Yungang Huang, Source Code Rhythm: My Aksu

@Jing Liu

This is a true investor's story. But one so real it hardly feels like an investor's story at all.

In 1986, Yungang Huang was born in Sichuan. At nine, he followed his parents to Aksu, Xinjiang. But this was hardly an idyllic memory: as a teenager, he had to move bricks and pick cotton alongside his farming parents. Not until age 18 did he get into Zhejiang University. Before leaving home, he didn't even know that Zhejiang University was in Hangzhou.

Then he joined Matrix Partners and Source Code Capital, became a partner, and backed era-defining companies like Kuaidi Dache, RELX, Kimi, Unitree Technology, and Stairmed.

Yes, this is the classic tale of education changing one's fate.

We have no intention of labeling any industry or group of people. But one can't help the stereotype: had this happened before the 1990s, something like Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi, it would be easier to imagine. Yet most of this story unfolded after 2000.

Among Huang's many memories, the most narratively rich are his journeys on green-skinned trains. On trips lasting anywhere from several hours to seven days and nights, he witnessed brutal fights, the rawness of human nature, and once nearly died himself. He still keeps those ticket stubs.

Train tickets, 2004–2010

He says that when society is in flux, some people might gain more by breaking the rules. But he doesn't believe in that. He believes the world operates according to certain principles, and that one must hold fast to oneself. So when he decided to start his own fund, he named it Source Code Rhythm.

Source Code Rhythm is an independently raised, independently decided, independently operated fund focused on early-stage investing, with three main areas of focus: AI applications, robotics, and smart hardware (tech-enabled consumer products).

Before recording the video podcast with Huang, I asked several people who know him. Some said he's like Xu Zhu; others said Fu Hongxue — though Huang himself rejects the latter comparison, finding Gu Long's characterization of Fu too tragic. But these assessments all point to the same thing: Huang is a man who carries a sense of destiny.

Perhaps because of this, Huang often reveals values rare in the investment world. His sense of being "worthy" seems unusually low. He possesses an almost primal empathy for the weak. He finds himself drawn to acts of kindness that seem almost unbelievable.

For more, please listen to the full audio version on the Xiaoyuzhou app, and the full video version coming soon to Bilibili and other platforms. There you'll hear Huang's more complete account — especially how his youth shaped everything that followed, including his investing career.

The main text follows:

A Childhood of Dire Poverty, Yet Bathed in Sunlight

The elementary school in his memory had only three classrooms. To attend middle school, he had to walk an hour on mountain roads, take an hour's boat ride, then walk another hour.

This was where Yungang Huang was born: a small mountain village in Sichuan-Chongqing country. Later his parents decided on Xinjiang — at least the roads there were flat. At eight, Huang spent days and nights on a train to reach Aksu. There his parents were simple laborers: picking cotton while moving bricks at a brick factory.

Whether by natural gift or early awareness that "this was the only path to change one's fate," Huang always excelled at school. He almost never placed second.

One day in his final semester of high school, dawn barely breaking, he lay in his dormitory bed surrounded by thunderous snoring. For the first time in his life, he felt lost. He asked himself: What do I want to do? What if I don't get into university?

The scene resembles Gao Jialin in Lu Yao's novel Life. But that was the 1970s; Huang's story came after the millennium.

When the results came out, Huang ranked third in his school — the top two were repeat students. He chose Zhejiang University because he'd seen it ranked highly on previous years' honor boards. But he says he didn't even know then that Zhejiang University was in Hangzhou.

Huang says that despite the harsh environment and poverty, he had the kind of feral, beautiful childhood: cycling for hours with friends from one place to another; catching jerboas, wild rabbits, gathering mushrooms; running across mountains and fields; lying under poplar trees and in alfalfa fields, gazing at the sky.

He still maintains 5.3 vision in both eyes. He attributes this to all the sun he soaked up as a child.

Cotton fields and the Gobi in Aksu

Escaping Bullying and Timing in Investing

Huang also experienced bullying in his youth, though the word may sound too severe.

The worst incident: on his way home from cycling, two older kids came up and beat him for no reason. He still remembers, after being hit, his bicycle fallen on the ground, its wheel spinning in the air, lying there for a while before getting up, righting the bike, and continuing to ride.

