English articles

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Bao Fan first describes Series A, B, and C: A validates technology or a product people use and explores the business model; B funds replication at scale; C approaches an IPO and supports formal systems or industry consolidation. Robin then outlines the stages: seed and angel rounds build the product and explore demand; pre-A and A find product–market fit and a profitable model; B rapidly replicates it, with exponential revenue growth but not necessarily profits; C and later deepen the moat, expand broadly, and prepare for an IPO. Lean startup means rapid, low-cost trial and error, then scaling once PMF is found.

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Lei Jun’s principles emphasize cash on hand for early startups: how long could you survive without revenue? At scale, focus on cash actually received, not receivables. Find the best people and prioritize getting them on board. Robin adds that broken financing is among the commonest causes of failure; do not prepare only for smooth fundraising. Business setbacks, difficult fundraising, departures of key team members, and giants entering are more common. Prepare multiple scenarios. Stable cash flow only keeps you from losing; winning requires talent. Netflix’s approach and a family-like culture each have advantages and disadvantages.

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Discussing Wa Cheng’s move into brunch, Robin says the outcome needs watching. Building a company means building a brand with a clear identity; expanding into more fields can blur it. He cites Bafang Yunji’s operation of Dante Coffee after the acquisition. Of a seemingly attractive hundred ideas, many are traps or temptations: reject ninety-nine and focus on the one core idea. Choosing what not to do can matter more than choosing what to do. Wu Bofan’s quoted remarks then describe brands as instant associations: keep them simple and pure, as Volvo does with safety.

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The post recounts WeMo Scooter’s 2020 Series A led by AppWorks and a further investment of several million US dollars in February 2023 to support Southeast Asian expansion. Robin is a WeMo user and likes the founder’s ideas, but asks how it will compete or cooperate with local giants such as Grab and GoTo. Capital needs, customers, pricing, and the business model all matter. More fundamentally, has WeMo, founded seven years earlier, found a profitable model in Taiwan that it can export? Otherwise, burning cash on two fronts could exhaust the new money quickly.

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As ChatGPT spreads, Robin argues that even the foundations of education must change. If basic education in Taiwan still force-feeds knowledge through large volumes of text, it cannot outperform ChatGPT. AI education and understanding must begin before university. Government investment in higher education and industry matters, but primary schools need to move beyond one-dimensional text-based rote learning and help children understand the world more fully. He urges the Ministry of Education to consider how children can enjoy learning, learn in diverse ways, explore independently, and build coherent systems of thought and values.

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In February 2013, Robin left underwriting—the financial sector broadly speaking—and joined TTVC with a mission to help small and medium-sized businesses transform and grow. Ten years passed. Initially, he approached investing with an underwriting mindset, seeking mature companies near IPO scale. Some portfolio companies multiplied their market capitalization, including thirtyfold growth to unicorn scale. Yet investing in these mature businesses often amounted to adding to existing success. More recently, he has spent more time finding early-stage opportunities, believing that innovation and investment can move Taiwan forward while he continues to play a small part.

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Wang Zhiqian’s MOT course says a key way to lower conversion barriers is to invite customers to try the product. A trial turns an explorer into a user and changes their mindset. Poor conversion often reflects a trial that leaves no peak experience or lasting memory. Robin adds that trials should create a vivid memory and a “wow” feeling. If customers generally respond “it’s okay,” “nothing special,” or “let’s see,” the likelihood of closing a sale is usually low.

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Robin sees the exhaustion of Taiwan’s demographic dividend as its greatest economic challenge, expressed in super-aging, fewer births, and crises facing labor and health insurance funds. His solutions are greater investment and bold innovation. He recalls two dividends: annual births above 400,000 in the 1960s, together with military personnel and civilians arriving from China; then Taiwanese businesses using China’s rural labor supply. With fewer than 140,000 births in 2022, he argues that Taiwan cannot sustain future growth on births alone. Put the wealth accumulated during those two dividends into new-era ventures and use people, resources, and markets worldwide.

