Source: LatePost (ID: postlate) How three distinct traits merge in one person. Serial entrepreneur Tang Binsen spent a decade in the internet circle, making big money but not gaining fame matching his earning ability. In 2016, he stepped into the beverage industry, where he finally became an internet tycoon. Genki Forest, founded by Tang Binsen, sold 100 million boxes of sugar-free sparkling water this year alone—80% from offline sales. Genki Forest broke into the offline channels firmly held by traditional beverage companies, with expected beverage revenue of 8.3 billion yuan this year, catching up to one-third of Nongfu Spring, which has been established for 25 years. A group of young game developers created the biggest entrepreneurial success story in China's consumer industry in five years—something almost no one could have imagined a few years ago. Tang Binsen, 38, probably didn't expect it either. Over more than a decade of entrepreneurship, he had already succeeded, but mainly in businesses with quick returns like web games, navigation sites, and tools going overseas. It wasn't until Tang found beverages, a large industry not yet successfully transformed by the internet, that he truly made his mark. He tries to overturn rules and create new ones. This is closely related to his personality and the confidence from his continuous entrepreneurial successes. Add fresh money, and everything seems lively—just like China's internet over the past decade. In Tang Binsen, you can see three prominent traits: rich like a super tycoon, with barbaric expansion ability like a pirate, and thinking and learning like the best product manager. These three advantages ensure that when he enters any industry, he may not succeed, but he can turn the industry upside down. Tang Binsen and his entrepreneurial story may well become a classic case in business schools in the future, possibly about success or failure, but it will certainly be brilliant. The following is an interview with Tang Binsen by LatePost: LatePost: Genki Forest's first hit product was sparkling water, but this success hasn't been replicated in other categories. Why? Tang Binsen: Not every product can be a hit, but each of our products sells well in its category. Ran Tea took two years to become the second-best in sugar-free tea beverages, with the first being Dongfang Shu Ye, launched ten years ago. Sparkling water's annual sales are about ten times that of Ran Tea. LatePost: Ten times difference. Tang Binsen: Because the latter's category is smaller. LatePost: Are there other categories as big as sparkling water? Tang Binsen: Mineral water and milk. In the internet era, there was a mindset: if an email service doesn't support large attachments, you make one that does; if a chat software lags, you make one that doesn't. I call this approach "gimme questions." Mineral water is not a gimme question; its technology is already mature. Our company has a project list: first, we look at market size; second, whether the ingredient list can be better than others. Genki Forest's share in the carbonated beverage market is still low, so there's room for growth, and categories as big as sparkling water will emerge. Milk has high barriers, but we have opportunities; we need the best milk and factories. We're building factories and pastures one by one. LatePost: Have you found a unified approach or formula to replicate the success of sparkling water? Tang Binsen: It's simply daring to use good ingredients that competitors don't dare to use. For a food and beverage company to cater to consumers' taste, adding sugar is the cheapest way, while adding sweeteners (sugar substitutes) is more expensive. Some sweeteners like aspartame are cheap but taste bad. Four years ago, we seized an opportunity by being the first to use the best sugar substitute, erythritol, which is 30-40 times more expensive than aspartame. We were the first to dare to use such a good sugar substitute for Chinese consumers. We also used the most "gas," so our sparkling water has a strong fizz. But this can easily cause explosions during production, leading to a 5% loss rate. At the time, R&D saw our gross margin was only 10 points and said the boss wouldn't last three years. Then he resigned. LatePost: But Genki Forest's milk tea uses crystalline fructose. Is that the best ingredient you can offer consumers? Tang Binsen: Milk tea is a difficult product. If we reduce sugar, people will think it doesn't taste good; using erythritol makes it worse. We had no choice but to add a bit of fructose. You say I'm sweet, but look how sweet others are. Many milk teas have long ingredient lists, with internal costs of only 0.5 yuan, and can sell 10 billion yuan a year. China is full of such products. LatePost: You can't say a product is good just because it's better than a very bad one. Tang Binsen: So we correct our mistakes. Milk tea produced after April this year has removed crystalline fructose entirely. The Chinese market needs good products. Many companies rely on strong channel building; as long as they have goods, they throw them into channels, and consumers have few choices. But now information is symmetrical and channels are flat, so products have opportunities. This also happened in the gaming industry. Genki Forest initially changed three waves of people, all beverage industry professionals with many rules. Later, I simply found some