👋 Welcome to Hance Zhang’s Blog
I write about learnings in leadership, AI, product building, and investment. I’m currently based in Tokyo, DM me via X!
Reality Bends You Before You Bend Reality
Why ‘seek truth from facts’ is not about honesty, but about letting reality rewrite your beliefs
Why Smart People Fail at Social Interactions: The Value-Accessibility Balance
The smart person’s social problem isn’t being too smart—it’s not knowing when to shut up
Repetition Over Perfection: Why Showing Up Beats Talent
The real challenge isn’t doing things well. It’s doing them at all.
The Futility of Attribution
Why psychological theories don’t make you happier, and how the illusion of control creates more anxiety than ignorance ever did
Domesticated by Technology
Efficiency gains don’t create leisure because technology is selecting what kind of humans survive
Stop Debating, Build the Experiment Machine
Product development in the AI era isn’t about building better products—it’s about building better assembly lines
Mimetic Desire and the Performance of Contrarianism
In the AI gold rush, ‘being contrarian’ has become its own consensus; the real move is choosing the life that fits you.
GPT-5 Is the Watershed: From 'Model Will Absorb Everything' to 'Environment Is What Matters'
The model and product layers in the AI industry are more clearly separated than ever.
Compute Is the New Leverage (and Probably the Best One)
Rich consensus is no longer necessary as compute outperforms labor as a leverage
Bitter Lesson, End-to-end Coding, Creator Economy
The Bitter Lesson is true for research, but product development requires working with the model’s grain, not against it.