Why be the princess when you can be the king?

Carmen Li on ambition, power and refusing to discount your own potential

Carmen Li in conversation with host Holly Staff

Why would you want to be the princess when the king is the one with the power?

It is a question Carmen Li remembers asking herself as a child.

While other children were drawn to fairy tales about princesses, Carmen was far more interested in the person making the decisions.

“Why do people want to be princesses?” she recalls. “It doesn’t look like she has real power.”

Even at five years old, Carmen was questioning the roles women were expected to aspire to. Why settle for being adjacent to power when you could hold it yourself?

That instinct has followed her throughout her career.

Today, Carmen is the Founder and CEO of Silicon Data and CEO of Compute Exchange, having previously built a career spanning finance, trading, data and enterprise technology. Her path has taken her from China and Singapore to the US, through organisations including Bloomberg, Citi and DRW Trading, and ultimately into entrepreneurship.

Learning not to see yourself as less

Carmen grew up hearing many of the same stereotypes that have followed generations of women into education and the workplace.

She was particularly strong at maths but remembers adults warning that boys would eventually catch up.

“She’s good in maths now, but just wait,” was the message. By the time she reached 12th grade, they suggested, the boys would overtake her, and she would become mediocre.

Carmen thought the idea was ridiculous. 

Her experience growing up in China also shaped her perspective in a more unexpected way.

Carmen believes one unintended consequence of China's one-child policy was that, for many families of her generation, traditional differences between the opportunities afforded to sons and daughters began to shift. When a daughter was the only child, she received the family's educational resources, financial support and attention.

“We’re as valuable as boys,” Carmen explains.

She saw women inheriting businesses, pursuing education and becoming entrepreneurs because they had grown up expecting to participate rather than believing certain opportunities belonged to men.

For Carmen, it demonstrates something fundamental about confidence.

Treat a girl from childhood as though her potential is every bit as valuable as a boy's, and she is far less likely to grow up believing otherwise.

“I’m the person to do this”

Carmen did not always know that she would become an entrepreneur.

What she did know was that she wanted to work on something that excited her and allowed her to make the greatest use of her abilities.

Over time, seemingly separate parts of her career began to converge.

She had worked with financial indices and data products. She understood trading. She understood the physical GPU infrastructure underpinning the rapidly developing AI compute market.

Suddenly, the opportunity in front of her made sense.

“I’m the person to do this,” she remembers thinking.

So she quit.

There was no prolonged crisis of confidence. One colleague actually commented that Carmen looked far too happy for somebody who had just left her job.

“I wasn't scared at all,” she says. “I was just purely excited.”

That conviction carried into fundraising. Despite being a first-time founder, Carmen says her pre-seed investment came from a five-minute conversation. Her seed round was completed without a deck and became oversubscribed within two weeks.

For Carmen, it was evidence that other people could see the same alignment she could: years of experience had created a combination of knowledge uniquely suited to the opportunity in front of her. 

She had not become an entrepreneur too late.

She had spent years building the experience that made her ready.

Stop being afraid of ambition

Carmen is refreshingly unapologetic about something women are often encouraged to soften.

She wants influence.

“I always know I want power and influence,” she says.

For Carmen, power is not simply about status. It is about agency: having greater control over your own destiny and being in a position to positively influence what happens around you.

Yet she believes women are rarely encouraged to talk openly about wanting it.

Instead, girls can be surrounded by messages encouraging them to focus enormous amounts of attention on appearance, beauty and external approval.

Carmen sees that attention as a distraction from a much bigger question: what are you building that will increase your capabilities over the long term?

Can you learn? Can you understand what is happening in the world? Can you develop skills and knowledge that make you increasingly valuable?

Because while appearance may command attention, Carmen is interested in something much more lasting.

Power, capability and influence. 

Which brings her back to the fairy tale.

Not because everybody should aspire to rule the world, but because women should not be afraid to imagine themselves as the person holding genuine authority rather than simply standing beside them.

Build productive capital

The same long-term thinking influences Carmen's relationship with money, career and time.

