N1 Entrepreneurship Academy: The Starting Point
The Starting Point of This Thinking
We are standing at a turning point in history. Over the next few decades, AGI, controllable nuclear fusion, supersonic aircraft, cancer breakthroughs, and other technologies will redefine the world, and maybe even humanity itself. Behind these changes, a group of young people may already be quietly emerging.
Sam Altman once predicted to us that the future may produce ten Google-scale companies, and four of them may come from China. I think that twenty years from now, we may see even more.
The reality is that today’s education system and startup ecosystem are not ready for that future. Many young people with enormous potential are buried inside mainstream paths because they lack early intellectual awakening and the right environment to grow. They need a place that can ignite their imagination and support their practice. That place must be full of strength and belief. It should be a birthplace of ideas and a spiritual pilgrimage site.
The best way to predict the future is to build it.
This sentence often pushes me to think. Instead of waiting for the future to arrive, we should take part in building it. Based on that belief, I want to set a new goal. We should stop passively waiting for top founders to appear. We should actively discover them and help them grow. We should help these people become a larger group. The four people Sam talked about should become fourteen, even forty. We should accelerate the rise of more great founders.
To make this happen, we need to design a completely new model. We need to cultivate a group of future founders with strong conviction from the very beginning. The key shift is from selecting elite talent after they emerge to growing together with them earlier.
Over the past year, I visited one hundred universities and met nearly thirty thousand students. I felt more and more strongly that what is truly scarce is a place that lets smart people enter the real world earlier. Many young people have curiosity, ambition, and the ability to build. But during the most important years, exams, internships, and the comfort of safe paths slowly pull them away. By the time they finally decide to start, part of their sharpest edge has already been worn down.
We need to build a platform focused on discovering and supporting top founders who have the potential and fierce determination to build tens-of-billions-of-dollars companies. We are not focused on people whose ambition is to build small or medium-sized projects. We want to participate in shaping the next thirty years of innovation.
Building the World’s First Innovation and Entrepreneurship Academy
I propose creating a practice-based entrepreneurship academy for young founders aged fourteen to twenty-two. Its mission is to discover and cultivate young people with the strongest disruptive potential.
The academy will be positioned as a place that trains the world’s most disruptive young founders, helps them go from zero to one, and pushes forward technological and social change. It will be a platform that brings new life into China’s startup ecosystem, from intellectual awakening to hands-on training.
We will teach startup skills and business knowledge, and we will also shape students’ innovative spirit and sense of social responsibility. We want to help them understand why to start a company, not only how to start one.
People at this age have not been fully shaped by fixed paths. They also have not built too much social self-protection. They can be awkward, impulsive, and prone to misjudgment. But because of that, much of their real curiosity is still alive.
Whether someone may do something important in the future is often hidden in very small early signals. Do they look for problems on their own? Can they tolerate loneliness? Are they willing to hear harsh feedback from real users? Can they keep moving after failure?
We believe every great founder comes from independent thinking, intense curiosity, and a restless desire to explore beyond the status quo. These are exactly the qualities that current education and social structures often overlook.
The core mission of the entrepreneurship academy is to use structured education and practice to help strange talents grow into first-rate people. We want to help them move from strange to world-class, and become the pioneers of the future. At the same time, we can also reserve founders with original innovative ability for the broader ecosystem. Through systematic training, students will build real experience and increase their chances of startup success.
The core value of this academy is to create new possibility. It focuses on discovering young people who have not been absorbed or polluted by traditional systems, yet possess enormous potential. Our goal is to give them the ability to define the next wave of innovation, push Chinese entrepreneurship education to a higher level, and inject new life into the ecosystem.
To help students go further in the real world, we will provide support when they need it most, including capital, compute, and companionship in key decisions. This support will be long-term and restrained. The goal is to help them build things, not to define their paths too early.
At its core, this model is an early-stage equity discovery platform with education as its entry point. We believe the founders most worth betting on should be priced before the mainstream sees them. This school is the place that finds these people and becomes their first check.
Discovering Younger and More Malleable Founders
The key to the success of the entrepreneurship school is attracting and cultivating the most promising founders early, especially young people with strong innovative spirit.
