On December 29, 2025, Meta announced that it
is acquiring a Chinese -founded AI startup called
Manus for over $2 billion in the hopes to supercharge
their own AI innovation programs. At announcement,
Manus had already reached millions of users and
hit a revenue run rate of more than $125 million.
Yet the product is only nine months old, making
it one of the fastest growing products in history.
When Manus initially launched in the spring of
2025, it went viral almost instantly, with many
calling it China's next deep -seek moment. Because
Manus can execute complex tasks like website
building, data analysis, and market research,
it is basically handing technical superpowers
to the average user and allowing freelancers
and small businesses to punch above their weight.
While some are calling this Meta's next Instagram
moment, the deal has also sparked a geopolitical
storm. In a bid to bypass U .S. restrictions,
the company relocated its entire team from China
to Singapore. As of today, the deal is still
under active investigation by the Chinese government,
whose final verdict could rewrite the rules for
all cross -Pacific AI deals going forward. Which
is why, for the premiere of Ascent Season 2,
we want to give you an in -depth look at this
company. We'll be talking about why we think
Banner's made it among thousands of other AI
agents that surfaced last year, how this deal
affects incumbents like OpenAI and Google, and
as always, we'll be going back into the histories
of the founders, who they are and what led them
to one of the most talked -about AI deals of
the year. And I'm your host, Linda. And I'm your
host, Pan. Happy New Year, and welcome to Season
2 of Ascent. By popular demand, we bring you...
There's nothing to hide here because usually
it's in the topic. We bring you Manus AI. This
company itself is incredibly young, actually.
Technically, it's only been founded for three
years. It took about nine months from the first
product launch to 100 million ARR. And it is
being acquired by Meta recently for... Over 2
billion US dollar. Not entirely sure about the
exact amount. Somewhere between 2 to 2 .5. And
when I think about it, I always look at this
company and I feel like, huh, it feels impossible
for this deal to happen. Because have you ever
heard of any other US company trying to acquire
a Chinese company before like this? Not in the
last... five six years not this whole geopolitics
is you know there's been cases where u .s investment
has went to chinese companies but legally there's
been executive order that prevents this from
happening right so nope not that i can think
of also Not to this degree of $2 billion plus
deal size. Right. And I looked up some deals
that's similar, like in structure, like a U .S.
company acquiring a Chinese one. I just couldn't
find any predecessor at all. The only other examples
that I could find. That is similar is the reverse,
like some Chinese companies buying like U .S.
companies in total. There was Lenovo buying Motorola
and Geely or Geely buying Volvo. But that was
a long, long time ago. And Anta, of course. And
also, how many years do you think it takes for
you to become a Magnificent Sevens VP and report
directly to Mark Zuckerberg when you start your
own startup? How many years do you think it should
take? Never, never, ever. And then the answer
is three years. So with all that, I think it's
time for us to dive into Manus AI. The AI agent
that kind of shocked the world. I'm going to
spend maybe one minute just to give a background
on LLMs and this whole AI. If you've been hiding
under a rock, listen to this minute. So when
most people think of AI, right? Nowadays, we're
mostly talking about ChatGPT or Cloud or Gemini,
maybe DeepSeek for a point in time. So these
are large language models. And they're like your
giant brain in a jar. So they're immensely intelligent
because they have processed essentially all the
available data available from the Internet or
from books or written materials. So I would say
I use these models day to day. And that's where
most people talk about. when they talk about
like AI models, right? Or when they say they
use AI. But there is, after two years of using
them, people are hitting this fundamental limitation,
which is while they are super smart, for the
most part, they're restricted to answering questions.
They cannot perform the actual task for you.
So for instance, you can ask ChatGPT to build
you a website. What it will do is it provides
this conversational guidance on how to code,
or it can even give you the code, but it cannot
execute the task itself. I think it... I don't
know if it like Gemini executes a bit, but it's
not really like self -sufficient. The user, for
the most part, would take that code, copy it
into their own IDE, run it. highly likely you'll
run into an error and then you'll have to copy
the error, go back to chat GPT, troubleshoot,
seek further assistance, go back, and then the
LLM starts hallucinating. That's where, you know,
after two years of use, a lot of users have been
hitting a wall with these LLMs. By nature, it's
actually kind of reactive, right? So you ask
a question and it'll try to give you an answer
passively. after you ask the question, and it'll
try to formulate its answer in one goal. And
then you ask the next question, it'll try to
formulate the answer in one goal. So that's the,
I guess, the OG AI, right? So big shift. The
OG AI, wow. The OG AI from 2023. This day and
age, this OG AI, all right, let's do it. And
so the big shift from 2025. We're in January
2026. So the big shift last year is the proliferation
of something called agents or the agentic applications,
which are built on top of these foundational
LLM models. So startups don't actually have hundreds
of millions of dollars to build these foundational
models. So they're building kind of the execution
engine on top of that. And they're trying to
make it useful. for the rest of us that are hitting
that block right so these new applications help
improve that by create are trying to create a
digital workforce that actually makes the big
brains useful for the rest of us or as useful
as it can so um but i want to make this emphasis
that the foundation models are not meant to be
replaced. They're kind of used in conjunction
with each other. You still need that brain to
perform the work. But agent are the ones that
are, you know, for example, booking you a flight
or building you a PowerPoint or launching you
a web page, right? So they're kind of the application
layers that are built on top of the LLM agents
that perform all these things. And so this is
a backdrop. And this is where I shift to what
Manus does exactly. So the website is called
Manus, M -A -N -U -S dot I -M. And this is their
interface. If you go to that website, you'll
see a simple interface that looks exactly like
ChatGPT. It says, what can I do for you? And
there's a box. And then you enter a prompt just
like you would with ChatGPT. I mean, you've tried
it. What's different is it doesn't give you a
one -off reply. The first thing it'll do for
most of my queries that actually as a result
is it will start up something, right? And then
there will be a box on the bottom that resembles
a screenshot. And then you click on the box and
it expands. And when it expands, you'll see something
called Manus' computer. So what it did in the
first step is it actually initialized a virtual
computer in the background. That virtual computer
then is just dedicated to your task or your prompt
into solving what you asked it to do. So the
differentiation is from most apps, it's not just
a browser window. It's actually a full -on computer.
It's a Linux workspace installed with its own
browser, its own text editor, its own terminal,
its own image editing tools. You will get pre
-installed Python libraries. Everything that
you or I would need to operate a computer to
perform our day -to -day task is there. And you
get that screenshot, right? It's actually like
a, it's almost like looking at Manus, the agent,
work over its shoulder. This is what's called
the computer -used or the GUI navigation, the
graphical user interface navigation. And that's
something that emerged late 2024, early 2025.
And these models are specifically trained to
understand how an agent, how a virtual agent
can use the graphical user interface and to click
and drag just like we would when we use computers.
I think what's special about Manos is that when
you ask it to perform a task, It's very different
than your chat GPT, right? It's no longer a chatbot.
It's actually a virtual person almost trying
to understand your task and try to perform it
and giving you results and give you a report
at the same time. And you have the ability to
overlook it. And I think that's where the biggest
value add of this group of agents. This is probably
one of the reasons why it caught the attentions
of so many people upon release. When we look
at the story, even though it is a very young
company, but there were plenty of content to
be researched upon. Let's talk about those three
key figures one by one before they started. Maybe
we can briefly touch upon one critical investment
fund, an investor of VC. And then when everything
is glued together, something else happened before
Manas and then Manas happened, right? Yes, yes.
Our person number one is Xiao Hong, right? The
CEO. The CEO. The main guy. Red, right. And how
would you describe Red? Adjectives. Smart. Knows
when to quit. This is my, you know, like I think...
A very... Interesting. Very big pro for founders,
actually. Yeah. A non -traditional AI agent founder,
I would say. Because he doesn't have a computer
science degree from Stanford or... Software engineering.
He does have a software engineering degree, but
his school is not exactly Tsinghua, Beidao, or
Stanford. I would describe him as he's very practical
because of the product manager work that he does.
He seems to be a very empathetic person and always
being rooted for what the customer might want.
He graduated from Huazhong University of Science
Technology in 2015, and he was a software engineering
major. I think very much like JK Liu, he was
also developing a bunch of different software
as well. He was in college. He was also on the
college innovation team. It was called Qiming.
When did WeChat came out in China? Do you know?
No idea. 2011, the first year that he went to
the college. Yeah. He designed a WeChat wall,
WeChat drift bottle, a lot of small features,
a lot of tools for WeChat because of WeChat just
came out. He is also a very solid talent for
PMF, product market fit. And why do I say that?
He made a tool within WeChat to benefit the group
of users as college students, like just his classmates.
He wanted to create a weather lookup function.
But obviously, whether looking up wasn't a must
-have function in the college at all, but looking
for grades is. So he then tweaked that function
into a grade -looking function in WeChat, and
that got viral. Right. Right. And then he became
the admin for the... the college school account
later he did a few tech internships during his
interview i think it was quite funny that he
mentioned a pro tip for if you want to be starting
your startup in the college you want to be buying
your engineering friends dinner or lunch. Because
in the college, you can just buy them very cheap
food and then they will just gang up with you
and then do your features. But if you are graduated,
then you will be buying them much more expensive
meals. Like machine learning. That's the pro
tip. I think it's a pretty good tip. It is acquire
them while they're young. Pete did the same thing.