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Robin agrees with most of Hong Dashen’s views: startups must know their business, their customers, and how they make money. Early on, pass on people seeking freebies, merely comparing prices or asking questions, or lacking commitment. A loss-making sale can still make sense: printers, coffee machines, water filters, and game consoles sell the main product cheaply and earn money from consumables or services. Show your core differentiation, or become one vendor among many lined up for the buyer to choose the cheapest. His four points: clarify the model, define customers, make trade-offs, and avoid highly replaceable businesses.

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After the FITI 2023 practice camp, Robin quotes Wang Xing: most teams present will probably fail in this venture—not a curse, but a lesson from experience. Prepare for failure. Being willing to work hard despite a high chance of failure is real passion, and failure still offers opportunities to learn. Robin adds that entrepreneurship is a process of self-refinement, learning, and growth. Experience accumulated through failure can become the foundation for the next venture.

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Robin recommends a reissued entrepreneurship book by Zhou Hongyi, previously titled Dianfuzhe (“Disruptor”). His own point: choose, focus after choosing, and differentiate. Even a platform needs a memorable starting point—LINE messaging, Google search, Meta social networking, or momo e-commerce. The right investor matters too. The book’s case describes Qihoo trying everything until an investor asked, “Are you planning to compete with everyone?” Zhou then cut the business back to security alone.

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The post quotes Zhang Yiming’s four reasons for rejecting a major company’s investment offer within his company’s first year: resources can act like stimulants and suppress internal capabilities, distort strategy, draw a startup into battles between giants, and make it harder to attract top talent than remaining independent. Robin comments that nothing is wholly good: gaining something means giving something in exchange. CVC may be praised, but it has two sides. Before major decisions, return to the original vision: what company do you want to build, and do you want acquisition or an independent IPO? Every choice brings gains and losses.

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An excerpt from Qiu Yue distinguishes two approaches to products: treating them as commodities or as creative works. The former is closer to running a business, pursuing mass markets and monetizing traffic; the latter is closer to creative work, expressing personal preferences and attracting a more selective audience. Robin comments that entrepreneurship is less about right and wrong than about making clear choices: choosing one thing means giving up another. You can differentiate a product by working on something you genuinely love, or turn out large numbers of ordinary products and hope for a lucky hit. His personal recommendation is to choose something you love and believe in, so you can persevere when difficulties arise.

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An excerpt from Dedao Headlines describes two approaches to entrepreneurship. One starts by putting yourself in users’ shoes, identifying a need you do not personally have. The other starts with a need you experience yourself and asks whether others share it. The latter has become more common in recent years, the excerpt argues, because consumers now want brands not merely to understand them but to empathize with them. Robin comments that starting from your own needs is ideal. However, if that need is unclear or is an illusory need confined to a tiny niche, the business may struggle to grow. When your own need is not clear, you must at least develop deep insight into your target users and learn to see things from their perspective.

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Robin discusses two challenges for Taiwan’s software industry. The first is technical barriers: in 2001, Openfind believed Chinese-language search offered a substantial barrier to competition, yet Google ultimately swept the global market. With zero marginal cost, software readily favors the biggest players. The second is complete solutions: large companies use acquisitions to assemble comprehensive offerings, making it hard for a small company’s superior standalone product to compete with an integrated suite. Robin argues that market scale matters most. Taiwan’s software industry once benefited from its position as a computer manufacturing powerhouse, with PC-cillin and CyberLink as examples. Its future requires reaching beyond Taiwan into large international markets.

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Robin recalls the Apple founding story in which Steve Jobs asked John Sculley whether he wanted to spend his life selling sugar water or join him in changing the world. Ever since, every entrepreneur has wanted to change the world. Robin’s personal suggestion is to start with something less grand: caring about yourself and the life around you. The following excerpt introduces anthropologist Biao Xiang’s ‘first 500 meters’: paying attention to nearby people and events, strengthening your most basic connection to the world, and developing your sensitivity to social life.

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An earlier Facebook post about Instagram’s founders felt familiar to Robin. Looking back at his previous posts, he found the same story in Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale, published in Chinese as 高成長思維, and recommends the book as a resource for entrepreneurs. He adds a point worth repeating: constraints are often the source of creativity and breakthroughs. When the resources available to a venture seem wholly inadequate, that may conceal another opportunity. He quotes architect Frank Lloyd Wright on humanity’s noblest building achievements emerging when limitations were greatest.

