Organizations & Teams

Reading guide

Zhang Yiming wrote this guide to choosing an employer for technical talent when Toutiao was still a small company. He introduces the EC ratio—enterprise value divided by total funding. Google, Facebook, and Tencent had very high ratios. Maintaining a high EC ratio indicates organic growth capacity rather than dependence on outside funding; a low ratio combined with heavy fundraising can suggest a business fattened by capital. He recommends that first-rate technical talent choose leading technology companies, judging technical investment and technology’s contribution to business value rather than money spent on field promotion. Drawing on his rejection of an investment offer from a giant, he argues that bundled traffic and distribution can become stimulants, distort strategy, and force a company to take sides. Do not join a company marrying into a wealthy family; join an outstanding company and become a great one together. He also criticizes obsession with titles and management headcount: titles suffer more inflation than the ruble, while WhatsApp and Instagram had tiny teams. Companies made up of people concerned with how many they manage rather than what they do cannot have high talent density. Finally, early and late are relative; the scale of future potential is the absolute yardstick. Alibaba and Tencent still grew more than a hundredfold after their fifth year. Rather than speculate on a runner-up, choose the leader.

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This post challenges the claim that customer interviews are unnecessary because customers do not know what they want. Ford’s “faster horse” actually contains a real customer problem: people want something faster than their existing solution, and a horse is simply the solution they know. Jobs said knowing what they want is not the customer’s job; Paul Graham regards understanding customers as a founding team’s first task. Robin identifies the key issue: asking questions does matter, but you may not be asking the right ones. Asking what customers want tends to produce improved versions of existing products. Instead, conduct outcome-based interviews: ask what results they want, not what solutions they want. When an answer describes a solution, keep asking why and what it would do for them. Ask the right people too: industry experts’ feedback often differs greatly from that of most users. The post also recounts a conversation between Graham and Airbnb founder Brian Chesky: if your users are in New York, what are you still doing in Mountain View? Early startups should do laborious things that do not scale, visiting users individually. This is also the sixth counterintuitive rule cited from Blitzscaling. Robin concludes: stop imagining and forecasting; get out of the room and have in-depth conversations with users now.

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Robin begins with a qualification: normally, he still encourages the standard Lean Startup approach—understand needs and do something you care about. But if a one-in-ten-thousand chance puts you in the path of a boom, it may be time to blitzscale. Liang Ning’s reading of Reid Hoffman’s Blitzscaling emphasizes speed over efficiency in a huge, uncertain market. To move fast, accept chaos, tolerate poor management, overlook customer complaints, and raise more capital than needed: the “barbarian rules.” Yidao founder Zhou Hang responded rationally, like a civilized person, and ultimately lost to Didi’s aggressive tactics. The account describes four stages: pirates, marines, army, and police. Pirates use flexibility and risk-taking to establish their initial position. Xiaomi’s early three-layer structure and “demanagement” resemble marines taking a beachhead, when conserving ammunition cannot take priority over firing. During Chinese New Year 2019, Zhang Yiming spent US$500 million promoting Douyin in eight days, separating it from Kuaishou, which emphasized spending nothing on promotion. When market headroom runs out, blitzscaling should stop and management must change, as Xiaomi moved toward an army-like structure. Banks and foreign companies resemble police maintaining order. The book reassures entrepreneurs who survived that their fundamental choice at that stage was right.

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This installment of Daily Lessons for the Elite introduces five tools that strategy scholar Richard Rumelt uses for strategic analysis. First, compare like with like: New York subway construction costs US$3.5 billion per mile—seven times the global average, four times London’s, and more than ten times Paris’s. The comparison reveals a problem; Paris has a design review committee that controls costs. Second, understand human behavior: a department manager’s attractive cash-flow forecast serves a competition for headquarters’ resources, highlighting good news and concealing bad. When knowledge, resources, and decision-making authority sit with different people, misleading claims arise. Most people avoid confronting their company’s real difficulties. Third, analyze data: detailed costing at a Brazilian window-blind company showed that large blinds were the real money-makers. A women’s clothing chain’s profitability depended on location and traffic rather than store size. Robin adds that breaking down startup pricing and subscription revenue often reveals losses. Fourth, use established frameworks: shipping’s overcapacity creates a prisoner’s dilemma; airline code-sharing and point-to-point services offer analogies. Fifth, seek insights from the front line: Kodak was defeated not by digital cameras but by a new ecosystem in which people stopped printing photographs.

