Justin 袁菁 After a $4B Exit: Entrepreneurship and “Useless Things”
Summary
After retiring from Moonton, 袁菁 added a hard constraint to his second startup: Pilot must support a way of working and living that he would willingly sustain for 20-30 years. He no longer wants to be dragged along by unattainable goals, and instead wants to build a compounding system where creators’ passion and commercial returns can coexist: “I want to build a system that gets both.” This is not universal advice for every stage of life, but a choice made possible by the experience and resources he has accumulated.
Pilot’s organizational thesis is a “commercial company for game people”: push creative authority down while sharing publishing, technology, and functional capabilities. Each project is led by a relatively independent core team, with the producer acting like a GM who controls the budget and mobilizes shared resources; 袁菁 handles direction, resources, and organization-building rather than speaking for the team. The key test is whether Pilot can keep finding producers with the motivation, expertise, leadership, and resilience required—and trust the team when things are uncertain.
Pilot’s first Steam folk-horror project, 《女吊》, offered the model’s first product validation while exposing its most consequential governance question: whether the founder can still trust the team when he wavers. The project started with the horror genre and a relatively small budget; the producer built the demo in Unreal himself and recruited commercial-game veterans willing to take pay cuts and change paths. The 2-player co-op format came both from the team’s multiplayer DNA and the producer’s own desire; the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai folklore came from the team and the worldbuilding lead; and Wu dialect voice acting was proposed by the publishing lead. 袁菁 initially worried the team was “having fun by itself” and that the first project would simply be tuition, but later found that what resonated most with players was precisely what the team most wanted to express: “We’re not afraid of being niche.”
At Pilot’s current stage, the most important validation is not revenue scale but whether its philosophy can attract the people 袁菁 genuinely believes in. He sees having largely assembled the team over the past year as the first phase of positive feedback; in the next phase, he hopes to launch projects in 2026, achieve interim results, or generate positive cash flow, allowing the team to keep iterating around the product. Passion does not exempt the company from commercial responsibility: it still has to make money, support employees, and meet shareholder expectations.
袁菁 shifted from sales targets during his final 3 years as Moonton CEO to systems thinking; Koji recalls a similar shift in his own years after Moonton and more recently. Now working in media and investment, 袁菁 has greater faith in time and compounding: maintain a steady cadence, repeat the right actions, and positive feedback gradually accumulates. Their shared conclusion is that what is truly scarce is not a single moment of glory, but confidence that one can sustain this rhythm for many years; 袁菁 even believes he could keep going to 65 or 75.
For 袁菁, “useless things” are not leisure in disguise but creative infrastructure. Camping, raising a dog, cooking, traveling, and consuming whatever content he wants move people from a state of narrow concentration filled by efficiency and phones into a more open, divergent mode, allowing curiosity and sensitivity to detail to “pour back in.” The paradox is that “what seems useless ends up being extremely useful,” but one should not demand an output from it while doing it.
Public expression is practically valuable to Pilot because it clarifies 袁菁’s vision to potential employees, partners, and investors while naturally exposing differences, not because it wins everyone’s approval. 袁菁 acknowledges that outsiders may still see Pilot as “rich and indulged,” and that if the company is understood as not being driven by profit, employees and shareholders will question it. His goal is simply to help the 1% or even 0.1% of people who already carry the same inner voice find one another.
Deep dive
1. Write the Lifestyle Constraint into the Second Startup
After retiring from Moonton, 袁菁 did not immediately replicate the pace of his first startup. Instead, he required himself to build a company while “living in the present”: today’s state should be one he would willingly live in for the next 20-30 years.
His days now fall into 2 patterns. When he goes to the office, there are meetings, midday exercise, and dinners or drinks with colleagues and friends; when he does not, he zones out in coffee shops, walks the dog, goes camping, or organizes Werewolf games, letting his schedule follow his interests.
This does not mean he sleeps well every night. Work, socializing, drinking, and late nights still compete with one another; a life that gets both requires constant balancing rather than a one-time design.
袁菁 adds an important qualification: he can make this choice because he has accumulated a certain amount of experience and resources. “Not everyone would necessarily make this choice at their current stage of life.”
