Binance and Dubai

Written by: Hanyang MASTERPA Source: hanyang.wtf

This is not an article, but more like an "index of things to be written in the future". Mainly some takeaways.

Before I had a feeling for the Middle East, I had already had an impression of Dubai in my childhood: Palm Island, Burj Al Arab, and later the Burj Khalifa... It is difficult to understand the complex situation in the Middle East, but it is easy to understand that Dubai is rich. Just like any place you have "some impression" of it, you can only experience it by yourself.

When the plane was about to land, I climbed onto the empty seat next to me and looked out the window. I wondered why there were still a few minutes to arrive, but there was still no trace of the city? After landing, I understood that Dubai is a city pulled out of the desert. After all, 20% of the world's construction cranes are here.

I came here to work, and I didn't have much time to go around. I just took a quick walk through the old and new city. Even though I come from a country that has developed rapidly in the past 40 years, it's the first time I've seen a place with such a big difference between the old and new city - I'm not talking about "Dubai Folding" or anything like that, I just feel that Dubai's new city seems to have no historical baggage at all. I read a sentence in "Tokyo Legend" before, which roughly said that Tokyo is a place where "there is no past and there is still a future"; then Dubai's new city is really a place where you can "completely abandon the past and still have a future."

I don't know why, after landing, the post was first located in India, and then in Dubai. As a result, several friends asked me if I went to India to make content, and then asked me what topic required me to go to India and the Middle East? Actually, none of them. I didn’t plan to produce any content directly this time. I was mainly here to attend Binance Blockchain Week (BBW).

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve done a lot of blockchain-related content, but I’ve only participated in a few major events. The first was Devconnect in Istanbul last year, the second was Token 2049 this year, and the third was BBW. I went to Turkey because I found that many friends had gone there, so I should go there too; the reason for 2049 was a bit strange: I always felt that it would be difficult for this event to continue to be popular every year, and I should check it out before it goes out.

I was ready to come to BBW two months in advance this time, but I couldn’t make a specific plan. Because I had almost no two Fridays in the same place in the past three months, I had no idea where BBW would be a few days before and where I could go. In the end, I confirmed the itinerary a week in advance, and I kept asking Binance friends to help me with various deadlines. I’m really sorry.

There are three main reasons why I want to come to BBW:

1. I have written about Binance before, but I have never had close contact with this company. When I was writing Xiaohongshu, I could still squat in the Starbucks in front of the office. Binance, all employees are remote, and they didn't give me this opportunity at all.

2. I started to contact the Yijie team half a year ago, wanting to see if there is a chance to communicate.

3. I had an appointment with CZ to chat before, but I haven't seen him for a year for various reasons. Later, CZ said on X that he would attend this BBW, and I also wanted to try to see if I could make an appointment.

These three ideas have all been realized, and they are far beyond expectations. Talk about them one by one.

1. Binance

Binance should have 200 employees responsible for organizing the event this time, and many extra people came to meet their colleagues offline. So I basically talked to various people whenever I had the chance. I didn't have any specific questions, but I wanted to figure out one thing: As an employee, how do you feel about this company?

The answers I got are enough to write a serious article. I will just mention one thing that impressed me the most: Binance employees believe that hard work is useful - that is, they believe that their work is not meaningless, that their personal goals can match the goals of the organization, and that as individuals they can drive things to happen and change.

It is very interesting to communicate with Binance employees and listen to them talk about how they joined the company and what they have done over the years. People who feel that their work is meaningless find it difficult to remember clearly what they have done step by step.

This is rare in today's Internet giants. The mentality of many employees in large companies is to execute the KPIs above and not to blame me if they fail to complete them. Few people feel that what they do is really useful to the overall situation. It was not like this a few years ago. It was an era with more momentum and enthusiasm. Everyone felt that they were also participating in a great journey. With the demise of entrepreneurship and the weak economy, this mentality has become less and less. Maybe it is only ByteDance, which was rising in the past two years, that can still see the afterglow of the old era.

Binance will give people a sense of déjà vu: work can be tiring, but it cannot and will not be meaningless. Most people know what they are doing, which is not easy. On the other hand, employees will be proud of what they do. Working hard on something will not necessarily make you proud; pride only comes from feeling that you have done the right thing.