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At the time of the post, Japan had become the fifth country to land on the Moon. Robin recounts a conversation the previous day with two aerospace experts, using Taiwan’s automotive industry as an example. Its domestic market was too small to support a vehicle manufacturer at scale, but the process helped develop many globally competitive component suppliers. He sees a possible parallel in aerospace and satellites. Launching a Taiwan-made rocket into space might not prove cost-effective, yet developing several influential suppliers of critical components along the way would still be a benefit. The difficulty of the task is precisely why it is worth attempting: confronting difficult challenges can help us become better versions of ourselves.

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Watching Starship’s fourth flight, Robin finds the efficiency of Elon Musk and SpaceX astonishing. He writes that operating efficiency and cost problems at Boeing and Lockheed Martin allowed SpaceX to catch up and win NASA contracts, and that the two companies formed ULA in 2006 to pursue SpaceX. He asks whether humanity might return to the Moon in 2025. He also reflects on our good fortune in witnessing an era of remarkable entrepreneurs—Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Musk, Jensen Huang, Zuckerberg, and Page—with the torch of innovation and entrepreneurship continuing to pass from one to the next.

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Robin argues that investment failures are part of everyday life in venture capital. People often ask why prominent VCs invested in FTX. His personal experience is that missing a good investment can have a much greater impact than making a bad one. In a portfolio of ten equally weighted investments, one failed deal costs 10%; missing a winner could mean forgoing a 10–30x return, or potentially 100–1,000x in the United States. VC is not about maximizing the success rate. That creates intense fear of missing out and a willingness to pay relatively high prices. VCs trust that time favors good companies: Facebook’s shares halved shortly after its IPO, yet it ultimately reached a market capitalization of 1.3 trillion, as the post approximately describes it.

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Robin believes that, beyond talent, capital, technology, management, and entrepreneurial spirit, Taiwan needs large alumni networks whose members branch out and support one another. He points to Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia and to Stan Shih’s founding of Acer in 1976, followed by the emergence of groups including Acer, ASUS, Wistron, Pegatron, Qisda, and AUO. He has yet to see a similar process in Taiwan’s software industry and hopes someone can turn a single tree into an entire forest. He also discusses the roles of Taipei Institute of Technology, ITRI, and universities such as Tsing Hua and Chiao Tung in industrial development, particularly semiconductors.

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Robin discusses the considerations in choosing a listing venue. Taiwan offers a low listing threshold—roughly NT$30–50 million in after-tax profit—low costs, reasonable liquidity, and convenient access to capital. He uses GGR as an example: reports put its pre-listing fundraising at US$334 million before its US listing in April 2022, followed more recently by a US$75 million private placement. That provided over US$400 million in two years for a cash-intensive business model. Robin is cautious about whether it could have raised over NT$10 billion by staying in Taiwan. At this stage, he sees Taiwan as suitable for pre-listing raises of NT$100 million–1 billion. For entrepreneurs, listing should support the next phase of growth rather than a rush to cash out.

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Robin argues that approving CTBC Financial’s tender offer for Shin Kong Financial could set off a wave of takeover battles in Taiwan’s financial industry. Larger groups Fubon and Cathay have deeper capital resources and tighter family ownership. If they followed the same approach, privately owned financial holding companies could face annual battles over management control and share ownership, with implications for financial stability. His other suggestion is that major shareholders of financial holding companies should keep increasing their ownership stakes. With excessively dispersed ownership, a company could become the next target in a wave of consolidation.

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Quoting school principal Li Xigui’s observation that ‘specifics bring depth,’ Robin argues that how concretely founders describe problems and details affects investors’ interest. His supervisor often remarks that startup presentations explain the industry and overall direction fluently but become vague about operational details, leaving him uneasy about investing. The best VC investment has everything in place except the final catalyst: the team has worked through the pitfalls from MVP to product-market fit and needs capital to scale rather than continue finding its way. Robin emphasizes two capabilities for entrepreneurial success: acting quickly and observing problems concretely.

