#403 Lora Chow: Trading Wall Street for a Steinway — Part One

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Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer.

I'm Vince Chen,

your ambitious human host.

Our show

is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world.

Today's guest is Nora Chow,

fellow Yale alum, former fund manager, and someone whose journey mirrors mine in more ways than one.

We are both from Hong Kong, shaped by the same family and societal societal expectations to chase money, business, and brand names.

We followed the expected path, elite schools, big careers, but eventually stepped away from the weight of titles, status, and what we were supposed to want.

In this two-part series, Nora shares how she returned to music, launched her new album, Referees on Ivories,

and built a life that sounds like her, not someone else's script.

From hedgephones to harmonies, this is a story about dropping the labels and choosing the notes that matter.

Let's get into it.

Nora, welcome to Chief Change Officer.

Welcome to my show.

Hi, Vince.

Thank you for having me.

I'm very excited to be on your podcast.

Nora and I have known each other for quite some time now through the Yale Club of Hong Kong.

Over the years, I've watched your growth and transformation, and I have to admit, I always assumed you've been a musician your entire career, but later you told me yes and no.

You are definitely a musician by training, but part of your career actually took quite a different turn into finance,

which happens to be the area I used to work in as well.

So I say there's a lot of interesting layers in your journey.

Let's start with a big question.

Who are you?

Tell us a little about yourself.

Where you're from, what you've done, and what you're doing now.

And then we'll dive into different parts of your story and your transformation.

Sure, I am Laura Chow.

I'm from Hong Kong.

I'm a composer, a singer, and a multi-instrumentalist.

I'm also the co-founder of two music organizations, the Yale Alumni Chamber Music Society of Hong Kong and Virtuoso Fiesta, which I founded with a friend also from Yale, a violinist named Ruda Li last year in Hong Kong.

Actually in 2023 in Hong Kong we co-founded Virtuoso Fiesta.

So I'm very passionate about creating music that inspire positive changes in the world.

And my background is that I studied music and economics at Yale College.

And after graduation, I pursued a career in finance from being a prop trader in investment bank to a portfolio manager in a hedge fund.

And I spent over 10 years analyzing stocks, learning about the financial markets, making returns.

But always on the side, I've been doing music as a performer, as a composer, and as an administrator, and trying to make changes in the music scene in Hong Kong to hopefully allocate more resources in the music scene and to promote the transformative power of music.

When you first shared your story with me, there were a lot of things I could relate to.

Not the singing or composing part.

I'm definitely not a trained musician.

I did learn piano as a pid, and I enjoy singing.

I even did some vocal training later on, but that was more for public speaking.

But like you, I was born and raised in Hong Kong.

I took part in all those extracurricular activities growing up, including music.

Then, like many of us, you went on to a great school.

And at Yale, you chose to major in both music and economics.

Can you take us back to that moment?

You were around 18, starting college.

What were you thinking back then when you chose those two majors?

Why not just music or just economics?

What made you want to combine the two?

Sure, I was always very passionate about music.

I started the piano at four and learned different instruments, played in orchestra, sang in choirs.

And I always wanted to be a musician, but I always also got the impression that it's impossible to be a musician in Hong Kong, where I was born and where it's a financial hub.

It's very unrealistic and it's very difficult to make a living.

And I'm not from a wealthy family, so I do have to be practical.

And of course, there are also pressure from my traditional parents, just giving me the idea that it's very important to have a stable income.

And it's much easier to be a professional and to have a high standard of living.

And being a musician is very challenging and competitive.

tough life.

With all these impressions in my mind, and I was doing quite well in my academic study.

I was pretty good at math.

My mom majored in math and she actually influenced me a lot.

So at first when I was around 17 thinking about college, I thought about majoring in math and I even applied to the University of Cambridge to major in math and got an offer from them.

Almost went there, but at the same time I applied to the US colleges because I know about the liberal arts education and the possibility to do a double major.

My goal is to do music with something practical.

At first I was thinking music and math because I was just pretty good at math and did the math Olympiad and all those in high school.

And then I regretted for applying to math major in the UK because my heart still really leans towards music.

But I'm very grateful that Yale offered this great liberal arts program and I could decide on my major after I got in, which is awesome.

I think it's very important to try different things and find out what we really love.

And

because Yale offers this opportunity in freshman year, I took some math courses and I discovered that I'm not really that into

math.

And I prefer economics, which is way more applicable to the real world.

And that's why I chose economics as one of my majors.

And then for music, it's always my love and passion.

So I always wanted to study music.

And of course, Yale is the best Ivy League school with professional music school.

So that's why I applied early action to Yale.

And I'm very grateful I got in and could do both economics and music.

I feel like I have a safety net in case music does not work out.

And at the same time, I can explore different interests.