It was utterly powerless. He drew an analogy for me: just as in investing you inevitably encounter people skilled at gaming situations, some colleagues might naively trust what the other party says, but he would always ask as a backstop: If the low-probability event occurs, what's the ultimate enforceability?

What he meant was: some things simply have no rhyme or reason. You still need to spell out in the terms what the worst case is and what to do about it.

But I digress. For a year or two during his school years, he lived in constant dread. The moment school ended, he'd tense up. Until he gradually mastered a precise escape technique: slipping out of the classroom two minutes before the teacher dismissed class, then scaling the wall through a side gate.

Huang even sees a parallel to timing in investing. He put it in industry parlance: "The best positive feedback is when your judgment [of timing] keeps improving, and this kind of thing simply stops happening."

Green-Skinned Trains, Children of the Jianghu

The green-skinned train is the central element of Huang's story.

He can still clearly recall what each letter — G, Z, D, K, N — stands for in train classification. Those journeys of four days and four nights to seven days and six nights spanned nearly his entire university years. In that era without WeChat or Douyin, countless strange tales unfolded.

There was suffering. He once had a sudden gastroenteritis attack, collapsed in the train toilet, and was rushed by ambulance to a hospital in Zhengzhou, a stop along the route. When he woke, he felt reborn; the two nurses before him nearly made him cry out in shock at their beauty.

There was cruelty. A young couple and a father-daughter pair came to blows over seating; he watched as the young man beat the girl's father until his face was covered in blood. For a long time afterward, Huang was haunted by regret: if he had simply offered his own seat, perhaps none of it would have happened.

There were lessons in human nature. He returned from the toilet to find his seat taken by four burly men. He'd meant to protest, but seeing them "open beer bottles with their eyelids," he shrank back. And so he stood for five hours.

Huang has told these stories to many people. What moves him is that the green-skinned train, once a kind of collective memory for Chinese people, was essentially a concentrated society: children of the jianghu, from all corners, some studying, some doing business, some leaving home, some returning.

The first time he took the train from Aksu to Hangzhou, he saw West Lake. He says he was enchanted, "wanted to jump right in."

So years later, when he watched Feng Xiaogang's A World Without Thieves, he felt an instant kinship, "like hearing an old song that brings back so many memories."

To this day, Huang still keeps his university-era train tickets. He finds it strange that he started feeling nostalgic from a very young age, though his uncle once said on the platform seeing him off: "The farther you are from home, the closer you are to your dreams."

He thinks perhaps it's because he was always leaving old places behind.

A certain green-skinned train, a journey Huang took repeatedly

Rhythm, Because He Believes the World Has Its Principles

The name Source Code Rhythm also connects to Huang's green train memories.

The human panorama he witnessed on those trains made him feel that sometimes rules don't work. Yet Huang happens to be someone who believes in rules.

So "rhythm" means principle. He says that when society is in flux, some people can gain more by breaking rules. But he doesn't agree. He wanted this word to remind himself: the world still operates according to principles; and one must hold fast to oneself.

"I Got Too Deep Into the Role"

His entry into investing came by chance.

In college, Huang interned at Tencent's HR department. Because he had to sift through massive numbers of resumes, he tried every recruitment website on the market. So when an opportunity came to intern at Matrix Partners, he immediately put this knowledge to use, recommending two recruitment sites — one of which was Liepin, which Matrix later invested in.

However, compared to some peers of his generation, Huang wasn't particularly strong at sourcing. His first year or two, he made virtually no noise. Until a company that colleagues had looked at and passed on came along: Kuaidi Dache.

The initial pass made sense: at the time, Kuaidi's management structure had issues. But by the time Huang got involved, this problem had been clarified. The investment process remained bumpy: from initially understanding the model, to nearly closing, then having another fund swoop in. The deal nearly fell through at the last minute.

But the most dramatic chapter of the Kuaidi story was the great merger.

The ongoing battle between Didi and Kuaidi was largely fueled by excess capital. So eventually, investors on both sides decided to negotiate a merger.

On the night of negotiations, the final conclusion was essentially set: Didi would absorb Kuaidi. Huang and Chuanwei Lü walked down to the hotel lobby first. Just then, the Didi team came toward them laughing and celebrating. Huang and Lü glanced at each other, then silently looked away.

Rationally, the ride-hailing war no longer needed to be fought. But emotionally, for Lü and Kuaidi's investors, it felt like handing over their child.

