Gene Yu’s military education included a lesson in the evidentiary power of a pizza receipt. During a survival exercise, he left the training area, acquired food and returned. The receipt stayed with him. So did the consequences. He was thrown out of the course, then eventually allowed to try again. It is a peculiarly domestic object to find at a turning point in a soldier’s career. Very few leadership diagrams make room for takeaway.
There is plenty in Yu’s life that would fit comfortably on a recruitment poster: West Point, the Green Berets, overseas deployments, a role in bringing a kidnapped family friend home. He has also written about the awkwardness and mistakes around those achievements. His first military books were called Yellow Green Beret: Stories of an Asian-American Stumbling Around U.S. Army Special Forces. “Stumbling” was doing some useful work in that title.
Today, he is the Singapore-based co-founder and CEO of Blackpanda, a company that provides cyber incident response and digital forensics. The problem he talks about is wonderfully plain. When somebody’s business is under attack, whom can they call? His career offers several versions of that question, and several imperfect attempts to answer it.
A school that sounded invented
Yu was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1979 and grew up in Northern California after his family moved there. His parents were Taiwanese immigrants. His later descriptions of his childhood return to the difficulty of fitting into the identities other people offered him. Being American did not prevent him from being treated as foreign. Being of Taiwanese heritage did not make every expectation at home easy to meet.
A novel provided an unexpected direction. As a teenager, he read Gus Lee’s Honor and Duty, about a Chinese American at West Point. Yu initially thought the military academy belonged to the novelist’s imagination. The place sounded like an institution somebody might invent to produce leaders. Then tennis recruitment made it quite real: West Point was interested in a player who had already become interested in West Point.
He entered in 1997, studied computer science and graduated in 2001. He also played Division I tennis during his first year. In his recollection, he had wanted the academy before he properly understood the Army. That order matters. The attraction began with a story and a place; the obligations became clearer after he arrived.
September 11 followed his graduation. The world into which his class had been commissioned changed abruptly. An education that could once be imagined in terms of personal accomplishment now came with a much more immediate prospect of war. Yu began as an armor officer, and later moved toward Special Forces.
The receipt that survived the exercise
The pizza episode occurred during Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training. Yu and other trainees were supposed to operate inside the exercise’s boundaries and live off the land. While out with members of his group, he encountered people playing football beyond the training area. A conversation led to a ride and a chance to obtain food.
In his telling, this was no innocent misunderstanding about where the boundary lay. He remembered the prohibition on crossing the railway tracks. He crossed anyway. The excursion became a story about initiative, judgment and the inconvenient distance between them. Having found a solution to one problem, he had created another.
He eventually returned to training and earned his Green Beret. His joke is that repeating the course gave him twice the survival training. The joke works because it leaves the failure visible. A polished biography might remove the receipt. Yu has made it one of the objects people remember.
A call from the family
In late 2013, Evelyn Chang, a Taiwanese family friend, was kidnapped from a resort on Pom Pom Island off Malaysian Borneo and taken to the southern Philippines. Abu Sayyaf held her captive. Yu had already left the Army. The request for help reached someone whose military experience included the region and the group involved.
Her recovery required more than a familiar name or an impressive résumé. Yu drew on contacts and helped coordinate the effort. Philippine personnel, police authorities, members of the family and others were involved. When Chang returned to Taiwan in December, her brother publicly acknowledged Yu’s assistance. Yu stood beside him at the airport press conference.
The political connection made the scene more conspicuous. Yu was the nephew of Ma Ying-jeou, then Taiwan’s president. It was the sort of detail that could swallow an entire story. Yet the important fact was that Chang had come home. The family thanked multiple agencies and people; operational details were withheld to protect those involved.
Yu later wrote The Second Shot: A Green Beret’s Last Mission, published by Little A in October 2024. The book places the rescue inside a longer account of belonging, ambition, reversals and returning to useful work. It allows the civilian years and the younger person to occupy space beside the former soldier.
That choice gives the title more than one meaning. A second attempt can follow a failed course. It can follow a career that no longer supplies the next instruction. It can also be an opportunity to tell a public episode with the complications put back in. The rescue is an event; the memoir asks how the person arriving at it was formed.
