“The Genius Factory and Director Dong”
Published: June 11, 2026 12:04 AM
Source column: MirrorSpeed CN
Source site: WeChat Official Account – 36Kr
Content Summary
Start a business early, invest early, make money early. Interview | Guo Yingzi Writer | Ba Rui Guo Yingzi Source | Dark Waves (ID: waves36kr) Cover source | AI generated before they start a business. Zhang Ailing said fame requires…

Start a business early, invest early, make money early.
Source|Waves (ID: waves36kr)
Cover source|AI generated
Before They Start a Business
Eileen Chang said “become famous early”; for Dong Kehan, this should be changed to “start a business early” — as early as age 14.
In the fall of 2025, he visited 40 North American universities in 59 days. After the tour, he posted his results on his Moments, “The dropout rate this month exceeds the norm; a trip to the United States seems to have a strong impact on the students.” According to his count, 14 students have dropped out or submitted dropout applications, including students from Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, “and there’s also one high school student back home.”
This is his fourth public tally of “dropout achievements.” Previously he reported “having persuaded more than 20 young people to drop out and start businesses” and “helping a post‑00s with a six‑figure salary decide to quit and launch a startup.” He also said, “I seem to be pretty good at influencing others to become entrepreneurs.”
All the posts are numbers, all the talk is about his influence—how many young people have changed their life paths because of him.If a prodigy can be mass‑produced, Dong Kehan is the manager of one such factory.
This is his ambition. It was also a major reason why he left Qiji Chuangtan in September last year to go solo.
As a founding member of Qiji and former head of investment and operations, Dong Kehan was once very close to CEO Lu Qi. However, according to several former Qiji insiders, the two had long-standing disagreements over investment targets—Lu Qi preferred older candidates with experience at big firms, while Dong Kehan wanted freshmen, sophomores, or even younger. A more blunt way to put it is: Lu Qi didn’t want to deal with minors. Dong Kehan said the things he does require risk‑taking, “you can’t drag others along to share the responsibility with me.”
He’s in a hurry. He wants to become part of their story before anyone truly decides to start a company and catches the attention of other investors.
During his year of solo ventures, Dong Kehan, acting as an individual angel investor, supported about 40 young people aged 14 to 22, with an average age of 19. Some were still in high school, some were on a university gap year, already holding Olympiad gold medals or high‑star GitHub open‑source projects, yet they might not have fully decided to start a business.
Interestingly, age is a key metric Dong Kehan uses to gauge “genius,” but he keeps his own age tightly under wraps; public reports rarely mention it, and he won’t disclose it when asked.
He named the project N1, derived from Neuron 1, the first neuron. Officially, it is positioned as an independent platform for discovering and supporting young creators.
Support includes, but is not limited to, funding, computing power, and opportunities to network with peers; as part of the commercial arrangement, both parties contractually agree on a right of first investment for members’ future ventures.
Dong Kehan’s criteria for selecting N1 members can be summed up in four characters: strange, fast, precise, ruthless.
According to Dong Kehan’s interns, dropouts from prestigious schools are a priority target; for high school students, school background doesn’t matter, but their technical ability should reach the level of an Olympiad gold medal.
Another criterion is whether they are willing to give it up. Guaranteed admission, guaranteed graduate study, elite school credentials—things that ordinary parents covet—here become the most important tokens for measuring determination.
A member of N1 said, “What he values is what you give up— the more you sacrifice, the more mature your thinking is.”
Currently, the most talked‑about figure in N1 is Chen Guangyu. The 17‑year‑old “prodigy” participated in the Moon’s Dark Side Kimi paper “Attention Residuals,” serving as one of three co‑first authors (Musk praised the paper on X).
Recently, Chen Guangyu announced his departure from Kimi and was later reported to have joined Discovery Loop, founded by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, using AI to automate scientific research, a story that quickly made headlines at home and abroad.
Dong Kehan had already signed Chen Guangyu into N1 before he joined Moon’s Dark Side.
When Chen Guangyu appears in reports with tags like “17 years old” and “7‑million‑yuan salary,” Dong Kehan’s talent‑spotting story is repeatedly told. This is his favorite way of getting exposure.
