The venture capital community in 2026 is collectively defying common sense.

In 2026, when the concept of "Embodied Intelligence + AI" has almost become synonymous with "China's venture capital", there are too many counterintuitive things happening in the market.

Surprisingly, those smart and shrewd minds not only do not care whether these things go against common sense, but also deeply participate in the "counterintuitive" game on the front line.

In the new era, it seems that some common senses of entrepreneurship and business have become negligible.

Today, let's sort out these abnormal things... 

Let's start with people. Because all stories are ultimately created and borne by people.

 I. Senior executives from top tech firms and PhDs from Tsinghua and Peking Universities are being priced at an inflated value

There is a very obvious phenomenon in the current financing market: the resume of the founding team is itself part of the valuation.

When a P9/P10-level talent from a top tech company starts a business, the first question investors ask is "how many core colleagues did you bring out with you".

The more people you bring, and the higher their ranks, the higher the valuation of this financing round will be raised.

It is even more extreme for PhDs from laboratories of Tsinghua and Peking Universities: a top conference paper can bring a round of financing, and if the name of their supervisor appears in the advisor list, the valuation will increase by tens of millions more.

This logic is almost unimaginable in other industries.

When a chef opens a restaurant after leaving a Michelin-starred restaurant, no one will give him a valuation based on who his former colleagues are. But in this field, resumes can be priced separately.

The problem is not whether resumes have value — of course they do.

The key point is, don't senior investors know — there is not just one step, but the evolution of an entire species between "having strong technical capabilities" and "being able to run a company well"?

They all know it, but they have to pretend not to know it at this moment.

Scientific research is to dig deep into a very narrow field, where failure is allowed, no results for three years are acceptable, and the evaluation standard is recognition from peers.

Running a company is to make trade-offs across a very broad scope, where long-term failure is not allowed, you have to submit performance figures every month, and the evaluation standard is whether customers are willing to pay for your products.

A person who can write excellent papers may not know how to negotiate payment terms with suppliers, how to deal with a core employee who wants to resign, or which demand to give up when the needs of two customers conflict.

But what is more troublesome than capability mismatch is the mentality of these young prodigies.

Capital is making an entire group impetuous.

If you have been in close contact with young entrepreneurs intensively in recent years, you will have a very direct feeling: everyone is in a huge hurry.

Financing news is popping up every day: someone closed Series A this month, and someone's valuation tripled next month.

Your peers on your social feed are on the "30 under 30" list, and your former colleague's company just announced a new round of financing.

In this environment, slowing down itself is regarded as a kind of failure, even if you are doing a great job with what you are working on.

A 27-year-old PhD started a business directly before graduation, with a valuation of 800 million yuan in the first round.

At the dinner table, someone will say to him: "You are already a quasi-unicorn founder."

When this sentence is said once, he may wave his hand in denial; but after being said a hundred times, he will believe it.

This is where I think the most dangerous part lies: The illusory valuation will be internalized as a young person's self-worth.

Valuation is originally an option that capital buys for the future, which prices possibilities, not current capabilities. But it is very difficult for young people who get the money to understand it this way.

He will think that the market recognizes him, which means he is worth this price; he is worth this price, which means his judgment is correct; his judgment is correct, which means he does not need to listen to others.

Once this psychological chain is established, all the pitfalls ahead are already laid.

He cannot take different opinions, cannot see the boundary of his own capabilities, and regards the success of one financing round as proof of his personal value.

One step further, he will be coerced.

Capital operators need stories, and stories need protagonists.

The prodigy founder is exactly that protagonist.

Financial advisors help you package your narrative, investors help you connect resources, and the media helps you amplify your voice.

Everyone is pushing you forward, and all the pushes seem very reasonable, every step seems to be for your own good.

But the pace is not yours.

When to raise financing, how much to raise, and what story to tell are determined by market windows and fund cycles, not by your technical progress and product maturity.

You are pushed to run, the faster you run, the harder it is to stop and ask: Is what I am doing now really what I want to do?

The most troublesome thing is that no one in this process seems to have malicious intentions.

Investors really want you to succeed, financial advisors are really helping you, and the media really finds you interesting.

