Hong Kong put out a red rainstorm warning at 5:05 a.m. on Aug. 27, and morning classes and full-day schools across the city were shut. Changpeng Zhao’s flight got held up by the storm, and he did not land until 3 a.m. About six and a half hours later, he showed up at a book event for Freedom of Money, the English title of his new book. Organizers had expected to use only half the venue. That did not last. The room filled, and they opened the whole space.
Zhao, better known as CZ, spoke for more than an hour on the 40th floor of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to a room packed with young attendees, including students from the University of Hong Kong, HKUST, CUHK, Imperial College London, the London School of Economics, UC Irvine, and Johns Hopkins.
The moderator was veteran media professional Xie Yafang, founder of Yafang Chuangbianpai. Right at the start, she said the conversation would not be about the industry, or about the rise and fall of any single venture. Her aim was different. She wanted to get back to Zhao’s basic logic as a person: someone who once affected the flow of global wealth, then hit a low point, spent four months in prison, and came out seeing the world differently.
Writing a book in prison
Zhao said the first sentence of the book was written in prison. Asked why he wrote it, he gave a bare-bones answer: “I was pretty bored in prison at the time, so I figured I might as well do something and keep myself busy” ("I was pretty bored in prison at the time, so I figured I might as well do something and keep myself busy").
His routine was simple: sleep, eat, work out, and write for 15 minutes a day. Bit by bit, the pages stacked up. Then he figured the material should not be wasted and pushed ahead with publication, though he said the editing and sorting took longer than the writing.
What hit him hardest was not the four months in prison. It was the more than five months before that, when he was stuck in the United States, unable to leave, getting ready for court and not knowing what sentence was coming. The worst part, he said, was the uncertainty: “Would they just keep me there the whole time? Would some new charge suddenly appear after a while?” ("Would they just keep me there the whole time? Would some new charge suddenly appear after a while?").
Once he was inside, things actually felt quieter. No internet. No timeline to scroll. So he wrote from memory. After getting out, he went back through everything he had posted on X to check the facts and found a few things he had missed. Even then, he joked that what he forgot did not seem as dramatic as what he remembered.
His view was simple enough: the things people remember are usually the things that matter. He made fun of his own memory, saying it is only a little better than a goldfish’s. Five minutes and gone, maybe. But not when it comes to major events.
Zhao wrote the book in English. At one stage, he asked professionals to help rewrite it, but he said the result no longer sounded like him, so he reversed most of those edits. In the Chinese edition, He Yi wrote the foreword and translated several passages. Zhao said it included words even he could not read, so those were taken out. His rule was blunt: the Chinese in his book could not include characters he could not pronounce.
Selling a house to buy BTC
The question many students really wanted answered was this one: why was he comfortable selling a house to buy BTC? Zhao split the answer into two parts. First, understanding the sector. Second, knowing his own downside.
On the first point, he said society keeps moving ahead, and people keep adopting things that create value. Big sectors, in his view, are not hard to see. First came computer hardware. Then the internet. Now it is Web3, AI, and biotech. Companies that win inside those broad shifts can grow by thousands of times, even tens of thousands.
But he added a catch. Web3 may be a big theme, yet even now it is still narrow in real use and remains tied mostly to money. Cases like land title confirmation have not really taken off.
So that turns into the real question. Not whether the sector is right, but what you can actually build inside it. As he put it, what you can create in a sector depends on your own ability.
He came back several times to one line: “Success in life is 80% about showing up. You have to participate. If you do not participate, you have no chance” ("Success in life is 80% about showing up. You have to participate. If you do not participate, you have no chance").
The second part was risk tolerance. Zhao said risk is personal, but the test is pretty direct: if the thing goes to zero, the investment is wiped out, and the plan fails, can you still keep living your life, and how much damage to your quality of life can you accept?
His own answer was straightforward. Even if BTC went to zero, he said, he could probably go back to Wall Street and get a six-figure U.S. dollar job. That was his floor. Also his confidence. Without that kind of cushion, he said, a person should take less risk.
He contrasted younger people with older ones. Younger people often have fewer family burdens and a different risk-reward setup, so they may be able to take bigger swings. Older people usually carry heavier responsibilities and may be less flexible about risk, but they often have more savings and wider networks. He added that many entrepreneurs do not even start until their 40s.
Then came the line that changed the room. Quiet, fast. When he started Binance, he said, he was already 39 or 40.
