Vivian Tu says she built her early career on spite.
That energy took her from junior trader on Wall Street to media personality and founder of her own financial education brand, Your Rich BFF. Betting on herself landed Tu on The New York Times bestseller and Forbes 30 Under 30 lists and launched her to millionaire status by the time she was 27.
Tu modeled her ambitions to be “so conventionally successful” to “spite a hater or spite someone who didn’t believe in me,” she told Sylvia Kwan, CEO of Ellevest, during a conversation with CNBC Make It.
Tu even dedicates her first book, 2023’s “Rich AF,” to a bad boss, among others: “To the man who told me I was too girly to ever succeed in finance: F—. You.”
Launching a new career
Whatever role spite has played in her career, Tu says she learned early on to never make big decisions, like quitting a job, purely out of anger.
As she recounts in “Rich AF,” Tu had been enjoying her early Wall Street career at J.P. Morgan, even finding her own “rich BFF” and mentor Jean Mah, until she was moved to a new team and manager who criticized her on a personal level, including by saying she didn’t belong in finance based on the way she looked and dressed. After one incident, Tu says she was fed up and told her mentor she planned to quit on the spot.
Mah talked Tu down and advised her to not make a rash decision without planning a next move, Tu told journalist David Begnaud during an episode of his podcast “The Person Who Believed In Me.” Instead, she took her mentor up on an offer to connect with a new opportunity at BuzzFeed.
Tu excelled in her new media sales role despite having no previous experience; in her last year at BuzzFeed, Tu says she was earning $625,000 thanks to her hard work and big commissions. In 2021, Tu began posting financial education content on TikTok for fun. Once she started getting brand deals, she saw potential in turning content creation into a full-time job. After over a year of building an audience, Tu quit her sales job and went all in on Your Rich BFF.
Turning insecurity into a search for meaning
Looking back, the energy Tu put into her accomplishments came from “a place of deep insecurity,” she told CNBC Make It. “I think especially at the beginning of my Your Rich BFF journey, my definition of success was very quantifiable. How many of these lists can I be on? I love a list. My mom loves a list.”
Now, she sees her drive as a way to repay the hard work and sacrifice her immigrant parents poured into her to set her up to excel at school, work and life in the U.S. For example, she says she recently treated her parents to an all-expenses-paid vacation to celebrate a milestone anniversary.
Tu’s relationship to her work has changed, too, she said. “Now, though not to say that I’m self-actualized, but I do feel like I am a more confident, wiser version of younger Viv,” Tu said. “Because of that, I think my personal definition of success now is: Do I get to wake up every single morning and feel like I’m actually doing something meaningful?”
It’s a less quantifiable measure of success, “but I want to wake up every single morning and be like jumping out of bed. And I think I’ve gotten to a point in my career where I get to do that,” Tu said. “I feel really, really grateful. I think 20-something-year old Viv would look at me and not even recognize who this woman is.”
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