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Robin argues that you do not need to serve everyone. A solution clearly aimed at a particular audience, use case, and need can still become a large business. GoPro initially addressed surfers’ photography needs; DJI opened a huge market by shifting its focus from professional applications to photography enthusiasts. Customer positioning is one task; making a good product is another. Listening to a Chinese podcast about DJI’s Pocket series, Robin highlights the need for clear product positioning, market segmentation, and continual feature pruning and refinement.

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Robin revisits the branching process behind Taiwan’s electronics industry. San Ai Electronics led to groups such as Kinpo, Compal, Inventec, and Quanta; Acer led to Wistron, ASUS, Pegatron, Qisda, and AUO. Another process involves large companies helping smaller ones grow: TSMC has elevated equipment, materials, and other semiconductor suppliers, with doing business with TSMC demanding world-leading capabilities. Robin argues that Taiwan’s software industry lacks both processes. Institutions such as ITRI and Taipei Tech have also been important forces behind industrial development.

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Responding to an earlier report that only 18 of 120 National Taiwan University accounting graduates joined the Big Four, Robin encourages graduates of leading accounting programs to spend two to three years there. A career may last 45 years or longer. The first few years at a Big Four firm offer structured training, exposure to different audit accounts and financial statements each year, and responsibility for planning an audit team’s work by the third year. He sees this as a setting for rapid professional growth. He also emphasizes that skills in accounting, auditing, and analysis depend on individual effort, citing two corporate-group chairmen with accounting backgrounds.

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The post relays reported figures for Transsion Holdings: first-half 2024 revenue of RMB34.558 billion and net profit attributable to the parent of RMB2.852 billion, up 38.07% and 35.70% year over year, respectively. Lei Jun also said Xiaomi would increase its investment in Africa, where its second-quarter smartphone shipments grew 45% year over year and market share reached about 12%. Robin comments that Chinese manufacturers have long been expanding beyond developed markets into Africa and Latin America, where competition is also intensifying. He finds Transsion’s decision to take a different route into Africa while others fought over familiar markets both remarkable and inspiring.

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Responding to an investor’s discussion of MVPs, Robin recalls that the concept came from, or was popularized by, The Lean Startup. It emphasizes low costs, rapid trial and error, feedback, and iteration, and may suit software-related industries better than fields such as biotechnology. He also recalls Peter Thiel’s skepticism toward lean startup thinking. Robin personally sees it as an intuitive, accessible entrepreneurial method. Yet he notes a paradox: the easier a method is for everyone to apply, the less likely it may be to produce outliers—and great ventures are usually outliers.

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The post opens with Luo Zhenyu’s observation that every era unfolds its own story while laying the groundwork for the next. Robin writes that capital in each era should do more than attend to the work immediately at hand: it should carry a larger mission and vision for opening a new era. VC practitioners can take on that sense of responsibility. Their work can serve the present and benefit generations to come. They should try to bring meaningful change to their time and the world, so that people looking back can see how pivotal choices and commitments helped create a better present.

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Robin believes Gogoro’s decision to list on Nasdaq through a SPAC was reasonable in the context of 2021–2022 and should not be judged by its subsequent share-price performance. Reports put the capital raised at US$344 million, roughly NT$11–11.5 billion. Gogoro is fundamentally a capital-intensive undertaking; in Taiwan, raising NT$1 billion in a single IPO already counts as a large deal. Robin relays a securities executive’s remarks at a seminar: Taiwan’s IPOs may be relatively small, but follow-on offerings are easy to carry out and liquidity is reasonable. SMEs can raise additional capital every two to three years, advancing through small, rapid steps. A good company may have the opportunity to grow more than twentyfold over twenty years.

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A conversation with a corporate VC professional in electronics leads Robin to reflect on the small scale of Taiwan’s software startups. He sees three challenges: appearing tiny alongside electronics companies with revenues in the tens or hundreds of billions, or even trillions; expanding effectively beyond Taiwan; and, crucially, increasing output per employee. He uses eLAND’s approximately 110 employees and roughly NT$1.66 million in revenue per employee as an illustrative comparison with the NT$4.63 million average employee salary announced by MediaTek in 2024. To attract excellent software engineers, AI companies need higher output per employee. He also includes the top ten average salaries for full-time non-management employees at listed companies in 2023, published by TWSE, with different years and measurement bases kept distinct.

