Raised in a nasty Los Angeles ghetto, this founder now runs a fast growing tech startup

It’s an understatement to say “life is tough” when you grew up in the only Chinese family in a Los Angeles ghetto, with drug dealers, gang members, and criminals as neighbors. But it was reality for Rosaline Koo, the 52-year-old founder and CEO of ConneXionsAsia (CXA), a Singapore-based startup building an online employee benefits platform that it hopes will shake up the industry.

Koo’s father was an illegal immigrant who landed in Mexico from China and swam up the coast to California. Her mother escaped during the Communist Revolution in 1949, leaving behind her then-husband – who was later killed – and two children. Her land was seized by the government, and Koo’s grandmother was sent to a labor camp.

One of a few Chinese kids in an all-black neighborhood, Koo was bullied and beaten up, and retaliation often wasn’t an option due to her diminutive stature.

“I had to learn how to rapidly judge situations, to decide whether I should fight or flee for my life,” she says. Her circumstances didn’t improve when the family moved into a latino neighborhood where drive-by shootings were the norm.

This childhood experience helped Koo develop into a tough-as-nails personality who could blend in with people who are different from her. It gave her a certain immunity to fear, which would later define her life trajectory.

In UCLA, she took up a degree in cybernetics, and she was invited to sororities for blacks and latinos. Her Asian friends remarked that she was more like them than her own ethnicity.

At the age of 21, she worked at Proctor & Gamble where she was thrust into a toothpaste factory in Iowa to manage two production lines, staffed by older white men in their thirties.

Koo describes the experience as sobering, and she resolved to brush up on her leadership skills.

That pursuit has brought her around the globe. She rose through the ranks at an investment bank in New York City, starting out as a summer intern and then climbing all the way to vice-president in just about a decade.

Past the new millennium, she traveled half-way around the world to start a couple of technology companies in Malaysia during the Dot-com Bubble, raising tens of millions of funding in doing so. Her second startup, which she later sold, was co-founded with the former president of Dell Asia.

She took up a corporate gig next, becoming the senior partner at employee benefits broker Mercer’s Asian office. She grew the business from US$11 million over the previous 30 years to US$88 million in annual sales within eight years. Her Mercer job pointed her to an opportunity to shake up employee benefits.

“There’s a lot of waste in how employers are spending on staff benefits,” she says. “If you’re single, you typically don’t need that much insurance coverage, but working couples often get duplicated coverage, so why not use that for something that the employee values?”

With healthcare costs rising faster than salaries, companies are wasting money on insurance that their employees don’t understand or value. The solution, therefore, would be to repurpose some of that insurance money currently used for protection or treatment into wellness and disease prevention.

Forced to bootstrap

Tech company through and through

Still a people business

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