Entrepreneurship & Strategy

Reading guide

Robin believes the most important discipline in a SaaS startup is making trade-offs. After wrestling with the decision, firmly walk away from large customers demanding customization; otherwise, they can drain your capacity to innovate and turn you into a labor-intensive software contractor. He points to Basecamp and Taiwan’s iCHEF CEO as examples of knowing what the company needs at its current stage and who its customers are. If a VC asks why you do not serve certain customers or build certain features, his preferred answer is: we make clear trade-offs; those are not right for this stage, and we have clear target customers and a product-development sequence.

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Robin draws five lessons from the story of conquering the South Pole: a major opportunity is rarely visible to you alone—many people race to be first; history remembers first place; thorough preparation, spare capacity, and flexibility help you stay calm when making critical decisions; cohesion matters more than team size; and disciplined daily progress, in good conditions or bad, determines the outcome. In extreme environments, doing your best is not enough: do your sustainable best. Small daily steps become a large advance when you look back.

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Following the previous point about talking less and listening more, this post warns against hypotheticals: asking “If we built this feature, would you use it or pay for it?” is the wrong approach. Ask about specific events that have already happened in users’ lives instead. Robin gives an example: asking whether someone would be interested in cutting costs by 20% and improving efficiency by 15% is hypothetical and leads them toward the answer you want. Such interviews are meaningless. Understand the path and motivations that brought users to the problem.

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Robin argues that world-changing inventions are often extremely simple: easy to understand and explain, flexible, and open to layers of applications. Business models should likewise be simple and focused, doing one thing well at a time. If you cannot explain your product, service, and model quickly, they are too complicated; start over if necessary and narrow the battlefield rather than launching on four fronts with eight products. His three tests: can you explain it on one A4 page, in six minutes, and to the grandmother selling vegetables on the corner?

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The post first summarizes Bao Fan’s three priorities: understand your target customers and market; recognize that the hardest part of entrepreneurship is doing less; and keep gathering resources—money carries resources behind it, which founders must actively uncover. Robin then adds seven points: know what you want and will sacrifice, understand customers, develop a feel for the market, simplify and focus, identify the core rather than aim for everything, invest time in depth, and gather resources including talent. His “guns in hand, follow me” metaphor describes a leader who can rally followers.

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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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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 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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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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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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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 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 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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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 relays a sports analogy. Taiwan’s national-team players are excellent and hardworking, but results in international competition depend on their capabilities, not spectators’ enthusiasm. Applied to startups, he identifies three questions. Is the field one of Taiwan’s core strengths, given its population of only 23 million? Can a startup assemble a first-team lineup when large companies offer pay of 3–5 million and its own budget is only 1–2 million? And is the best Taiwanese team still among the best when compared internationally? Startup markets can be winner-take-all. Investors resemble spectators: their enthusiasm cannot determine the result.

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Robin extends the discussion of the relationship between platforms and creators or influencers. A platform is more valuable if it can generate traffic of its own and direct it to creators. If creators bring all the traffic themselves, the platform’s value is mainly functional; it also has a weaker bargaining position, since creators can switch platforms at any time. He cites Facebook, Instagram, PTT, Dcard, MOMO, PChome, and Japan’s Weekly Shonen Jump as platforms with their own traffic. Jump’s loyal readers attract submissions from emerging manga artists, setting a virtuous cycle in motion.

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Robin asks founders to explain their secret advantage and winning strategy, then answer a more concrete question: how much will they personally commit? Will they leave their job or put in their savings? Others are more likely to follow once the founder takes the plunge. The article refers to two approaches: a product far beyond every competitor’s, or a completely different form of innovative value that disrupts a market. Robin says he finds both claims hard to verify. One thing is easier to verify: whether the founder has gone all in first.

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Robin notes that traditional business education emphasizes focus, concentrated resources, simplicity, and doing one thing well. Yet extraordinary mavericks such as Musk and Branson have succeeded across very different industries. Such successes are exceedingly rare. For most founders, he still recommends returning to the textbook: keep things simple, concentrate resources, find a market gap, make a focused breakthrough, and do one thing well at a time. He also previews a discussion of how Branson identifies gaps, competes directly with giants, and manages Virgin Group across roughly 400 businesses.

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Robin looks back to 2004–2005: offered a choice between Dangdang and JD.com, most investors would have chosen Dangdang. It was founded earlier, received US$11 million from Tiger, and became profitable early, but then slowed new investment. JD.com started later and expanded aggressively under Richard Liu, repeatedly encountering working-capital problems. By the time Dangdang went private in 2016, its market capitalization was only US$530 million; the gap with JD.com later exceeded a hundredfold. Robin’s conclusion is that a company’s greatest risk is refusing to take any risk, and its scale depends on its CEO’s vision and courage.

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Robin identifies five reasons large technology companies struggle to enter completely unfamiliar fields: they fail to see an opportunity, dismiss it, fail to understand it, and then run out of time; they cannot afford to lose, since public companies cannot tolerate falling revenue; new projects struggle to obtain internal resources; talented employees can move internally and rarely choose marginal projects; and the CEO’s attention is scarce. He uses Skype as an example: it challenged telecom giants with voice over Internet Protocol and a new business model, before Microsoft acquired it for US$8.5 billion.

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Robin reads Wang Zhiren (王志仁)’s article about how he would rescue PChome if he were Hung-Tze Jan, then quotes the closing passages of American venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s ‘Staying Positive’: leaders must bring optimism and positive energy, and focus on building and shipping. He notes that MOMO, backed by Fubon Financial and Taiwan Mobile, had roughly fifteen times PChome’s market capitalization and 2.5 times its revenue. Against a competitor on a different scale, strategy, tactics, and execution all need reexamination. Entrepreneurs must remain optimistic and keep exploring new problems and markets.