2. Unattainable Goals Give Way to Sustainable Systems
袁菁 recalls being pulled along by sales targets during his final 3 years as Moonton’s CEO: every major promotion had a target, and even a single Li Jiaqi livestream had one. The targets were often difficult to hit because “if you hit it, that means you set it too low.”
Now working in media and investment, he puts more faith in time and compounding: “Every day, I do 1, 2, and 3—the things I believe are right.” Stable weekly publishing and repeated correct actions gradually build positive feedback.
袁菁 describes the change as 2 different states. A commercial system keeps a giant target hanging overhead, forcing people to squeeze more time, potential, and surrounding resources out of themselves; a day-to-day system focuses more on whether today produced something and whether it felt good.
Sustainability has become the new standard for both men. 袁菁 used to ask, “Can I keep doing this for another year?” Now he believes he might be able to continue to 65 or 75; Koji says he has felt something similar in the years after Moonton and more recently.
3. “Useless Things” Reopen Life to Curiosity
While traveling in Chengdu, 袁菁 canceled his planned return date and decided each morning which hotel to stay in. He also went to a theater festival, organized outdoor cookouts, gathered around a bonfire in cold weather, and asked friends to each cook a home-style dish.
These activities did not begin with a search for meaning, but with “What do I want to eat or do today?” Camping started after he happened to see a video of rain falling on a tent with a fire burning inside; getting a dog began with an inexplicable feeling that it was “so cute.”
Even when choosing a Maltese, he used AI to compare intelligence, training difficulty, odor, and shedding. Rationality had not disappeared; it simply no longer decided whether an interest was worth pursuing.
4. Zoning Out Is a Switch into Creative Mode
In retrospect, 袁菁 feels that once he allowed himself to do useless things, curiosity, interest, and sensitivity to detail began to “pour in.” He used to think cooking was inferior to ordering delivery; now he can genuinely enjoy the process.
In one conversation with a game producer and a friend who is a Google executive, they discussed 2 states. When focused, only a small number of neurons are operating at high speed; when relaxed or divergent, the whole brain seems more open, able to draw on different parts and build connections.
袁菁 often has breakthroughs in the shower. He also believes people need to detach from their phones: phones and urgent tasks seize attention, leaving people deaf to food, conversation, and changes in their surroundings.
What he wants is more ambitious than occasional isolation: the ability to focus at work while preserving a long-term state of uselessness in daily life, allowing 2 modes of cognition to coexist.
5. The First Steam Project Tests a New Method with a Small Budget and a Loose Brief
Pilot saw Steam as a platform gathering more committed players that was still growing, and believed Chinese Steam games had a future. But the team had never made one, so it started by choosing the horror genre and setting a relatively small budget.
Unlike the “proposition essay” of commercial game development, this time Pilot provided only a direction and budget boundaries, then waited to see whether the producer genuinely wanted to do it: “If he doesn’t want to, then we won’t do it.”
The producer is both a real Taoist priest and a veteran of commercial games. He switched from design, built the demo himself in Unreal Engine, and then recruited peers willing to take pay cuts and move to Shanghai to try a different path.
袁菁 was initially highly pessimistic, worried that a Shanghai team would still aim too high and that the first project might simply be tuition. But after 《女吊》’s PV exposure and first demo playtest, audience attention and its performance on Steam’s monthly charts exceeded his expectations.
6. What the Team Most Wanted to Express Became the Market’s Resonance Point
The 2-player co-op format came both from the team’s multiplayer DNA from making online games and from the producer’s own strong desire to make it. The team also believed a horror game might attract female players, enabling mixed-gender pairs or 2 women to play together.
Field trips across Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai drove the folk-oriented worldbuilding, while the team and worldbuilding lead wanted to express the region’s culture. The publishing lead later proposed Wu dialect voice acting. The dialect made the story, culture, and sound fit together more closely; the team chose not to fear being niche or worry that some players would not understand it.
袁菁 once worried that too much personal expression would turn into “having fun by itself.” He later found that the parts players liked and connected with were precisely what the creators most wanted to express. It changed his understanding of the boundary between commerce and expression.
