Hello everyone. Glad to be here this year.

Wanted to talk about not about autonomous driving today. I wanted to talk about entrepreneurship in general. You know, every time when I visit the Bay Area, I feel this is a promised land. A lot of miracles happening here and more drama of course.

So there will be two types of uh capitals. In fact after 10 years in a in doing all kinds of uh startups I found that it's actually not only about VC there are two types of capitals.

One is called venture capital and the other one is called consensus capital and venture capital bet on ideas. Ideas where it's big enough to change the world. ideas where pe other people don't believe in.

So that's why you call them venture capital. But many other capitals are here to bet for consensus.

So consensus capital is the type of capital where okay two years ago everyone thinking about large language model that's the thing to bet. So you bet on it. Uh even if you bet your bet is wrong there's no problem because everyone is feeling the same.

And more often you can get in in a round and get out in C round. and you can make money, right? So that's a consensus capital and people may feel that well everyone is talking about VC and VC and VC. So VC might be the majority of this capitalism.

But in fact what I feel is that the consensus capital is actually more typical.

That's a matter of fact. I'm not really trying to say consensus capital is evil or anything. It's actually they have their reasons because every fund they have a certain limit of years to return to the in to their investors so that they have to bet on something that has certain amount of certainty.

And also the biggest fund like Andrea Horowway is actually is is making great money for their investors but after all they are betting money on the consensus.

And look at the consensus today we have a robotics and we have a BCI right and we we used to have autonomous driving but not any not anymore but those are the consensus we talk about.

So every now and then in the Silicon Valley I hear people even in the restaurant I hear people talking about some buzzwords and those are the consensus and those what attracts people getting in attracts investment getting in and making miracles happen

but the choice is for the founders it's not always true that we get into something that is a consensus because hey if I'm getting into that consensus and my peers are also getting into the same consensus everyone is competing on the same topic that happens too often in this promised land in here in the Silicon Valley

The founder do who does startup is a founder that has a certain time before the consensus is running out. They got to make their way out. That is a typical startup. So I I have several friends who just repeatedly starting small businesses getting acquired by big companies and restart again. So that's a lifestyle. So I call them startups.

The other one is enterprise because if you really sell your company to a big company, uh you you sell your startup to a big company, there's no way for you to continue the journey. Someone else is taking over and you you have a board that managing you and they are not driven by the vision. They're driven by the next year, next uh quarterly report or annual report of the financials.

So uh the other one if you're trying to do something you wanted to go to the very end of it I call them enterprises. So that's results driven. So there's a very different mentality between the timed driven and results driven play.

And of course all of that has been influenced by the consensus

and we all know this. This is a very typical Gartner Gartner cycle of hype. Every year uh there's a new thing

and I try to uh for specifically choose for this meeting this is a AI related gardener cycle not my opinion but Gartner Institute's opinion about it people talk about this I think this is definitely not the first time you saw it

but what I see from this cycle is that there are two things one in the general trend things take a lot of years to mature to the right end to finally plateau of productivity on the right bottom

But there is a hype cycle and in fact hype cycle in other words is actually the attention span of the consensus. A lot of people focusing in one thing. Of course this is a phenomena but this phenomena this party only lasts for certain amount of time normally not more than five years sometimes even one year.

Like how many of you started thinking about starting building a large language model company as of today? Not a good business right? Maybe tomorrow OpenAI would have another feature that kills you.

I talk about this to investors back in 2023, but people don't listen. But you know, this year maybe we can talk about robotics, but you know, two years in the future, some some people would tell you, oh, of course, that's that's a very natural uh issue for robotics to to robotics is not a good business in 2025.

And the reason is A, B, and C. Two years later, people will tell you that that becomes a new consensus of course.

So consensus has a very relatively short time span but in order to achieve something achieving an enterprise takes much longer time. So this this is what I call a mismatch especially if we're thinking about building hard texts.

A lot of people are like me who are coming from the academia and we get into the startup world or enterprise world whatever we build things. Building hard tech itself is already very very torturing and it takes a long time.

But even worse, we also have to build the product around it. Because building technology, you know, you have great technology, but it doesn't really make money out of it. You need to find the customer, you need to polish your product instead of uh instead just the core technology.

Those algorithms are relatively cheap. The product is what makes money. But building product plus building tech, how can we squeeze all of that within one consensus cycle?

And very often the consensus cycle is gone before we even finish building the hard tech. That's a sad reality and that's why many of the company are suffering.

Thinking about this great technologies my opinion most of the grid technology they must go through the cycles. They can't really just stay in one cycle and build everything. If you're building that in within one cycle I'm telling you you're building a small business. You're not building an enterprise.

All of the things virtual reality. How many of you are talking about virtual reality today? Back in 2016, I have one of my best friends in the Silicon Valley decided to go home, go back to China and build his own VR company. He's still fighting, but his life is not as great as some of the other companies because it's very hard to raise money for the sake of virtual reality.

Similar things with autonomous driving. I'm still working on autonomous driving. I'm so jealous of myself, you know, uh seven years ago, it very easily become an unicorn and easily go to public.

But uh you know the the chance is no longer there today. Genomics, robotics, quantum computing, even if we take a general a very generic sense artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been through multiple hypes. Back in 1960s, Dartmouth, right? People are talking about computer vision to be solved in one summer camp. That's not happening.

and decades of up and downs and hint Jeff Hinton used to be the celebrity and used to be the hetradox research scientist and then becomes a celebrity again and this is the third time he becomes a celebrity but he has this insistence only with those type of insistence great technology will be born.

and what happened after the hype I call them after hype so I've been living in the after hype world for about two years even though I'm still fighting I still feel the pain.

