Moonton Co-founder 袁菁 on Life After a $4B Sale

Summary

• In 2021, 袁菁 sold Moonton to ByteDance for more than $4B, and after leaving in 2024, he founded game company Pilot without hesitation, saying he wants to work for another 40 years, until he is 80. The motivation comes from “On Old Age” in Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack: “Wisdom is the weapon people keep accumulating as they continue to grow, even into old age.” He has made “wisdom” the anchor of his life, linking “what I enjoy doing now” with “what can still make me shine in old age”: “Once you can connect the two, why wouldn’t you do it for 40 years?”
• MLBB’s decisive move was a total all-in: after its first game, Magic Rush, became profitable in year two and the company reached a valuation of RMB1B, he put all the cash on the balance sheet into MLBB, taking on Honor of Kings overseas, published by Garena/Sea, and Riot’s League of Legends: Wild Rift. “The opportunity was too good, so we went all in. Once you’ve gone all in, you have no choice but to enter extremely brutal commercial competition.”
• His postmortem on competing with giants: giants are not scary—the resources they truly commit to competing with you are only a small part of the company’s total, and internal interests pull them in different directions. “You’re fighting for your life; everyone at the company has their life in this.” “There are advantages to being big, and advantages to being small. Small is a form of strength.” In the legal fight, he represented himself and got Riot’s lawsuits dismissed twice in California courts, reversing his conclusion: “Because there is a legal system, I’m actually less afraid of giants.”
• Selling the company was not his decision: his partners and investors wanted to exit, held larger stakes, and “this was a commercial decision.” His choice was only whether to stay, and he stayed for the full 10 years before leaving in 2024. The most exhilarating moment of his life was not the acquisition, but the day the first game reached $10M in revenue and he calculated that the company could bring in roughly RMB1M in cash a day at its peak: “Holy shit, was this profitable?”
• Pilot’s business model is a form of long-termism built around “losing as little money as possible”: personal assets generate investment income as ongoing ammunition, while project approval is set at “if it can support itself, we greenlight it,” below the industry’s usual 2x return threshold, with potential hits providing upside. “The content industry is suited to the long term; it is not a short, intensely competitive market.” Five years from now, success simply means “this structure survives as a model, with its basic shape intact.”
• On AI, “I choose not to be anxious”: he does not see himself as technically oriented and instead positions himself as a user—“make it the most important weapon in your arsenal”—with the goal of upgrading his understanding rather than merely learning to operate tools. He is arranging a conversation with one of the founders of “Deep Think” (likely DeepSeek, judging by the quantitative-fund background) and plans to invest in their quantitative fund.
• His read on the era: a slowing economy is making the exam-to-big-tech single-track path more zero-sum and more intensely competitive—“if one person’s ranking rises, someone else’s must fall.” The way out is to “do useless things,” taking Japan as a reference: economic stagnation gave rise to subcultures and finely segmented industries. “Why not choose some other peaks?” Find work that creates a positive feedback loop and puts you in flow.

Deep dive

1. Opening portrait: Plenty have achieved financial freedom; few are this free

• Host 荣慧 introduces 袁菁 (Justin), co-founder and CEO of Moonton Technology. ByteDance acquired the company in 2021 for more than $4B. “By any standard, Justin has achieved financial freedom.” Yet he immediately started over, founding new game company Pilot and saying, “I still want to work for another 40 years, until I’m 80.”
• 荣慧’s personal angle: she met this “talkative guy who always insisted on picking up the check” over hotpot on 静贤路 in Shanghai last summer. It took another 2-3 months to realize that he had sold a company for several billion dollars and appeared on the Hurun rankings.
• 袁菁’s own résumé: born in 1980, he joined Shanda in 2002, then moved to Tencent. He left in 2014 to start Moonton and departed last year after exactly 10 years. Its flagship MLBB (Mobile Legends: Bang Bang) is “one of the Chinese-developed games with the largest overseas user bases,” and a national game in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and elsewhere.