Like when he was not even in college, when he
was in high school, he was doing that. We'll
come back, come to that later. And then 2015,
just a few months before he graduated, he started
this company called Nightingale Technology. I
don't know about whether you buy into the story
of the Nightingale. I don't. You should tell
the story. Why is name Nightingale? Question.
So it was claimed. OK, so Nightingale Technology,
the name Nightingale is from Oscar Wilde's book.
The Nightingale and the Rose. And if you don't
know what that is, very quickly, Tale of the
Arts, a short fairy tale about an anygale who
sacrifices its life, her life, to create a red
rose for a young student who left, like just
a very romantic idea. It's like a sad romance.
Sad romance. I'm not going to spoil the whole
story. It's actually not a romance. It's a criticism
on humans. Right, yeah. So basically, it's a...
The bird sings all night with her heart pierced
by a thorn and with the blood that is coming
out of the heart, staining the rose. And then
the girl finally gets the red rose, but rejects
the love, blah, blah. But it's a it's a very
tragic story. And he interpreted and Red interpreted
this as. building useful tools yeah it's great
for humanity like he's he thinks the nightingale
is a supporter in the story yeah so we're and
his company is a supporter of wechat ecosystem
yeah i don't know how i don't know how that ties
together but that was the reason for naming the
company nightingale right we're gonna build you
useful tools And then quickly moving on. So remember,
he founded the company in January 2015, just
a few months before he graduated, which is in
June 2015. He did build a few things when he
started that company, and mostly WeChat related,
mostly in the WeChat ecosystem. And those tools
are still in use today by WeChat. And one is
called Yiban Zhuzhou. Yiban Assistant, which
is basically an editing, operating, tool for
WeChat official accounts. A lot of friends still
use it today to manage posts. And the other one
is Weiban Assistant, which is a CRM tool. And
that business was eventually acquired by another
company, which is a public company right now,
Minglu Technology. So these are on the successful
ends for Xiaohong's projects when he was in school
and ended up getting millions of users. Did you
know? Xiao Hong used to have a WeChat blog post
called Tool Geek. But it's no longer updating.
But it just shows how much he loves building
tools. And here is a visual for something that
he had posted about 10 years ago. Oh, no, actually
not 10 years ago, just a couple years ago. But
it was a very old post and it's written by Steve
Jobs. And here it's Steve Jobs' autobiography.
But one of the ways that I believe people express
their appreciation to the rest of the humanity
is to make something wonderful and put it out
there. So I think that's what he means. He's
really into this tool building. He's really into
tool building. Yeah. Yeah, that I agree. And
he's very good at it because he started Iban
understanding that there's a lot of... There's
a lot of posts that are being posted on official
WeChat accounts, but then the editors don't have
a lot of tools. And so he created a tool for
editors so that it saves their time, like a one
-click editing for the WeChat interspace. He
knows what they want. He's born a product manager.
He is. He knows. where the pain point is at.
Yeah. You know how he started with Iban for the
first three years and then only started Weiban
around 2019. And it wasn't, like when he first
started Weiban, and Weiban is different from
you. So Iban is meant for creators to edit their
posts. Weiban is a... CRM software for businesses,
small businesses to manage their customers. So
they're very different. Even though they're both
in the WeChat ecosystem, they're very different.
And the first six months of Weiban was not a
failure, but a waiting period. It wasn't clear.
It wasn't clear because according to him, in
2019, he and a bunch of WeChat platform suppliers
went to a WeChat hosted event where they hinted
that we're going to figure out how to improve
our whole WeChat ecosystem with combining the
business accounts and the personal accounts.
Because a lot of small businesses before then
were using personal accounts to manage their
business accounts because you have a lot of plugin
that actually made it easier for you to manage
your customer in the personal accounts. Because
of the proliferation of this plugin and the fact
that you can auto message and spam everyone,
WeChat, he made a bet that WeChat in the future
would do something about it to make sure that
their ecosystem is sustainable. But it's like
the big short. where you make the bet before
it happens and you wait but the period where
you wait everyone's telling you that why are
you doing this what are you doing yeah interesting
i mean comes with the risk yeah but he was so
certain of the ecosystem play he just had to
wait I thought that was pretty interesting story
because it wasn't a short thing. It wasn't like
AI, you know, like you just you go in. Right.
Yeah. I personally been through that period where
there were a lot of business just sending private
messages through WeChat and it was very irregulated.
Right. Yeah. So he made the right bet based on
and obviously he had a lot of relationship within
WeChat. the corporate because of his success
of iban so probably helped with the decision
but still that's like a lot of enduring that
he has to he has to tell his employees that don't
worry i know there's no users right now it's
gonna happen it's gonna happen and it happened
yeah and he sold it right after yeah a lot of
enduring that comes in to red's life that enduring
moment came One step earlier, actually in 2016,
when he wasn't even sure whether he wants to
continue on with that company. Apparently, the
company wasn't banking on a lot of money and
also doesn't have much to do at the time besides
just Yiban. So he felt a little helpless and
bored. A lot of his classmates went to work for
the big tech firms in Beijing and anywhere else
in China. And so he was still staying on in his
startup. But then one day, this is also one of
the had he not done this moment. So before he
officially onboarded with a big tech company
because he thought that, oh, maybe I should do
this too. Him and his teammates in 2016 in October
participated in a hackathon that was hosted by
Ping West in Beijing. In the hackathon, one of
the judges was an investor from GenFund and his
name is Liu Yuan. Red at the time already made
the decision that, oh, I'm going to, you know,
go on to take an offer from a big tech company.
So he wasn't extremely stressed out about the
result of this hackathon at all. But it was indeed
very life changing for him. And they were demonstrating
some of the extensions for Chrome for that hackathon.
Liu Yuan's attention. And then that was the investor
from Zhen Fan. So the next day, right after that
hackathon, Liu Yuan brought him and his team
to Zhen Fan for an IC to see the investment committee.
And in that, their name was being added to the
IC last, handwritten on it. He was not on the
official list of all the projects that's being
screened by the IC at the day. Just want to show
you a bit of a... Red's personality. So by the
end of the IC, everyone was kind of impressed
by the work that he's done. And they were saying
that this is such an interesting project. And
an investor, unnamed investor from GenFund asked
him, if I were to give you this much money, how
are you going to use this money? And Red immediately
replied, that's not necessary. We can make a
profit. We don't need that money. So he rejected
the money in the first place. And on the same
day, he received a competing offer. That's coming
from a very big tech company and made an even
higher offer from the money that Zhen Fan was
going to offer him. It was allegedly 3 to 4 million
RMB. Zhen Fan was offering him 1 million RMB.
Red rejected the 3 to 4 million RMB offer from
the big tech company of purchasing his whole
company on Tell You Why. And he eventually decided
after thorough thinking, he realized that, oh,
maybe I want to be working on my own projects.
And if I don't do it now, I don't think he'll
ever use it. So he ended up taking GenFund's
1 million RMB. So the tech company investor wanted
him to do not his own project? There are two
offers. One is from GenFund and then one is from
a different tech company. But for the same product?
For the same product, for the same product, for
the same chrome extension that he was building
at the time. And so apparently he's doing a very
good job with the team. And maybe that tech company
sees great value of that product thriving at
the broader ecosystem that they were building.
But it was not given any name, but it was being
offered at a higher price. Got it. So he neither
wants the money and he wants the autonomy of
development. Clearly, he's prioritizing the autonomy
and just chasing dreams. So lessons learned from
this whole period of building the first company
and Red Set later. If you want to showcase your
work, you should always find a place to showcase
it. And if you are more relaxed, you will even
get better results. That's what happened to him.
I think it's so true. Yeah, yeah. If you care
less in general, I think that comes out better,
right? To be a chill version of yourself. And
the third one is don't give yourself a fixed
conclusion too early. Because he... was kind
of desperate and he wasn't happy with the project.
And all of a sudden two offers come. I know,
right? Like things could really turn in a day.
I think that actually goes into how much we don't
talk enough about his trials and errors, right?
His first venture. after graduation, he tried
a couple of things, failed, and then found this
one that works. And then with Weiban, he also
tried a couple of things and found Weiban and
found that the business side of Weichat worked.
And then later on, he'll try other things, right?
And then found that Manus works. So it's like,
you don't really give up on your first try. And
then he also got lucky by the time he is at his
nth try. is about to give up, an investor like
Jim Fund comes in. Shows up. It's what we call
fate. Oh, actually, I think he has a third option,
which is to go work for a tech company. But that
third option doesn't have any autonomy. So I
guess he doesn't. Yeah. Or like a million dollar
funding. For sure. For sure. Million dollar in
the year 2016. That's not possible for someone
who is just going to work for a company after
graduation. Exactly. I would take the investor
funding. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I want to save
the butterfly effect company for later. OK. Can
we do peak now? Let's do peak. Let's do peak.
