SBP#27 - Sacrifice, Immigration & AI: How Runbin Dong Built Scale Social AI After Raising His Sisters in College

Runbin Dong’s path to founding Scale Social AI is anything but typical.After moving to the United States, he began studying pre-med at UNC Chapel Hill with plans to become a doctor. During college, he adopted his two younger sisters and brought them to live with him — first in his dorm room, then in off-campus housing he worked with the university to secure. With almost nothing materially, they lived minimally while he finished school.Runbin went on to work at IBM and several tech startups, moved to Japan for his wife’s career, returned to the U.S., explored healthcare, and even helped his mother launch and grow a dumpling business that was eventually sold.All of that life experience led him to create Scale Social AI — a platform designed to help businesses use AI to scale their content authentically without scaling overhead.This episode is about sacrifice, responsibility, reinvention, and building lean in a world obsessed with growth.