I was actually pretty interested in economics as well because it gives me a great perspective about the real life experience, about how different companies run, how a lot of industries work in the world.

So I'm very glad I did both.

Yeah,

Yale.

This episode might feel a little Yale biased since we're both alongs.

But it is really known for its liberal arts education.

It gives us that freedom to explore, to try different things, and figure out what turned us on.

No one at Yale ever said,

you have to choose either the arts or the sciences.

You are someone who's strong in both, music and economics.

That's rare.

So truly, I applaud you for that.

Now,

I know you started started learning music at a young age,

and that love for music stayed with you.

But I also see how studying economics gave you an other toolkit,

especially helpful when thinking about career planning, job options, and maybe even the practical side of life.

That's probably why you ended up in banking and hedge funds.

You knew how to hedge your risk.

But your heart, it kept pointing you back to music.

Still, four years later, as a graduating student, you had to make a decision.

Stay in the US, go back to Hong Kong, maybe take part in campus recruiting.

So What was your thinking back then?

You chose to go into finance.

And what led you to pick the more realistic path at that moment instead of diving straight into your passion?

Yeah, yeah, it was a tough choice.

I had really great experience with music at Yale.

I sang in the professional chamber choir, Yale Scholar Cancorum, and I sang in a lot of the opera there.

I was cast as one of the leading role in an Italian opera.

And these experiences are really wonderful and my dreams came true.

But when I was in my junior year, I got a lot of pressure from my peers.

Everyone who majored in economics were applying for internships at investment banks.

And of course, my parents were also encouraging that, like many other Ivy League.

parents,

especially from Asia, also encouraged that.

And And there was a good reputation from investment banks about how they took in the smart kids and gave amazing training to them and have a wonderful future ahead.

So I was

part of that group.

I just followed the crowd to apply online all these internships with different banks.

I did the interviews.

I remember like Morgan Stanley even flew me to Hong Kong for just one day to do the the interview and then back to the US the next day and it really impressed me how much they invested in college students and also it widened my horizon during the interviews about how trading floor works how financial markets are so exciting so I thought to myself let's try the internship doesn't hurt.

I spent my sophomore summer in Italy singing opera.

So junior year I decided that I would come back to Hong Kong to do an internship with Morgan Stanley and it went really well.

I won the trading game during the internship and I got a full-time offer at the bank which was pretty lucrative

and I missed Hong Kong too.

It's my hometown.

My family is here and they wanted me to come back as well.

And Hong Kong is a financial hub.

There's no full-time job for opera singer.

At that point, I think my options were pretty much like applying for a master's degree in singing in the U.S.

or come back to Hong Kong to work in this investment bank.

And I chose the later because of my curiosity about how the financial markets work.

And I guess there were also a lot of influences as I grew up in this financial hub.

I hear from my family discussing stocks in family gatherings and the financial news always talk about stocks on the TV.

So I was curious about how all these things work.

And I wanted to make money too, just to be realistic.

I aspire to have a home with a grand piano where I can host concerts.

So it seems like this is the path where I can achieve this dream.

And of course, even when I was working on the side, I continued to take singing lessons, I continued to perform in concerts, and I was pretty ambitious that I wanted to do both, having a great job while still doing things in music.

So that's how I decided to come back to Hong Kong for the job.

The side on boom, the whole package,

it was all very attractive.

And back then, investment banks really knew how to treat young talent.

Whether you were fresh out of undergrad or coming from an MBA, they invested seriously and expensively in people,

including time, training, and yes, money.

And let's be real, money matters.

It pays the bills, pays off your student loans, gives you security, and lets you dream a little.

Maybe even a house with a grand piano, like you said.

So of course, when a place like Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs makes you an offer, who would say no?

I also call this the Hong Kong factor.

I grew up in Hong Kong too

and everyone here,

literally everyone,

is talking about the financial markets.

Stocks, real estate, investment, and even housewives, are they trading?

That's just the environment we were raised in.

So naturally, there's also this peer pressure.

You see your classmate joining top banks, getting promoted,

earning six, seven, or eight figures.

That stuff gets into your head.

So it makes total sense that you followed the practical path and you did well.

You built a successful finance career over 10 years.

But then what changed?

What happened around 2020, 2021

that made you stop and finally listen to your heart

for the last 10, 20, even 30 years.

It sounds like your head was in charge.

What triggered you to finally make that ambitious change?

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Yeah, I think there were a series of events that built up to this transformation and big change in my career.

And

I wouldn't say there's one specific trigger it's more like things just gradually build up and until a point that I think

everything

works in my favor to switch out from finance into music.

Also during my career in finance there were times when I thought about maybe I should pursue a master of music maybe I should just devote all my time in music but then there were things that held me back so it was like a struggle.

