Growing up in China, then moving to the States, I get asked about Superapps constantly by international friends. It sounds grand and obvious. My answer is always the same: it's not that easy! Every superapp starts as one genuinely indispensable app. Let’s use WeChat as an example: 2011: Messaging (core chat) 2012: Moments (social timeline) 2013: WeChat Pay (payments) 2014: Red Packets (红包), arguably the single most important product moment in WeChat's history. Launched during Chinese New Year, it went viral overnight and onboarded hundreds of millions of users onto WeChat Pay in weeks. Tencent later called it a "Pearl Harbor attack" on Alibaba's Alipay dominance. 2015: WeChat Pay expanded into offline retail broadly. 2016: Enterprise WeChat 2017: Mini Programs, which allowed third-party apps to run natively inside WeChat without users downloading anything. 2020: Channels (short video, direct response to Douyin/TikTok's dominance.) 2022+: Deeper Channels integration, live commerce, search ambitions It's the heaviest app on my phone and i'm forever grateful that it exists so i can send silly photos to my parents when I was roaming around the world. Never forget that building the initial core product sets the foundation for everything that comes after

Growing up in East London, actor Idris Elba watched his father give "a voice to the unvoiced" as a union representative for Ford Motor Co. Sabrina Dhowre Elba’s mother left Somalia in 1986 amid a civil war that would bring state collapse and, as a single mother of five, went on to found a nonprofit dedicated to educating and supporting women in rural areas of the country and Eastern Africa. The couple met in 2016, married in 2019, and together founded the Elba Hope Foundation in 2022 — a continuation of everything their parents taught them about showing up for others. This year, TIME named them to the TIME100 Philanthropy list. Read their full interview and what has been accomplished so far here:

growing up as a girl in Korea a lot of our femininity and sensuality is repressed. Korea is much more conservative than America. It can be quite toxic and suffocating if I’m being honest. I always had thoughts growing up, the kind of thoughts that would make you considered “weird” or “dirty” or a “wh0*e” but after moving to America I realized I might as well embrace that part of myself as it’s a part of me. In my opinion a fantasy also doesn’t necessarily mean reality and it’s okay to indulge in it in a safe environment. One of my biggest fantasies is taking on multiple men at once….multipe c**ks 😖😖😖 Being able to please many men at the same time. Have them use me for their pleasure and be at their sensual service Do you think that makes me weird? Does that make me dirty? Or should I embrace this side of me more?

Kids growing up in chaos have the same brain scars as soldiers coming home from war. Let that sink in. Neuroscientists studying children raised in unstable households, the constant fighting, the screaming, the neglect, the abuse, found something nobody wanted to see. Their brains looked like combat veterans. Same wiring. Same damage. Same survival mode burned into the tissue. A child who never knew what mood mom would be in. A kid who flinched at footsteps in the hallway. A teenager who learned to read a room before learning to read a book. Their nervous systems were never resting. They were deployed. Hypervigilance. Shrunken hippocampus. Overactive amygdala. The exact signature you find in a soldier who spent a year dodging IEDs. Except these kids weren't in a war zone. They were just home. And here's the part that hits hardest, the brain doesn't know the difference between a battlefield and a kitchen full of yelling. Threat is threat. The body keeps the score either way. So if you grew up walking on eggshells and still feel like you're bracing for something you can't name, you're not broken. You came back from a war nobody acknowledged.

What’s something you were taught growing up that you still do without even thinking? For me, it’s turning off lights every time I leave a room like I’m personally responsible for the national power grid. Funny how those little childhood lessons stick. Close the door, don’t waste food, say thank you, turn off the lights and somehow hear your parents’ voice in your head forever. What’s yours?