---
title: "After Reading Yuanqi Forest's Tang Binsen's 74 Thoughts, It Turns Out He's Hiding Much More"
description: "Tang Binsen is a heroic entrepreneur. After selling his self-made gaming company, he expanded into multiple fields, continuously summarizing and self-correcting along the way. He has read extensively, studied biographies of entrepreneurs who built billion-dollar companies, and is well-versed in theories from Buffett, Ren Zhengfei, and Lei Jun. He sums up these experiences as, \"Happy companies are all alike; each unhappy company is unhappy in its own way.\""
author: "笔记侠"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2022-03-03"
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# After Reading Yuanqi Forest's Tang Binsen's 74 Thoughts, It Turns Out He's Hiding Much More

> Tang Binsen is a heroic entrepreneur. After selling his self-made gaming company, he expanded into multiple fields, continuously summarizing and self-correcting along the way. He has read extensively, studied biographies of entrepreneurs who built billion-dollar companies, and is well-versed in theories from Buffett, Ren Zhengfei, and Lei Jun. He sums up these experiences as, "Happy companies are all alike; each unhappy company is unhappy in its own way."

Source: Notes Man (Biji Xia)
Tang Binsen is a heroic entrepreneur. After selling the gaming company he built from scratch, he expanded horizontally into multiple fields, continuously summarizing and self-correcting along the way.
During his entrepreneurial journey, Tang Binsen has also been enriching himself and absorbing new nourishment. He has read numerous books, studied biographies of entrepreneurs who founded companies worth over ten billion dollars, and is intimately familiar with theories from Buffett, Ren Zhengfei, and Lei Jun.
He summarizes these experiences as, "Happy companies are all alike; each unhappy company is unhappy in its own way."
The similarity lies not in external form but in inner essence. "The Signal and the Noise" also told him that the amount of information grows at 250 megabytes per day, but most of it is just noise; the number of objective facts is relatively constant, just as there are actually few laws truly worth summarizing in this world.
Thus, seeing through appearances to the essence, and maintaining respect for and application of the consistency and continuity of basic laws, became the underlying logic for Tang Binsen's later rise to such heights.
Such a founder, who has made big money and possesses great personal charm, leveraged his accumulated huge funds, using both Yuanqi Forest and Challenger Capital, quickly gathering a team of capable people, and now marches steadily toward building a consumer goods empire.
The editor has compiled multiple sources, organizing Tang Binsen's insights into seven categories: entrepreneurship, management, decision-making, organization, team, learning and cognition, and internet thinking, for readers' reference and learning.
******About Learning and Cognition**
1. There is a logic that is always right: learn from those things you cannot learn, and those people who have made money, learn the truths that those who have made big money repeatedly say but you cannot learn.
Beware of truths that are easy to learn, beware of things that seem complex, like C2M, private domain traffic, beware of these things, beware of these terms, beware of this complexity, beware of those who make a living selling knowledge.
2. Do not focus on those worse than you; there will always be those worse. Focus on the truly strong and learn from them.
3. If a person knows how to learn from experience, their life growth will be N times faster, not 1 times. 1 times means you pay tuition with your life; N times means you take others' tuition and teach yourself.
4. When a person feels small, they begin to become great. Our seven or eight years of entrepreneurial story is a process of constantly discovering our own smallness. Each time you feel small, you will sublimate and become greater, just like humanity's exploration of nature.
5. Good industries are different from bad ones. In a good industry, even being 100th, 10th, or 20th is better than being first in a bad industry; the difference is huge.
6. Humans have a cognitive flaw: they like to summarize at the drop of a hat. Why? Because they want to simplify things.
Why are some people superstitious? Why do some like to burn incense and worship Buddha? Because the year before it didn't rain, and they happened to worship Buddha today, and it rained the next day, so they think it's effective. Actually, these two things have no necessary connection.
7. You must clearly understand which things are basic laws. **What is a law? A law is something that, once you execute it, will definitely happen, just as the sun will definitely rise in the east and set in the west.**
If you do something and go back and forth without results, you must think clearly: is there a problem with the basic laws you're discussing? Is there a problem with the basis of your discussion? You're still crawling in a pit, not finding the true law.
