Nine Years of Sands Washed Away: Sun Yuchen, the Survivor of Entrepreneurship — The Price of Winning
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Nine Years of Sands Washed Away: Sun Yuchen, the Survivor of Entrepreneurship — The Price of Winning
Tolerating individuality, tolerating Justin Sun, has made Justin Sun.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsIntroduction: Over the past 7-8 years, 99% of post-90s entrepreneurs have failed. Sun Yuchen, who has been in business for nine years, is an exception. The reasons behind this case are worth studying.
(Sun Yuchen wins multiple international awards in 2023)
Main Text
Recently, Sun Yuchen—the most creative figure in the blockchain industry—has been making a series of moves.
Sun Yuchen and his company TRON have won several industry awards at events such as the 2023 Dubai Blockchain Ecosystem Conference and Wiki Finance EXPO. Sun was also awarded the "2023 Crypto Innovator of the Year" by Benzinga, a well-known U.S. business magazine.
While award selections inevitably involve subjectivity, there is little dispute about Sun Yuchen's and TRON’s standing in the industry.
(Sun Yuchen speaks at the 2023 Dubai Blockchain Ecosystem Conference)
TRC20 is the most popular token protocol, and TRON has become the largest circulation platform for USDT (Tether's dollar-pegged stablecoin, often regarded as the universal currency in the blockchain world).
To put it in terms easier for non-industry audiences to understand, TRON can be seen as the Alipay or WeChat Pay of the blockchain industry—one of its most critical infrastructures.
Over the past 7-8 years, during the wave of mass innovation and entrepreneurship, a large number of post-90s entrepreneurs emerged, many of whom were darlings of VC and PE firms. Yet today, 99% of them have failed.
Born in 1990, Sun Yuchen stands out as an exception. While controversial, he is among the few surviving post-90s entrepreneurs with global influence in the industry.
Many people criticize Sun Yuchen—but their criticism has ironically made him an outlier. Is this tolerance from the era toward Sun Yuchen, or is the era shaping him?
The Targeted Post-90s Entrepreneurs
In 2015, during an interview with GQ magazine, Sun Yuchen revealed that he positioned himself as a "post-90s entrepreneurial leader." Born in July 1990, he started his venture at age 24 and secured angel investment from renowned firm IDG in his first year.
Objectively speaking, Sun Yuchen embodies the traits of post-90s entrepreneurs—perhaps even taking them to extremes: he enjoys dancing on the edge of a knife. This trait helps attract resources and attention, but also makes one vulnerable to backlash.
His public image aligns with this pattern: after every unconventional act, many people lash out at Sun Yuchen. But setting aside the noise, his business achievements are widely recognized in the industry.
For example, at the recent "2023 TOKEN 2049" conference in Singapore—an elite Asian crypto event—Sun Yuchen was a featured guest. During his keynote speech, he shared that TRON already holds 52% of the USDT market share, with approximately 196 million accounts, 6.7 billion transactions, and nearly $9.6 trillion in digital asset circulation.
(Sun Yuchen attends the "2023 TOKEN 2049" conference)
He was also invited as a guest speaker at last year’s Milken Institute Asia Summit.
Afterward, International Business Times commented: "At heart, he is a staunch advocate of blockchain technology and a strong supporter of global new finance."
Although Sun Yuchen carries numerous controversy tags in Chinese cyberspace, overseas evaluations—from the industry, media, and global users—are significantly more tolerant.
His English X account has 3.475 million followers—second only to Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin within the industry—while his following on Chinese social platforms lags far behind.
In December 2022, Forbes Portugal released its list of “40 Outstanding Blockchain Entrepreneurs,” ranking Sun Yuchen second.
Thus, the image Sun Yuchen leaves in the industry is contradictory.
One suspects Sun Yuchen himself feels conflicted.
He may not fully enjoy the process of being criticized, but he knows it’s an inevitable path to achieving his entrepreneurial goals.
Along the way, he still has his pride and limits.
For instance, in the first year of founding TRON, on November 24, 2014, he participated in a dialogue with Sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan on the "Maker 987" segment organized by China Entrepreneur Magazine—and felt deeply hurt.
He kept this buried inside for five years. It wasn’t until June 2019 that he finally spoke up.
“Flipping through old photos with friends at New Year’s, I came across one from November 24, 2014, when I recorded a show with Wang Xiaochuan. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes—as if sizing me up as a scammer. He called me a fraud, said I would definitely fail, claimed it was humiliating to appear on a show with me, and eventually refused to continue filming. Less than three years later, my company surpassed Sogou’s market cap. In life, those who look down on you push you harder in ways nothing else can.”
After posting, he added a comment: “Ultimately, entrepreneurship is about changing the world, not proving who was right or wrong. But these painful humiliations and motivations are precisely what fuel the drive to keep going.”
