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

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Zuckerberg dropped a bombshell after Meta officially announced the completion of its acquisition of AI agent startup Manus.

The multi-billion dollar deal makes it the third-largest acquisition in Meta history, after WhatsApp and Scale AI.

Even Instagram, which reshaped the social media landscape back then, might have to take a backseat to the price tag of this acquisition.

Following the acquisition, Manus founder Xiao Hong will become Vice President of Meta. But what's most breathtaking isn't just the price, but also the speed.

According to LatePost, the entire acquisition negotiation took only a little over ten days. ZhenFund partner Liu Yuan remarked, "It was so fast that it made people wonder if it was a fake offer."

This "blitzkrieg" pace is extremely rare in the history of mergers and acquisitions by Silicon Valley giants.

It's more like a "bride-stealing" game that Zuckerberg is determined to win—perhaps Zuckerberg knows better than anyone that Manus is a ticket he must acquire on the road to the future with Agent.

I. Another Dimension in a Small Town in Jiangxi

Xiao Hong was born in 1993 in a small town in Suichuan County, Ji'an City, Jiangxi Province. The town is known as the "core of the Red Revolution, the capital of tea, and the hometown of hot springs".

For children in small towns, the only options are to study hard to succeed or to work to survive.

Xiao Hong wrote a third scenario for himself: he liked tinkering with computers.

Xiao Hong's family has an old desktop computer. When it comes to computers, many children use them to play games and watch movies, but Xiao Hong often goes online to explore and experiment with various software.

This became even more apparent in high school, when he became enthusiastic about using software and writing review articles.

In the "Otherworld Software World" community, we can still see a large amount of his content. Among them, the earliest article, written in 2010, titled "GeeXBox: A Free Multimedia System That Lets You DIY Your Own Portable Media Center PC," has over 100,000 views.

"Phew, this is my (Hiro's) first article in this other dimension. It's definitely not as good as Xiao X's, but I still hope you all like it."

At the time, he was a high school student. He wrote software reviews and got 100,000 reads. In an environment without traffic pools or algorithm recommendations, his achievement was already quite remarkable.

Through those words, we can perhaps clearly grasp the two core underlying abilities that led to his later success: first, the ability to break down hardcore and complex technologies into "plain language" that even laymen can understand; and second, his knowledge of what is cool and his ability to make others feel that "this thing is really awesome."

This "let's try something fun" geek logic has remained unchanged for 15 years, from audio-visual systems in 2010 to Bitcoin in 2013, and then to Manus in 2024.

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

In 2011, Xiao Hong was admitted to the Software Engineering major at Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a score of 600 in the college entrance examination.

"From now on, our educational background will not be as high as yours. From now on, you will have to make all the decisions in your life yourself." These were the words Xiao Hong's parents left for him.

During his four years of university, Xiao Hong not only studied his favorite major but also embarked on his earliest entrepreneurial experience.

According to an article on the WeChat official account "Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Huazhong University of Science and Technology", Xiao Hong was active in technology clubs during his studies at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, joined the Qiming College "Joint Innovation Team" and served as the vice captain.

In 2013, WeChat was just starting out. Xiao Hong and his team created a "WeChat Drift Bottle" feature—a campus drift bottle version from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Users could reply with "drift bottle" to "drop a bottle" with their message, which would be randomly received by others; they could also "receive bottles," randomly receiving bottles from others and replying to them.

It sounds simple, but back then, this way of playing was quite novel.

Within three days of its launch, the message in a bottle received 40,000 replies on WeChat, making it a favorite among many students. Data from the backend shows that requests for boyfriends/girlfriends and venting through online forums were the main content of the messages.

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

This experience of starting a business on campus demonstrated Xiao Hong's keen insight into social needs and product experience, which was further validated in his later product designs.

You don't need to invent needs; you just need to accurately meet those needs.

III. Nightingale and Butterfly: Xiao Hong's Romance

In 2015, the mobile internet was booming rapidly, and most Huazhong University of Science and Technology graduates could easily find jobs at big companies. Unlike his classmates, Xiao Hong decided to start his own business very early on.

"I've almost never heard of him sending out resumes or looking for jobs. He even rented an apartment with a partner, where he lives, eats, and works. He's more focused on technological innovation and wants to put his ideas into practice," said Xiao He, a classmate of Xiao Hong.

In 2015, Xiao Hong founded Wuhan Nightingale Technology Co., Ltd. in Optics Valley. Initially, Nightingale was just "singing" in small houses in Wuhan.

The landlord even suspected that the group of young people were involved in a pyramid scheme.