How would you describe Peak? Genius. I put down
the same word. Anything else? INTJ genius. So
there's one impression where he's like, I've
tried to be a CEO. I realize I'm not good at
it. So therefore, I'd rather be the CEO and I
just do all the tech stuff. I know. So besides
genius, I also put down idealistic. I think they're
all pretty idealistic. That whole team, including
their investors. Which is so insane. How would
you, at this day and age, you have a whole team
of very idealistic, from investor to product
manager to engineer. Everyone is kind of on the
same page. Realistic idealistic, though. Not
just like, oh, we're going to, yeah, practical
idealistic. I'll start with a how do you not
moment. So Peak Ji, his Chinese name is Ji Chao,
right? Goes by Peak. So how do you not? He's
mom and dad. Oh, this is not very average Chinese
family. So his dad is a college professor in
physics. And his mom is a serial entrepreneur
in Beijing. And before we dive in, I think we
should just take a moment to acknowledge that
he is very lucky to be born in a family like
this. Yeah. I think what resonated with me was
there is no such term as serial entrepreneur
in Beijing. At that time. At that time. Either
it could be like somewhere between late 80s or
90s. Yeah. There was no venture capitalism in
China. Right. Peak lived exactly as a combination
of his parents, I think. Right. His first development
experience, which is insane, in elementary school.
So he. He left China at the age of four and went
to the States with his parents and came back
in the second grade. And because he has superb
English, because you're in the States for a few
years, he got... acquired by the robotics team
in the elementary school in Peking University
-affiliated elementary school. And he constantly
joins competitions on the international championship.
One of those super smart kids, right? Like those
kids on the robotics team. At the age of 16,
okay, another had he not moment. And this gives
me a little goosebumps because we might share
the same school principle. based on how Peak
described his high school. My high school principal,
headmaster, left my high school two years after
I graduated and went to Beidafuzhong to be headmaster.
So there is this possibility. that the age also
kind of clicked. Look how you guys turning out
so well. But hold on a second, hold on a second.
But I think this really shows like the school's
whole management system feels like, oh, I think
he was the headmaster of the time. Going back
to Peak. So in high school, that's when he started
working as a full stack developer for Mammoth
browser. Still downloadable today. mammoth browser
oh really yeah the school is so supportive of
what he did at the time the vice headmaster verbally
said to him it doesn't mean that you're an excellent
student just because you have scored 600 in your
college entrance examination this is like 99
percent 99 .99 percentile probably the other
teachers working at the school will tell them
that Before you graduate and move on with your
lives, you need to be an independent person with
critical thinking before you can do more things
with your life and do academics or do anything.
It's so rare. And I want to put this into context
in like 90s, early 2000s China. This is a very
different landscape from liberal arts America.
Kids don't do this. Like Gaokao is... the university
entrance exam is their life for 18 years you
don't deviate from that most family will not
let you most parents will not let you deviate
from that principals and teachers are half your
parents and they won't let you they will push
you from that right yeah so it's a very different
landscape from the you know your western uh academics
k -12 is very different so in china this is if
you have the brains you need to get on that either
you bypass the exam because you're so smart or
you get on that exam and you you get you get
the best score that you can Yeah, absolutely.
And as Eminem would say, you have one shot in
your life. That's exactly what he meant. That's
exactly because, you know, college is an examination.
You get one shot. You get one shot. So this is
a very unconventional school that he went to,
a very unconventional family and system that
he was in. So by senior year in high school,
he was being poached by tech companies. And guess
who was poaching him? xiaomi no yes xiaomi had
just started at the time okay and there was another
company that was you know trying to grab the
talent apple also likes him because of the browser
business that he started oh right so he got attention
from apple right and just to to give you a little
bit of a what size of a business was he starting
the business model was very simple It was Mammoth's
browser. You pay by each download. So for every
copy that's sold on the App Store, you make one
copy of money. Which is the normal business model
when Apple App Store first started. That's right.
They only did freemium like... Per purchase.
Afterwards. Yeah, exactly. And guess how much
money he made just by Mammoth number one. Not
sure. He made 300K US dollar. That's not bad.
two, three million RMB as a high school student.
Why do you need college interest exams? And how
did he even spread the news and did the GTM of
MAMA's browser is by posting on discussion boards.
So he hoarded a bunch of Western users and he
knows that these would be the people who will
be paying for my browser. And he also, like at
the age of 17 or 18, he is well aware that Chinese
people don't like paying for a software. So he
wasn't even trying for the Chinese market. Not
that he was going global right away, but he was
just very acutely aware that Chinese people are
not going to pay for that. Who's the paying users?
Right. But he posted on the Chinese forum anyways,
just to get the popularity up. And that's also
good for the app store at the time. He did the
UI UX development testing daily operations completely
on his own. Of course, who else are you going
to hire as a high school student? Right. So because
his browser was all over the place and someone
didn't notice him and it was someone from Sequoia
Capital. And it was the time when Sequoia Capital,
Sequoia China was still a part of Sequoia Capital.
And by way of introduction, he met with a partner
with Sequoia Capital who later. introduced him
to the dream investment of his life the fund
that we'll get on later which is Zhen Fund and
he get it introduced to Bob Xu also Sequoia didn't
invest in him but they introduced him to Zhen
Fund I think they both did okay but it was kind
of a small circle of people because at the time
everyone knows each other and this is at the
time when you know it's the early 2000 and 13,
15 -ish. Yeah, venture capital just kind of getting
its way. Right. And also, if you just speak English
well enough in Beijing, I think that will get
you a lot of attention. Not to say that you've
built something really cool, right? And one quick
note I want to add about Zhen Fan and Xi Xiaoping
is Bob Xu, before he started Zhen Fan, he was
also a partner of the largest English tutoring...
agency literally every single chinese kid would
know the name new oriental yeah new oriental
yeah You've never. You didn't need to. I've never.
But actually, interestingly, a lot of my Canadian
high school classmates who are Chinese would
go back for summers. And teach? No, no, no. Students?
Pre -college. A lot of us wanted to go to the
U .S. for colleges. The ones that are targeting
U .S. colleges. They wouldn't go through the
Canadian tutorial system. They would go back
to China for this. summer go sign up for new
oriental and then they come back and their sat
scores jump and you slay yeah and i didn't get
on that i didn't get i didn't know this information
no i didn't know i did i did i just didn't know
i had information asymmetry back then but anyways
anyways that's that's my first uh acquaintance
with new oriental right yeah so so that gives
bob a very good pool of talent. people in China
talented kids and like everyone who is going
abroad and studying right so funny you increase
their SAT scores they get into better colleges
and they come back and work exactly that's the
point that's the whole point yeah I also studied
very briefly at with New Oriental it was okay
if you go to some of the smaller classes but
the one that I've been to I was studying TOEFL
at the time and I was the only high schooler
in a in an ocean of college students and anyways
Very long ago. Back to Peak. Had he not moment,
he also joined a hackathon event that was hosted
by GenFund. Not the same one as what? Not the
same one, but he got asked the same question.
He got asked, literally asked. Can I give you
money? Literally the same question. And Bob asked
him, if I give you money, if you do a startup
and not go to the college, would you do it? And
Peak said, do you want to guess? Yes. no let
me think about it peak said no immediately he
rejected yeah he went back home and discussed
his parents his parents said quit school his
parents said no no his parents didn't say quit
school but his parents and this is also very
rare answer guys let's just say kudos to the
parents the parents said I think you should evaluate
this opportunity and see what's the opportunity
cost there. And I'm like, oh, my God. See what's
the opportunity cost there. I know. Like to a
17 -year -old who just made $300 ,000 out of
building a browser. So his parents' suggestion
is you should reevaluate and see what's the opportunity
cost. And after very careful thinking, he decided
to go on with the startup and not go to college
and start what we later know as Peak Labs. So
here's a funny thing. He did something that read.
also did very similar fashion he recruited a
few students who had already graduated from the
same high school who got accepted by peak university
and the three of them worked together as a team
but did the other two quit the university no
the other two are in the college already so they
didn't have to worry about it and there was that
pku okay and they're older and they all were
a part of the computer club which is very similar
to the robotics club idea. So he's always been
with the whiz kid. And you just grab a couple
others who don't have to worry about it. The
600 -plus gal gal group. Yeah, the 600 -grade
gal gal group. That's right. How did Mammoth
end? Peak got into natural language processing,
NLP, by the end of 2011. That's before Jeff Hinton.
No, it's very early, but he was only reading
articles about it. He found something interesting
and then he stopped working on browser. He just
went to chase the next thing that he got interested
into. So he was just reading a whole lot about
NLPU. And this perfectly channels onto the Peak
Lab development. In Peak Lab, so both Sequoia
Capital and GenFund together invested about $5
million in him. That's a lot of money. Yeah.
And in six months, he developed a couple projects.
And obviously, like Mammoth still continued to
evolve. There's Mammoth 1 and all the way it
went into Mammoth 5. All the talent that he had
used for Manus, he had already used it for Mammoth
5. So from design. to the commercial, to the
voiceover is all done by Peak G. And up until
Madness, he was also kind of the poster boy for
Madness. So he did that early on. In 2013, around
that period was when, okay, this is also one
of the, had he not or had this not happened,
maybe he wouldn't ended up in the sector. There
were a lot of papers being published by NLP.
right yeah because they yeah there was a after
the lee feifei alex net alex net that's right
it blew up everyone's into it right but so he
was in this whole foundational model thing way
before Way before. Wow. As a high school slash,
you know, never went to college kid. And in 2014
to 15, there was some other event that happened
that really inspired him into thinking, what
will the next generation of search be? Do you
know what happened in 2014 and 15? Hint, hint.
Hardware. Hardware? 2014? iPhone? iPhone actually.
No, Apple Watch came out in 2014. But I was quite
shocked when I realized, oh, Apple Watch came
out that early ago. It was 2014. 2014 was the
announcement was made and 2015 was when the prototype
came out. Got it. All right. So IoT? Wearables?