This reveals Sun Yuchen’s inner conflict: on one hand, he pursues individuality; on the other, he cannot completely disregard outside opinions. Ultimately, he transforms pressure into motivation—a form of self-reconciliation.
All Personality Serves the Goal
A celebrity entrepreneur close to Sun Yuchen once remarked: “Don’t be misled by surface-level public opinion. From what I know, he is a young man deeply driven to achieve things.”
Sun Yuchen rose to fame early—featured on Time Warner’s *Asia Weekly* at 21, named a “World Economic Forum Global Young Leader” at 24, and twice listed on “Forbes Asia 30 Under 30” at ages 25 and 27.
It appears he trades uniqueness for fame, then leverages fame to support his startup—an approach he might see as a “shortcut.”
Internet virality spreads like ripples—either hitting many points or creating big splashes. Sun Yuchen excels at both.
Whenever a hot topic arises, it becomes a moment for his “aggressive PR.”
Offering to help Dai Wei resolve the ofo deposit crisis, proposing to pay 1 million yuan to hire Luo Yonghao as TRON’s entrepreneurial spirit ambassador, funding a laid-off NetEase employee battling illness—Sun Yuchen is behind all these initiatives.
Using minimal funds to leverage massive traffic is something he eagerly pursued in his startup phase.
TRON, the public blockchain he founded, aims to reach hundreds of millions of users—which requires high brand visibility. The conventional route to such visibility? Steady, long-term investment: burning tens or even hundreds of millions annually over five years.
Clearly, in the early days, Sun couldn’t afford to wait or burn that kind of money. Hence his statement on the show *Luyu Has a Date*: “For startups, only the founder stepping into the spotlight and aggressively doing PR can capture investors’ attention.”
The peak of his PR strategy was the “Buffett Lunch incident.”
In June 2019, Sun Yuchen purchased the Warren Buffett charity lunch for a record $4,567,888 at the time. Over the next two months, his team relentlessly marketed the event on social media. Some observers joked that the publicity value from just three news cycles far exceeded the $4.5 million price tag.
Yet afterward, as with the “Wang Xiaochuan incident,” Sun paid a heavy price for his boldness, facing widespread criticism from netizens worldwide.
Following this event, from an external perspective, Sun Yuchen’s personality became less flamboyant.
Perhaps, as he originally stated, “startups must rely on the founder stepping into the spotlight and aggressive PR to attract investor attention—how else can they compete with big companies?” After 2019, TRON had evolved into a major organization no longer needing the founder to constantly court attention.
Instead, Sun began a series of external collaborations, acquisitions, and investments.
In March 2018, Tether began issuing its stablecoin USDT on the TRON blockchain (the TRC-20 version). While Ethereum transactions can take minutes or even hours, TRON offers instant settlement at a fraction of the cost. This partnership proved decisive, quickly elevating TRON into the ranks of the world’s top three public blockchains.
In June 2022, Sun Yuchen and other institutions completed the acquisition of Poloniex, a U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange.
In October 2022, Sun joined the Huobi HTX Global Advisory Committee.
This October, Sun announced the establishment of an artificial intelligence development fund aimed at advancing integration and innovation between blockchain and AI. With a size of around $1 billion, the fund will primarily invest in AI payments, AI-powered oracles, AI-driven portfolio management, and AIGC.
According to data from blockchain explorer TRONSCAN, as of December 2023, TRON has surpassed 200 million on-chain accounts and over 6.8 billion transactions, making it the world’s most popular Layer 1 public blockchain.
Era of Tolerance and Making of Sun Yuchen
In summary, while most post-90s entrepreneurs failed over the past 7-8 years, Sun Yuchen stands out as an exception—a business case worthy of study.
In the book *The Investor’s Mind Map*, the relationship between entrepreneurship and personality is discussed.
It states that the most crucial factor for entrepreneurial success is the founder’s perseverance. Exploring unknown technological frontiers is like “chewing glass while staring into the abyss”—a state of continuous pressure.
This makes tech innovation an extreme sport—only suitable for a select few. We may not determine whether Sun Yuchen is good or bad, but we can say definitively: he belongs to the minority.
His uniqueness lies in being “extremely unconventional”: having the founder step into the spotlight, aggressively doing PR to gain attention and resources to compete with giants.
(Sun Yuchen appears at Hong Kong Web3 Carnival events)
He truly treats entrepreneurship as an extreme game: starting a venture immediately after graduation in blockchain; pushing boundaries throughout, such as leveraging a global icon like Buffett for publicity.
Undeniably, the era has been forgiving, and Sun Yuchen has been fortunate. Despite his unconventionality and repeated attempts at extreme games, the era has responded with criticism—but never stripped him of his global entrepreneurial stage.
This is the charm of the innovation-and-entrepreneurship era: tolerant of individuality, tolerant of Sun Yuchen, and ultimately, shaping Sun Yuchen. Success standards remain consistent, but paths can be diverse.
Perhaps this is what this generation of entrepreneurs should be most grateful for.
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