Our goal is to discover and support top founders who are committed to building companies worth more than twenty-five billion dollars. This includes unusually gifted high-potential people and unconventional strange talents. They may not yet have achieved obvious success, but they have the courage to break convention, the passion to start, and the ability to learn fast. These qualities can become the foundation for future entrepreneurship.
These founders are often internally rich, strong learners, and cognitively more mature than their age. They believe they are destined to change the world, and they have the ability to handle pressure and take risks.
The strange talents we are looking for may not be the smartest people in the room, but they have unusual traits and the courage to break rules. We hope they can grow through practice and reflection into first-rate founders who lead the next wave of entrepreneurship.
For example, early Steve Jobs was not simply discovered for his strange qualities. He was also shaped into someone with unique judgment, operating ability, and leadership, and eventually became an industry leader. The goal is to prevent this strangeness from becoming a defect that violates market or social reality.
For research-driven founders, we will focus on science and engineering students with technological foresight and entrepreneurial thinking. They need strong foundations in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, a long-term view, and a sense of mission to solve major social problems. These future technology definers, like a twenty-year-old Jensen Huang or Wang Chuanfu, can find balance between technical depth and commercialization. With deep long-termism, they can patiently push entire industries forward.
Our target group can roughly be divided into five types. First, people who started acting very early and may have already deviated from traditional paths. Second, people with clear advantages in mathematics, science, or technology who are willing to enter the real world. Third, people who grew up across different cultural environments and have a wider perspective. Fourth, people who are underestimated but growing fast. Fifth, people with research depth who are willing to bring technology into real applications.
To ensure student quality, we will set a high selection standard. Through written tests and multiple rounds of interviews, we will understand each candidate’s motivation, ability, traits, and strategy for handling challenges. We will examine execution, creativity, teamwork, and leadership. We want to cultivate young people with founder-level determination, independent thinking, and social responsibility, so they can take responsibility for social change in the future.
In this era, smart people without moral boundaries can use technology to amplify their abilities and bring risk to the world. So the entrepreneurship academy will place values education at the center. While pursuing business success, students must also develop the right values and social responsibility, and use goodwill and justice to push the world forward.
Educational Philosophy
The core educational philosophy of the entrepreneurship school is Learning by Doing. Students learn through projects built around real problems. Their growth path is shaped by curiosity and need, not by a fixed curriculum. Through practice, they face real challenges, make mistakes fast, learn fast, and begin building early. The school is designed around three core modules: intellectual awakening, hands-on execution, and resource support. The goal of entrepreneurship education here is to create a real startup environment for students, where they train under real pressure, not in simulation. They get access to the resources that actually matter: capital, compute, and mentors through office hours. Students do not just study ideas. They build entrepreneurial capability through action, from day one, inside the real world.
Beyond this, students will feel a powerful sense of mission and spirit inside the school. As Napoleon said, the sword is always conquered by the spirit. The focus here is to build courage, not just intelligence. We want students to challenge authority, think independently, and rebuild their understanding of the world from first principles. In everyday life at the school, failure is part of learning. We will create Failure Day, regular sessions where students openly share failures, hard lessons, and personal challenges. The goal is to build a culture of openness, honesty, and learning in public. Failure will be respected here. Action will be seen as the foundation of progress. We want students to build experience through doing, form deep bonds with each other, and one day support each other in creating meaningful change in society.
To prepare students for the real challenges of entrepreneurship, we are designing a curriculum that helps them move from intellectual awakening, to strategic thinking, to execution, and ultimately become entrepreneurial leaders who can operate on the global stage.
Innovative Teaching Model
We do not believe in traditional lectures. That model of education is outdated. Truly exceptional students do not need to be taught in the conventional sense. They should be able to challenge even the teacher’s assumptions about what knowledge is. Our role is to provide a platform where students can explore questions on their own, bring ideas into discussion, discover consensus and disagreement, and turn those conversations into living learning material. The teacher’s role changes too. They are no longer just lecturers. They become thinking partners who offer critical feedback at the right moments.
Here, students lead their own learning. We help design the framework, but the actual content is explored, created, and refined by the students themselves. Some parts of the curriculum will challenge how they think. Some will feel abstract. But everything is anchored in the deeper forces that shape humanity and how the world works. The purpose is to help students grow into high-level founders.
