How 3 Asian American Women Conquered the C-Suite at OpenTable
From left: Susan Lee, Debby Soo, Amy Wei
Asian American women rarely make it to the top in corporate America. Here's how three did and at the same company.
Debby Soo has never been shy about admitting she's ambitious. "I'm not going to hide from it. I always knew that I wanted to be a CEO," she says. "That was the North Star and that was not in question. It was not, yes or no? It was, when?"
So when the top job at restaurant reservation website OpenTable opened up in 2020, she jumped at the chance, never mind that Covid was raging and the hospitality industry was in crisis. "It wasn't even a choice," Soo says.
Soo's ascent to CEO is a rare feat for an Asian American female: In fact, a 2021 study by McKinsey and LeanIn.org looked at more than 400 large companies and found Asian American women made up about 6.2 percent of the entry-level workforce, but their representation drops off with each level of seniority. The same report found that Asian American women hold just 2.5 percent of senior vice president roles and 1.8 percent of C-suite executive positions.
How 3 Asian American Women Conquered the C-Suite at OpenTable
But what's especially remarkable is that Soo has been joined in the C-suite by two other Asian American women: chief operating officer Amy Wei and chief strategy officer Susan Lee. Soo and Wei's parents came to the U.S. from Taiwan; Lee immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea when she was in middle school.
As Soo, Wei, and Lee tell Inc., their joint rise was a combination of ambition, hard work, and mutual support. Their leadership is clearly working: In the past year, OpenTable's U.S. restaurant network grew in size by 7 percent, with a 29 percent increase in award-winning restaurants joining the platform.
Coming Up Together
How 3 Asian American Women Conquered the C-Suite at OpenTable
Soo and Wei met in 2010, as MBA students vying for summer management internships at Este Lauder, a process that required each of them to give a presentation to a senior leadership team. Soo was one of the first to go and, Wei says, when she returned to the waiting room full of nervous candidates, Soo told them the interviewers would ask tough questions, but reassured them that if they knew their stuff, they'd be fine. "She looks me in the eye and she goes, 'You're going to be OK,'" Wei remembers. "I was like, she's going to be my friend, and she is going to do some real shit in this world. It's going to be amazing.'"
How 3 Asian American Women Conquered the C-Suite at OpenTable
CEO Debby Soo.
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"We both got offers--it was very competitive," adds Soo. They worked together that summer, and Wei stayed on at Este Lauder, moving to China to launch brands La Mer and Jo Malone in Asia.
Soo, meanwhile, took a job at travel booking site Kayak, which, like OpenTable, is part of Norwalk, Connecticut-based Booking Holdings, a Nasdaq-traded company that owns several hospitality tech websites.
By 2015, Soo was the head of Asia Pacific at Kayak and was looking for people to help grow the business there. Wei, as it turned out, was ready to move on from Este Lauder. "I emailed Debby, 'Let's do this together,'" Wei says. "You need someone on the ground. You can trust me. I know how to launch businesses in Asia. I've just done it for a big brand."
They met up for ramen in Shanghai and soon enough Wei was Soo's first hire on the ground in Asia. A little after that, Soo was looking for someone to lead the business in South Korea when a mutual friend put her in touch with Lee. They'd met earlier in their careers, when they were both at Citibank, but lost touch while Lee was being a "badass investment banker," Soo says.
"She spent part of her childhood growing up in South Korea, but she also understood doing business in an American context and American company," says Soo. "Within six months, Amy, Susan, and I were the three people leading Kayak Asia. And we've been working together since."
"We've gone through marriages, divorces--that's me, I'm raising my hand--motherhood, and, of course, coming up through the ranks at Kayak," Soo adds. Although their careers took them in different directions at various points in the past decade, after Soo's move to lead OpenTable in 2020, she recruited Wei. Lee had been the first to work at the company, joining as a vice president in 2019.
