Podcast

How China Became A Technology Superpower - Robert Wu, CEO of BigOne Lab

Robert Wu is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and thinker.

He started working for BigOne Lab, China’s leading data & information service provider, first as an employee/partner, and later, with a buyout, became its CEO.

You can find his China-focused Substack here at https://www.baiguan.news/?r=8th0v

Chapters:

00:00 Trailer and Intro
01:32 DeepSeek's Watershed Moment for China's AI
02:21 China's Emergence As A Tech Leader
10:02 Why Was China Not A Known 1-N Innovator?
13:58 The Funding of Innovation in China
17:27 The Current State of Venture Capital in China
21:22 The Role of State Subsidies in Chinese Innovation
25:52 Tesla's Catfish Effect
31:01 How Tesla Benefitted From China
33:37 Chinese Tech Talent
39:03 What's Behind The Crackdown on Jack Ma
45:02 Cultural Differences Between China and the West
50:50 Understanding Censorship in China
55:22 Current Challenges in China
57:35 Advice for Graduates

The following is the transcript of my interview with Robert Wu

Full Transcript

Keith Yap 01:32

If you look at China's tech giants - Alibaba, TikTok, ByteDance, Huawei - they've dominated the past decade. But it wasn't until DeepSeek's entrance into the AI race that people saw China as a peer to the US. My question is, why was DeepSeek's emergence such a watershed moment for China's AI capabilities?

Robert Wu 02:05

It was really a surprise to everyone, including people in China. Before DeepSeek, no one imagined we could have such original creativity and innovation so soon. Even I thought this would happen three to five years down the road.

Most past discourse about China focused on its ability to replicate, iterate, and scale from one to a thousand. Many of us didn't fully believe China was ready for zero-to-one innovation. DeepSeek got very close to that kind of innovation - maybe not exactly zero to one, but at least 0.5 to one, which is really different.

China is already doing a lot of original innovation in areas like drones and battery technology. But because the world's attention has been so focused on DeepSeek, this moment became a big event that made everyone take notice that Chinese innovation is on the table. It's a defining moment, and we're going to see more cases like this.

Keith Yap 03:58

Your company Baiguan and Big One Lab has been covering the Chinese tech scene for quite a while, focusing on translating innovations from China for the world to understand. You highlighted that China could enter the AI race and potentially emerge as a peer to the US, which wasn't the mainstream view back then. Could you walk us through your key thesis as to why China could emerge as a technological peer?

Robert Wu 04:36

I look at the current generation of AI technology, which has three main components: compute (GPUs and chips), algorithms (the core of large language models), and large amounts of data for training and inference.

Looking at all three, I don't see any fundamental barrier making it impossible for China to catch up. For chips, while we don't yet have technology as advanced as Nvidia's chips made by TSMC, and we face restrictions, the fundamental physics of chip making and design isn't exclusive to anyone. It just takes time and energy to develop engineering know-how, and we have an abundance of good engineers. It's a time issue, not a fundamental one.

Regarding data, while we may not have as rich textual data as the English-speaking world, large language models don't have a language barrier. Each model is trained on all languages, math, and coding. There's no way to shut China off from the world's knowledge and information.

As for algorithms, the basic principles of transformers and current AI technology are available to everyone. It's not as if someone has discovered a new law of gravity that Chinese researchers don't have access to. There's no huge conceptual threshold that's inaccessible to China.

What I didn't foresee was that groups like DeepSeek would use these same fundamental principles and chip technology to achieve similar AI capabilities with fewer, inferior chips. This perfectly demonstrates that as long as the principles are there, good engineering teams can make it happen. I knew nothing was stopping China from achieving this - I just didn't expect it so soon.

Keith Yap 07:43

China had to catch up, but you didn't expect them to emerge as a peer that quickly, right?

Robert Wu 07:49

This could be the result of export controls. Without them, there would be no way for a local team to innovate in this style. The best thing you could do would be to buy high-end GPUs from Nvidia and pay the premium. With export controls, teams and engineers in China were forced to innovate under scarcity. We should partially thank the US for closing the doors.

Keith Yap 08:31

When I was reading about DeepSeek's technical innovation, it was really about the fundamental architecture. That's where they were trying to innovate compared to their US peers, who were focused on scaling faster or bigger. DeepSeek asked first-principle questions.

