Their Paths, Methods, and Conviction | 5Y Tavern Vol. 27: International Women's Day Special
Has there ever been a belief, behavior, or habit that truly changed your life?
This special Women's Day edition of the 5Y Tavern brings together female founders and investors from 5Y Capital to share how they renew themselves, shape their thinking, and stay focused in a rapidly changing market.
Though each path is different and every perspective unique, real growth never comes from blind pursuit — it's about learning to find your own rhythm amid change. We hope their stories offer something you can take with you :)
01 What draws you most to what you're doing now?
"I'm constantly moved by founders' conviction and persistence. Being able to help them keep going is a tremendous privilege."
— Yaqiong Chen, 5Y Capital
"It's like a puzzle game — constantly finding new pieces of information to get closer to the truth."
— Mengqi Ji, 5Y Capital
"Believing that a new generation of AI companies will emerge, and being there to support fearless founders who are driven by pure passion."
— Lu Liu, 5Y Capital
"It's watching ideals become reality. My original vision for starting Zhuben was to let ordinary people enjoy the benefits of aromatherapy at accessible prices. Over the years, consumer feedback has made it clear that this dream is slowly coming true."
— Qianfei Liu, Founder of Zhuben
"It's using modern technology to redraw the frontiers of medical understanding — that sense of 'using algorithms to pierce the code of life' is the ultimate romance of medical AI. We're proving that compute density × data dimension = revolutionary emergence in medical cognition."
— Chune Ma, Founder of Shukun Technology
"What attracts me most is the process of constantly creating goals and finding answers. Along the way, I've found a more compelling goal that hasn't yet yielded positive feedback: solving real-world problems for a community of consumers and creating genuinely meaningful value."
— Sue, Founder of oatoat
"Interesting, meaningful work, with a group of like-minded people who trust each other moving forward together."
— Min Wan, Founder of BestSign
"The challenges are different every year — plenty of variety."
— Fangfang Xiao, Founder of Ufliu
02 How do you quickly understand an entirely new field?
Can you share your "minimum viable learning framework"?
"Go to the front lines. Spend at least half a year deeply studying the most successful company, founder, and paradigm (Winner Pattern) in that field, and think about what opportunities today's variables might create."
— Kaiyan He, 5Y Capital
"1. Find a public company in the space, look at revenue breakdowns and notes in their filings — this quickly clarifies what value the industry creates and how it makes money. 2. For new terminology or industry chains, analogize to industries or business models you already know. Large language models + good prompts have made this remarkably efficient."
— Mengqi Ji, 5Y Capital
"Start by searching to understand concepts, then find books or videos for systematic frameworks. Take training courses if available. Only seek out experts once you can formulate real questions."
— Fangfang Xiao, Founder of Ufliu
03 When facing information overload, what methods
do you use to regain focus?
"Search more, browse feeds less (entertainment excepted)."
— Mengqi Ji, 5Y Capital
"Stay patient. Focus on what's in front of you."
— Lu Liu, 5Y Capital
"My method is continuous triage. Every decision to let something go is an opportunity for inward examination. No matter how tempting the opportunity or complex the information, it's a chance to re-examine who you are and where you're headed. This process of self-exploration lets you see your relationship with the world more clearly. The next time distracting information appears, you can decide faster.
It's also crucial to think deeply from the start about what you truly want to achieve. 'The noble person sets a constant aim, not constant new aims.' If your purpose is firm enough, focus comes naturally."
— Qianfei Liu, Founder of Zhuben
"My secret weapon is 'floral cognitive pruning':
Selection rule: Like choosing a dominant flower stem, extract three 'cognitive trunks' from the information torrent that truly affect strategic direction; Spatial management: Deliberately preserve 30% mental whitespace, like negative space in flower arrangement, allowing unexpected inspiration to grow like vines; Color contrast: Layer product R&D (cool tones) and commercial expansion (warm tones) in alternating patterns, maintaining cognitive tension balance.
This method has proven its worth repeatedly in our recent integrated machine project — like using preserved flower techniques to 'fix' dynamic inference frameworks in hardware, preserving AI's agility while ensuring medical-grade reliability."
— Chune Ma, Founder of Shukun Technology
"Information overload is genuinely universal, especially since curiosity is a trait many founders share. Over the past year, I've tried some concrete practices: using fragmented time to set and complete specific, well-framed goals. Though occasional random events disrupt things, this also leaves me without time or energy for unnecessary information.
Of course, the most important thing may be cultivating the mind — building mindfulness to achieve body-mind focus. I'm still working on this."
— Sue, Founder of oatoat
04 Is there a belief, behavior, or habit that has genuinely
improved your life?
"The 80/20 rule — learn to subtract. There aren't actually that many things that matter."
— Yaqiong Chen, 5Y Capital
"Habit that improved my life: confidently down-weighting people who don't seek truth, reducing noise. Belief that improved my life: truth is a country without roads — you have to walk your own."
— Kaiyan He, 5Y Capital
"Something a painter taught me when I was still working in Beijing. When you feel panicked and unprepared for something — whether it's a difficulty, impromptu speech, or sudden situation — don't be anxious. Just drop the fear and fully believe: as long as you face the people and matter before you with sincerity, the outcome will be good. Believe 100% in sincerity and genuine intent, and put yourself out there. This belief lets me bravely and calmly face the things I fear most."