2. A typical day now: Packed in 30-minute blocks by day, mostly off work at night

• He schedules the following week in advance: some days at the office, some days at home, and some days meeting friends or working out on 静贤路. “I generally don’t work at night.” Evenings are for socializing and life outside work, and he switches quickly between day and night. This was not a post-retirement condition: even at Moonton, he scheduled 6-7 half-hour appointments during the day and still “enjoyed his own time” at night.

3. The SARS-era GM years: Online games are not creation; they are internet services

• He joined Shanda in 2002. During the 2003 SARS outbreak in Shanghai, he worked 12-hour rotating shifts on the Legend of Mir and Bubble堂 teams: “When users are there, you have to take customer-service calls.” In player slang, GMs, or Game Masters, had “a strong sense of authority” and were called “gods.” Some players messaged him privately asking to meet offline. “We obviously couldn’t respond, because we were acting in a professional capacity.”
• His characterization of that period: it was not game creation. “You were really an internet service provider. Your schedule had to follow your users and your product.” The games business is even more intense than big tech—“you can imagine something more intense.” The only difference in entrepreneurship is that you are grinding for yourself: “You’re constantly thinking, what else can I do for my own company?”

4. “I’m not a grinder. I’ve always been exceptionally lazy”—without a challenge, his mind wanders

• Looking back on his youth, he offers a rare confession: during his first 2 jobs at Shanda, “I always felt my bosses were dissatisfied with me.” Raised in a system of advanced classes and competition prizes, he initially blamed his laziness on “not being satisfied with myself enough, and not being recognized by my leaders.” Years later, he revised the diagnosis: “I seem unwilling to do things that I find intellectually unexciting.” If he could not find the right method or found something boring, “I wanted to go online and look at something else.”
• The turning point was acceptance: “For many years afterward, I accepted that this was who I was—and I actually liked being this way.” Without a challenge, his mind wanders. “I’d rather just enjoy life.” That ultimately became a source of motivation for his own growth.

5. The most exciting moment was not the acquisition, but the day cash income hit RMB1M

• Asked how he felt when the company was acquired, he rewrote the question. The real milestone was when the first game reached $10M in revenue. He ran the numbers on the revenue split: “On a good day, RMB1M in cash would come in… Holy shit, was this profitable?” Employees focus on monthly paychecks, arguing over bonuses and whether their raise beat someone else’s. “But that moment seemed to set you free.”
• The freedom was tangible: he and his partners took business partners to dinner. “Let’s go to 万岛, the Japanese buffet—we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want.” That was “such a rush.” He had assumed the script was to work up to department manager and stay there until 60. “Then one day in your 30s, you realize you don’t have to live that way.”
• As for the acquisition day: “I probably had a feeling that this should be the high point of my career.” But that was more an intellectual recognition than an emotional peak. “You have to recognize it as a landmark moment across all dimensions of your life.”

6. The games business has 2 faces: The lowest odds of success, the fastest explosion

• His structural read on the industry: online games have an “extremely, extremely low probability of success, basically the lowest of all entrepreneurial categories,” but achievements arrive exceptionally fast and explosively. A former colleague’s first game, 托塔传奇, is the example: Lilith made it the No. 1 game in China. “They were only 27 when they became famous. This industry produces that kind of miracle effect.”
• Moonton was similar. Once its first game was complete, an A-share company approached with a proposed acquisition price of RMB1B. In theory, he could have sold the company in his second year as a founder.

7. Low ego, and entrepreneurship is not a one-shot bet

• He summarizes the team’s style: “First, we had relatively low ego. Second, we didn’t treat entrepreneurship as a one-shot deal.” Unlike the mass-entrepreneurship era, he and his partners had already bought homes and cars in Shanghai before starting. “Even if we didn’t make money for several years, our families would still be fine.” Entrepreneurship meant “reducing pressure as much as possible and not letting pressure distort our actions.”
• The method was to accumulate before acting: “First accumulate personal wealth, then accumulate professional capability… and pursue one successful outcome.” They benefited from the double tailwind of mobile internet and overseas expansion. “Luck, the era and our choices accounted for a large part of it.” His own contribution was to “stack more conditions around an extremely difficult, uncertain undertaking.”
• The company followed the barrel principle: the shortest stave determines the barrel, so every stave had to grow. Apart from 1-2 years of slower growth, “we were actually growing every year” across the decade.

