Philip Su

I'm a reflection of the American Dream alongside its questionable future.

My parents immigrated to the US with $600 and worked below minimum wage cleaning houses. Motivated to leave the terrible neighborhood I grew up in, I graduated as valedictorian of my high school, got two degrees in college, and worked at major tech companies like Microsoft and Meta. I even founded a Seattle nonprofit funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build free software for global health.

Some might say that my life was a great example of the American Dream gone right. At Meta, I reported directly to the CTO and led its London engineering office to become Meta's largest outside the US. By 36, I had donated a million dollars to charity and had made enough to retire.

But early retirement isn't all it's made out to be. I found myself spiraling into depression, getting out of bed sometimes at 2pm, sometimes at 6pm, struggling to find meaning in each day. Out of desperation and a sense that something needed to change, I took a job at Amazon's flagship warehouse in Seattle, earning $18.55 an hour, during its busiest season, from Black Friday through Christmas 2021.

This experience was life-changing. In addition to trying to pull myself out of depression, I also took the Amazon warehouse job because I was frankly a bit skeptical about all the breathless news articles claiming that employees needed to pee on themselves or work around associates who had died on the warehouse floor. Lastly, as a technologist, I had long been concerned about the rise of robots and what it means for the future of work.

I came away from the experience with a deep appreciation for the plight of American labor. I saw many instances in which Amazon mistreats its workers, creating a two-class system that differentiates dramatically between highly-paid "corporate" employees and its nearly one million warehouse workers. And lastly, I learned how doing a hard job can reset one's hedonic treadmill, giving me a new lens by which to be thankful for everyday things.

I have a quick wit and a great sense of humor, but I also bring deep insights that can bridge the worlds of the "global elite" and the common American wage worker. There's a story that America needs to hear: about the direction that technology is taking us, about the bifurcation of our society, and about the need for us to take collective action before it's too late. I can help build that story with compelling real-life narrative along with experiential insights.