The year Dong Kehan spent on N1 was also the hottest year for “young prodigies” in the primary market. Two months ago, an entrepreneur told Dark Wave, for an AI startup team to catch an investor’s eye, it’s best to assemble a professor or scientist, a big‑tech expert, and a “young prodigy.”
Recently, the wind has shifted again. The media started discussing “young prodigies busting investors,” and some investors are eager to distance themselves, saying they don’t look at “young prodigies.” At least verbally, the label is no longer as popular.
But the market’s chase for youthful talent won’t end immediately just because a label falls out of fashion.
Dong Kehan told Dark Wave that N1 originated from students’ desire to learn and try entrepreneurship, and he “doesn’t pay much attention to capital’s endorsement.” But the people he picks happen to match the capital‑favored profile perfectly: young, hands‑on early, with real output, and preferably willing to leave the established path.
Dong Kehan once said, N1 “the acceptance rate is less than one in a thousand from outreach, there is no public application portal, only invitations are extended to those who can already create independently and tackle important problems.”
Working backwards from this, about 40 members imply at least tens of thousands of outreach attempts. Fortunately, Dong Kehan had already refined his recruitment methods at YC China and Qiji Chuangtan.
In 2018, YC entered China, bringing former Baidu president Lu Qi to lead it. At that time, Dong Kehan had dropped out and returned to China, his travel company “was about to collapse,” and he was seeking advice everywhere.
He guessed Lu Qi’s corporate email correctly, and a single email earned him a chance to join YC China.
At the end of 2019, YC withdrew from China, and the original team spun off as Qiji Chuangtan. Dong Kehan became a founding member and head of investment and operations, building an intern sourcing network, visiting campuses, giving talks, and pulling out young people with ideas. Just like what he does today.
According to a former intern, after going solo, Dong Kehan’s team once had only two full‑time staff, with interns spread across Beijing and Shanghai. Some recall that at its peak there were over 30 people, and Dong Kehan said the peak number of simultaneous interns was 17, with some who left still “hanging around in Feishu”.
They work on growth, operations, video editing, but the most important task is just one: finding people.
Dong Kehan’s “weird, fast, accurate, ruthless” criteria, once in the hands of interns, became concrete sourcing KPIs.
They combed through every place where young people might leave a trace: Xiaohongshu, GitHub, paper sites, competition lists.
A former intern reviewed his own pipeline: first DM on Xiaohongshu, switch to WeChat, then arrange an offline meeting; write a crawler to scrape high‑scoring accounts on GitHub and send forty or fifty cold emails a day, getting three or four replies; the paper sites are a back‑door—scan the author list for any “kid,” then trace the school and continue filtering through alumni.
His colleague is even more hardcore: two phones placed side by side on the desk, both scrolling Xiaohongshu. Because the recommendation algorithm has to be fed. Feed it enough and the feed ends up full of their own people.
They hold a screening meeting once a week, picking out from hundreds of leads the candidates worth a personal meeting with Dong Kehan.
The two‑hour meeting with Dong Kehan is the key to whether you can enter N1. Supposedly, he often asks:What did you do last week? What was the biggest shift in your thinking over the past three months? What opportunity did you discover in the past year that others missed? How do you define entrepreneurship?
As long as he sees potential in you, it doesn’t matter if you have no company, no product, or even no entrepreneurial intention. After both sides nod, you can sign the contract.
The contract includes a “small amount” of money. An N1 member interning on a big‑tech large‑model team said the amount “isn’t even enough to cover my salary for a month.” Intern Li Xiaonan recalled it being “no more than $30,000,” to lock in priority investment rights after the other party’s startup.
“If you start a company, we’ll give you more money; if you fail, we can still give you more money,” Li Xiaonan said. As for the equity stake, the rumor Waves gathered from interns and an N1 member is “roughly similar to Qiji.” (Qiji typically invests $300,000 for a 7% stake.)
Dong Kehan said that for the first time support includes both capital and computing power, with investments ranging from 50,000 RMB to $300,000; whether additional funding will be added in the future depends on the support capacity. He emphasized that he does not take a board seat and has no operational decision‑making authority.
