Day: September 25, 2025

• Young Chang had a comfortable career as a tech consultant at Disney and Warner Bros.
• He decided to leave the corporate world to bring A-Sha Foods, a Taiwanese noodle brand, to the US.
• Chang said lessons from his first job as a line cook to his consulting career prepared him to scale A-Sha.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Young Chang, the CEO of A-Sha Foods. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

On paper, it made no sense to leave my well-paid corporate career — which spanned from Disney to Warner Bros. — to run a noodle brand. But trading studio lots for soy sauce has been the best move I’ve ever made.

By 34, I was a senior director at Warner Bros. Life was easy: great pay, a 401(k), total control of my schedule.

I’d already done stints across the Southern California media world — Disney, Sony, Warner Music — translating tech jargon for business teams and even setting up webcams for C-suites. Then, my former brother-in-law in Taiwan kept asking me to help bring A-Sha, a noodle company he’d invested in, to the US.

He’s the reason I jumped. One day, he asked me, “What is the chance that you will ever become CEO of Warner Bros.? Here, you’d become CEO from day one.” My corporate mentor told me the same thing: “You’ve got to go.”

My parents — 30-year IBM vets — said, “Don’t do it.”

I did it anyway.

Running your own business quickly takes over your life. I jokingly call myself the noodle king, and my staff makes fun of me for it, but it’s true — there’s rarely a moment I’m not thinking about the business. If you can’t live with that level of commitment, then don’t do it, but for me, it feels like the chances as a founder are endless if you’re prepared to take them.

I’ve always felt lucky, and now looking back, I can see how earlier experiences prepared me for where I am now.

From line cook to Big Four consultant

My first job was as a line cook at Swensen’s ice cream parlor when I was a teenager. Friday night rushes were chaos; I’d go home and tell my mom I didn’t want to go back. After a month or two, I learned to line up my tickets, start the fries, and block out the noise. That taught me how to stay calm under pressure — something I still use every day.

At 18, my parents helped me get an internship at IBM reviewing programs that validate software functionality, called test scripts. When broadband hit the dorms at UC Irvine, I became obsessed with Cisco, emailed them constantly, and landed a summer internship. That same persistence has become key to my success at every level since.

Then, the 2001 bubble burst. Cisco froze hiring, and I realized I wasn’t great at coding — I literally walked out of a Microsoft interview when they said, “Write the code.” I joined PwC as a consultant that year.

As a tech consultant, you get very close to your clients. I kept getting poached from my consulting roles since my clients wanted me in-house, so I bounced around a bunch of huge companies and spent the next dozen years working at the Burbank entertainment studios.

I had enough technical knowledge to talk to engineers, but my real value was translating it to business needs — movie legal clearances, production timelines, governance, negotiations. I wore a suit and tie when no one else did because that’s what the clients did. A Warner Bros. SVP kept asking for me, I think because I looked the part.

That’s when I first realized that opportunities are always there if you know how to grab them.

While still at Warner Bros., I helped A-Sha on the side for six months. The product, chewy ramen noodles, was really good and unique. Even my mentor, the SVP who’d liked my suit, said, “Go.” My brother-in-law kept pushing, and I finally took the leap — even though my parents weren’t thrilled.

We’re not from “entrepreneurial blood,” but I felt young enough that if it didn’t work, I could go back.

My leap of faith paid off

Our approach to scaling in the US has been like an immigrant story: You keep your identity but meet the market halfway.

People in the States may not know A-Sha noodles as a household name, but they know Hello Kitty. So, when a licensing opportunity tied to the Tokyo Olympics landed in our laps in 2020, I said yes even though I knew nothing about royalties or minimum guarantees. COVID extended the one-year deal into two, and by the end of our first contract, we were one of their top food licensees.

That was another lesson: The opportunities will show up, but you still have to be ready.

COVID is also when our business took off. We had tried for years to get into Costco, but in the early days of the pandemic, everyone was stockpiling ramen packets. That was our in.

Once we got approved, Costco said they’d need 20 containers of product by the next month. At that point, we were still a three-containers-a-year company, but my business partner had always told me to find a way into the deal, and he’d be ready on the product side to fulfill orders.

We ramped to 20 containers a month, then 40, and peaked at 60 a month for about 18 months. We never shut down a day.

