Choosing a Direction: Go Big Market
"The things you're doing may not be the biggest things you're capable of." This lesson is Lei Jun's greatest regret and lesson from his time at Kingsoft: how to choose a direction, how to estimate the ceiling, and a phrase he used more than the person who coined it — Go Big Market.
Lei Jun loves asking founders starting from scratch three questions: What do you love? What can you do? And what do you think is big enough that you can actually do it? Choosing a direction means finding the answer at the intersection of these three circles. He says about Xiaomi: "I was very lucky — I found something I love, that I can do, and with a market large enough to matter."
Why does the first question come first? Lei Jun tried reversing the order. Liu Chuanzhi said "turn necessity into passion" — Lei Jun used this to motivate himself, then discovered "turning necessity into passion is quite hard. It goes against human nature."
When Kingsoft pivoted to online games, he rallied all colleagues to play games — those who didn't would lose their year-end bonus. He forced everyone to grind through games. After years of this, many people still didn't genuinely enjoy gaming and only said "I love games" under the wave of pressure. "If they don't actually enjoy games, how could they possibly make good games?"
Take a direction you're considering, click to answer the three questions, and see Lei Jun's verdict.
"Choose what you love, what you can do, and then find the biggest opportunity in that domain" — behind this summary are two real lessons learned.
The first is Lei Jun's own: back when choosing between KingSoft Antivirus (Duba) and PowerWord (Ciba), he chose PowerWord because "working with the public security bureau for antivirus felt annoying" — but the antivirus market was more than 100 times larger. By the time KingSoft Antivirus launched, it was four years behind PowerWord: "a bloody battle, and still second place today."
The second is Li Xueling's: he first built Duowan, the gaming portal. Lei Jun warned him "it's worth a hundred million dollars at best" — he worked hard for three years and it was indeed about $100M. After pivoting to YY, from its July 28, 2008 launch, valuation crossed $1 billion in two years and four months — with Tencent breathing down its neck.
Click to switch between two cases. The comparison bars scale proportionally by market size. Notice how short the small one is.
"Go Big Market — go after the fattest market." Lei Jun credits Chen Yizhou with coining the phrase: "I thought he said it so well that I've used it more times than he has."
The reason Xiaomi is worth so much isn't mysterious: the smartphone market is worth that much. Five years after the iPhone launched, revenue could reach $100 billion; 1.6 billion phones sold globally per year, all shifting from feature phones to smartphones. Lei Jun's calculation for the Chinese market:
"If I weren't in this market, how could I possibly reach ¥10 billion in revenue in my first year of selling products? If I were still doing WPS today — China plus Microsoft combined is only ¥1 billion." When the direction is big enough, your opportunity is big enough. If you choose a tiny direction, no matter how hard you grind, you can't build significant scale. Scale is bounded by the market you're in.
No matter how large the market, there's one final test: are you the right person for it? This is a real founder Lei Jun met. Click "Next line" to hear the full conversation, then make your investment decision.
Conversation over. If you were the investor, who would you back?
The question Lei Jun asked on the spot: "Am I investing in you, or in your wife?" His conclusion: "When you are the most important person in the company, you have to be clear about whether you are the core value of the company, and whether you can do what you truly understand. If it's all things your wife understands, can you let her start the company while you support her? It would have a much better chance of succeeding." Even after the three questions narrow down the direction, there's still this final gate: do what you actually know.
The most common mistake solo developers make is exactly "choosing PowerWord." Developers naturally gravitate toward developer tools — familiar, comfortable, no need to deal with regulators — but that's often the "PowerWord market." The same tech stack aimed at a different audience (e-commerce merchants, parents, content creators) could be 100× bigger. AI applications are especially like this: model capabilities are universal; the ceiling is almost entirely determined by the audience and use case you choose.
Before building, do a Duowan-style calculation: what's the absolute ceiling for this direction? If the answer is "a decent side project" and you want more than that, take a page from Li Xueling — pivot early.
"Invest in you or your wife?" is an even harder question for a one-person company — because there is no wife to defer to. You are the entire team, so "do what you truly understand" is a hard constraint: if you don't understand e-commerce, don't build product-selection tools; if you don't understand healthcare, don't touch telemedicine — no matter how fat the market is.
A workable path is a variant of Lei Jun's own: either first turn yourself into the target user (genuinely spend six months using the product), or deeply partner with someone who truly understands it. The complete version of the three questions is four: love it, can do it, big market — and is the core value of this thing actually in you?
Three questions for direction: what do you love, what can you do, and what is big enough.
Passion comes first: "Turning necessity into passion" goes against human nature — you can't do well at something you don't love.
Within what you love and can do, choose the biggest market: PowerWord vs. Antivirus differed by 100×, Duowan vs. YY by 10×. The ceiling is set before you even start.
Go Big Market — then ask one final question: is the core value of this company actually you?
Source: compiled from Lei Jun's public entrepreneurship lectures