English articles

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Dedao Headlines offers parents two suggestions for the school break that also apply to personal growth. First, leave some space: give parents and children time apart, and do not make children the center of every shared activity. A University of Southern California professor calls this deliberate low-intensity parenting. Giving children room does not mean abandoning them; they still need full attention when it truly matters. Second, look for strengths rather than fixating on weaknesses. Applying the barrel principle to education can backfire. A psychologist’s modeling-clay exercise found that refining a work’s strengths made those strengths stand out while also reducing flaws. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences offers eight categories for identifying strengths: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. First observe what excites a child, then provide resources for deliberate practice, distinguishing enjoyment of the activity itself from enjoyment of the feelings it brings. Finally, use strengths to address weaknesses, carrying confidence from one area into others. Robin comments that students should maintain a basic standard in every subject. Once people enter working life—including entrepreneurship—his personal advice is to stop focusing on their weaknesses and make the most of their strengths.

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Wu Bofan recounts Swiss watchmaking’s reversal of fortune against Japanese quartz watches. Developed for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, quartz watches were more accurate, convenient, and affordable. Their rise in the 1970s pushed Swiss manufacturers back. In a high-welfare country, a price war offered neither a technological nor a cost advantage—a predicament resembling traditional businesses disrupted by the internet. Swatch founder Hayek’s answer was to redefine the watch. Drawing on French fashion, he gave inexpensive Swatch quartz watches a new dimension: fashion. New models followed fashion’s rhythm, turning a durable good into a fashion item and encouraging women who had not worn watches to wear several in a year. Middle Eastern culture suggested another dimension for mechanical watches: men’s jewelry and a knight’s badge. Strict price segmentation built a luxury system. Acquisitions gave Swatch Group a portfolio from Breguet and Blancpain through Longines and Tissot to Swatch, creating a protective barrier for Swiss mechanical watches. In a product category invented by Japan, Switzerland competed on an additional dimension. Robin’s point: do not fight competitors to the bitter end on existing dimensions alone. Inventory your strengths and find a new dimension; a Swiss-style comeback may be possible.

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Ning Xiangdong describes four thresholds in life. One pursuit: accomplish at least two things at university—learn a skill that earns a living and find a lifelong pursuit. Hobbies shift, and interest alone cannot sustain a career. A lasting vocation begins with something you do not tire of doing; curiosity grows until interest, aspiration, and work become integrated. One domain: ages 25 to 35 are for cultivating depth. Judge a 35-year-old not by money or rank, but by whether they have established a solid place in a field. One distinctive skill: around 35, develop a unique competitive advantage, tested by whether anyone else in the organization can do what you do. Strengths and weaknesses often arise from the same characteristics; make full use of strengths and avoid weaknesses rather than trying to compensate for each. One person in charge: after 40, positions are fewer and competitors stronger. Decide whether to lead. Start by leading yourself; self-management is the hardest management, and self-knowledge has blind spots. Achieving a dream also requires leading others, endurance, stability, and toughness at critical moments. Robin asks readers to return regularly to basics: have you found work you love, what will you give for it, what unique expertise do you have, where can you use it, can you manage yourself and an organization, and will you share and grow a team?

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Robin opens with the idea that a founder’s breadth of vision determines a company’s scale. The starting point matters, but the acceleration of learning and growth, and breadth of outlook, matter more: “Our journey reaches toward the stars and oceans.” The quoted article examines managers’ self-motivation. An unmotivated manager is far more dangerous than an unmotivated employee. Employees enjoy relatively immediate rewards with a high return on effort. Promotion brings fewer stimuli and longer reward cycles. Remaining in an employee mindset can make higher positions feel less rewarding and more risky. The central warning: what once motivated you will eventually constrain you. Every manager must endure unfairness and frustration; these experiences broaden their perspective. Often, it is not an inability to grow but a retreat of resolve. Growth also involves continually taking things up and letting them go. Becoming a manager means putting on social personas; becoming a leader means shedding labels. Sales champions must stop dwelling on bonuses, and technical specialists must abandon single-track thinking. Peter Senge says you are not your position but a person in development. Wang Shi’s mountaineering, Ding Lei’s pig farming, and Musk’s ambition to reach Mars are ways of stepping beyond familiar circles and generating intrinsic motivation.