young game developers and said, "Don't discuss costs with me; just make a product you want to drink." We have a principle: before a product launches, ten people around us must each buy a case; if they do, the product is reliable. Last year, we voluntarily took a product off the market—fruit tea. I told the team, "It's selling a bit now because we have channels. But we can't do that." LatePost: I heard Genki Forest is like a game company internally, with many teams racing, and only those with good data get resources. Tang Binsen: I believe good and bad are not subjective but relative—it's about picking one in a hundred or one in a thousand. So Genki's product philosophy is not to say whether it's good or bad, but how many times you've tried. Some departments have trial-and-error budgets of tens of millions a year, testing flavors and packaging, and finally choosing the one with the best data. Game companies are particularly tolerant of trial and error because failure is normal in this industry. Traditional companies want to improve product success rates; we admit we don't know the future, so we lower the cost of each trial—these are two different worlds. LatePost: How do you use mechanisms to make employees feel the company is willing to bear more trial costs? Tang Binsen: We don't encourage employees to do things with short-term effects; rewards are retrospective. For example, this year we gave the Ran Tea team an award called "Product Changed the Company's Fate," rewarding the entire team with company shares. LatePost: How much of the methodology from your previous game company,智明星通 (Elex), is reused in Genki Forest? Tang Binsen: I've said before: learn strategy from secondary market investors, management from "pirates," and products from game companies. Buffett can make gains by just thinking, so the people who think most clearly about strategy are those in the secondary market. Many companies look well-managed, but it's actually because their business is awesome. If a company isn't making money or isn't awesome but still leads the team well, that's a pirate—working hard, doing dirty and tiring work. In product capability, game companies are very strong; they release many products each year, and if one doesn't catch on, they die. Many internet companies appear to have strong product capabilities, but they only need to release one product and spend the rest of the time maintaining it. LatePost: You imitate game companies in products. In channels and marketing, what did you do right? Tang Binsen: Previously, convenience stores and mom-and-pop shops rarely took on new products because many new brands failed, making these shops lose money. For channels, we passed one level at a time, accepting the rules. In the first year, I told the team to first do well with the small shops downstairs. The second stage was gaining recognition from peripheral convenience stores, then entering mainstream convenience stores. The third stage was building a nationwide ground promotion team to enter mom-and-pop shops, and finally the lower-tier market. It's a long process. Now we have 6,000 people including distributors, covering 800,000 terminals, with 10% being convenience stores. LatePost: It seems Genki Forest's success path is no different from traditional consumer goods companies—big stars, big ads, big channels. Tang Binsen: Last year, we only did one Focus Media (ad), one Bilibili (gala), and sponsored three programs on Hunan TV. We hope that for our users, the proportion of advertising and channel costs in what they consume is the lowest. LatePost: But you advertise heavily. Tang Binsen: Advertising is to compete head-on with rivals. In China, if you don't make key efforts at key times, you'll miss opportunities. LatePost: How do you penetrate with ads? Tang Binsen: We spent the same amount on the Bilibili gala as some sponsors, but do you remember their ads? No. We sponsored the best program of that day, and only promoted one product—sparkling water. The team opposed it at the time, but I didn't think it was a big deal; spending more or less isn't the main issue. LatePost: You always sound like you have deep pockets. Tang Binsen: It's all lessons. When we were the first game company to release a farm game in the US, we didn't dare spend money. Our competitor Zynga lost $10 million a month, spending like crazy, reaching 50 million daily active users. Twelve months later, they went public with a $10 billion market cap. Later, I concluded that every seven years in life, you get a straight flush; if you don't go all in, you're done. LatePost: Why seven years? Tang Binsen: If you have good cards every year, then the cards aren't good enough. If you have opportunities every day, they're not opportunities. LatePost: What are some things Nongfu Spring would do but you wouldn't? Tang Binsen: We develop our own smart freezers that remind salespeople to restock without going to the site. Nongfu hasn't done this. LatePost: Coca-Cola had only one product for a long time. Why does Genki Forest make so many products? Comparing to game companies, Supercell doesn't win by betting on probability with many products. Tang Binsen: If you've read the book "Creative Company," you'll understand that the products users see as excellent are the result of many internal failures. If I throw a bad product into the market, that's not trial and error. Trial and error is trying