Li Xiaonan said that even if you never start a business in your lifetime, the money will never be recovered. He also mentioned that after being invested in, some took money from other companies, terminated the contract with himDong Kehanonly felt that “the other party lacked contractual spirit.”
Of course, some people refuse to sign because they don’t want to be priced so early. There have even been parents working in finance who warned their children,“Real big‑shots never sign this.”Because the valuation offered is too low.
Having seen it a lot, interns have noticed a pattern: although the people they “ask” to talk with Dong Kehan may not get funded, those who proactively approach him basically never get any money.
The intern who was looking for people was also put into a rigorous screening mechanism.
According to the intern, there must be at least three valid leads each day, “you still have to successfully set up one more, talk it through, then judge.” Being assigned a person counts as a KPI, pushing a meeting also counts, with different weights, “He (Dong Kehan) has his own algorithm.”
Li Xiaonan asked around VC peers, “no one does it like this.” He dreams about KPIs, and some even “wake up in the middle of the night to vomit.” Working overtime until midnight, or even communicating with U.S. entrepreneurs late at night, “it’s all normal.”
If you miss targets for two consecutive weeks, you’ll be placed on unpaid leave or reassigned. The pay is 200 CNY per day.But according to interns, starting in August, the Deal Sourcing team switched to a daily wage of 150 CNY plus performance bonuses. If a candidate they find catches Dong Kehan’s eye, he will send a 1,000 CNY reward red envelope to that intern in the team’s group chat.
Even so, interns are still one in twenty.
Impressive peers, unattainable industry resources, and the chance to be “noticed” by an investor are enough for many young people to accept these rules.
“Seeing what peers are doing here and their growth curves helps calibrate my own development,” said an intern of Dong Kehan.
Previously, during Zhipu’s IPO, he spent two days at AGI Bar just to ask for a referral from a large‑model company employee. Now, following “Brother Dong,” his network reach is far broader than a stint at the Bar.
A junior college student incubating early‑stage startup projects received private messages on Xiaohongshu from three of Dong Kehan’s interns in succession.The opening was almost identical: “Do you know what our Dong Kehan team does?”
Dong Kehan’s name has become a token in the primary market. A 20‑year‑old intern carrying it gains the confidence to knock on more doors.
Beyond the token, there’s also a big slice of pie.
In January this year, when he recruited interns he explicitly gave priority to “gap year” candidates, and promised that outstanding performers could be retained by the fund, saying, “We want to cultivate future partners, or support you in starting a business.”
By September, after Dong Kehan’s non‑compete period ended and a new fund launched, they began hiring full‑time staff. “We sent out four return offers in August,” Dong said, adding that he didn’t tell anyone else because the classmates who didn’t get a chance “were unhappy.”
Interns can also become his portfolio companies; reportedly, an N1 member once interned in his Beijing office. Dong said, “Some of them eventually join the N1 AI School.” Thus the job feels like a selection process that could instantly rewrite one’s identity.
Dong Kehan has long practiced this craft of organization.
A former Qiji employee recalled that when Dong led interns, whoever brought in the most startup‑camp registrations would receive an iPhone, “so there were instances of inflated numbers, similar to a Great Leap Forward.”
He still remembers a certain intern meeting after it ended, when Dong Kehan looked at him and said, “Actually I really like you, but I’ve never had a chance to talk with you all this time.”
When those words come from the boss, they hit harder than any team‑building activity.
Dong Kehan once said he liked literature, loved performance and theater. He truly understands the power of storytelling—when to deliver a line, how to wrap up a scene—he knows it all by heart.
For example, the ending line of the public account article “How to Spot Someone Worth Investing in at Age 20”: “My mission is to say at the right moment, ‘I see you’”; or this line: “I really like you.”
First believing in young people and earning their recognition and trust is what Dong Kehan considers his strength.
He quoted a classmate’s assessment of himself: Dong Kehan believes in young people, “to the point that even the things he says, he himself believes them,” as if he has a “brainwashing ability.” Dong Kehan said he doesn’t know whether this is a pejorative or a compliment.
For example, if a classmate is learning something, he repeatedly tells them they will definitely excel in that field in the future. After saying it enough, the young person starts to believe it themselves.
Resources, opportunities, and the feeling of “being seen” become the driving force of this system.
