ZhenFund's Lunar New Year Reading List: A Good Story

真格基金·January 23, 2025

Walking alongside words, seeing a wider world.

Z Talk is ZhenFund's column for sharing ideas and perspectives.

With the Lunar New Year approaching, ZhenFund has curated a reading list. We hope these books bring you warmth and inspiration. In the days ahead, may you find good company in words, and see a wider world.

Leave a comment below for a chance to win a mystery book box from our list 🎁 Wishing everyone a happy Spring Festival!

01

The Venture Mindset

Authors: Alex Dang & Ilya Strebulaev

Recommended by: Anna Fang

For founders seeking investment, understanding the venture capital mindset is essential. Why must venture capital "bet it all"? Why does it favor bold ideas and "misfit" companies?

For VC practitioners, The Venture Mindset is a bible on sourcing deals, making decisions, talent, negotiation, patience, intuition, and the pursuit of outsized returns. In today's venture and startup landscape, this is required reading.

02

A Brief History of Intelligence

Author: Max Bennett

Recommended by: Yusen Dai

A masterpiece that stands shoulder to shoulder with Sapiens. Bennett traces five breakthroughs in the evolution of intelligence, sweeping grandly from the first cells in hydrothermal vents to the birth of GPT-4. He strikes a perfect balance between scientific rigor and narrative vitality. I read it in a single day; when I closed the book near midnight, I hadn't touched a drop of alcohol, yet I was thoroughly intoxicated.

03

Story

Author: Robert McKee

Recommended by: Yusen Dai

A classic is a classic for a reason. This book offers profound insight into the tao and meticulous detail on the shu — the way and the craft. It appears to be about stories on screen, but it's really about life itself, since our own lives are nothing but one story after another.

Reading it through an investor's lens, I found much to savor. A good product is a good story for its users; a good company is a good story for its investors.

04

Wang Dingjun's Memoirs: A Four-Volume Trilogy

Author: Wang Dingjun

Recommended by: Yuan Liu

I recommend all four volumes of Wang Dingjun's memoirs, but if you only have one day, read the third, Breaking Through the Mountain Pass. As a friend remarks in the afterword, writing this book employed the freedom he had waited his entire life to use.

Most histories are top-down, chronicling the triumphs and failures of heroes and great figures. But the history each person lives through is bottom-up, like this book. The smoke and fire of an era torn between old and new, a lifetime of displacement, a homeland that can never be returned to — "in a great fog, people walk step by step, and the road stretches out foot by foot." What finally gets recorded are "twisting and turning lines, dim and bright figures, flickering words." We don't know what tomorrow holds, but we should always remember yesterday.

05

Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences

Author: Tynan Sylvester

Recommended by: Yuan Liu

One of the most successful indie game developers, Sylvester built RimWorld with a tiny team of just two or three people and sold over $100 million worth of copies — he was only 31 when the game launched.

This book is a practitioner's notebook, starting from designing emotional experiences for users and covering team building, the game production process, and the personal evolution of a creator. Along the way, he draws effortlessly from a vast array of classic games, demonstrating both his nuanced understanding of the works he admires and his burning passion for games as an artistic medium.

I believe every reader will finish this book wanting to try many of the games mentioned, perhaps even make one themselves. Life itself is a game, and every product is an experience designed for someone else — which is why I've recommended this book this year to many friends who aren't in the game industry and don't even play games.

06

The Uncommon Reader

Author: Alan Bennett

Recommended by: Kuang Wei

This winter at Imaginist Bookstore, I stumbled upon a marvelous work of fiction: The Uncommon Reader. Alan Bennett, one of Britain's most beloved novelists, wrote this during Elizabeth II's reign — a fictional tale of the Queen's belated romance with reading.

The prose is exquisite, effortlessly readable, yet utterly absorbing and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Through the perspective of this late-blooming, singular character, Bennett explores the myriad pleasures of reading and writing, answering for his readers what reading is and how to read.

This is a perfect companion for travel during the Spring Festival holiday. Bennett twice declined royal honors; by choosing the Queen — the very embodiment of authority — as his protagonist, he conveys his belief that reading is the ultimate form of democracy. "Literature is a commonwealth. Letters are a republic. Books do not defer. All readers are equal."

07

The Beginning of Infinity

Author: David Deutsch

Recommended by: Zhong Tianjie

Deutsch repeatedly invokes "good explanations," arguing that the possibility of better explanations overturning our current worldview is the foundation of human and worldly progress — the beginning of infinity for civilization. Uncertainty is inevitable; infinity is inevitable. Yet through creativity and criticism, in the relentless search for simpler and better explanations, we unravel mysteries bit by bit. Let us stay optimistic and embrace radical change.

08

Robert Kuok: A Memoir

Author: Robert Kuok (as told to), Andrew Tanzer (written by)

Recommended by: He Zhiliang

From the perspectives of business, corporate management, history, political culture, and sociology, Robert Kuok's story is utterly singular.

09

The Complete Stories of Isaac Asimov

Author: Isaac Asimov

Recommended by: Yu Haonan

Amid the AI wave, rereading Asimov's work from half a century ago and rediscovering Multivac is a peculiarly wonderful experience.

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