Li Xiaojun: 52 Annual Reflections Saved on My Phone | End of 2025

"Training your own model."

By Li Xiaojun, IDG Capital

Today's "2025 Finale" comes from Li Xiaojun, Partner at IDG Capital.

As one of venture capital's sharpest hunters, Li is known for his precise read on frontier trends and distinctive nose for early-stage projects. As an early-stage investor, his ability to "read people" has left a deep impression on many.

For instance, he once said: "Reading people is like science, but more like investing — it's ultimately an art. The greatest uncertainty is that everyone changes, and every individual is different. So reading people is just a matter of probability."

Perhaps precisely because of his years of practice and reflection on "reading people," Li displays his characteristic calm and self-consistency — unlike the confusion, worry, or anxiety that many show at this moment about macro conditions and new opportunities.

Li effortlessly maps foundational AI-era logic like scaling law, reward function, and data annotation onto dimensions of talent identification, career planning, venture investing, and even personal cultivation and life's journey. In his eyes, life itself seems to be a model that requires continuous pre-training and alignment with high-quality data.

On a recent long-haul flight, the physical isolation at 30,000 feet gave Li another opportunity to examine his "system." Afterwards, he shared these reflections on his WeChat Moments. Rather than a response to the outside world, they read more like a "debug log" for self-cognition. We've organized and categorized them here.

Exactly 52 entries — one for each week of the year.

"2025 Finale" is still accepting submissions. Thinkers from the business and investment worlds are welcome to reach out via our backend or at chenzhiyan@36kr.com. True thinking endures, even as times change.

Part 01

On Talent, Career, and Investing

1. When hiring or evaluating founders, always adopt a growth lens. The best chapter of their career should be the next one, not the present or past. Don't be constrained by titles; look at real experience and capability.

2. Can a company's core competitiveness transfer to an individual, and can that individual then transfer those capabilities to a new company? When searching for people, look for potential rather than achievement; find those who can still shine ten years from now. Time (era, age), personality (past decisions), and passion (ambition, conviction) usually matter more than "current ability." Whether one's abilities fit the era (or company) matters most — more than present competence.

3. An investor's taste and cognitive ceiling are typically determined by the best founders you can access in an industry. Think about who the best are and how to learn from them.

4. Talent tends to appear in clusters, with value following a power-law distribution.

5. When examining any industry or profession, first judge which structure it belongs to:

Winner-takes-all (e.g., search, social, professional sports)

Power law (e.g., VC, cloud computing, AI-leveraged industries)

Fragmented (e.g., restaurants, law — industries with lower leverage)

6. The best careers are: compounding, scalable/high-leverage, and capitalizable. Buffett achieved all three.

7. "People on the rise have the most self-drive, are easiest to manage, and have the strongest learning will and adaptability. Those who take over after the peak usually have a defensive mindset, making it hard to perform with new businesses." Turbo's insight is very illuminating.

8. Lessons from AI models:

Scaling law → Without sufficient practical experience, you won't generate genuine cognitive models.

Attention is all you need → You must maintain focus on what matters most.

Reward function → Be clear about what you want to produce good behavior and process.

Implications for investing: Investors are training their own models; data comes from personal and others' experience — the higher the relevance, the more valuable. Seek first-hand information whenever possible.

Models must also learn to "tune": what to distill, what to pre-train, and how to calibrate when external conditions change — rather than blindly adjusting to external outcomes, which only leaves you perpetually behind.

Attention time ≈ compute; maintaining focus is effective compute.

9. Due to randomness and exponential effects, primary-market investing may yield only one mega home run in a lifetime. But if you pursue investing itself, the continuous refinement of core capabilities, you need repeatable, transferable, and accumulable insights.

10. In early-stage investing, fear of missing out and decision urgency need balancing. FOMO is inevitable — acknowledge it but don't overindulge. Urgency is necessary; understand your own emotions and the market's. Consensus vs. non-consensus matters: understand where consensus lies, why the market thinks this way, and where the boundary is.

11. Investing involves taste, limitations, and ego. Strive to reduce the ego component, recognize your cognitive limitations, expand boundaries, and cultivate good taste.

12. People love abusing buzzwords like first principles, PMF. When this happens, always verify: "What exactly do you mean?"

13. Many professions have a "prime." The best prime is slow rise, long peak. The prime ends when you stop renewing your inner curiosity and external rhythm.

14. "The brilliant minds always live in two opposite ideas but still can function well." This makes particular sense.

15. When listening, distinguish facts, emotions, information (source), and opinions; then factor in the other's expertise, preferences, and past experience.

16. Choosing what to do matters more than how to do it. Many companies are simply "unbuildable" — who builds them matters less.

17. More investment dimensions and rising complexity actually create more opportunity for those who think well. Today's major opportunities come from understanding three complex dimensions: AI, investing, and the international environment. Investment dimensions include: conviction about the future, industry cognition, company judgment.

18. Everything is the art of being. The best in every field take the most basic cognition and practice it year after year, until they can teach others.