8. Going overseas from day one: Only by avoiding channel control can you hold your lifeline

• Before founding Moonton, he and his partners had built 部落守卫战 at Tencent. It often ranked No. 1 on QQ, and its mobile version reached the top 5 on the iOS grossing chart. Because their wireless business unit did not use WeChat traffic, “we distributed it ourselves.” The team had strong autonomy.
• The logic behind going overseas: at the time, China was an ecosystem where “traffic was king and channels were king,” with 360 and Xiaomi controlling game distribution. “If you’re a product company and traffic guides you from day one, you may never build your own competitive edge or control your lifeline.” Overseas, Google Play and Apple were open platforms, while Google and Facebook were major advertisers. “Your revenue and your traffic are both free. To survive, you just need to capture a share of users”—a better ecosystem for consumer product companies.
• He traces his record of judgment from the free-to-play model that was relatively pioneering in China during the PC MMO and Bubble堂 era, to Tencent’s shift toward web and mobile games, and then to overseas expansion. “It wasn’t just one correct macro judgment. It was several.”

9. Where judgment comes from: A sense of danger, history and a 3-point framework

• The starting point was self-doubt: “For a long time, I didn’t really value myself that much.” When you do not think your accumulated experience matters, “you develop a sense of danger,” and keep watching the outside world. He also reads extensively and studies history. Patterns in film and television can reveal patterns in games. After benefiting from several industry cycles, he formed a principle: “No industry stays in bloom for 100 days. You have to keep bringing new things in.” This time, he is “basically not doing the old tracks.”
• In retrospect, he had unconsciously hit the framework laid out in a strategy article: reset and assess market space, conduct a pragmatic inventory of your own accumulated strengths—“no matter how good the opportunity is, it has nothing to do with you if you have no relevant capability”—and identify competitors and their supply. “If you understand all 3 clearly, you will probably make a high-quality directional decision.” The prerequisite is mindset: “First, don’t think too much about yourself.” The less confident you are, the more carefully you check whether you deserve the opportunity.

10. Living through multiple cycles: What rises fast can fall just as fast

• He runs through the evolution of China’s games industry: imported Korean MMOs, domestic development and monetization reform—from charging RMB0.4 per hour to item-based payments—then web games, mobile games, overseas expansion and richer content experiences on mobile. In every wave, “games develop first because games are closest to monetization.” Other categories need VCs to subsidize user habits; games can charge as soon as they are made.
• He has seen every kind of rise and fall. “The king of one era may fade into obscurity in the next.” Among the first generation of Nasdaq-listed companies, some remain durable while others “aren’t doing so well now.” Web-game founders also became “quite a poignant sight.” His conclusion: “In 20 years, I’ve seen too much. It feels like I’ve lived several lives.”
• Having watched a friend’s company become an overnight hit and suddenly attract calls from everyone, he took a more detached view when it happened to him: “These things don’t come entirely from you. It’s just that your company and product happened to be the hit of that era.” He has always maintained “an observer’s perspective” on what was happening to him.

11. All in on MLBB: Putting every dollar of cash behind a direct fight with the world’s strongest rivals

• When Magic Rush took off in its second year and the company reached a valuation of RMB1B, he made the most aggressive decision: “When we were making MLBB, I put every dollar the company had into it. It was also a gamble.” The rivals were top-tier: Honor of Kings overseas, distributed in Southeast Asia by Garena, the core business of Sea, the “Tencent of Southeast Asia,” and Riot’s League of Legends: Wild Rift. “We were going head-to-head with the strongest competitors in the world in the largest segment of mobile games.”
• The basis for the bet was data, not bravado. The first version took only a few months to develop, and its retention and user metrics were strong when it launched overseas. The size of the MOBA category on PC provided another signal. The biggest unknown was whether overseas mobile MOBA users would pay; at the time, user acquisition was primarily funded through losses. He deliberately demystifies the story: “The opportunity was too good, so we went all in. Once you’ve gone all in, you have no choice but to enter extremely brutal commercial competition.” For a long time, the goal was financial freedom, not mythmaking.

