Initially, his parents could only find menial work. His mother, who had been an associate professor in information systems at Liaoning Normal University, served coffee at a Robert Harris.
His father, who had worked as a senior electrical engineer for a major shipping firm, took a job at a furniture factory.
“It wasn’t a good landing experience,” Pan says. “But they worked their way up.”
His mother went on to enjoy a long career at the University of Auckland while his father worked for Kone and in the superyacht industry (both are now retired).
Pan arrived at Northcote Primary on Auckland’s North Shore without a lick of English.
No matter. It was nearly the end of the school year and his parents bought him a set of textbooks and tapes for learning English.
“I had one job that summer, which was to cram English,” he says.
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He got through several chapters each day, his mum quizzing him every night. He returned to school a fluent speaker. Everyone was like, ‘What happened to this kid?’, he says.
There was one wrinkle. The tapes were from the US.
“That’s why I speak English with an American twang,” Pan says.
The teachers were “very empathetic,” he says, and many of his fellow pupils were welcoming.
Although he couldn’t understand her at the time – his friends would later update him – his first primary school teacher, Mrs Morrison, told his class: “Boys and girls, you must understand how difficult it is for Bowen to join in with you.”
“Mrs Morrison at that moment – although I didn’t know it at the time – gave me an incredible lifelong lesson in empathy: to be able to put yourself in others’ shoes, see what they see, and feel what they feel. It’s something I try to remind myself about every day.”
He was the only Asian immigrant at his primary school.
“My parents were part of the first wave. New Zealand as a society wasn’t quite ready for immigrants from Asia,” he says.
Pan said the idea of race was foreign to him until his family immigrated to New Zealand.
“But from that day, there were many big and small incidents that quickly made me aware of racism.”
They included an incident at a public swimming pool changing room “where a boy several years older than me made fun of my Chinese ethnicity and decided to test his ‘kung fu skills’ by kicking me in the face”.
“I stood there in shock.
“At school, there were almost weekly insults about being Chinese, with one boy harassing me over three years. The bullying eventually ended when that boy tried to punch me, not realising puberty hit me earlier than him and he was swiftly dealt with a swollen face – and stopped bothering me.”
His parents suffered worse.
“As I got older, the overt racism started to disappear and became more unspoken, and I vowed to distance myself as much as possible from the experiences I had by working as hard as I can to create a buffer of achievements and success and so I can choose the kind of people I can surround myself with.”
And achieve he did. Pan was crowned Dux at Westlake Boys High School, then earned first-class degrees in civil engineering and property from Auckland University.
The Kiwi dream
“I was gearing up to be a property developer,” Pan says.
What turned his head?
Pan joined Spark (now Velocity), the university’s entrepreneurial development programme, founded by Geoffrey Whitcher – a formative influence on Pan and the founder of the Knowledge Wave conferences of the early 2000s, which helped spawn Icehouse.
Pan’s circle expanded to include friends like Icehouse intern Robbie Paul (today chief executive of Icehouse Ventures).
Inspired to join the start-up scene, Pan created a social networking site for university called uniFriend in 2005.
“At the time, it was novel. I was able to get quite good penetration,” Pan says. Facebook, or “The Facebook” as it was known, was still confined to Ivy League students and few were glued to their phones (it would be another two years until the first iPhone launched in 2007).
Pan was runner-up in Velocity’s then-$4000 (and now $100,000) start-up competition.
Facebook soon went global, including its launch in New Zealand during Pan’s second year at varsity.
“I like to say, ‘Thanks to Facebook, I graduated’,” Pan says.
He had been setting more and more of his studies aside as he concentrated on uniFriend. Zuckerberg’s juggernaut put paid to it.
After graduating, Pan spent a short stint as a business analyst at Deloitte before joining the strategy and new ventures team at Trade Me in 2012 – where he launched the Treat Me daily deal platform (later sold in a management buyout as the Groupon-frenzy faded).
