In eleven months, OpenEvidence went from a $1 billion valuation to $12 billion. By April 2026, the company reported that its platform was being used by approximately 65% of US physicians and supported nearly 27 million clinical consultations that month, with much of its adoption attributed to physician word-of-mouth.

Think explosive growth is just about having the best AI tech? It’s not. If you look at the AI companies truly scaling today, their real competitive edge is deep market insight. Too many founders skip this step because they’re rushing to build something impressive instead.

Many view AI as a dragon coming to burn down their industry. But it also represents transformative and generative power. If you cannot outmuscle a force like that, you learn to ride it to become stronger.

As AI shifts from a simple tool to an autonomous agent, completing complex work with less and less human intervention, founders face a clear choice: draw a sword, or learn to fly.

Qian and the Anatomy of a Founder

The I Ching (Book of Changes), an ancient Chinese philosophical text, uses the dragon as a central metaphor in its first hexagram, Qian (The Creative). It tracks a dragon through six stages of maturation — from total obscurity to full command of the sky. It perfectly mirrors the modern founder’s journey.

Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, describes five mindsets that keep people stable and effective through accelerating change: curiosity, abundance, exponential thinking, longevity, and moonshot thinking. Map them onto the dragon’s ascent and you get an operating system for building through the AI era — one altitude at a time, plus a warning at the top that most founders skip.

1. Hidden Dragon — The Curiosity Mindset

“The dragon is hidden. Do not act.”

At the earliest stage, the market doesn’t know you exist, and that’s fine. This is a research phase. The Curiosity Mindset is the fuel: what specific problem does this technology actually solve, for whom, better than the current alternative? Curiosity prevents premature action and allows you to deeply understand the landscape before making your move.

2. Dragon in the Field — The Abundance Mindset

“The dragon appears in the field. It furthers one to see the great man.”

You launch, and suddenly you’re standing next to other companies with more computing power, more data, and more capital than you’ll ever have. This is where scarcity thinking kills founders, treating AI as a fixed pie that a handful of giants will win.

An abundance mindset realizes that AI is driving the cost of intelligence toward zero, baking an infinitely larger pie. You now have the tools to build things that would have required a much larger engineering team just a few years ago.

3. The Diligent Dragon — The Longevity Mindset

“All day long the superior man is creatively active. At nightfall his mind is still beset with cares. Danger. No blame.”

This is the grind. You have entered the market and are building furiously, but the psychological and physical pressure is immense. You are active all day, yet anxious at night. To survive this perilous phase of non-stop execution, founders must adopt the Longevity Mindset.

A Yale study led by Professor Becca Levy found that older adults with more positive views of aging lived about 7.5 years longer. For founders, the Longevity Mindset applies this same logic to the body and the organization: you cannot reach the next stage on a burned-out founder or a brittle team. Resilience works as load-bearing infrastructure for the leap itself.

4. Leaping Dragon — The Exponential Mindset

“The dragon leaps over the abyss. No blame.”

This is the scaling phase, the most dangerous part of the journey. To cross the chasm, founders must adopt the Exponential Mindset.

Human brains are wired to think linearly, but AI advances exponentially. The Exponential Mindset means architecting for where the model will be in eighteen months, not where it is on launch day.

Founders who build their product roadmap against today’s capability ceiling are already building a legacy product. You must anticipate the leap, building infrastructure that scales with the compounding intelligence of the models themselves.

5. Flying Dragon — The Moonshot Mindset and Scenario Maturity

“The flying dragon is in the heavens. It furthers one to see the great man.”

The Moonshot Mindset treats “impossible” as an unsolved engineering problem rather than a wall. But a moonshot without a landing site is just a hallucination with better production values. What separates a flying dragon from an expensive fireworks show is Scenario Maturity — a check on whether the specific use case you’ve chosen, not the technology in general, is actually ready to fly.

That means asking harder questions, such as:

• Is there a real buyer, with real budget and real urgency, ready to act now rather than someday?
• Does the workflow generate a feedback loop that compounds in your favor the longer you run it?
• Can today’s models actually do the job reliably at the point of use?

Get that match right, and the moonshot has somewhere to land. Chase ambition alone, and you’ve built a very well-funded crash.

Case in Point: Open Evidence

Open Evidence is an AI-powered medical search engine and clinical decision-support platform that allows verified healthcare professionals to ask complex medical questions and receive rapid answers grounded in peer-reviewed literature. It demonstrates scenario maturity through a precise, high-stakes alignment of buyer, monetization, moat, and capability match:

• The Buyer & Monetization: Targeted physicians making time-sensitive decisions at the point of care. Instead of inventing a new budget, it tapped into existing pharmaceutical marketing dollars by keeping the tool free for verified doctors and monetizing via contextually relevant pharma advertising.
• The Moat: Built exclusively on peer-reviewed medical journals and direct content partnerships with elite institutions like the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. The data asset is compounded by proprietary, verified clinical consultation loops that competitors cannot easily replicate.
• The Capability Match: Bounded the problem domain tightly to clinical medicine rather than attempting open-ended consumer chat, allowing current-generation models to maintain exceptional reliability.