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Robin identifies five requirements for developing a sport: active participation across society; joy and pleasure as the starting point; long-term planning; continuous exchange with the world’s best, including help for players going abroad; and integration with local culture. He sees the same principles applying to government efforts to build an environment for innovation and entrepreneurship: encourage attempts that may fail, do not fear failure, welcome challenges, learn from the best, develop culturally distinctive innovation, and plan over a longer horizon. The Look at the World article echoes these ideas. Behind Japan’s victories over Germany and Spain at the Qatar World Cup lies a century of soccer development: the association founded in 1921, league-based selection across 47 prefectures, and a professional league established only in 1993. A Japan Football Association office in Düsseldorf helps players abroad; leading players such as Ritsu Doan and Wataru Endo have European experience. At the community level, Football For All brings soccer into schools and neighborhoods, while club activities form a distinctive sporting culture. The JFA Values, established in 2015, put joy and pleasure at the heart of sport and players first. Coach Hajime Moriyasu asks players not to show excessive deference to world-leading teams, but to compete as equals.

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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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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 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 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 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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In this sixth segment of Allen Zhang’s early-2016 speech, he discusses payments, Enterprise WeChat, and the future of WeChat. A service works best when users barely notice it: they simply open WeChat and scan a QR code when paying. Enterprise WeChat would have far greater value if it extended beyond internal company communications and made every employee an authenticated service contact. A 4S dealership employee, for example, could function like a customer’s mini program, combining a service menu with real-time conversation and helping build customer loyalty. Zhang argues that population is finite while new services are not; in the internet era, three to five years can mark a new generation of needs. Innovation is the only way to meet the future, and the real challenge comes from changing users rather than competitors. The WeChat team does not set out to hit KPIs; it asks what each feature means to users, and questions features built only to drive traffic. WeChat’s aspiration is to be each person’s best tool and friend, and to create a marketplace where creators can realize value. In the image of the wall and the egg, it sides with the egg. Its only real competitor, Zhang says, is whether its organizational capabilities can keep pace with the times. The excerpt closes with the line, “Among all things, hope is the most beautiful.”

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A Roadmap for SaaS Startups identifies three headwinds for China’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. First, demand for IT products that improve efficiency has not yet taken off at scale: many small and midsize businesses are managed informally and focus on winning orders, without recognizing how IT systems can reduce costs and improve productivity. Because efficiency is the core value of general-purpose SaaS tools, companies without a clear pain point are difficult to sell to. Second, many SaaS products are not good enough. Early innovations are quickly copied, leaving software companies to compete on marketing and price-performance or turn to custom development. Yet customers’ needs change frequently, and vendors may not even recover the cost of the staff assigned to a project. Global software giants such as Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft dominate the most profitable market segments, leaving only a few niches. Weak software-industry capabilities carry over into SaaS: products lack useful features and clear value, architectures are repeatedly rebuilt, and organizations lack management systems. This creates a vicious cycle of weak product value, poor customer word of mouth, and slow demand growth. Third, complex corporate IT procurement drives up marketing costs, slows customer access, and makes renewals require fresh negotiations. The author sees procurement as a symptom; the deeper issues are demand and product value. The book expects industry-specific and scenario-specific SaaS to grow faster than general-purpose tools because the problems are more concrete, the founders often understand the industry firsthand, and the products take fewer detours.

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Fusion physicist Annie Kritcher, named one of Nature’s ten people who mattered in 2022, offers three ways of thinking worth learning from. First, build complementary strengths: reaching the top 20% in two fields can put you in the top 5% of the population. Alongside scientific excellence, Kritcher sought opportunities to lead projects and teams and deliberately honed her communication skills. Second, keep looking for hope amid pessimism. The U.S. inertial-confinement fusion program began in 1997, its facility was completed in 2009, and ignition was first achieved in 2022. Before success, you may not know exactly what you are pursuing; solve the problems in front of you and seek small gains in each successive experiment. Third, communicate in a way that quickly establishes common ground: explain ignition to the public as bringing to Earth the process that powers the Sun, then switch to technical language when speaking with peers. Robin’s commentary applies this to entrepreneurship: an MVP should be low-cost, fast, and designed for learning through trial and error; stay constructive, complain less, and do what you can.