Robert Wu 08:55

Exactly. It shows there's no lack of first-principle thinking in China. Under constraints, there will be another route of technological development. That's actually quite dangerous for the West because you're forcing technology to be more diversified. It will be up to the rest of the world to choose, whereas before there may have been only one path everyone would follow.

Keith Yap 10:02

The number of Chinese EVs from BYD appearing in Singapore today - I don't think people would have predicted that 10 years ago.

Robert Wu 10:09

Not even five years ago. They used to carry a very bad brand name. I just saw a video this morning of Elon Musk a decade ago answering questions about BYD, and he was just laughing. Because ten years ago, BYD was a poor brand with poor products. But in such a short time, they've grown into a successful company with a strong brand and strong products. It's amazing.

Keith Yap 10:22

In the past, China was seen as a 1-N innovator and not a zero-to-one innovator. Now we're starting to see them shift in that direction. Why was it for so long that China was labeled as just going to be okay with being the one-to-end innovator or manufacturer of the world and not the primary innovator?

Robert Wu 10:42

I think it has deep cultural and social reasons. Coming from Chinese or East Asian culture and education, most people are asked to conform and learn from the best. There's less emphasis or tolerance for taking the ultimate risks of creating things out of nothing. I have to be frank - this is really what Western civilization has been excellent at. They are risk-takers. The current generation of Chinese people is learning from that, changing their mindset, and starting to replicate this type of thinking.

Take DeepSeek as an example. It's not a traditional company - it's not invested by traditional venture capital, it's not state-run, and it's not part of any large company. It has a single owner who is rich, talented, and deeply involved in the actual work. So at this stage, it's not really proof of the overall innovativeness of the Chinese system, but rather an example or role model that more people can learn from.

Just imagine if it wasn't this kind of team - if it was a team within a larger company like Alibaba or ByteDance, trying to convince supervisors to give them a hundred million budget to do something as amazing as GPT-4. It would be very hard. To do groundbreaking innovation, you need capital and talent. In most institutions, this wouldn't be possible. But DeepSeek was fortunate enough to have a setup where they could make their own decisions based on what they believed in.

I don't think this mindset has completely changed in China, but examples like DeepSeek and other successes are moving us more toward original innovation. That's its significance in terms of the social and cultural evolution of modern China.

Keith Yap 13:58

The founder was from High Flyer Fund. It's a very interesting model in which they financed the creation of DeepSeek because it's a spin-off from their own firm. It was a hedge fund essentially that decided to develop this technology. You don't see that kind of model - it's not VC funded, it's essentially a hedge fund pet project.

Robert Wu 14:22

High Flyer Fund (幻方量化) is one of the largest quant hedge funds in China. At their height, they had assets under management of about 100 billion RMB, which is like 15 billion USD. So it's really remarkable, and they're making a lot of money from management fees and profits.

The CEO and founder, Liang Wenfeng, was a billionaire from the very beginning. He's also an engineer with specific beliefs, dreams, and vision about AI. Since he had the means to achieve that, he decided to create what you called a pet project or spin-off that is legally unrelated to the fund but funded by himself. It's a self-funded model.

That's really unique and also kind of a wake-up call for all the VC people in China. After DeepSeek emerged, a lot of VC investors in China felt an existential crisis because such a popular and great success had zero VC money involved. They naturally feel worried about themselves. It's a surprise to everyone, including all these investors whose career is about finding companies as successful as DeepSeek, but they totally missed it.

I think this will inspire more people in China, especially successful high-net-worth individuals. Some of them are in the best position to do innovation - they have financial liberty and enough social resources to consolidate a team. As long as they have the mindset that doing this is cool, I think more of them will be caught to join this. That's why I really think that Liang Wenfeng as CEO is setting a very good example for what you do with your wealth in China. Before that, we didn't have so many of these kinds of examples.

Keith Yap 16:55

It's interesting because from a third-party observer's perspective, especially in a financial hub like Singapore where we're so used to traditional modes of financing innovations, this is something new and novel to us. You alluded earlier to the existential crisis of VCs in China in one of your viral essays. Are VCs in China today better off or worse off than they were three to five years ago?

Robert Wu 17:27

Three to five years ago is definitely better - now is worse. I would say the VC industry in China was back to zero, meaning all the game rules and principles will be rewritten and readjusted. That's because US capital and US VC funds are permanently out of China, and they will be out for a very long time due to geopolitical reasons. That was actually the majority of venture capital money in China.

