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 Little League and lemonade stands are staples of the average American childhood. But for entrepreneur Jaalin Cheng, his formative years were anything but typical.
Because Cheng was the only child of two highly dedicated business people, he was exposed at a very young age to the business world. “It was easy for my parents to take me in tow wherever they had to go, so I was constantly going to their business meetings and hanging out outside their business meetings,” Cheng remembers. His father worked as a corporate executive in Hong Kong and his mother was a Chicago-based entrepreneur, facilitating trade between the United States and China.
While other six-year-old boys were playing with action figures and joining AYSO, Cheng was traveling to Shanghai and Beijing, where his mother sat down with the powerful political elite of China. One of Cheng’s earliest memories of his mother is her video editing of documentaries on China and other Asian countries. “I can remember she’d put in 16- to 18-hour days,” he recalls. “I would go to work with her and fall asleep and she’d be editing. When I’d wake up, she’d still be editing.”
Seeing how hard both of his parents worked made Cheng appreciate what it takes to succeed in business and ignited in him the passion to pursue it. Cheng graduated high school in Hong Kong before studying political science and business management at Drew University, a small liberal arts college in New Jersey. When he started at University of San Diego School of Law in 2000, Cheng never intended to be an attorney and instead envisioned himself going into finance or business after graduating.
However, Cheng soon got caught up in the litigation-oriented culture of law school. After taking the California Bar Exam, he became an extern and later a law clerk for Magistrate Judge Jan M. Adler. Shortly thereafter, Cheng moved on to a one-year stint at The Watkins Firm while pursuing an L.L.M. in business and corporate law at USD.
“[My work at the Watkins firm] just reaffirmed my belief that I didn’t want to litigate,” Cheng notes. “Litigation is so adversarial. Every day you bring that angst with you. It was just very tough emotionally. I want to bring people together, not tear them apart, so I knew I wanted to do transactional law.”
In 2005, Cheng took one step closer to his goal of pursuing a business career while putting his law degrees to good use. His father, Larry Cheng, who had been working as senior vice president and director of Asia operations at Motorola, was nearing retirement but did not want to get out of the game completely. “That’s when we hatched the idea of doing something together,” says Cheng. “We thought, ‘why can’t we do what [my father] does for Motorola, but on an independent consultant basis?’”
And with that impetus, Starbridge was born. The Cheng men, who have dubbed themselves “opportunity consultants,” assemble virtual teams of accounting, legal and strategic planning professionals in the United States and China to create and adapt businesses in both countries. “[Starbridge] act[s] as the bridge between U.S. and Chinese markets, companies and resources,” Cheng explains. “We can be a bridge to all the barriers you might encounter, whether they might be logistical, cultural, business cultural, language, process inexperience or lack of contacts or connections. We can help you with it all.”
Cheng, who does all of the in-house legal work for this family business venture, got the entrepreneurial spirit and business sense necessary to form Starbridge from his parents. “I got to understand what it takes to do business just by seeing how hard they worked,” he says. “If I’m going to have a decent shot at this, I’m going to put all my energy and all my effort into it.”
Cheng is hesitant to offer himself up as an example of success, but he does extend two bits of advice to those who wish to emulate him.
“My first message is to be reflective now: really think about who you are and what you want in life,” he suggests. Attorneys’ desires often conflict with their career paths, and many have difficulty finding a balance between family and work. Upon reflection, Cheng determined that he wanted to go into business with his father, since they spent little time together during his childhood. “We finally have a subject matter we can talk about and connect on,” Cheng says. “We’ve talked more in the last year or two since we’ve been in business than in my 18 years growing up.”
Cheng’s second directive is “Do what you are passionate about. My passion is business,” he notes. “I love what I do now, because it allows me to practice the law and get involved in the business side as well.”
Cheng recommends setting a desired goal and working toward it today, even if the task seems daunting. A distance runner, Cheng advocates the marathon mentality: “One of the things marathon runners taught me is that you don’t run a marathon in one step, you run it in thousands of steps,” says Cheng. “If you string enough little steps together, you can run a marathon, just like if you string enough little steps together, you can overcome whatever hurdles there are to doing what you want, even if it takes 20 years.” Because in the end, a rewarding life is not built upon money, power or success, but instead is comprised of thousands of individual days of happiness and fulfillment.
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