When you truly find the law, it will be something that grows quickly; when you go back and forth without seeing obvious changes, you must reflect on whether your methods and past experience have problems.
8. Strategy should learn from secondary market investors, management should learn from "pirates," and products should learn from gaming companies. Buffett can get returns just by thinking, so the people who think most clearly about strategy are those in the secondary market. Many companies look well-managed, but actually it's because their business is strong.
If a company doesn't make money, isn't strong, and can still lead the team well, that's a pirate—working hard, doing dirty and tiring work.
9. **Some things should not be reduced; don't look for shortcuts. Every part of life's journey is not in vain, and don't try to take shortcuts in life.**
10. At thirty, one should try more and explore. At forty, one should find and focus on what you love. But in the end, you'll find it's fate. Whether the business you do is good determines who is great. The top three internet companies in China, South Korea, and Russia before were all search engines, social networks, and e-commerce.
Some people are fifty and established, forty and not confused, but thirty and knowing fate is foolish; more people are thirty and not confused, forty and established, which is also not good. The rhythm cannot be wrong. Many internet bigwigs stumbled upon big opportunities; they didn't think much. But we really need to find opportunities, so we must continue to start businesses and constantly seek answers. This is called "nomadic."
**About Management, Decision-Making, and Strategy**
1. I often ask: when you make beverages, do you start a company to solve a problem or to make money? This is very important; it distinguishes excellent entrepreneurs from money-making entrepreneurs.
2. Mission and values are your compass in major decisions. There are some things where you can't find answers; at such times, you need some underlying things to support you and give you strength. Everyone has their own original intention; when you find your original intention, even if the thing is difficult, hard, and losing money, you're willing to do it.
3. Major decisions should be more emotional; small decisions should be rational. Major decisions should follow ideals and a sense of mission.
4. We used to say that entrepreneurship shouldn't always be opportunistic. What is opportunism? Always thinking there are things others haven't done that I can try, hitting some big luck, and creating something awesome.
Ren Zhengfei said, "In the era of great opportunities, never be opportunistic; we must have strategic patience." Surround the big business with prolonged attacks, don't lose the main track business. Huawei also makes phones, Jobs also made phones, Alibaba does e-commerce, Amazon also does e-commerce; some businesses are unavoidable.
5. In choosing a track, go to a big red ocean where the business model has been validated and competition is fierce.
6. **Success probability = industry probability × team probability. No matter how strong the team, in a bad industry, success is still impossible.**
7. The biggest cost in our entrepreneurial process is decision cost. Many companies may waste 50% of the next three years; at this time, pay attention to this, and don't spend too much time bargaining with employees over salaries, negotiating rent, or agonizing over office color schemes.
When we first started, we didn't have much money, and we agonized over many management details, spending too little time on strategic thinking and timing. This is the biggest cost. Lei Jun says deep thinking is more important than everything else. Similarly, **don't use tactical diligence to cover strategic laziness. Spend more time thinking about your direction, pay less tuition, take fewer detours; life can go in a straight line.**
8. Our company has a culture called "**Good companies manage people; bad companies manage things.**" We think of the company as a product to be built, so it can automatically and continuously output good products.
I think whether your company is great depends on whether you can cultivate a group of people, whether you use people as tools or ignite them.
9. Our company has a culture: a game without a final boss is not a good game. **Whether something is great depends on how many times you encounter things that make you want to give up; the more you want to give up, the greater it is.**
10. It took me about 10 years to discover a few truths: focus, and know your own smallness. A CEO's energy cannot cover too many things; even in the biggest trend, even if you're strong, you can only do one thing well.
11. **Three principles for single-point breakthrough: believe it, invest in it, dig into it.** Why don't many people believe in single-point breakthrough? Three points:
First, you must believe the value behind this point is huge and can extend to many things;
Second, you dare to invest decisively in this point; at this time, you'll encounter many things; can you give up other things and only invest here?
Third, you know what else can be dug out of this point and continued to be done thoroughly. If you think these through, you can achieve single-point breakthrough. If you can't, there's a big problem.