This process exists to trigger deep thinking and build the ability to solve hard, complex problems. We believe great founders must be able to define knowledge, not just absorb it.
At the same time, we are deeply pragmatic. The school will also bring in world-class entrepreneurial mentors, including experienced founders, technical experts, and scholars. Based on what students are actually working on and struggling with, mentors will help through office hours focused on solving specific real problems.
The N1 Growth Path: Real Training for Future Builders
At N1, learning does not mean sitting in class and listening. Real learning happens when a person makes decisions in the real world, lives with the consequences, updates their judgment, and gradually develops their own sense of direction. We designed this path to help the most promising young people go through an important transformation early: from being smart and full of ideas, to becoming people who can define problems, organize resources, build real things, and shape the world.
Stage One: Motivation Alignment. You need to understand why you are starting. Not by writing a beautiful vision statement, but by unpacking your ambition, fear, curiosity, and dissatisfaction. You need to answer one question: if there were no applause, no income, and no certainty, would you still keep going? The final output is a problem you are willing to spend five to ten years on, plus an action plan to test it over the next few weeks.
Stage Two: World Awareness Training. You need to learn how to see the changes that actually matter. Every day, you will engage with firsthand information across technology, products, capital, industry, and society. In the noise, you must learn to tell the difference between temporary distraction and shifts that will shape the future. The final output is one direction you choose, and a clear explanation of why you are willing to place your time there.
Stage Three: Real Problem Discovery. You need to leave abstract imagination and enter the real world of users and real situations. A direction matters because real people are already paying in time, money, pain, or inefficiency to deal with the problem. The final output is twenty real interviews, three recurring pain points, and one minimal entry point.
Stage Four: Cold Start Building. You need to build something usable in a short amount of time. It can be rough. It must be real. The evaluation standard is simple: will anyone use it, will anyone come back, will anyone pay for it? The final output is a working prototype and the first wave of real user feedback.
Stage Five: Feedback and Iteration. You need to learn how to face reality instead of protecting your own ideas. If users do not use the product, if the product is weak, if the direction is wrong, that is information. What matters is whether you can identify the problem quickly, cut what does not matter, and focus resources where they create the most value. The final output is a clear iteration record: what changed, why it changed, and whether the result improved.
Stage Six: People and Organization. You need to learn how to accomplish bigger things with other people. Entrepreneurship is not a solo performance by a smart individual. It is a series of real relationships with cofounders, users, mentors, investors, and teams. You need to learn trust, conflict, division of responsibility, commitment, and boundaries. The final output is a small team collaboration project and a clearly defined responsibility you personally carried.
Stage Seven: Long-Term Judgment. You need to place today’s decisions inside a much longer time horizon. Smart people are easily distracted by opportunities. Truly strong people know what to ignore. You need to review your direction, capability, pace, and cost. You need to understand how today’s decisions shape the person you become three years from now. The final output is a long-term judgment memo: what you continue, what you stop, and what you upgrade.
Stage Eight: Personal Mission. You need to answer a harder question: if the next ten years go well, what kind of person do you want to become? The answer cannot stop at success, freedom, wealth, or influence. You need to define what problems you are willing to carry for a long time, who you want to create value for, and what price you are willing to pay. The final output is a commitment to your future self, and a path you can begin executing immediately.
First Step to Reality: The Pilot Program
The first step for the entrepreneurship school is the pilot program. It is designed for young people during summer break, winter break, gap years, or periods when they have stepped away from traditional education. It offers concentrated short-term opportunities for learning and real-world practice. During the pilot phase, we will admit 15 to 20 students within the first year and operate at small scale to validate the model through experiments like entrepreneurship summer camps. We will refine the program based on feedback. At the same time, we will continue giving talks and testing educational pilots across 70 leading universities in China, including Tsinghua, Peking University, and Fudan. We will run two to three entrepreneurship summer or winter camps to test attraction and outcomes. With support from local governments, we will also establish one entrepreneurship experimental base as the prototype for a future campus. The full pilot cycle is expected to take one to three years.