That preparation changed everything. I don’t think we’re smarter than anyone else. We’re just prepared. We want to know the answer before the question is asked.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the hardest part isn’t the endless hours; it’s the responsibility. We have more than 30 staff in the US and 100 in Taiwan. People rely on me to make the right move.

Thankfully, that pressure doesn’t bother me — Swensen’s trained me to handle it.

On Tuesday in New York City, various leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries sat down with President Donald Trump in an atmosphere of deep unease. The summit, which included other Arab and Muslim leaders, came days after the first-ever Israeli airstrike on a Gulf country—a stunning escalation that shook their faith in U.S. security guarantees that underpin stability in their region.

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Following the attack, Saudi Arabia, the dominant GCC country, concluded a mutual defense treaty with Pakistan, a military powerhouse with nuclear weapons. The Saudis are believed to have not informed their American partners until the deal was inked.

Some in Washington are interpreting this major development as a Saudi step away from the U.S., a subtle rebuke to the American security umbrella. That is a misreading. The pact is not aimed at Washington but at complementing U.S. security guarantees that have repeatedly proven inadequate—historically against Iran, and most recently in deterring and defending against the Israeli airstrike targeting Hamas negotiators in Qatar.

These concerns and frustrations among America’s Gulf Arab partners are not new. They stretch back over a decade and across Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The Obama Administration secretly negotiated the Iran nuclear deal without consulting GCC capitals. Trump, for all his early outreach, failed to respond during his first term when Houthi drones and missiles linked to Iran came crashing down on Saudi oil facilities in 2019. President Biden, too, looked the other way when the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen attacked the United Arab Emirates with drones in 2022. Each of these episodes reinforced a perception in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and beyond: that the U.S. cannot be relied upon exclusively.

Last week’s brazen Israeli airstrikes against Hamas negotiators in Doha turbocharged those anxieties. For years, Gulf rulers worried about Iran. But now, Israel—Washington’s closest regional ally—crossing such a red line has shaken confidence in America’s willingness to keep the regional balance from tipping dangerously out of control.

The Trump Administration claims it was unable to thwart the attack, notified by Israel just as its jets were in the air and about to fire their missiles. Few Arab leaders believe this narrative, and reporting from Israel suggests Trump was given ample notice.

Arab concerns are amplified by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own words and actions. Having destroyed much of the Iran-backed axis across the Levant, Netanyahu now boasts that Israel is fighting “on seven fronts,” a sweeping declaration that suggests an ambition to reshape the region far beyond narrow self-defense. Already, Israeli forces have seized and occupied territory in southern Lebanon and in southern Syria. At home, Netanyahu openly flirts with annexing large swaths of the West Bank. To GCC leaders, such rhetoric and actions are not only provocative but destabilizing, threatening to redraw the map of the Middle East unilaterally, replacing Iranian hegemony with that of Israel.

The Gulf states are valuable U.S. partners. Their energy supplies and huge sovereign wealth funds help underwrite America’s competitive edge over China in energy and capital-intensive industries of the future—AI, cloud computing, and the mining and processing of rare-earth minerals. And their hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. treasury bills bolster the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Trump certainly understands this, and it’s why he made Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar his first foreign destination upon taking office, securing billions in new investments.

That is why Trump must take the Saudi-Pakistan defense pact not as a rejection, but as a warning shot. The Gulf states are hedging against Israeli overreach—not abandoning America.

The upcoming visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Washington this November will present an opportunity to reassure and deepen defense ties with the most important GCC state. And while an ironclad defense treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate remains politically unfeasible, Trump can expand on existing defense commitments modeled on the U.S.–Bahrain Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement (C-SIPA) signed in 2023, the strongest U.S. commitment outside of NATO’s Article 5. These commitments must extend to defending Gulf allies, even when the source of the threat is Israel.

If the Trump Administration fails to act, the Saudi–Pakistan defense pact could become more than just a bilateral agreement. Regional heavyweights Egypt and Turkey, which were also at Tuesday’s meeting, are similarly very concerned about an Israeli-dominated Middle Eastern order. The pact could become the nucleus for other Islamic defense accords—undermining Trump’s signature foreign-policy achievement: the Abraham Accords.

Rather than expanding the Abraham Accords and paving the way for further normalization between Israel and Arab nations, unchecked Israeli overreach will drive America’s Arab and Muslim allies into parallel security arrangements of their own.

The choice before Washington is stark. Reassure America’s Gulf allies and contain Israel within its legitimate borders—or risk watching America’s security architecture in the Middle East unravel.