Around the same time, Pan and his girlfriend (later wife) Maya, co-founded LawSpot, an online legal aid non-profit that drew ex-Attorney General Margaret Wilson as its patron and 80 volunteers (it was later absorbed into the Community Law Centre of New Zealand).
He met Maya while they were both working in Wellington. She was studying law and became a solicitor at Russell McVeagh.
He then got itchy feet.
“Trade Me was kind of it for tech in New Zealand at the time – although it’s very different now. And I felt like my learning had plateaued in New Zealand. I was a nerd growing up. I asked for a programming book for my 13th birthday. It was always a dream to work in Silicon Valley,” Pan says.
The easiest path to a visa was through higher education. Pan gained a spot at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he pursued an MBA, while his wife enrolled at the same university for a Master of Laws.
While at Stanford, in 2013, Pan took a summer internship at Dropbox. At the time, the file-sharing site was one of the hottest tech companies on the planet, with Apple and others offering tens of billions to buy it out.
By extension, that made Pan hot property.
With his studies still in train, he was hired by Facebook. He recalls the social media network had about 7000 staff at the time of his interview. Over the two semesters it took to finish his MBA and start his role, it had hit 13,000 (by the time he left the firm, seven years later, its headcount was close to 60,000).
As a new hire, Pan was placed in “Facebook Bootcamp”. Part of the programme was a project for which he browsed the firm’s huge research portal.
That included a look at Indonesia, a giant market where Facebook page adoption was low. But in an appendix to the research, Bowen saw one in three Indonesians used Facebook as their primary e-commerce site.
“That was super weird. How was that even possible?,” he thought.
He discovered the locals were creating groups, or adding people as friends short-term (there were restrictions on friend-adding to prevent scams) as workarounds.
On a hunch, he ran a database query across Facebook, looking for terms related to “sales”. He used Google Translate to cover multiple languages – the better to uncover the degree of buying and selling between the social network’s members.
“And half a million groups came back in the results. If you aggregated the results, it was bigger than Craigslist,” he says, name-checking the giant American classified ad listings site.
“It was a jaw-dropping moment. Some of the groups were huge. One, in Mauritius, contained a third of the country’s population.”
The received wisdom is algorithms lead users by the nose, but this was a case of users co-opting Facebook features for their own ends. Pan likens it to bulletin boards in the early days of the internet.
He joined 50 of the groups to further his research. He says at the time, Facebook Groups was something of a backwater, with just two engineers. Neither of their jaws dropped when Pan highlighted his results.
Pan tried pushing his research, and his early concept of what would become Marketplace, to others.
“I preached it to anyone who would listen,” he says. He got a positive response from Deborah Liu, who had recently joined Facebook from eBay and who was in charge of a – so far undefined – commerce push.
Liu, in turn, introduced Pan to Vijaye Raji – who, along with Liu, became a Facebook legend as the pair pioneered mobile ads.
Raji was sold.
“Vijaye said, ‘I have to keep doing my day job, but I will help outside of that’,” Pan remembers.
“There is no ‘20% time’ at Facebook. It was all evenings and weekends,” Pan says.
A company hack-a-thon (an event where staff get together for a day, breaking into groups to collaborate on possible new projects) provided the opportunity to pull a basic version of Marketplace together.
Pan and his crew got the opportunity to present it to Facebook’s founder and CEO. It was the first time he had spoken to “Zuck”.
Zuckerberg saw the potential.
His mandate: “I’ll give you whatever you need to make it happen. If you don’t make it happen, I’ll find another team to make it happen.”
The Facebook founder was even willing to give up hallowed on-screen real estate – a Friend Request tab – to accommodate Marketplace once it arrived.
The pressure must have been immense.
How did Pan deal with it?
“One thing that not a lot of people know is that right before Facebook, I went into a really intense meditation course,” he says.
“It’s called Vipassana. It’s really hardcore: 10 days, 11 hours a day, complete sensory deprivation. I finished that course and the next day I started at Facebook. I think it must have helped. Through the entire founding of Marketplace, I did not feel any ego.”