Once the pilot is validated, the school will move into its next phase of development. We will work toward credit exchange mechanisms with universities so entrepreneurship education can fit alongside existing academic structures, allowing students to spend one to two years building companies without losing academic momentum. Resource support will expand further, including startup capital, compute resources, and structured capability development. We will also explore international partnerships so global entrepreneurial resources can flow into the school. This middle phase is expected to last three to ten years, giving the model time to mature.
Ultimately, the school will become a full-time global entrepreneurship education platform that breaks beyond the traditional higher education model. It will offer a structured, practice-driven growth path for young founders. It will be more than a place that trains entrepreneurs. It will become a central node in the global entrepreneurial ecosystem, helping the most promising young people gain access to resources, partners, and opportunities to drive real technological and commercial change.
Vision and Positioning: Building the Global Benchmark for Entrepreneurship Education
The vision of the Entrepreneurship Academy is not only to become a school. It is to build a new way of thinking and become a spiritual symbol of an era. It is a place that lights up passion and wisdom for young founders. It is also a source that brings new talent and new ideas into the existing ecosystem. Our goal is to cultivate one hundred entrepreneurial leaders over the next thirty years who can redefine the rules, and to help China take a more important place in the global startup ecosystem.
In the future, we also hope young people from around the world will see China as their first-choice destination for entrepreneurship, not only the United States. By attracting international students from Asia, the Middle East, and regions outside Europe and America, the Entrepreneurship Academy will lay the foundation for going global in the future, and also bring more diverse perspectives into China’s startup ecosystem. This is an education experiment, and also a long-term strategic addition to the global innovation ecosystem.
Education often has two models. One is to discover and cultivate the rarest talents, like Bole finding great horses. This is elite education. The other is inclusive education that reaches more ordinary people. We hope to first bring out top talent quickly, help them become real breakthrough builders, and then expand this model to a larger group. We want to increase the number of rare talents and eventually find a balance between elite education and broader access. This keeps the sharpest competitiveness alive, and also allows more people to benefit from it.
In the end, the academy plans to practice Decentralized Student Self-Governance, allowing students to manage admissions, budgets, and academic affairs.
Campus Space Design
The core physical space of the academy is imagined as a Hacker House, an open, multifunctional space for learning and building. The design will focus on simplicity, natural light, and flexibility. Students can choose areas for collaboration or independent thinking based on their needs. On the walls, the Ambition Ideas board will record students’ inspirations and startup ideas. The Curiosity Sparks board will push students to learn how to ask deep questions in the AI era. In the center of the space, there will be a smaller-scale pirate ship.
The underground Hacker Lab will be equipped with the latest hardware tools and frontier AI compute resources to support product prototyping, design, and testing. The equipment will be lean, but enough to support students’ technical exploration and prototype development. The Product Room and the entrepreneurship library will provide professional resources and deep learning support, empowering students through the full journey from idea to product.
The whole space will reflect the nature of entrepreneurship. By reducing outside distractions and unnecessary decoration, students can immerse themselves in thinking and building. They will face challenges in a real startup environment, and train their perseverance and execution. The living areas will combine simple dormitories, an open social café, and a dining space. The culture wall will display inspiring lines such as The greatness of life lies in action. Videos of great humans in history will play on loop. The meditation room will include cold weapons for people to swing, as Sam suggested. If long-term conditions allow, we also plan to build sports fields, gardens, planting areas, and animal-raising areas, giving students space for exercise and rest, and using hands-on labor to train their practical problem-solving ability and sense of responsibility. Here, every design choice will revolve around action and creating the future, allowing students to explore fully, unlock their potential, and move toward becoming original innovators.
Why Now
China’s startup infrastructure is gradually becoming more complete. Platforms such as MiraclePlus, the Institute for AI Industry Research, and Shenzhen InnoX Academy can receive and continue to accelerate teams on the back end. On the front end, innovative education platforms such as Tsinghua Moonshot Academy and 01 College have already taken brave first steps. They can send innovative students to us, or co-cultivate them with us.
