He Zhiyuan dislikes being described as the person who applies the brakes. He prefers to describe the job as making sure the investment committee genuinely understands what it holds. The framing traces back to his early training: he studied applied mathematics at Zhejiang University and later completed a master's degree in risk management at Imperial College London, both of which emphasized probabilistic thinking and scenario work rather than simple compliance checklists.
After graduating, He Zhiyuan spent more than six years in the market risk function of an international investment bank, mainly supporting trading desks with scenario analysis and stress testing. The experience left him with a practical skepticism toward quantitative models: models handle risks that are known and measurable, but the losses that actually occur tend to come from outside the model's assumptions. That view later shaped how he built the risk framework at Havrion Capital — from the outset, he refused to reduce risk management to a dashboard of a few numerical indicators.
His work at Havrion Capital covers investment-risk frameworks, portfolio risk analysis, scenario assessment, concentration monitoring and risk reporting, but scenario assessment is where he spends the most effort. He Zhiyuan has the team prepare at least three scenarios for every significant investment — a base case, a downside case, and a case that looks unlikely but would be very costly if it occurred — and requires the team to write out a concrete response for each, rather than stopping at a probability estimate.
He Zhiyuan has also made the pre-mortem a fixed step in the investment decision process: before a transaction is formally submitted to the investment committee, he has the team assume the investment has failed three years out and work backward to the possible causes. Some colleagues initially found the exercise overly pessimistic, but He Zhiyuan maintains that imagining a specific path to failure ahead of time is far more useful than reviewing lessons after the fact — it surfaces potential weaknesses while there is still room to act on them.
For He Zhiyuan, the real value of a risk function lies not in blocking a transaction but in being genuinely listened to by the investment committee. He is clear that if a risk opinion is treated as a procedural box to check, the function has already lost its purpose; the work only matters when the risk team's judgment can materially change a transaction's structure, size or timing. That is also a principle he has held to consistently — risk reporting must be direct and specific, avoiding language vague enough to be read however the reader prefers.