Entrepreneurship: From Ambition to Purpose

First written in June 2026 and revised on 2026-08-16 for privacy and affiliation disclosure. This is not a success formula, investment advice, or a route others can copy. It is a personal review.

When I was younger, entrepreneurship meant opportunity, ambition, and a chance to take my life off its old track. Today it feels more like a delayed mirror. It reflects courage and ability, but also greed, immaturity, and everything a founder would rather not see.

People first found me through this English-learning repository. Others later read about the software company that failed, the health problems that followed, my return home, and the effort to begin again. Connected together, those events ask one question:

How many times must a person break before understanding where their abilities should be used?

2016: Putting Work into the Market

I went to Beijing on 7 March 2015 to find an internship. A series of encouraging interviews gave me a young person's illusion that I might force a place for myself in the world.

The university required me to return for my graduation defence. I did not receive my certificate on schedule because of unfinished internship requirements, so I went home. The period did not feel impressive: I learned to cook and developed joint pain. In retrospect, major turns often begin in the gap created by having nowhere obvious to go.

In 2016 I built a film website, bt0.com. It was not a world-changing product, but it had real users and real feedback. That was enough to teach an important lesson: code is not written for the maker's admiration, and products do not receive applause merely because they exist in the maker's imagination.

I took web-design projects and formed early companies with a former classmate. I moved quickly and easily mistook speed for direction. In an old post I had written that I wanted to work steadily, avoid rushing, and boast less. It took years to understand my own sentence.

2017: Joining a Company and Betting on It

On 1 April 2017, I joined a Nanjing technology company as a front-end developer to work on software for lawyers and law firms.

The first version had been outsourced. The code lacked comments, project management was confused, and product direction often changed by impulse. In my first month, one timeline module went through more than twenty versions. I did not yet know the terms organisational capability or requirements governance. I knew only that repeated demolition can turn enthusiasm into numbness.

I later led a front-end rewrite in Vue. After more than half a year, the new release reached the market, and for a long time produced no orders. Compensation stagnated and colleagues left. I continued because I believed in the product, moving from employee to team lead, general manager, and partner.

There is much I still value: I worked seriously on a product, led people seriously, and sincerely believed the work could succeed. But I also confused persistence with correctness, investment with a moat, and effort with a claim on the market.

Entrepreneurship permits sincerity and hard work. It never promises compensation for either.

Restaurants, Hotels, and Cash Flow

Outside software, I took part in a resort hotel and a club and lost heavily. Small restaurants taught me more directly.

A relative ran a successful beef-soup shop. I studied it, opened one of my own, then designed, renovated, photographed products, and expanded to more locations. Restaurant work was exhausting but honest. Customers, table turnover, serving time, consistency, reviews, rent, labour, and cash flow answered every day. The numbers could not hide behind a narrative.

The software company taught me that dreams are expensive. Restaurants taught me that cash flow is real.

The shops helped fund my later software investment, but eventually closed during the pandemic period. The lesson was not that physical business is good and the internet bad. Every business returns to real exchange: will people pay, can the cost structure survive, and can the organisation remain alive when conditions change?

2022: A Problem That Cost More Than Twenty Million Yuan

The software company moved into a larger office and invested in hiring, welfare, and environment. At the beginning of 2022, sales fell sharply. The product had accumulated features and defects, and customer feedback was poor.

An experienced engineer joined and helped expose deeper problems: old project structure, performance and security risk, and AI/data claims without the training data and foundations we had imagined. Much of what looked like core capability was search and preset output.

We had invested in interfaces, platforms, and feature volume without securing the core data and engineering foundation. Continuing to add features felt like painting a dangerous building; rebuilding required money the company could not afford.

One evening, the partners talked late into the night. A major shareholder who had invested heavily was close to emotional collapse and demanded to know whether the project could continue. I understood the despair. The money was personal savings, not abstract investment capital. I had also invested millions.

The company struggled to pay salaries and borrowed money. Management became more controlling: attendance enforcement, reduced benefits, meaningless overtime, constant reports, and monitoring. By September the team no longer wanted to come to work, and the company ended.

Combined losses exceeded twenty million yuan, before including other ventures. Harder than the number was guilt towards colleagues, family, and people who had trusted my judgment. Failure does not only damage a balance sheet. It can reveal that something once held with certainty was wrong at the foundation.

2023: Survive Before Restarting

At the end of March 2023 I transferred the final restaurant. In June I left Nanjing with family and returned home.

My health and routine had deteriorated: stomach problems, insomnia, poor appetite, blurred vision, and pain. Medical examinations did not reveal the catastrophic illness I feared, yet every day felt dangerous. I escaped into games, reversed day and night, stopped earning, left online groups, and disconnected from GitHub and people I had known.

The worst part was not lack of money but lack of visible hope. I repeatedly asked whether stopping earlier or recognising the foundations more clearly would have changed the outcome.

Recovery did not arrive through one inspiring sentence. It came from slowly regaining control: eating, sleeping, going outside, learning again, facing the past, admitting mistakes, and sorting the wreckage.

Founders often romanticise “starting again”. The first step may not be another company. It may be admitting that a founder is an ordinary person who can fail, needs rest, and must first support health and daily life.

2026: AI and the Physical Economy

By June 2026, I had returned to technology, products, and industry as a company leader. Product details, company visits, relationships, dates, and non-sponsorship disclosures are now centralised on Author Projects and Real-world Practice so that a personal review does not double as product promotion.

An industry visit reinforced a direction: useful AI should not remain an abstract idea or a toy for a small group. It must enter real processes, including agriculture and other physical industries, and become usable by ordinary people.

That statement is still a direction, not evidence of impact. After the software failure, I ask harder questions: who needs this, can it enter a real workflow, can people keep using it, and can delivery, compliance, cost, and service close the loop? Without answers, a beautiful technology story can become another unstable building.

What I Learned

A product is not a collection of features

Users care whether a problem is solved more quickly, reliably, and affordably, not how many modules appear on a screen.

Technical debt becomes business debt

Confused code, old architecture, missing data, and security risk eventually consume delivery, slow iteration, raise maintenance cost, and damage sales, support, and morale.

Cash flow is more honest than valuation

A small business that survives is not inferior to a grand internet narrative. Cash flow is respect for reality.

Founders should distrust heroic stories

“One more push will work”, “we invested too much to be wrong”, and “everyone following me will have a future” can become harm when facts no longer support them.

The willingness to learn after failure is an asset

I once closed the connection to GitHub and technology. Returning does not mean the pain disappeared. It means failure must become judgment, or remain only failure.

Entrepreneurship Is Not Self-immolation

I once thought a founder should burn time, health, relationships, and savings, and that success would justify it. I no longer believe that.

Good entrepreneurship should make a founder clearer, a team more orderly, users better served, and family more secure. Risk is not recklessness. Persistence is not refusal to stop. Belief in the future is not refusal to see the present.

Before continuing, I now want plain answers:

• Who needs this and why now?
• Where does revenue come from and where are the costs?
• What guarantees delivery?
• How is risk contained?
• If it fails, how can people exit responsibly?
• If it succeeds, can ordinary people benefit?

This is not the display of youthful success or the accusation of later disappointment. It is an attempt to rebuild judgment after reality broke it, and to use what remains for work that helps others.

Related Reading

• Archive from a Decade Ago
• Last Year and Now
• My Story
• Author Projects and Real-world Practice
• GitHub profile

Next: 90-Day Action Plan