At the same time, as the age of general intelligence arrives, AI capabilities are rising rapidly and beginning to replace many repetitive and non-creative jobs. This trend is making the traditional university education model less effective, and creating a rare historical opportunity for new education models to rise. In the short term, we are also in a window where the AI foundation is still unstable, while China’s economic adjustment cycle is creating new openings. Now is the key moment to cultivate the next generation of innovators.
Why Us
From Paul Graham to Sam Altman, YC has always emphasized one thing: find the most promising people at the earliest stage, give them freedom, resources, and trust, and let them create something truly important from zero. This way of maximizing innovation at the source has deeply influenced me, and has become one of the core beliefs behind my education and investment practice over the past decade.
In walking alongside young people, I have become more and more certain that the real value of education lies in lighting up potential, building conviction, and creating paths. I have participated in screening and supporting more than one hundred thousand founders. I have had deep conversations and co-created with thousands of young people. I have trained thousands of interns and taught entrepreneurship courses at more than one hundred universities. I have seen many people start from vague ideas and eventually grow into people who truly change the world around them. These experiences make me believe even more strongly that a future-facing education model must have both the sensitivity to see people clearly and the ability to accompany them for the long run.
Years of working on the front line of investing and entrepreneurship have also shaped my standard for recognizing real founders. They are people who are not afraid to begin from chaos, who dare to explore alone for a long time, and who have the ability to learn and act fast. They are often the variables outside the system. What this group needs is more than financing. They need a structure that supports them in becoming builders of the future.
This Entrepreneurship Academy is designed exactly for these people. We believe that from age fourteen to twenty-two, a young person is in the most important stage to be lit up, accompanied, and unlocked. The people who truly change the future are the ones willing to start with you now. We hope to become those people.
A Final Thought
What I want to say at the end is this: the meaning of education is planting trees. Some people say the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the next best time is now. But we do not only want to plant a forest. We hope every tree grows wildly in its own direction and becomes part of the forest. The Entrepreneurship Academy creates soil, so different young people can find their own paths of growth. Some will grow roots downward. Some will bloom upward. The academy exists to expand the boundary. What truly matters is whether they are willing to begin, and whether they dare to keep walking for a long time.
Through this project, we hope to find and cultivate one hundred young builders over the next thirty years who can disrupt the rules. We want to help them move from possibility to reality, create one hundred chances for large-scale world change, and redefine the global landscape of innovation. We believe that through intellectual awakening and practice-driven growth, this attempt will create real new value for the future.
Pilot Results: What We Discovered in the First Summer Camp
This summer, we put the idea of N1 into a real environment for the first time. In just one month, more than half of the students went from an idea to a working product, producing results that exceeded expectations. Some built a full AI video generation engine. Some completed the cold-start loop of an AI assistant. Some built a prototype for a 3D printing recycling device and clarified the market entry point. More importantly, they learned how to focus on core functions under high pressure, use high-frequency user interviews to drive iteration, and begin forming a sense of vision and long-term path.
Student E from Oxford started with scattered directions. Three months later, E converged on building a horizontal intelligent assistant and completed 280 iterations. E cut low-value features and focused energy on core modules such as Briefing. When facing deep industry users for the first time, E was able to clearly present the design logic and respond to feedback immediately. In July, E completed a major product restructuring, clarified the cold-start strategy, and began sprinting toward the first high-resonance feature.
Fourteen-year-old Kimi started from connecting APIs. Within a few weeks, Kimi ran through the full process of AI video generation and locked in one-click generation as the differentiated positioning. Stanford student Y built a prototype for a 3D printing recycling device, and was also able to use fundraising language to attract resources. Zhenghan grew from an individual creator into a near-CEO leading a team. He turned his instinct for game creation into a reusable method, with the goal of making a game that players truly become addicted to.
The research group also produced surprising results. Under the guidance of Peking University PhD Yuan Jingyang, N1 focused on Efficient Attention and Test-Time Learning, moving from GPT-2 reproduction to original research topics such as Contextual Alibi. Students proposed innovative solutions in low-level acceleration, distributed derivation, and related areas. Sixteen-year-old Nathan taught himself and reproduced Transformer modules within one week. He seized an opportunity from reposting a technical blog, delivered a research task within twenty-four hours, won an internship at a Silicon Valley startup, and received an invitation from DeepSeek. Through research and operations, he kept clarifying his own position: to become a technical founder with real research depth.
