CZ Answers 15 Questions in Hong Kong on Binance, Web3 Cycles, and Advice for Young Entrepreneurs

At 5:05 a.m. on Aug. 27, Hong Kong issued a red rainstorm warning, and all morning and full-day schools were suspended.

Changpeng Zhao's flight was also delayed by the storm, and he didn't arrive in Hong Kong until 3 a.m. About six and a half hours later, he appeared at the "Binance Life" book club event. The venue, originally planned to be only half open, was packed, and the organizers temporarily opened all areas.

Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, sat in a conference room on the 40th floor of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), facing a group of young people who had returned from HKU, HKUST, CUHK, as well as Imperial College London, LSE, UC Irvine, and Johns Hopkins, and chatted for over an hour.

The event was hosted by veteran media professional and founder of Yafang Change Makers, Xie Yafang. She opened by saying: Today we're not talking about industry, not about the success or failure of any particular venture, but about returning to a person's underlying logic. How does someone who once influenced global wealth flows, then fell to a low point in life and spent four months in prison, see the world after coming out?

The new book is called "Binance Life" (English title: Freedom of Money). And the first line of this book was written in prison.

1. This book was written in prison to "find something to do"

When asked why he wrote the book, his answer was so plain it was almost funny: "I was bored in prison, so I decided to keep myself busy with something."

So he developed a routine: sleep, eat, work out, and write for fifteen minutes every day. After accumulating a pile of writing, he thought, "I shouldn't waste this time," and decided to organize it for publication. In the end, organizing took longer than writing.

What really tormented him wasn't the four months in prison, but the period before. He was stuck in the U.S. for over five months, unable to leave, preparing for trial while not knowing what the sentence would be. He said the hardest part was the uncertainty: "Would they keep me there forever? Would a new charge appear after a while?"

Once inside, it was actually quieter. No internet, couldn't check the timeline, so he had to rely on memory to write. After his release, he went through everything he had posted on X to fact-check and found a few things he had missed—

"But the things I missed didn't seem as exciting as what I remembered."

What you remember is what matters. He joked that his memory is "probably just a little better than a goldfish"—if someone tells him something, he forgets it in five minutes, but he can't forget the details of major moments: like what you were doing when 9/11 happened, you probably remember.

He wrote the book in English himself. He hired professionals to help rewrite it, but after reading their version, he said, "It wasn't my voice anymore," so he rejected almost all of it. For the Chinese version, He Yi helped write the preface and translated a few passages. When he read it, he found: "She used words I can't even pronounce."

His solution was very CZ: "The Chinese in my book cannot contain any characters I can't read." All difficult characters were eventually removed.

2. What was he calculating when he sold his house to buy BTC?

This was the question students most wanted to ask: How did you dare to sell your house at that time?

He split his answer into two parts. The first part is cognition—the sector.

"Society is always progressing, humanity is always progressing. As long as something new has value, it will be used." He said the major sectors are actually very easy to identify, so easy that "everyone will tell you": early on it was computer hardware, then the internet, and now it's web3, AI, and biotech. Companies that succeed in these sectors will all succeed, growing thousands or tens of thousands of times.

He added a blunt truth: web3 looks like a big sector, but to this day it's still very narrow, "basically just about money," and things like land titling haven't really taken off yet.

So the real question isn't whether the sector is right, but—"what you can achieve in this sector is determined by your own abilities."

He also emphasized a phrase repeatedly: 80% of success in life is just showing up. "You have to participate. If you don't participate, there's no opportunity."

The second part is risk—the bottom line. He said risk varies from person to person, and there's only one criterion:

If this thing goes to zero, investors lose all their money, and you can't keep going—can your life continue? How much is your quality of life affected? What level of impact can you accept?

His own answer was clear: "Even if BTC goes to zero, I could go back to Wall Street and get a six-figure job without much trouble."

"That's my bottom line, and my security. Without that security, you might need to take a bit less risk."

Following this line, he gave different prescriptions for young people and middle-aged people: young people have a different risk-reward profile, fewer family burdens, and can take higher risks; older people have heavier social responsibilities and weaker risk-taking ability, but more savings and connections, so there's a balance—"That's why many entrepreneurs actually start their businesses in their forties."

Then he said something that silenced the room: "When I started Binance, I was already 39 or 40."

3. The most stressful time was the weeks when BNB fell below its ICO price

When asked about the peak stress in his life, he didn't mention prison or the $4.3 billion.

