The COO of Taiwanese AI company Appier on the role of science in her success, the meaning of true inclusion and how she’s helping to further female workforce participation and entrepreneurship
Appier is in the business of using Artificial Intelligence to help companies understand their customers better, anticipate their actions, and ultimately make better business decisions and solve problems. In March 2021, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) company also became Taiwan’s first digital unicorn to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the first Taiwanese company to list in Japan in over 23 years. In a continuation of the company’s success, Appier co-founder and chief operating officer Winnie Lee was named Woman of the Year at the Women in IT Asia Awards 2022.
From humble beginnings with three friends in a living room in 2012 to a listed company with over 600 employees across 17 markets today, the 10-year journey of Appier hasn’t been easy. In its early days, the company pivoted from eight failed business models in a row—one product being an AI engine to help gamers intuitively keep their progress running even while offline—before it found its current footing. The goal has always been to find answers to questions, says Lee, but finding what the right questions were was the key.
According to Lee, Appier’s DNA for optimising technology and people is key to its success, and a direct result of the founding team’s background in scientific research.
Born and raised in Taiwan, Lee received a master’s in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, a doctorate in Immunology from Washington University in St. Louis, and served as a research technologist at Boston Children’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School. She met Appier co-founders Chih-han Yu (now her husband) and Joe Su initially when they were college roommates. Having spent 10 years in the United States, she was considering academia for the rest of her career when her father’s health took a turn, and she decided to return to Taiwan. “As much as I loved immunology and science, I wanted to make sure that if I looked back in 10, 20 years, I wouldn’t regret it,” she says.
Serendipitously, Yu and Su were in the beginning stages of Appier at the time and jumped at the chance to recruit her. “These were the two smartest people I had known in my life, but I was not trained as a computer or AI scientist, so I had no picture of how I could actually contribute to their business,” Lee says. “But [Chih-han] continued to pitch me. As the entire team at the time was scientists and engineers, they needed someone who could speak a more ‘human’ language on the team and do the things that were not related to algorithms or coding.”
With no clear job scope at the beginning, Lee took up all the odd jobs in the office as well as leading human resources and was pivotal in growing the company to today’s scale. Now her days are filled with strategic meetings, constant communication and decision-making. But she always makes a point to head home to her daughters by 9pm.
Lee’s scientific training, combined with her readiness for healthy debate and constructive criticism, came in especially helpful when navigating an unfamiliar field, she says. “We were all scientists by training, so the good thing is that we can be very objective, and we can also face our own weaknesses very honestly.”
Looking back, Lee realises that she was well prepared to tackle the company’s early obstacles only thanks to this trained skill of trial and error. “If you look at startup life, it’s actually very similar to doing basic science. In order to do it well, you need to be familiar with a space so you can identify one very important question, or a need in the market that has not been answered yet. Then, you need to put 120 percent of dedication into answering that question the fastest, then publish or go to market quickly and strongly before anyone else.”