She talks about the idea of “productive capital”: putting resources into things capable of creating further value rather than prioritising immediate satisfaction.

That could mean money, but it could equally mean education, experience, relationships or simply how somebody chooses to spend their time.

“If I spend time in this, will this help in the long run versus just immediate satisfaction right away?”

It is a mindset that also shapes her advice to women considering stepping away from their careers.

Carmen has watched highly capable friends calculate that the salary they currently earn is similar to the cost of childcare and conclude that continuing to work therefore makes little financial sense.

She believes that calculation can miss something enormous.

Future growth.

“The problem with that math is you are assuming your future earning potential is not going to grow.”

That ignores promotions, experience, future earnings, networks and opportunities that have not happened yet.

In other words, do not accidentally calculate your future as though your current value is the highest it will ever become.

“If anything, you have faith in yourself, then the method doesn’t work.”

Motherhood without losing yourself

That refusal to discount her own identity continues into Carmen's approach to motherhood.

And Carmen illustrates the point with a characteristically candid example.

Her husband likes taking their children to Disneyland.

Carmen does not enjoy Disneyland.

So she does not go.

Instead, she chooses experiences she genuinely enjoys sharing with her children: longboarding, travelling, exploring culture and visiting places such as Paris and the Louvre.

“Pick the things that actually you enjoy as well, because you’re a human being.”

It is funny, but the principle underneath it is serious.

Motherhood does not have to mean disappearing into somebody else's childhood.

Children can experience a mother as a complete person, with her own interests, ambitions, preferences and identity.

Decide whose opinion deserves weight

Perhaps one of Carmen's most distinctive characteristics is that she does not automatically give somebody's opinion authority simply because they offer it.

She remembers doing this remarkably young.

When a teacher criticised her as a child, Carmen's instinct was not simply to absorb the judgement. She considered the person delivering it and questioned how much value their assessment should carry.

That has developed into a wider principle.

Everybody has an opinion. That does not mean every opinion is equally informed.

Carmen applies the same standard to herself. If somebody asks her opinion about an area in which she does not have sufficient expertise, she is perfectly comfortable admitting that her view should not carry much weight.

Confidence, then, is not believing you are right about everything.

It is understanding what you know, recognising what you do not and refusing to let uninformed judgement determine what you are capable of.

If you want influence, you have to want it

Towards the end of her conversation with Holly, Carmen returns to perhaps the most challenging theme of the episode.

Women need to become comfortable with wanting power.

Not symbolic influence. Not somebody telling them they are “the boss” while somebody else retains the real authority.

Actual influence over decisions, resources and outcomes.

“Anyone needs to desire power to have power,” Carmen says.

And she rejects the idea that it will simply be handed over.

“You have to fight for it.”

That fight will not always be comfortable. There will be disagreement, competition and conflict because meaningful change inevitably challenges an existing distribution of influence.

“The fight itself is not pretty. It’s not going to be calm. It’s not going to be full of roses.”

It is not conventional advice about female empowerment.

But Carmen is not particularly interested in conventional advice.

Why be the princess?

Carmen's career has been shaped by an unusually strong belief in her own agency, but she does not present confidence as a substitute for ability.

Quite the opposite.

She is equally clear that success cannot depend on constant reassurance.

“If you need constant validation, you're not cut out for this world,” she says.

Instead, Carmen believes people need to understand themselves well enough to recognise where they have genuine talent and then be willing to act on it.

Because nobody else can decide how ambitious you are allowed to be. 

Perhaps that is why the five-year-old Carmen was never particularly interested in becoming the princess.

She was already looking at who actually held the power.

And wondering why it shouldn't be her.

Listen to the conversation

In the latest episode of The Women Behind the Network, Carmen Li joins host Holly Staff to discuss entrepreneurship, ambition and the experiences that shaped her determination to build a career on her own terms.

They explore women and power, financial independence, motherhood and identity, investing in long-term potential, navigating gender expectations and why building genuine capability matters more than seeking validation.

And, perhaps most importantly, why women should never be afraid to ask themselves:

Why be the princess when you can be the king?