That combination, not a superior model, is what turned a niche physician tool into the fastest-scaling case in the sector.

One Line Further: The Arrogant Dragon

The Qian hexagram doesn’t stop at the flying dragon. Its sixth and final line describes a dragon that has flown too high — an overreaching dragon with cause for regret. It’s the founder who mistakes access to a powerful model for scenario readiness, and pours capital into the most exciting application instead of the most prepared one.

The lesson isn’t to stop climbing. It’s to keep re-checking, at every altitude, whether the business, the data, and the technology are actually ready for where ambition wants to take you.

The Human Edge: Judgment Over Data

If AI can already process the available information instantly, where does human advantage come from?

Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital, drew this line decades before anyone was worried about AI:

• first-level thinking stops at the obvious conclusion;
• second-level thinking asks what everyone else is missing, and what happens next because of it.

AI has made first-level thinking free — any model can summarize the data, the consensus, the obvious take, instantly. That pushes the entire edge left for founders and investors up to the second level:

• Judging the second-order effects of what the data actually implies, not just what it states.
• Weighing what can’t be measured — management quality, grit, the structural maturity of a scenario.
• Deciding, on conviction, which future is worth building toward before the market has agreed with you.

AI is an incredibly powerful engine, but it lacks a soul. It lacks intent. Understanding the limitations of AI allows us to shed the victim mindset and reclaim our natural birthright as creators.

No matter how powerful the machine becomes, the human founder still evaluates the scenario and sets the destination – at least for now. We remain in charge of our lives, fully capable of shaping our own destinies.

Do not fear the dragon. Find your scenario, and ride it.

导语：

《易经・乾卦》有云：“天行健，君子以自强不息。” 这份无论处于哪种际遇，都能尽己所能的底层力量，在蔡磊的实践中得到了最极致的印证。

2019 年，41 岁的蔡磊确诊渐冻症（ALS）。彼时他身为京东副总裁、中国电子发票第一人，刚迎来新生命，正处于事业与家庭的双重巅峰。而医生给出的 2-5 年平均生存期，为他按下了冰冷的人生倒计时。

七年后的今天，他的身体功能评分从 48 分跌至 4 分，脖颈以下完全瘫痪，声带彻底萎缩，依赖流食与 24 小时呼吸机维持生命，全身上下仅剩双眼可以自主控制。

蔡磊的故事，远不止一场关于抗争与共情的励志叙事，从产业视角出发，用 SMAF（场景成熟度评估框架）拆解便会发现：这更是一场教科书级的深科技场景破局 —— 一套完整的成熟度体系，将全球医学界公认的 “无解绝境”，重构为高成熟度、自循环的科研协作与产业转化生态。

一、SMAF 框架深度拆解：蔡磊的 “破冰之战”，为何是罕见病领域的高成熟度超级生态

在 Mans International，我们使用SMAF（场景成熟度评估框架 / Scenario Maturity Assessment Framework） 来评估深科技与跨国项目的落地潜力。我们见过太多死于“PPT造车”或“实验室自嗨”的项目。

从场景成熟度的角度看，蔡磊的“破冰”行动真正厉害的地方，不只是“相信”，而是把相信之后的每一步，把一个原本高度破碎、长期低效、缺乏足够资源关注的罕见病场景，逐步组织成了一个患者、数据、样本、科研、临床、资金、AI 与公众信任共同参与的协同系统。

1. 数据和工作流：从零散病友到研发基础设施

罕见病研发最大的难题之一，是患者分散、样本稀缺、真实世界数据不足。很多时候，科研并不是没有方向，而是缺少足够稳定、持续、可用的数据基础。

蔡磊牵头搭建的“渐愈互助之家”，是全球最大的民间渐冻症科研数据库（注册量突破18000人），收录了上万份结构化的真实世界病例。

• 在工作流端：这套360度动态生命指标跟踪系统，将原本极其低效的临床招募压缩到了令人惊叹的速度——实现以“小时”为单位的极速响应（2小时700人报名，3个月内开启临床）。
• 在数据端：他启动了“渐冻症科研AI大脑”，全天候训练全网超2000万篇跨学科文献。AI 没有增加研究员的负担，而是“消失”在科研工作中，自动过滤与进化靶点。