He said it was the two or three weeks after the ICO—BNB fell below its ICO price, and twenty to thirty thousand people had bought it.

"The pressure was enormous."

His view on the "success factors" wasn't mystical: "I believe everyone here already has high IQ. Once you pass that threshold, being higher doesn't make much difference." EQ also matters, but in the end—"you still need persistence. Resilience is quite important."

4. The sharpest question of the event: Which moment in life would you return to?

The host asked: If you could go back to any point in your life, where would you go? What would you change?

He thought for a few seconds. "Probably back to 18 would be best."

Why?

"Youth is the most valuable thing. If you said now, take away all my wealth and let me go back to 18—I wouldn't even think about it. I'd 100% want to go back immediately."

5. What not to do is more important than what to do

This is a principle he repeated many times, and he emphasized it wasn't his original idea—he read it somewhere—but he executes it extremely thoroughly.

"Most people today don't consider what not to do. Someone sends a message, they have to reply; someone invites them out, they have to go; they have to socialize; whatever their friends like, they have to like too."

"Many people could cut these things out completely, but they don't."

The host followed up: So you chose to come here today because you genuinely wanted to?

"Yes. I could have not done this, but I still chose to do it."

6. The order of entrepreneurship: product and users first, everything else later

For students already starting businesses, he gave a startup checklist.

At the very beginning, there are only two things: product and users. "You need to be able to attract users, and you need to provide value to users. Without these two, you won't have a company."

As the founder, only after that do you build a team, handle legal compliance, and do marketing. He made a special distinction: marketing isn't that important at the start; legal depends on the industry—tech startups have low legal risk early on, but financial businesses are different.

Looking back at Binance, he gave two very specific "if I could do it again" points:

Do compliance first. Now countries basically define exchanges as financial companies, so you need specific licenses. "Looking back, it's simple."

Block all U.S. users from the start.

On delegation, he said there's no such thing as "reaching a stage where you can let go completely": "When you find someone you trust, you can hand it over to them; when you can't find them, you have to do it yourself."

But even after delegating, you must regularly "get down in the trenches"—talk to users, check whether a feature is well-designed, look at system performance. "There's never a time when you can just talk to 10 executives in the company."

He also gave an actionable number: 3 to 5 high-quality feedback users with deep connections is enough. "You don't need to talk to hundreds of users every month; talking to 5 every month is enough."

7. Judging people: In interviews, he directly asks, "What are your flaws?"

When asked about experiences of choosing the wrong people or misjudging people over the years, he started with a philosophical opening:

"I think we live in a simulated world, and this game is imperfect. You won't be perfect at judging people either; no one is perfect."

He divided misjudging people into two categories: one is pure judgment error; the other is more common—"when you look at this person, there are flaws you don't understand."

So in interviews, he directly asks: "What are your flaws?"

"Many people don't like this question. But most people should understand their own flaws and be able to face them. Even if you don't ask your partners, you need to know their flaws very well."

Having flaws doesn't mean you can't cooperate; the key is what kind of flaws. Here he drew a non-negotiable line: "If it's a moral flaw, you can't cooperate. Anyone who can destroy trust—the faster you kick them out, the better."

He also criticized a common social calculation: "Many people think, this person has some moral flaws, but it's acceptable, maybe they'll be useful someday, so they keep in touch—that's meaningless."

"I actually have very few friends. But my friends are all very reliable."

As for the "world-class pit" he fell into, his review was calm to the point of understatement. He said as far as he knows, no one else in the world has gone to prison for a single violation of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act—most people aren't even defendants, let alone fined or placed under house arrest.

"I'm the only one who went to prison. But overall, I was lucky it was only 4 months. At the time it felt long, but looking back, getting through it was enough."

"People always step into pits. After stepping in, you climb out and keep walking."

8. Binance only looks for one thing when hiring: initiative

Many students at the event wanted to join Binance, and the host asked about the selection criteria on their behalf.

His answer was just three words: be proactive.

"Binance is remote work. You can slack off—it's easy to slack off for a few hours a day. But if you're not proactive enough, after two months you might have no results."

Then he described a working style that would send chills down colleagues' spines:

"I deal with a lot of things, jumping from one to another. Some things I say and then forget. I generally don't follow up. If the person doesn't proactively update me, I'll forget. But I might remember two months later and ask them, and they say, 'We made progress for a week and then stopped'—then I'll fire that person."

