Tiffany Yu: We’ll definitely take some time at the end of this to plug whatever social handles are relevant for this. But I guess I’ll just plug it now too. It’s @hateisavirus_ or you can just follow the hashtag #HATEISAVIRUS and then be directed to the main Instagram page. So a $1 million fund to help support local Asian-owned businesses. I think that’s amazing. I have mentioned this publicly, I am going to be matching any contributions to the fund, up to $1000. Head over to the link in my bio and I’ll provide a link in these show notes to learn more about the fund. I guess I wanted to chat with you a little bit more about that because I think even as you were thinking about getting Asian Hustle Network off the ground, this was part of that idea initially wasn't it?

Bryan Pham: That’s right. Prior to repurposing our fund, we were giving away $1,000 to aspiring entrepreneurs every single month. And given the coronavirus outbreak, we figured we should think bigger. That we should repurpose the fund. And actually try to fundraise more money into this fund so that we can give back to more people. We had some people reach out to me, “Hey is it ok if you give away $1000 every month to one person?” But it made Maggie and I feel a little bit uncomfortable because we were only helping one person. So now instead of helping one person, we’re thinking bigger, to help 1000-2000, even 10,000 people depending on how much money we raise. That’s our vision right now. We just want to be able to support our community as much as possible.

Tiffany Yu: I think being able to have that fund, in addition to all of the initiatives that are happening right now around supporting small businesses during this time, is going to keep some of our favorite Asian-owned brands afloat. Do you have any ideas around how you're thinking about application process? How will the funds be distributed?

Bryan Pham: The way it is right now, we’re going to designate a portion of the to non-profits to support all the hate crime that’s going on in the world. But as far as actual give away, we are doing an application process. Right now I'm working with a couple of pretty successful restaurant owners to help me come up with a process to vet these applications that come in. We mainly want to be able to help a lot of the restaurants who are struggling because of coronavirus and we realize that having an application process will bring in a lot of people who were struggling before the coronavirus outbreak. We want to make sure that the money goes to the right people through the application process.

Tiffany Yu: And I know you and I have chatted a lot about mutual aid efforts that have been launching since the outbreak related to the disability community, which is where I spend most of my time, people who identify as LGBT. I’ve seen it for artists and creatives, people who work in entertainment, wellness--people who work in wellness. And so I'm excited to see--and for me, this is probably the first mutual aid effort that I’ve seen within the Asian community. If there are others, you can let me know or if you’re listening, you can let me know as well. I’m excited to see this fund come together.

Bryan Pham: Thank you Tiffany. Appreciate all of the support you’ve given us so far. We’re the light to other people, but you’re the light to us.

Tiffany Yu: It’s all that--is the movie called Pay It Forward? Where the guy draws the diagram where he shows this ripple effect. I will say, I have noticed just for myself that I have been a little less active during this time. Gina and I talked about grief in our conversation, and for those of us--so right now what is happening, is it is a globe grief pandemic as well in the sense that with the social distancing, and shelter in place, and lockdown, people are losing their ability around physical human connection and touch. Unless you have roommates or partners that you live with and so, that is impacting how people are reacting and a need to really hone in on yourself and check in on your own mental health during this time. And so I have noticed for myself, as someone who lost a parent as a child, it’s triggering that grief but then also the grief around human connection and being able to meet up and and having IRL in real life community. I'm just really excited by your leadership. Always 100% happy to support. I know you have said the exact same thing to me. Last thing I want to chat about, I know that there is potentially a merch campaign, where proceeds are going to be contributed back into the fund as well. I know things were moving a little slower because shipments and different things that were happening in California.

Bryan Pham: That’s the main objective too is that we’re going to raise some money through the merch as well. And because of the coronavirus outbreak, a lot of our production is being delayed until Wednesday. So hopefully after Wednesday, March 25, you guys will be able to purchase some apparel to support the cause.

Tiffany Yu: I’m excited about that and I actually think this show will go live potentially after that date. So I will provide in the show notes a link to the Asian Hustle Network. If there are people who identify as Asian who want to check out the Facebook Lives with the two exciting guests that you mentioned, and also links to learn more about how to get involved in the campaign. So all of that said, was there anything else about the campaign you wanted to chat about?

Bryan Pham: Nope, you covered everything. Thank you Tiffany for giving us the opportunity to speak up on it.

Tiffany Yu: Of course. And thank you Bryan for being such a willing guest as I try to learn how to be a podcast host.

Bryan Pham: You did great. Thank you so much.

[outro] Tiffany Yu: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Tiffany & Yu. This is your host Tiffany Yu. My ultimate hope is that we can co-create something beautiful together, so if you have feedback or suggestions on topics you’d like us to explore, I'd love to hear from you. This podcast now has its own Instagram handle @tiffanyandyu. And you can also find me across social media at @imtiffanyyu. That’s the letter “I”, the letter “M”, followed by my first and last name. We’re hoping to drop episodes every Tuesday so I hope you'll join us for the next episode. And a special thank you to RootHub for my opening and closing podcast medley.

[Closing Medley by RootHub]

Tiffany Yu
Previous

003: Tiffany & Kasley
Next

001: Tiffany & Gina