Wearables. So the Apple updates and all the NLP
papers prompted into thinking, will there be
new ways of like search that will interact with
people? And he started this way early on, right?
And then this is still when he was, you know,
in peak labs. And all of these thinking ended
up with a second project in peak lab, which is,
I don't know how to call it. Is it Maggie or
Maggie? Maggie. Maggie. Okay, cool. It's an AI
powered search engine. So I remember this one.
It's not actually. a search engine where you
could go in and type right it's actually it's
also in the foundational layer where you need
to build application on top of it i found the
demo oh there's actually a demo okay let me show
you and i will probably cut this bit out Okay,
end of demo. And I just, I have my laptop here
just because I want to show you that. I will,
I don't know what to do with it. I just really
want to see your reaction to it. Okay, I'll tell
you exactly why they didn't continue it. Oh man,
I'm like a fan. Okay, bunch of nerds. Very hardcore
nerds. They're like, I love, like, not 42. The
answer to the work should be Magi, not 42. So
we've both seen it, right? It's an AI -powered
search. It has knowledge graphs, which has a
lot of values later on. Actually, a lot of tech
companies are still using it today. And it has
structured answers, and you can add your ad queries
on top of it. I think it's a creation that's
very much ahead of its time. I wonder if Google
Knowledge Graph is developing the same thing
at the same time. A lot of people were developing
the same thing at the same time. But with like
a team of a thousand engineers. Right, right.
You know? Because guess what happened after they
had this? What happened? ChatGPD 3 for early
access. Wait, this is so late in the... Yeah,
this is already pretty late. Okay. Yeah. And
so ChatGPD came out and Peak felt like, oh, this
is the end of the world. Well, sorry, this is
not what he was thinking, but this is just me
trying to impersonate what he was thinking. But...
So Peak Lab then took a long time between...
Lasted a while. Mammoth kind of maintenance mode
to... I think they were continuously trying to
try new things, but some of the major events
that happened in Peak Lab would be first continuing
mammoth, and then this Magi. Got it. Magi. Magi.
Right? And Peak actually also mentioned the project
Magi a couple times in his various interviews
on... browser and search he had he had a dream
and then the dream is to build something that
can take over google that can be the next generation
of search he has has had that dream before and
i think magic was trying to yes tackle that and
he was also into natural language processing
i think it's just unfortunate that google is
developing something exactly the same at the
same time that he's working on it so i mean he
could have just went to work lead one of the
teams i know i know transfer the knowledge but
uh yeah wow so you know this chachi beauty 3
came out and he felt like that all of his work
is for nothing it's all moving too fast so his
first instinct was to sell magi so his reflection
at the time is um too ahead of his time But he
tried everything. He coded word by word. There
was no regrets. After Magic, he went to work
for a B2B AI tech company. And he was working
on, well, as a researcher slash engineer, working
on improving the scores for AI. Like no longer
founding a company, but employed by a company.
Probably did that for fun. And he, in fact, did
that for fun. What was he doing at the time?
So he's... Primary goal is to make sure the AI
is getting as high score as possible on all the
international scoring systems. And those who
made the AI to the leaderboard will get more
graphics card. And guess who ranked number one
on that leaderboard? Peak. Peak was on number
one at all times. And this is a positively reinforcing
mechanism. Like the better scoring you get, the
more graphics card you get. And then the better
score. The better results you get, the more graphics
cards you get. So at the end of the day, he ended
up hoarding a bunch of graphics cards he wasn't
even using. That's not very nice. But very capable,
you know, doing it for fun. And if you're interested
in more of Peak's work. First of all, he was
listed on MIT Technology Review in the Innovator
Recognition in 2025. Really, Innovators 135 did
a bunch of cool things. And he is also on GitHub
under the handle PeakG. So that's where you can
get his most updated work. So this is him before
he met Red. Or let's say Butterfly Effect and
how that materialized. Young genius. Yeah. Very
cool. Yeah. All over the place with a lot of
ideals. But a constant supply of people who are
willing to invest in him and his hobby projects.
I know. Yeah. It's great. If you're that talented
and put yourself out there, people will notice
you and they will want to lift you up. Yeah.
Yeah. He was very lucky. Okay. On to number three.
Zhang Tao. Tao. Hide Cloud. His name is Hyde
Cloud. I love that name. How would you describe
him? So he's the one that I read up the least
about, but I think he's like a product manager,
kind of your more typical path, right? By going
to the tech firms in China and paying his dues
and understanding how products are developed.
I listed almost the exact same set of words.
I said solid PM. Yes. With a lot of practical
experience on the ground. Yes. Super grounded
person. He's a bit older though. Oh, okay. He
was born in 1986. And he's from Chongqing. It's
a pretty thick, cute Chongqing accent. Homie's
accent. Okay. So he's kind of the older brother
for the team later on in Manus. But he is actually
the one with the most PM experience. And how
experienced are we talking about? Did you know,
fun fact, he started working in tech companies
in 2014. To give you a little more reference,
have you ever heard of a system that's called
the Symbian OS? Saiban? Vaguely. Vaguely? Do
you know which cell phone company? Wait, is it?
That's not Huawei? So SymbianOS was a pioneering
discontinued mobile operating system for smartphones,
dominating in the 2000s, especially on Nokia
devices. Oh, Nokia! Known for its early multitasking,
customization, and robust features like messaging,
web browsing, blah, blah, blah. So Nokia. So
he goes way back. Wow. Yeah. Goes way back. And
he also had the experience of working in a series
of tech companies and a lot of relations to Google.
First, Tencent, obviously, because that's the
biggest slash the first one. And SnapP, Wandojia,
does that ring a bell? So Dr. Li, Dr. Kaifu Li,
one of his first ventures with Sinovision was
SnapP and it was an app store. A lot of Googlers
actually ended up working for Snapchat. For Android.
Yeah. In China. Global. But it was physically
based in China, based in Beijing. So Tao was
also a product manager for ByteDance, naturally.
And for the first couple of years, he was working
towards more on the data end of things. There
was a website called sensorsdata .cn. so that's
where he started and later he went to work on
lark which is the international version of the
collaborating software facial yes he also worked
in a company which also discontinued but was
very interesting which is also related to one
of the later investors to manus So Wang Huiwen,
this name, you're familiar with, right? So his
name showed up in the Manus list of investors.
Yes. And they used to work with each other. So
Tao and Huiwen used to work with each other in
a company called Guanglian Zhiyuan. which is
also an AGI company. And I couldn't find the
proper English name for it because it has unregistered.
That company no longer exists. But that company,
I guess, can roughly be translated into Light
Years Away. It's an AGI -focused company, I guess,
developing a bunch of products that's related
to AI. And Wang Huiwen is a co -founder of Meituan.
So the company was eventually taken over by Meituan.
That's correct. Because Wang Huiwen and Wang
Xing, the Meituan CEO Wang Xing, they used to
be college dorm buddies. They were in the same
dorm. Okay. So I guess if you're in the dorm
in Tsinghua and starting a business together,
you're kind of brothers for life, right? Yeah.
So that's why that company got bought out by
Meituan. So HiCloud. is a serial PM. Serial and
very serious PM. And a few other things that
he did, I have to point out. Had he not done
this, he wouldn't have been picked up by the
group. In year 2024, he was still working for
the AGI company light years away. In his sharing
as the PM in that specific company, he expressed
a couple times. which is also kind of his ethos
for working as a PM, which is as a PM in the
AI era, it is simply not enough to find the PMF.
You need to find the best model product fit,
which is exactly, I guess, what you described
earlier, that man is championed, right? They're
so good at it. Use the right model to create
the right product, and then you find the product
market fit. So that's what he said. In February
2025, and specifically February 10th, 2025, remember
what happened in the end of January last year?
End of January last year? Around Chinese New
Year time. Deep Seek. Yes, exactly. Deep Seek
came out, right? And Zhang Tao did a very famous
two -hour video on Deep Seek's R1 model. He did
what? he did that video to educate the non -technical
everyone that why is it good? How did I not come
across this in the deep -seek research? It's
just so well hidden. But when I click on that
video, I have so many friends who like that video.
And every single person who clicked liked on
that video. Where is this published? I will send
it to you later. It's published on his WeChat
blog post. And those people who like that video
are either working for an active AI research
institution or a very big tech firm. So it shows
the credits of how good that content is. And
the name of that video is called The best way
to pay tribute is through learning. I don't know
whether learning here means whatever learning,
but it's giving the background of what is R1.
And he was explaining in very layman's term why
DeepSeek was good technically and compared a
bunch of models. And I think it was probably
ranked by a lot of people in the tech world,
tech video of the year. Wow. Yeah. Actually,
this comes to all three co -founders that we
covered so far. They do have this commonality,
which is they're all very active, not only with
the investors, but within the tech community.
The influencers kind of. Yeah, they're like your
influencers within the tech community. And they
like posting. Their ideas and their thoughts.
And I think that actually helped with popularity.
Do you want to guess? So for the two -hour video
that Tao created, who was the initiator of that
video? Whose platform was hosting that video?
Platform? Or whose channel? Who initiated that
idea? Pink or red? GenFund. GenFund. Oh, GenFund
has a... Oh, podcast? It was on their channel.
Wow. Yeah, it was kind of on the public education
side of things. Okay. Yeah, so everything all
comes together, right? Everything all comes together.