Why is single-point breakthrough more valuable than doing multiple businesses? Later, after we finished this game, we made many new games. I later found that if we pulled some people to make new games, the annual revenue of the new games combined was less than the value of putting those people into an activity for this game.
12. **Some things require "defending the right and surprising the wrong," don't be opportunistic.** Do what others do; you can't miss any, and you need to be a bit better. It's not that we innovate; we're the same as them. We just respect users and make good products, and in our organization, everyone is equal.
If you do these basic things well, the rest of the tactics can be the same as theirs.
13. **"A good company is a gym; a bad company is a pig farm."** A gym is tiring when you work out, but you feel good after. A pig farm is pleasant when you go in, but you get slaughtered when you leave.
14. Management becomes simpler with systematization; compared to that, finding the core problem is harder. What problem does the company exist to solve? If you haven't figured that out, even if your tactics are all right, your strategy is wrong.
******About Partners, Teams, and Organizations**
1. The requirement for a boss in entrepreneurship is to find a team, set strategy, lead the group. In one sentence: find people and lead them well. If you can't find people, you'll definitely lose at the starting line. What is the value of team members (partners)? I summarize in two sentences: eliminate blind spots and fill gaps.
A good team, even if missing a center forward, the guard can fill in. What kind of partner to find? Even if you hire them as CFO, if the HR person fails one day, they can step up. In a good team, members should be flexible.
2. What kind of partners to find? Partners should be those who truly don't care about small gains. Partners must have original intentions.
3. How do startups recruit? **If you want to build a 10-year company, character is first, then growth potential, and finally current experience; if you only want to sell the company in two years, experience first, growth second, character doesn't matter, since you'll only be together for two years.**
4. The underlying driving force of internet spirit is extreme respect for talent. Why did the internet industry invent the concept of stock options, not other industries? Because they value talent and create various incentives.
Also because they value talent enough, the internet industry promotes a culture of equality and simplicity. Have you ever thought why the internet industry is great? The core is that talent density is sufficient; they truly provide enough incentives, enough shares, and treat all talent as partners.
I used to say, why was the FMCG industry backward in the past? An important reason is that when an excellent talent chose a job, first they'd go to a foreign company, second to a private internet high-tech company, then financial institutions, then manufacturing, maybe automotive manufacturing, and the last choice would be consumer goods companies.
So a very important status quo in China's FMCG industry was that it didn't attract talent well. Today, we see many excellent internet talents, many graduates from Tsinghua and Peking University starting to choose consumer goods, which shows the industry has opportunities.
5. Good companies pay attention to organization and build the organization as a product.
6. Paying attention to organization means thinking more about how to solve problems from a people perspective.
7. If you want to cultivate people, you should focus more on the person's inherent qualities. For example, if you want to find a good runner, between an African who has never trained and a Chinese who has trained for a year, who do you choose? Choose the African, the one with better fundamentals.
8. Is the company looking for a specific position, or looking for someone to cultivate? The one-night-stand mentality in hiring: only looking at whether this person can solve a problem.
9. **In fact, when a boss only uses an employee, the employee will also feel used, which in turn hurts team loyalty.**
10. I naturally like pirate-like teams. One of Yuanqi Forest's basic laws is: don't let honest people suffer, be ruthless to bad people, and don't be egalitarian with excellent people. My personal stake in Yuanqi is no more than 50%, investors have over ten percent, and the rest is for the team; 20% of employees are shareholders. I think a company organization should have brotherhood and bandit camaraderie, not be too professional, and should have a pirate feel. That is, everyone is equal and simple, a group of people with feelings doing something meaningful. **Don't have too many rules and regulations that distance people; be more sincere and simple.**
******About Products and Innovation**
1. Is a good product one in a hundred or one in ten? Don't tell me your product is good; if you only have one, why do you say it's good? You must have countless things to choose from.
I used to play cards; why can't everyone in Texas Hold'em have a straight flush? That way everyone is good, but if everyone has a straight flush, it's not interesting. The meaning of a straight flush is that it's one in ten thousand, so good and bad are relative. If all are good, then none are good. **Every year, 99% of our products don't work; only one product comes out, and 99% is wasted.**
2. How does Yuanqi Forest actually make products? Why can it make so many hit products? My answer is: learn from gaming companies.
