ShaoLan Hsueh was born and raised in Taiwan, the daughter of a calligrapher and a ceramic artist. “I grew up in this environment, in the mud, in the ink, in the paintbrushes,” she says. She didn't immediately take on her parents' artistic legacy: describing herself as an unashamed “geek”, she studied biochemistry at university, wrote some unlikely and bestselling Microsoft user manuals (“I used my imagination and put a lot of my own thoughts in”) and went on to be a first-wave internet entrepreneur, co-founding pAsia, an early internet success story, in 1995. At its peak it had 250 employees.
薛曉嵐(ShaoLan Hsueh)出生在臺灣，是一位書法家和一位陶瓷藝術家的女兒。她說：“我是在這樣的環境中長大的，與泥巴、筆、墨為伴。”她并沒有馬上繼承父母的藝術遺產。她將自己稱為一名毫無顧慮的“極客”，在大學里學的是生物化學，寫過一些令人難以置信的、相當暢銷的微軟(Microsoft)用戶指南（“我發揮了自己的想象力，在其中融入了很多自己的想法”），然后成為了第一波互聯網創業家，在1995年與他人聯合創立了pAsia。該公司是互聯網創業成功的早期例子之一，巔峰時曾有250名雇員。