Discuss & Debate Night

Improve your communication skills through deliberate practice; get comfortable with taking a stance on random topics in front of others. Discuss and debate with peers, get feedback and make like-minded friends at Pitch Perfect!

Starter topic:

There's a bubble tea chain that opened in Singapore a few years ago that I keep going back to.

CHAGEE. The one with the Peking Opera logo. Jasmine milk tea. Clean, no-frills, same drink every time.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

The guy who built it couldn't read until he was 18.

Zhang Junjie was orphaned at 10 in Kunming, China. Both parents gone. For the next seven years, he had no home, no school, no family. He slept on streets. Picked through garbage when he was hungry.

At 17, he walked into a milk tea shop and asked for a job. The manager handed him a pinyin textbook and said: learn to read or you can't work here.

So he worked 12-hour shifts making drinks during the day. At night, in the staff dormitory, he taught himself Chinese characters one by one. Every time he heard an idiom he didn't understand, he'd ask what it meant, then force himself to use it in the next conversation.

He wrote one line in a notebook: "I will make up for the lost time."

By 24, he'd opened the first CHAGEE store. By 32, he'd taken it to Nasdaq. Net worth: $2.1 billion.

But here's where it gets interesting.

In 2017, bubble tea in China was an arms race. Heytea had cheese foam teas. Nayuki had elaborate fruit teas with seasonal toppings. Every brand competed on who could add more. More ingredients. More complexity. More Instagram moments.

Zhang went the other direction entirely.

One product. Tea and fresh milk. No fruit. No cheese foam. No seasonal gimmicks.

On paper, it's boring. Three ingredients.

In reality, it's what made CHAGEE scale to 6,400 stores in seven years.

Here's why. Fruit tea requires cold-chain logistics, seasonal sourcing, high waste, and three months of barista training. Tea and milk requires a machine that makes each cup in 8 seconds with less than 0.2% flavor variance. New staff can produce a perfect cup on their first day.

In 2024, Luckin Coffee launched 119 new products. CHAGEE launched 10.

CHAGEE's single bestseller — a jasmine milk tea — sold 300 million cups that year. 91% of revenue comes from one category.

He even published the full recipe publicly. Ingredients, calories, caffeine content — everything. Most brands guard recipes like state secrets. Zhang gave his away.

Because by the time competitors copy the recipe, he's already built the machine, the supply chain, and the franchise system they can't replicate.

The orphan who couldn't read at 18 saw what MBAs running billion-dollar tea empires missed:

Complexity feels like progress. But simplicity is what scales.

Everyone in the bubble tea industry was adding. Zhang was the only one subtracting.

Sometimes the biggest moat isn't what you put in. It's everything you have the discipline to leave out.

What's something in your business you keep adding to — that might actually work better with less?