How DJI's Frank Wang overcame the midlife 'meaning crisis'

(This article is authored by Zhou Tian Industrial Analysis, published by Titanium Media with authorization)

By Zhou Tian, Industry Analyst, Author: Zhou Tian

, a highly compelling piece, is one of the rare lengthy interviews today where a founder deeply explores their inner world.

I caught a phrase that made me feel as though Wang Tao’s inner contemplation had reached a certain level, and this is what I believe to be the most important statement in the entire piece. Wang Tao put it this way: With a personality like Sun Wukong, seeing a demon makes you want to smash it with your staff, trying to use strong confrontation to pursue an ideal state of purity, but in fact, Sun Wukong is a much bigger 'demon'.

In the past, Wang Tao had an odd relationship with the world. He liked to criticize the world and enjoyed mocking existing systems and institutions. For example, he insisted on designing his own office building, and when raising capital, he set his own rules, forcing investment firms to follow them.

While Wang Tao criticized the entire world in the past, he also kept himself hidden, avoiding public appearances, using a stand-in for his image in promotional materials. Moreover, there was a decade-long gap between his two interviews. Even Liu Jingkang of Insta360 and Tao Ye of Tuozhu knew well that Wang Tao disliked being in the spotlight, frequently calling him out by name hoping to bring him into the open. This time, Liu Jingkang finally succeeded.

However, the current Wang Tao has reversed his previous self, putting aside his sense of superiority and critical nature while displaying a great deal of reflection and empathy. Wang Tao said, 'You can't criticize others just because God gave you a certain talent,' and he added, 'Later, I realized that people's feelings are also important. They have their own internal logic, and I shouldn’t disrupt someone else’s harmony.'

In a Forbes interview with Wang Tao in 2015, the slogan hanging on his office wall was still: Bring your brain, not your emotions. Clearly, at that time, Wang Tao was busy winning and had no time to care about others' emotions.

This time, in a LatePost interview, Wang Tao finally showed that he has completed his socialization. He said he had finally found his missing part — relationships between people — and mentioned that the proudest thing in his 20 years of entrepreneurship was 'learning how to reflect.' Despite already having amassed billions, I noticed that Wang Tao’s socialization and maturation came relatively late, around his early forties. In his early thirties, he received a flood of positive feedback, likely basking in success and busy expanding into the world, leaving little time for self-examination, which meant he missed the chance for personal enlightenment.

So, today’s Wang Tao no longer says 'I want to change the world,' but instead talks about 'discovering truth and living by it.' At this point, I feel Wang Tao has leveled up. When Wang Tao looks at Liu Jingkang and Yu Hao now, there is a sense of mutual respect; he remarked that Yu Hao is precious. It’s almost as if he sees a younger version of himself. Perhaps we could add some subtext: The mindset of wanting to win and change the world that drives Liu Jingkang and Yu Hao is a stage I, Lao Wang, have already passed through. Life is a journey of cultivation, and sooner or later, you will each receive your own life lessons.

Reflection comes from pain, and Wang Tao's pain was concentrated between 2018 and 2019. During that period, he took drastic anti-corruption measures, sending dozens of colleagues either to jail or terminating their employment.

That was because Wang Tao believed at the time that 'DJI is a pure land, a place for pure entrepreneurship and artists born out of dreams.' Wang Tao set 'purity' as the entry threshold and a condition for continued existence — you had to be pure, otherwise you didn't deserve to be there. And when impurity inevitably appeared in reality (corruption, laziness, self-interest), Wang Tao's previous conclusion was: the pure land had been polluted, and the source of pollution must be eliminated.

The young Wang Tao used dichotomy to understand the world. Corrupt employees were 'demons' that had to be struck down; those not good enough were 'mediocrities,' not worth wasting time on. This moral clarity made his product decisions extremely fast — there really is a clear distinction between good and bad design — but applying this to people turned into a disaster.

Now, Wang Tao says: 'When farmers thresh rice, birds fly down to peck at it. The birds don’t even have the concept of 'stealing.' Wang Tao no longer assumes people should be pure, starting to view self-interested behavior as the default setting of human nature. From blaming the birds to finding ways to upgrade protection himself, this marks an evolution in Wang Tao’s management understanding based on human nature.

The young Wang Tao was an engineer version of Rousseau — he believed that 'pure people' existed, and DJI's mission was to gather these people, isolating them from contamination. The later Wang Tao shifted towards Madison — people are not angels, and the purpose of systems is to produce the best possible outcomes from imperfect individuals.