First of all, in the afterhive world, no one takes a pain. You can make a promise saying that you know the robotics can do everything. Their generalization power is great enough or you can say agentic AI can actually solve all of the problem for you.

All of these things are promised because you have not yet provide hard evidence in doing that. By the way, I just learned that for agentic AI uh one of the metric interestingly is how many hours can you run the agent without falling without failing

and in fact the the metric has a caveat. If you have 50% of the success success rate I we count it in as a as a counting in as a duration of of the running like 50% come on that's not a product at all but people are willing to bet in because people can always messize themselves and saying yeah today the technology is not perfect but it's 50%. Maybe next year it gets to 70% and two years later 90%. Who knows, right?

People have this kind of optimism about technology, but that thing never happened in the after world. After world is like I've been talking to people, hey, we be building the autonomous driving trucks driving without a driver. I've done it before, so trust me, we can do it.

Nah, we wanted to talk to you after you finish it. Of course, we'll finish it and there will be more challenges and questions. That's one.

The second is that in afterhive world, no one cares about the relative progress. I'm always joking that I've been presenting to other people that we have delivered the the driver out level four driver out truck without a human uh with only 41 millions of spending.

That's a a wild number even to myself. I feel very proud of the team. But investors like well you know the I've seen more capital efficient companies out there. This is like a very I would say humiliating to me

as if I were telling people I've run a 100 meter sprint with nine second and eight 9.80 seconds and some people say oh reminds me about the world record. So this is where I felt that no one really cares about the relative progress

and uh the worst is that for us the founders we're not prepared for all of it. I wanted to do a tally here. How many of you been working in uh startup world for more than five years? Raise your hand please.

I don't see many. And uh you know to me I've been working in this world for about 10 years a little bit more than 10 years but uh I have uh did my account my first startup was the at the born of deep learning where I certainly I'm the beneficiary of the hype

and my second startup was in autonomous driving. I lived uh probably six years in the hype which I enjoyed the hype and uh then the third startup a little bit more than two years I live in the after hype world.

So I have either lived in the hype world or the hopter hype world. And I think this is also a very common symptom for everyone here in the in the promised land of the Silicon Valley where we always live in this hype or after hype world.

and we including myself has ignored a bigger world normal business world and in fact the answer is in this traditional investment activity the normal business world is the answer to go through the hype cycles.

This is what I believe. I'm talking to my team. What if people don't believe in autonomic driving anymore? What pe what if people feel that there's after hype repercussion? We can still make money.

We can still find investment if we thinking about ourselves in a very humble way thinking that we're running a chain restaurant business. Of course, 90% of the uh all the economics are happening in just like a normal world, not hype, not after hype. Okay?

No secret recipe. We were not KFC. We're just like a typical typical restaurant and no one need to need to take a leap of faith with us. Like our food is not superior and there's no valuation inflation and of course limited social media attention.

But even with all of that, can we make money here? This is a formula. If you want to take photos, please take this one. This is probably the most important thing. Your your survival formula for the after hyper world.

Restaurant value equals food value minus operating cost. and minus advertising cost. If you can solve that value, you can say, "Okay, my restaurant makes money. Now I need more money to build more restaurants to make a chain."

That is very convincing to normal investors. We don't need to find those consensus investors. We don't need consensus or or uh venture cons venture capital.

But let's transform that restaurant formula for autonomy product value. People are talking about autonomous driving. Oh, beautiful. Remove the driver, right? But people are forgot about operating cost and customer acquisition cost.

Especially especially if you are selling the technology. A lot of us today we're simplifying our uh road map of of technology growth or company growth or enterprise growth by thinking about okay let's about thinking about selling technology to millions of the customers assuming that we have the customer is tomorrow and they don't really think about getting into there.

but I feel more and more true that many of these hard technologies requires the founder of enterprise not a startup they're planning to sell to big companies next year a founder of a enterprise price to really focusing on making money as if we're building the chain restaurant, especially on the operating cost for autonomous driving.

Even cleaning the sensors is not is not a trivial job. But many people have overlooked that.

Give you one data point. Uh in my last company, we spend $20 per mile in operating our fleet and we're making $2 per mile. Yes, the technology is cool, but people will only pay for coolness in the hype.

we got to go back to the normal business. And I'm not sure if today I I don't I don't wanted to speculate about Whimo's cost, but my understanding is is that the total cost combined of the operation is still not making money.

And I'm I'm glad my new company bought auto, we are already making a tiny bit of money by removing the driver here in the operating cost.

And the last thing is customer acquisition cost. This is especially true for robotics. Like I don't really feel that my parents would allow a robots to be invited to be introduced to to their home and they're living with a robot. No way. They're not prepared.

So how can we get customers if we're selling a robots to others? Similarly, how can we sell the autonomous driving technology to a car manu truck manufacturer, car manufacturer or a fleet of trucks? We have to be the owner who operate the trucks.

Just again this is like a chain restaurant. We are here providing the food. We're not here providing the recipe. We're not here providing the the the the halfy baked food, right? That's a like a halfy processed food. That's a that's an issue in China right now, right?

But thinking about this, if you are if you are a restaurant, you truly believe you're a chain restaurant, you got to provide the food for the customer because that's the easiest way for you to make money. You can solve the customer acquisition cost and solving operation cost.

Okay, I'll leave several minutes for the quick Q&A. And for those who want to build hard techch, live long and prosper.