In product capability, gaming companies are very strong; they can produce many products each year. Many internet companies seem strong in product capability, but they only need one product and spend the rest of the time maintaining it.
Also, gaming companies are especially tolerant of trial and error, because in this industry, failure is normal. So some of our departments have trial-and-error budgets of tens of millions a year, doing data tests on taste and packaging, and finally choosing the one with the best data.
Finally, we don't encourage employees to focus on short-term effects; rewards are retrospective. For example, last year we gave the Ran Tea team an award called "Product Changed the Company's Destiny," and also rewarded the entire team with company shares.
3. Ren Zhengfei once said, **the best strategy to encourage innovation is to welcome failure.** In your company, when people fail, what's your attitude? What's the organization's attitude? There's a gaming company called Supercell; it says to celebrate every failure. If you do that, don't you have innovation?
4. Humanity only rewards companies that are good to users. From an internet perspective, internet users only reward companies with high retention rates and high NPS scores.
What is retention rate? It's whether users are willing to continue using; willingness means being good to users. What is NPS? It's whether the product is so good that users are willing to recommend it.
******About Internet Thinking**
1. Now people are starting to summarize "internet thinking," and seeing this makes me both happy and sad. Happy? Internet thinking is gaining recognition. Sad? Many traditional companies copy internet thinking blindly; companies that were profitable become unprofitable. They see others offering free services, so they do too; they see others doing ground promotion, so they do too.
Many entrepreneurs just learn DTC, then CTM comes, then distribution fission. I particularly agree with Ren Zhengfei's saying, "**Copying Huawei's skin will die; copying Huawei's soul will be awesome.**" Internet thinking is more about the skin, the surface; the internet spirit behind it is the original driving force for internet entrepreneurs to transform traditional industries.
2. On the internet, first there are active users, then revenue. When we used erythritol, the most expensive sweetener, I said don't talk about other things first; ensure the taste first, then consider other things. This is internet thinking.
**Internet thinking is truly considering user value first, not whether you make money.** Today, if food and beverage companies can do like Yuanqi Forest, where R&D, product, and sales personnel don't know the gross margin at launch, and only after two or three months does finance calculate it, I think that company is truly a good company. That's how we do it.
3. Children of poor families grow up early. **Whether a team or an individual, creativity bursts out only when resources are concentrated and scarce.** If you have too many resources, everything you think about is money problems, solved with money, or asking leadership for budget.
I've also told the team, don't think that the most awesome thing about the internet is that great companies aren't built with money; big companies kill products by throwing money and resources at them. So you must find a way to solve problems without money.
4. Our company has a culture of not playing games. Some people's values are that making money is about bargaining with distributors and users. So you see in the internet industry, the true internet thinking is to work together, cooperate and win-win, not to play games.
Many bosses' values always feel that they don't have the ability to create value; they can only grab others' value, negotiate value, trade value; they can't create value.
**About Entrepreneurship**
1. Entrepreneurs tend to overestimate their success rate. For example, ask an entrepreneur what their success rate is, and they might say 50%; in reality, 5% would be good.
2. Entrepreneurs tend to think their company is growing well. If your company's growth rate doesn't exceed that of companies like Alibaba (CAGR 40%+), then it's not high growth.
3. Only traffic but no transactions means non-core indicators aren't growing, which can also create illusions; hard indicators like revenue that reflect core business are objective.
4. **Don't focus on a small group of loyal fans who like you, because even the worst products have loyal fans.**
5. Once the boss is not objective, employees will be even less objective.
What are objective indicators? Whether users love you; the clearest indicator is whether they're willing to spend money. A company that can't make money is not a good company. Whether gross margin can stay higher than peers for a long time; if competition can't bring your gross margin down, it means you have barriers and a moat.
6. **How to measure if you're truly in a real trend? Acquiring a large number of loyal users at extremely low cost.**
7. Objectivity is actually against human nature, because people are subjective and only believe what they see; objectivity requires stepping out and having a macro, statistical view.