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Zhang Xiaoyu summarizes three hiring criteria associated with YC. First is drive: at an early-stage startup, attitude matters far more than ability. Drive means facing difficulties and achieving goals under your own steam, without being pushed. Apple, Nike, Starbucks, and Airbnb did not arise from astonishing technology, but from professionals overcoming obstacles to make good products. People with impressive credentials may have more fallback options and retreat first when difficulties arise. Marc Andreessen compares drive to height in basketball: it cannot be taught, so find people who have it and persuade them to join. Second is curiosity: a desire to keep improving one’s craft and stay at the forefront of a field because it is enjoyable, not compulsory. Startups do not have time to cultivate this quality. One interview technique is to ask which websites inaccessible in China the candidate regularly visits. Robin suggests asking what skill or technology they learned most recently, why they chose it, and how much effort they invested. Third is integrity. Paul Graham’s method is to keep probing a familiar subject until the candidate reaches something they do not know, then observe whether they admit it or bluff. A good leader’s progress should also improve the lives of subordinates, rather than come at their expense. The article ends with a metaphor from Xu Haofeng, screenwriter of The Grandmaster: one kind of person is like a wildfire that leaves nothing growing, while another is like an auspicious creature whose passage brings nourishing water, fertile soil, birdsong, and flowers.

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The post draws on Harari’s argument in Sapiens: humans can build large-scale social organizations because they have the extraordinary ability to imagine things that do not exist. Shared imagination makes cooperation at scale possible. Robin’s personal view is that AI still lacks imagination, including the ability to derive new knowledge and generate new insights. It functions more like a system that assembles and presents large amounts of existing information, and it may even lack the ability to make value judgments. For example, when asked whether vaccines are beneficial or harmful, AI can gather much of the information online and draw a conclusion, but that conclusion still rests on existing scientific data available online. This is a personal assessment from December 2022; AI’s capabilities have changed since then.

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The post argues for starting with a change in how we teach. Traditional large classes can become one-on-one, tutor-style question-and-answer exchanges in the AI era. Taiwanese students, who have not been accustomed to asking questions, must now actively develop and organize their own questions. In the past, the worry was that a teacher could not answer. Now the worry is that we cannot formulate questions well: asking the right question matters more than being given an answer directly. If an explanation is unclear, students can keep asking, request a different explanation, ask for language an elementary school student can understand, or seek more depth and examples. The author argues that education in this new era needs to be redesigned.

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Robin sees a critical moment for transforming education: Taiwanese children spend their days on workbooks and complete more than ten thousand test papers, while American children work on hundreds of projects from an early age, developing teamwork and problem-solving skills. The excerpt that follows comes from Wan Weigang’s column. It argues that education needs to change even without the AI wave; AI simply makes the problems more visible. In programming, for example, the question should not be which language you studied or how many facts you mastered, but which projects you have completed. We need to move from a “course mindset” to a “project mindset.” The excerpt also argues that GPT helps people learn faster rather than giving them a reason not to learn.

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The post reprints a Dedao Headlines piece explaining why some powerful technology companies have so few people. It uses Midjourney, with approximately eleven employees, as an example; the figures are those stated in the reprint as of June 2023 and have not been independently verified. The analysis offers three reasons: low marginal costs in technology product development, mature infrastructure that removes the need to reinvent the wheel, and the 10x engineer effect. An additional section discusses team management at the “critical point of a phase transition.” Robin’s closing comment is that if revenue growth is highly correlated with headcount growth, the business is fundamentally a traditional, labor-driven enterprise rather than a technology company.