When they left, there was a big void, a big vacuum in China. There are no college endowment funds, not much insurance money - none of these evergreen capital sources that look at investments on a generational scale. So there are only government funds, which are really kind of rewriting the incentive structures in China. Because it's government money, the government is very risk-averse, but then you have to use all that risk-averse money to fund high-risk projects. There's a fundamental disconnect there which I think they haven't really figured out how to solve yet.

Right now, everyone is experimenting with different types of models. DeepSeek represents one model, where successful entrepreneurs get into the game with their money and talents - a self-funded model. But there are also other innovations. For example, one of the largest VC funds in China called Qiming Venture recently acquired a listed company shell in China's A-share market. It's possible they're planning to use that listed company to acquire and invest in startups or high-growth companies. That's quite an interesting model because nowhere else in the world does a venture capital fund acquire listed companies to then use for investment. But it all makes sense in China's context. We're just trying to figure out what's the best way to support innovation with the right capital structures.

Keith Yap 20:14

It seems to me that the Chinese market is much more chaotic than Western markets. On one extreme end, you have companies like Evergrande that spun off a thousand different things and tried to do everything, then collapsed under its own weight. On the other hand, you have firms like DeepSeek that look like pet projects but could spin off into something bigger. I suppose this is all part of the process of experimentation within China.

Robert Wu 20:45

It's all about changes and adjustments to different changes in the macro environment. It's always changing fast. Like, if you think about three decades ago, nobody would believe that China could develop so much real estate and sell so much land within such a short time. And now that age is over, and we're trying to figure out another form of economy. Everything happens so fast, and there is a lot of tolerance for changes in our society.

Keith Yap 21:22

The follow-up question I had was on industrial policy. When outsiders look at innovation in China, be it in EVs, hardware, consumer goods, or technologies like AI and LLMs, there is a temptation to chalk it up to state subsidies and industrial policy. I think that often misses out the full picture. What's the flaw in interpreting Chinese innovation through the lens of state subsidies?

Robert Wu 21:59

This is almost like a reflex. When people talk about great Chinese innovation or products, the reflex is that because China is run by the party, all these companies are supported by the state. And it's because of state support and subsidies that contribute to their successes. But to be frank, these assertions don't follow basic economic principles.

China is not alien - we are humans and our economy is almost the same as the rest of the world. We need to follow economic rules. If a company's main reason for success comes from the state, it's very likely you will not have innovation. Instead, you'll have parasites trying to siphon off state funds and become vested interests.

Take EVs as an example. Yes, in the beginning, because it's zero to one and it takes some incentives for consumers to purchase more expensive EV products than traditional ICEs, the government had to give some support to push the industry forward. But the beauty of many of China's industry policies, which I think the US and many other Western countries can learn from, is that you have to deal with this policy in a planned and tapering-off way.

All these supports and subsidies cannot last forever. You have to create an expectation that this is just temporary and it will slowly taper off. That process is going to be painful for many people in the game, and actually, most people will suffer in the end.

If you think about EVs, you now know BYD, maybe NIO, maybe Xiaopeng - all these major players. But for each one of them, I bet there are at least 20 to 30 that were already dead. Five years ago, there were many companies trying to build EVs. There are many names you've probably never heard of. There was one in Nanjing called Baiteng that had about 1 billion USD of investment - all burned out and bankrupt.

The government didn't try to create 100 or 200 or 300 EV companies by their support. They're saying, let's have this industry, but only the fittest survive. That's exactly why they make decisions on tapering off the subsidies, which also happened in the solar sector. There was a big drop-off in state support around 2018, which led some companies to go bankrupt. But only the fittest survived - the ones with the best cost and quality structure.

Keith Yap 25:52

Also in EVs, there was the decision to introduce a strong global player - Tesla. The Tesla Shanghai factory was really important. It came at a time when Model 3 was entering what Elon Musk called "production hell." They weren't able to catch up to the speed they needed until they had the Shanghai factory, which was rapidly built with almost free operation support.

When China made that decision, they didn't say Tesla was too good, even though at that moment Tesla was better than any Chinese EVs. At that time, BYD didn't have a chance - nobody thought they would ever match Tesla's quality and brand name. The Chinese authorities didn't shut them out of our market. Instead, they invited them in. We call it the catfish effect - a catfish is strong and feisty, and if you throw it among sleepy fish, it motivates them to become stronger.