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The post relays news that ChatGPT for Mac, for Team, Enterprise, and Edu users, added recording and cloud-drive integration. Starting a recording produces a live transcript that ChatGPT turns into summaries, key points, action items, and open questions. Unlike a recording bot that joins a meeting in tools such as Zoom or Notion, it listens through the device. Robin comments that application-layer AI startups must examine whether they are sufficiently differentiated. If the product is only a thin layer of added features, a technology giant could deliver the entire functionality in one update, perhaps better or more cheaply. Differentiation must be assessed from customers’ perspective: do they genuinely see a difference?

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Robin shares a lesson from interviewing startup teams. When he asks why something happened, answer A often describes an outcome rather than a cause. Do not settle for a surface-level answer. Ask why five times to uncover deeper causes, forcing yourself to think more deeply as well. Questioning can upgrade your thinking, moving you from not knowing what you do not know to recognizing those gaps. Many founders discover, through an investor’s follow-up questions, that they have never really considered a particular issue.

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Robin offers three considerations. First, are you creating something irreplaceable? If customers and the world are largely indifferent to whether you or your company exists, creating value is difficult. Second, can enough people, or even people around the world, use your products and services? Serving only a few hundred or thousand people nearby makes it hard to scale your impact. Third, the most direct measure is each employee’s contribution to output and profit. As an approximate illustration, he cites TSMC’s revenue contribution per employee of over 30 million and after-tax contribution of 12 million.

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Robin argues that Taiwan’s public budgets operate under comprehensive, complicated procedures. Civil servants prioritize protecting themselves from procedural flaws and may be constrained by the system even when they want to help startups. He believes great startups do not emerge simply by following every rule and process; rigorous, fair reviews tend to produce ordinary companies. Government can build an encouraging environment without intervening excessively. A subsidized unicorn is not necessarily globally competitive. In his view, at least half the people who encounter an exceptional company early on will wonder what it is doing. He illustrates this with a retelling of Paul Graham’s initial reaction to Airbnb.

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An excerpt relays Liu Run’s observation that ‘profit is compensation for prejudice.’ Latin America’s perceived disorder, distance, and poverty can instead be understood as high compliance costs, an uncontested market not yet caught in cutthroat competition, and a large gap between supply and demand. Tariffs should be considered within total costs rather than in isolation. Robin comments that entrepreneurs should choose troublesome problems. If a business or market looks easy, it probably offers little opening for you. More than a decade ago everyone wanted to go to China; seven or eight years ago it was Southeast Asia; today it is Japan. But Japan is not as far behind as people imagine: others are already doing what you have thought of, and even what you have not.

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Robin admires TSMC but sees its enormous market capitalization as a giant black hole drawing in Taiwan’s resources, especially increasingly scarce talent. The underlying question is how much value a company creates: can customers do without it, what would change if it disappeared, and is it irreplaceable? For a company to succeed, attracting talent is crucial. If TSMC offers pay above 3 million while a software startup’s output per employee is below that level, how can the startup compete for talent? Without the ability to attract first-rate people, how can it compete internationally?

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Robin describes a16z as the venture capital firm most adept at media promotion and grand narratives today. Earlier firms such as Sequoia and KPCB let entrepreneurs take the applause while remaining in the audience. With a16z, VCs also moved into the spotlight, publishing extensively to explain their view of opportunities and communicate the future to founders and the public. Its ‘software is eating the world’ narrative helped define that era. Robin mentions narrative economics in relation to Bitcoin and considers how grand narratives might connect more effectively with venture capital work in Taiwan.

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Robin lists applications for registration on the Emerging Stock Board: 83 in 2024, 81 in 2025, and 18 by January 22, 2026. He believes the 2026 total could exceed 100 and reach a record. In 2025, there were also 45 applications for exchange listing, including the Taiwan Innovation Board, and 44 for OTC listing. Securities firms have many deals but a severe shortage of advisory staff, making it harder for small companies to find a sponsor. The number of listed and emerging-stock companies has grown tenfold, yet capital increasingly concentrates in large technology stocks. Robin offers two suggestions: connect with the main market trends—find a way to make TSMC a customer—and keep increasing your scale.