Dong Kehan attracts young people to his side, then has them seek out and attract more young people. As the circle turns, each person is both the target of this system’s search and the limb that lets it keep expanding.
A former Qiji colleague who worked with him summed up Dong Kehan’s ability: “His followers can work for him for free.”
Last autumn’s North American tour was a microcosm of this expanding influence. Most events were organized by student clubs, with no direct involvement from the university.
Dong Kehan spoke on entrepreneurship, investment, and how young people should choose their own paths: when to start a business, what kind of people are worth backing, and why some roads should be taken earlier.
These details struck a freshman at NYU who wants to become a VC,“and he felt he had to be part of it.”When he learned that Dong Kehan’s team had no photographer, he called a few friends the next day, rented a car, drove from New York all the way to Princeton, and filmed for Dong Kehan for free.
“Later, Brother Kehan asked me to stay and work together.” He became Dong Kehan’s intern. This scene later appeared in the N1 Media Lab documentary.
Dong Kehan continuously sends a signal to young people—don’t wait, the opportunity is right now.
“A good entrepreneur takes off when they have a 20‑30% certainty, building the engine while flying.” “The world isn’t changed by the smartest people, but by those who act first.”
Li Xiaonan remembers that Dong Kehan often told the “kid”:“Your growth trajectory is already steep; have you ever thought about making it even steeper?””
And “steep” is indeed the word Dong Kehan frequently uses to describe young people’s growth curves; it appears repeatedly in his posts.
“What does ‘steep’ refer to? Is it entrepreneurship?” Waves asked.
“Yes, of course, that’s the steepest.” Dong Kehan replied.
His interns and N1 members have long understood this—“Don’t stay in school, go start a business.”
But Dong Kehan wouldn’t say it so bluntly. He also said, “I won’t push them into entrepreneurship.”
A member (N1) interning on a big‑company large‑model team said that Dong Kehan often pushes him with questions: “If you’ve been here for three months or half a year, have no results, and become just one of the many, what will you do?” He said, “Whenever you might settle down, he makes you jump again.”
“He won’t encourage you to drop out,” the member emphasized, “He only asks you questions, but all decisions are yours to make.”
When a young person who had just taken a leave of absence messaged, “I think doing something truly different requires not only unique ability and IQ, but also decisions that others are afraid to make,” Dong Kehan happily posted the message on social media with a “satisfied” meme, calling it a “wonderful moment.” He explained to us that he was pleased not with the act of dropping out itself, but with “them starting to think independently and being able to take responsibility for their choices.”
In Dong Kehan’s view, choosing to bear the cost is commendable. The “dropout achievements” he repeatedly showcases publicly also tell later generations what kind of choices are more likely to earn his approval. But blind dropping out isn’t counted; that’s “reckless bravery.”
“I think young people should indeed seize the opportunities of the times; some may get inspired, which indirectly leads them to decide on a gap year, and some quit to start a business.”
In the documentary filmed at N1 Media Lab, a young entrepreneur after six months, whose team has dissolved, is left alone. Dong Kehan asks him what reflections he has, and the young man says he should first clarify the direction, then polish the product.
Dong Kehan shakes his head and says that’s wrong. “What you should do is fire the first person who asks you for a salary.”
In Dong Kehan’s view, anyone who wants a salary but not equity isn’t pursuing the same dream.
He also gave tech‑savvy young people a startup direction checklist: rockets, brain‑machine interfaces, nuclear fusion, gene editing, quantum computing—almost every item requires massive capital and long‑term investment.
In his own words, if you truly dare to do it, “you’ll discover that brave people are actually that rare.”
Once the direction is set, he teaches fundraising.
He often says in his talks: Don’t make investors feel sorry for you; make them FOMO. In August last year, he even wrote an article titled “How to Successfully Raise Funds?” whose core message is to treat fundraising as a high‑intensity sales pitch.
At the end of the piece he boasts a result: a former intern he mentored later started a company, secured 17 term‑sheet offers in the first round, and ultimately chose only two.
But he doesn’t want young people to call him “teacher,” because “teachers might become their ceiling.” He prefers to be a “good friend” or “good older brother.”
However, in the eyes of some young people, Dong Kehan’s role clearly goes beyond that.