7. The Founder’s Creation Is the Organization Itself
When Koji pressed him on whether he would greenlight a project he had no interest in, 袁菁 drew a clear distinction: the first game belongs to its producer and core team; Pilot’s organizational method is his own expression.
He has gradually confirmed that his job is to hold the broad direction and resources. If the founder still makes every remaining decision, team autonomy is only a slogan. The real test is whether, when he is uncertain, “you believe in them.”
What pleased him most over the past year was not only the feedback on 《女吊》, but also how closely the producer’s stated philosophy in game-media interviews matched Pilot’s: “He understands me completely, and he is one of my kind.”
8. Pilot Combines a Shared Platform with Project Autonomy as an Organizational Product
Publishing, accumulated technical capabilities, administration, human resources, and legal work are built jointly by the company. Individual projects retain relatively independent core teams and creative intent.
The producer is similar to a GM: the budget and information are open to him, and the shared platform provides services, but he largely decides how the project is organized and how resources are mobilized internally.
袁菁 has studied NetEase Games for years: from recruiting young people who love games and have strong overall abilities, to selecting studio heads, reviewing projects, allocating resources, and designing incentives. Generation after generation of mechanisms has allowed differentiated projects to keep emerging.
He does not intend to copy a single template. Instead, he is combining those lessons with his own experience at Moonton and the more idealized view of organizations he carries in his head.
9. A Producer Needs Long-Term Conviction Before Complete Capability
袁菁 puts passion first: a producer must genuinely want to make a particular kind of game in a particular direction, and that desire cannot last only in the short term. A strong long-term desire to make money, become famous, or build a large-scale game can also be valid.
Professionally, the producer must understand design, technology, and art. Organizationally, he must be able to articulate a shared vision, persuade people from different disciplines to collaborate, and take responsibility for the full budget.
Games have a low success rate, so resilience is indispensable. A producer must be able to continue after a project fails or falls short of expectations, making him “quite similar to an entrepreneur.”
10. Durable Motivation Comes from Within, Not from Calculation
Koji relayed Perfect Diary founder Huang Jinfeng’s view: if he could choose only 1 quality in an entrepreneur, it would be “original intention.” In the near-death experiences of entrepreneurship and the hardships of consumer brands, it is easy to give up without that original intention.
袁菁 sees it as essentially the same as passion: “It should be something inside you, not something you calculate in your head.” External information keeps changing, while inner desire influences how a person continues down the path.
He also rejects a universal route. He once “overused his brain,” and only saw what was inside him after gradually reducing fear and satisfying his need for security; others may be guided and developed by that inner calling from the start.
11. Emotion Initiates; Reason Decides Whether to Act Now
袁菁 is extending the method he developed last year: let emotion identify the direction first, then use reason to validate it. Reason does not suppress desire; it assesses resources, timing, and priorities.
He once seriously prepared to open a small bar roughly 500 meters from home: wood, warm dim lighting, and an everyday sense of life, where friends could drop by the counter and chat without formally arranging dinner. The space was even close to signing.
Pilot then revealed difficulties beyond his expectations, and he realized that the memory of his first startup had grown distant; his second startup was even harder. He decisively shelved the offline plan and returned his attention to Pilot, without ruling out the bar in the future.
12. Long-Lived Creators Offer Another Narrative of Age
Koji likes Japanese creators in their 70s who are still working at the front line. Kenya Hara’s “low-altitude flight” project involved traveling again and photographing familiar places, viewing everyday scenery from roughly 50 meters above the ground.
At the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka, 袁菁 saw a workspace piled with paints, drawing paper, and objects. Imagining how creators worked there year after year, he began thinking about improving Pilot’s own working environment.
Koji added that the 2 biggest early hits from Xinshixiang were both created in a small building in Beijing’s Apple community. The team often did not sit at their desks, instead wandering around, talking, and letting space and behavior jointly shape the creative work.
13. Cultural Input Is a Connection Protocol for Creators, Not a Stockpile of Distractions
袁菁 says he has a degree of “electronic impotence” and therefore needs work that gives a strong return. His favorite game this year is 《The Game of Sultans》; he also played 《Death Stranding 2》, but overall he spends more time on film, television, and reading.
