After graduating from university in 2001, I joined a large foreign IT company and worked there for 3 years. Later, because I wasn’t very good at navigating office politics, I resigned to venture out on my own.

For the first year or so after leaving, I tried everything: the apparel business, building corporate websites, selling computers… After hustling for a while, I didn’t make much money. Later, I wanted to go back to a regular job, only to find that big companies didn’t want me anymore. Only some small business owners were willing to give me a chance, and the pay was basically pure commission with no base salary.

But that was fine, I treated it as gaining experience. I only chose companies in the internet industry and worked for the boss essentially for free for over a year.

Unexpectedly, the traffic on a few websites I had on hand began to explode, ranking in the top 50 nationwide at their peak, and I earned my first pot of gold. From then on, I dedicated myself entirely to my own projects.

I’ve been doing this for over twenty years now.

When there was plenty of money and work, I hired more people; when money and work were scarce, I cut costs, increased efficiency, and downsized the staff. Regardless of whether business was good or bad, I would always set aside the salaries and severance my employees deserved in the company account first, never owing anyone anything.

Through the storms of these years, I’ve experienced all the ups and downs. I also constantly thought about selling the business and met quite a few investors, but the valuation for small companies was just too low, offering a PE ratio of around 2 at most. Calculating it all, I could earn more by running it myself for another two years, so I never sold it and just continued to run it myself.

Now, business is getting harder and harder, the money I can make is shrinking, and the company downsized to just a handful of people a long time ago.

However, times have certainly changed.

In the past, doing internet business, no matter how small the company was, you had to support a team for tech, operations, design, and customer service. Now that AI Agents are becoming increasingly powerful, the technical work in my company has basically been entirely handed over to AI. What might have required a technical team in the past, I can now do alone leading a bunch of AI.

So what if business gets a little worse?

If I can’t afford many people, I’ll keep fewer. If I can’t even afford a few, the worst that can happen is that it’ll just be me left, continuing to work with a bunch of AI Agents.

As long as I can still make 6k a month to pay the server and AI subscription fees, I’ll keep playing.

If one day I can’t even make 6k, I’ll just shut down the sites and go get a job.

Over twenty years ago, wasn’t that how I started from scratch anyway?

If I can do it, I’ll do it; if I can’t, I’ll change paths.

What’s the big deal? Haha.

I am Zixia, founder of Zixia Games: game.zixia.com