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Robin argues that if a product has been on the market for six months or a year without a positive response, it may solve a nice-to-have problem rather than a must-have one. A technical breakthrough that improves performance or reduces cost by only 10–20% can also meet a weak need: customers may prefer established partners with stronger relationships, distribution, and commercial terms. He argues that a benefit exceeding tenfold, demonstrable with real commercial data, can turn it into a must-have. He also cautions founders against prioritizing social contributions before understanding their business model. First establish the customer’s decision-making priorities.

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The opening passage relays Naval’s view that direction matters more than speed: choosing the right direction at each fork matters far more than the effort spent moving forward. Robin adds that good choices test both long-term judgment and the ability to take risks. Would a Google employee have left for Facebook when it had fewer than 100 employees? Would a Facebook employee have joined Stripe when it had only a few dozen? Would you leave school to start a company? He uses these forks in the road to invite readers to examine their own choices.

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The opening excerpts discuss Paul Graham and the YC model: make something people want, an internal benchmark of 10% weekly growth, an emphasis on frugality, and the scale advantages of an alumni network. Robin adds that many Taiwanese startups feel they cannot expand without more funding. Founders should nevertheless calculate each stage’s capital needs carefully. Money arriving too easily can be the beginning of disaster; concentrating on using every dollar well is a key to success. He also cites Frank Lloyd Wright’s observation that humanity’s finest building achievements came when constraints were greatest.

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The opening excerpts relay Buffett’s and Munger’s advice to ordinary people: keep cash available, earn more than you spend, and invest in your earning power. Robin adds three reminders for founders. First, maintain cash reserves, which can help you outlast competitors in difficult periods. Second, earn more than you spend; seeking more investors otherwise brings mounting pressure. Third, invest in your own and your team’s ability to learn, grow, and earn, building a moat around the business. He also emphasizes that health matters most.

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The opening section presents nine suggestions from Master60’s summary of Burn the Boats, including trusting your intuition, turning anxiety into fuel, and embracing crises. Robin adds that the biggest challenges for university professors starting businesses are commitment and the option of retreating. Many want to stay at the university to retain resources and the value of their title. Yet entrepreneurship brings distractions and hesitation; cutting off retreat and committing fully may improve the chance of success. He illustrates this with Xiang Yu’s destruction of cooking pots and boats at the Battle of Julu.

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The opening excerpts from Touzi Yilei discuss working with larger trends, drawing on remarks attributed to Lei Jun, Zhang Ruimin, and Huang Mingduan (黃明端), and caution against glorifying a CEO’s individual capabilities. Robin adds a founder’s perspective. Investors assess industry size, but founders can begin with a small niche, concentrate resources, and aim to dominate a specific segment. They should choose something they love enough to spend ten or twenty years building. There can be tension between that passion and choosing a large market. His advice: be yourself, build for your ideals and dreams, and do not start a company merely to raise money or please investors.

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The opening excerpts describe Wang Xing setting benchmark targets for Meituan by looking to Taobao’s growth trajectory. They also relay a saying within Meituan: greater confidence in the future brings greater patience with the present. Robin adds that finding a benchmark company helps a startup position itself, much as sailors first locate the North Star when navigating at night. A benchmark makes it easier for investors and employees to imagine what the future could look like. Then comes the work of pursuing the dream practically, taking each step firmly and moving forward with conviction.

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The opening excerpts describe entrepreneurship as a combination of passion and ability. Founders who began at the same starting line and spent fifteen to twenty years doing one thing well may already have taken their companies public; those who chase a new trend every few years may never build anything substantial. Over the long term, founder and business are closely connected. Robin compares building a company with growing a tree: a seedling does not become a towering tree in three or five years. It takes time, patience, and staying rooted. To persist for twenty years, you must love the work—and only you truly know whether you are the right person for it.

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As the fourth quarter of 2023 begins, Robin suggests reviewing the decisions and actions of the first three quarters. Were they coherent, consistent, and directed toward an established destination, or was each day a series of improvised responses? If events, problems, and new customers arrive entirely at random, he argues, strategy and goal-setting are probably at fault. The closing excerpts from Ning Xiangdong explain that strategy must express a goal and a direction, so that actions remain coherent and team members work in coordination.

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Robin recounts turning points in Morris Chang’s life: not being admitted to MIT’s doctoral program, moving to Stanford for a doctorate in electrical engineering, becoming a senior executive at Texas Instruments, then leaving after a missed promotion and disagreement over the foundry idea. Later, Sun Yun-suan invited him to lead Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute, and he founded TSMC at 56. Robin’s point is that if any link in that chain had been different, today’s TSMC might not exist. A succession of apparent setbacks helped create the figure known as the godfather of semiconductors.

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The opening excerpts describe foresight as the habit of looking ahead and preparing a Plan B for everything. Robin adds that Plan B is neither retreat nor surrender, but the operational flexibility needed to respond to change. Many founders have only one solution and rely on fundraising whenever problems arise. Yet fundraising itself is often the biggest problem. He has seen a company rely entirely on raising money, fail to do so, and enter dissolution and liquidation. In his view, preparing alternatives is also a measure of management capability.

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Robin imagines opening a restaurant to outdo the one next door by offering an enormous menu. More than 90% of the dishes go unordered, while even the few specialties may not be done well. Startup teams can fall into the same trap, trying to make an all-encompassing product that becomes a jumble with no competitive strength in any one area. Slow performance and a poor user experience then drive users away. He argues that good product development depends much more on subtraction: clearly identifying and retaining the functions users need most urgently.