10 truths about how a business actually works
What business school doesn't teach you. And what my first 7-figure fuck up did.
🔳 I learned business from broken games that printed money and elegant ones that died on arrival. Half my career was in mobile gaming, a brutal market where you adapt fast, or you simply disappear. This piece is about reading the business reality, from our series The Unseen.
I once pushed hard for a deal to publish a game that seemed destined for greatness. The art was stunning, the mechanics felt new, and our financial models all pointed to a breakout hit. We poured millions into its launch.
Six months later, I was writing the report on what went wrong.
That same quarter, a rival studio released what looked like a cheap knock-off. It went on to hit the top 10 grossing chart in the US and Canada.
The lessons were real. And expensive.
They taught me that spreadsheets are fantasy, and business plans are fiction written for people who don't like surprises. All my years in the industry, doing deals, strategy, and corporate politics, all that - I realized that real success comes from seeing the game beneath the game. The one most people, even the brilliant ones, don’t see.
Over time, I started keeping a list. The hard-won patterns that revealed how a business actually works, not how it says it works.
These are the patterns.
The Org Chart Is a Lie.
We're all taught to start with the org chart. You look at the boxes and the lines, and it feels solid, professional. You feel like you understand the structure.
But it’s mostly a convenient fiction drafted for HR.
The reality of a company is a complex system designed for one purpose: to turn an idea into cash. Your first job is to understand that cash-generating process. To see it, you have to trace the journey of value from its creation to the customer’s wallet.
Think of it in gaming terms: A developer creates the game. A publisher markets it. A channel like the App Store distributes it. The user downloads it. And then they pay. That's the core flow.
Amazon built an empire on this. Their competitive advantage goes far beyond a website, it’s an obsessive mastery of the flow of goods, data, and cash, from the factory floor to your doorstep.
Early in my career, I was tasked with negotiating partnerships for a new game. I spent a month chasing meetings with VPs of Marketing at major tech companies because their logos would look so great on our strategy deck. I got nowhere.
A veteran on my team pulled me aside. He told me to forget the VPs and find the single manager who handled editorial features for games on the app store.
One mid-level person.
It turned out she had more direct control over our game’s discovery by millions of users than any executive. The deal we struck with her was worth more than all the fancy, title-driven partnerships combined.
🔳 Follow the money, not the titles. Your first question should always be: how does value move from creation to a customer's wallet? Trace that path relentlessly.
But following the money only tells you the path. It doesn't tell you why the path is blocked right now.
But What Is Their Real Problem?
Every company has a mission statement, but the truth of what it cares about today is buried in the leadership’s top three objectives. Those goals are the honest confession of what the business is actually willing to spend money and political capital on.
I watched a brilliant strategy team spend an entire quarter building a data-rich market entry plan for Latin America. They presented it to the CEO, who nodded politely, and the plan was never mentioned again.
The team never bothered to discover their CEO’s entire bonus was tied to one objective: increasing the profit margin of existing titles by 15%. An expansion into a new continent is a massive upfront investment that slows down short-term profitability. Their magnificent plan, while probably smart for the long term, was a direct threat to the CEO’s immediate, critical goal.
Your value is a direct function of how well you solve the crucial problem for the person whose resources you need. Your move should be to uncover their core objectives, figure out which of those priorities your work can directly impact, and then orient your effort around solving that specific problem.
This principle scales all the way to the top. Think of Apple when Steve Jobs returned. His singular, urgent problem was survival through radical focus. He famously killed dozens of projects to aim the entire company at that one goal. The people who thrived in that turnaround were the ones whose work directly solved that problem. Everyone else, no matter how talented, was working on an irrelevancy.
🔳 Your brilliant solution is irrelevant until you understand their most pressing problem.
Solving the immediate problem makes you valuable. But to see what's coming next, you have to look backward.
Study the Last Great Failure
No business operates in a vacuum, every decision is a response to a long history of past moves and a constantly shifting competitive environment. To understand your company’s next move, you have to understand the story of what came before.
