Top Highlights

• Titling himself as a “moral champion,”16 he set about conducting personal improvement tasks, splitting his time after class between programming, reading, and repairing computers—the three pursuits that he later credited for helping him cultivate patience, knowledge, and friendship.
• Yiming later explained the rationale behind marrying his first partner as such: “If there are 20,000 people in the world who are suitable for me, I only have to find one of those 20,000. That’s an approximate optimal solution within an acceptable range.”19 How romantic.
• During his time at Microsoft, Yiming bought his first apartment in Beijing—a big deal for anyone his age. Real estate is taken very seriously, particularly for young men in China, due to cultural expectations of homeownership before marriage. Owning their first property in the capital would be a lifetime milestone for any Chinese, with similar pric...
• After one year, the chosen apartment had more than doubled in price. Of course, the whole market was rising at that time, but the compound Yiming chose increased the most of any within the surrounding area. This anecdote again highlights Yiming’s disregard for traditional approaches when making high stakes decisions and skepticism of the status quo...
• Yiming was like a fish in water, back in his entrepreneurial element after time away at big tech Microsoft.