many directions and constantly starting over. LatePost: Now competitors have also replaced aspartame with erythritol in sparkling water. Where is your competitiveness? Tang Binsen: We upgrade every six months. We've removed common preservatives like sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate from all our sparkling water. And reducing sugar is a global trend; we'll continue to reduce. Besides erythritol, there are steviol glycosides, monk fruit sugar, and other substitutes for product iteration. But these are more expensive. LatePost: Erythritol prices are rising fast. Will you go upstream to control raw materials? Tang Binsen: That's not something for the boss to think about. I only solve big problems, like building factories. In March this year, an international giant cut off our supply chain by pressuring our contract manufacturers to stop cooperation immediately. Our channels also faced challenges. When we were small, we wouldn't encounter such things, but after growing, we will. So we need to build our own factories. We'll build even more beautiful factories, ones that can be tourist attractions with tickets. LatePost: This contradicts your theory from gaming days. You once said the best business is to use a very thin product to hit the global market, not a heavy product for verticals. Tang Binsen: Previously thin, now heavy, because times have changed and industries differ. Why build factories? Because we want to shorten ingredient lists and make preservative-free sparkling water, but domestic factories can't do it, so we have to do it ourselves. At the time, the production team said there were two options for building a factory; one cost twice as much but allowed aseptic production. I asked what aseptic production meant, and they said sparkling water could be made without preservatives. I said, "No need to discuss; we'll take that." Because there are no preservatives, we have to ensure the bottle caps are hard to open. Many consumers complained, so we introduced a bottle cap technology from Germany to solve this. Just improving one production line cost over 20 million yuan, and each upgrade requires significant investment. Supply chain building is a slow process, but not difficult; it's just about spending money. LatePost: You were initially an investor in Genki Forest, not the founder. What made you decide to take over? Tang Binsen: After three changes of people, I couldn't find anyone to take over. At that time, good entrepreneurs were all doing P2P or O2O. That was my worst time; at the worst, I put a lot of my own money in. LatePost: "Put" money. Tang Binsen: Yes. Our first product cost 5 million yuan. I invited a friend to try it, and he took one sip and stopped. Sales suggested selling the stock in lower-tier markets. I said that would ruin our future brand. In the end, we spent 1 million yuan to destroy it, and those beverage experts left too. For the second group, I proposed full employee stock ownership with low base salary and high performance pay, and they left as well. At that time, COK (Clash of Kings, a game under Elex) was making a lot of money, and everyone thought, "Old Tang, why are you doing beverages?" They kept asking, "Are you still doing it?" I said I would be the last to give up. In 2016, I took over Genki Forest myself, also to show my determination to make it work. LatePost: In 2014, at 32, you sold Elex. Why? Today, the rise of new-generation game companies like miHoYo proves there's still huge space in this field. Tang Binsen: They love games; I don't. I just hope China can be strong. I don't play games either. Making games every day is like being in prison, and I even made money from it. LatePost: You don't love games but made so much money. Did you feel good inside? Tang Binsen: No. The year I sold the company, we were third in China's gaming industry. I was conflicted, but later I figured it out: when making major life decisions, you can't calculate accounts; it makes you small-minded. Think about what you want to do in the next 20 years, even if it doesn't make money. I definitely didn't want to do games. The company sold for 2.7 billion yuan, and friends thought I sold at a loss. Because the profit was 150 million that year, and after selling, profits multiplied seven times. LatePost: That means the buyer managed the company better than you. Tang Binsen: Our business foundation was solid, and the team was stable. In 2008, we were the first to take games overseas. But by 2014, overseas games were all Chinese companies. I proved that Chinese people could succeed in this track; the mission was accomplished, and I felt it was no longer interesting. LatePost: It sounds like your criteria for ending or starting something is whether Chinese people have succeeded in that track. Games, and now consumer goods. Tang Binsen: To understand a person, look at how they earned their first pot of gold. My first pot was in 2004 as a graduate student at Beihang University, winning first place in an overseas programming competition, beating foreigners, and earning 250,000 euros. The competition was at the 3GSM exhibition in France. We were a Chinese team, with no one to turn to. Then we saw Huawei's booth; they were the only Chinese company at the exhibition. Do you know the feeling of finding family? We even ran to the Huawei team and said, "We're Chinese too." So Genki Forest later had a brand label: "China can be strong." LatePost: You're a serial entrepreneur. What do you think you're good at and not good at? You also tried a cloud computing platform but failed. Tang Binsen: There's no such thing as good or bad at something; it's all fate. At thirty, you should try and explore. At forty, you should find and focus on what you love. But in the end, you'll find it's fate. Whether the business you're in is good determines who's awesome. The three largest internet companies in China, South Korea, and Russia were all search engines, social media, and e-commerce. Some people are "fifty and established, forty and unconfused, thirty and know fate"—that's foolish; more people are "thirty and unconfused, forty and established," which is also wrong. The rhythm can't be wrong. Many internet tycoons stumbled upon big opportunities without thinking much. But we really need to find opportunities, so we keep starting businesses and searching for answers. This is called "nomadic." LatePost: Don't you want to find a fertile market? Tang Binsen: That's why I came to beverages. LatePost: Is it because it's a big business rather than a sense of mission? Tang Binsen: In 2014, I founded Challenger Capital with the mission: "China can be strong, challenge giants, invest in good products, believe in young people." "China can be strong" means if no Chinese company is in the top ten of an industry, we should invest; "challenge giants" means I think there's nothing new in the world; we should work on old businesses. Based on this logic, we selected many industries. I think many companies must think clearly about strategy. I believe Chinese people are awesome, so I want to compete with foreigners. Buffett said, if you want to be champion, never sit at the same table as the world champion. I think the best table is competing with foreign companies, not local ones, because local companies are all awesome. I also invested in a company called Tiger Brokers. The founder wanted to make stock trading software. I said if you're going to do it, do a big business; if you're going to do it, do a securities company. If your opponent is a $100 billion company, you're awesome; if it's a $100 million company, it's useless. LatePost: People often say you have a strong achievement motive. When doing something, you often think not about how valuable it is, but how to win and win big. Tang Binsen: To create value, you must win. If a person doesn't win battles, they can't create great value. Scholars are awesome, bandits are awesome, but the most awesome are those who integrate scholars and bandits. So winning is important. LatePost: Are you a scholar or a bandit? Tang Binsen: I'm the one who integrates scholars and bandits. LatePost: A big gambler who wins big. Tang Binsen: Big gambling and big winning is a result; the key is sustained tenacity. Our company has a culture: a game without a final boss is not a good game. Whether something is awesome depends on how many times you want to give up; the more you want to give up, the more awesome it is. LatePost: How many times have you thought about giving up Genki Forest? Tang Binsen: Many times. LatePost: What happened between thinking the industry was good and settling down to make good products? Tang Binsen: Because I saw that most well-done consumer companies in the Chinese market are foreign. I wanted to make a good beverage worthy of hardworking Chinese people, just as America has Coca-Cola and Switzerland has Nestlé. LatePost: Some think Genki Forest initially leaned on a Japanese brand, which was borrowing momentum and also a brand failure, because today Chinese consumers are more willing to pay for made-in-China. Tang Binsen: We actually set up a Japanese company with over a dozen people doing R&D. After a year, we felt it would cause problems and told the team to stop. So we later emphasized the characters "燃" (burn) and "気" (ki). We want to sell whiskey with big Chinese characters to the world like Japan's Suntory. LatePost: But that "気" is Japanese. Tang Binsen: All Asian culture is deeply influenced by Chinese culture; you can't strictly define it as Japanese or Chinese characters. LatePost: Brand core is important in consumer goods. Coca-Cola has emphasized the word "enjoy" for decades. What is Genki Forest's brand core? Tang Binsen: "Plainness is truth." We want to be a plain companion to consumers. I once wanted to shoot an ad: others send you 999 roses, but I accompany you to leave work on time, never leaving. We want to provide more people with more affordable, high-quality beautiful life. LatePost: Today, building a food and beverage empire, compared to old foreign giants, what different path will you take? Tang Binsen: We don't build; we solve problems. In the process of solving problems, the map gradually becomes clear. Does hard work help? LatePost: What kind of company will Genki Forest ultimately be? Tang Binsen: A company that solves problems. If a problem is already well solved by existing companies, doing it is meaningless; it's taking someone else's cake. The world doesn't reward companies that take others' cake. The entire human information system constantly encourages behavior that is better for humanity. LatePost: What is the ultimate problem humanity needs to solve? Tang Binsen: The ultimate problem of humanity has nothing to do with me; I can't solve it, and I'm not at that level. But one thing