The civilian years had more than one job title
Leaving the military did not deliver Yu directly to Blackpanda. He worked in equity swaps at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong and in business development for Palantir in Singapore. Those jobs placed him in very different organizations, each with its own language for risk, customers and decisions.
A 2014 appointment took him to migme as vice president of corporate development, based in Taiwan. Before that, he had been director of business development at Perx Technologies. The career underneath the familiar Green Beret introduction had acquired a substantial civilian middle. There were products to sell and businesses to understand, as well as stories to tell.
There was mixed martial arts, too. Yu founded the FLOW MMA apparel line and handled Chinese-language commentary for ONE FC. He was interested in how the sport might develop in China and elsewhere in Asia. An apparel business allowed him to support different promotions and gyms rather than depend on one event’s fortunes.
That chapter is easy to miss if every subsequent job is treated as a preparation for cybersecurity. It deserves its own place. Yu was working in a developing sports market, thinking about audiences, cultural familiarity and how to introduce something people might enjoy. Combat experience does not explain clothing distribution. He had other things to learn.
Who pays for the people on standby?
Blackpanda began in Hong Kong in 2015 with physical security work. Matt Pecot, Yu’s friend and mentor, helped launch it. Its early assignments included security consulting around infrastructure projects in the Philippines. The company later moved into cybersecurity and relocated its base to Singapore in 2020.
Yu’s explanation for the move toward digital work is rooted in demand for help. Companies faced attacks, and the response services they needed could be costly and difficult to arrange. Blackpanda’s founders brought experience of physical crises to a field with technical specialists and a growing need for coordinated action.
The economics became part of the mission. A responder available around the clock has to be paid before the emergency happens. A smaller company may struggle with a large, unpredictable consulting bill after a breach. A subscription changes when the money arrives and makes the service easier to budget for.
Yu has used emergency services as his analogy: many people contribute toward a system that serves the few who need it at a particular moment. Blackpanda applies that reasoning through response subscriptions and related insurance offerings. The technical investigation still needs experts. The financing determines how many customers can reach them.
Plan the response.
Investigate the breach.
Address financial loss.
In 2023, Blackpanda announced a US$15 million Series A round. Yu described a fundraising environment in which conversations had slowed and investors’ interest had cooled during 2022. Having a story to tell did not spare the company the ordinary difficulties of raising capital.
An additional US$6.7 million strategic investment announced in September 2024 brought the aggregate Series A round to US$21.7 million. Singtel Innov8, Gaw Capital Partners and WI Harper Group participated. The announcement tied the financing to expansion in Asia and to the company’s combined approach to readiness, response and insurance. The figure describes company financing, rather than a personal fortune.
Learning to lead without the uniform
Yu has described the adjustments required when military leadership becomes business leadership. A company needs structures that its founders must create. Directness also lands differently across workplaces and cultures. The habits that make a command clear do not automatically make a conversation productive.
His interests have shifted toward the relationships inside the company. He has talked about wanting to spend more time in sales and marketing and about valuing trust with employees. These are specific ambitions for the working day, alongside the larger aim of making cyber emergency help accessible.
“We get put on a pedestal a little bit too much.”Gene Yu, on perceptions of the Green Berets
By August 2026, Blackpanda was announcing its third consecutive Frost & Sullivan Asia-Pacific Company of the Year recognition for incident response. Its account emphasized local-language teams, round-the-clock access and a portal through which customers could initiate response. These are the operational details behind the reassuring idea of somebody answering a call.
Yu’s work now depends on specialists across countries, on distribution partners and on arrangements made before anything has gone wrong. The former officer remains visible, but the service must function beyond its founder’s personal availability. That is a different assignment from helping one family through one emergency.
The thread through his career is a willingness to return to the question of where his experience can help. A novel opened a door. Training exposed mistakes. A family’s request gave old contacts a new purpose. Running Blackpanda requires him to turn that purpose into a repeatable service, staffed and paid for, ready when the next customer reaches for the phone.