Even many years later, Huang says that when choosing payment methods, he uses Alipay over WeChat whenever possible, simply because Alipay supported Kuaidi back then.

"I feel like I got too deep into the role," Huang says.

The evening of 2013, by the Huangpu River, when the decision to invest in Kuaidi Dache was made

Between Sorrow and Joy

After Kuaidi, Huang's next signature deal was RELX. This was his first investment after moving from Matrix Partners to Source Code Capital.

RELX founder Ying Wang had previously worked at Uber, so it was something of a continuation of his mobility investing era. But what's interesting is that Huang himself neither smokes nor drinks, yet he invested in e-cigarettes.

As Source Code's first externally recruited partner, Huang was under enormous pressure for a time.

It was around 2018, when online education was white-hot. Huang also invested in a one-on-one online tutoring company. But in retrospect, online education was already in its second half by then, and the one-on-one model barely worked.

Soon, that company ran into trouble. But RELX hadn't yet broken out. The pressure peaked.

During that period, Huang recalled something Kobe Bryant said: "Even if you go 0 for 20, keep shooting." He copied this into a small notebook as encouragement to himself.

Until 2021, when RELX went public. Its market cap once exceeded $50 billion. Huang's pressure released instantly. He says, strangely, that day felt like playing a video game, but the next day he returned to calm.

Babaoshan and Liang Qichao

He had proven himself. But soon, Huang felt pressure once again.

This was 2021, when people assumed Source Code was riding high. The entire market was flooded with capital, but Huang, on one hand sensing the frenzy, on the other felt increasingly exhausted. "It was basically, too tired to love," he used a phrase very much of that era.

Huang says he was having nearly ten investment committee meetings a day back then, his mind roaring afterward. He even started having insomnia.

So he decided to seek answers in books. He read no business or finance books; instead he turned to biographies from the Republican and early PRC periods, like Liang Qichao. Then one afternoon, on a whim, he decided to visit the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.

There he saw those legendary heroic figures, felt the vastness of life, "very moving." When he returned, he was at peace.

This story sounds almost fantastical. Perhaps similar to how some people go to hospitals to witness the coming and going of humanity?

It was during this same period, while reading a book about Liang Qichao, that one particular story lodged deeply in his memory. Through this memory, perhaps we can better understand Huang.

He says that when Liang Qichao fell ill and went to Peking Union Medical College Hospital, they unfortunately removed the wrong kidney, causing his condition to rapidly deteriorate. Liang's family was prepared to make an issue of it, but Liang stopped them. Because he didn't want to harm the hospital on his account.

In Huang's view, this was "great kindness."

Returning to Aksu

In mid-2023, Huang returned to Aksu once more. The last time had been over a decade ago: after graduating from university, he had never gone back.

Upon landing, he said "that fold was opened": Sichuan, Aksu, Hangzhou, Beijing. These four coordinates suddenly connected into one.

It was also his first time flying to Aksu. What once took days and nights now took only four or five hours.

He had injured his foot at the time and went back on crutches. Old classmates drove him around, but he found with sadness: the brick factory of his youth was gone, replaced by brand new residential complexes. In just over a decade, so much seemed to have happened.

After returning, he decided to start his own fund: Source Code Rhythm. Early-stage focus, small team with fast decisions, concentrated on AI and robotics.

2023 return to Xinjiang, left ankle ligament torn, but still went horseback riding

"I Want to Become the Best Investor"

Before the video podcast with Huang, I asked several people who know him. Some said he's like Xu Zhu; others said Fu Hongxue. One close friend even suggested we ask about his ambition — not because he actually wanted to know, but because he was certain Huang would likely evade the question.

These assessments all point to the same thing: Huang is an introverted, or "low sense of worthiness," person.

For example, at his first meeting with RELX founder Ying Wang, the two talked for over three hours, getting along famously, but Huang never worked up the nerve to ask if she planned to start a company. He said: "How could I ask that at a first meeting? Even if I asked, why would she choose me?"

One founder's assessment of Huang: Many people make themselves the center of attention, but Huang doesn't. He's the one who sits quietly listening to you.

But when we threw his friend's question at him, he answered: I want to become the best investor in this industry.

He says this is very unlike something he would say. This was another attempt to break through himself. Just like over twenty years ago, when he spent days and nights on a train and decided to leave Aksu.

Cover image: On-site photography