Meet Zheng Li, Director of Product at Raygun, a startup that has already won several awards in New Zealand and is making a splash in the United States. She is small in stature, but don’t let her physical size fool you. She is quite the force to be reckoned with.

What Her Bio Says

Prior to joining Raygun, Zheng was the Founder and CEO of Zing Design, a digital design and UX agency that was acquired by New Zealand Hi-tech Startup of the Year Raygun in 2015. Raygun is a software diagnostics and operational intelligence company with thousands of customers in more than 100 countries. Zheng is also the Chief Organizer for Female Founders Exchange, a meetup group for women tech entrepreneurs in New Zealand. She was recently named as one of the top 50 women in tech in Australia and New Zealand and was instrumental in establishing her hometown of Wellington as the “most feminist tech ecosystem in the world.” As an award-winning entrepreneur, Zheng has run numerous businesses and has invested in many others.

What Her Bio Doesn’t Say

Although Zheng and I only recently met, we fell into conversation easily. I particularly enjoyed our chat because in addition to sharing my passion for helping women move into entrepreneurial and senior management roles, Zheng speaks her mind and acts with authority – traits that have served her well throughout her career. Although she studied architecture in New Zealand, she decided in 2005 to move into tech because she wanted to make her own way instead of falling prey to the institutional prejudices of the architecture industry.

Raygun is about thirty employees strong now, and 40 percent of them are women. I asked Zheng how Raygun had managed to do something that most US companies are only talking about, and she said it happened organically. “Our company hired an exceptional female general manager who brought in colleagues and interns through the connections that she had. This gave us a wider range of qualified people to select from. Young women are increasingly looking for work in companies that have strong female leaders and Raygun has just that. 50% of our leadership team are women, which is amazing for a geeky high tech product company.”

With her impressive accomplishments, Zheng Li is definitely a woman I will be watching closely. She is clearly a rising star both in the tech and entrepreneurial worlds. I am looking forward to the day when I am able to say, “I knew her when…”

Kernels of Wisdom from Zheng

• Don’t internalize everything as your fault. “Women tend to internalize external events as their fault. If a project fails and you have honestly done your best work, then it’s not your fault. Sometimes we have to remember that the world does not revolve around us, and we are not responsible for every failure.”
• Call people on their B.S. “Call people on their B.S. so that you can discuss things in the open in order to move things forward for the benefit of everyone involved.”
• Don’t tie your salary to your self-worth. “Learn to invest in yourself by continuously learning and sharpening your skills, learn to invest in others, and learn how to build passive income that’s independent of your job, through diversified assets, stock, real estate, etc.”
• Mentors are important. We’ve heard this over and over again from each of the women I have interviewed. Although Zheng has had many male and female mentors in her life, she considers her husband her mentor in the world of entrepreneurship.
• Speak up! “Women tend not to speak up until they feel 100 percent about their knowledge. Men don’t. Speak up, let your voice be heard, come to the table. Your ideas will be no worse, and maybe better, than the person sitting next to you.”

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