Hideo Kojima’s 《The Gene of Creativity》 helped him understand “meme” as a cultural gene. The book covers roughly 200-300 novels, films, animations, comics, and pieces of music, showing how one producer absorbs inspiration.
It also addresses a personal doubt: since he plays fewer games now, is he still suited to working in games over the long term? The answer lies not only in making games himself, but in how broad content experience allows him to resonate with different creators’ expressions.
He also mentioned 《The Studio Battle》, 《Adolescence》, and 《The Hot Spot》. In particular, 《The Hot Spot》 uses aliens, future people, and superpowers to package the trivialities of a small town, while ultimately talking about friendship and everyday life.
14. “Pilot” Encodes the Boundary Between Creativity and Commerce
袁菁 first encountered the term pilot while downloading American and British television series. Once a pilot episode is approved, it moves into full-season production and commercialization, placing the term naturally between creativity and scale.
This also maps onto his own division of labor: running the company requires a commercial orientation, while daily interaction with creators requires sensitivity and the ability to “feel what they feel,” preserving emotion without abandoning commercial judgment.
On success, he returns to the idea of a system rather than a goal. Pilot wants to become a “commercial company for game people,” proving that those who put passion first can also make it work commercially.
“Getting both” does not mean avoiding financial discipline. The company must make money, support the team, and meet shareholder expectations; 袁菁 simply refuses to make how much money to earn a creator’s sole first priority.
15. Not Being Understood by Everyone Is Pilot’s Selection Mechanism
Koji asked whether outsiders still saw Pilot as “rich and indulged.” 袁菁’s answer was: “Still.” An individual can personally absorb the loss if a project does not make money, but if a company is understood as not being driven by profit, employees and shareholders will naturally question it.
He acknowledges that the same vision may not suit every employee or investor, and that it is difficult to explain something new completely in one pass. Authentic expression necessarily carries a point of view, and points of view can be confrontational.
The practical role of interviews and podcasts is to help those who listen carefully understand what he is trying to do. Even if only 1% or 0.1% agree, expression has value if it creates resonance among people who already carry the same inner voice.
Pilot does not begin with a mandate to change the entire industry or “grow bigger and stronger.” 袁菁 wants to test whether a small ecosystem composed of a Taoist producer and other people of the same kind can work.
16. To Hedge Against People-Pleasing, Build a Minimum Safety Loop First
袁菁 says he may have been a people-pleaser from childhood: exam-oriented education and big-company experience easily train people to seek external approval. Fortunately, laziness, reading novels, and playing games—things he could not stop doing even without recognition—protected part of his core.
His advice is not to quit immediately and “be yourself,” but to identify the things you are still willing to do despite producing little output and treat them as valuable clues. If you cannot act on them yet, “keep the spark alive inside you.”
A minimum safety loop resembles the life described in 《Eight Square Meters in Tokyo》: have a place to live and professional skills that can support you across companies and cities, rather than staking your sense of security on one large tech company.
Housing, children’s education, and other consumption can push people into a higher cost structure. 袁菁 suggests first distinguishing what is genuinely necessary from what comes from parents’ and society’s expectations. There is no need to reject them immediately, but you should see them clearly.
17. The Next Phase Is About Project Results and Cash Flow; the Long-Term Goal Is “Happiness on Ordinary Days”
袁菁 hopes that in 2026, a Pilot project will launch, achieve at least interim results, or generate positive cash flow, while enabling continued product iteration. That would give organizational partners greater certainty and allow him to be “more lazy and more free.”
Koji recommends cycling, which lets people experience the street without being enclosed in a car. He also sees the cups, restaurants, and theater festivals encountered while traveling as ways to bring memories back into daily life and buy new spaces and experiences. 袁菁 says he enjoys travel, food, camping, and gatherings.
袁菁 no longer deliberately accumulates the second kind of high point—investment, suppression, and a final burst—and admits that the richer one’s experience, the harder it is to be purely dazzled. Compared with extreme experiences, he prefers “a year without a high point, but with every day full on average.”
The 2 men ultimately close with Sun Yanzi’s 《Happiness on Ordinary Days》: more precious than happiness on birthdays or New Year’s is the ability to keep ordinary days livable. 袁菁 captures the tension in a self-portrait: “Life is ENFP; at work, I’m ENTJ.”