David Wong teaching Artemis Real Estate Partners interns alongside Co-CEO Alex Gilbert, returning to the firm that helped him break into Wall Street.

An Unlikely Golden Ticket: How BCNY opened a world I never knew existed 

“What the heck is a Middlesex? and why am I missing my basketball game?” 

I was in middle school when, on one fateful night, I was pulled away from a basketball game and brought to the Boys Club of New York in East Harlem to interview for a boarding school I had never heard of… Middlesex. At age 12, the first question I asked my mother was, “What the heck is a Middlesex? and why am I
missing my basketball game?”

In Asia, if you come from the ‘right family’ and study hard, going to boarding school becomes a prestigious medal of honor that you and your mother brag about with your friends. At the Boys Club, where mass incarceration was embedded in our daily reality, prestige was not in our vocabulary.

I was an only child raised by a single mother who gave me everything she had. My goals were simple: get out of the house, play sports on grass instead of concrete, and join a stable community.

Thankfully, the interview went well, and with the help of the dream team, led by my mother, Antonio Aponte, Bill Mitchell, and Nina Pina, I received a full scholarship to Middlesex, the only school that accepted me. Middlesex gave me three things that proved to be priceless: a community, a voice, and a window into worlds I had never heard of. My mother cried every day I was away from home, but she never once asked me to come back.

Babson College and beyond

That foundation would define the next decade of my life, starting with another scholarship from the clubhouse, this time to a two-week SAT prep camp, where I stumbled upon Babson after meeting a student from the college during a pickup basketball game. My college admissions process followed simple New York logic: Babson ranked third in median salary ten years out of college, only after Harvard and MIT. After seeing that ranking, I said to myself, “Lord knows I’m not getting into Harvard or MIT, and I’m here to get paid,” so I applied early decision to Babson.

At Babson, I got my first real taste of business, and through a fellow boarding school alum, I was introduced to Wall Street, where I learned people made six figures after college if they had a 3.7 GPA. My mother raised me from humble beginnings, so we had never seen that kind of money in our lives. When I began to connect the dots and realized school could offer tangible economic value, I said, “consider me a scholar.” That was the first time in my life I became a straight A student.

At the same time, some of my closest friends at Babson were international students from Middlesex and other boarding schools who saw the world completely differently. They came from families of successful entrepreneurs who were ride-or-die for family business and independence. Growing up in New York, when I heard “family business” back then, all I could picture was a mom-and-pop bodega. I meant no disrespect, but I thought: Is that all you want to do with your college degree?

In time, however, I came to appreciate what they were really expressing, which was the spirit of independence, ownership, and the value of family. Inspired as I was, there was no way I was going to give up a six-figure salary for a mere idea.
That couldn’t make sense.

Things began to change in 2019, when my friends invited me to visit Southeast Asia. I couldn’t afford the ticket, but as chance would have it, my grandfather, a Vietnam veteran, decided to buy me my golden ticket as a gift over winter break. My classmates were disgusted that I knew so little about the region, but when we arrived, we had a blast, and seeds were planted that one day I might come back
and follow their footsteps.

Entrepreneurship

Before taking the leap, I decided to build my foundation as a banker at Citi and a private equity investor at Oaktree Capital Management. At Oaktree, I invested over $1 billion dollars and even worked on the same floor as my idol, Howard Marks, friend of Warren Buffett, billionaire, and the world’s most successful credit investor.

A $133 million hospitality investment I worked on at Oaktree Capital Management, before deciding to become an entrepreneur in Vietnam.

In many respects, I was living my wildest dream, but I had an itch for something different. Before making the final decision, I asked to meet Bill Tyree, Chair of the BCNY Board and Managing Partner at Brown Brothers Harriman (“BBH”). For context, BBH serves as custodian for $3.3 trillion US Dollars, and I wanted to ask for his hard-earned advice. Despite his busy schedule, he made time, for which I was very grateful.

