Hance Zhang
中文

Writing

30 essays since 2024, most of them in both English and Chinese.

2026

  1. The More You Believe in Technology, the More You Should Believe in Value InvestingAI makes value easier to create and harder to keep. Value investing measures the distance between the two.24 min read
  2. Interpretive Authority Is a Form of PowerWhoever controls the interpretation of their own words holds the upper hand.5 min read
  3. Managing Your Decision RightsWhen the time comes to use their judgment, most people have no room left to use it.7 min read
  4. Stability Is One of the Most Expensive Commodities in the WorldMany business relationships appear to trade products, labor, or services. What’s actually being traded, underneath, is stability.6 min read
  5. Good Business Is Sustainable AltruismHow a company makes money trains it, over time, into a certain kind of organization. The best business models make satisfying users the easiest way to make money.12 min read
  6. Do Long-Term Relationships Actually Compound?Modern culture has moralized ‘long-term’ into a kind of political correctness. But time doesn’t pick sides: whatever structure a relationship already has, good or bad, time magnifies it.10 min read

2025

  1. Reality Bends You Before You Bend Reality‘Seek truth from facts’ means letting reality keep rewriting your beliefs: when an idea and reality disagree, you change the idea10 min read
  2. Why Smart People Fail SociallySmart people often lose out socially because they don’t know when to shut up5 min read
  3. Repetition Over PerfectionMost things worth doing don’t need a grand ‘why’. What matters is making them easy to start and easy to keep doing.9 min read
  4. The Futility of AttributionKnowing more psychological theories doesn’t make you happier, and the illusion of control brings more anxiety than ignorance ever did7 min read
  5. Domesticated by TechnologyEfficiency gains don’t create leisure because technology is selecting what kind of humans survive9 min read
  6. Stop Debating, Build the Experiment MachineOnce AI makes delivery cheap, product teams should spend less time arguing in meetings, run more experiments, and turn the way they run experiments into a machine9 min read
  7. Mimetic Desire and the Performance of ContrarianismIn the AI gold rush, ‘being contrarian’ has become its own consensus; the real move is choosing the life that fits you.3 min read
  8. 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.6 min read
  9. Compute Is the New Leverage (and Probably the Best One)Rich consensus is no longer necessary as compute outperforms labor as a leverage6 min read
  10. Bitter Lesson, End-to-end Coding, Creator EconomyThe Bitter Lesson is true for research, but product development requires working with the model’s grain.8 min read
  11. Why Growth Hacking and A/B Testing Are Bullshit Before PMFBefore PMF, growth hacks and A/B tests won’t help you much. What you should do is use unscalable methods to build a ‘10-star’ experience that users rave about.5 min read
  12. From ‘I Think’ to ‘I Tried’: Building an Experiment-Centric Team Culture with AIAI has made trying things cheap, so teams can argue less from opinion and decide more from the facts small experiments produce.6 min read
  13. The Scorecard FallacyPromotions are decided by people, and understanding them matters more than a perfect scorecard.4 min read
  14. Big Tech Hires Because It Can Afford ToBig tech companies mostly hire because they can afford to, which makes those jobs less secure than they look.2 min read
  15. Socratic Questioning and the Reality Distortion FieldSimply doing Socratic questioning can be simply annoying.3 min read
  16. The Heresy of SimplicityThe best businesses make complexity invisible.4 min read
  17. Does Proactive Design Still Mean Anything in a Random World?Being proactive should mean building a system that gains from randomness4 min read

2024

  1. Brian Chesky and Founder ModeGreat leadership is presence, not absence3 min read
  2. Don’t Put the Founder on a Pedestal—Or Anyone ElseResist the urge to place founders or leaders on pedestals; it hinders growth and critical thinking.2 min read
  3. Self Management for Effective LeadersHow I manage my time and my reports as a leader.4 min read
  4. Six Principles to Build a Great ProductA redacted excerpt from an internal letter on product strategy.7 min read
  5. How to Provide Advice in a Helpful WayProtect the positive reinforcement loop if you really wish others to grow2 min read
  6. Selling WhysMost people are struggling to find a “why” for their work and life. Be the person who finds a good “why” and sell it to them.2 min read
  7. Why I Write Blogs?Exploring the motivations behind blogging, from clarifying thoughts to sharing knowledge.2 min read