I was once on a growth team that had perfected user acquisition on Facebook. Then our growth stalled. We tried everything, new creative, bigger budgets, etc, and nothing worked. We were so focused on optimizing our existing methods that we failed to recognize user behavior was fundamentally changing. TikTok had emerged, introducing a whole new culture of discovery that made our old tactic looks silly.
We were so comfortable, we assumed the rules of mobile marketing were static.
This pattern repeats in every industry. Power shifts, and companies that don't study the history of those shifts get left behind. Like Blockbuster. They were so focused on protecting their revenue from late fees that they famously passed on buying Netflix for only $50 million. They saw Netflix as a minor competitor in their current market, failing to understand that the historical shift from physical to digital media was already underway.
🔳 Study the last great disruption in your industry to understand how the next one will unfold.
Studying history isn't just about reading the headlines. Real breakthroughs are rarely found in the summary.
Raw Data > The Official Summary.
Internal decks and industry reports can give you a clean, filtered view of what happened. But insights are buried in the raw, messy, inconvenient details - the parts that get scrubbed out before the final report is written.
We were once deep into due diligence to acquire a small indie game studio. As a final check, I insisted on spending a day digging into their raw customer support tickets.
It was a nightmare. The tickets were filled with rage about the game's economy design that never showed up in the high-level data.
Those support tickets saved our company 1.6 million dollars.
🔳 Go to the source. The founders of Airbnb flew to New York to meet their first users and take photos themselves. The team at Slack built the product to solve their own raw, painful communication problems. Real insight only comes from direct contact with the problem.
But that kind of deep dive is expensive and hard to justify. So how do you get the buy-in to go to the source when you’re not even sure what you’re looking for?
Build Curiosity with Small Bets.
You don’t have to be naturally fascinated by supply chain logistics or enterprise sales funnels. Most people think of curiosity as a fixed personality trait.
The truth is, you can build it. It grows from the momentum of small, tangible results.
When we wanted to explore entering the Japanese market, the corporate style would’ve been a three-month research project involving consulting firms and dozens of interviews. Instead, I fought to get a tiny $2,000 budget for a simple, localized ad campaign for one of our old titles.
We learned more from the real-world feedback of that two-week micro-test than any research paper could have told us. That small, messy result created the excitement and genuine curiosity needed to fund the next step.
This isn't just my personal experience. Facebook’s early mantra, "Move Fast and Break Things," was a blunt expression of this same idea. It prioritized the rapid learning that comes from small, fast actions over the paralysis of trying to plan for a perfect launch.
🔳 Don't wait for curiosity. Build it with small, fast experiments. Learn just enough to act, act just enough to learn, and let that momentum guide you.
Of course, the most valuable information often comes from experiments you can't even plan.
The Real Meetings Happen by Accident.
The critical information in any company is rarely shared in a scheduled meeting with a formal agenda.
You find it in the informal, unguarded moments: the short walk to get coffee, the quick chat after a big presentation, the casual question over lunch.
I learned about one of my old company's biggest strategic pivot, the decision to go all-in on one specific genre, while having a smoke break with a director from finance. In all the formal meetings, the topic was still an "exploration." But in that three-minute conversation, she throw me an oddly casual question about the revenue forecast we were building for that genre over the next two years.
That accidental chat gave me a two-month head start on everyone else.
The famous Pixar Braintrust, for example, is built on a foundation of informal candor among peers. Their most valuable feedback happens outside the pressures of a formal production meeting, creating a space for honesty that a structured review rarely allows.
🔳 The real meetings are the ones that don't look like meetings. Your title gets you into the formal briefing, your network tells you what was decided before it started.
This network is what helps you avoid the most dangerous trap of all: falling in love with your own solution.
Think With the Owner's Question.
Your expertise is your ticket to the game. It’s what makes you valuable. But that same deep specialization can create a subtle and dangerous blind spot.
We get sooo good at our craft, we build a beautiful financial model or a complex framework, then we go searching for a problem that fits our brilliant tool.
I was part of a BD team that spent months crafting a technically brilliant partnership with a European mobile phone company. We were so in love with the complexity and cleverness of the deal that we never stopped to ask the most basic question: "What is the fastest, cheapest way to acquire users in Europe?"
