Xiao Hong: From Small Town Youth to Manus CEO, a Long-Term Believer in Bitcoin

I. The "Other-Dimensional" Time in a Small Town in Jiangxi

In 1993, Xiao Hong was born in a small town in Suichuan County, Ji'an City, Jiangxi Province. It is known as the "Red Core, Tea Capital, and Hot Spring Town."

For children in this small town, the choices are either to study hard to leap over the dragon gate or to work for survival.

Xiao Hong wrote himself a third script: he liked to tinker with computers.

His family had an old desktop computer. While many kids used it to play games or watch movies, Xiao Hong often went online, exploring and experimenting with various software.

This became even more evident in high school, where he developed a passion for using software and writing reviews.

In the "Other-Dimensional Software World" community, we can still find a wealth of content he wrote. Among them, the earliest article, written in 2010, titled "GeeXBox: A Free Media System to DIY Your Own Portable Media Center," has over 100,000 views.

"Wow, this is my (Xiao Hong's) first article in the Other Dimension. It's definitely not as good as Xiao X's, but I hope everyone will like it."

At that time, he was still a high school student, writing software reviews, and achieving 100,000 views without any traffic pool or algorithmic recommendations—an impressive feat.

Through those words, we may clearly capture two core underlying abilities that later contributed to his success: one is the ability to break down complex, hardcore technology into "human language" that even laypeople can understand, and the other is his understanding of what is cool and his ability to make others feel, "This thing is really exciting."

This "let's try something fun" geek logic has remained unchanged for 15 years, from the 2010 media system to Bitcoin in 2013 and now to Manus in 2024.

II. The "Message in a Bottle" from Huazhong University of Science and Technology—You Don't Need to Invent Demand

In 2011, Xiao Hong scored 600 points on the college entrance examination and was admitted to the Software Engineering program at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

"From now on, our education level will no longer be higher than yours. From now on, all decisions in your life will be made by you." This was the message Xiao Hong's parents left him.

During his four years in college, Xiao Hong not only studied his favorite major but also embarked on his earliest entrepreneurial experiences.

According to an article from the WeChat public account "Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Huazhong University," Xiao Hong was active in technical clubs during his time at Huazhong University, joining the Qiming Academy's "Co-creation Team" as vice captain.

In 2013, WeChat was just getting started. Xiao Hong led a team to create a "WeChat Message in a Bottle"—the Huazhong version of a campus message in a bottle. Users could reply "message in a bottle" to "throw a bottle" and write down what they wanted to say, which others would receive randomly; they could also "receive bottles" and reply to others' messages.

It sounds simple, but in that era, this kind of gameplay was quite novel.

In just three days after its launch, the WeChat backend recorded 40,000 replies, making it a favorite among many students. From the backend feedback data, requests for romantic partners and venting frustrations made up the majority of the content.

A campus social product captured the most genuine needs of college students.

This entrepreneurial experience in college showcased Xiao Hong's keen insights into social needs and product experience, which would be validated again in his future product designs.

You don't need to invent demand; you just need to accurately capture it.

III. Nightingale and Butterfly: The Romance of Xiao Hong

In 2015, as the mobile internet was rapidly and vigorously developing, most graduates from Huazhong University could easily find jobs at major companies. Unlike his peers, Xiao Hong had already determined to pursue entrepreneurship early on.

"I hardly heard of him applying for jobs or looking for work. He rented a house with his partners, living and working there. He focused more on technological innovation and wanted to put his ideas into practice," said Xiao Hong's classmate, Xiao He.

In 2015, Xiao Hong founded Wuhan Nightingale Technology Co., Ltd. in the Optics Valley, and the initial Nightingale was just "singing loudly" in a small house in Wuhan.

The landlord even suspected that this group of young people was involved in pyramid schemes.

Xiao He pointed out that the name Nightingale comes from Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose."

"You can tell from the company name that Nightingale Technology and the Butterfly Effect— the former is taken from Wilde's story, showing he has a bit of romantic sentiment."

Romance is one thing, but reality never listens to Wilde's stories.

In that "gold rush era" of mobile internet, Xiao Hong's story began with a very clear "self-denial."

At that time, the WeChat ecosystem was still a wild land, but Xiao Hong focused on application development and promotion within the WeChat ecosystem.

The first successful product was Yiban Assistant—an enhanced plugin developed for WeChat public account editors, which remains a favorite among public account editors to this day.

However, for Xiao Hong, this business was too "stable," so stable that it felt somewhat boring.

If you set your sights on the stars and the sea, you won't linger too long in a comfortable harbor.

So, in 2018 and 2019, his team went through some trial and error, creating small products like a family photo album mini-program, a live-streaming quiz mini-program, and a bookstore mini-program. Some of these products made a splash, while others barely made a ripple.

On November 28, 2019, the WeChat Work team held a service provider recruitment salon in Wuhan, which led to the birth of Weiban Assistant.