2. 商业闭环：使命必须有长期供血机制

罕见病科研很难完全依赖短期捐赠或单点资助。药物研发周期长、失败率高、资金需求持续，而外部融资环境、公益热度和社会关注度都会波动。如果没有稳定的资金来源，再宏大的使命也很容易在中途失血。

蔡磊和段睿所形成的夫妻共患难组合，恰恰体现了愿景与运营的互补。很多人看到段睿的直播，会首先想到“妻子的牺牲”。这当然是真实的，也是令人动容的。但在商业视角下，这是极其高明的商业闭环设计。

蔡磊负责不断拉高使命天花板，连接患者、科学家、药企和社会关注；段睿则承担大量现实层面的运营压力，包括直播、团队、资金、成本、节奏和风险控制。这种“前端商业造血+后端科研烧钱”的闭环，为一个长周期、高不确定性的科研项目，提供了一种持续供血机制。

3. 叙事：从悲情共情到产业行动共识

在蔡磊之前，渐冻症在公众与产业语境中，始终是 “无药可治、无利可图” 的悲情命题 —— 只有泛化的同情，没有明确的行动路径，属于典型的弱叙事场景。

蔡磊完成了叙事层面的本质升维：他没有停留在 “呼吁关注” 的情感表达，而是将罕见病研发拆解为可落地的产业命题，让科研界、产业界、公众都清晰看到自身的参与方式与价值。

这套成熟叙事最终穿透圈层，联动起全球 60 余个科研团队、50 余家生物科技公司，将 “无人敢碰的冷门赛道” 变成了有共识、有资源、有节奏的攻坚战场。

蔡磊在2026 年6月21日世界渐冻人日的《倒计时》演讲，更是进一步强化了全行业的攻坚共识，成为推动场景持续进化的精神内核。

二、 天行健，君子以自强不息：给中国创始人的“心力”启示

蔡磊在最新的视频《倒计时》中说：“我已经终结了一个比他更可怕的对手，名为绝望。”

他把自己比作孙悟空，“纵使不敌，也绝不屈服”。对当下正穿越周期阵痛、直面生死考验的中国创始人而言，蔡磊的“心力”是一面镜子：

第一，摒弃受害者心态。

抱怨大环境、哀叹资本寒冬毫无价值。蔡磊全身瘫痪、彻底失语，从未沉湎于命运不公，而是立刻切换战略，以眼控仪开启 “生死时速”。接受现实，倾尽所能 —— 这是创始人最底层的职业素养。

第二，在绝境中撬开增量缝隙。

蔡磊说：“你觉得前方只有一堵墙，其实未必，低头看有路，侧身有缝，甚至你可以选择翻过去、挖过去。” 当传统融资收窄、出海壁垒高筑，创始人的核心能力，就是借助 AI 杠杆、跨界生态，撬开被主流忽略的增长空间。

第三，把事业锚定在更大的命题上。

“战胜恐惧最好的方法，就是把自己置于一个更大的事业当中。” 当企业愿景与硬科技突围、生命科学攻坚、能源变革等社会核心命题绑定，你获得的韧性，将远超世俗名利的支撑。

华大集团 CEO 尹烨是蔡磊科研生态的核心产业合作者：“你说要‘打光最后一颗子弹’，但这颗子弹会形成撞击，产生裂变，唤起更多的社会群体参与进来，共同解决。”

蔡磊以第一性原理与极致执行力，搭建起全球成熟度领先的 ALS 科研与数据基建。而攻克神经退行性疾病，不止关乎 50 万 ALS 患者，更关乎未来数十亿面临阿尔茨海默、帕金森威胁的全人类，这需要一支全球舰队的协同。

结语：倒计时，是胜利的序曲

蔡磊的房间里摆着四个时钟，滴答作响。

媒体说，那是他生命的倒计时。

他却说：“这是我送给渐冻症的倒计时。”

“如果眼睛看不见了，我会连上脑机接口；万一脑子转不动了，就把意识传送到具身机器人。我一路走到绝症面前，不是来向它投降的。”

天行健，君子以自强不息。

敬所有在周期谷底仍步履不停的创始人，敬所有在实验室死磕的科研人，敬所有不屈服于命运的前行者。

不必追问希望在何处 —— 向前走，希望自会显现。只要不退却，四面八方，皆是前路。

全球顶尖科研机构、跨国药企、Biotech 及国际基金：若您希望直通全球最大渐冻症科研生态与极速临床转化通道，请通过 Mans International 对接。我们以 SMAF 框架为您精准匹配患者数据、生物样本与临床招募资源，打通跨境跨界协同壁垒，加速您的管线从实验室走向临床。