The Best Investment Is Attention: Why a Serial Entrepreneur Never Lets a Meeting Go Uncaptured

Richard Zhang has spent over two decades evaluating businesses, closing deals, and building companies. His edge has always been knowing what matters. Scriben makes sure nothing that matters gets lost.

Richard Zhang · Co-Founder & President, FITURE

As a former Managing Director at Merrill Lynch, he oversaw major IPOs across international markets. As CFO and President of Manbang Group, the freight logistics giant that listed on the New York Stock Exchange, he managed the financing of a company at scale. And as co-founder and President of FITURE — a smart fitness mirror brand that reached a $1.5 billion valuation in under two years — he did it again, this time from the ground up.

Across all of it, one thing has remained constant: the conversations that happen in meetings are where decisions are made, relationships are built, and value is created or lost. The question is whether you’re actually present for them.

The meeting where everything gets decided

For anyone who manages multiple stakeholders — investors, co-founders, customers, partners — the volume of consequential conversations is relentless. A comment in a board meeting that reframes a strategic question. An investor’s offhand remark that signals their actual concern. A customer call that reveals the gap between what you built and what they need.

These are the moments that compound over time. Miss enough of them, and the decisions you make are built on an incomplete picture. Capture them, and you operate with information your competitors simply don’t have.

Zhang has described his decision-making approach as deeply rational, built on asking the right questions: Is the market large enough? What position can we hold in it? What value are we actually creating for users?

The problem meeting bots don’t solve

The standard playbook is a bot in your online meeting, or a phone on the table running a transcription app. Both work — for scheduled video calls. But the moments that actually shape an executive’s or investor’s day happen somewhere else: the customer lunch, the investor coffee, the hallway run-in at a conference, the five-minute pull-aside, the call from the car, the across-the-table 1:1. None of these have a meeting link. None of them tolerate a phone propped up to record. And these are the conversations where decisions get made and relationships move.

Even when a bot can join, it only solves the easy part — leaving behind text. A 4,000-word transcript still has to be re-read to surface the one sentence worth acting on. Run six meetings a day and transcripts stop being an asset; they become a backlog.

Scriben changes the shape of the tool. It’s a pen — something already in your pocket — and the same motion captures a thought on a video call, in a face-to-face meeting, on the walk between terminals, or alone on a Sunday. Nothing on the table. No app to open. No room where it feels out of place. Press once, say the thing you don’t want to lose — an insight, a to-do, a name to follow up with — and it’s saved. No looking down to write. No transcript to dig through later. You stay in the conversation.

“Investing in yourself is the best investment”

Zhang is someone who thinks carefully about where attention and capital go — and treats both as assets that compound. The problem is real. Knowledge workers — founders, investors, executives, dealmakers — spend enormous amounts of time in conversations that carry enormous amounts of value.

Most of that value evaporates. The professional who builds a system for capturing and using it consistently has a structural advantage over everyone who doesn’t.

Scriben is that system. Not a complicated one. Voice. A button. A meeting where you stay present, and nothing important disappears.

The bottom line

Richard Zhang is the co-founder and President of FITURE, a smart home fitness company backed by DST Global and Coatue, which reached a $1.5 billion valuation within two years of founding. He is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience across investment banking, technology, and consumer hardware.