Heng Xin — About Sozou

👋 I’m Heng Xin, the creator of Sozou. I’m a first-generation Australian-Chinese immigrant. I was born in Shunde, Guangzhou, and have been in Melbourne, Australia since the age of six. In addition to English, I speak conversational Cantonese and Mandarin.

There’s a particular kind of in-between that comes with growing up away from where you’re from — not quite one culture, not quite the other, and in the midst of it I spent much of that time in front of a screen: Microsoft Paint first, then PC and console games. It never occurred to me that any of it could be a career — it was just what was fun and in the moment.

Post-graduation, the plan was financial planning. Serco, JBWere, MLC, Bennelong Funds Management — five years in financial services operations were meant to be the on-ramp to that.

Covid, and then the arrival of ChatGPT, changed what I wanted. Watching a text box start doing what used to take a team made the slow, structured path to becoming an adviser feel like the wrong bet. I wanted something autonomous and fast-paced instead.

In between paths, I helped my brother start his dealership, MM Carz, alongside his co-founders. From December 2024 that turned into building the place’s website and digital presence, then automating the operations behind it, not just the storefront in front of it. It was that project I fell in love with — the building itself, and the speed of it — and that’s how Sozou was born.

想像

I’ve had a soft spot for Japanese culture since I was a kid — Japanese classes in primary school, Japanese cartoons dubbed on TV, long before I understood either was “Japanese culture.” It grew into visiting Japan as a teenager and young adult — the culture, the food, the sport — and it’s a good part of why the name and the mark are Japanese rather than anything else.

Sozou comes from 想像, pronounced roughly “so-zoh” — imagination. (Properly romanised it’s sōzō, with macrons over both o’s; the brand name is a simplified spelling of the same word.) The mark is a single enso, brushed in one unbroken stroke: in Zen tradition, a circle completed the moment the brush lifts — a full-circle moment where thinking stops and something just gets made.