In 2010, Bing Chen, an impact founder and investor, founded the Gold House non-profit to bring together Asian and Pacific Islanders in the US to promote multi-cultural representation in different walks of life. Chen, who has also founded and currently chairs AU Holdings, which in turn also invests in multicultural creators and communities to rebalance socioeconomic inequities, has previously been named in Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2014.
Having attended University of Pennsylvania, Chen commenced his career in Google’s product marketing and went on to take prominent roles in YouTube’s creator development. He spearheaded the platform’s global creator ecosystem as Global Head of Creators. Bidding farewell to his immensely successful stint in 2014, Chen went on to establish AU holdings and later, in 2017, Gold House.
Gold House aims to bring API voices together to amplify their impact, a demographic that is woefully underrepresented in many industries across the country. The company’s website, which also includes fifty ethnicities and hundreds of dialects in the broader API umbrella, highlights the internal fractures and lack of cohesion as prominent reasons for the lack of support that so many Asian Americans face at multiple junctures of their lives.
Bing Chen, President and Co-founder of Gold House
The non-profit organization endeavors to both bridge these fissures to bring together APIs from different walks of life and enable meaningful relationships and leverage those relationships to improve socioeconomic representation and success. Interestingly, the group aims to achieve these objectives not at the cost of other socioeconomic demographics but rather by adding value for the entire society and consequently, benefiting all communities.
The group’s strategy is founded upon three-pronged framework: unity, representation, and success. The first buttresses the need to build internal strengths through a lifetime membership program, high-value networking, and most interestingly, intimate salons. Moreover, the Gold House collective recognizes the significance of building purposeful synergies and collaborations which is why it regularly takes initiatives that involve other communities and social equity projects.
The company also focuses on elevating the popular cultural relevance of the API community through diverse creative projects and events that emphasize Asian identity through prominent roles on media shows and reporting of achievement recognition events. The Gold House initiative’s objective is to create relevant influence to which the wider Asian American community can relate to.
The third and, perhaps, the most critical of all is acquiring economic support for API creators and founders, both internally and through capital injections. With access to the largest Asian angel investor syndicate, the group has enabled dozens of projects and businesses founded by Asian Americans to obtain the financial resources required to fund their ventures. Moreover, with an emphasis on internal professional networking within the community, founders can also access counsel and guidance from the successful APIs in their field of interest.
Photo Credit: Daniel Seung Lee
With a clear-cut objective to create authentic representation for APIs on and off screen, the group has partnered with dozens of API-led creative projects. Most of these like Crazy Rich Asians, The White Tiger, and Parasite have not only been a source of inspiration and relatability for Asian Americans but have also been commercially successful and have captivated wide audiences all over the globe.
The largest API collective, Gold House, makes a compelling argument for their role in creative projects. The group’s website notes that while the APIs are the fastest growing racial group in United States, the underrepresentation is overwhelming. In fact, only 5.6% of lead roles are played by actors of API descent. Moreover, just 4% of movies had APIs as their writers and only 6.7% of movies in 2021 were directed by APIs.
Gold House has partnered with media mammoths such as Marvel, Disney, Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, and Warner Bros. The group is involved with the entire duration of the project, playing an active role in development, production, and distribution. With cultural research, script, and design reviews, and cast recommendations, Gold House’s priority is to ensure that the representation on these creative projects is rooted in reality and retains its relatability to Asian audiences.
Gold House is also involved in with editing and reviews, marketing activations, influencer engagement, and press amplification. The agency is committed to playing the best possible role it can to augment the impact of these projects on improving the representation of API demographics.
The largest API community of creatives and founders also provides this platform for its members to accelerate their careers, build requisite skills, and access structured networking with peers. Career acceleration involves a range of tools that these futures can utilize in terms of business development and company-building opportunities from leading corporations in their respective industries.
Skill-building can be one of the most important aspects of the entire program as it really helps creatives and entrepreneurs in accessing knowledge and skills that are essential to effectively build their brands, improve their delivery and creation, and market their products or artistic pursuits to wide audiences. This tenet of Gold House Futures platform substantially improves the odds of commercial success for API creators and founders alike.
Mentoring also plays a significant role in supporting these creatives and founders in their pursuits of success as they have access to industry leaders who have experienced similar struggles and obstacles as these futures have to face. Moreover, these interactions also offer an additional networking opportunity for these budding creatives and entrepreneurs to capitalize upon.
As one of the most prolific API led and focused venture fund, Gold House Ventures offers a broad range of access to funding ecosystem to Asian Americans. The venture focuses on maintaining an effective internal structure that can leverage relationships with influencers as well as major external platforms to accelerate commercial growth of products and build brand equity.
The profits that Gold House Ventures makes are dedicated entirely towards Gold House community upliftment initiatives and therefore, efficient performance is incentivized through an augmentation of capital that becomes available for the overall Gold House organization.