And this contact has once again deepened my "stereotype" of Binance: This is a company composed of normal people. Normal people have advantages and disadvantages, but it doesn't matter, normal people can communicate. Especially after seeing all kinds of weird, crazy and persecuted companies, my feelings are particularly obvious. Go to chat, write, and contact this company, you don't need to worry about anything. So in addition to Binance, I am willing to write Xiaohongshu. In addition to personal interest, the biggest reason is that both companies have normal people. How deep the doorway is here, people who understand Chinese Internet companies know.

But I feel that the work at Binance is indeed very tiring, and it is not much less than that of the big companies. That is, global remote work is far away from the discussion context. If Binance is also a standard company with a headquarters, facing the office building that never turns off the lights, there will be no shortage of arguments about this on the Internet.

2. Yijie

It is true that Yijie has a lot of information on the Internet and leaves a lot of traces, but it is not very useful. Especially in the past two years, the information has become even less. In general, there is a lot of gossip, but there is little valuable information. But thanks to two related articles last year, I met some friends who used to work at Binance. All those who have worked directly with Yijie have a high opinion of her. The contradiction and tension between the online information fog and the offline real-person evaluation made me very curious.

So since the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I have been trying to make appointments through different channels to see if I can talk to Yijie. Actually, it shouldn’t be difficult to make an appointment with Yijie to chat, but my request was a bit "excessive": I didn’t want to chat for two hours and then write a conversation; I wanted to talk to her in depth for a long time and write about some bigger and more difficult topics. So I asked if there was a chance to go with Yijie for a day or two to see her usual working status.

Unfortunately, Binance had just finished an event in Dubai, and I was in Japan and missed it. And she usually stays at home and is not particularly convenient to interview. So I didn’t have the opportunity to meet Yijie until this BBW. Friends at Binance still remembered my proposal a few months ago, so they helped me arrange a 30-minute one-on-one exchange, and I could participate in several activities with her. A total of about two or three hours.

As a result, I not only talked to Yijie alone for nearly an hour, but also followed her for nine hours from the afternoon until the end of the event at midnight, and had a meal in the middle. In the middle, because of the lack of manpower, I also helped to carry some things - so much so that the people I met the next day thought I was a Binance employee.

Many people say that starting a business is also a physical job, and few people can have a deep understanding of this sentence. I think Yijie must understand. As a person who follows, I feel a little tired, but she has been in business all the time. Moreover, BBW had a high fever the night before, and she took various medicines to suppress it. During the half day I followed her, I saw her finish a small box of Ryukakusan. Later, I saw someone post a group photo on Xiaohongshu, saying that she looked a little haggard, after all, she was sick.

I won't write about the specific content of the exchange here. There should be a chance to turn it into an article, but the earliest will be half a year later.

I just want to talk about a detail that particularly caught my attention:

In the evening, she had dinner with two colleagues and me, waiting for the dishes to be served, and chatting about what they have been doing recently. She said that she would check Xiaohongshu before going to bed. A colleague asked if there were any interesting hot spots? She asked if she had paid attention to "Enter Kexue" recently? A colleague and I laughed immediately, mature netizens will take the initiative to be found by hot spots. However, another colleague has lived in the Middle East for a long time and is not very familiar with the current Chinese Internet hot spots. So I quickly talked about what this is: including but not limited to who Kexue refers to, the problems encountered by the protagonist in it, the controversy between feminism and anti-feminism on the Internet, and the extremism of the Internet today. It is definitely a skill for a person to be able to quickly popularize hot events and explain the background context and the general environment. But what impressed me most was the following words.

After chatting, Ke Xuecai had not come yet, and everyone was a little hungry, so they sat quietly on the chairs. After a while, she suddenly said to us but also a little to herself: "In any case, no matter which side's point of view, this is just participating in a grand online violence."

Indeed.

3. CZ

We made an appointment a year ago, and finally met. I imagined what would happen when we met, but I never expected it to be like this:

We met in the morning, and the assistant took me into the room and said he would go downstairs to pick him up. I was alone in the room, and suddenly the doorbell rang, and I didn't know whether I should open the door. Because he would not arrive at the venue until 4 pm in the preview, we were afraid of security problems so we met in advance and were reminded to keep the specific location confidential and post photos after 4 pm. The meeting place was not a heavily guarded office building, so I wondered if the person looking for the neighbor pressed the wrong number? Or someone was looking for him? After all, he must have his own key to his space, and otherwise people around him could open the door.

