Zhang Wei: Forget the Leaves, Flourish in Growth

Our latest podcast episode features Wei Zhang, founder of LimX Dynamics, a portfolio company of Oasis Capital.

We spoke with him about three major leaps in his life: his journey from the University of Science and Technology of China to graduate school in the United States; his transition from engineering training to theoretical research, and eventually to becoming a professor at Ohio State University, where he learned as much from his students as they did from him; and finally, his decision to leave behind a tenured position and return to China to build a company from scratch, pushing the frontiers of embodied intelligence.

We asked him: when making these pivotal choices, how were you able to act so quickly and with such conviction? His answer: See the trunk, forget the leaves.

In Zhang's story, we see a scientist committed to the truth-seeking principle of "training the core, not the tricks," finding richness and self-sufficiency within stability. We also see how he redefined himself through identity transformation, continuing to iterate and learn on his path to becoming an entrepreneur.

We invite you to listen with us.

If you have any reflections you'd like to share, please leave a comment below.

The following is an excerpt from our conversation — passages we found particularly illuminating, shared here in written form.

Enjoy

Oasis Capital: What kind of student were you back then? How many hours a day did you spend studying?

Wei Zhang: I never had great study habits. Most people read fast, skimming several lines at a time. I had very little training in that.

There's a stark contrast: when I needed to read a math book, it might take me a month to get through a single page. But the thing is, when you truly understand one page, it illuminates a whole dimension of your life. It's fascinating. Even though you know this knowledge has no practical application, I've since carefully analyzed this — I don't think it's about training for a specific sport. It's about building your strength, the strength of your thinking.

You can approach academic or technical learning as a sport, a specific type of athletic training — table tennis, fencing, whatever. But this kind of learning isn't about optimizing for one particular sport. It's fundamentally about building your fitness, your capacity to think. I call it "strength training." If you're just trying to score points in one specific game, you might not need it. But if you want to be a good athlete overall, it's essential.

The problems themselves, and the methods needed to solve them, keep changing. But strength itself doesn't change. That's why it matters so much. I felt the deepest nourishment during that period.

Wei Zhang: You also had to teach in English, keep the energy alive, make sure people felt they were getting something out of it. My classes started at 8 a.m. Other professors would take attendance, but I didn't need to. I told them, "You can listen online." But the students didn't want that. They wanted to come in person.

Oasis Capital: Why?

Wei Zhang: I think people have a shared need for value and meaning. They felt that in the dialogue with you, in that space — I wasn't phoning it in, and they could actually gain something, some genuine insight, some inspiration. That's what they sensed when they talked with me.

I think if you can't explain something simply to others, you haven't truly understood it yourself. Good output requires good understanding. The mark of good output, I believe, is simplicity. No need for cloudy, esoteric vocabulary. Being able to explain the full context of something in plain language — I spent an enormous amount of time thinking through and organizing that ability. It's also part of that pre-training you mentioned.

One specific example: there was an important theory in our field that all robots use now, called the Kalman filter. Back in my day, the Kalman filter was widely considered difficult. When I taught it later, even undergraduates could grasp the derivation. Very few people had managed that before.

Oasis Capital: Why could you do it when previous professors couldn't?

Wei Zhang: I think previously it failed because there wasn't a user-centric mindset, a genuine effort to design from the student's perspective — if they want to understand this, what's the actual path? And everyone taught knowledge in a procedural way: you finish this as an undergraduate, you reach this level in probability theory during your master's, and then you take this course and you know these things. That's terribly inefficient, and people get tangled up in irrelevant concepts, losing sight of the underlying principles.

So I designed it around how to explain it clearly, extracting only the most essential elements from probability theory, laying the groundwork properly, and presenting it in a way undergraduates could understand. I also designed enough exercises so they could actually learn it.

Kalman filter:

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%8D%A1%E5%B0%94%E6%9B%BC%E6%BB%A4%E6%B3%A2/5485372

Wei Zhang: I mean, isn't that what people live for — hope? When the space for imagination shrinks, that excitement just isn't there.

I want to maximize my ceiling while protecting my floor, not maximize my floor. Those are two different objective functions.

Oasis Capital: Different objective functions — is this the core decision function of your life?

Wei Zhang: Looking back now, yes. There are two kinds of ceilings: one in your career, and one in your life outside of it. Both matter. Especially the human connections in life — I had many foreign friends abroad, and the relationships were good. But you felt that the cultural friction, the upper limit of what you could get from it, wasn't that high. After all, if I mention Guo Degang, they have no idea, haha. But with you, I might say something and we instantly resonate. That feeling matters. So I felt that life there was somewhat limited. My decision function became quite clear: I didn't want to spend my whole life in the United States.