A former dropout‑turned‑entrepreneur once referred to him in a social‑media post as:“god father Kehan”.
N1’s base is on the lower floors of a high‑rise apartment in Shanghai’s Hongkou district—inside a 14‑meter‑high atrium, a long wooden table that seats twenty leads to a stair‑stage at the far end. On the stage sits a high‑back wooden chair that clashes with the surrounding tech aesthetic: dark wood carving, accented with white‑painted patterns, an exaggerated design that evokes the Iron Throne from “Game of Thrones.”
High-back wooden chair in N1 space
Dong Kehan said it was a gift from a friend, had nowhere to put it, so he placed it there. He encourages “hesitant” classmates to go up and sit, and also invites visitors to experience it and take a couple of photos.
Lu Qi once said: “Successful people found companies; more successful people founded nations; the most successful people founded religions.”
N1 member Gao Ran said that Dong Kehan wants to be the founder.
Someone publicly claimed to have “distilled” Dong Kehan: gathering every available public and private piece of information into a local knowledge base for study, calling themselves “the person who knows Dong Kehan best, bar none.”
He believes Dong Kehan is “the most accurate judge among investors,” and wants to become the top entrepreneur, “so I should first learn as much about him as possible.”
But this member also emphasized that Dong Kehan “is not invincible,” pointing out his “fatal weakness” is a limited understanding of technology, exemplified by Dong Kehan’s failure to keep up with GPT version updates.
A former Qiji intern who once worked with Dong Kehan said you can treat him as a good cognitive screening threshold, because “people with high cognition won’t listen to him.”
He then added: “Kehan is a very impressive person; he can package something terrible very well, so his words are basically untrustworthy—precisely because of that, I think he’s impressive.”
People Who Set the Standards
Dong Kehan is also a dropout. He studied at UC Santa Cruz until the second semester of his junior year, and he considered himself “not cut out for studying.” He couldn’t sit still; apart from chatting with professors, he would wander around, and few people resonated with him. More importantly, he felt “growth outside is far faster than at school.”
Later, after visiting dozens of universities across the country, he met many young people in situations similar to his own back then. More classmates from N1: some did doctoral research as undergraduates but struggled to get authorship, some tackled hard problems only to be mocked… Dong Kehan hopes they encounter peers earlier.
So beyond N1, he also founded a school that specifically enrolls 16‑ to 22‑year‑olds.No high school diploma required, but applicants must have high‑school‑level math, a passion for AI, and be willing to commit a year.
On September 1, the school named N1 AI School opened applications. The first cohort must take a gap year, stay on‑site for 6 to 12 months, fill gaps in math, computer science, and model fundamentals, and join real projects. No formal credentials are required, and both board and tuition are free. Dong positions it as “a supplement to today’s Chinese education,” aiming to “treat Scaling Law as a new discipline.”
In his vision, graduates from this program should at least be able to train models, understand the entire workflow, and explain it clearly to laypeople.
The selection and support for this N1 has been extended to an earlier stage. It is reported that some young people who were not selected for N1 also received invitations to apply to the School.
Dong Kehan said, “The reason N1 AI School can succeed is that N1 moves forward under load, using its own life as an experiment. We have very fine-grained observations and methodologies, and after systematizing this set of knowledge we package it for the students.” Whether this experience is sufficient to become a replicable educational method remains to be tested.
However, the applicant profile presented by N1 AI School to the public is still quite glamorous.
The recruitment article states that hundreds of applications have been received, nearly one-fifth from minors; about 63% have GitHub or open‑source code experience, 72% have research experience, and 59% have participated in competitions or hackathons.
Interestingly, these attractive profiles may not all come from N1 AI School applications. A Waves scan of its enrollment portal revealed that the same application form allows selecting either N1 AI School or N1, the latter having a minimum recruitment age of 14. Yet the School claims to target ages 16‑22, while the published applicant profiles start at 14. Merging the two entry points blurs the boundary of the student base in external presentations: a school without elite‑school thresholds appears to showcase a group of young people who already have research, open‑source, and competition experience.
This is quite similar to Dong Kehan’s repeated posting of “drop‑out achievements”:Those drop‑outs may not all be N1 members, but by placing them in the same narrative they become footnotes to his influence and help him attract more people who want to follow.