12. The legal war: Leaving instructions for family, planning an escape island, then beating Riot twice

• The darkest detail came a few months before his child was born. He, his partners and investors agreed on an order of succession: “If one of us loses personal freedom, the people left behind have to keep the company running and take care of the family.” They prepared a pessimistic Plan B: “If it really doesn’t work, we’ll run to an island somewhere in Southeast Asia and keep making games.” At its worst, “normal operations at the company were affected.” He also acknowledged that being small magnified their fears: “With the benefit of hindsight, it may not have been that dangerous.”
• The case against Riot in the US became a “second startup.” Lawyers warned that it could easily cost tens of millions of dollars and were pessimistic at first. The company did not even have dedicated legal staff. “I fought those cases myself.” He worked through jurisdiction, the first and second hearings, piece by piece, learning the law and finding arguments. The result: Riot’s lawsuits were dismissed twice in California courts in succession. “I think I could be a part-time lawyer now.”
• The unexpected conclusion was positive: “I actually came away more confident in China’s legal system—or legal systems around the world… Because there is a legal system, I’m actually less afraid of giants and more willing to use the law to defend commercial competition.” That became one of the sources of confidence for starting over.

13. Looking back on fighting giants: Small is a form of strength

• What did they get right? The first point was a reversal in perception: “Giants are not scary.” The resources a giant actually devotes to competing with you may be only a small fraction of its total. “But who are you? You’re fighting for your life. Everyone at the company has their life in this. You’re all in.” Giants have other interests and departments pulling them in different directions, so “they can’t fight you with complete focus.”
• That became an organizational philosophy: “There are advantages to being big, and advantages to being small. Small is a form of strength. You have to use it flexibly.” Moonton approached 2,000 employees at its peak, but he is proud that it “remained in a quasi-startup state.” With Pilot, he again wants to use the power of being small. “I don’t like everyone in an organization becoming a machine or a cog in its mechanism.”

14. Why sell: The decision was not mine

• He describes the actual mechanics without drama: “My partners and investors wanted to exit. Their combined stakes were larger, and in business you have to respect that when making decisions. It was a commercial decision. Whether to sell was not up to me.” His personal choice was whether to keep working on the company. He chose to stay until 2024, completing 10 years.
• On the ego of wanting to build a large company, he redefined the premise: “The greatest game company, in my view, is Nintendo.” It may not have the highest market cap. “Greatness is not about being No. 1 in market cap or profit. It is about its philosophy and contribution to the industry.” The series of commercial confrontations with Tencent and Riot later became a major source of self-confidence and internal coherence.

15. The 3-stage mission: From making money to 1B users to helping game talent flourish

• The first mission was unusually candid. At a Hupan class in 2018–19, when asked about mission, vision and values, he said: “We want to make money. The higher the profit per employee, the better, because profit per employee represents capability.” People pushed back: “How can you have no mission?” The challenge came when business stalled and some employees left. “I started interrogating myself: Holy shit, isn’t this a sign that a company is declining?” Employees asked what kind of company the 2 founders wanted to build. “You couldn’t withstand that question.”
• The second mission was excavated from the company’s own DNA: “Serve 1B users globally and let them experience the joy of games.” The evidence was behavior, not a slogan. Southeast Asia had a relatively poor gaming ecosystem, and “a Southeast Asian user might pay one-twentieth of what a user in Japan or the US pays. But did we treat them differently? No.” The bigger measure was where users needed you more, not where they were worth more. For many users, MLBB was “the first game of their lives.”
• The third is Pilot’s proposition: “I want to build a commercial company for game makers… People with talent should be able to flourish. My mission is to help the next generation of game talent flourish.” He stresses that he dislikes overly dramatic, story-driven narratives. The mission emerged through a step-by-step internal interrogation. “It wasn’t a natural sense of mission that I had from the beginning.”