The Right Team for the Job
As recently as a few years ago, OpenTable's most popular bookings were for Italian restaurants and steakhouses. Now, diners are increasingly seeking out diverse cuisines, and Asian American chefs in particular have been racking up James Beard awards and Michelin stars. Under Soo's leadership, OpenTable has been active in promoting female and minority chefs, and supporting programs to provide culinary training to young people in underserved communities.
Chief strategy officer Susan Lee.
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"I find that mandate to showcase different types of food to be incredibly inspiring," says Soo. "And I think the three of us are the right people to be doing it. We grew up straddling two cultures, and we pursued this straddling of two cultures, even in our professional careers."
The surge in interest in Asian American cooking comes at a time when Asian culture in general is increasingly prominent in American pop culture, notes Bing Chen, who helped develop the creator economy at YouTube in the early 2010s, and whose organization Gold House honored Soo last year. K-pop bands sell out arenas in the U.S. and headline Coachella. Pokmon, created in Japan in the early 1980s, is the most profitable media franchise ever. Everything Everywhere All at Once dominated last year's Oscars.
Ongoing Challenges
Despite these successes, many Asians and Asian Americans face an insidious stereotype that they're hard-working but not creative, a phenomenon known as the bamboo ceiling. Jackson Lu, a professor at MIT who has written extensively about the bamboo ceiling, asked new MBA students to evaluate their classmates. In a series of studies, he found East Asian students (including U.S.-born students with roots in countries such as China or South Korea) were generally rated as less creative, and they were also less likely to be nominated and elected class section leaders.
Women seeking leadership roles face added hurdles: sexism and the notion that motherhood is incompatible with leadership.
Chen sees OpenTable's C-suite as part of a new generation of leaders who are "excellent and equitable." They're serious about building the best software platform out there, he says, but also modeling a new type of leader. "I'm kind of obsessed," says Chen. "They're so thoughtful, but also give no fucks."
That attitude of being authentically themselves may have been a powerful asset as they took over OpenTable at a time when Asian Americans were increasingly targeted for hate crimes and racist comments. "Even at our own company, headquartered in San Francisco, we heard rhetoric, like, 'I guess you just have to be an Asian female to make it to the C-suite,'" Soo remembers.
Chief operating officer Amy Wei.
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"In my role, I take the hits," she says. "But to see it happen to people who I have such deep respect for, and the company is so fortunate to have recruited--to have them be diminished or me be diminished in that way within the broader context of what was happening with Asian Americans across the board--it was really, really hard."
Wei remembers that her "heart sank a little bit" when she heard co-workers question how she got her position. Her first response was to work even harder and prove herself through good work. A colleague pointed out that it was crazy that no one looked at her resume or track record of achieving all-time high revenue on teams she leads.
"From then on, I was like, I deserve a seat at the table," says Wei. "That's the mindset: Be unapologetically yourself, knowing that people are going to have their feelings and think things."
They're thankful that, given a bit more time, those comments have pretty much faded away. Still, they say that even today sometimes people mix them up. "I would meet somebody at an event and then they would email her," Wei says, referring to Soo.
Claiming a Seat at the Table
Like Soo, Lee and Wei see value in being open about their ambitions. Lee recalls that when she interviewed for the original job at Kayak, she told Soo, "I'm looking for a role where my head's on the chopping block. I feel very ready coming out of grad school to be given a business and to take on the risks of my decisions."
Throughout her career, Wei told her managers what she wanted to do, and asked what she needed to do to get there, a practice that meant she was top of mind when opportunities arose. "You've got to rely on yourself to make that happen," she says. Rather than assuming hard work will be noticed, point out what you've done, and how it can help you get to the next level in your career. "Make it easy for your manager," she says.
Lee says that it's important to see diverse people in leadership roles, so that others can in turn envision themselves there, and perhaps have an easier time having their talents recognized. "We didn't necessarily have that--I didn't until I found Debby," says Lee. "She saw me for my leadership."
"I could take off my armor that I had to put on to try to battle stereotypes," Lee adds. "For us to have found that through Debby and through this peership that we have, we owe it to others to provide representation at the top, so that they can lay their armors down."
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated when Susan Lee joined OpenTable. She was hired in 2019.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.