Three Questions About Value Creation: Irreplaceability, Scale, and Output per Employee

Originally published 2025-10-11Robin’s commentary (as of October 2025)

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English translation of the Chinese post originally published 2025-10-11. Translated 2026-11-04 with AI assistance. Historical figures and claims have not been updated or independently verified. 中文原文

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Robin offers three considerations. First, are you creating something irreplaceable? If customers and the world are largely indifferent to whether you or your company exists, creating value is difficult. Second, can enough people, or even people around the world, use your products and services? Serving only a few hundred or thousand people nearby makes it hard to scale your impact. Third, the most direct measure is each employee’s contribution to output and profit. As an approximate illustration, he cites TSMC’s revenue contribution per employee of over 30 million and after-tax contribution of 12 million.

Key points

Irreplaceability: if your presence or absence makes little difference, creating value is difficult.
How many people can use the offering affects its potential scale and impact.
Each employee’s contribution to output and profit is the most direct measure.
The TSMC per-employee figures are approximate statements with no measurement date specified.

Distinct modular elements joined into a coordinated, balanced whole. — Management & organizationsThematic illustration · AI generated

Full text — English translation

Here is my own view. 1. Are you—or, more often, your company—creating something irreplaceable? If you or your company is merely optional to your customers and the world, your presence or absence makes little difference. Customers and the world can quickly find someone else to fill the gap. That makes it difficult to create value. 2. Can more people, or people around the world, use your products and services? Can what you offer be used by more people, enough people, or people around the world? The value doctors create is difficult to measure; after all, their work saves lives. But if they can still serve only a few hundred or thousand people nearby, it is hard to scale up and create a sufficiently large impact. 3. The most direct measure is each employee’s contribution to output and profit. At TSMC, revenue contribution per employee exceeds 30 million. Spending 4 million on you is therefore quite reasonable. After depreciation, salary expenses, and taxes, each employee still contributes 12 million after tax.

These articles are personal notes, book excerpts, and collected reprints. Figures and events reflect the time of the original publication, are not current information, and do not constitute investment advice.

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