Doofan also likes posting stuff. Oh, very active,
very active. So one last thing about Tao is he
said that he reads paper every day and he would
very jokingly mention that it's not that I have
such a good habit of reading paper every day,
but factually in this industry, One new paper
is published every day. At least. At least. Yeah.
So he's still reading paper every single day.
Oh, I know. Like all three of them are, I'd say,
rightfully on top. on the respective things that
they're working on. And they're still learning
and studying and staying active in the communities.
How do you bring these three together? How do
you find them? How do you bring them together?
What an excellent question. Let's get to that
bit. But before we can really connect the three
of them, we should definitely just quickly talk
about Zhen Fan before we go into Liu Yuan and
how they all meet each other. So GenFund, we
all heard of this company before. GenFund has
a sort of an investment manifesto. And it goes,
GenFund believes in backing visionary founders,
fostering technological innovation, empowering
bold entrepreneurs with... Disruptive ideas,
early stage tech angel investing, emphasizing
speed, resilience and supportive partnerships
with over strict control, focusing on areas like
AI, biotech, new consumption and high end manufacturing.
Yeah. And if you haven't heard of them, they're
one of the largest, well -known early stage venture
capital. Early stage. Early stage. And they're
very known for. not just investing on the project,
but investing in people. So like founder first
kind of theory. They're all very liked by the
investor community. Right. Yes. So Liu Yuan was
the key investor in Red's former company. Yes.
19U, right? Yeah. Liu Yuan actually invested
in Red five times. Yeah. So Liu Yuan was obviously
very... Like four, five rounds. So Liu Yuan was
very much linked with Red, and they're actually
both from the same place, Hubei, Wuhan. And Pete
got connected with them because of Anna. I thought
it was with Bob. Bob was the one that tried to
convince him, the founding partner. But linking
onto a specific project with Red, that was for
Anna. And Zhang Tao was brought into the team
later because of Yu Sen, Dai Yu Sen. Okay, so
basically... Was a lot of matchmaking here. Yeah,
and they're all the names. They're just directors
or founding partner, like partners or founding
partners of GenFound. Yeah, right. Apparently,
they collaborate a whole lot. And when they're
working on a new project, exchange information
and bring the relevant folks together. So that's
the way of working. So a bit more about Liu Yuan.
Obviously, he is the initiator. And he's the
sort of the core investment partner in this project.
Yeah. The person who gave Red the first pot of
gold, basically, after the 26th. And continued
to give him four more pots of gold. Yeah. So
Yuan graduated from Washington Lee in the US,
which is a liberal arts college. And his major
was accounting. And as he described, it was not
the sexiest. major at the time. I think it's
generally known. No, but at the time, it was
useful. It was practical, right? At the time,
it was never sexy. Before he joined GenFund,
he was working for another investment firm called
Green Spring Associates in Maryland. And at the
time, he was, you know, doing a lot of research
about all the funds in the world. So he is well
aware of all the backgrounds and he did a lot
of deals. And then he came back to China and
then joined GenFund. And as he described on his
official page, he said that because I only studied,
and sort of sarcastically to himself, because
I only studied accounting, so the investment
portfolio that I cover are quite broad, ranging
from... uh hard tech like companies like momenta
and credit ai to like consumption everyday use
like amira and ramen talk to uh content and even
a company that we both know casbox which is a
ex -googler started company And out of all the
companies, I found other companies that I actually
know personally. Plantag was one of my classmates'
company and that he also invested in. Apparently,
it's a very small world. So he seems to really
invest it in a broad range of things. But nothing
super big up until Manus. Exactly. Very good
eye on that. And he had a moment. on that he
had a moment on that yeah i'll tell you that
just in a minute but he invested in red all together
five times and i'll break it down for you the
first one is the 1 million rmb at the hackathon
the second time is with 19 go technology um and
the third time which I can only find in one of
the videos that he had done a lot early on, which
is with a company called Benchling. It's not
Benchling, the US Benchling, but it's Red's idea
of getting Benchling to China. Right, right.
Getting Benchling to China. And Benchling is,
for context, it's a Slack for... biotech or science
scientific research and development that's right
that's right so getting that to china and it
is i think when you say red has a taste or knows
when to stop did you mean that because everything
i mean when he sold uh the wechat assistance
when he stopped benchling and later on when he
stopped the ai browser yeah yeah yeah so So Benchling
or slash Jianji, the Benchling China version,
was the third time that Yuan has invested in
him. And then the fourth time is Monica. Monica
.im, yeah, the butterfly effect, which we'll
get to later. To your point on why Yuan also
needed this victory, he apparently is a very
sentimental person. Right? Yes. Right? How would
you describe him? I heard one podcast where he
self -proclaims that he cries at every moment
that he can. Healthy. That's really healthy.
It's very healthy. It's very healthy. Yeah. So
he seems to be a very loving person. They're
usually not this type. i know right yeah so i
was just checking sense check are they all like
that uh is this average would someone who work
in the vc or p sector be as sentimental or as
caring as as you know i think it actually prevents
you from I don't want to say that, but I agree.
I know what you mean. You're supposed to be very
number oriented. You calculate your, you know,
like how much would this company worth and, you
know, but so adding that extra emotional touch
is probably detrimental as an investor. I agree.
But at the same time, I think it, it is what
made him stick with red for so long. And so you
can argue that this personality is, what created
his ultimate success. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, that's
a very good way to put it. So as a very compassionate
and gentle investor, in the year 2022, Yuan wrote
Bob a very short note. And he said, And because
he started working in 2014, so by 2022, it was
eight years. For eight years, I failed to produce
any work I could be proud of, perhaps the peak
of my career when I was promoted as a partner.
Since joining GenFan, I've grown under the immense
favor and encouraging words of you and Anna.
If I have achieved success, it will be a perfect
story of repaying your kindness. And if I don't,
my robot Zhen Fan will be like a favored eunuch
in the imperial court. That's what he said. you
see yeah yeah and i think he actually meant what
he said about how do you respond to a message
like this he didn't respond um yeah but i think
um and you know like how how much uh so obviously
i think everyone at jinfang was helping each
other out and yuan helped xiao hung so much in
the past 10 years, besides investing in him like
five different times, he also pulled, do you
know how many WeChat groups he pulled for him?
Hundreds, probably. 130. But I, so, okay. I think
he stuck, he sticked with Red, continued to invest
in his ventures because the first exit with the
WeChat assistants, It was positive. It wasn't
like huge. It wasn't $2 billion exit, but it
was a good, decent exit. I think the BenchLink
equivalent didn't end up making money or not
that they talk about it. Monica was cash positive.
It was great. Right? Yeah. And so there is no
reason to not invest in this guy. It was on the
positive trajectory. Yeah. And for the only other
portfolio company that I know, which is CastBox.
they're doing pretty well. It's just, you're
not, it's not madness, but it's, you know, it's
doing well, but maybe he wants to be the person.
Explosive. He wants to be the person that's known
for investing in the Red Book, which is what
Jim found is, you know, known for. And being
that and being promoted, you know, into his position,
he thought that there should be at least one
of these companies to show for. Makes sense.
So he was aiming for something really high. Right.
And it doesn't mean that's. by any means a failure
because it must be net positive. It must be 1000x.
But Xiao Hong did get rejected by a lot of other
VCs in China. That's a fact. And he got invested
by Hongshan and Sequoia and Tencent because that's
probably the only ones that he's got. And all
the rest of the objections are very, very similar.
And they always ask, come back to Xiao Hong with,
oh, what is remote? doesn't seem to have a lot
of moot is the market big enough for the things
that you develop it's so interesting because
it reminds me of pop mart because it was so hard
for wanting to get investment as well and and
both of them came from you know not so i wonder
if there's this bias towards certain type of
founders from the vc community at that stage
and so it's extra hard for them to raise money
and as a result a lot of people miss out in like
we realize a lot of people miss out recently
because of all the uh growth trajectories and
all the ipos and whatnot but the investment happened
like six seven eight years ago yeah so maybe
there's a fundamental mindset back then yeah
that doesn't favor any of these guys i agree
yeah yeah it wasn't the right time or people
didn't believe yeah and and now i don't know
if like i don't know if they shifted this mindset
or if it's still like oh we're gonna maybe it's
starting to change yeah yeah but we'll go on
to the the sass bit because sass is man is is
we're we're almost there we're almost there so
almost there So the role of Zhen Fan in MANAS
was very critical, right? Day one investor, right?
Also first institutional backer. And Zhen Fan
also attracted some other people who came on
to invest for Monica later on. And while Liu
Yuan was leading the investment, literally everyone
at Zhen Fan, I think, was participating in helping
out. uh the crew yeah it's a small company it's
a it's a pretty small company that's right that's
right butterfly effect was officially registered
in june 2022 okay um but it was around that time
it was very blurry right red was the person who
started uh monica .im uh so he acquired oh right
okay he bought the chrome uh extension which
is called chat gpt for google that was such a
such a funny story okay so what i got here which
which i think will perfectly lead on to the chat
gpt for google story step number this was before
the two other founder even exactly this is before
this is just red And his old co -founders. Exactly.
Who are still in the team. Who are still in the
team. But this is when it's starting to take
shape, like monica .im. And at the time, all
the AI tools are starting to pop out. Red thinks
that, okay, I can't be depressed. Gotta do something.
