My Path and Past
This tarot deck has been with me for ten years. I've heard that every deck has a spirit, and over time it grows attuned to its owner — there's a kind of quiet, unspoken understanding during each reading. When something can't be proven false, I tend to do the same thing: trust an inner intuition. I've come to realize that most of my adult life has played out this way.
Adult life hasn't been the grand and dramatic adventure I imagined. It's been mostly chaos and uncertainty. To borrow a popular term, I'm still in my Odyssey years. The pattern, oddly fitting, is that before every major life decision I've made, I've done what the tarot does: followed the intuition I trusted in that moment, and let it lead me forward. The destination, I've come to realize, has shifted — from "the conventional path to success that others can see" to something else entirely: getting closer to myself.
I used to suffer over decisions. Which school to choose, which career, which American university, whether to change direction. I tried "rational pros-and-cons" frameworks more than once — wanting to turn myself into a supercomputer, do all the research, exhaust every possibility. But following those analyses, I kept feeling a clear inner resistance to the result. So I asked my mom: how should I decide? Back then every choice felt like it determined whether the rest of my life would succeed or fail. The fear of choosing wrong was paralyzing.
My mom said: small choices, use your head. Big choices, use your heart. Get quiet, she said, then listen for your inner voice in the stillness.
But what is the inner voice? At the time I had no idea. I sat there listening to meditation music, reading, walking in the forest park behind my house, trying to enter what I imagined was the quiet state, searching for that voice. I never found a mystical voice. I fell into a particular kind of pain — somewhere between the fear of "this decision will define my whole life" and the confusion of "but which one is my path." Tossing, turning, sleepless. The pain made me want some kind of release. Following that desire, I started imagining my future life. I wanted novel experiences, not a fixed script. I knew I was the kind of person whose blood quietly leaps at the word "adventure." Eventually, following that voice, a direction emerged: choose the option that opens up more possibilities. From there, I gradually settled on the operating principle that has guided every major decision since.
To my friends, I've always seemed a little restless. I've tried multiple careers: equity research intern, headhunter intern, financing consultant in primary markets. Two years into work I went back to school for Information Systems. Then a marketing job I figured out from scratch, then AI companies, then a shift from straight marketing to product marketing.
1 Where the Adventure Started
My departure from the conventional path actually began with my first job as a student — a headhunter internship. While my finance classmates were applying for finance internships, I noticed a headhunting firm that was one of China's fastest-growing — they placed C-level executives. So with zero relevant experience, I applied to be their intern. I remember the interview was with a partner running one of the business lines and a female manager on his team. Walking into the office, the heat of the place — everyone in business attire making call after call — left a strong impression on me.
After the basic questions, the interviewers asked the one they were most curious about: your university is solid; why are you trying this headhunter internship? I had no professional experience to draw on, so I trusted my gut. "You're the fastest-growing headhunter firm in China in the past two years," I answered. "From public interviews with your founder, I understood his vision — he wanted to reform the traditional headhunter org and build a new kind of firm. Unlike other firms, you've built an internal system around industry research and talent research — the combination of consulting and industry-shift insight excited me. I have no prior experience in this, but I think my financial industry-analysis skills can give me a different angle on what candidates and clients are really looking for."
My strong feeling at the time: I really want to try this. A different kind of internship. After the interview they told me to wait. As soon as I left the office I started doubting myself — maybe I'd been too unprofessional, leaning too much on curiosity and passion. Maybe they wouldn't pick me. But at least I'd tried.
That evening the manager called: they were offering me the position. I almost jumped out of my chair. There, I went from my first cold call to my hundredth, through dozens of candidate meeting requests being rejected before one finally accepted, and my first "underwater" referral candidate making it to the final round at a Fortune 500. I remember the moment of decision on that candidate — my partner-boss asked me, what's your read? (He liked open questions; I liked his communication style.) I answered honestly: I think this one was smooth up front, but the risk of it falling apart at the finish line is high. Then I explained why. He nodded, satisfied, and said I'd grown a lot.
That was the first time I realized clearly: deal outcomes between candidates and clients aren't determined by experience and hard metrics alone — but by far more subtle factors. Management dynamics. The psychology of negotiation. The underlying conflicts of interest behind each move.
After the internship ended, I didn't stay. I chose to go back to finance. During the internship I had been assigned to source a CTO position, and through that process I realized: without genuine understanding of the industry and a real network in it, you can't actually put the right person in the right place. But the operational work kept piling up while I wanted more time to understand industries and products. Around then I got an offer from a small financing consultancy. So I left that brief but vivid place behind.
2 Back to Finance
At the new company I discovered things I really liked. Not having to sit in the office all day. Getting out frequently for roadshows and management meetings. I also realized I prefer project-based work: a beginning, a climax, a wrap-up. New adventures, repeatedly. I stayed there for over two years. Constantly shuttling between meetings, hearing management teams talk strategy, concerns, fundraising needs, growth worries — and watching how my boss gave strategic and fundraising advice — taught me a lot. That was the first time I really entered the commercial world where decisions hit the income statement. Every choice tied to money.
