I'm Zhao Fengnian. In 2026, I stood on the rooftop of Jiangcheng's financial center with the bank's final notice on my phone. Thirty-six years ago, I went from a poor student who couldn't pay 500 yuan in class fees to a man worth tens of billions, only to lose it all overnight.
They said I was crazy, a gambler. But I just understood the information gap. Shortly before graduating in 2010, I couldn't pay my fees and my diploma was withheld. Using my Nokia, I found a forum post from someone looking to buy an iPhone 4 engineering prototype. I pulled off a deal with no money of my own, flipping display models and earning my first 3,500 yuan.
That was the start of my business career. Later, I used the same logic to fight my way through the group-buying wars, buy the dip when Bitcoin crashed, and get out before the P2P lending bubble burst.
I'm not a gambler. I'm just an ordinary person who knows how to find gold in a pile of trash. I'm good at piecing together scraps of information to map out huge profits, using human greed to get the rich to put up the money and the people with the goods to do the work, all while operating at the edge of the rules.
But I have limits. My wife, Lin Wan, always says, "Don't let yourself become a dragon." She's my moral anchor. Every time I'm about to cross the line, she reminds me: Make money, but don't let it corrupt your heart.
This book is a review of the first half of my life. I'll tell you how I turned 500 yuan into my first million, used a crack team of ground promoters to crush the giants, bought the Bitcoin dip with cold wallet technology, and avoided the P2P crash using supply chain finance.
This isn't motivational fluff. It's the true story of an ordinary person who turned an information advantage and sharp judgment into money in a lawless era, climbing to the top of the pyramid. It's a little dirty and a little ruthless, but it's real enough.
If you want to find your own information advantage in an uncertain age, keep reading.
I'm Zhao Fengnian. This is my story.