Wang Tao’s reflection on his anti-corruption campaign during 2018-2019 is one of the most valuable methodological sections in the entire interview. He said: 'Fighting corruption and organizational restructuring shouldn't be done simultaneously. The correct approach is to first hire people, reconstruct the organization, weaken factional power, and then address corruption opportunistically. But I lacked experience, and no one reminded me.'

In 'The Open Society and Its Enemies,' Popper refers to this mindset of 'seeing a problem and wanting to solve it completely' as 'Utopian social engineering,' contrasting it with 'piecemeal social engineering.'

The Utopian engineer's mindset is: I've designed a perfect blueprint, and reality must transform into the blueprint's image in one step. The piecemeal engineer's mindset is: I don’t know all the consequences my plan might create, so I only make small changes at a time, observe the results, and decide the next steps. Wang Tao’s reflection — 'first hire people, reconstruct the organization, weaken factional power, and then address corruption opportunistically' — indicates that his thinking habit has transitioned from Utopian engineering to piecemeal engineering.

Acknowledging the limitations and imperfections of human nature, being wary of radical change, advocating for gradual improvement based on existing order, and respecting the tacit wisdom accumulated through experience and tradition — these conservative traits are beginning to show in Wang Tao.

Having bid farewell to radicalism, Wang Tao needed to rediscover himself. Let’s see how he searched for his identity. Late in this process, he left behind rare historical insights: 'Being number one in the world, winning — aren’t these important? These things drove me for the first half of my life. But then you realize, creating and producing, that 'I' is poison.'

When he was young, he read the biography of Steve Jobs, and his favorite part was the early section about raising the pirate flag at the company — 'that self-centered spirit, after reading it, I felt I should be like that.' He read Ayn Rand’s 'Atlas Shrugged' and was struck by John Galt — a genius engineer leading elite creators to build a utopia for the strong. The common feature of these two spiritual templates is: the self is the absolute center of the heroic narrative, the world changes because of 'me.'

This narrative provided tremendous psychological motivation in the early stages of entrepreneurship – it allowed a twenty-something young person to persist with something that everyone thought was unfeasible, despite having no resources, no experience, and no team.

But this narrative has a built-in trap: when 'I' become the sole source of meaning, any evidence that shakes 'me' becomes an existential threat. He later realized that 'many innovations that seem ‘great’ are essentially derivative... many of us are just ‘movers,’ not geniuses who create out of thin air.'

Wang Tao, who once considered 'I create' as the pillar of his identity and somewhat viewed himself as a genius inventor, now redefined himself as a 'mover' – this acknowledgment was clearly painful. He then described the pain: 'Once I figured this out, the driving force that used to be addictive was suddenly dismantled. You feel nihilistic, like something is wrong, but you don’t know where it’s wrong.'

Wang Tao, the entrepreneur worth hundreds of billions, revealed the anguish of standing at the peak: when you discover there is no 'higher purpose' at the top, only more complex balancing and distribution, you feel lost and nihilistic.

This is a classic 'meaning crisis,' an existential vacuum after losing an established framework of meaning; Wang Tao read Jung's books, where Jung discussed how the driving forces people rely on in the first half of life (achievement, competition, self-validation) naturally become ineffective in the second half, and one must seek new sources of meaning. Wang Tao's experience confirms Jung's assessment – he himself quoted a widely circulated statement by Jung: 'True life begins at 40; before that, you're just doing market research.' Wang Tao said when he saw this statement, he felt 'he was one of us.'

This statement is actually a simplified version of Jung’s expression; a more precise exposition is included in 'The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man':

The psychological task of the first half of life (roughly until 35-40 years old) is ego development: establishing identity, developing capabilities, finding one's place in the world, and pursuing achievements and social recognition.

The psychological task of the second half of life is individuation: integrating neglected and suppressed parts of the personality (shadow, anima/animus), moving from the narrow identity of the ego towards the greater wholeness of the self.

Wang Tao said in the interview: 'Now I want to demonstrate another possibility – entrepreneurs aren’t just outwardly exploring and conquering the world; they’re also inwardly exploring and overcoming inner demons.'

This statement, I believe, is the most valuable thing Wang Tao could share with the entire technology and venture capital community.

*If this article mentions any publicly listed companies, it is solely for research and discussion purposes and does not constitute a recommendation of stocks or related financial products.

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