Gotta do something. And so in 2022, he realized
that, oh, maybe it could be a good idea. To build
something that I'm familiar with. An extension
on a browser. Yeah. Maybe I can start with that.
Yeah. Productivity tools. I'm a tools guy. I
think because he benefited from the WeChat platform,
he thought that, you know, my next startup will
always be platform based. And what's another,
what's a better platform than Google Chrome?
I think they started doing all right with the
extension because there's some usage. And then
they quickly realized there's a cap to extension
usage because most people don't use Chrome with
extensions. Right. And once again, there will
be a lot of people criticizing that. Even if
monica .im, what is monica basically? It's kind
of an aggregator of all the existing LLMs. You
package it, right? And so that when you open
that extension, you can freely switch around
different LLMs to do your work. So a lot of people
are criticizing. On Red's post, he posted that.
Also, I think this is very much from a product
manager point of view. And he's very less so
about, oh, going like deep, deep tech, having
my own model. He's more so about how do I make
people use? What value do I bring to the users?
even if it's just an aggregator, he's like really
going at it. And then they wanted to benchmark
to Jasper. Oh. Yeah, Jasper AI, which was a writing
aid. But the problem is now I have the product.
I don't have enough traffic. I need to get on
or at least learn from the best and how to drive
that traffic to the extension that I have. And
Red was very much inspired by... And I'm not
kidding. He was reading Anta's CEO talking about
him acquiring Amersports. So if you're interested,
you can also have a listen to the Anta episode.
Besides Anta's story, and he was also looking
at Constellation Software. He was wanting to
just acquire the traffic and not building it
on his own. And he did one thing, which is to...
get the traffic from ChatGPT for Google and that
product is made by Red's alum. a guy who was
older, graduated a little earlier, and ChatGPT
for Google got its traffic from 100K to 500K
user in just a month. It is a fantastic extension,
about 200 lines of code and took about a weekend
to accomplish. So Rhett was not the only person
who wants to get that extension. There were...
a couple other contenders who want to get the
Chateaubriand for gold because everyone was rushing
at the same time. And Rhett wasn't also necessarily
pitching the alum at the highest price. His pitch
was actually on the lower end. And the alum went
back home and told Rhett that I need to negotiate
with my wife whether that price was okay. So
Rhett waited until the alum came back to him
and said, oh. i can sell it to you now you can
clear it and red did not wait for the investors
fund he made the transfer to the alum immediately
on his phone and rejected the higher uh the the
alum rejected the higher offer and then this
tool later became very critical in monica's traffic
the acquisition of amor sport by anta prompted
his decision to acquire rather than build from
scratch even though he builds monica from scratch
but chat gpt for google helped with the traffic
don't start from scratch when you don't have
to onto the right so browser steady cash cow
12 million dollar arr and they realize that it's
not going to continue to grow and it's not going
to be there forever so let's find something else
And Red has an idea for an AI browser. So he
has the AI extension. He thought AI browser would
be the natural next step. I don't know why somehow
taking over Chrome is on everyone's mind. So
that's his first idea. And he went to different
people with the idea, hoping that they would
join his team. And that's where, I guess, GenFund
and Peak and Heidkau comes in. How did Red know
Peak? So he was not really working for anything
at the time. He was working as an entrepreneur
in residence at GenFund at the time. So he was
just observing and sitting in all of the meetings.
And he had browser development experience with
Mammoth. And Red had a proposal to Peak. And
his proposal goes... I know you have built a
web browser before and you've also built an LLM.
You've built a search engine. Do you want to
build a three -in -one with me? And Peak said
yes. So the end of 2023, that's when Peak and
Red started engaging on more conversations about
building. You know, something like Manus, but
it wasn't called Manus at the time. It's something
completely different now. The AI Chrome. Yeah,
the browser thing. March 2024, that's when Peak
officially joined the team. And later in May
2024, that's when Tao joined the team. a similar
time period early 2024 right and i i think the
setup was that the original monica im team is
still in wuhan at that time right and then both
peak and tower in beijing and so this new project
it's kind of like game science they have like
a A small new project team. And then you kind
of gradually shift people over as the new project
gets bigger. But at first, it's just a very small
team trying to develop this new product. And
the new product, I think, started in March, April,
like right after they joined. And then lasted
all the way until second half. I want to say
August or so of 2024. uh so maybe a few five
months of development time yeah for the ai browser
and somehow during those five months all of them
eventually realized that it might not not be
the product yeah again going back to you know
they already developed the product by august
so they could either release it or scratch it
and i would imagine a lot of people would release
it just to see where it goes so for the three
of them to actually say let's scratch this and
start from scratch it's really bad it's well
I think it's courage, right? Because you could
just say release and then maintenance, but they
don't want the opportunity costs because for
every hour spent on maintenance and trying to
figure it out and still... Cost. Exactly. So
you either shut it down completely and pivot
or you don't let go of your babies and then you...
It turns into something else that you don't want
it to turn into and it eats up your time. So
I think it's actually a good decision. The other
thing that's related to kind of the AI period
of software development, right? They develop
something very quickly and it's all application
layer. The opportunity cost of pivoting, the
sunk cost is not as big as a few years ago. So
pivoting to Manus and developing Manus. I actually
looked at the Manus development period that they
quoted. It started from September, probably mid
to late September, like a month after they scratched
the AI browser project. And the first prototype
was actually done in mid -January. That's three
and a half months. That's like not even four
months. Manus was created. And they waited until
March for the release only because Cloud Sonnet
release timeline was 3 .7 was in late february
and they wanted to wait for that for both a better
model base model and for publicity like you can
kind of use the leverage the extra publicity
carry over from from cloud i guess relatively
it was a hard decision to just say forget about
this thing that i originally promised you guys
that we'll do um but it's also like very very
low opportunity cost to say oh let's develop
something else yeah and this something else is
just Turned out to be the right decision because
there are other AI browsers that are still in
development right now. And I think the amount
of splash in the market compared to Manas to
another AI browser. They're doing decently well,
but just not to the degrees that Manas has been
gaining traction. When they decided to drop the
browser business, they realized that all three
are very, you know. They all have a lot of product
experience. So for three, I would say two and
a half season product managers to see this and
to say, maybe let's not ship this. They must
have like an instinctual feeling that this is
not going to work. It's not going to work, right?
The three of them, the whole team had about 2
.5 weeks just wandering around and not knowing
how is this going to turn into something else.
And in their office, they've observed a lot of
the non -technical folks, like the non -engineers,
were using cursor. I think for most non -technical
folks, aka like me, to see a lot of codes running
on your laptop and commanding to those codes
can be very intimidating. And that was the issue.
for the non -technical folks in that office they
didn't know what's the best way to use it but
them coming from a technical background and observing
this they started with a few conclusions they
realized that oh so instead of us giving better
prompts is there a way that we can make better
use of the like we can interpret better to the
machines that what human want to do. So can we
possibly do like a mid layer in between that,
like to do a better UI and UX and slash make
agents run on clouds and make this interface
much better to create a tool, not just for engineers,
but for professional users. So this got them
thinking that can we implement these? So they
started trying. So a new project was born shortly
two and a half weeks after they had the failed
browser launch. The browser that they were launched.
Yeah, it decided not to launch. The new project
isn't called Manus yet. And it's called Browser
in Browser in the Air. Airbnb. Browser in Browser
in the Air. Okay. And this project started, like
you said, September 2024. Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah. So the original idea is actually just a
browser, not an OS in the air. That's right.
Because they all have very rich experience in
designing browsers. Right. I'm glad they didn't
keep this Airbnb concept. Right. So obviously
you can't really call yourself Airbnb. Once that
product consolidates and everyone was, you know,
feeling that, oh, this is a ready to ship product.
And we all feel that the quality of the product
that it's paying, it's really going somewhere,
right? So they decided that, oh, maybe we should
name this project. They had a few options. Option
number one, which I don't think you'll even like
it. I didn't know they had options. Option number
one is called Dodo Bird or something like that.
Oh, I do know they have options. Okay, yeah.
And Anna didn't like it. And then option number
two was called Vida, which is life and energy
because they want something that was energetic,
vetoed. And option number three. was manners
which was the mit slogan hand yes and peak picked
it right i mean dodo burst never gonna work because
it's extinct and it doesn't fly so right then
a good call yeah yeah yeah um but yeah the opposite
of that manners is a is a very good way of describing
This project, because it is the hand to the mind
that is already been created with the likes of
ChatGPT and Gemini. It's perfect. Yeah, it's
perfect. We're about to get to the March 6th
and March 7th product release, right? Yeah. And
so just, I guess, as context for anyone who doesn't
know what happened last year, not before this,
before March 7th, in January last year, DeepSeek
launched its first... I guess, interface, right?
Yes. DeepSeek R1. Blew up the internet. Blew
up the internet. And if you want to learn more
about how it blew the internet, you can listen
to the DeepSeek episode that we launched last
year. Season one, episode two. Yeah. And then
in March, they launched. Yeah. So it's been called
another... It's one of those other China DeepSeek
moment. OpenAI doing some... similar stuff and
they said we might come up with a agent that
will do your work for you and we might charge
you that ten thousand dollars already yeah the
rumors like reddit has it you know like ten thousand
dollars we're gonna charge you for this agent
so before they're like If you do listen to our
Deep Seek episode, they said, we're going to
charge you maybe $1 ,000 for a reasoning model.
Deep Seek comes out, reasoning model free. And
a reasonable price for a reasoning model. Sorry.