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

"You can tell from the names he chose for his companies: Nightingale Technology and Butterfly Effect. The former is taken from a story by Oscar Wilde, showing that he still had a romantic side."

Romance is romance, but reality never listens to Oscar Wilde's stories .

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

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

The first successful product was called YiBan Assistant—an enhancement plugin developed for WeChat official account editors, which remains a favorite among them to this day.

But for Xiao Hong, this deal was too "stable," so stable that it was somewhat boring.

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

So in 2018 and 2019, his team did some trial and error and made some small products, such as a parent-child photo album mini-program, a live quiz mini-program, and a bookstore mini-program. Some of these products made a splash, while others probably didn't even make a ripple.

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

Li Zhifeng, Vice President of Tencent Enterprise WeChat, recalled at the 2021 SaaS Conference: "Dozens of companies came that day, including a young man with a bag. Others might have just listened and moved on, but after he went back, he decided to go all in on Enterprise WeChat, develop based on the Enterprise WeChat ecosystem, and wrote his first line of code that very day."

The young man he mentioned is Xiao Hong, CEO of Wecom Assistant.

At that time, the development of Weiban was not going smoothly.

Although version 1.0 had just been released, it was immediately hit by the pandemic. To make matters worse, the market was flooded with cheat tools at the time, making the compliant and restrained Weiban seem like a clumsy, obedient child in comparison.

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

At that time, Tencent launched a large-scale crackdown on WeChat plug-ins and personal accounts, banning a large number of personal accounts. Some users even had more than 100 accounts banned, and hundreds of thousands of customer resources vanished instantly.

At 3 a.m. the next day, Weiban Assistant published an article on its official WeChat account titled "Just Now, WeChat Massively Suspended Accounts! Customer Resources Instantly Gone to Zero, Where Should Private Domain Operations Go After WeChat Auxiliary Tools Are Banned?", which garnered over 100,000 views the following day.

With cheat software being banned, companies began looking for alternative products, and Weiban Assistant naturally took on these needs and enjoyed the benefits brought by WeChat's ban on cheat software.

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

IV. From Monica to Manus, the butterfly begins to flutter its wings.

ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022.

For ordinary people, it's a toy to chat with; but for Xiao Hong, it's a tombstone from the old era.

He started the Butterfly Effect.

This time, his target is no longer WeChat, but rather the gateway to the internet – the browser.

Among the wave of AI shell companies that sprang up like mushrooms after rain in 2023, Monica was like a quiet miracle—one of the few companies that survived and did quite well .

To date, Monica has accumulated millions of active users worldwide, and its ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) has quickly surpassed ten million US dollars.

Logically, he should have popped the champagne, but he didn't.

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

"When I was working on Monica, I realized that 'context' was key, so I made the plugin automatically capture web page information, saving users the trouble of copying and pasting. Later, Cursor became popular, which proved that when the model's coding capabilities matured, chatbots were not the best product form and a carrier that was more in line with the coding workflow was needed."

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

This is why Manus was created.

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

His answer was: computers. In the digital world, computers are the terminals through which humans handle all tasks. Therefore, theoretically, if we equip AI with its own computer, it could perform all tasks just like a human.

According to Manus's official introduction, the name Manus comes from the Latin phrase "Mens et Manus" (mind and hands). However, Manus's hands were embroiled in controversy from the very beginning.

Manus was released on March 5, 2025. Before that, it was already a top-tier tech product – invitation codes were being resold for tens of thousands of dollars on secondhand platforms, and were extremely difficult to obtain. However, the moment the product was unveiled, public opinion took a sharp turn for the worse, with a huge wave of skepticism quickly drowning out the initial fervor.

Many people believe that Manus lacks significant innovation and is merely a repackaged product using foreign models. "It doesn't develop its own large-scale models; it's a product based on existing large-scale models in the industry."

Some people even wondered: Why is it that when such an exciting product comes out, the tech industry seems to have little reaction, and only independent media are reporting on it?

It can be observed that within a week of Manus's release, its reputation underwent a significant reversal. This phenomenon was not limited to China; opinions also varied considerably internationally.

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

Faced with criticism, the Manus team doesn't shy away from admitting it's a "shell" product. This in itself isn't terrible; the key is whether it can solve users' problems.

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

Innovation lies in systems, interactions, and ecosystems, not in the hardware itself.

In April, Benchmark led a Series B funding round that brought the company to a post-money valuation of $500 million. However, shortly after the investment, the U.S. Treasury Department launched an investigation into Benchmark's investment in Manus to examine whether it violated 2023 restrictions on AI investments in China.