I believe: the beverage market will never outrun games; physical consumption growth will always lag behind virtual in the long run. Products that meet higher-order needs will become increasingly important, while products meeting basic needs will account for a decreasing share of GDP. Games are the ultimate direction for humanity. The past 100 years have been a history of moving real things to the virtual world. Don't you think realizing oneself in the real world consumes too much environmental resources? Games allow people to realize themselves in the virtual world, which is environmentally friendly and efficient. I don't play games, but I like the underlying things, like IP. IP and brands are similar. In the future, Genki Forest may join forces with game companies I've invested in to develop IP; otherwise, we'll miss the boat again. LatePost: Under what circumstances would Genki Forest be eliminated by the market? Tang Binsen: Elimination is inevitable. Only when new young companies and young people keep appearing does the industry have a future. As a leading company, the best strategy to make the industry better is to die yourself. If you don't die and survive as an old company, the industry has no future. LatePost: Some say Genki Forest's internal employee incentives are like pirates—not based on seniority but on merit. Good performance gets options; poor OKR completion directly deducts options. Tang Binsen: I naturally like pirate-like teams. One of Genki Forest's basic laws is: don't let honest people suffer, be harsh on bad people, and don't be egalitarian with excellent people. My personal stake in Genki is no more than 50%; investors have over ten points, 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, but have a pirate feel. That is, everyone is equal and simple; a group of loyal people do something meaningful. We can't have too many rules that distance people; we should be more sincere and simple. LatePost: Your colleagues say you send hundreds of thousands of yuan in red envelopes on WeChat every year. Tang Binsen: I often do value Q&As, and whoever answers correctly gets a red envelope. For example, I ask, "Does this action violate which of our company's sayings?" LatePost: Give an example. Tang Binsen: "Communication problems mean both are fools"; "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 enter, but you get slaughtered when you leave. LatePost: Genki Forest now has several thousand people. Have you thought about how to manage tens of thousands? Tang Binsen: With tens of thousands, managing the product team is most important. Management becomes simpler with systematization; compared to that, finding the core problem is hard. What problem does the company exist to solve? If you haven't figured that out, even if all your tactics are right, your strategy is wrong. LatePost: How much money do you manage? Tang Binsen: Few approvals come to me. LatePost: Under what circumstances do you compromise? Tang Binsen: I delegate in most cases, so I rarely compromise. LatePost: When do you take back power? Tang Binsen: At key moments when others don't dare make decisions. There's a kind of decision where if you make it right, people never feel the value of being right. Another kind is when problems arise, it's definitely because you didn't do this thing. LatePost: Several early executives left Genki Forest to start beverage companies. How do you view this? Tang Binsen: I'm used to it; I wish them well. One executive who left sent me a box of Moutai last year. I said no need, but he insisted, so I took it; it would be rude to return it. Think about it: an excellent company won't let excellent people leave. If a bunch of bad people leave, it shows the company is awesome. If all the talents leave, it shows the company is stupid. LatePost: You also hired an executive who left ByteDance. Does that mean ByteDance is awesome or stupid? Tang Binsen: I hired this person because they love products, have love, and don't worry about money, so they can make products. LatePost: An investor wants to ask: why are the terms for investors so harsh when Genki Forest raises funds? You're also an investor; would you want to be treated that way by entrepreneurs? Tang Binsen: Does that investor want to invest? LatePost: He wants to. Tang Binsen: Then that's it. I didn't force you. At that time, we set the valuation, and they were all scrambling. Let them scramble; I said whoever comes gets it. I didn't raise the price; I just created that atmosphere, and everyone rushed in. LatePost: What projects does Genki Forest do itself, and what does Challenger Capital invest in? Tang Binsen: Challenger doesn't do what Genki can do; Challenger does what Genki can't solve. LatePost: Like baijiu? Tang Binsen: Baijiu and beer, Genki is also doing; the boundary is still unclear. Alcohol can't be rushed. Look at the consumer goods that survive in China; they're all state-owned because they're slow. We recently invested in a British children's food company and bought an Australian oat milk. Our philosophy is to serve the global market with the world's best products. LatePost: How do you choose CEOs for acquired consumer brands? Tang Binsen: Looking at whether a founder has made money is the simplest and most direct way to prove their ability. Once, Shen Nanpeng (founder of Sequoia China) asked me, "Is the '活力二八' project good?" I said, "The boss made 20 