I shared that I was considering moving to Southeast Asia without a job. There was a pause. Bill Tyree, an executive who navigates countless boardrooms with grace, looked at me with an expression that can best be described as confusion. He took a breath, nodded slowly, and said something to the effect of: so, like… a yoga instructor in Bali? If that’s what you want to do, then sure. You can do that. Technically, anything is possible.

I couldn’t help but laugh, and I didn’t hear a no, so that was enough for me. From my vantage point, after a few years, I felt ready to follow my boarding school friends and become an entrepreneur in Southeast Asia.

In 2023, I arrived in Vietnam, and the transition gave me a small taste of what it meant to be an immigrant. Thankfully, the Babson and boarding school community helped me navigate the basics: a visa, a bank account, and a sense of belonging in a place I didn’t yet understand.

I quickly learned what it meant to live in a traditional Confucian society where nobody had heard of EBITDA, and all they saw was a young, brown American claiming to be Vietnamese, saying he used to be an investor. My résumé meant nothing. People would look at me and simply say, “I don’t believe you.” I never accounted for a scenario where my résumé was unprovable to a closed mind.

In Vietnam, the only things people responded to were the name Middlesex and the fact that I spoke English. I wanted to cry. Did I really give up my job for this? Is this really what I spent all these years working towards? Still, the distance from home provided an unexpected gift: closeness. I didn’t see my mother once in three years, but we spoke on the phone every single day.

Realizing a Middlesex education and English were my only two assets, I fell into something I had, once again, never heard of: admissions consulting. I started helping Southeast Asian students navigate the same US study abroad journey I had just completed, applying to boarding schools and the Ivy League, and figuring out how to build careers after college. Although I learned the business, I knew the lone wolf starves, and after two years, I was faced with a hard decision: change my approach or accept defeat and go home.

I would rather die than admit defeat to the people who doubted me, so with my last breath, I dug in and studied the education industry. Eventually, I learned that KKR and other private equity firms were investing heavily in Southeast Asian education, and immediately, I knew I could bridge between entrepreneurs and investors. All I needed was one person to believe in a value proposition that, to me, was obvious.

I decided to pitch myself to other entrepreneurs, who I believed were results-driven. For them, my background would help them solve two problems: (1) communicating with investors to fundraise, and (2) better managing their money on the ground.

This realization led me to my next opportunity, where I was introduced to a manufacturing conglomerate built from scratch: thousands of employees, hundreds of millions in revenue, and operations across multiple continents. There, I saw the same problems: how do we fundraise, and how do we better control our costs? What I lacked in manufacturing expertise, I made up for in financial precision.

My flagship green manufacturing project. 

Manufacturing by nature is capital intensive, so when the business became money management, I was in heaven. Construction, equipment, budgets, loans: this was everything I learned at Oaktree Capital Management. Those lessons gave me the opportunity to lead finance for the company’s new expansions in Vietnam and other countries, and our flagship project was worth a few hundred million dollars.

To become a more effective fundraiser, I had to get my hands dirty and learn manufacturing operations… Or else. The company sent me to its factories in the rice paddies of Vietnam, and I became one with my roots in ways I never envisioned. Channeling the energy of Biggie Smalls, this New Yorker brought Bed-Stuy do or die energy to a dire sink-or-swim scenario. Against all odds, I found my place in the rice paddies where I was eventually embraced, and with our unconventional approach, I helped the team secure term sheets from banks for over a hundred million dollars to fund the project. In one year, I found more success than I had at any point in my career. The company even made national headlines, and the country’s leaders attended several of our ceremonies to show their support. In many ways, this project was the exact dream I set out to pursue with my friends from Babson.

As I begin to reflect on the real journey, I can’t help but feel a deep sense of gratitude for that one fateful night in East Harlem. None of this happens without the entire BCNY team, who continue to open doors for kids like me that we never knew existed.

To the Boys Club kid reading this, fighting to make it through yet another difficult day, remind yourself what you’ve already overcome. You already know what it feels like to look and look again, only to come up short, no matter how hard you search for the light at the end of the tunnel. You know that you don’t deserve this, but regardless of how you feel, stand tall and control what you can control, which is where you focus your time and energy. The next window of opportunity will open for you once again, and you’ll only need one.