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GrowingIO founder Simon Zhang’s translator’s preface to Hacking Growth begins with “If you are not growing, then you are dying”—growth is an enduring business imperative. In 2010, Sean Ellis introduced the growth hacker, whose sole mission is growth. Unicorns such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Slack used creativity and scientific data analysis to attract millions of users quickly and at very low cost. Traditional marketing addresses only the beginning of the customer lifecycle—branding, positioning, and acquisition—bundling budgets and outsourcing execution in a broad-brush, inefficient approach. Data-driven operations now extend well beyond marketing into product, sales, and service. Retention is especially important: data identifies improvements at every stage, supporting continuous iteration. Since 2017, marketing’s center of gravity has shifted from advertising and traffic toward customer experience managed by product teams. Zhang identifies four gaps between China and the United States: recognizing data’s value, mastering data-driven systems and methods, using data to guide business functions, and using analytics tools in place of manual work. These motivated him to establish GrowingIO. As demographic dividends fade and traffic benefits concentrate among winners, unit operating costs rise linearly or even exponentially. Chinese businesses must replace broad-brush marketing with more scientific, efficient growth methods.

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Xunlei founder and 遠望資本 (Yuanwang Capital, pinyin rendering) founding partner Cheng Hao’s recommendation preface to Hacking Growth describes spending two days reading the book and another drawing a mind map. He calls it a practical guide that every frontline entrepreneur and executive should study twice. He finds startup competition in China harsher than in the United States: where an overseas market has two or three competitors, China may have more than a dozen bike-sharing or power-bank-sharing entrants at once. Clever business models and impressive team credentials are insufficient; founders need a systematic approach to rigorous, detail-oriented operations. He sees Hacking Growth as a companion to The Lean Startup. The latter tests needs and solutions rapidly and cheaply; the former addresses acquisition, activation, retention, and profit after validation. Together they cover most of entrepreneurship. He identifies two weaknesses in project-based work: teams disperse after solving an issue, leaving no continuing owner of growth, and execution depends on individual managers’ experience, making learning hard to accumulate. Dedicated growth teams offer a useful alternative. Viral-marketing examples resonate: Dropbox exchanges storage for referrals, while WeChat red packets made payments—a utility product—spread virally. Nearly 100 million users activated WeChat Wallet over one Chinese New Year, without Tencent spending a penny.

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Robin connects two posts: the previous one described clear American strategy in World War II; this one examines costly stagnation in spaceflight caused by pursuing too many contradictory objectives. Remember: there are not 100 equally important tasks; one matters most. Wan Weigang presents Richard Rumelt’s analysis. NASA intended the shuttle to reduce orbital delivery costs below US$100 per pound, but the actual figure was US$28,000. Two of five shuttles were lost, killing 14 astronauts. Congress wanted supposedly cheap solid-fuel rockets; the public wanted astronauts; the Air Force wanted wings; legislators wanted contracts for their states. Satisfying every wish produced an incoherent hybrid. Rumelt distinguishes interest groups making demands, politicians brokering compromises through pork-barrel deals, and strategists who must withstand pressure and abandon some objectives, as Roosevelt did. Compromise is acceptable, but actions must not directly conflict. A company cannot seek lasting competitive advantage while cutting R&D, or sell reliability through trend-chasing marketing. The account criticizes the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals as contradictory promises. Strategy combines policies and actions to overcome a critical challenge, requiring priorities and real authority. The basic takeaway is to distinguish wishes from strategy.