Precisely because no one is malicious, it is very hard for you to resist.

You will convince yourself: They are right, I should speed up a little more.

The word "being utilized" sounds heavy, but it describes an objective fact:

Your technical capabilities are used to support a capital narrative, and the ownership of this narrative is not in your hands.

When the narrative needs to be upgraded one day, you need to cooperate to change the story line; when the narrative cannot be continued one day, you will also be the first person to be replaced.

 II. The temporarily assembled "luxury team" is also regarded as a founding partnership

Let's talk about teams.

Since it is said that the technical/scientific research capabilities of a prodigy alone cannot support a company and there are defects in business management, someone will come to form a team for you —

I have seen too many such founder combinations: a prodigy in charge of technology, a vice president-level talent from a top tech company, a veteran in the supply chain industry, plus a person who understands capital operations.

When you put all their resumes together, it looks very impressive: technology, business, industry, capital, all four corners are covered, and they dare to claim a unicorn-level valuation as soon as they start.

Investors are very receptive to this kind of configuration, because it looks "complete".

But you know that — configuration is not equal to a partner team.

What kind of relationship are real partners? It is a relationship that has gone through hardships together.

It is the scene where when there is no money left in the company account, two people sit in the stairwell discussing whether to mortgage their houses; it is the scene where after the product was scolded by the customer in person for two hours, they can still review the whole case together until early morning; it is the scene where after serious disagreement and slamming the table, they still go to work together the next day.

This kind of relationship requires time, and also requires shared experiences.

But the experience of many teams now is like this: the first meeting is a dinner arranged by FA, the second meeting is at the negotiation table for the term sheet, and the third meeting is the signing ceremony.

Several people with completely different backgrounds split the equity in a 40/30/30 ratio, and start to "run a company together" on the first day.

This is not called partnership, this is called teaming up to play a copy in a game.

We do not deny that there are examples of temporary teams that can make it. But this kind of success largely depends on luck, right?

It just so happens that these three people are really complementary, there is no fundamental conflict of interest, the company develops smoothly, and there is no moment where someone has to make concessions.

But once the company encounters real difficulties, such as whether to cut a product line, whether to replace a co-founder, whether to accept a clause that will dilute everyone's shares, what you are competing for at this time is not ability, but trust.

Trust has no inventory, it can only be accumulated on the spot. And it is too late to accumulate it when you need it.

 III. Startups look exactly like large established corporations on their very first day

The luxury team is formed, and the valuation goes up — when these overvalued and pushed people get together, what will they become?

They will become a "company that looks exactly like a large established tech giant on its founding day".

Does this make any sense... 

I have seen an embodied intelligence company founded in 2023.

It raised hundreds of millions of yuan in Series A, its office is on the high floor of an office building, there is a logo wall at the front desk, the HR director is poached from a top tech firm, and in the first month of joining, she started to build the rank system and performance assessment mechanism.

The founder is in his early thirties, his last startup was in a residential house, four people shared a box of instant noodles, and he haggled with the cloud vendor's sales for three days just to save server costs.

There are five years between these two experiences.

But in these five years, he did not really experience the process of an organization growing from 5 people to 500 people.

But for his second startup, his team directly started at the scale of 500 people.

This is the most counterintuitive part in my opinion.

Organizational capability grows naturally, it cannot be configured artificially.

A founder needs to know how to decide whether to pay salaries first or pay rent when there are only 800,000 yuan left in the account; he must know what to value when recruiting the 10th employee, precisely because he hired the wrong 9 people before. He knows whether a middle manager is reliable or not, precisely because he has been pitted by unreliable people before.

All these capabilities have one thing in common: they all require time, and they can only be developed when resources are insufficient.

The current situation is that all the money is in place on the first day.

Office, team, suppliers, media exposure, all are configured according to the standards of large established corporations.

I often use a metaphor: if you give a person who has never run a marathon a pair of top running shoes, a personal trainer, and a full set of sports monitoring equipment, he still cannot finish the marathon. You can buy the equipment, but how do you buy cardiopulmonary function?

Capital buys speed. But organizational density is the only thing that cannot be accelerated.

And these two things are connected.