"I never follow up. I need them to push things to me."

He extended this into a judgment about the entire era: "As long as you proactively and actively do something, you will succeed. If you wait until your boss comes to check your performance before doing it, you won't succeed."

(The host added on the spot: Everyone here today was selected because they wrote emails, kept pushing the organizers, and submitted questions.)

9. About the first job: He advises young people to work at a big company for 2 to 5 years first

A junior student interning at Tencent asked: What abilities should be learned in a mature organization, and what can only be learned through entrepreneurship?

His advice surprised many—go to a big company first, at least two years, ideally two to four or five years.

"In a big company, you'll learn their entire management system." He said his four years at Bloomberg were the biggest company he'd worked at outside of his own ventures, "and I learned a lot."

He was also clear about the downsides of big companies: "You're a cog in the machine, only seeing your own small part. If you do tech, you only do tech; if you do marketing, you only do marketing. Marketing at a big company is easy because they have established systems—you don't need that much creativity."

Startups, on the other hand, are rolling in the mud—you have to do everything, everything needs creativity, and there's no model to follow step by step.

"Many people are in a hurry. They see others succeed in entrepreneurship during college and think they must start a business too. That's unnecessary. Entrepreneurship is a long process—many people start a business for ten years or more, so there's no need to rush."

He half-jokingly told that student: You can work at Tencent for a while and then come to Binance.

10. A specialized skill: aim for the top 1% globally

For general advice to young people, he gave a harsh but clear-eyed model.

"This world is a globally competitive world. In your strengths, you have to be much better than others—but honestly, you might not be able to be that much better."

Using programming as an example: there are millions of programmers worldwide; you can't be twice as good as everyone else. "At most, you're just a little bit better than the next person."

But if that little bit puts you in the top 1% or even 0.1% globally, the returns could be several times, dozens of times, or hundreds of times higher.

"The gap may be very small, but the treatment of first place and second place is very different."

Once you have a specialized skill, if you want to start a business, then go build connections, improve your communication, and learn the skills you're not familiar with.

On how to recruit partners who are better than you, he didn't pretend: "At the beginning, you might need to paint a rosy picture—that's probably unavoidable." But beyond that, you need personal charisma: "Others need to believe that for this vision, I'm willing to give up other opportunities to work with you."

He also pointed out a structural issue young people most easily overlook: don't split equity equally.

"At Binance back then, I was the oldest, so I found a group of people younger than me. But I had slightly more shares and slightly more say, so there was a leader role. Many young people choose to split three ways or four ways equally, and then many decisions in the company get stuck."

It's not necessarily bad, but progress will be slower. "There are trade-offs here."

11. About the Sequoia "feud": If he could do it again, he'd still go talk to them

A student directly asked about the public dispute with Sequoia in late 2017: If you could go back, would you have avoided Sequoia from the start?

"Probably not. My relationship with Neil Shen is actually quite good now. We became friends through a fight."

His reasoning wasn't about saving face, but pure value calculation:

"Any investor of that caliber who is willing to talk to you—you should go talk. Whether they invest or not is one thing, but just the communication stage teaches you a lot—what does a top investment fund care about? How do they evaluate your company?"

And connections compound. "They might not invest, but a couple of days later, if you want to expand into the Indian market or other markets, they'll have people they know to introduce you to."

He admitted he "generally doesn't maintain connections well," but added: "For someone of that caliber, if it were me ten years ago, being able to meet them would be an honor."

12. Industry judgments: RWA, stablecoins, and "the next hot thing we might not know yet"

When talking about the industry, he gave several information-rich judgments.

On RWA (real-world assets on-chain), he admitted he missed it.

"Tokenizing securities has developed much faster than I expected. Thinking about it later, it makes sense."

His reasoning was straightforward: many people want to buy U.S. stocks or A-shares, but opening a brokerage account in another country is "very, very, very difficult"; even if you do, U.S. trading hours for Asian users are "8 p.m. to 4 a.m.," and closed on weekends. Once on-chain, "ease of access will be much higher."

From the issuer's perspective: "You issued a stock—why would you only want people in your own country to buy it? If 8 billion people worldwide can buy it versus a few hundred million in one country, obviously 8 billion is better."

