Reading Notes: Freedom of Money
I spent two days reading the autobiography of Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Freedom of Money. I’m not into crypto, but I’ve always been pretty curious about CZ’s legendary story—selling his house to go all-in on Bitcoin, becoming the richest ethnic Chinese person, building a crypto empire, serving time in a U.S. prison. Piece together these scattered news fragments, big and small, and you get a remarkably compelling story. I started reading the moment the autobiography came out. Here are a few reflections.
Early Life
CZ’s adolescence was so eventful that, compared to his peers, it borders on extreme.
Born into a family of intellectuals, he spent his early years growing up on the campus compound of the University of Science and Technology of China, then immigrated to Canada with his family. This experience alone blended two utterly different cultural foundations: the academic atmosphere of a Chinese STEM household, combined with growing up in Western society. More interesting still, he captained a volleyball team in Canada—the combination of Western team-sports spirit and the temperament of a Chinese STEM guy turns out, in hindsight, to be well suited to leading a tech company. The fact that he rose quickly to team lead early in his career is not unrelated to this hybrid background.
CZ is hardly the only such case. Jensen Huang won a national-level table tennis competition in the U.S. in his youth. It seems that once a Chinese STEM guy layers on the leadership and stress tolerance forged in competitive athletics, his potential gets amplified even further.
One detail left a deep impression: when CZ’s family first immigrated, money was extremely tight, yet his father was willing to spend half a year’s salary to buy him a computer. Making that decision in the early ’90s required considerable vision and nerve, and in hindsight it was an investment with an extraordinarily high return—CZ’s entire later career was built on his programming ability.
Before founding Binance, CZ had already worked in Canada, Japan, Shanghai, and elsewhere, shuttling between East and West and engaging deeply with people from many countries and cultural backgrounds. For someone born in China in the ’70s, accumulating such a broad international perspective before the age of 30 was rare among his generation. The global mobility a Canadian passport offered back then was an advantage that most native-born Chinese could hardly enjoy.
Entrepreneurial Philosophy
Values, trust, and regulation, contrasted with the cultural differences of homegrown domestic teams.
(To be continued)
Prison Life and the U.S. Justice System
The U.S. justice system is better at grinding people down than I had imagined; his time in prison felt almost like a retirement ritual.
(To be continued)
CZ and Justin Sun
Two people in the same industry but with wildly different styles, each with his own distinctive operating logic. The two hold different values, different understandings of political leverage, and their idealism points in completely different directions.
(To be continued)