The most intense pressure: BNB below issue price
Asked about the moment of greatest pressure in his life, Zhao did not bring up prison. He did not bring up $4.3 billion either.
He pointed to the two or three weeks after the ICO, when BNB dropped below its issue price and around 20,000 to 30,000 people had bought it. “The pressure was huge,” he said.
He said he does not believe the ingredients of success are all that mysterious. The people in the room were already very smart, he said, and once someone passes a certain threshold, extra IQ does not separate people that much. EQ matters too. But in the end, persistence and the ability to withstand pressure matter more.
If he could go back
Asked what point in life he would return to if he had the chance, Zhao paused for a few seconds and said he would probably go back to age 18.
Youth, he said, has the highest value. If all his wealth were taken away in exchange for being 18 again, he said he would accept that trade immediately. No hesitation.
What not to do matters more than many people think
Zhao said one idea keeps returning in his head: deciding what not to do can matter more than deciding what to do. He was careful to say the line was not his original idea, though he follows it closely.
Too many people, he said, never stop to ask what should be cut. Someone sends a message, and they think they have to reply. Someone invites them out, and they think they have to go. They assume every social event matters, every shared preference in a friend group matters.
His view? A lot of that can just be removed. When the moderator asked whether showing up at this event was one of the things he had truly chosen to do, Zhao said yes. He did not need to be there. He chose to come.
Startups: product and users come first
For students already trying to build companies, Zhao laid out a sequence that was very practical. At the beginning, only two things matter most: product and users. A founder has to bring in users and give them value. Without those two things, he said, there is no company.
After that come team building, legal and compliance work, and marketing. He made a distinction here. Marketing is not that important at the very start. Legal needs depend on the field. Early-stage tech startups may face low legal risk. Finance is different.
Looking back at Binance, he gave two very specific answers to the question of what he would change:
- He would start compliance earlier. Countries now mostly treat exchanges as financial companies, which means they need specific licenses.
- He would block U.S. users from the start.
On delegation, Zhao said there is no magic moment when a founder gets to stop being involved. If you find someone you trust, you can hand the work over. If you do not, you still have to do it yourself.
And even after delegating, he said, a founder still has to drop into the details now and then: talk to users, inspect how a feature is designed, check system performance. There is never a stage where speaking only with 10 executives is enough.
He also gave one concrete operating number. To stay close to useful feedback, a company only needs three to five high-quality users it keeps in deep contact with. No need to talk to hundreds every month. Five can be enough.
How he evaluates people
Looking back on years of hiring mistakes and misreads, Zhao said nobody sees people perfectly. His framing was almost philosophical: the world is imperfect, and human judgment is imperfect too.
He said bad reads usually fall into two buckets. One is plain bad judgment. The more common one is failing to understand a person’s flaws the first time you assess them.
That is why he asks directly in interviews: what are your flaws?
Many people do not like that question, he said. Still, most people should know their own weaknesses and be able to face them. Even if you do not ask a co-founder that exact question, you still need a very clear sense of their flaws.
Having flaws does not mean someone is impossible to work with. The type of flaw is what matters. Zhao drew a hard line on ethics: if the flaw is moral, the relationship will not work. Anyone capable of breaking trust should be removed as fast as possible.
He also criticized a common social calculation: staying connected to someone with questionable ethics because they might be useful one day. In his view, that is worthless. His friend circle is small, he said, but those friends are highly dependable.
When the discussion turned to what he called a “world-class pitfall” in his own life, his tone was strikingly calm. As far as he knows, he said, no one else in the world has gone to prison for a single violation of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act. Most people, he said, are not even charged, never mind fined or jailed. He added that being the only person to go to prison was one thing, but the lucky part in his case was that it lasted only four months. It felt long at the time. Looking back, he said, he made it through.
People fall into holes, he said. The point is to climb out and keep walking.
At Binance, initiative comes first
Many students in the room wanted to know how Binance hires. Zhao boiled it down to one trait: initiative.
Because Binance is remote, he said, it is easy for someone to coast for a few hours a day. But if a person is not self-driven, two months can pass with no real output.
He then described a management style that probably made some former colleagues wince. He handles many things at once, switches topics fast, and often forgets tasks after bringing them up. He usually does not follow up. If the person responsible does not come back and push an update to him, he may forget the issue altogether. But if he remembers two months later and finds out the work stopped after one week, he said he would fire that person.