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Hongyi Zhou has been called the outsider who most influenced Tencent’s outlook: after the 3Q war, Tencent moved from closed imitation toward openness. His first venture, 3721, offered Chinese-language web access. Before Baidu, it was China’s largest search service, with 80 million daily users and more than 600,000 paying corporate clients. Yahoo acquired it for US$120 million in 2004. After several transitions, Zhou joined Qihoo in 2006 to start again. Qihoo emphasized community search and “100 million portals,” giving each user a personalized page—similar to Toutiao today. Robin notes the shift from people finding content to content finding people. Yet in 2006, before the iPhone, the idea was too early. Attempts at text and multimedia messaging, images and ringtones, and podcasts never produced a focused core revenue stream. In his autobiography 顛覆者 (The Disruptor, descriptive title), Zhou identifies two mistakes: a star team with technology and funding became restless and overambitious, forgetting that internet experience can become unreliable and founders must be ready to start from zero; and platform thinking lacked a focused entry point. Platform products must initially address something that resonates with users. His analogy: a second baby still needs ten months of pregnancy. Investor Wang Gongquan’s question—had he built another Sina, Baidu, and Alibaba and planned to compete with everyone?—was a wake-up call. Despite the poor start, Zhou clarified his thinking and retained a strong team, preserving the spark for 360.

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Robin cites the idea that entrepreneurs should think like rocket scientists, emphasizing that the most worthwhile things are those no one else has done and that you can do. He suggests asking yourself late at night: is this venture worth focusing on for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years and pursuing to the highest standard? What change and value will it bring to the world? What would be different if this company did not exist?

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Robin offers startup teams three levels to consider: seeing, executing, and doing it well. First, see future developments and have a clear blueprint and plan. But seeing without implementation is useless, and fixation on small immediate gains should not displace long-term positioning. Seeing and executing get you roughly 80% of the way. Whether the last 20% is done well also depends on luck, such as meeting the right people at the right time and place.

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Robin discusses cycles: experience matters. The more you have seen, the calmer you become and the better you can seize opportunities across cycles. Because cycles exist, avoid continually maximizing leverage in good times—an antifragility consideration. In adversity or a prolonged downturn, if you endure it, you may well win.

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Robin identifies two causes of corporate giants’ decline: being burdened by existing strengths and arrogance. The post mentions Netflix seeking a sale to Blockbuster and Google seeking a sale to Yahoo, followed by the two giants being overtaken by history; no sources are supplied for these accounts. He quotes Jack Ma’s progression—failing to see, looking down on it, failing to understand, and being too late—to explain how giants pursuing high growth and high margins dismiss fledgling ventures, giving startups room to rise.

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Robin revisits earlier fundraising advice: an introduction from a respected industry leader improves your chances of attracting investors’ attention. Also work to secure a face-to-face discussion, ideally a pitch to someone who can actually decide. He notes that pandemic conditions at the time—July 2021—made meetings difficult and suggests waiting until the situation eases.

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Robin believes simplicity creates power by keeping you and your users focused on what matters most. Simplicity is harder: apparently simple messages emerge from repeated organization, refinement, and careful design, and require resolve to maintain. He offers two rules of thumb: if your venture cannot be explained on one A4 page, it is probably too complicated; if the woman selling vegetables next door still cannot understand it after thirty minutes, it is also too complicated.

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Robin believes a venture should ideally move people, create impact, and bring change. He gives Japanese manga as examples: Slam Dunk inspired Japanese teenagers to love basketball, while Captain Tsubasa sparked many Japanese children’s interest in soccer. These are popular illustrations, not empirically established findings.

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Echoing the previous fundraising post, Robin urges founders not to begin with a mindset of dependence. Confront real-world problems from the outset and create a sustainable business. Fundraising and spending other people’s money may temporarily conceal problems, but if the rocket has not reached orbit before its thrust ends, it cannot ignore gravity and will ultimately crash.