Robert Wu 26:45

This intentional introduction of strong competition to weed out the weak and keep only the strong - I actually haven't seen it in the West. If you look at the US, GM and Ford got a lot of subsidies, but they are not the source of innovation anymore. They basically have to rely on state and federal support to stay afloat.

I think that's why when people look at China, they assume Chinese companies must rely on state subsidies if they're successful. But this is really applying what they're used to to understand true innovation, which is wrong-headed. The real secret sauce is this manmade hunger games that introduces competition and accepts bankruptcy and failures for many players.

Keith Yap 28:53

The second-order effect is that your supply chain also goes through an upgrading process, right? Because now they need to source parts internally to achieve economies of scale. When Tesla came to China, it forced your battery providers and parts providers to improve their production quality as well, so the ecosystem benefits as a whole.

Robert Wu 29:16

Exactly. That's also a strong argument against the idea that China is always just replicating or stealing technology. When companies like Tesla or Apple are in China, they need to source parts from suppliers and apply their standards. That process alone will diffuse know-how, expertise, and innovation. You can't really stop that.

Otherwise, why would Tesla set up their factory in China if they were just sourcing parts from overseas for assembly? That would be too much work. As soon as you set up the factory there, suppliers will come to you and learn from you. Through working with you, they learn from the best. That's just unstoppable. It's also perfectly fine business practice - it's natural when you decide to move production to other places.

[31:01 - 33:37 How Tesla Benefitted From China]

Keith Yap 31:01

Tesla benefited equally or as much from entering the Chinese market. How did they benefit?

Robert Wu 31:08

They benefited in two ways - both production and consumption. On the production side, in 2018 and 2019, I actually invested in Tesla stocks because I drove a Tesla back then and loved the company and product. But I sold too soon because at the time the company was barely surviving and running out of cash. Remember, Elon Musk was also very unstable then - he sent out that tweet about taking Tesla private, causing a lot of controversy.

The big bottleneck for them was turning out as many cars as possible to get cash flow. In that context, the Shanghai factory really saved them. It's their most efficient factory in the world. They just keep producing lots of cars that really gave them a second life. More than half of Shanghai's production goes overseas, making the Shanghai port now a major vehicle export center for China.

Then you also have the market. Chinese consumers are big EV buyers - in Shanghai, you see Teslas everywhere. They got a big boost in both production and consumption. Without Shanghai, Tesla would have gone bankrupt, I think.

Keith Yap 33:17

It's interesting that governments play such an active role but also know where to stop, and I think that's actually a key point. The Chinese government, even in Singapore, they're learning that at some point you can come in as a catalyst but at some point you need to let creative destruction take place.

Robert Wu 33:37

Exactly. The other question I had was related to the Chinese ecosystem as a whole. You have these different tiers of cities, but we're also starting to see a lot more sophistication in how China has evolved as an ecosystem for talent.

Going back to the DeepSeek example, most of the researchers there are now educated domestically in China. You don't have as much desire to hire from Ivy League schools - that was maybe more prevalent 15 to 20 years ago. A lot more innovations and innovative startups are coming from cities that previously didn't get the spotlight. Hangzhou is a good example, where it's really emerged as a top tech hub for China. What are the secret ingredients that make places like Hangzhou attractive for Chinese talent?

[Previous content remains the same through 26:45, then continues:]

[25:52 - 31:01 Tesla's Catfish Effect - Continued]

Robert Wu 27:15

That's why when people look at China, they assume Chinese companies must rely on state subsidies if they're successful. But this is really applying what they're used to to understand true innovation, which is wrong-headed. The real secret sauce is this manmade hunger games that introduces competition and accepts bankruptcy and failures for many players.

Keith Yap 28:53

Robert Wu 29:16

Keith Yap 31:01

Tesla benefited equally or as much from entering the Chinese market. How did they benefit?

Robert Wu 31:08

Keith Yap 33:17

Robert Wu 33:37

Keith Yap 34:00

Robert Wu 34:15

Hangzhou is successful, but so is another city called Hefei, which is the home of many innovations and great companies like NIO. There's now a big nuclear fusion research center in Hefei as well. And there are many other cities. This speaks to the fact that China is huge - 1.4 billion people is very hard to imagine for someone born and raised in a small city or country. If you think about it, Shanghai and Beijing and all these cities you've heard of only account for maybe 5% of China's population.

