The Backstory I Didn’t Know

This interview with PIK (季逸超), Chief Scientist at Manus, dropped around the same time Meta announced their $2B acquisition of the company. What fascinated me was learning about Manus’s origin story, which is very different from what I expected.

PIK’s Entrepreneurial Roots

PIK’s journey started remarkably early. While still in high school, he built an iOS app - a smarter browser than Safari’s default - and made $300K from it. Not bad for high-school and telling of the entrepreneurial DNA. I believe that it would also give him the confidence to drop out of Peking University.

He was later funded by the ZhenFund in China, which seems to mirror Peter Thiel’s fellowship model: paying young people to drop out of college and build startups. PIK and some classmates from Peking University took this path.

The NLP Years

His first startup focused on NLP, semantic web, and knowledge graphs. While it didn’t take off, it exposed PIK to the wave of NLP breakthroughs happening at the time: Word2Vec, BERT, GPT-3. After that venture, he joined a unicorn where he continued leading NLP efforts.

The Monica Connection

Here’s what I didn’t know: before Manus the agent, there was Monica - a Chrome extension that gives you access to multiple AI models while knowing the context of what you’re browsing. Think of it as an AI sidebar that sees your current tab and connects to various LLMs.

Monica was already generating revenue when PIK joined as Chief Scientist. He credits this existing business as what allowed them to explore and eventually build Manus. They had runway to experiment.

The Pivot That Led to Manus

Interestingly, they initially tried building an AI browser - the natural progression from a browser extension. Similar to what OpenAI is doing with Operator, or The Browser Company with Dia. But they stopped, pivoted, and became what Manus is today: a general AI agent company.

The pivot from “AI-enhanced browser” to “general agent platform” is a fascinating strategic choice that clearly paid off.

A Window into the Chinese Tech Ecosystem

Beyond the company story, this podcast gave me insight into how the Chinese startup ecosystem operates: their management style, decision-making processes, and how entrepreneurs there support each other. It’s a side of the tech world that doesn’t get much visibility in Western media.

A Note on Sources

This entire podcast is in Mandarin. I was able to extract these insights using Podsumo to transcribe and summarize the content. There may be errors in my understanding - I welcome corrections. The power of LLMs to make foreign-language content accessible continues to impress me.