Behind these results were high-density Office Hours, an always-on community atmosphere, and collective review mechanisms. Under real market pressure in the deep water, students completed the role shift from creator to product owner. This validated N1’s core hypothesis: with an immersive environment, cross-disciplinary support, and real market pressure, young people can complete in a few months the kind of leap that traditional systems often take years to produce.
The Evolution of the Thinking: From School to Holy Land, August 2025
Looking back on the past few months, one thing has become increasingly clear to me. What I first imagined was an entrepreneurship academy, but what I truly grasped was a spiritual archetype. After the first group of students arrived, I instinctively designed with courses, modules, and structures. But as I stayed up late with them, pushed projects with them, and met users with them, I felt more and more strongly that what they needed most was a piece of land where they could safely be themselves. They did not need someone to teach them from above. They needed someone who understood them. They did not need a set of standard answers. They needed a group of people willing to search together in the dark.
We are building the Jerusalem for entrepreneurs. School is a product of the industrial age, designed to send people into jobs in batches. Entrepreneurship is a choice of destiny. Traditional schools focus on putting things into people. Real founders need to dig themselves out from within. So I slowly let go of the obsession with building an efficient school, and started asking a different question: can I build a spiritual holy land, a place where people destined to wrestle with the world can come before departure, make a pilgrimage, gather, recognize each other, and explore inward?
One direct discovery from these three months is that outstanding young founders do not really crave joining a community. In fact, they often reject the surface-level excitement of communities. What they need is more like a platform, a high ground. Standing here, they can see that others are also taking risks for the same thing. Standing here, they can know during their loneliest stage that they are not crazy. Standing here, they do not need to be persuaded. They only need to be seen. This feeling is completely different from school. It is much closer to a spiritual home.
From Holy Land to Destiny Platform, October 2025
From the time we officially began bringing in the first group of N1 students in August to the later period when I went to the United States, my vision opened for a second time. The first group of students made me believe that this model can work on the entrepreneurship track. But during my time in America, I kept meeting young people who did not need an entrepreneurship school at all: people doing fundamental research, people creating culture, people preparing to spend their lives in politics and public affairs. They talked with me about problems, the world, and destiny. They had no interest in school and no interest in entrepreneurship classes. But I was very clear that if the world over the next thirty years is going to be reshaped, people like them will stand in the front row.
This forced me to ask myself a more painful question: if N1 only serves founders, is it too small? If what I truly care about is the young generation most likely to rewrite the rules of the future, why should I lock myself inside the label of entrepreneurship?
Can our platform hold the future Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Masayoshi Son, and Kanye West at the same time? Demis Hassabis is not a founder or scientist in the traditional sense. Kanye West does not need an entrepreneurship camp. One is working on the boundary of cognition and intelligence. One is rewriting the structure of culture and narrative. The young person I met in America who was preparing to devote the long term to politics was, in essence, trying to rewrite the direction of a country over the next few decades. These people do not lack entrepreneurship classes. What they lack is one thing: a place that is early enough, honest enough, and free enough to acknowledge their destiny, hold their ambition, and allow them to grow in their own way.
So on the way back to China over these weeks, I began taking apart my original idea. In the first stage, maybe N1 must be an entrepreneurship academy, because entrepreneurship is the fastest engine for forming a loop with the real world. It can validate the model, build reputation, create cash flow, and keep the platform alive in the shortest time. But over a longer time horizon, N1 has actually been growing toward a larger form all along: a destiny platform for all people who want to achieve something great. Whether you build companies, do science, make art, or drive social change, as long as your inner drive is to pull the future toward your side, N1 should have a place for you.
Two Stages of Self-Distinction
To keep myself from losing control of the rhythm, I now deliberately separate these two things in my mind. The first stage is very clear: N1 must first make the school for future founders solid. We need to make the entrepreneurship track work, validate models such as summer camps and long-term residencies, and complete the foundations of funding, admissions, selection, post-investment support, and alumni network. The key in this stage is to produce a group of truly outstanding founders, who can grow over the next five to ten years into a force that can feed N1 back. This is the economic engine of the platform.