He gave a striking number: the entire Philippine Stock Exchange's daily trading volume is about $50 million—"roughly what one trader in New York does in a day." Companies in such markets are already looking for secondary listings elsewhere, and tokenization means they can directly face global trading.

On stablecoins, his framework is that "stablecoins are also a form of RWA"—just putting currency on-chain. "Most stablecoins today are U.S. dollars, about two to three hundred billion dollars. Which country wouldn't want its currency to circulate more widely globally?"

On what's hard to put on-chain: real estate. "Real estate price fluctuations don't follow the same pattern as traditional financial assets. Without volatility, liquidity might not be as strong." In contrast, IP and social media virtual assets might be easier, but "these markets are still relatively small."

On DEX and regulation, he said the door is opening. As far as he knows, pressure in the U.S. has eased a lot. After separating international platforms from those serving U.S. users, international platforms can operate without KYC under certain structures. He added a personal comparison:

"What happened to me before was because they said Binance's KYC wasn't good enough—we actually had KYC for everyone. Now a DEX can operate without KYC."

"If it can be like this, the industry will develop faster."

On cycles, he believes the four-year cycle is still very accurate, and the reason is psychology.

"In human psychology, painful memories last about two years. After two years, the pain is forgotten."

He gave a relatively optimistic judgment: in the past one or two weeks, the industry has seen positive shifts, and those still building in this industry now "should have just survived the coldest part of this winter."

But he didn't overcommit: "The next hot thing might not even be RWA. It could be something we don't know yet."

13. On AI: Don't push AI-written code directly to production

A college student who had already secured funding said 80% of his company's workforce has been replaced by AI. This question was addressed in his final summary, and his attitude was quite serious:

"AI helps us become more efficient, but it doesn't mean you don't do anything yourself."

"Right now, if AI-written code goes directly to production, especially in our industry, it's very, very, very dangerous."

The reason is specific: the code hasn't been audited. "One bug means millions or tens of millions of dollars gone. For many startups, that's basically fatal. More mature platforms might be able to withstand it a bit better."

His conclusion was plain: "AI is a tool, and we should use it." AI startups have opportunities, and web3 startups have opportunities too.

14. On Hong Kong: Strong advantages in Web3, not obvious in AI

As someone who visits Hong Kong five or six times a year, his assessment was quite specific and not just flattery.

The clear advantage is Web3: Hong Kong is a financial center with advanced fintech, strong talent pool, and convenient access from the mainland (exit-entry permits, work visas). "In all of Asia, Hong Kong has a very strong advantage."

The advantage is not obvious in AI: "Hong Kong's electricity costs, data centers, etc.—the advantage isn't obvious there."

He also advised young people rushing into AI: every industry is hot at the beginning, and AI will continue to develop—that's fine—but the criteria for choosing should be your own interest, your own ability, and value, all three combined.

When pressed on "besides Hong Kong, which city globally is best for Web3 development," he gave two answers: the UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi), and the U.S. right now.

15. Finally, he proactively poured cold water

At the end of the event, there was a segment: the organizers wanted him to write a message for college students.

He declined. The reason wasn't modesty, but self-protection: "I'm afraid someone will use it to launch a token."

He then spent an entire paragraph clarifying, in a tone more serious than at any other point: the English version was self-published on Amazon, with no publisher; the book club was arranged by the publisher, and he was grateful, but it wasn't his own planning. And—

"I know many project teams wanted to pay to come in and promote their projects at this event, and I said no. So any project or token promotion has nothing to do with me. Sharing the book, sharing content, community discussions—I fully support those. But if there are any projects, token launches, etc., everyone should judge for themselves."

A person who manages even his autograph as a risk exposure probably illustrates the value of "trust" better than any success story.

Epilogue: Two words he gave to entrepreneurs

In his final summary, he stood and gave only two words.

The first is learning. "The world changes very fast, and technology keeps evolving."

The second is resilience. And his definition of resilience might be the most anti-motivational quote of the entire event:

"In any field of entrepreneurship, the more successful you are, the more problems you have; the bigger the platform, the greater the pressure. So you have to really love what you do, and you have to be able to hold on. If you can't hold on yourself, then don't start a business."

From a high-paid engineer at Bloomberg, to selling his house to buy BTC, to founding Binance at 39, to four months in federal prison, to sitting in a Hong Kong venue today being grilled by college students—Changpeng Zhao's self-definition has never changed:

"I'm still a very ordinary person, just luckier and having experienced more things."