16. Munger’s “On Old Age”: Wisdom is the anchor, so 40 years is not perseverance

• He first corrected the premise: “It’s not perseverance. The word perseverance implies suffering, so I don’t persevere.” If doing something is joyful, “you just keep being happy doing it.” He initially told the team they would work together for 5 years, then changed it to 10. The reason was simple: “Because I enjoy it. I’m always afraid of making promises I can’t keep, so I try to express myself precisely and not mislead people.”
• The real source was Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack and its essay “On Old Age”: “Wisdom is the weapon people keep accumulating as they continue to grow, even into old age.” “I read that and slapped the table in delight.” He had feared death and old age as an atheist, especially “the state of aging without a living experience.” Then he realized: “Holy shit, wisdom can still be so powerful while the body ages. So I want to accumulate wisdom.” Looking at Munger and Buffett, he saw people who lived long and used wisdom to influence the world in their final decades. “That’s fantastic.”
• His resulting life algorithm: “The anchor is wisdom,” which can extend to cognition, principles and influencing others through ideas. The second piece is doing what you enjoy and enjoy now. Connect the two: “Once you can connect them, you basically understand what you can still do in old age, and you know that what you’re doing now makes you happy. So why wouldn’t you do it for 40 years?”

17. What if Pilot never produces a hit? Split positive feedback across multiple systems

• He faces the possibility of failure directly: “Of course I’m afraid. It would mean a huge amount of negative feedback.” But his habit is to “split the feedback systems when doing something difficult over the long term.” Is the team growing? Is the process enjoyable? Does my financial position support continuing? “A substantial part of those elements can be present, so positive feedback is secured.” That feedback, in turn, “helps achieve the long-term goal and creates a loop.”
• He has also defined the exit condition: “I stop when I can find no positive feedback at all”—a major change in his understanding of the direction, combined with a team that no longer wants to do it. Normally, unless there is a major change in cognition, “those positive-feedback systems should not disappear.”

18. Emotion points the way; reason verifies the route

• His model of human nature gives reason the role of foundation: first prize in math competitions, computer science, internet-product work and a love of history. Emotion comes from playing games as a child and reading wuxia fiction. The key is the relationship: “Emotion helps you see the direction.” Without emotion, what drives you to do something is usually just a calculation. “The energy and effort are not as strong.” But without rational verification, emotion has no support and you will easily give up once negative feedback arrives.
• The decision rule is straightforward: “For important decisions and directions in life, let emotion point the way and use reason to reason through and verify it.” Once all the information has been gathered and the reasoning checked, if you still feel this is what you want, “then do it.” Pilot followed that process: “In recent years, many things kept testing whether this was how I wanted to live. I tested it, and I still wanted to do it. So I did.”
• Pure emotion also has a place: unexamined emotion may resemble dopamine or an animal instinct. “It either needs to be released or challenge your rationality. Only after it has challenged reason and held up can it emerge.”

19. No longer competing for its own sake: Growth is unavoidable, but I’m opting out

• He identifies the structural trap in business: employees want higher pay, which means business revenue must keep rising. “Growth is unavoidable in business. Without other supports, it is easy to get trapped by it.” His own arithmetic is clear: “I’ve already sold the company for that much money, and I’m still saying I need to move up another level over the next 40 years. Am I not just driving myself to death?” His friends are much younger, learn faster and have more room ahead. “Do I really want competition to remain the dominant principle of my life? I don’t.”
• The host asks whether the Pilot team worries that his ambition is weaker than before. His answer is a discipline of disclosure: “I never said I wanted to build a $5B company. I say what I have. Once I’ve figured something out, I tell you.” He sees the same mindset among a new generation of game makers: make games that move you, win recognition from some users, and stay alive by supporting yourself. “That is what I truly want to advocate.”