The answer was probably a simple ad campaign. Our beautiful deal was a solution to our own ego for a sophisticated project, not the business's actual problem.
This focus on the core problem is what separates great owners from smart specialists. The entire Costco business is built around one question: "Does this lower the price for our member?" Look at their Kirkland Signature brand. They just simply wanted to deliver more value by cutting out the middleman.
🔳 The owner’s question is always simple. Costco asks: “Does this lower the price for our member?” You have to ask: “What is the simplest way to solve this company’s problem, even if it means my beautiful solution isn't needed?”
And almost without exception, asking that simple question points you toward one place.
The Answer Is OUTSIDE.
You will never find the ground truth of your business looking at a dashboard. To truly understand, you better leave the building and make physical contact with the world you're trying to change.
The early story of Airbnb is the masterclass for this. In their first year, they were famously close to failure. The data on their site showed them what was happening: no one was booking. But it couldn't tell them why.
Instead of tweaking the website from their office, the founders flew to New York to meet their first users. They didn't run a survey. They knocked on doors and saw the problem with their own eyes: the photos of the apartments were dark and amateurish. The listings looked shady. So they rented a camera and took professional pictures themselves.
It was an unscalable, manual, real-world action.
And it worked.
🔳 Leave the building. The answer to your biggest problem is rarely in your office. It’s out in the world, waiting for you to make contact.
After you've found the truth outside, you have to bring it back inside. And this is where so many brilliant strategies die.
A Good Plan Must Survive People.
A great plan still has to survive contact with other people.
I almost lost a critical deal because my team’s handshake style clashed with our partner’s meticulous lawyer. We saw him as a blocker, he saw us as a bunch of reckless foreigners. The deal only moved forward when we stopped debating contract terms and started talking about our different ways of working.
The roadblock was the people.
The partnership of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is this principle in action. Wozniak was the technical genius who could make anything work. Jobs was the visionary who knew how to package that genius and build a team around it. Their success depended entirely on their ability to navigate each other’s wildly different styles.
🔳 Analyze the players as much as you analyze the market. Your strategy is worthless until it survives contact with the people needed to approve and build it.
Once you understand the people, you have one final task: organize the chaos.
Find the Simple Story.
After all the research, you're left with a flood of disconnected facts. You need a way to organize them into a coherent story. For me, this usually means applying one of two mental models.
The first is the internal view, which looks at how the business actually functions. It breaks down into three parts: What is the core human Demand being met? What is the Organization built to meet it? And what is the Process they use to get it done?
The second is the external view, which is how the world acts upon the business. I remember trying to explain a complex competitive threat to our board. I had a deck with dozens of data-perfect slides, but you could see their faces. They were lost.
I stopped mid-sentence, went to the whiteboard, and drew three circles: Policy, Economics, and Culture.
I explained how new privacy policy from Apple changed the rules, how a tightening economy changed user spending, and how a new discovery culture on TikTok created the opening for our competitor.
Instantly, everything clicked. That’s the power of choosing the right model. It gives everyone a shared story to hold onto.
🔳 Amazon's famous "flywheel" is a great example of an internal model organizing immense complexity. A good strategist knows which model to use. You need one to understand how your business works, and another to understand how the world works upon it.
We eventually got a chance to do another big publishing deal.
This time, we didn't start with the financial model. We started by mapping the true flow of money and talking to the developer about their boss's actual goals. We spent two weeks with their players before we even started talking terms.
It was a slower, harder, less glamorous process. It involved fewer spreadsheets and more uncomfortable conversations. The game we chose looked worse on paper, but when it launched, it worked. This one outperformed our initial projections.
We didn't just back a good product. We understood the entire business.
That's the difference between hope and strategy. The difference between the game you think you're playing, and the one that's actually being played.
These are the things I learned to look for.
And now, so do you.
Hi!
I'm Yuehan. After a decade spent building businesses in both the West and China, I'm sharing my most valuable, road-tested lessons right here on Substack.
Since I'm starting from scratch on this side of the world, your support means a great deal. If this piece resonated, a restack or a simple ❤️ is massively appreciated.