The second stage will slowly grow from that foundation. In every cohort, we will reserve a small number of spots for young people who are instinctively not founders, but who clearly belong to the most dangerous and most possible people of this generation. They may be students working on AI theory. They may be teenagers preparing to devote their lives to a branch of science. They may be politically oriented talents with strong mobilization and narrative ability. They may be creators already writing, making music, or making films with real power. They are not here to learn how to start a company. They are here to stay with a group of people who are also restless about the world, to confirm that they are not alone, and to form a long-term spiritual alliance with this platform.
So mentally, I now see N1 as a two-layer structure. The bottom layer is the founder academy, the part whose return can be measured through equity, products, and projects. The upper layer is the destiny alliance, made up of people who are not suitable to be bound by equity, but who will continue to intersect with N1 over the next several decades. The first layer lets N1 survive. The second layer determines N1’s place in history.
From Entrepreneurship School to Destiny Field
This also pushes the metaphor of the Jerusalem for entrepreneurs one step further. At the beginning, this holy land was mainly built for founders. I hoped generation after generation of founders could depart from here, carrying a shared spiritual quality as they wrestled with the world. Now I am beginning to realize that if it is only about entrepreneurship, this holy land has been compressed into a smaller dimension. The people who will truly come here for pilgrimage will not only be founders. There will also be people doing fundamental science, people creating culture, and people reshaping social structures and institutions. They may not fully understand each other’s fields, but they will all stop before the same question: what should this life be used for?
So if I were to give N1’s final form a definition closer to my current thinking, I would say this: it is no longer just an entrepreneurship academy. It is a destiny field for people aged fourteen to twenty-two who may achieve great things in any important field in the future. At the beginning, we use entrepreneurship as the line that moves the real world, so this model can have cash flow, cases, and stories. In that process, we gradually weave in the higher-dimensional line, allowing N1 to become a spiritual alliance among the most ambitious young people of this generation.
Writing these thoughts down today is more of a reminder to myself. The starting point of the past few months was right, but it was only the first layer. My time in America showed me that N1 cannot only be a school for founders. In the end, it must become a place where top talents from many different directions are willing to return and gather at certain moments in their lives. At that time, what we discuss will not only be companies. It will be science, art, institutions, and civilization. Entrepreneurship is only one language for speaking with the world. What truly connects all of this is the people who are willing to take responsibility for the future.
Final Reflection, December 2025
I gradually realized that N1 should not be understood as a school, or an accelerator, or a tool for training founders. Its real mission is to provide a place where a certain kind of young person between fourteen and twenty-two can breathe normally for the first time in life. These are young people who cannot find belonging in traditional systems, but who are sharper, more curious, and more restless than their peers.
There are three things this place must do clearly. They are the core we will not compromise.
First, let them meet their own kind. This is not mass socializing. This is not a fake elite community. It is about helping each person meet two or three companions who may be rare enough to appear only once in a lifetime. That kind of collision will reshape how they understand themselves, like waking someone from sleep.
Second, let them create their first truly weight-bearing works in the real world. Endless classes do not create growth. Only after falling and getting back up several times in real markets, with real users and real feedback, can a person’s thinking and judgment grow. We will not design a huge, complicated project framework. We will provide a high-density practice environment: resources, compute, mentors, space, and time, so every student can find their first hard bone to chew.
Third, accompany them as they grow into people who are both strong and kind. Strength is easy. Kindness is hard. Technical ability, business instinct, creativity, leadership, and taste can all be trained. But a person’s values, judgment, and the boundary of their power need to be shaped correctly during a few very important years. We will provide rigorous discussions, deep questions, and choices that carry consequences, allowing students to naturally develop responsibility for the world as they build.
The long-term form of N1 will not be a school. It will be more like a destiny accelerator. What people do here is see, for the first time, the person they may become in the future. We connect mentors from research, art, technology, entrepreneurship, philosophy, and other directions because great people have never been divided by academic disciplines. We provide resources and companionship, but we do not possess their lives. We may invest in them, but we will not use equity to lock them in. What we give is a sense of direction, not a sense of control.
We believe a truly promising young person is lit up, awakened, and released. What they need is an environment that allows them to grow out of themselves.