I met a lot of early-stage startups and founding teams there. I also realized for the first time: running a business and "raising-money-to-build-a-startup" are two very different things. I remember an early-stage women's scalp-care DTC brand that just couldn't land an investor it liked. Where was the problem? Our team had given them business strategy advice, but during a debrief I opened their marketing materials — read their copy, the kind of social posts I wouldn't bother clicking, copy-pasted templates — and I realized: strategy is one thing, but execution capability at an early-stage startup is what determines whether anything ships.
That was the first time I felt how important marketing is. A technically great product without effective distribution is fatal.
I wanted to help them, but I wasn't inside the startup system. I knew almost nothing about their execution. As a junior outside fundraising analyst, how could I give professional advice in a field I had no execution experience in? And even if I gave it, how would the advice actually reach them and change anything? I felt powerless then.
Two years in, China's finance industry changed dramatically. Policy tightened. Foreign VC investment got squeezed. The CSRC's industry filters for IPO candidates got stricter. The fundraising industry entered a frozen period within my career window. Our client pipeline dropped sharply.
I had a sense at the time that this wasn't a months-long thing — it might be years. Earlier, COVID and family worries had forced me to abandon my plan to study abroad for graduate school. Now, with the industry shifting and some lingering questions still on my mind, I took the grad school application step again. I wanted to see what abroad looked like, especially the America I'd watched in TV shows as a teenager.
After thinking it through, I made another decision that surprised my friends: I applied for Information Systems. Maybe it was the SaaS companies I'd encountered at work that had pulled me toward this kind of business. When I first encountered SaaS I knew nothing — I had no concept of user lifecycle, ARR, churn rate. I just felt that when those startups described technical concepts, there was something different about the way the software world approaches real-world problems compared to consumer brands. A completely different mental model for problem-solving.
3 Studying in the US
With curiosity in hand, I applied to one of the few schools that let a humanities student apply for a STEM program. And so I set foot for the first time on American soil — the place I'd been curious about for years. Early on, the coursework was hard to adjust to, and after a semester I realized I had limited interest in the systematic technical side of the program. Maybe it was the lack of a concrete use case — I couldn't picture what all the technology stacked together was actually solving.
I returned to my old question: what do I care about? The technology underneath, or the distribution? I realized my interest in the latter was stronger. Getting people to perceive value and pay for it looked, to me, like magic.
Fortunately, beyond the required courses, I was allowed to elect from outside the program. So I took several courses on innovation, entrepreneurship, and marketing. In those classes I felt real interest, real curiosity. While my classmates discussed CS and Data Analysis roles they planned to apply for, I decided on a different path: marketing. Even if it meant a much lower starting salary than CS roles, for now.
4 AI Marketing, and Narrowing Down
My first marketing job, somewhat by accident, was at a very early-stage startup using AI to generate interior home design imagery. There I learned the tactical specifics of marketing — SEO, email, social, small-budget ads, influencer collaborations. I ran the company's first batch of influencer + UGC partnerships, going through screening, negotiating rates, contracts, scripting, watching traffic outcomes from influencer work, and also seeing the problems in that funnel. Conversion and retention were too inefficient, the budget got tight, and we had to pause. I left that company for various reasons. The strange thing was: the next job was also at an AI company.
At the second company, I was more involved in AI product marketing. I started testing competitors constantly. The engineering team wanted user-perspective feature suggestions from me, so I started writing PRDs. As AI models advanced rapidly, my role inside the org shifted too. Previously, PRD docs and small requirements weren't worth engineers' time — so I started using GitHub myself, pushing some SEO content requirements directly through Claude vibe-coding straight to GitHub. I felt the org shape subtly change and individual functional boundaries expand. All thanks to model capability climbing.
My role at the second startup was still many-hats-at-once, but most things stayed shallow. Through the work, I noticed I was — sometimes deliberately — pulling my time toward competitor testing, product positioning, and user research, instead of creative production and script writing. I think those are what I want to be doing more of. It overlaps with my finance-industry research-and-analysis work, and the headhunter work of pulling insight from conversation. I want to deliberately go deeper in that direction.
I don't know what the future looks like, and I do feel anxiety about how others perceive my many pivots. I make my choices with shaky hands, but I'm grateful that all of them have brought me closer to myself, in that direction. I've doubted myself — I haven't built enough vertical experience on one track. I've envied people who knew their direction from day one. My realizations have been intermittent; my life has been a series of stumbles. I admit I've sometimes overweighted finding the right path. Now I understand: no single path is absolutely right or wrong. I've stopped judging myself, accepted my own version of the Odyssey years, and prepared to set out again, in a clearer direction.
If I had to put a number on inner certainty: when I chose marketing as a broad direction, I was 50%. When I narrowed further to product marketing, I was 70%.
On Product Marketing: there's no bible I can study to be better at this. I've stepped onto an exploration path. The good news is that AI's development lets me test more products, observe successful examples, and learn from people who've done this well before — through professional newsletters and other channels.
I want to record the exploration process, the learnings at each stage, and the thinking — and put them here, on my personal site.
Welcome to Marisa Ma's personal site.