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In September 2024, Robin suggested looking at industry and gross margin when discussing startup output per employee, and using annual gross profit divided by total employees to assess individual contribution. He mentioned approximately 15 million in gross profit per employee at TSMC and an intuitive startup threshold of approximately 1–1.5 million, but the original post did not specify currency, calculation year, or the headcount basis. TSMC’s consolidated gross profit and global workforce in its 2023 annual report produce a similar order of magnitude. That does not establish Robin’s original calculation, nor is it an officially reported gross-profit-per-employee metric. His suggestions on automation, AI, and outsourcing are personal views, not universal industry standards.

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The post reprints three ideas from Liu Run. First, AI replaces tasks rather than occupations: identify what AI can do and what only you can do. Second, the gray-collar era has arrived, favoring people who understand technology and can do hands-on work. Third, hard skills become outdated, while soft skills such as communication, judgment, and problem-solving form a moat. The piece concludes that we should not compete with AI at what it does best. When getting things right is no longer difficult, setting direction and taking responsibility become the scarcest resources. Robin adds the ability to ask good questions, organize and clearly express ideas, simplify complexity, think abstractly, use imagination, set an organization’s direction and boundaries, collaborate, and take ultimate responsibility.

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Robin recounts a conversation with a startup CEO. AI may provide a certain level of translation and communication in the future, but people still need very strong command of at least one language to think deeply, analyze, organize, ask AI questions, and express themselves clearly. The CEO believes that after thirty years of science and engineering overshadowing the humanities, AI’s ability to perform basic logical operations will shift human value back toward feeling, understanding, imagination, and empathy. He sees a future for humanities graduates. The Industrial Revolution freed human physical labor; AI will free mental labor, requiring society’s underlying operating logic to be rebuilt. This is a retelling of a conversation, not a statistical or research finding.

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The excerpt discusses “slow entrepreneurship” in deep tech. Compared with the lightning expansion sought by internet and platform businesses, deep tech emphasizes taking time to build technology and using substantive innovation to empower industry. Real breakthroughs require the patience to endure long, lonely work. It sets out three points: long-term investment needs full-cycle support from incubation through acceleration to commercialization, with room for failure; supply-chain collaboration should connect large enterprises, small and midsize companies, and research institutions; and capital should be patient, with venture funds providing long-term support. Robin closes with one line: the faster the world moves, the calmer the mind. The excerpt’s source remains unconfirmed; it is not Robin’s original writing.

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The post reprints an interview with a venture investor. Judging trends is the most important investment skill. A genuine trend must meet at least three conditions: last more than ten years, change industry structure, and change user behavior. The biggest trap in venture capital is not competition but demand that does not exist, so ask whether a need is real, how long it will last, and how large the market can become. The piece also discusses the explosion of AI-generated content and data. Robin adds that pigs can fly in a strong wind, but when the wind stops, the ground is littered with their bodies. Better to understand how the world is changing and prepare for the future, so that you are in position when the wind rises and the wave arrives. The reprinted material is not Robin’s original writing.

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The post presents several short arguments about strategy. Strategy means being explicit about what to do and what not to do; focus requires both choice and sacrifice. If you cannot reach the top three in a niche, do not rush into a second business. First take the original business to its fullest potential, then turn methods for analyzing customers, building teams, and establishing rules into organizational capabilities that can be applied to new businesses. Even a market worth hundreds of billions is irrelevant to you if your organizational capabilities cannot support it.

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Robin observes that highly resourced, privileged teams and grassroots teams have roughly equal chances of success, with strengths and weaknesses offsetting one another. The former have more opportunities but higher costs and more escape routes, and may retreat more readily or raise and spend too much. The latter use resources carefully and persist through problems. He urges founders to clarify what problem they solve and what value they create for whom. Vague positioning can leave a team confused about its own direction. The closing Quibi excerpt warns against becoming dependent on the path of past success.

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Robin explains why he encourages teams to spend more time abroad. Taiwan’s market is limited, and a team that feels impressive only at home can resemble the River God or the summer insect in Zhuangzi. The best way to broaden perspective is to enter a larger market and experience its impact firsthand. Drawing on the River God’s encounter with the North Sea in “Autumn Floods,” he argues that success often depends on breadth of understanding rather than effort alone. Perspective depends on one’s environment, so spend time with people who are better than you.