The great majority of people don't live in the cities that you know. Chinese government has always had this tradition of regional competition - some people call it fiscal federalism. You have all these local governments at provincial level, city level, and district and county levels. There are almost 3,000 counties in China and each one competes against the others. It's almost like a market economy where all these local districts are competing for more talents and businesses.

From this competition, some places are bound to be successful. Usually, the secret ingredients for success are, first, they need to have a great source of talents. Many of these cities have great universities because of historical reasons. Hangzhou has Zhejiang University and China Science and Technology University, among others. The educational resources are actually quite distributed in China, not just concentrated in Shanghai and Beijing.

It also takes what I would call a small government mindset or an agile government mindset that knows the boundaries between government and business. The clearer the boundaries, the better. We just talked about knowing where to stop. From traditional Chinese bureaucratic or political mindset, it's actually pretty hard to know where to stop because we have government involvement in every part of our life.

The best local governments are the ones that have great plans but also know how to execute them well - knowing where they should act and where they shouldn't. Hangzhou is a great example, as is Shenzhen. These are innovative cities that business people and young talent really love. Because of this competition between local governments, the best practices will win in the end - it's just the nature of competition.

Keith Yap 38:14

The other thread I wanted to pull was that you pointed out earlier that when the lines are clearer between government and business, then the city or ecosystem tends to thrive. But in the past, China has kind of tolerated shadow economies, right? Like much of Alibaba's rise in China came from operating within gray areas. That's how they pushed the boundaries of innovation. As a result, you had someone like Jack Ma who emerged as a tech titan of China. Internationally, if people think of Chinese tech, they think of him as the brand ambassador for the past 20 years. So what explains his fall from grace in your view?

Robert Wu 39:01

That's a very controversial question - I hope the Alibaba PR team isn't listening to this. It's pretty ironic that Jack Ma became the face of this narrative that China was cracking down on the private sector for the last few years.

What happened was, in late 2020, just before the IPO of Ant Financial (the parent company of Alipay), he made a speech at the Bund Financial Summit in Shanghai. He basically argued that China's banks are all pawn shops - they're too old and have to be remade. That was like a trigger for the bureaucracy to clamp down. It was dramatic because the IPO was canceled, even though it was already approved and investor money was paid up. It was just a formality before the IPO, but even that was canceled.

For a long time after that, Jack Ma disappeared from the limelight, making only very few appearances. This was a stark contrast to what he used to be - if you think about Jack Ma, he was everywhere, talking to Elon Musk, talking to Donald Trump. But to be clear, he was not arrested or imprisoned. Many people in the West believe Jack Ma was under arrest, but no - none of his wealth was taken away, he didn't even have any penalties or fines. He was just basically silenced in some sense, and he was allowed to go overseas, golfing in Spain on his yacht somewhere.

I think it's wrong to equate that with the assumption that China is bad for private businesses. Jack Ma was very special - he was a very political person. He loved and thrived in changing narratives, politics, and policies. You mentioned operating in gray areas - Alipay itself is a great example. When his team created Alipay, it could have been illegal because at that time, there was no payment regulation. What he did was basically collecting funds from the public and helping manage their funds without any regulation.

He actually said to people around him that this thing might get them arrested, but if they came, he would turn himself in. So just be bold and act. In the end, when this became a big industry, the rules actually bent for them and the government made rules tailor-made for them. This happened many times.

A decade ago, there was a big argument between Alibaba and the ministry in charge of commerce in China. The ministry said Alibaba was encouraging fake and counterfeit products, while Alibaba claimed they were important for small and medium businesses. If you check the history, Alibaba won that battle - the ministry retracted their criticism and the minister actually visited Alibaba as a token of goodwill.

Jack Ma was really powerful. He didn't have an official government position, but he had huge influence. During the Trump administration, even before inauguration, Jack Ma visited - it wasn't Xi Jinping visiting, it was Jack Ma. And Jack Ma told Trump he was going to bring a million jobs to the USA. This is not a typical businessman - it's more like the Elon Musk of China, overstepping the boundary between business and government.

So when he made that speech about overhauling the Chinese banking sector on the eve of Ant Financial's IPO - another big empire of his - it was hard not to perceive that as a political message. I think that was the moment when the whole bureaucracy and top leadership thought, "this is too far, we cannot allow this to happen." Again, I don't think it was a crackdown on private business - it was about someone who had ambitions in politics getting whacked out, but with no penalty, no loss of wealth, no loss of liberty.