His wording was blunt: “I never follow up. I need them to push updates to me” ("I never follow up. I need them to push updates to me").
He stretched that into a wider rule for this era: the people who move on a task by themselves are the ones who win. The ones waiting for a boss to check their numbers do not.
The moderator added that everyone in the room had written emails, kept pushing the organizers, and submitted questions in order to get selected.
Why students should spend time at a large company first
A junior interning at Tencent asked what skills are best learned inside a mature organization, and what can only be learned through entrepreneurship.
Zhao’s advice was to join a large company first for at least two years, ideally two to four or five. In a big company, he said, people get exposure to a complete management system. He used his own four years at Bloomberg as the example and said he learned a great deal there.
But there is a downside. In a large organization, a person becomes one cog in a bigger machine and sees only one piece of the puzzle. Engineers do engineering. Marketers do marketing. Marketing is easier because the system already exists and needs less creativity.
A startup is different. You are in the mud. Doing everything. Making it up as you go. No template.
He warned students not to jump into entrepreneurship too fast just because they have seen classmates succeed in college. Starting a company is a long process, he said, and many people spend 10 years or more on it. No need to rush.
Half-joking, he told the student he could work at Tencent for a while and then come to Binance.
Be in the global top 1% at something
For younger attendees looking for broad career advice, Zhao offered a framework that was demanding but clear. The world is globally competitive, he said, so a person needs to be much better than others in one core area. In practice, that gap may be smaller than people assume.
He used programming as the example. With millions upon millions of programmers around the world, expecting to be twice as good as everyone else is unrealistic. More often, someone is only slightly better than the next person.
But if that slight edge puts you in the global top 1%, or even the top 0.1%, the payoff can be several times larger, dozens of times larger, or hundreds of times larger. The gap may be tiny, he said, but first place and second place are not treated the same.
Once a person has one strong skill, they can add networks, communication, and the other abilities needed for entrepreneurship.
Asked how to recruit co-founders stronger than yourself, Zhao did not fake modesty. Early on, he said, some amount of selling the vision is probably unavoidable. But beyond that, a founder needs enough personal pull that others believe in the mission strongly enough to give up other opportunities and join.
He also pointed to a structural issue young founders often miss: equity should not be split equally. In Binance’s case, he said, he was the oldest person in the group and recruited younger people around him, but kept a somewhat larger stake and somewhat greater authority. That created a clear leader. If three or four founders split ownership evenly, decision-making can jam up. Not always bad, he said. But usually slower.
On the old Sequoia dispute
One student asked directly about the public dispute with Sequoia at the end of 2017, and whether Zhao would avoid that route if he had another chance.
He said he probably would not. His relationship with Neil Shen, he said, is quite good now, and he described the episode as one of those cases where conflict led to familiarity.
The logic was not emotional. It was practical. If an investor of that level is willing to talk to you, you should take the meeting. Whether they invest is a separate question. Even the conversation itself can teach a founder what a top-tier fund cares about and how it judges a company.
And networks compound, he said. An investor may not back you today, but later may know exactly who to introduce if you want to expand into India or another market.
Zhao admitted he is generally not good at maintaining relationships, but added that if someone of that caliber had been willing to speak with the version of him from 10 years ago, it would have been an honor.
RWA, stablecoins, DEX rules, and cycle timing
On market structure and the direction of the industry, Zhao made a series of pointed comments.
He said he had underestimated real-world assets, or RWA, especially tokenized securities. In his view, the sector has moved faster than he expected. After thinking it over, he said the acceleration makes sense.
His reasoning was direct. Many people want to buy U.S. stocks or A-shares, but opening a brokerage account from another country can be extremely hard. And even then, U.S. market hours run from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. for users in Asia, and the market is closed on weekends. Once assets move onchain, access gets much easier.
From the issuer’s side, he framed it just as plainly: if you issue stock, why would you want only investors in one country buying it when eight billion people worldwide could be potential buyers?
He used one number to drive the point home. Daily turnover on the Philippine Stock Exchange is about $50 million, which he said is roughly what a single New York trader might do in one day. Companies in that kind of market are already looking for second listings elsewhere. Tokenization, he said, opens a path to direct global trading.
On stablecoins, Zhao said they also sit under the RWA umbrella because they put currency onchain. Most stablecoins today are tied to the U.S. dollar, with roughly $200 billion to $300 billion outstanding. In his view, any country would want its own currency circulating more widely around the world.