20. The zero-sum education game and the compounding returns of “useless things”

• He cites Xu Zhiyuan’s interview with Lin Xiaoying, vice dean of Peking University’s School of Education, who returned to her middle school in Changsha. A student asked: “I study for more than 10 hours a day, but what if my ranking falls?” “The question itself was what upset me most. If one person’s ranking rises, someone else’s must fall. This is a zero-sum game.” During rapid economic growth, there was room for everyone. Slower growth means fiercer competition. Parents are middle class and spend more energy competing. “It’s terrifying.”
• His answer comes from personal experience: “Luckily, I did those useless things when I was young and discovered my interests.” At 7 or 8, his father bought him a Nintendo. At 13 or 14, his mother spent 2 years’ wages on a computer. “I cried under the blanket. I thought I had wasted our family’s money.” He felt the desire to play on one side and the conditioning that waste was wrong on the other. “I could apply as much reason as I wanted, but emotion was guiding me. I entered this industry after graduation and I’m still in it all these years later. It has been so useful.”
• Japan is his macro reference. “When the economy stops growing, it actually creates many subcultures and finely segmented industries.” Instead of crowding into the most competitive exam track, look 10 or 20 years out. “Why not choose some other peaks?” It may be a small peak today, but accumulation compounds as you walk, and the thing still comes from your inner passion. “Isn’t that wonderful?” When parents say games are an improper pursuit, he does not argue: “‘Improper pursuit’ carries a very strong value judgment. Everyone can keep their own view.”

21. The biggest positive feedback loop is people: The story of a disabled Indonesian streamer

• He traces the root of his own emotional energy: “Look at what I’m saying—developing the next generation of talent and building a commercial company for game makers. The keyword is people.” He is good at bringing people together, and colleagues give him powerful flow energy. “Working with this group of people is just incredible.” Once he has surplus energy, “I start using it to see other people and other things.” That is part of what Pilot means.
• He tells the full story of a male streamer in Indonesia. As a child, he had to cross a narrow footbridge to get to school. After falling, he kept walking because he was afraid his parents would worry. Delayed treatment left him paralyzed, with movement in only 1 hand. MLBB supports custom controls, so he learned to play one-handed and made many friends. He streamed to show how he played. “Many people supported him, and he could make a living from it. His life gained color because of this.” Moonton also held a disability-focused competition at the Southeast Asian Games; “some people played with their feet.”
• The story also recalibrated his view of the world: users in Indonesia buy drinks in plastic bags, Filipino users buy cigarettes one stick at a time, and buy skins by the day. In China, “people buy several hundred yuan at a time.” Those who can chat leisurely on 巨富长 are mostly social elites. “The biggest variable we can adjust is ourselves—our own time and our own thoughts.”

22. At the crossroads: A once-in-5-years choice and regret over a parallel life

• Using Buffett and Munger’s idea that major life choices come roughly once every 5 years, he revisits his own. He chose Shanghai over Jiangsu for the college entrance exam; more than 10 classmates went to Nanjing University. “When you’re younger, you have less independent judgment and are influenced by others. There’s some luck.” At Fudan’s campus recruitment, he chose Shanda over Jiucheng. He later moved to Tencent in Shenzhen: “Tencent was my second growth phase; it washed and rebuilt many things.” When starting Moonton, he and his partners chose to trust investor 唐明森, founder of 元气森林, and his vision. When 徐正华 no longer wanted to be CEO, “I told him, then I’ll do it.” Finally, when selling the company, “there were several buyers at the time, and in the end we chose ourselves.”
• The parallel-life story remains vivid. Early at Tencent, he gave up on a project that later became one of Tencent’s best games and largest businesses. Its leader went on to thrive within Tencent. “For several years after making that choice, I was unhappy, frustrated and often regretful. The fewer resources you have early on, the more valuable the choice.”
• It took 3 years to metabolize the regret, producing 2 insights. “I value teams more. I want to stay with a team for the long term. My partner is highly sensitive to market opportunities, but I realized I’m not. I’m better suited to long-term work.” The second was a decision rule: “The more important the decision, the calmer you should be. It’s fine to spend more time.” Once he extracted something useful for the future, “the episode was over, and I was actually grateful for it.”