Precisely because the valuation is pushed so high, the company has to maintain such a grand scene.

A high valuation requires an organization that seems to be worthy of it, so the team has to be luxurious, the office has to be decent, and the press conference has to be as grand as an industry summit.

The organization is expanded before it has the ability to grow naturally, just like putting an adult's suit on a teenage kid.

 IV. 1 billion yuan valuation on the first day, and then no one knows where to go

If we continue the previous story, we will arrive at valuation distortion.

These companies have a valuation of over 1 billion yuan in less than a year after their establishment.

This number sounds like an achievement, but in fact it is a yoke. As the saying goes — all gifts from fate come with a price tag.

Now the valuation in China's primary market is basically "one-way", it can only go up, not go down: how do you explain to all your old shareholders that new investors can buy shares at a lower price?

The first round is 1 billion yuan, the second round must be 2 billion yuan, the third round 4 billion yuan.

This number is not up to you, it is set by the investors of the previous round. From the moment you sign that term sheet, teams that do not have strong capital capabilities (most teams are like this) have handed over their control over valuation.

As a result, the company enters a very strange state: all decisions must serve the valuation of the next round.

The product needs to have a grand narrative, the team needs to be a luxurious lineup, and the press conference needs to be held like an industry summit. (The cycle goes on... 

Things that should be done properly, such as polishing products, verifying market demands, and controlling costs, are pushed to the back burner, because those things do not contribute to valuation growth.

Who is in control? In fact, no one. The founder cannot control it, the investors cannot control it, and the market cannot control it either.

Everyone is on a conveyor belt that can only move forward...

Then the most terrifying and neglected layer I think is: A large part of this money comes from state-owned assets.

It is not wrong to take money from state-owned assets, but it has an unavoidable attribute: it has a maturity term. The duration of government guidance funds is usually 7 to 10 years, and they have to start considering exit about 5 years after investment.

This means that local capital sources that are enthusiastically investing now are in a super honeymoon period with entrepreneurs, but in three years when it is time to recover the capital, what will the situation be like... 

(In fact, many mobile Internet enterprises from the last wave are very familiar with this feeling, but the prodigies are still in the happy period... 

Our exit channels: IPO is sometimes open and sometimes closed, the M&A market is very inactive, and S funds are just starting, their scale cannot support such a huge volume.

All three major channels are blocked, what should we do — there is also team repurchase. Then... repurchase clauses, valuation adjustment agreements, and founder's personal joint and several liability.

These things are often just a line of text in the contract when signed, but when the fund matures and LPs are pressing for DPI, they will turn into real money claims.

At that time, the party that bears the risk will not be the fund, nor the LP, it will be the founder who signed the document back then.

Wake up.

Think it over carefully, you have no products, no customers, what makes you worth hundreds of millions of yuan?

If market-oriented funds cannot exit, they may ask you to repurchase. If you take money from the government and cannot exit, what will happen? No one knows.

 V. Do local governments really have money

Then let's talk about the main sponsors in the current equity market.

If you do not pay attention to venture capital, your impression of local finance may be: high debt, no money, and deleveraging everywhere.

But if you are in the equity investment circle, you will feel a completely different picture:

Almost every province, every city, and even many districts and counties are setting up funds and making large-scale investments.

2 billion yuan, 5 billion yuan, 10 billion yuan, the names of the funds are more resounding than each other.

Signing ceremonies at investment promotion meetings are held one after another, leaders show up, take group photos, and release press releases.

Both of these two things are true at the same time.

But in fact they are not contradictory, because they refer to two different sets of accounts.

The general public budget of local governments is indeed tight. Land transfer revenue has decreased, tax growth has slowed down, rigid expenditures are still rising, and many places are struggling even to maintain normal operations.

But the money used to set up funds is not entirely fiscal money. For a 2 billion yuan industrial fund, the government may only contribute 300 million to 500 million yuan as guidance capital, the rest is raised from social capital, or contributed by local state-owned enterprises and platform companies, or leveraged from banks. With leverage, the book size becomes very large.

So "the government has no money" and "the government is pouring out a lot of money" are not contradictory.

The former refers to fiscal revenue and expenditure, while the latter refers