Agent Of Change

People call her ‘Turnaround Girl’ but this CEO would rather be remembered as ‘The Kickass Entrepreneur Who Doesn’t Quit’.

- Charmian Leong

Anna Gong was hired to save the day in 2014 when Perx’s B2C customer loyalty app was floundering. Within a year, she had doubled the number of registered users from 200,000 to 400,000, racked up five million app impressions, and retained key investors like Eduardo Saverin and Golden Gate Ventures. But it wasn’t enough for her to provide a fix; Gong wanted a long-term strategy. So she pushed for the platform to be available to enterprises and implemented a scalable SaaS (software as a service), subscription model, instead. Perx clients now include Ezlink, Sephora, UOB, Prudential and more.

“I had to present to the board my plan to pivot the business into an entirely different space and redevelop the whole platform. This meant shutting down business with millions already invested in it, letting go of the B2C team and seeing investors cash out, so of course, there was pushback,” she says. “But I told them it was either that or liquidate the entire company.”

The risk paid off, and it’s Gong’s unshakeable belief in herself and refusal to take no for an answer that gets her suggestions taken seriously. She was the youngest female tech leader at CA Technologies where she was promoted to vice-president of solution sales, virtualization, service automation and cloud for the Asia-Pacific, but it was a promotion she was denied twice before.