Some voices in Silicon Valley have begun to question: "Is it compliant for a Chinese company to use Anthropic's model and receive American funding?"

Xiao Hong stood in a position that no one wanted to stand in.

Regulatory tensions between the US and China in the AI field reached a delicate tipping point in the first half of 2025. Manus finds itself in the middle: it uses Claude as its underlying technology, its investors are in Silicon Valley, its users are located worldwide, and its company is registered in Beijing .

Every step could become a reason for a dead end.

He may only have two paths before him:

The first option is to shrink back to the domestic market and create a "Chinese version" of the AI Agent. It's safe, but the ceiling is predictable.

The second point is to proactively sever ties and transform Manus into a truly "global company." It will be painful, but it could lead to greater success.

Xiao Hong chose the second option.

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

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

Ten years later, he may have understood the full meaning of the name.

In order for the rose Manus to bloom all over the world, he had to sacrifice something.

This isn't running away; it's cutting off a limb to survive .

But Manus did not stop there.

On May 12, Manus ended its invitation code system and opened registration to all users, launching a subscription plan. Before the opening, there were already more than one million users on the waiting list.

June and July were perhaps the most controversial period for Manus. Manus' co-founder confirmed that it would move its headquarters to Singapore. Starting July 8th, Butterfly Effect, the Beijing-based company where Manus is based, began layoffs. Approximately 80 employees in China were laid off, and their social media content on platforms like Weibo and Xiaohongshu was deleted.

During this period, the label of "running away" was almost entirely attached 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. It took less than nine months from commercialization to $100 million in ARR.

Looking back at the very beginning of the message in a bottle product, Xiao Hong had already realized that users don't actually care whose model you are using. Users only care about one thing: can it meet my needs and can it help me do this well?

Manus's answer is: Yes.

V. Surprisingly, Xiao Hong is also a Bitcoin holder.

Indeed, on Xiao Hong's "Jike" personal homepage, in addition to founder, INFP, and tool maker, he also has a simple identity: BTC Holder.

This is not a speculative label for following the crowd.

If you turn back the clock 12 years, you'll find that this keenness for new things was already ingrained in his genes.

In November 2013, Xiao Hong, a freshman in college, wrote a long popular science article on "Otherworld Software World": "What is Bitcoin? How to use it? Bitcoin wallet client software download".

Back when Bitcoin was still relatively unknown, most people viewed it as a "tulip mania" or a "geek's toy." But Xiao Hong had already posted his wallet address at the end of his article, writing, "Just buy a few dollars and put them in my wallet. Look at how cool this is."

Out of curiosity, I looked up that address. In February 2014, the holdings at that address were worth only $0.793; 12 years later, the assets are worth $1,969.

A 2482-fold increase!

The address from that time is probably no longer in use, and this amount of money is insignificant to the current VP of Meta, but what this number reflects is extremely amazing: he is a person who can find and hold onto the "future".

This composure in "holding positions" is fully reflected in Manus's valuation curve.

In early 2024, when Monica was just beginning to emerge, ByteDance offered $30 million to acquire it. For a 90s-born entrepreneur, this was enough to achieve financial freedom and a perfect opportunity to "secure the profits."

But Xiao Hong refused.

Just as he had weathered a long and volatile period with the value of Bitcoin in his wallet, he recognized that Agents are the true ticket to AI general intelligence. He chose to continue "holding" his position and continue 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, it's not just a leap in valuation, but also the highest reward for long-termism.

In his article, Xiao Hong also stated that he enjoys "trying new things" and "new experiences." But in reality, his true strength lies in identifying genuinely vital signals amidst a sea of noise.

Whether he was a small-town youth holding $0.70 worth of Bitcoin 12 years ago, or the multi-billionaire VP of Meta standing next to Zuckerberg 12 years later, his core essence has never changed:

Identify a future, and hold onto it like a belief.

"That way you can directly experience Bitcoin. Just buy a few dollars and put them in your wallet. 'I'm a Bitcoin guy now.' Look at that level of sophistication."

In conclusion

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

True innovation doesn't necessarily mean reinventing the wheel from scratch; it can also involve recombining existing elements to create products that truly solve problems.

Looking back at Xiao Hong's "The Monologue of the CEO of Weiban" written in 2022, couldn't Weiban in the past be the same as Manus today?

Today's Manus is still far from achieving all of the above. To make it more than just a concept on paper, the company's members must work even harder. This process will inevitably involve physical exhaustion, mental stress, and sometimes, even the frustration of being misunderstood.

At this moment, silently recite that mantra that has inspired countless people:

Per aspera ad astra, following this arduous journey, to reach the heavens.