I remember even just a couple years after graduation, I thought about joining an international singing competition, but I had a traumatic experience at that time that

my vocal cord had a polyp and I couldn't sing.

I couldn't even talk for an entire month and I couldn't sing for an entire year and I had to rest my voice to try different therapies and alternative medicine to recover my voice.

And the vocal cord is very fragile.

So

even after a year when I started singing again,

it's different from what I had from before.

It takes time to build up the muscle again and also to fully recover from that.

It actually took many years.

So it held me back, but at the same time,

because of this injury, I had an urge to compose.

It was at that time that I started composing more.

Before that I actually never had any formal training in composition but I had good intuition to improvise and to write music.

But at that time I was seriously looking for opportunities to learn composing formally and I signed up for this summer program in film scoring to learn from a Hollywood composer, Christopher Young, who scored Spider-Man and many other Hollywood movies.

It's a three-week program in Bulgaria.

And I learned so much and I was so fulfilled during that time.

I wrote pieces for orchestra, we recorded there.

I

found my real love, a real passion in music for composing.

Although since then, I came back to Hong Kong, of course, as a composer who is still very young and inexperienced, it's hard to find opportunities.

But I tried my best to write music for friends and I started the Yale Alumni Chamber Music Society of Hong Kong.

I wrote music for them for the inaugural concert, which was very well received.

And because of that, I got an opportunity to write for the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

But even with this kind of success, it's still like once a year I get to premiere a work and it's not sustainable.

So I was still working in finance on the side.

And it was during COVID when I had more time to write music.

I was working remotely.

All the concerts venues were shut and I had more time to think about my life and COVID kind of inspired me to think that life is short, time is very valuable.

And there are so much I want to do that I couldn't at that time because concert venues were shut according to the government rules.

But I had this strong desire to compose more music and I wrote a lot of homeline.

I started to just upload it to my Instagram and even to YouTube.

And then I get feedback sometimes from strangers, sometimes from friends who are very supportive and motivated me to write more music.

So after the pandemic, I got more opportunities to perform my music and to compose for different people.

And even the chairman of my company really appreciated my music and sponsored a new work that I wrote for Hong Kong Phil.

And I felt really honored.

And all these supportive voices from high profile people, from people I really respect,

drove me to make this decision to devote more time in music.

And at that time, there were a few projects that was looming on the side I have been discussing with like Mr.

Eddie Tam about writing this fusion opera, combining Cantonese opera with Italian opera.

That's a really exciting idea to me and I know I have to spend time to work on that.

And also I just co-founded Virtual So Fiesta with my violinist friend Ruda and it started off pretty well.

Actually, to my surprise, a lot of people were quite generous in sponsoring this new music organization.

And they connected us with people relevant to the field and to people who could support us in different aspects from helping us to make a website to taking professional photography for our events.

And all these

came together to drive me to really focus more on my passion.

And of course, on the side, also, the market has been pretty weak.

And it was a little bit upsetting to see that the markets are driven a lot by political decisions, just headlines.

For example, whether the government is positive about reopening or zero COVID policy.

Like one policy changes so much in the market.

And it became

actually quite difficult to invest in stocks.

It became more irrational, I would say.

The stock price movements are less rational than before.

And this is a bit discouraging to me to continue my analytical work in the financial markets.

So balancing all these factors, it drove me to transform into a full-time musician from hedge manager.

The way I see it,

for a period of time, your head led the way.

You let your heart stay in the background, not ignored, but quieter,

still

beating, still alive.

You didn't silence it, but you asked it to wait while you focused on logic, on what made sense at the time.

And then, as life changed, maybe your heart changed too,

and you decided it was the time to let it lead a little more,

to let it take center stage.

You are still the same Nora with sharp analytical skills.

Skills you developed in finance.

Skills you will still need as you undertake new endeavors.

You are just choosing to use those skills differently now to support something more personal, more meaningful.

So while

you've shifted into using your artistic side to help transform lives.

I see it as you finally giving your heart the spotlight, but your head is still right there, backing it up.

Yeah, yeah, that's very true.

And I feel that I focus more on my heart because my mindset has changed.

I focus more on like the spiritual growth actually over the last couple years.

And I realized that a lot of things, if we believe that it will happen, it will

actually happen.

And I guess starting virtual so Fiesta in 2023

was like a dream came true for me and Ruda.

And we realized that dreams can come true and

there are a lot of supporting community that can help us realize our dreams.

And that's why I think I should follow my heart.

That's it for part one.

We followed Nora's journey from mathematics and music to Morgan Stanley and back again.

But the story's just getting good.

In part two,

we dig into how she's using music to challenge the status quo,

why classical doesn't mean stiff,

and how her new album is both a personal statement and a public invitation.

See you there.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media.

I'm Vince Shen, your ambitious human host.

Until next time, take care.