Dong Kehan cited examples of the first batch of School admits: some built servers with second‑hand hardware in a county town in Shandong at 17 and wrote AI agents, while others created a product with 400,000 monthly active users and then chose to quit. The stories still revolve around youth, audacity, and early action.
But the trend of pushing investment and cultivation forward is real, and Dong Kehan is not the only one doing it.
On September 22, the Holowitz·Anderson Institute, incubated by a16z, opened applications in San Francisco, also targeting young people aged 16 to 22, but requiring a high school diploma, with an initial cohort of about 50. No grades, no exams; the curriculum is co‑designed by ten companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, and NVIDIA, and participants have the chance to go directly into these companies for hands‑on experience.
This approach is not unfamiliar to Chinese people; in the past it had a simple name: targeted cultivation.
The reason for doing this can perhaps be found on a slide from Dong Kehan’s tour.
The slide titled “Signals That Are Happening” reads: “Top companies are starting to bypass universities and recruit high school students directly; universities no longer necessarily make people stronger; degrees and abilities are becoming decoupled.”
And this PPT was captured by a Haidian mother who “actively looks for alternatives outside the system,” and placed it in her own public account article. Coupled with the news about Chen Guangyu, 17 years old with a 7‑million‑yuan annual salary—what moved people was probably not only the youth but also anxious parents.
If the three judgments on the PPT hold true, following this logic leads to an obvious implication—If academic credentials are no longer the sole standard for measuring a young person’s ability, what else can be used to assess a person’s potential?
Dong Kehan’s public account has been updated frequently since the second half of last year. The most widely shared articles—“How to Identify a 20‑Year‑Old Worth Investing In,” “At 14, I Took My First Step into Entrepreneurship,” and “What Kind of Person Must Be an Entrepreneur”—all describe what Dong Kehan is doing and repeatedly explain the same point: what kind of young people deserve early investment.
He not only writes, but also proactively mass‑messages articles to his WeChat friends and asks them to share. N1 member Gao Ran said he has multiple WeChat accounts, “the total number of friends is close to 100,000, and if each person reads it once, that’s 100,000 views.” Gao Ran knows “this is something no media professional would do. His execution is terrifying, and he doesn’t care about anyone’s face.”
Dong Kehan summarizes his method on his personal website as a closed loop:Engage talent early, work with them, invest capital at the moment of conviction, then amplify through networks and storytelling.
“Growth slope,” “structural exogenous growth,” “protagonist feeling,” “AI Native”—these terms constantly appear in his narrative. The old standards haven’t become obsolete, but a new set of standards has been urgently proposed.
Of course, he himself denies having such influence and never intended to do this.But what he does admit is,whether it’s N1 or N1 AI School, his role is more like “the person who sets the standards”.
However, Dong Kehan does not see himself as shaping “little geniuses”. “I don’t think this can be shaped that way. What I want to shape are ambitious young people who can seize the best opportunities of this era.”
“Training models at 16, publishing papers at 18, joining top labs at 20.” In the view of intern Li Xiaonan, Dong Kehan “is not fighting against overwork, but inventing a new kind of overwork.”
Andy— the college freshman who chased from New York to Princeton for a free shoot— said in the documentary that he asked Dong Kehan, “Entrepreneurship is risky. If I give up everything and go all‑in, what happens if I fail?”
According to Andy’s recount, Dong Kehan replied, “Failure is just failure; there’s nothing you can do about it. To let one genius make history and change the world, you have to burn hundreds of geniuses to pave the way for that one.”
Dong Kehan later denied that recount, saying Andy “misinterpreted” him. He also emphasized that he never asked the other party to drop out, and if you really talk about the so‑called cost, “it’s basically a one‑ or two‑year delay in studies. I think that’s fine; it’s not like you can’t go back.”
But he does not deny the extreme concentration of success and rewards. He once described the industry with a “power-law distribution”: “The top 0.1% may earn more than 90% of the money.”
At a Tsinghua networking event, Dong Kehan told young people that the greatest capital “is not money, but the ability to afford loss”: without a mortgage or family burdens, you can fail and start over.