— Qianfei Liu, Founder of Zhuben
"My decade-long 'cognitive entropy reduction ritual': 15 minutes every morning for 'knowledge decluttering.'
Specific method: Set phone to grayscale mode, physically isolating information noise; On a special notebook, draw a 'cognitive energy distribution map,' visualizing the domains truly needing focus that day; Use a red marker to cross out three 'seemingly important but actually ineffective' learning goals;
This habit keeps me clear-headed amid the busyness of AI medical entrepreneurship — just as with our intelligent computing integrated machine, it's not about blindly adding compute power, but achieving intelligence density leaps through architectural optimization."
— Chune Ma, Founder of Shukun Technology
"Decide what you want, then see what you need to do. Many people look at what they can do first."
— Fangfang Xiao, Founder of Ufliu
"Treat yourself as a reinforcement learning model. Treat every conversation with founders, every field study and observation, as precious input. Constantly form judgments, revise judgments, overturn cognition, while avoiding overfitting. The goal is to become a robust model that produces higher-quality decisions."
— Jingran Zhu, 5Y Capital
05 What's the most mind-shifting piece of advice
you've received in your field?
"Most of the time, production relations matter more than productive forces in determining the quality of a business."
— Mengqi Ji, 5Y Capital
"I used to deeply believe that treating people sincerely would always earn positive understanding and response. As our brand grew more prominent, this belief was completely overturned. I realized being misunderstood is the fate of those who express themselves. Because everyone's life experience differs, no one can fully understand another. However precise or sincere your expression, listeners will only interpret through their own lens. So I began to respect the power of expression while cultivating a mindset fearless of expressing. I still encourage myself to express sincerely, but my expectations about being understood or misunderstood have fundamentally shifted."
— Qianfei Liu, Founder of Zhuben
"Strong thinking usually requires strong positions, but sometimes no position is the best position. If what we want is to win the game, to hit a home run, observing the strike zone matters more than swinging blindly. Weak thinking is a high-fault-tolerance framework that lets you maintain resilience and agency no matter what happens. Respect the nature of pharmaceuticals, acknowledge that what you know is just the tip of the iceberg, don't try to defend your correctness — just observe and evaluate objectively. Investing with common sense is the best choice."
— Jingran Zhu, 5Y Capital
06 What's your biggest hope for the coming year?
"While stabilizing China operations, validate whether a Xiaohongshu private-domain business model can work. It's not just about how much we can sell — more importantly, whether through optimizing supply chain and pricing, we can migrate omnichannel users into private domains and build long-term emotional connections with them."
— Qianfei Liu, Founder of Zhuben
"Driven by continuous growth and improving efficiency, the company achieved positive operating cash flow in the second half of last year, becoming the first in China's e-signature industry to do so. I hope BestSign can maintain rapid business growth this year while achieving full-year positive cash flow and profitability."
— Min Wan, Founder of BestSign
"My biggest hope is the scaled deployment of Shukun's large-model intelligent computing integrated machines. When that happens, the 'production relations' of the healthcare system will be fundamentally restructured: for doctors, AI becomes a 'super clinical assistant,' dramatically reducing reading time; for patients, diagnosis shifts from 'probabilistic guessing' to 'spatiotemporal推演' — examination data generates future disease evolution maps, with prevention windows opening much earlier; for hospitals, compute pooling breaks down silos, letting grassroots hospitals leapfrog in capability and reducing misdiagnosis rates.
This isn't just an efficiency revolution — it's a qualitative transformation in healthcare equity. We're using AI to build a 'medical highway without altitude differences,' letting every life reach the shore of health equally."
— Chune Ma, Founder of Shukun Technology
07 Recommend one work that shaped your thinking (book, film, or paper)
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari."
— Mengqi Ji, 5Y Capital
"A book that helped me greatly during a low point: The Truth of Suffering. It gave me deep insight into the concept of impermanence: everything is impermanent, essence is cause and effect. Every result has a cause. When you're in difficulty or at a low point, believe that effort on the 'cause' will naturally change the result and turn the situation around. And when you're in a highlight moment, understand that everything will change. This way of thinking keeps me equanimous, with more courage and wisdom to face everything."
— Qianfei Liu, Founder of Zhuben
"Every book, every film, every paper subtly shapes our thinking and cognition. Good books are vast as the ocean — let me recommend two first: The Road to Serfdom and Fahrenheit 451."
— Min Wan, Founder of BestSign
"The Antidote by Barry Werth. Pharmaceuticals have had many transformative breakthroughs, but also many systemic problems. Similar stories keep repeating, with shared game rules and winning strategies.
Also Making the Familiar Unfamiliar. In it, Bauman explores modern social fluidity through dialogue, revealing the predicament where traditional methods fail and new methods haven't yet formed. By questioning what's taken for granted, it offers new cognition and ways of thinking, helping us better face life's insecurities and understand our own era."
— Jingran Zhu, 5Y Capital
Join the Conversation — Win a Gift
What are your thoughts on these questions? Or do you have a special take on any particular answer? Share in the comments — we'll select two standout responses to receive a gift from 5Y Capital.
5Y Capital seeks out, supports, and inspires lonely entrepreneurs, providing everything from spiritual support to operational backing. We believe that if the person others see as crazy starts to be believed, the world will become a different place.
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