If we had to say what the value of N1 is, it might be this: in the cleanest way possible, gently move a generation of the most promising young people away from paths where they might be wasted, and onto the paths they were truly meant to walk. During their most important three to five years, we want to become the safety net that does not let them fall, the bit of wind that pushes them further, and the hand that pulls them up when they are lost.
This is N1. It is destiny calibration. It helps the future’s leaders find the line they are meant to walk.
If we can do this well, even if we only change one hundred people, the direction of the world will be different.
Why We Need to Build the Jerusalem for Entrepreneurs, April 21, 2026
During this period, I have become increasingly clear that what I truly want to build is no longer just an entrepreneurship academy, or a platform that gives young people resources and opportunities. I want to build something deeper. A place where the future’s builders can truly see each other, recognize each other, and ignite each other for the first time.
I have seen too many people who could have grown into something great slowly get worn down by their environment. They do not lack intelligence. They do not lack passion. They do not lack effort. What they lack is a place. A place that is dense enough, real enough, and lasting enough. A place where they face real problems every day, meet truly strong people, and see a truly high standard. Most environments pull people back toward the average. They slowly teach people to accept good enough, stable, and respectable, and then people convince themselves. Real creation requires someone to keep pulling you out, to make you face reality, face the gap, and face the ways you lie to yourself.
When I was young and starting companies, I never encountered such a place. Many paths were discovered by crashing around alone in the dark. No one told you what mattered most. No one woke you up with harsh truth when you were about to fool yourself. Later I understood that a person’s most precious years are often wasted this way. So what I am building today is not an abstract design. It is a very concrete response. I am trying to build the place I needed most back then and never had, so that truly promising people can take fewer wrong turns and enter real growth earlier.
I have also walked another path. I did public-interest work for many years. I have seen real suffering, and I understand the weight of goodwill. But I have become increasingly clear that much goodwill remains on the surface and struggles to truly rewrite reality. What can change the world at scale is technology, products, organizations, and companies. It is someone building medicine that can save lives, solving energy problems, raising efficiency to a new order of magnitude, and turning what once seemed impossible into daily life. So later, I became more and more certain that the most powerful path is to help people with real creativity, execution, and courage build things that change the world.
I have always believed that truly large innovation often grows at the edge. People who do not fully belong to the mainstream, people with flaws, obsessions, and strange qualities, are often closer to new things. But they are also the easiest to misunderstand, the easiest to isolate, and the easiest to leave trapped inside their own worlds. They may never be trained, and they may never turn their potential into influence. I do not want to watch these people disappear quietly. I want to give them a place where they can keep their sharpness, be shaped by the real world, and eventually step onto a larger stage.
There is a deeper motivation behind this. I feel more and more strongly that the most frontier opportunities in today’s world are still concentrated in a few places. Many young people are not lacking. They were simply born farther from the center, so they are seen later, understood less, and find it harder to enter the real scene of creation. Resources, opportunities, knowledge, and judgment keep gathering in a small number of places. The path to the frontier becomes narrower and narrower.
But I have always believed humanity should not be divided this way. If a person has ability, courage, and creativity, they should have the chance to participate in humanity’s most important creations. Their destiny should not be decided early by birthplace, nationality, or path. What I want to do is build a bridge as early as possible, so people from different places can be seen, judged, and pushed forward by the same standard. They can recognize their own kind in one another, pursue truth through shared problems, and grow together through real creation.
If such a place truly exists, it will create more than a few companies, a few technologies, and a few success stories. It will make people meet who otherwise would never meet. It will make things happen that otherwise would never happen. It will let talent that would otherwise be buried grow out for the first time. It will be a small prototype, but it points to a much larger possibility: fewer boundaries between humans, less monopoly over paths, and more opportunities to create the future together.
So what I want to build has never been an ordinary school, an ordinary incubator, or a commercial education product. I want to build a source. Let the most promising young people meet here, push each other, ignite each other, and see the true scale of the world through each other. Then they can depart from here and build the companies, technologies, works, and ideas that truly define the future.
If one day we look back, I hope what remains is not a name, but a feeling. Someone will say: the moment I truly began to change my destiny started from that place.
KH