After 18 months of hard work, Marketplace was ready to go live on October 4, 2016.
But there was also an ill omen. He woke up with a sharp pain in his back (that had never occurred before – or since).
“I went through breakfast and a shower and it got worse and worse. I realised I couldn’t even drive,” he remembers.
He called an Uber. The pain got worse.
“I said to the driver, ‘Pull over to a pharmacy. I need one of those muscle relaxant sprays just to get me through the day’.” He bought one, then said, “I’m going to pay you a really great tip, but I’m going to pull off my shirt and I want you to spray the entire can on my back.”
At the office, Pan asked for a tennis ball and then rolled it on his back on the floor. It helped him get through series of phone calls with media.
Traffic spikes … and hedgehog spikes
The next day, Marketplace launched at 3am Pacific time. The social network staged a big party. A number of positive articles were published, based on Pan’s pre-launch interviews.
Then there was a phone call from the New York Times.
“You know this Marketplace thing you just launched. We’re finding guns and animals and what looks like people soliciting. Do you have any comments?,” a reporter asked.
“We built a very smart and very robust integrity system,” Pan says.
“But when we launched it, there was a huge spike in traffic and Marketplace was using the same pipeline as ads.”
An on-call engineer had dealt with the spike by turning off the filters.
Today, Facebook Marketplace is used by around one billion people.
Pan left Facebook in 2020 – but not before also building Facebook Gaming and Meta’s first response to TikTok: a standalone app called Lasso that became the basis for Reels.
He left to become head of product at online payment giant Stripe – one of the world’s fastest-growing companies during the pandemic, responsible initiatives including its growing app market place.
He then became vice-president of product for artificial intelligence (AI) sales and marketing start-up Common Room – which helps some of the tech world’s trendiest firms, including Atlassian, Figma and Databricks, spot buying signals and develop sales.
The return home
Family was a big reason for the Pans’ return home. The couple wanted to raise their daughter (5) and son (3) in New Zealand and be closer to their parents (his in Auckland, hers in Palmerston North).
“But I’m also excited to spend a lot more time supporting start-ups and tech companies,” he says.
He says he left New Zealand in 2012 after wrapping up at Trade Me partly because there were few other options on the local tech scene.
But the start-up landscape is “unrecognisable, for the better,” since he headed offshore 13 years ago.
“Not only can we build world-class companies here but world-leading companies like Crimson Education, Halter, Auror, Tracksuit and Partly.
“You can now go big and go home,” he says.
Last week, he was named to the board of advisers for Auckland University’s Business School.
And he and his wife Maya (who until recently worked in a GenAI role for Meta) have founded advisory and investment firm Redwood Pan Group, which “brings deep experience from Silicon Valley to the Pacific” which is partnering with early-stage start-ups with their product and go-to-market strategies.
In June, Pan was named an independent director of NZME, whose stable includes the Herald, OneRoof and Newstalk ZB.
What’s his take on media in 2025?
“There will always be a need for media and news that is more catered to local tastes. And I think that’s especially true for a country like New Zealand, where we have our own very specific culture. And not just local news but regional news,” Pan says.
“And my second point is that I think that media companies of this era really are all in different stages of evolving from being just media companies to being digital audience companies – you have all these different audiences, and then you have the ability to think about how you build the right services and channels for those audiences.
“In the old days, these took the form of different publications. But in the digital era, things are far more fluid – and that’s where I think there’s some really exciting opportunities in the marketplace and classified spaces.”
He sees a degree of parallel to 2012, when Zuckerberg saw an “intentionality” problem with Facebook.
“People came on to Facebook and didn’t even know why. They just wanted to kill time,” he says.
Pan helped solve that with Marketplace and later Lasso as it set the foundation for Reels that would transform the social network’s content.
He says he’s “very bullish”.
“The good news is that media companies that have successfully evolved into digital audience companies are thriving.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