As for what is harder to tokenize, he pointed to real estate. Property prices do not move like traditional financial assets, he said, and without that pattern, liquidity may be weaker. By contrast, intellectual property and virtual assets tied to social media may be easier to move onchain, though those markets are still small for now.
On decentralized exchanges and regulation, he said the door seems to be opening. Based on what he understands, pressure in the United States has eased a lot, and once international platforms are separated from services for U.S. users, some international structures may not need KYC.
He contrasted that with his own experience: “What happened to me before was because they said Binance’s KYC was not good enough — even though we did have KYC across the board. Now you can have a DEX that does not need KYC” ("What happened to me before was because they said Binance’s KYC was not good enough — even though we did have KYC across the board. Now you can have a DEX that does not need KYC"). If that setup becomes workable, he said, the industry will grow faster.
Zhao added that the four-year cycle still looks right to him, and he tied that to psychology. Painful memories usually fade in about two years, he said. Based on that, he gave a cautiously positive read: the past one to two weeks have brought more constructive changes, and founders still building now may have just come through the coldest stretch of this downturn.
Still, he stopped short of naming the next big theme. The next hot sector, he said, may not even be RWA. It could be something the market does not know yet.
His warning on AI code in crypto
One student founder in the audience said AI had already replaced 80% of the labor at his company. Zhao saved that subject for later in the event, and his response was unusually sharp.
AI, he said, is there to improve efficiency. It does not mean people stop doing the work themselves.
Putting AI-generated code directly into production is “very, very, very dangerous,” especially in crypto. The reason was concrete enough: unaudited code can contain a bug that wipes out millions or tens of millions in funds. For many startups, that is fatal. Bigger, more mature platforms may be better able to absorb the hit, but the risk is still there.
His point was plain: AI is a tool and should be used. There are opportunities in AI startups. There are opportunities in Web3 startups too.
Hong Kong’s edge in Web3
Zhao said he had visited Hong Kong five or six times over the past year, and his view was specific, not just flattering for the sake of it.
He sees a strong edge for Hong Kong in Web3. It is a financial center, financial technology is well developed, the talent pool runs deep, and access from mainland China is fairly convenient through travel permits and work visas. In Asia, he said, Hong Kong holds a very strong position.
He was less convinced on AI. On power costs, data center conditions, and related infrastructure, he said Hong Kong’s edge is not obvious.
He also warned young people rushing toward AI not to choose based only on what is hot. Every industry is hot early on. AI will keep developing. What matters more, he said, is whether the choice fits a person’s interests, abilities, and the value they can create.
Asked which other cities are best suited for Web3 besides Hong Kong, he gave two answers: the United Arab Emirates, specifically Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and the United States as it stands now.
A late-stage clarification on projects and tokens
Near the end of the event, organizers wanted Zhao to write a short message to students. He refused. The reason, he said, was not modesty. It was risk control: he worried somebody might use it to issue a token.
He then spent a full section making his position extra clear, in very serious terms. The English edition of his book, he said, was self-published on Amazon and has no publisher. The Hong Kong event was arranged by the publishing side of the book, and while he appreciated that, it was not something he had personally planned.
He also said he knew many project teams wanted to pay to get into the event and promote themselves, and that he had rejected that.
His statement was explicit: “So any promotion of any project or any token has nothing to do with me. I strongly support sharing books, sharing ideas, and community discussion. But if there is any project, token issuance, or anything like that, everyone needs to make their own judgment” ("So any promotion of any project or any token has nothing to do with me. I strongly support sharing books, sharing ideas, and community discussion. But if there is any project, token issuance, or anything like that, everyone needs to make their own judgment").
Two words for founders
In his closing remarks, Zhao stood up and gave entrepreneurs just two words.
The first was learning. The world changes fast, he said, and technology keeps evolving.
The second was resilience. His definition had none of the usual motivational polish: in any field, the more successful a startup becomes, the more problems it will face. The bigger the platform gets, the greater the pressure. So, he said, a person has to truly like the work and be able to keep going. If you cannot persist, you should not start a company.
From a highly paid Bloomberg engineer, to selling a house to buy BTC, to founding Binance at 39, to serving four months in federal prison, and now to sitting in Hong Kong answering questions from a room full of students, Zhao said his own self-description has not changed: “I’m still a very ordinary person. I’ve just had better luck and gone through more things” ("I’m still a very ordinary person. I’ve just had better luck and gone through more things").