Lulu Cheng Meservey, Founder of Rostra

**David Senra** (0:02)
So, you were born in China, yet you speak Norwegian. Can you explain what occurred in your life between these two points?

**Lulu Cheng Meservey** (0:10)
Yes, I was born in rural China.
I was born in a little village where I think my mom didn't even know whether I would come out a boy or a girl or in six months or 12 months or there was very little knowledge. And so I emerged and we were able to leave China because my father was sent to Germany to get his PhD in astrophysics. I think at that time the number of people who wanted to leave China far exceeded the number of people who were allowed to. So technically we were supposed to stay behind as a kind of collateral to make sure that he came back. However, dot dot dot, we end up settling in Germany. My mom and I actually do go to join my father at the University of Heidelberg where he was getting his PhD. And we started moving around to different universities where he would study at University of Ex to work at the observatory. And so University of Oslo is one of the places where he was sent to work on astrophysics and that's where I did a lot of my growing up, went to public school and I just became a little bit Norwegian.

**David Senra** (1:12)
How many different countries did you live in then?

**Lulu Cheng Meservey** (1:14)
Yeah, I grew up in China, then Germany, Norway, Canada, at which point we were able to become Canadian citizens, which was very exciting and welcoming for us.
Then grand slam, big dream, the United States. I came to the US for college, been here ever since and a few years ago naturalized in the first Trump administration, which was very exciting for me.

**David Senra** (1:36)
How long did you know that you wanted to come to America? Was it just for school or did you think, no, I'm going to live here after?

**Lulu Cheng Meservey** (1:43)
No, I just wanted to live and be here and be American. It was a dream that was inherited from my father. If he hadn't gone to Germany, he would have tried to go to the US. In fact, the only reason he couldn't was because it was over-subscribed as a destination at the time. So, we've had a multi-generational dream to come to the US, and what I'm doing now feels like the culmination of multiple generations of work.

**David Senra** (2:07)
I consider you a very singular player on the board.
I don't know anybody else that has a business like yours. You do the comms for some of the greatest tech founders in the world. You have anywhere from 10 to 12 clients at a time, but you have a wait list of 1,000 companies that want to work with you.

**Lulu Cheng Meservey** (2:24)
A little less.

**David Senra** (2:25)
Yeah, a little less that want to work with you. But it's always like the elite of the elite. And few of these people have been on the show, for example, and I've talked to them in private about you.
So it's an unlikely story. I happen to know this because we spent a bunch of time together with us a year and a half. But can you explain, okay, you go to college. What do you think you were going to do when you were in school?

**Lulu Cheng Meservey** (2:47)
I did not know what to do. You and I have talked about friends of ours who've known maybe from an early age that they wanted to go in a certain direction. I did not know. And I think because the thing that I'm doing actually has not existed until I started doing it. And there are many other things like this out there that don't exist until someone starts doing it. So I think there's a lesson there. But what I really was forced to do and then enjoyed doing was some version of super duper reading the room and then figuring out how to become and speak as someone that the room would accept. And as a kid moving around and always being the weird kid with the weird accent and the weird clothes, it's a forced almost survival mechanism. I'll tell you a story about in Norway in a second, how I learned this. And when I got to Canada, I actually learned English from a book called English.
Literally, it was like a green and blue book. I could picture it, look like a Greyhound bus seat type of design called English. I read it and I was like Neo waking up from The Matrix. I was like, I know English. I thought I knew English. I actually did not because English, there's like the book English and then there's the how people actually use it English. So while I was in college, I did an interview with BCG or something that the career office funnels you towards. And thank goodness I did not get this role. But part of the reason I didn't get the role was they asked me if I had any experience doing something. And I said, yeah, I have quite a bit of experience below the belt.