8. Some business models seem revolutionary but are actually uninhabited deserts. Some seem fiercely competitive but are actually vibrant rainforests.
9. **Entrepreneurs tend to blindly look for a blue ocean where no one else is, but often find a desert.**
10. Entrepreneurship is not innovation; it's not about doing something no one has ever done.
11. It's hard to create something entirely new, and it's hard to create a new business model; new models and products evolve gradually from existing things.
12. Business models shouldn't be too idealized; don't over-"design." New models also appear with clustering. If you see yourself doing something no one else is doing, the chance of you finding a unique business model is much smaller.
13. Bayes' theorem - the world is continuous. Generally, the past can predict the future, except when the big environment changes.
14. Why is SAAS always the "first year"? Why has India never risen? Why do some industries always huddle together for warmth? If you want to play cards, first go to a table with fools and money, or a table with strong players and money, or a table with little money and fools; don't go to a table that's poor and full of experts.
15. Finding discontinuous opportunities is awesome. How to measure? If the market grows 5 or 10 times in a year, that's truly discontinuous; use data to speak.
16. **Don't mistake the means of success for the cause of success, and do things unrelated to the essence.** For example, entrepreneurs blindly imitate Jobs, focusing on unnecessary details and being rude to subordinates.
17. Talk less about isms, talk more about problems. Talk less about concepts, talk more about user needs. Beware of those who make a living only talking about isms and concepts.
18. How to judge if a model is good? Whether it can improve pricing and gross margin is the most important.
19. Understanding human nature = believing human nature is predictable, finding what is unchanging in people's genes.
20. Which signals are valuable? **Anything that sounds like it will work immediately is useless. Do things that are hard, take time, but are right. Those things that many rich people have said many times but are hard to execute are often truly awesome.**
21. Successful people tend to overestimate their alpha and underestimate luck and beta. It's great in a bull market, but cruel when the tide goes out.
22. The only chance to fly is in a trend. **Truly great entrepreneurs seek the big trends of the times, not rely on their own awesomeness.** When starting a business, think more about the times.
23. Strength and luck can transform into each other. If you really think you're strong, try more times. This offsets the volatility of luck and increases your win rate. If you think you're lucky and succeed, then stop immediately!
24. People with resilience + strength should keep trying; strength and luck can stack.
25. Stay away from two types of people: those who haven't succeeded after 10 years of entrepreneurship—their luck factor has likely been offset, and their strength is truly insufficient; and those who had great luck at the start but are weak in strength, because regression to the mean is likely next.
26. **Don't mistake luck for strength, and don't mistake temporary bad luck for lack of strength.**
27. A person creates 80% of their wealth in 20% of the time; the other 80% of time creates 20% of wealth. So we should often self-reflect: **are we now in the 80% time or the 20% time?**
28. Industry choice is very important. Ask a group of entrepreneurs not what they do, but which industry they're in, and you'll roughly know who's doing better. Because a bad company in a good industry is much better than a good company in a bad industry.
29. Street vending vs. robbing a bank: street vending seems simple, but it's a bunch of poor people competing, and it's not scalable; robbing a bank is hard, so there's less competition, and it's scalable (robbing 1 million vs. 10 million is about the same difficulty).
30. Good products are simple; good businesses are pure.
31. Have confidence in the future and patience for the present. The premise is to believe in the future, believe in the long-term nature of the world, and believe in investment indices.
32. Strategy is a decision with time compounding; tactics are not. People with long-termism should focus on strategy and things with long-term effects, and pay less attention to specific tactical execution.
References: 1. Yuanqi Forest Tang Binsen: Choosing the right path is too important 2. Yuanqi Forest Tang Binsen: 7 major misconceptions of entrepreneurs 3. Yuanqi Forest Tang Binsen's 50 entrepreneurial principles, why does he challenge giants? 4. Dialogue with Yuanqi Forest Tang Binsen: Rich man, pirate, and product manager 5. Wave New Consumption, Yuanqi Forest Tang Binsen: How to use internet spirit to do consumer goods well?
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