Building New Worlds

Bing Chen, C’09, doesn’t mince words about his aspirations, and he has the portfolio to back it up.

An architect of the multi-billion-dollar content creation ecosystem in the early days of YouTube, and now technology and entertainment mogul working side by side with founders and auteurs around the world through his company Gold House, Chen is always working toward something bigger and better.

Chen has received numerous accolades, including being named a Google Multicultural Champion, a Los Angeles Times Most Influential Leader, a Hollywood Reporter Next Gen Leader and Most Influential Agent of Change, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, an ABC News History Maker, and more. His companies have also been recognized as “brands that matter” and “top startups,” among many other honors.


His philanthropic work focuses on culture and cross-continental unity as a Board Director of the Asia Society, Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, the Banff World Media Festival, and VidCon, the largest online video convention, which he helped forge in the 2010s.

Chen discusses with Omnia his journey through Penn, the tech industry, and his role as a creative.

How did your early life guide your professional philosophy?

I’d say my identity is really defined from three faculties. One is growing up on multiple continents between North America and Asia, which showed me, at a very practical, visceral level how similar our species is, rather than how different. The second is when my father passed away from cancer when I was 15, forcing me to prioritize existential efforts that will endure the test of time. The third would be what became, effectively, my single mother. In addition to redefining gender norms, she showed me how you can balance being economically successful and phenomenally emotionally empathetic—and how both are essential to everything we do.


How did your Penn journey prepare you for your eventual careers?

Penn sets you up for life, and the reason I chose it is really threefold. One, my dream since I was a boy was to be the new existential Walt Disney. And when thinking about how people pursue their dreams at a practical level, it’s a combination of stories and systems. Stories are the beliefs that we hold about ourselves and others, and systems are the financial resources, spaces, products, tools, and so forth, to help us realize them at a practical level.

And so, if you want to be Disney, Hollywood was full of Penn alums. Rich Ross, C’83, was the president of the Disney Channel, which, for my generation, means he’s God. Stacey Snider, C’82, was the CEO of DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg. Marc Platt, C’79—whose name has become famous again because of Wicked—dominated the theatrical world. And so, number one is Penn bred incredible industry leaders.


The second that I really value, as all fluid-identity people do—I’m bicultural and bisexual—is the interdisciplinary nature of Penn. Everything is intrinsically across the aisle. And that’s just really rare to find. It almost goes out of its way to forge hybrids. And I do believe that the highest forms of genius, a la Einstein, come from the hybridization of two historically distinct faculties.


The third faculty is Penn’s pre-professional emphasis. There was just something about being able to know how to surmount the basics like what to wear, how to speak, how to write a resume that, when you’re 22, puts you three to six months ahead of all your peers.

You focused on creative writing at Penn but moved into tech. How did the liberal arts interact with this shift?

I deliberately stayed in the College because you have to form how you think before you form what you think. I wanted to stretch my brain to the infinite bounds before I tried to compartmentalize it, place it, and apply it.

And so, I gravitated toward English and creative writing, because I think all things in life are ultimately about taking an abstraction, or something that effectively doesn’t matter, or, in many cases, is not even true, making it really cogent, then making it practically useful to people. When I was admitted to Google’s executive management program, I was told that the reason was because I thought differently, and that is entirely because of my majors.

Can you discuss your time at Google?

At Google, we studied everything that traditional media had, from the gold record in music to how Walt Disneyland was structured. This led to building the creator economy; we created incentives and launched monetization opportunities. We fostered new growth opportunities like launching watch time and the now-famous global rewards system, anchored by my gold play button. The term “content creator” was not popular at the time—it didn’t really exist outside of a few creators themselves—and I was really excited because I was creating something from scratch, which I’ve learned is my greatest fervor, my greatest strength.

From there, I globalized the partner program when I was 25 years old into 42 different countries and eventually brought in a billion and a half dollars. There’s no question that I would not have been able to do this if I wasn’t raised on multiple continents and if I didn’t have the pre-professional training at Penn, as well as the trust and support of our YouTube leadership.

Why did you transition away from the tech industry?

I was so grateful to have so many great mentors and bosses at YouTube who really enabled me to skyrocket, but every day I would look in the mirror and lament that I wasn’t able to pursue my creative ambitions. At the end of the day, 51 percent of my heart is creative, 49 percent is systems thinking. So, I thrust myself into creative. Using my Google savings, I moved back in with my mom and allowed myself to devote two years full of my life just to creative pursuits. I started architecting my version of what will hopefully be the new Wizarding World or Star Wars—that will finally start releasing next year. It apparently takes a decade to birth any real fictitious universe in any form, and I’ve now learned that the hard way.

The story is grounded in reality and will release as a trilogy of trilogies. Aesthetically, it’ll look like a Hunger Games—slightly dystopian and steampunk-y. It has the levity and sarcasm of a JD Salinger or Oscar Wilde, the lyricism of a slam poet, but with the heart of a Maya Angelou story. So, it’s a nice hybridization.

You eventually came to found and helm multiple companies. How did that come about?

At the two-year mark, I was 60 percent done with that creative franchise, and in tandem, I had realized that half of my body was missing the systems side. So, that is when I began AU Holdings, which is an investment and advisory firm that advises on creator strategies. Over time, we started investing in a ton of different companies. But something was missing still, something like a Disney World.

This was a time when a bunch of Asian communities were experiencing xenophobic attacks, so I realized I needed to build an apparatus that would lead to a better, more inclusive world where everyone could feel safe. This was the impetus for Gold House, a Walt Disney-esque company anchored by people from the Asian diaspora. We just turned six this fall, and it’s been awesome. We now have a family of companies and a research arm, a cultural consultancy, an agency, a venture fund, and a content fund.

What recent exciting projects is Gold House involved in?

Gold House’s creative fund has just absolutely crushed it. We are really excited to continue to invest in incredible films, filmmakers, and creative companies. Our last film, Didi—a coming-of-age comedy-drama about a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy grappling with his identity—won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Ensemble award at Sundance Film Festival, and we’re hoping for some Oscar nominations.

The cornerstone of Gold House’s phase two plan is a Pan-specific ”Gold Bridge.” The idea here is that I want to bring everyone across the Pacific closer together, so we can invest better and distribute each other’s companies and content better. This is codified, for example, through a significant multi-year relationship with the Singapore government. It’s not just about bringing people together or investing or helping to create the next great Silicon Valley in Singapore; it’s also a bridge at the programmatic level, connecting all the marginalized communities of the world to elevate other.

You’ve used the phrase “world-building” in relation to your process. What do you mean by that?

I think there’s an imperative to improving the world that we have inherited, but I think there’s something so much more exciting about building new ones. One of the most important principles within stories is that we all invariably want the same thing. We just talk about them or live them differently. Not everyone wants to get married, not everyone is living their dream, not everyone lives well. But we still crave connection in some form. We all want to be impactful. We all want to live healthily. It is my job to translate, and figure out, “Well, what does that mean for everyone?”

I used to hate when people said, “The journey is the destination,” because I thought, “No one in the middle of a journey believes that the destination is worth it.” What I think the aphorism now means is that every step we take is progress, and because we will not necessarily live to taste the fruits that we plant, every step we take has to be enough. And every step will be an achievement unto itself.