Li Zhi Feng, Vice President of Tencent WeChat Work, recalled at the 2021 SaaS conference: "That day, dozens of companies attended, and among them was a young guy with a backpack. Others might have just passed by, but he went back and decided to go all in on WeChat Work, developing based on its ecosystem, and he wrote the first line of code that day."

The young guy he mentioned is Xiao Hong, CEO of Weiban Assistant.

At that time, Weiban's development was not smooth.

Although version 1.0 had just been launched, it soon faced the pandemic. Worse, the market was flooded with various external tools, making the compliant and restrained Weiban seem like a clumsy, obedient child.

Perhaps it was thanks to Xiao Hong's persistence that a turning point arrived on May 25, 2020.

At that time, Tencent launched a large-scale cleanup of personal WeChat external tools, banning a large number of personal accounts. Some users had over 100 accounts banned, and hundreds of thousands of customer resources vanished in an instant.

At 3 a.m. the next day, Weiban Assistant published an article on its official WeChat account titled "Just Now, WeChat's Mass Ban! Customer Resources Instantly Reduced to Zero. After the Ban on WeChat Auxiliary Tools, Where Should Private Domain Operations Go?" The next day, it garnered over 100,000 views.

With external tools banned, companies began to seek alternative products, and Weiban Assistant naturally captured this demand, benefiting from the advantages brought by the ban on external tools.

This experience is worth savoring. At the crossroads of short-term benefits and long-term value, Xiao Hong always firmly chose the latter. This is not only courage but also a kind of cognitive confidence.

IV. From Monica to Manus, the Butterfly Begins to Flutter

At the end of 2022, ChatGPT was born.

For ordinary people, it was a toy for chatting; but for Xiao Hong, it was a tombstone of the old era.

He began to establish the Butterfly Effect.

This time, his target was no longer WeChat but the entry point of the internet—the browser.

In 2023, amidst a wave of AI shell companies emerging like mushrooms after rain, Monica seemed like a quietly miraculous company—one of the few that survived and did quite well.

As of now, Monica has accumulated millions of active users worldwide, with an ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) quickly surpassing ten million dollars.

Logically, he should be popping champagne, but he didn't.

Xiao Hong realized that while technological capabilities were continuously evolving, product forms often lagged behind.

"When I was working on Monica, I found that 'context' was key, so I made the plugin automatically fetch webpage information, eliminating the need for users to copy and paste. Later, Cursor became popular, proving that when the model's coding capabilities mature, Chatbots are not the best product form; a carrier more aligned with the coding workflow is needed."

"At the end of last year, we saw the emergence of new capabilities like 'Agent' that can perform complex planning and autonomous execution, and we judged that it also lacked a good product form. This is our opportunity: to seize the window of model capability overflow."

This is the reason for the birth of Manus.

In Xiao Hong's view, the ultimate question is—what is the ultimate "shell" for AI?

His answer is: a computer. In the digital world, a computer is the terminal through which humans handle all affairs. Therefore, equipping AI with a dedicated computer theoretically allows it to complete all tasks like a human.

According to Manus's official introduction, the name Manus comes from the Latin "Mens et Manus" (Mind and Hand). However, Manus's "hands" were already in the eye of the public opinion storm at its inception.

Manus was launched on March 5, 2025. Prior to this, it had already become "top-tier traffic" in the tech circle—invitation codes were even sold for tens of thousands of dollars on second-hand platforms, making them hard to come by. However, at the moment the product was unveiled, public opinion took a sharp turn, and huge doubts quickly drowned out the initial enthusiasm.

Many believed that Manus lacked significant innovation, merely being a shell product that used foreign models. "It doesn't have its own large model; it's a product developed based on existing large models in the industry."

Some even wondered: why did such an exciting product come out, but it seemed like there was no reaction in the tech circle, only self-media reporting?

It can be observed that within a week of Manus's release, its reputation underwent a significant reversal. This was not only evident domestically but also severely polarized internationally.

TechCrunch once reported that Manus might not be China's second DeepSeek moment. However, shortly after Manus's release, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey stated that the product was excellent.

In the face of skepticism, the Manus team did not shy away from being a "shell." This in itself is not scary; the key is whether it can solve users' problems.

Just like product innovation and underlying technological innovation. Apple doesn't produce chips and screens, but the iPhone remains the most successful smartphone.

Innovation lies in the system, interaction, and ecosystem, not in the hardware itself.

In April, the Series B financing led by Benchmark was completed, with a post-investment valuation of 500 million dollars; however, shortly after their investment, the U.S. Treasury Department initiated a review of Benchmark's investment in Manus to check for compliance with the 2023 restrictions on AI investments in China.

Some voices in Silicon Valley began to question: "A Chinese company using Anthropic's model and taking American money, is this compliant?"

Xiao Hong found himself in a position that no one wanted to be in.

