Entrepreneurship & Strategy

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Robin says startup strategy means figuring out the single most important thing to do, and choosing not to do the other 99 things that also seem important. This is not a question of deciding which tasks come first and which come later. It is about recognizing that there is only one most important thing.

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Robin says the familiar advice to keep going and never give up is incomplete: it leaves out the need to be heading in the right direction. Many entrepreneurial journeys resemble being lost in a desert. Those who make it out alive rely on more than persistence; they also need a compass.

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Responding to online complaints that Formosa Chang is “expensive” and “raising prices,” Robin argues that a set meal at NT$120–150 still costs less than many Japanese ramen or pasta dishes. Wanting higher wages while rejecting businesses’ price adjustments is a paradox. He advocates allowing prices to adjust as the economy grows and wages to rise alongside them. Businesses should be encouraged to make good products, earn reasonable profits, and treat employees well. Consumers, too, should value good products over cheap, poor-quality ones, creating a virtuous cycle.

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Robin cautions entrepreneurs against skipping critical early steps, especially customer discovery. The most important starting point is not finding money, assembling a team, developing technology, building a product, or planning a business model: it is confirming the needs of target customers. He identifies another warning sign. You set out to do A, discover after testing the market that A will not work, and decide you first need B to make A possible—then add C. The most likely outcome is that neither A nor B succeeds. You may not recognize this, because one of entrepreneurship’s greatest traps is deceiving yourself.

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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.

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Robin observes that many teams disappear after receiving investment and stop interacting altogether, which only makes it harder for them to move forward. His personal recommendation is to report progress at least once a quarter, good or bad: what is going well, where the bottlenecks are, what is going badly, and what to examine next. Facing investors’ questions is also a valuable opportunity to assess yourself from someone else’s perspective.

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On October 12, 2022, Robin observed that technology giants from Meta, Google, and Amazon to Microsoft and Apple were freezing hiring and recruiting less, while tech startups continued tightening their belts. Silicon Valley’s hiring freezes and layoffs appeared likely to continue for a while. His personal guess was at least another 12 to 24 months. (This was a forecast at the time; subsequent developments need to be compared separately.)

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Robin says entrepreneurship calls for disregarding existing rules, trying to break them, and setting new rules of the game. But avoid going too far into gray areas, lest you invite too much controversy, as with Uber.

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Robin argues that entrepreneurial success does not come from being exceptionally capable yourself. It comes from finding people more capable than you and attracting them to join. “Willingness to share shows generosity; knowing how to share shows wisdom.” He retells a story mentioned by Mr. Qiu: Momotaro kept sharing his rice balls along the way, recruiting a monkey, a dog, and a chicken to work toward and ultimately achieve the same goal. His conclusion is that entrepreneurs must be willing to share and know how to share to attract people more capable than themselves.