For an investor, a year or two may just be a trial-and-error phase for a project; for a young person, it could be an irreversible life fork.
Dark Wave asked a CEO from the “six little dragons of large models” a radical hypothetical: “If a ‘young prodigy’ drops out of high school, starts a business, and then comes back looking for a job after three or five years, would you hire them?”
In this CEO’s view, these young people are likely to be heavily specialized, and university provides not only knowledge but also socialization, collaboration, and other comprehensive skills. “They should at least stay for two years,” otherwise “these individuals, unless extremely lucky, will find it hard to achieve great success.”
He believes that encouraging young people in China to leave school prematurely is an irresponsible act.
This brings to mind a comment made by former Harvard president and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Summers in 2013 about the Thiel Fellowship:“I think this is the most misguided charitable initiative of the decade; Peter Thiel is actually paying to lure young people out of college.”At that time, Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel offered outstanding young people $100,000 to support them in leaving college and spending two years on entrepreneurship.
Dong Kehan clearly knows that what he is doing now may also attract similar criticism.
So whether in the two conversations over the past five hours or in the two late‑night replies each about 1,400 characters long, he has been vigorously correcting—or trying to guide us to understand—N1, N1 AI School, and his relationship with these young people.
He always starts by describing the situation of young people who show talent too early but struggle to find peers or opportunities within the current education system, then shares his understanding of them and attempts to create a “resource‑rich, feedback‑driven environment with a stretch of time for free exploration and mistakes,” so that they won’t be held back by a predetermined path.
He also says that accompanying young people’s growth has helped him “find his own life purpose,” hoping they will eventually “no longer need my advice.”
“But it can’t be just that, right?” DarkWaves asked.
Of course he knows what we’re asking. He just wants to push the commercial‑interest side as far back as possible. “It (N1) should form a self‑sustaining economic system, enabling dignified, free innovation.”
“Just because we have an investment component doesn’t mean everything is about investing.” He said that investment, community, and education are means, “the core is the people here.”
Later, those two long replies posted in the middle of the night wove his entire explanatory framework together flawlessly—
He said N1 will affect young people, “any environment will have an impact”;
He said “don’t treat taking a leave of absence, starting a business, raising funds, or the next valuation round as N1’s success criteria,” and is more concerned with whether young people learn to find problems on their own;
He admits, “I may indeed be both a mentor and an investor for a young person at the same time. These two roles could present conflicts of interest, and we can’t ignore them just because we trust each other.”
For young people who haven’t yet decided whether to start a business, it remains unclear whether this means more options or pushes them into a harsh evaluation system earlier.
Dong Kehan also has a more clearly return‑oriented investment on his hands: he says that in the year he went solo, he personally invested directly in about 20 companies across China and the US, hoping the returns will buy N1 more time.
Dong Kehan is raising a new fund, not yet closed, targeting a size of “tens of millions of dollars.” Discovering and nurturing young talent requires ongoing investment, and he must also prove that this system can eventually sustain itself commercially.
N1 AI School is tuition‑free, providing living stipends, compute resources, and project support, but the opportunities students receive are not cost‑free; the bills are simply not in their hands yet.
“How do the people we train become the school’s commercial return?” Waves asked.
“We calculate it the same way YC does,” Dong Kehan replied. “YC is just about continuously funding projects that get off the ground, selling them when they succeed; if they fail, they can become partners and run again… As long as talent is here, the opportunities are limitless.”
Whether you see him as great or controversial, Dong Kehan is undoubtedly one of the most perceptive people of this era. He noticed earlier than many that AI is changing how young people price themselves. Skills that once required degrees, experience, and institutional certification can now attract capital market attention with just a paper or an open‑source project.
Investors fear missing the next prodigy, young people fear missing their own era, and parents are also starting to worry, when many paths close one after another, which path actually leads to the future? At that moment, one road opens up:this era has an unprecedented demand for “little geniuses” and is willing to give them unprecedented rewards.The whole era seems to be saying, start a business early, invest early, drop out early, make money early—everything should be done early.
In Shanghai’s N1 outpost, Dong Kehan sits on the throne, and he is not alone.
(At the interviewee’s request, the names Li Xiaonan and Gao Ran in the article are pseudonyms.)