Oasis Capital: So it's harder to find resonance in conversation, everything stays lukewarm. That's life. What about career?

Wei Zhang: Career-wise, to be honest, I didn't think that much about it at the time. I was doing fine in the US, but from a robotics perspective, I felt the ceiling was in China. The iteration was too slow in the US, especially on hardware. I wanted to be somewhere that could iterate faster in robotics-related fields, while still being internationally connected and open. So I went to Shenzhen.

These decisions could all be made within five minutes.

Oasis Capital: But this kind of decision — for someone else, it might take a year, with endless back-and-forth, endless vacillation. You don't struggle with decisions.

Wei Zhang: There's no right or wrong, really. I think it's just about being internally consistent.

Oasis Capital: This is an interesting phenomenon. First, your background — academia, theory, research — sounds very ivory tower, not like growing up on the streets. People from ivory towers tend to come with a judging function, usually a relatively singular perspective or worldview.

But many people who grow up in street culture, what we call street smart, they actually have a lot of this diversity, this fundamental tolerance for diversity. Why do you have this?

Wei Zhang: I think this may go back to childhood. In elementary, middle, and high school, I was class monitor — they called me the hooligan monitor. The people I hung out with were usually the worst students. Then maybe their grades would improve a bit, and the teacher would assign someone else to hang out with me, hahaha.

So I've always liked looking at things from various angles. I don't really see a distinction between good grades and bad grades, or being good at this versus that. Some judgment criteria just don't exist for me. Sometimes I envy someone for being so athletic — that's impressive. I think people are diverse. That's the influence of my early environment.

Oasis Capital: What made you realize, from a young age, that people are diverse?

Wei Zhang: My sources of joy and reward aren't singular. As long as you have these antennae from the start, they gradually nourish you. So you'll find that these kinds of people, they can also bring me insights, and I'm willing to engage with them. If you're only good at studying, I find that a bit boring. I think life needs some fun, and this diversity lets you learn about more things — it's a source of pleasure. So you increasingly wonder: is there something I haven't discovered yet, something I could explore? And the prerequisite for exploration is that you can't have too many preconceptions. You have to respect things. So from the bottom, from intention, from the very first moment of meeting anyone, it's fundamentally open — it just became a habit.

Wei Zhang: A lot of the time, managing people is about mutual expectations. They need to be very clear, direct, straightforward. For example, if I'm now looking for a very good executive, the first thing I discuss is: how do we break up? Let's get that clear first. Under what circumstances, if we're both dissatisfied, can we part ways? What's the process for leaving?

Oasis Capital: When you say these things, do you feel any emotional baggage?

Wei Zhang: I used to. Not anymore. Maybe I overthought things before. Just be simple and direct — it's better. Vague praise, trust, and encouragement are actually unhealthy. Praise, trust, encouragement — or rather, not criticism, but suggestions — they need to be specific. With vague things, they don't know what they did well or poorly. It just becomes upward appeasement. It has to be very specific. Especially suggestions and criticism — I think those should be about behaviors, specific matters. Tell them I hope you do it this way. But don't judge their character. Encouragement, on the other hand, can be about character.

Oasis Capital: Actually, the more specific, the more effective the reinforcement learning.

Wei Zhang: Do they actually know what they didn't do well and what they did well? The alignment of our objective functions — that's what I care more about. "I hope in this situation we do this thing — what do you think, how do we align?" That kind of exchange is necessary.

Oasis Capital: This is actually consistent with what you said earlier. You don't have a rigid black-and-white view. You're also pursuing this process of growth — forget the leaves, keep growing.

Wei Zhang: I think this also reflects something, a major realization I've had recently: the inner struggles you mentioned, or unhappiness, often depend on the gap between what you believe you can do and what the people around you actually expect from you collectively. If you're excessively humble, your motivation diminishes. You always feel there's a huge chasm to cross. There was a public account before, now a smaller one, called LimX Innovators — "Celebrate Every Small Step Forward." Whether for individuals or organizations, you need to celebrate every tiny bit of progress.

Oasis Capital: I read an interesting paper recently. For example, when someone achieves something, if you don't praise them, their brain can't actually register the success. You might have achieved something great, but if no one celebrates it for you, your brain has no way of recognizing how significant that success was. It just passes by. So if you want to succeed, celebrate often — celebrate in advance to succeed. This celebration, this act of celebrating, what you call "celebrate," is actually extremely important. If others won't celebrate you, you have to celebrate yourself.

Actually, speaking of which, the self should also be in a constant process of adjustment.