19. In financial services, institutional value > individual value. Personal halo comes from the institution, not vice versa. Influence decays rapidly after leaving an institution, lacking the long-tail credibility of systems and brands. Long-term career value must be built on the compounding growth of institutional value.

20. Judging an institution's vitality from a people perspective has three dimensions — whether top talent keeps progressing, the state of the middle layer, and attractiveness to new and future talent.

Part 02

On Cultivation and Growth

21. Breathing needs to be learned and trained. Learning to breathe correctly brings calm and relaxation. Using your core to drive movement helps you better perceive your body as an integrated whole, with a central engine operating and propelling it. Understanding and using your body well is a lifelong learning project.

22. Early to bed and early to rise isn't mandatory, but if staying up late is simply "because I don't want to sleep," you might as well rest earlier. Knowing your "peak hours" matters enormously for daily mood and efficiency.

23. Pleasure distracts the directionless but nourishes those with purpose.

24. Finding books itself requires method and time; the cost of trial and error is low — dare to skim quickly, dare to abandon. When you encounter a good book, focus: try 25 minutes of uninterrupted reading.

25. The greatest recognition often comes from your strongest competitors. The key question: Do you pursue mass recognition, recognition from those you care about, or ultimately self-recognition?

26. The core of everyone's model is: conviction, capability, personality. Capability can be trained; the others need calibration. In the AI era, even as cognition and intelligence accelerate, physical energy, happiness, and desire cannot be scaled — so they deserve even more attention.

27. Knowing what not to do matters more than knowing what to do. Wanting to win and fearing losing are two different drives.

28. Using "analogy" to explain things is an important capacity for understanding, simplifying, and outputting.

29. Sometimes decisions need to marinate — sleep on it. The same for giving advice; the same for emotional reactions — leave some space.

30. A mentor once said something excellent: Work with good & positive people; learn new things; priority setting.

31. No one dislikes praise. What matters: whether the attitude is sincere, why you're praising, and whether the timing is right.

32. What you choose not to learn sometimes matters more than what you learn — but the difficulty lies in knowing which part to skip.

33. Everyone has a bug; it's basically hardwired, and it's usually the flip side of your brightest quality.

34. Don't settle for simple self-consistency; seek self-consistency after self-interrogation. Keep questioning, keep updating. Always wanting to prove yourself right is the greatest obstacle to personal growth.

35. Diversity isn't about converging toward mediocrity, but expanding cognitive boundaries through collision of different viewpoints.

36. The sign of "quiet good years" is when you fret only over trivial matters. Because real trouble usually doesn't announce itself in advance. So don't let excessive worry occupy your mind. Learn to coexist with your emotions — even harness them.

37. Using tools is the greatest distinction between humans and animals; using tools well — from books to computers to the internet to AI — further widens the gap between people. Tools grow ever smarter, and increasingly require combining with goals to be used more wisely.

38. Behind every seemingly effortless victory lie countless awkward, struggling failures faced without giving up.

Part 03

On Life and the World

39. Self-cognition isn't just static; it needs a spatiotemporal dimension (world changes). How you grow over time — this is crucial. It's really the classic three questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Finding your absolute value to the world and your relative value advantage over peers matters. Finding value that compounds for you over time matters.

40. One's view on education is an even deeper worldview than the "three views." Because the person you hope your child becomes is often the model you most deeply endorse and idealize.

41. Compounding, exponential curves, power-law distributions, and normal distributions — these statistical and distribution models often explain the structure of the world better than linear relationships.

42. "Friendship means two people agreed to help each other to become the best part of themselves." Reid Hoffman's summary of friendship is excellent.

43. For some people, money is just "money" — digits in a bank. For others, it's "wealth" — something to spend, but more importantly, a resource for doing more meaningful and valuable things.

44. Each achievement may look like a solo journey, but it is always lifted by the love and support of others.

45. Beyond stimulating thought and accumulating cognition, conversation should ideally carry some "human connection" — resonance with the other person. This requires genuine interest in them. That is, beyond intellectual collision, what matters more is making the other feel you care about them as a living person.

46. Imposter syndrome and narcissism both stem from a deep insecurity about one's value.

47. Everyone's lifespan is roughly similar, but the "data quality" produced by time varies enormously, as does data annotation capability — so using this data to train your own model produces vastly different models.

48. Optimism and pessimism are personality; positivity and negativity are attitude. You can be pessimistic, but must be positive, because positivity most benefits yourself and others. Many things can be analyzed through four quadrants.

49. Life's three most important decisions: where to live, what career to pursue, who to be with. These determine most of life's quality. Choices matter more than effort; character determines destiny — this truly makes sense.

50. Intensity and duration are important dimensions for measuring friendship and partnerships, joy and happiness.

51. What you've always envied and assumed you couldn't do — these are often your blessings.

52. Time is fair. If you view life as a timeline, "timing" is the derivative, "time" is the integral. Life's altitude depends on how you treat time, how you seize timing. When your rhythm resonates with the era's pulse, you achieve more with less.

Layout | Yao Nan
Image source | IC Photo

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