Setting Out on a Journey at 36 | Call for Submissions

By Jing Liu, Zhuxi Huang, and Yunxiao Guo

Has 36Under36 grown old? If we trace back to the inaugural class we selected in 2017, we nominated 516 founders and 144 investors, and the oldest among them are now 43. Over the past seven years, some have reached the pinnacle of success, while others have vanished without a trace. Seven years — long enough to yield a meaningful sample for observing China's venture capital and entrepreneurship landscape. But also long enough to force us to reexamine: What kind of people are we actually looking for?

36Kr initially chose 36 as a cutoff age, perhaps as a numerical coincidence. But from the earliest someone might start a company at 20 to the upper limit of 36 for selection, that's a full 16 years. That's longer than the entire mobile internet era in China, and the most unpredictable stretch of a person's life. For entrepreneurship, it's nearly a lifetime.

Not to mention, generational succession and rivalry is an eternal human theme.

Three years ago, when the mobile gravy train screeched to a halt and opportunities surged toward energy, consumer goods, and manufacturing, many hung their heads in despair: "Time for the old guard to reclaim the stage." When the current AI wave arrived, some radicals proclaimed: This is the young people's stage, this is the post-95s era. Early-stage funds went hunting everywhere for "ruthless Gen Zers." But wind the clock back to 2006: A business magazine introducing China's first batch of "geeks" struck an eerily similar tone: "How terrifying youth is!"

Using age to define entrepreneurs is probably unscientific. Such attribution ignores the complexity of entrepreneurship, a person's malleability, and most importantly, the variability inherent in business.

But today, the profile of who we're searching for has become increasingly clear. Let me toss out a few names.

Zhilin Yang may be the most representative of this moment. The Carnegie Mellon AI PhD, over the past year, built a large language model company now valued at over $2.5 billion. "I wanted a more radical, more thorough path to break down the barriers between academia and industry," he said in one interview, describing his entrepreneurial impulse. The 32-year-old founder placed a white piano at his office entrance and named his company after Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon.

Junjie Zhang, 31, could not be more different. In 2023, his Ba Wang Cha Ji became ubiquitous, now operating nearly 4,000 stores. But before age 17, he was homeless, and couldn't read a single character until he was 18. His investors have told us that Zhang's self-learning ability is extraordinary — "His grasp of business models, his insight into management, they're better than most CEOs I know."

There's the romantic faction too. Two years ago, Huawei's "genius youth" hire and Bilibili celebrity creator Zhiyuan Peng (稚晖君) decided to leave "the chrysanthemum factory" to start his own venture. He announced on Weibo: "Next I'll embark on a new endeavor, to do something more challenging — not because we're confident we can nail it, but because this has always been my passion and dream." His company, AgiBot, now carries a valuation of 7 billion RMB. He too was born in 1993.

Then there's growth visible through journey. In early 2021, Tim Pan — another well-known creator, founder of Yingshi Hurricane at age 25 — filmed his first entrepreneurship vlog. Back then, he talked about loving video because "preserving space and time is godlike power." By his second entrepreneurship story in 2023, he was discussing "the production structure of a content company" and "the rules of the content industry." At the start of both videos, he asked himself: "Does building a company, building a team, make a creator more successful?"

It's hard to say what inevitable similarities the above share. If there must be one, it would include this: a captivating yet uncertain imagination. Perhaps this relates to age, perhaps not.

I think we'll be able to describe it more precisely when we find them.

In 1987, Yu Hua published his breakthrough work Eighteen Going Out into the World, about an 18-year-old boy leaving home for the first time (the oldest applicant in this year's Under 36 was also born in 1987). In 2024, Yu Hua reissued the book.

Borrowing that title, here's an early gift to this year's Under 36 class: At 36, still going out into the world.

Image source: IC photo