After Selling His Company for $4 Billion: A Founder's Past, Present, and Future Plans | A Conversation with Yuan Jing, Co-founder of Moonton

For the new year, alongside our ongoing AI coverage, we're adding something new: profiles and interviews with individuals whose stories illuminate how technology reshapes lives. We believe AI will transform every facet of existence, just as every previous technological wave has profoundly affected how people live. And every person navigating these changes — through their own growth and choices — repeatedly arrives at life's crossroads. We hope these conversations offer inspiration, encouragement, and fresh perspective.

Our first episode of the year features Yuan Jing, former co-founder and CEO of Moonton Technology. Founded in 2014, Moonton released Magic Rush: Heroes and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang (MLBB) — titles well-known in gaming circles, with MLBB achieving phenomenon status across Southeast Asia. In 2021, ByteDance acquired Moonton in a deal reportedly exceeding $4 billion.

We recorded this episode sitting on the floor of Yuan Jing's living room — by then, he'd already left ByteDance to launch his new company, Pilot. He walked us through his career arc: from a self-described "not particularly hardworking employee" to co-founding and exiting Moonton, experiencing what he calls "a defining moment from every dimension," to starting over with ambitions of building a "business run by gamers" that balances commercial logic with multidimensional positive feedback. You'll hear a serial founder break down how he makes business decisions, reflect on his career to distill how to choose correctly, and share hard-won perspective on competition and self-awareness from someone who's ridden the highs and lows of fierce market battles and a major acquisition exit.

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I. Personal Journey

02:30 — Yuan Jing's background

03:58 — A day in his life now

05:19 — Early career: an internet service provider

08:41 — Post-graduation ambition: simply making a decent living in Shanghai

09:40 — "I don't grind. I've always been pretty lazy"

10:00 — On "laziness": self-dissatisfaction, refusing to do work he finds mentally unstimulating

12:12 — More thrilling than acquisition by a giant: first game hitting $10 million in revenue

14:08 — The day of the acquisition: "a landmark moment across every dimension"

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II. Entrepreneurship: Lessons Learned

15:53 — What did Moonton do right? Low ego, not treating entrepreneurship as a one-shot bet

16:54 — Accumulation plus luck: stacking as many success conditions as possible onto a very hard, uncertain endeavor

18:04 — Accumulation story #1: gaming for global markets at Tencent's wireless division

20:20 — How did he make multiple correct calls? Low ego breeds vigilance; staying attuned to external shifts; reading widely to make cross-domain connections

26:12 — Gaming industry success comes fast and fades fast; seeing enough rises and falls cultivates third-person self-observation

29:52 — Profitable in year two, then going head-to-head with the world's strongest competitor

32:57 — Peak pressure: envisioning worst-case scenarios, even planning for family's care

35:56 — Post-victory reflection on competing with giants: small has its own strength

40:24 — How mission, vision, and values get built step by step, not declared

45:24 — Starting over: prioritizing work that feels genuinely fulfilling

46:06 — Charlie Munger's influence: accumulating wisdom, doing what brings intrinsic joy

48:56 — Rationality vs. intuition: let intuition set direction, rationality prove the path

52:19 — What if the next venture fails? Break it into nodes and alternative reward systems

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III. Reflections and Insights

54:52 — Business is just one part of life; we can't let it consume everything

57:59 — We're raised to be the best competitor, but competition is zero-sum — someone's rise means another's fall

59:37 — Exams aren't the only path. Looking back, following his interests guided him here

1:03:35 — Becoming excellent matters; equally important is finding internal motivation and positive loops

1:05:52 — We can't change how the external world operates, but we can master ourselves — our most important asset

1:06:43 — Sources of positive energy: team, users

1:11:15 — Stories of choosing at life's crossroads: major decisions roughly every five years

1:13:42 — Once regretted wrong choices; the scarcer resources are early on, the more precious each choice becomes

1:14:52 — What matters more than the choice itself: understanding why you chose; second, don't rush

1:16:33 — Hopes for Pilot: must be profitable, baseline is not losing money, respecting content industry fundamentals in game development

1:20:22 — On the AI era: use it well

1:22:34 — On Black Myth: Wukong: enormous social and industry significance

1:26:41 — Defining Pilot's success: a company is a living organism; its very existence carries great meaning

1:28:10 — "My thinking keeps evolving; what I share today represents my subjective view at this moment"

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