No puns intended. And then a year later, another
Chinese comes out. See your pattern. Yeah. We're
going to charge you $40 for what you wanted to
charge $10 ,000 for. And we just talked about
the scrapped AI browser project, right? The feeling
in the team pre -release comparing Manos to the
AI browser project was night and day. With the
AR Bros project, everyone's like, do we really?
No, I mean, I know we'd spend effort, but let's
not release it. We're not sure, right? With Manos,
everyone's like, this is gonna be the bomb. So
dope. We're just gonna drop this on March 6th
and wait for publicity. Everyone had this confidence.
Oh my God. Or at least... peak set that yeah
right it's like we know this is gonna blow up
the internet and so they filmed this very simple
video yeah you might have more stuff but it's
a very simple video put it up on youtube did
blow up the internet do you know what was my
first reaction to that video when i watched it
last year Was that an AI talking? Oh, really?
Yeah, because there were so many AI -generated
videos. There were so many backdrops. They said
they filmed it in the... Because they didn't
have a proper office, they filmed it on the first
floor of wherever they were working, their co
-working space, and there was just people walking
around. And then they had to black out a section
because there was a janitor walking around or
something. So anyways, it was pretty scrappy,
but it was, you know, like... goes back to the
product mindset if you believe very much in your
product who cares about the marketing who cares
about how you reveal it right and the video itself
was cut really nicely yeah um when it was published
it took a few days for silicon valley to catch
up but when it did it just because of all the
uh endorsement from investors uh from the tech
community it did take it so it blew up in the
term that a lot of influencers a lot of youtubers
in and out of china are are uh how do you say
like created a secondary market for the code
right and so that moment although the madness
team expected the explosion they weren't expecting
that level of explosion and so when you get too
much attention for them at least they actually
shut themselves down rather than going back out
into the market as they would typically to tell
people you know we we didn't do any marketing
it's not us uh we're gonna do this and this and
that expect like 1 .5 to launch or whatnot they
actually kept really quiet during that whole
phase afterwards I think one is to focus on the
product development and to ensure that they have
enough bandwidth for their growth potential and
to work with their cloud providers, their vendors,
et cetera, to really focus on the product and
let the product speak for itself. But also, I'm
guessing they just don't know how to react because
nobody had... They were confident, but not that
confident. I found that the total expenditure
for the March 6th or 7th product released that
video, in total, if you don't count Peak's price,
should account to 39 RMB. For what? That was
the price to ship the camera from Yusen to Manus'
hide -in office. That's how much it takes. Wow.
Peak's appearance. Yeah, Pete's appearance. It's
like a million dollars by itself. And then the
reason that he was the person who ended up doing
the product launch because he's the only one
who speaks better English on the team. Oh. Right?
That's actually a potential. We might talk about
it later on that now they're acquired by Meta.
How are they supposed to work with Meta? I'm
sure it can all work out. But it's just when
they pick the representation of Manus for that
particular video, Pete became the base. It's
a good call. It is a good call. Zhen Fan was
helping so much on reaching the international
crowds. Anna Fang, the GP, was helping getting
people's attention on LinkedIn. And Yuan himself
also personally reached out to a lot of KOLs
overseas. And they were all really excited for
her. Because it blew up so much that Junfeng
had to work for Manos for a period of time. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. That's right. Which is how they ended
up getting from March to December 125 million.
Yeah. Yeah. And they didn't disclose the exact
number of paid users. Um, but I did a rough calculation
based on their per month price that they charge.
It's probably somewhere between 200 ,000 users
to three, three 30, because, um, there is the
$20 package, but a lot of their users do pay
for the $40 package. And some of the power users
end up paying. not only the one is a $200 package,
but also they top up on tokens because it only
gives you a fixed amount and then you would need
to top up in the end. Sidebar, I created, and
I just showed you this, I created our Ascend
podcast website, or I was trying it out if it
would create the website. It created a great
website. In the matter of 15 minutes after three
back and forth prompts. The amount of effort
that I used to create our old website. Was. A
lot. Definitely more than 15 minutes. And almost
zero brain cells. I think it took me like a week
or so. Right. And it wasn't as nearly as good
as this one. In terms of. the appearance right
because i had to i had to generate my own images
and whatnot so uh so the amount of time if you
okay i don't know i'm like my hourly wage right
now so the amount of hourly if i were to pay
myself let's say the minimum hourly wage right
now i would pay at least 40 50 but i would pay
up to like you know a thousand dollars for this
product alone uh just a year ago so i think there
is so much potential in charging your consumers
and most of them are prosumers who uh who have
this high willingness to pay so um i think i'm
jumping ahead a little bit in that i think 125
million arr is nothing compared to manis's potential
which directs me toward this Probably inaccurate
hypothesis that they might have sold themselves
short with $2 billion. But there's other things
at play in terms of the grand landscape of AI
agents because it's so proliferated that maybe
they see that next year the valuation won't be
as high for your generic AI agents. Maybe there's
other entrants. Totally possible. Because building
an OS, right, and creating an environment for
your agent to operate, it's not as hard as building,
let's say, an LLM model. So the barrier of entry
is lower. And as much as I think that this group
has some technical geniuses and product geniuses,
the amount of effort that's needed for copy and
pasting manners is actually much lower than...
what you expect a similar product to come out
a few years ago without the proliferation of
AI. So maybe they see that there is a roadblock
to grow from 125 million ARR to 500. But going
from zero to 125 took them nine months. And they've
been consistently, and they've been quoting a
12, 20. 20 % month over month increase in ARR.
So hitting, I'm just imagining if they really,
you know, do the promotions well and everything,
do the marketing plus improve your product, hitting
a 500 million ARR in maybe one or two years isn't
unfathomable, right? Given that they managed
to produce something that would cost me. maybe
$4 ,000, $5 ,000 to hire a full stack developer
to do. And when you have a $500 ARR product,
even with a much lower revenue to, like a revenue
multiplier of, let's say, 10 rather than 16 to
20, it's still a $5 billion company. Absolutely.
Right? The other side of me, because we did this
background research on the team's entire idealism
and pragmatism, a part of me wants to say that
maybe they see the future. So they know when
to quit. We know that they know when to quit.
Maybe they see that 2025 is the year and maybe
the only year for such an agent to create such
high multiples and a good exit. Or maybe they
just are putting money on the table. They don't
care if they can grow manas to a $5 billion valuation.
They just want their foot in the door to meta
so that they can get the resources of meta ASAP
so they can do more things with the amount of
resources. I think we both have referenced one.
interview of Peak. And in that interview, I think
Peak said it very clearly. It was just throughout
the message that to be able to compete at today's
AI landscape, we're just a bigger size developer,
independent developer. And to be able to compete
better in the future, you must become a big tech
company. Because it just requires so much, whether
it's computing like the model the money the capex
yes i think that interview was done before meta's
acquisition so i think maybe in their mind uh
there was that direction of we're either going
to be working very closely with a big tech company
or we're going to become a big tech company yeah
but still i mean It's a lot of money on the table.
If you have a firm belief that you can grow your
ARR to 500 million, and if you only take 2 million
for the deal, there's something else at play,
right? That we don't know about. We can only
make our hypothesis. But for the users, for us,
I think it's great that Meta acquired Manos because,
and I'm, On Meta's perspective, right? Why would
Meta acquire Manos? I think there's a few things
that folks quoted. One being that Lama 4 was
a flop. And they do need to use acquisition or
other means to quickly get into this game because
this game is a war right now. And obviously there
are other companies within the Mach 7 that are
winning. And so if Meta still wants to be in
the game, they need to do this through acquisition
because that's the fastest way of entering the
arena. And so not only did they acquire Manos,
they acquired a 49 % stake of scale AI. So that
all speaks to their determination. The other
thing that was quoted was, what are they going
to do to generate that $2 million or more back?
And I did a little bit of number crunching. So
one of the things they quoted was to apply AI
agents in WhatsApp. So WhatsApp, did you know
WhatsApp is one of the most under -monetized
apps out there? Really? So let me give you some
figures. Go. So we all know Meta has three main
products. You have Facebook and Instagram and
WhatsApp. Instagram, they have a $70 billion
revenue. Roughly, let's give or take $70 billion
revenue with about 2 to 3 billion users. Primarily
advertising? Advertising, yes. More than 95 %
advertising. For the same amount of users that's
on WhatsApp, $1 .8 billion versus $70 billion.
Because it's hard to, with Instagram, you can
have reels, you can have stories, and you can
just put your ads everywhere. With a chat messaging
app, people are averse to ads. And so they'd
never, or the product never kind of proliferated
as they only started ads in 2018. And that's
how they got to the 1 .8. But what they've been
building in WhatsApp is what WeChat tried to
do in 2020, which is the business side of things.
Charging your business customers. So WeChat,
sorry, WhatsApp now has WhatsApp Pay. It has
WhatsApp for Business. which gives you like the
group messaging functionalities. And so like
a company like Delta Airlines can use WhatsApp
for business and they will be charged for conversation.
Oh, that makes so much sense. That's so agentic
integrated. Exactly. Because it's customer service
in the US. You don't know how like in China,
right? How often do you receive AI generated
message from Taobao right now? Like. like like
a million a day i don't know like hey your promotion's
about to start hi can you give me like a five
-star rating hi do you like me so so it's just
so integrated and merchants do pay even in china
merchants pay a few thousand yuan for these for
a month per month like the the bigger merchants
um so there's huge leeway a huge potential in
this area that whatsapp has the $2 billion, sorry,
the 2 billion or so, 3 billion users, and almost
little to no monetization. Jeez, I cannot imagine
a day where my WhatsApp's going to be proliferated
with SMBs asking me, oh, do you want to buy this?