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Robin identifies three questions founders need to clarify: how strongly target users need the product; whether users could easily switch away without noticing its absence; and whether losing it would cause major inconvenience. The less replaceable a company is, the more valuable it becomes. He includes Wu Jun’s response to a reader asking why Evernote struggled. Wu argues that the product was not essential enough and its timing was squeezed by Google Docs and Office. Robin says their views are similar.

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The main text describes how Google challenges rigid thinking by asking people to make an idea ten times bigger. It tests an idea’s maturity through three questions: could it affect hundreds of millions or billions of people; does it contain a distinctive technical insight; and could it become feasible soon? Robin comments that employees should pursue tenfold breakthroughs rather than 10% or 20% improvements. But the approach does not fit every situation: a small startup may struggle to find a narrow entry point if its scope is too broad. Fundraising in Taiwan tends to require concrete results, whereas this approach can help when raising internationally.

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After completing his FITI reviews, Robin shares seven points: similar teams can join forces to compete internationally; use national resources such as Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Economic Affairs programs and the National Development Fund’s angel investment program; decide whether the endgame is acquisition or an IPO; making a product or obtaining certification is not the ultimate test—selling it worldwide is. A customer saying “sounds good; we’ll evaluate it once it’s built” is usually negative; someone with real demand wants to pay before completion. Professor-led student startups should include someone who has run a business, and R&D startups should stay asset-light and outsource where possible.

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Robin finds an interesting definition: a startup is a temporary organization aiming for rapid growth in a short time. Even a newly established company is an ordinary new business if rapid near-term growth is not its objective. A restaurant or hair salon’s ceiling depends on its premises and spending per customer; a custom software outsourcer’s ceiling depends on customer spending. Neither type is better: they simply pursue different goals.

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Robin believes the most important discipline in a SaaS startup is making trade-offs. After wrestling with the decision, firmly walk away from large customers demanding customization; otherwise, they can drain your capacity to innovate and turn you into a labor-intensive software contractor. He points to Basecamp and Taiwan’s iCHEF CEO as examples of knowing what the company needs at its current stage and who its customers are. If a VC asks why you do not serve certain customers or build certain features, his preferred answer is: we make clear trade-offs; those are not right for this stage, and we have clear target customers and a product-development sequence.

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Robin draws five lessons from the story of conquering the South Pole: a major opportunity is rarely visible to you alone—many people race to be first; history remembers first place; thorough preparation, spare capacity, and flexibility help you stay calm when making critical decisions; cohesion matters more than team size; and disciplined daily progress, in good conditions or bad, determines the outcome. In extreme environments, doing your best is not enough: do your sustainable best. Small daily steps become a large advance when you look back.

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Robin writes to young venture capital professionals: VCs often tell founders to focus, cut back on nonessential activities, and stop chasing trends, yet frequently chase trends themselves. In his ten years in the industry, the hot sector has changed almost every one or two years—from games, software, the internet, and the sharing economy to AI, blockchain, electric vehicles, and the metaverse. He argues that VCs should calmly identify their core strengths and what makes them irreplaceable, then build those strengths deliberately. With enough accumulated resources, they may even create a trend themselves. The advice VCs give founders applies equally to their own careers.

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Someone asks how angel investing differs from an angel fund. In Robin’s basic understanding, angel groups—of which Taiwan has several—discuss incoming opportunities, then each angel decides individually whether to invest, using their own money and taking responsibility for their own decisions. An angel fund pools money under unified management and makes a collective invest-or-pass decision; in that sense, it can be viewed as institutional investing. Angel groups charge membership fees, whereas funds charge management fees, such as 2%, and share investment profits, such as 20%; these are examples. He welcomes corrections and additions from practitioners.

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Following the previous point about talking less and listening more, this post warns against hypotheticals: asking “If we built this feature, would you use it or pay for it?” is the wrong approach. Ask about specific events that have already happened in users’ lives instead. Robin gives an example: asking whether someone would be interested in cutting costs by 20% and improving efficiency by 15% is hypothetical and leads them toward the answer you want. Such interviews are meaningless. Understand the path and motivations that brought users to the problem.