million from his own startup; you decide." LatePost: I heard you often make bets. In March 2019, you bet with an investor on whether Pinduoduo would succeed. Tang Binsen: At that time, I made two bets: one on Luckin Coffee and one on Pinduoduo. I bet both would fail. In the end, Pinduoduo lost, and Luckin won, so they offset each other. (Here, the WeChat chat interface of the bet is shown.) The book "Counterforce" tells a story: no one thought the Lebanese war would last over a decade; everyone thought it would end in a year. But in hindsight, everyone thinks it lasted at least 10 years. The benefit of betting is that it makes you remember your decision at the time. I also like writing diaries to see how stupid my decisions were. LatePost: What are you good at betting on? Tang Binsen: Cognition. So when I bet within my own company, I basically always win. For example, I said to raise the price of beverages; colleagues said it would affect sales. I said, "Try it and see if it does." LatePost: Why weren't you optimistic about Pinduoduo at the time? Tang Binsen: I've reflected. I applied my product logic to understand platforms—that was wrong. Product companies can't burn money; if users truly love your product, you shouldn't lose money. So I thought Pinduoduo's subsidies were too much, maybe because the platform wasn't good. I didn't expect that by subsidizing, it became a platform. Platforms must be rewarded because they improve efficiency; that's a different story from product companies. LatePost: Besides writing diaries, I heard you've watched the "News Broadcast" (Xinwen Lianbo) every day for decades. Tang Binsen: I used to watch daily, but now I'm too busy, so I watch weekly, fast-forwarding through seven days in 20 minutes. Do you know how? On Xiaomi TV, go to video hotspots, click in, and there's a "News Broadcast" channel with replays. LatePost: What makes you stop? Tang Binsen: When they talk about building projects, roads, or poverty alleviation. I've loved watching since childhood, seeing the country's positive changes every day. LatePost: You loved watching "News Broadcast" as a child. What was your dream then? Tang Binsen: I wanted to be the mayor of Hefei, but I didn't succeed in joining the Party. In high school, I was class monitor but got removed because I told the homeroom teacher, "Your (math) solution has a problem." The teacher was stunned and asked what was going on. LatePost: If you were the mayor of Hefei, would you invest in NIO? Tang Binsen: I don't know. Maybe in that system, I'd think differently. People's values are formed in childhood, so I can tell someone's era by listening to them sing. LatePost: You were born in 1982. Your friends say you love singing "在水一方" (On the Water Side). What era are you from? Tang Binsen: I'm the same generation as Ren Zhengfei. Because I grew up with my grandparents; my grandmother sang Teresa Teng's songs, and my grandfather sang "歌唱祖国" (Ode to the Motherland). I cry when I hear "Ode to the Motherland," you know? I also love singing "女儿国" (Kingdom of Women). I think Tang Seng could pass other trials, but the hardest is the Kingdom of Women. I often say a boss must have heart strength, not just brain power. So I think Tang Seng is the best CEO. LatePost: You've said many times you admire Huawei. What do you admire most? Tang Binsen: I think Ren Zhengfei is someone who explains basic principles in plain language. When I was in college, I wanted to ask the school why they didn't teach Java or PHP but kept talking about computer systems. I thought, what's there to talk about? It doesn't solve problems. I wanted to write code and make websites; I even wanted to sign up for a website crash course. Later, I understood: some things change. Today you need Java, tomorrow PHP, and in two years something else; those aren't worth learning. What's truly valuable are the basics—systems, languages, math. The same goes for business. Ren Zhengfei is right: there's no big secret; if you grind tofu well, people will buy it. There's a business school model that sells courses to make money, tempting people to take shortcuts. But truly awesome educational institutions like Harvard and Yale teach first principles; they expect students to donate, so they must find ways to educate students well. LatePost: But you also attended China Europe International Business School and Hupan College. Tang Binsen: I had nothing to do then. I never thought classes were important; I went to make friends. LatePost: Who do you consider a friend? Tang Binsen: Once at CEIBS, I told new students there are four principles for business school: First, don't face opportunities; face future trends. Second, don't make business partners; make soul friends. Many people go to business school to do business, and such people get worse. I think a CEO is lonely and needs people to drink and chat with. Third, don't just look for changing things; look for unchanging things. LatePost: Well summarized, but that's Bezos's quote. Tang Binsen: I don't mind quoting. I like studying what people who've made money say. Bezos, Jobs, Buffett—I don't trust others. LatePost: You often use two words: "awesome" and "stupid" to describe many things. Why? Tang Binsen: Simple and direct. LatePost: Is there a middle state? Tang Binsen: Does the middle state matter? I'm mostly like that myself, occasionally awesome, occasionally stupid. Are you "watching" me?