Do you want to buy that? But isn't it a natural...
It's reasonable. Right? And I think it's actually,
maybe it's not the large... but the small mom
and pop shops actually relies on this Facebook
and WhatsApp ecosystem to survive. And if they
manage to do what WeChat did for China or what
Line did for Southeast Asia and Japan, imagine
the profitability potentials. And so Mr. Zuckerberg,
he famously purchased Instagram, right? for $1
billion, 13 employees, and zero revenue. And
look at where it is now. I know. So with the
right resources and trajectory, the $2 billion
that WhatsApp spent on Manos is nothing. So every
two weeks, they have a net profit of this much.
So every two weeks, they can purchase a Manos.
So for them, it's peanuts. Just tossing... For
us, it's like, whoa, $2 billion. You're throwing
away money if you grow your ARR by $500 million.
But for them, it's like... I can pay this. I
can afford this. Yeah, like even if it flops,
right? But the potential, the upside potential
of getting WhatsApp for business right. A lot
of imagination. Wow. Goodbye. Goodbye. But the
downside is, how are you going to integrate this
Chinese team who's now based in Singapore and
with the two countries at geopolitical tension
with each other? We will continue to monitor
the two teams. Well, actually, this episode is
recorded the end of January. It will likely come
out at the end of this month. So we actually
don't know what's going to happen with the purchase.
Is it actually going to go through? Exactly.
So a lot of... room for um imagination should
we give some context around this so there was
a first uh in uh may of last year when the usvc
and we i think we skipped this where a usvc called
benchmark put in 500 million dollars for manos
um this triggered a U .S. investigation, U .S.
side investigation, because there was an executive
order in, I think, 2019, 20 period that actually
would not allow any U .S. company to invest in
Chinese startups that are in the AI ecosystem
or a lot of ecosystem, including AI, because
you don't want U .S. money to fund AI develop
in China for obvious reasons. And so this benchmark
investment of 500 million in a Beijing -based
company triggered something of an investigation,
right? What they've done is... Move this whole
team. They actually fired a lot of people in
Beijing. Move this whole team to Singapore to
Singapore wash the team. I don't know. There's
other terms out there, but like. I like your
term. It is Singapore wash. Right. So now the
team is established in Singapore. Everyone moved
to Singapore. You have zero data retained in
China. And so U .S. government, as a result,
stopped investigations. right until december
when this is announced china comes back and like
hey wait a second okay us is okay but we're not
okay we're not okay with it you developed the
technology in beijing and now you're benefiting
non -chinese users Like, what is this? You're
to claim it, Reds. Right. And so the Chinese
Department of Commerce then sets up another investigation,
which is happening right now. And there is a
potential that they'll block the sale. But, and
this is, again, my personal opinion, because
a lot of the recent acquisitions in Silicon Valley
are acquihires. So it's not really, they built
the product in three and a half months, right?
Worst case scenario, everything. Goes back to
scratch. I don't think that's going to happen,
but it's just... Worst case scenario. If you
moved everything already, your databases and
everything already outside of China, your personnels
are outside of China, there's a lot of legal
ways to work around this to enable Meta to still
acquire what they want, even if it's not Manus
as Manus today. They can acquire monosystem technology.
They can license whatever, right? So there are
ways around it that will ultimately enable this
whole technology to be under meta. It's a one
plus one equals a hundred story. And all the
users out there in the world will want this to,
well, I mean, at least I would want this to happen
because I've directly benefited. From using manners.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think Liu Yuan also shared
his fair comments to the future of manners. He
said, we don't worry about things that will take
place tomorrow. If it's geopolitics, because
anything can happen tomorrow. Like AI development
will happen very fast. But the one thing that
we're for sure. will know is like all of those
people who are working on the product will just
continue to work on these things they will never
stop working on this kind of thing why do we
think it has ended why do we think it's on our
list i feel like with the combination of these
three people and the amount of project they worked
on and how much they are willing to throw things
in the trash bin even if they didn't develop
manners they probably have will end up with something
else yeah just my take um also i think there's
a there's a big learning with all of red's ventures
rely on the platform like don't go against it
right with wechat they created iban and weban
and they kind of caught the the flow of wechat
going from personal to business uh assistance
uh with monica it was kind of they were leveraging
on Chrome as the platform. With Manos, they're
leveraging on all the combination of LLMs out
there rather than competing against them. So
having your product set on an existing platform
and not, it's less risky. And the other thing
I think really helped them is that the whole
scrum process. Again, in one of the interviews,
they mentioned that with three co -founders,
they actually have like six people with the two
other previous co -founders that worked on the
Monaco project, right? The decision is, you would
imagine when there's a clash in terms of decisions,
it would be difficult because it's not a one
-person decision. But in the end, for them, actually,
they make all the decisions very fast because
they don't care if it's the wrong decision because
the amount of time that's needed to correct a
decision nowadays is so low. So why don't we
just, if we disagree, fine, let's go with one,
like make the decision, we'll go with one direction.
Very quickly, in two weeks, three weeks, our
customers, our users will tell us if it's the
right decision. So let your users, because the
development process is very condensed nowadays,
you can actually let your users tell you that,
Manos, I like using you for PPT. I like using
you for website creation. I'm okay with using
you for other things, right? So I think that's
how they managed to really... get their product
out so soon and make pivots very quickly. It's
a very democratic way of product management.
You just let the data tell you. Right, and you
have one decision maker, but you don't fix that.
You let the product then tell you what happens
with the decision. For sure. They made it to
our list. Well, first of all, they are requested
by a lot of our friends. There are plenty of
people who drop you a message and say, you must
get on Manos. I'm like... OK, let's do it. Yeah.
And in fact, Lena and I, we had a moment where
we were about to record and I last minute pinged
her and said, hey, I can't do this this afternoon.
Can you give me two more days? Because. I completely
underestimated how much information it was out
there, even though it's a very young company.
But I don't know why. They're all so talkative.
That's why. They're everywhere. There's a lot
of information. There's a lot of information.
Compared to... What was the one that we had a
lot of trouble on? Deep Seek. Oh, deep -seek.
Yeah. Because no one ever makes an appearance
anywhere. Yeah, exactly. He doesn't do any talks.
Yeah, whereas this one is just like overwhelming
amount of information. Which is a great thing
for doing research. But I also grant you that
the research done for this episode is completely
human -driven. There's nothing AI about it because
I have to go through everything. I like them.
Because I think there was some sort of a consensus
on day one when they started the company, Butterfly
Effect, that we're not going to create another
LLM. We're just going to go for products. So
I think that was quite clear. Nobody was going
for reinventing the wheels. They just wanted
to build a really great product that people will
use. Going back to the tool geek kind of mindset.
The other thing is, it's like Zhen Fan up until
today, neither confirms or denies that Manus
has already made it because they think that it's
nice to be the incumbent for a bit, but the hype
changes very fast. So they don't know, which
I think is a very modest way of looking at that.
And I think it's fair. And I think they deserve
some spotlight. Let's just be honest. Of course.
I think like, I mean, just to put it plainly,
the monetary reward itself has been great, right,
for them. I think in that perspective, they've
already made it. I think what we want or what
everyone wants to see is what would happen post,
once you have the meta resources, can you make
this into an epic? Exactly. Is it, prove the
dissenters wrong that this is just a wrapper
without a future, right? Prove to the dissenters
that with the support of meta this is going to
be something that can generate 70 million dollars
for whatsapp make whatsapp instagram um yeah
scary one thing i do want to last last thought
i promise where is amazon in all of this why
why didn't amazon purchase because hear me out
the virtual machines they're amazon The virtual
machines, the 80 million virtual machines that
Manos created, the vendor is Amazon. Oh my goodness.
The company that is most like Taobao that needs
agents is Amazon. Logically, yes. Right? So naturally...
Customer service. I would think Amazon would
be competing. And maybe that's why Zuckerberg...
Have to buy it fast. Got it in 10 days. Wow.
Fair guess. We'll see what it is. Yeah. Yeah.
Guess of the year. Very cool. Okay. Yeah. When
we shut off the mic, you can tell me more. This
whole story at the end of the whole research
gives me a feeling that it takes a village to
raise a kid. Don't you think? And they can't
be modest. Yeah. It's such a, like, with the
founders, with the funds. And these group of
people have been working on the project like
that for about a decade. And so I'm very glad
that the product. was able to graduate and now
going out to the world. And obviously, I will
not finish this episode without Manus writing
something for the Manus episode. So I did give
a little prompt. What did it say? Hear me out.
And so the story closes where it began. Mammoth
to Maggie, Monica to Manus, Manus to Meta, different
names, same instinct. The quiet belief that tools
can think with us, not just for us. Call it evolution,
coincidence or fate. The spirit of M kept shipping.
That's it. It is a coincidence that they all
started with M. Why it all started with M, I
don't know. But best of luck to Manus. Best of
luck to Manus. I'm looking forward to more developments
in that area. All right. Thank you for listening.
And if you like this episode, please... Comment
or rate us on Apple and Spotify. We'll see you
in the next episode. Bye.