So I didn't open it.

Then the doorbell rang a few more times, and I thought, why not open it? As a result, when I opened the door, CZ was standing at the door alone, carrying a backpack on one shoulder and a huge sports water bottle in his hand. He was probably a little surprised why I didn't open the door, and I was also surprised why he came here alone.

After standing for a while, he asked me if I had come to the right place. I said if you are CZ, then this is the right place. So we put down our bags and water bottles, sat down and started chatting. It was very easy to talk to, and he had a good sense of humor. As long as a person has enough humor and accepts self-deprecation, it is impossible to have a bad chat. In the middle, we talked about the book he was writing, and he said that he felt that he had experienced a lot of things and could write about them; I was very happy at the time, after all, in terms of how much experience he had, few people can compare with him.

And his Chinese is very good - if you don't know, I speak very fast and have an accent, so many people (including pure Chinese) can't understand what I am saying; I have to control my speaking speed every time I record a program. CZ can not only hear what I say clearly, but also catch the jokes I throw out. Even afterward, the first question that Chongqing asked me was: Can he understand what you are saying?

I will not go into the details of our conversation for now, and I hope to write something next year. After the chat, I suggested taking a photo together, and took out the Polaroid 680 I brought with me. He recognized it as a Polaroid, and I said that this machine was bigger than both of us, and whether it could produce photos depended on luck.

Sure enough, there was a paper jam.

I fixed it when I was packing up to leave, but at this time CZ's assistant came downstairs to pick someone up, and we were left alone in the room again. I suggested that we take a selfie, I haven't tried taking selfies with Polaroid, but it should work.

It worked this time.

On the first day, I heard people chatting at the event. Some people said that it is not easy to meet CZ now. He must be surrounded by bodyguards. Compared with the person sitting opposite with a sports bottle in hand when we actually met, this feeling is still quite strange.

In addition, if I had known that you two were of this style, I would not have bothered to bring formal clothes. Apart from attending a friend's wedding, the last occasion where I needed to wear formal clothes was before the epidemic. This time, I want to meet people, so I want to be more formal. But whether it is Yijie or CZ, they should not care about these.

By the way, many friends are meeting me for the first time, and I want to add that I am not usually like this. I usually look like this:

Photographed by Yang Dayi

I also met some netizens I have never met before. Many friends thought I was a full-time reporter. In fact, not only am I not a full-time reporter, I can't even be a good reporter. In the past three years, I have gradually realized one thing, that is, Wang Hanyang has none of the skills that a good reporter needs.

A good journalist needs to have enough enthusiasm and patience to report a thing clearly, and be able to continue to follow a company; he must also have a good understanding of the topics he covers. Moreover, journalists have to endure long hours of boring work and ensure that they can produce results. David Simon, the screenwriter of "The Wire", is a model of a good journalist in my mind.

I can't do that. My entire interest in creation lies in the exploration itself, not in obtaining conclusions and results. So almost all of my articles share the path of my exploration, and I have been criticized for always not giving conclusions because of this - I haven't obtained the results myself, I just walk a part of the way with you. Another side effect is that I find many roads boring after walking them, so I don't write about them.

The same is true for the topic selection. I am only curious about the threads in my problem consciousness. I don't want to touch anything that I am not interested in - this is very unprofessional for journalists.

Another question I was asked several times this time is, where do you find so much time to write? Actually, this question does not exist. Most of my energy is on work. Writing or photography, such as creation, only takes up 20% of my time at most. I feel that I have a lot of output because I can spend 20% of my time on creation year after year.

Another common misunderstanding about creation is that it is like doing a test that requires continuous answering. It is not. Take an article as an example. If it takes 100 hours to write, then the actual time spent on writing may be only 20-30 hours. The rest of the time is all thinking and research before writing. When waiting for the subway, waiting for the elevator, squatting... these are all time that can be used for thinking. The difficulty is never how to create, but to keep creating.

If there is no mark, the pictures are taken by myself