How I got here, roughly

I grew up in a small city in Jiangxi and spent the first eighteen years of my life doing the standard student route: school, exams, more school, more exams. Very original stuff. There was no dramatic childhood founder story, no lemonade stand with unit economics, none of that. Mostly I was just curious in a slightly nosy way. I wanted to know how successful people thought, how other people lived, and what existed outside the small world I knew.

Hangzhou made the map bigger. University put me around people from different cities, different backgrounds, and wildly different assumptions about what a life could look like. During sophomore year I accidentally found RW Lab, which was my first proper internet-native rabbit hole: Web3, digital nomads, startups, builders, people casually shipping things on a Tuesday. Until then, learning mostly meant a syllabus. RW was the first place where I learned because I genuinely wanted to, which, frankly, is a much better retention strategy.

Through RW I met people who were constantly building projects, arguing about ideas, and trying things before they had perfect permission. I loved that energy immediately. Soon after, I joined an AI startup as an intern. I thought it would be a short internship. It turned into nearly two years of working closely with a founder and learning more than any course could have politely fit into a semester. Product, growth, fundraising, VC, engineering culture, the messy reality of building a company. Also the less formal curriculum: how ambitious people think, decide, panic a little, then keep moving.

Around the same time, I spent two months in a digital nomad community called DNA. That sounds like the beginning of a LinkedIn post about freedom, but it genuinely changed something in my head. I met founders, creators, investors, freelancers, and remote workers who had built lives that did not look like the default template. Some were inspiring, some were chaotic, some were probably both. But they all made the same question harder to ignore: what kind of life do I actually want to build?

One conversation from that summer stuck. An investor told me the most important thing I could do was keep thinking. At the time I was like, sure, great, but can we get back to doing things. Very patient of me. Years later, annoyingly, he was right. Clear thinking, independent judgment, and being able to read what is actually going on underneath the noise have become the skills I care about most. Still working on them. Some days better than others.

Since then I've bounced around different corners of tech: AI companion products, AI music, AI apps, AI video, SEO, growth, go-to-market, the whole "what if this product needs users" department. I've worked with founders, agencies, startups, and international teams. The common thread is not that I had a neat master plan. I did not. The common thread is that curiosity kept dragging me into rooms where I had to learn fast, ask better questions, and occasionally pretend I was less confused than I was.

In 2025 I moved to Madrid for my master's degree. Beautiful city, excellent light, shocking amount of paperwork. It has been one of the most difficult periods of my life. Academics, work, finances, job hunting, visas, rent, a new country, a new language environment, and the tiny daily humiliations of not knowing how basic systems work yet. At the same time, it forced me to become much more independent. I started building an audience online, got my first independent consulting projects, worked on SEO cases that actually moved, and eventually joined an international team focused on go-to-market.

So that's where I am now: still exploring, still working around AI and growth, still very into how people build products, careers, communities, and lives that don't make them quietly miserable. I like long conversations, ambitious people with actual kindness, internet communities, and projects that start as tiny curiosities and somehow become real. Mostly I'm still answering the same question from years ago: what kind of life do I want to build? Current answer: one with good work, good people, enough freedom, and ideally fewer visa forms.