@gkxspace: Spent over half a month in Shanghai and Hangzhou, met up with more than 20 friends while working — the post-05 generation is already charging in... More than half of the people I met this trip were born after 2005, all dropouts or on hiatus from school. The Yangtze River Delta is truly terrifying. Each of them is a notable figure in the AI circle — some running 2B services with stable cash flow, some with profitable SaaS products, some raised 10 million yuan, and a few are already financially free just playing around.
Summary
The author shares insights from meeting over 20 friends in the AI circle in Shanghai and Hangzhou. Most are post-2005 entrepreneurs who dropped out or took a break from school. Many have already secured funding or become profitable. The author plans to base in Hangzhou in the second half of the year and go all in.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 07/07/26, 02:13 AM
After hanging around Shanghai and Hangzhou for half a month, while working I met up with over 20 friends—post-05s are already charging in…
More than half of the people I met this time are post-05s, all of whom have dropped out or taken a break from school. The Yangtze River Delta is truly terrifying.
Each of them is well-known in the AI circle—some run 2B services with stable cash flow, some have SaaS products that are steadily profitable, one raised 10 million, and another is already financially free just for fun.
As for me, I’m doing okay. I spent the past two years building products, and in the first half of this year I focused on enterprise services, conducting product research and making single-point attempts. But I don’t really have anything impressive to show yet.
This trip was very rewarding. After talking with many friends, I’ve broadened my thinking. Recently, many investors have also been reaching out proactively (they’re hungry for deals too, haha).
Also, my Twitter just hit 40k followers today.
I’ll probably base myself in Hangzhou for the second half of the year—success or death.
Similar Articles
@shao__meng: Over the past few days, I've been conducting intensive interviews for R&D interns, and I have to say, the younger generation is formidable! The students I interviewed are mostly second-year master's students or juniors, born around 2001-2002 or 2005-2006. The way these post-00s think really surprised me. Thinking back to when I was a junior, I was still doing promotional gigs and tutoring to earn living expenses, because a physics bachelor's degree made it hard to find a job, and also...
An interviewer shares observations from intensive interviews with post-00s R&D interns: they generally have internship experience at big tech companies and now prefer joining AI-focused startups, having become disillusioned with big-tech processes and career paths.
@beefnoode: Last night I had a coffee chat with @Charles77xixi, and we really enjoyed the conversation. Teacher Charles is relatively young, but has already achieved great results in the AI field. He graduated from a top school and entered a top-tier big company, and now works at a star AI startup. In terms of technology, even though I…
The blogger shares insights from a coffee chat with AI practitioner Charles, discussing the choice between big companies and AI startups, entrepreneurial paths, differences between B2B and B2C markets, and the importance of networking and resources.
@Phoenixyin13: Nanjing University CS LAMDA Group 2025 Graduates Employment: A Microcosm of the High-Purity Involution Era in AI. As the top face of domestic machine learning, the career destinations of Professor Zhou Zhihua's LAMDA Group at Nanjing University for the class of 2025 directly strip away the last arrogance of the current AI job market. First, the visible trend is the academic circle completely closing its doors...
The employment data of Nanjing University LAMDA Group's 2025 graduates reflects the involutionary state of the current AI job market: scarce academic positions, PhDs flocking to big companies like Huawei and Alibaba, some turning to quantitative trading, while star AI startups have minimal hiring scale.
@yan5xu: Sharing an AI company research library I recently compiled: Oh My AI Company.
Author @yan5xu shares their compiled AI company research library 'Oh My AI Company', which includes 75 AI companies and products, 75 investment firms, etc., and introduces a research method combining Similarweb traffic analysis and multi-source cross-validation, aiming to provide a continuously updated market map.
@FinanceYF5: A Decade of AI in One Person's Story 1/ Expelled from high school, dropped out twice, worked over 30 jobs before age 22. Later, he participated in ChatGPT from zero to one, witnessed the months when hundreds of millions of users flooded in. Now he's thinking about what to do in the next decade. A personal account worth reading.
A person who participated in building ChatGPT from zero to one shares his decade-long journey in AI, including being expelled from high school, dropping out multiple times, working over 30 jobs, and witnessing the explosive growth of ChatGPT users. Now he's considering his direction for the next decade.