Regulations in the AI field between China and the U.S. tightened to a delicate critical point in the first half of 2025. Manus was caught in the middle: using Claude at the core, investors in Silicon Valley, users worldwide, and the company registered in Beijing.

Every link could potentially become a reason for being stuck.

He perhaps had only two paths before him:

The first path was to retreat to the domestic market and create a "Chinese version" of an AI agent. Safe, but the ceiling would be clearly visible.

The second path was to actively cut ties and turn Manus into a truly "global company." Painful, but it could go further.

Xiao Hong chose the second path.

No one knows how much pressure Xiao Hong endured during that time.

In 2015, he named his company "Nightingale"—the bird that sings with its life and waters roses with its blood in Wilde's story.

Ten years later, he perhaps understood the full meaning of this name.

To let Manus bloom globally, he had to sacrifice something.

This is not a runaway; it's a self-sacrifice for survival.

But Manus did not stop there.

On May 12, Manus ended the invitation code model, opened registration to all users, and launched a subscription plan. Even before the opening, over a million users were already on the waiting list.

From June to July, it was perhaps the most controversial phase for Manus. The co-founder of Manus confirmed that the headquarters would be relocated to Singapore. Starting from July 8, the Beijing Butterfly Effect company began layoffs. About 80 employees in the China region were laid off, and content on social media platforms like Weibo and Xiaohongshu was cleared.

During this time, the label of "runaway" was almost affixed to Manus and Xiao Hong.

In October 2025, Manus released version 1.5, reducing the average task completion time from 15 minutes in April to less than 4 minutes.

In December, Manus announced that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) had surpassed 100 million dollars. It took less than 9 months to go from commercialization to 100 million dollars ARR.

Looking back at the initial message in a bottle product, Xiao Hong had long recognized that users actually do not care whose model you are using; they only care about one thing: can it meet my needs, can it help me get this done?

Manus's answer is: yes.

V. You Didn't Expect It, But Xiao Hong is Also a Bitcoin Holder

That's right, actually on Xiao Hong's "Moment" personal homepage, he labels himself not only as a founder, INFP, and tool maker, but also has a simple identity: BTC Holder.

This is not a speculative label that follows the trend.

If you turn back the clock to 12 years ago, you will find that this sensitivity to new things has long been ingrained in his genes.

In November 2013, just entering college, Xiao Hong wrote a popular science article in "Other-Dimensional Software World": "What is Bitcoin? How to Use It? Download Bitcoin Wallet Client."

In a year when Bitcoin had not yet entered the public eye, most people still regarded it as a "tulip bubble" or "geek's toy," but Xiao Hong had already posted his wallet address at the end of the article, writing, "Just buy a few bucks and put it in your wallet, see how cool this is."

Out of curiosity, I checked that address. In February 2014, the holdings in that address were worth only $0.793; today, 12 years later, that asset is worth $1,969.

A 2,482-fold increase!

That address should have long been inactive; this amount of money is trivial for today's Meta Vice President, but the number behind it reflects something astonishing: he is someone who can find and hold onto the "future."

This "holding" determination is vividly reflected in Manus's valuation curve.

At the beginning of 2024, when Monica had just begun to emerge, ByteDance offered $30 million to acquire it. For a post-90s entrepreneur, this was enough to achieve financial freedom, a perfect opportunity to "cash out."

But Xiao Hong refused.

Just as he once held Bitcoin through a long cycle of ups and downs, he recognized that the Agent is the true ticket to AI general intelligence. He chose to continue "holding" and keep running down that path.

Just a year and a half later, Meta knocked on his door with a multi-billion dollar offer.

From $30 million to billions, what was crossed was not just a magnitude of valuation but the highest reward for long-termism.

Xiao Hong also stated in the article that he likes to "try new things" and enjoys "new things." But in fact, what he is truly good at is identifying those signals that have real vitality amidst the long noise.

Whether it's the young man from a small town holding $0.7 worth of Bitcoin 12 years ago or the Meta Vice President standing next to Zuckerberg today, worth billions, his core has never changed:

Identify a future and hold onto it like a belief.

"That way, you can directly feel Bitcoin; just buy a few bucks and put it in your wallet~ 'Bro, I have Bitcoin now,' see how cool this is."

In Conclusion

From a small town in Ji'an, Jiangxi, to a small house in Wuhan, and then to the spotlight in Silicon Valley, Xiao Hong's story may be telling us:

True innovation does not necessarily have to invent the wheel from scratch; it can also recombine existing elements to create products that truly solve problems.

Looking back at Xiao Hong's "Monologue of the CEO of Weiban" written in 2022, how could the past Weiban not be today's Manus?

Today's Weiban (Manus) still has a distance from everything mentioned above. To ensure they exist beyond paper, the members of this company should double their efforts. In this process, physical exhaustion, mental tension, and sometimes, even misunderstandings and grievances are inevitable.

At this time, just silently recite that phrase that has inspired countless people:

Per aspera ad astra, through this arduous journey, to reach the stars.