23. Pilot’s business structure: Multiple layers of insurance, with no losses as the floor

• He first dissects the logic of capital. Funds are selected by users based on annual returns, which leads managers to pursue a return every year. Berkshire Hathaway, by contrast, uses proprietary assets and its own voting arrangements, so “it doesn’t have to.” Pilot is designed with multiple layers of insurance. First: “The money I’ve earned keeps being invested, so I have money to put in.” Second: “Try not to lose money. If you don’t lose money, the money given to the team can keep the operation running and support continued iteration.” Third: “There may be a hit, which would generate better profits to reinvest. Just raise the floor on each project.”
• That makes the approval threshold lower than the industry standard. “Others won’t greenlight projects unless they can return 2x. I may greenlight a project that can simply support itself.” The strategy rests on his view of content: small content can become large content. There was no anime-style game category before; over 10 years, one emerged. “The content industry is suited to the long term. It is not a short, intensely competitive market.” So he can lower his short-term return requirements. The floor is simply to lose as little as possible.

24. AI: “I choose not to be anxious”

• Faced with industry-wide information anxiety, his position is clear: “Technology orientation is not my strength, so I think my role is application.” Make AI the most important weapon in your arsenal—but use it wisely, not mechanically. “What I need to iterate is my cognition and understanding of this area.” In practical terms, he is meeting one of the founders of “Deep Think” tomorrow afternoon. Given the reference to a background “starting from quantitative funds,” this likely refers to DeepSeek. “I’ll also invest in their quantitative fund.”
• The conclusion is a choice of mindset: “After thinking and feeling it through, I realized I’m not anxious. I’m facing it directly. I choose not to be anxious, and I want to use it in the way I choose.” The host says this may represent 99.99% of people; genuine AI researchers are a very small group. His view on replacement is confident: “I’ll assess over the long term whether this thing can keep doing what it does and whether AI will replace us. I think I still have some tricks. So let’s keep going.”

25. Black Myth: Wukong: The entire games industry should thank Game Science

• He and 冯骥 joined Tencent around the same time and were “basically like brothers.” They also started companies around the same time. “We kept working in a highly commercial way, while they gradually shifted to PC.” His candid assessment: “Even though we knew them well, Black Myth exceeded expectations.” But the foundation was there: Game Science was bound to execute well. Its investors’ sales expectation was probably around 15M copies. It will certainly reach that now.
• The broader significance is the industry externality: “Everyone should thank Game Science.” Games can make a lot of money, but outsiders understand little about the industry. Black Myth made people realize that “a game can have such a large impact,” influence people overseas and even attract national attention. It became a social representative of Chinese cultural products. Without it, many people would still think games harm children’s studies and are an improper pursuit. “Its social and industry significance is enormous.”

26. The 5-year success test: Survive as a model; a company is a living organism

• He deliberately sets the milestone at existence itself: “I hope that 5 years from now, Pilot can be presented to people this way: there are games in development, games already launched, users playing them, and the company operating soundly. The thing I want to do may be somewhat idealistic for the industry today. If it survives as a model, with its basic shape intact, I’ll already be very happy.”
• His reference point is Pang Dong Lai. “A company is also a living organism. Different forms of companies should exist in this world.” Pang Dong Lai may be a special case, but it radiates such force to employees and consumers and influences other businesses in the industry. It achieved that “by exchanging time for results.” As a distinctive living organism with its own philosophy, its existence is itself meaningful.
• His closing statement is worth preserving: “What I’m saying is simply what I think at this moment. It may keep changing. What I want more is to record the truth of each moment. Countless truths from each moment, recorded along the river of time, are actually very powerful.” Host Koji echoes the whole episode: people should be free to be wolves, sheep or little birds. “Whatever kind of self you want to be, I hope everyone finds the thing that gives them the strongest positive feedback.”

Verification Notes

• The raw captions say “Deep Think”; whether this refers to DeepSeek cannot be confirmed from the raw.