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Robin advises taking great care with every hire. Before a small startup hires someone, ideally you or a team member should have done that job personally for a while. Do not hire unless you really need to: having done the work yourself, you will understand its requirements and the objectives the person must achieve.

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Robin compares Louisa and Starbucks. Louisa expanded quickly through franchising, with roughly three franchised stores for every company-operated store. Revenue from franchised stores includes only coffee beans and partially prepared food, so comparing revenue alone may not be fair. He notes that takeout accounts for about 40% of Louisa’s revenue. With takeout as a foundation, Louisa expands its seating areas as much as possible to encourage longer visits and higher spending per customer, rather than pursuing table turnover. This resembles Starbucks’ “third place” philosophy and 7-Eleven’s earlier expansion of in-store seating. (Ratios are relayed figures from October 2021 and have not been independently verified.)

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Before starting a business, clarify your original motivation: what kind of company do you want to build, and what kind of life do you want to lead? Someone else’s template will not be yours. Entrepreneurship offers countless possibilities. Do you want to keep running a small company, have the opportunity to run a large one, or look for a chance to exit along the way and hand it over to someone else?

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Robin reminds readers that starting a business takes courage, and that they should think it through before setting out. You will need the courage to leave your job and invest your life savings; you may even fall into debt or face family discord. Would you have the courage to ask your parents to contribute their retirement savings? Could you persuade former classmates and friends to give up a steady salary and join you for just 20% to 30% of their current pay? (The 20% to 30% range is Robin’s illustration.)

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After expressing agreement, Robin adds a qualification: in entrepreneurship, taking too lofty a perspective too quickly can make you miss the details—and the devil is in the details. Even when they can see the distant scenery, many founders describe a future vision up in the clouds, without being able to put it into practice or knowing how to get there.

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Robin argues that setting ambitious goals does not mean daydreaming. Aim for Mars, and you still have a chance of reaching the moon; aim only for the rooftop, and you may well remain where you started. Break a major goal into measurable key metrics for each year, half-year, and quarter. A startup should go further, breaking them down by month and week and demanding extraordinary growth. He adds that finding the right entry point into a large industry is also important.

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The post proposes that major opportunities in the future business world arise at the intersection of three things: first, something will become highly valuable; second, most people do not think it will become valuable; and third, it is your core or comparative advantage.

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Using changes to Google Photos as an example, Robin says the “attract, lock in, then cash in” approach has already been demonstrated once. (The post does not specify the timing or details; this has not been independently verified.) He describes it as one typical SaaS playbook: let customers use the service for free on a large scale, acquire as many customers as quickly as possible, and build scale and an ecosystem. Once customers have stored all their data with you, loyalty has taken hold, and moving elsewhere is difficult, bring out the big blade and cut hard.

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Robin shares comments, originally in English, from a senior VC who passed on a deal nine years earlier. The project was too large, and implementing the solution would require more work than a startup could afford. Even after completion, marketing would be another barrier. The comments end by noting that this is a personal view offered for reference. The post does not identify the deal or the senior VC.

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Robin believes product managers and developers of small games can learn from the thinking behind Wordle. A simple little game can have a big impact and spread widely, leading to an attractive exit opportunity. As he gets older, he increasingly feels that simpler is better: the simpler a product’s design, the clearer its value proposition, the easier it is to learn and share, the greater its impact, and the faster it can create value.

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Robin sees entrepreneurship as discovering opportunities, but that does not always mean creating a major industry shift yourself. You can also look for opportunities that emerge as industry giants expand rapidly in their early stages. Some industry shifts create opportunities so vast that the secondary opportunities are full of potential too. His example: Facebook’s rapid growth gave social game developer Zynga an opening to build its own platform.