It's a sign of how in China, capitalism is always second to maybe the socialist government. Capital is always in service, whereas in the US, it's different - where the government is often beholden to the interests of capitalists.

[Previous content remains the same through 45:02, then continues:]

Robert Wu 45:10

Yes, like right now, what Elon Musk and others did to the federal government would never happen in China. You will never have billionaires in the White House dictating what's going on, what should be done in the country. That will never happen here.

Keith Yap 45:42

You're trying to bridge the gap between the West and China, and you've been very eager in doing that. As a Singaporean who is at the crossroads between the East and the West, I get to see the views from both sides. One of the worries I've had is that our American friends are misunderstanding China more and more these days. They view China as an insecure expansionist power, and we think that might be mistaken because like all Southeast Asian countries, we see that we have challenges but never problems.

It might be useful to take this time to help demystify China a little bit, to help us understand the cultural operating system of China. What is the larger narrative that China believes about itself?

Robert Wu 46:35

That's a huge question. I write a personal newsletter called China Translated, and actually, the question you're asking is the core question that I try to explain through the newsletter. You're right - at the fundamental level, there are big cultural, social, and ideological differences between China and at least the US. It really takes a lot of understanding, especially firsthand understanding.

The best thing I can advise is for more American friends to come to China, not just to travel for a few days, but to live and work and experience and learn the language. That's the best approach to really appreciate the differences. However, I know most people don't have that luxury, so that's why I started writing newsletters to explain the differences.

There are many differences, but at very fundamental levels, one of the biggest is the very different religious tradition. In the West, you have several millennia of Christianity, which plays a lot on preaching, on turning others to make them look like them. Once you have a good idea, you teach it to others - that kind of mindset. I think that's very prevalent even today when society is less religious.

That idea persists that the world has to have one operating system and our operating system is the best. So it's a privilege for you to learn from us. That mindset totally doesn't exist in China. Although Chinese people believe in ourselves and think we are great, we've never thought about converting other people. We have our way of dealing with things, our political system, our social system. I think there's zero interest for us to replicate this in other countries like the US. We don't really care, to be honest.

Keith Yap 50:50

The other question I have for you as a company that's working in data, insights and editorial opinions is on the issue of censorship. How should we understand censorship in China?

Robert Wu 51:07

It's a big part of the discourse ecosystem. Fundamentally, it stems from a key principle - Chinese government's first priority is to maintain stability in society. It's not just the government, but most members of society want stability above everything else. Because of our historical and cultural genetics, we tend to value stability above everything else. You have to have a stable, peaceful society first, then we talk about the rest.

The government authorities are very mindful of potential conflicts that might induce either violence or chaos. So there's this general tendency to maintain at least an appearance of stability. While in the West, you have a different operating system where they think the most paramount thing is individual freedom - that's the First Amendment in the US, and nothing can be sacrificed for that. In China, stability cannot be sacrificed for anything else.

Keith Yap 55:09

If we look at what are the sources of challenges to stability or sources of instability to China in the near term, what are they and what should people be looking out for?

Robert Wu 55:22

I think right now there's a consensus that our economy is not doing that great, which is understandable because after two or three decades of breakneck speed development, there has to be some kind of reversal or correction. Many people feel the economic pains, which in some cases translate into crimes. The government is seeing that.

A lot of the problem is not just about economy per se, but about distribution of wealth and income. If you look at the top level documents recently, it's all about boosting incomes for people and boosting consumption. A few days ago in the state council meeting, they said that boosting income and consumption is the top priority, of paramount importance right now. It's actually listed as the single most important thing to do this year for the government. So definitely we are facing some headwinds, but we are working on it to try to stop that from spiraling into challenges for social stability.

Keith Yap 57:31

Last question for you - what advice would you give to someone who's graduating from university?

Robert Wu 57:35

I think just be bold. Make mistakes, especially for students in the East Asian setting. Most of us don't like mistakes, and so we missed a lot of time. We waste a lot of time copying from others. We don't have to. You only have one life.

Just try something crazy when you're still young and the cost is low. When you grow older, 10 years later, you will have way more costs to do crazy things. So just be bold, test out things, make mistakes - you will learn from these mistakes and you will not regret them.

Keith Yap 58:23

All right, with that, thank you, Robert, for coming on.

Robert Wu 58:25

Okay, thank you. Thank you so much.

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