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Robin begins with a joke: if every car on the road seems to be going the wrong way, you are probably the one driving in the wrong direction. He says great entrepreneurial ventures often charge ahead fearlessly against the flow, making every other driver wonder whether they are the ones going the wrong way. In his generation, he sees Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX as examples of defying others’ opinions and creating a legend—one person ushering in, at a minimum, the eras of electric vehicles and the commercial aerospace market. (This is Robin’s personal assessment.)

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Robin offers practical fundraising advice: cold-emailing business plans is the least efficient approach. Sending them out indiscriminately may be no help at all and can even backfire. Go to events where you can meet investors and briefly introduce yourself and your venture face to face. Explain it clearly and spark interest within three minutes. Opportunities to meet investors can be created, so always have a three- to five-minute introduction ready. A recommendation from someone you know is another plus.

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Robin begins a series on Lei Jun’s approach to entrepreneurship, saying the next 18 days will cover the subject. This post argues that entrepreneurship requires belief: you must first believe something can happen to have the confidence to persuade people to work alongside you. Because you believe, you can see it. (The post does not specify whether this sentence is a direct quotation from Lei Jun.)

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Robin offers four suggestions for working with investors: communicate proactively and regularly rather than avoiding them; build trust for a long-term partnership; if you can make investors 100 times their money, you can make yourself 1,000 times yours (a rhetorical statement); and when fundraising is going poorly, first ask where you are not yet prepared instead of blaming everything on investors’ lack of vision.

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Robin suggests reading this alongside the fifteenth post in the series on Lei Jun’s approach to entrepreneurship, “Go Big Market.” He quotes two remarks: Haier’s Zhang Ruimin says, “There are no successful companies, only companies of their time”; RT-Mart’s Huang Ming-Tuan says, “We defeated every competitor, but lost to the times.” The post contains only these two quotations, without further explanation.

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Robin takes the same view of entrepreneurship: what important problem have you solved, and for whom? What value have you created, and what contribution have you made? Would the world be any different with or without you? He closes by asking: does the world need you?

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Robin outlines three stages of industry development: beginning with exports and foreign trade; then seeking to replicate products and services overseas; and now entering a third stage, in which a company is global from the moment it is founded.

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Robin argues that most people face too many choices and too much information rather than too little. Excess scatters attention; choices and decisions also have a cost, and frequent decision-making lowers decision quality. (This is Robin’s argument; no research is cited.) He therefore repeatedly emphasizes focus, trade-offs, and doing what matters most—even reducing how often decisions are made. Delegate authority as far down the organization as possible, manage through organizational layers, or give employees greater autonomy to solve most problems on the front line.

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Following news of Uni-President’s acquisition of full ownership of Carrefour, as described in the July 2022 post, Robin says that if he had to identify one decisive factor in retail, he would still choose scale. The competition ahead would also revolve around scale. At the same time, he stresses that a small startup taking on giants must be able to exercise discernment, make trade-offs, focus, respond quickly, and stay flexible. Speed might make up for its lack of scale.

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Robin argues that this era has no shortage of predictions about major trends. What is missing is the patience to settle down and observe smaller trends closely. Entrepreneurial opportunities often lie in the subtle changes constantly unfolding around us.

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Robin offers a recent example: TapPay, which PChome had just acquired, according to the post; acquisition details are not given. TapPay began with work that large companies considered low-margin and labor-intensive. Over time, it became a gateway to online checkout, transforming its value. The accompanying text argues that many activities do not suit large companies because they are unprofitable and thankless. But declining to do them creates opportunities for smaller companies, which can displace the incumbents once they grow.

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The post quotes WeChat creator Allen Zhang: “The best service is the kind users do not notice.” Take paying with WeChat: you pull out your phone, scan a QR code, and you are done. That quietly seamless feeling is the best product experience. Robin concludes that the best products should not feel forced; they should truly become part of users’ lives.

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Robin says there is no single route to startup success. The lean startup approach recommends moving quickly in small steps. Some people instead spend three or four years building a major product that takes the market by storm, and that can work too. But in his personal view, the lean startup approach is better suited to ordinary founders.