🎪 Crossing will be hosting an exclusive online closed-door session with Guanlan Dai on August 16 (Sunday) to dive deeper into Agent Infra topics left unexplored in the podcast. Engineers and entrepreneurs interested in the Agent Infra space are welcome to apply. To ensure quality discussion, attendance is capped at 20. Click here to register.
🚥 This week's guest on "Crossing" is Guanlan Dai, founder and CEO of Runta.
Runta is a Silicon Valley star startup in the Agent Infra space, having just completed a $20 million Seed round led by a16z. Jeff Dean, Fei-Fei Li, and others also participated as individual angel investors.
Guanlan was an early team member at both Cloudflare and Kong. His rationale for starting a company now is straightforward: model capabilities are already sufficient — if you're going to compete, compete on infra. In the future, there will inevitably be more agents than humans, and the critical questions in AI will become: Where do they run? How are they managed? Who takes responsibility when things go wrong?
In this conversation, we start with the sharp turn in token culture: in just six months, token maxxing (the more you use, the more glorious) rapidly shifted to token minimizing (ROI, budgets, attribution, cost-cutting). What signals worth paying attention to lie behind this shift?
You'll also hear:
When software execution shifts from "logically clear determinism" to "LLM probability": How is AI shaking the very foundation of the digital world?
Who will build the "utilities" of the AI era? Why, this time, do startups actually have a better shot than giants?
What will a world look like with tens of billions of agents working simultaneously? Can today's internet and cloud infrastructure even handle it?
Why do humans, through repeated clicks of "Allow," unwittingly surrender boundaries and control?
Why is "a catastrophic incident inevitable in the next 10 months"? And how will that incident "re-educate" everyone?
📢 Runta is hiring for the following roles across its Silicon Valley and Singapore offices: Core Runtime (hypervisor/VM customization and scheduling), Cloud Infra (IaC and multi-cloud), and Product Engineering (Agent Experience and DX). Interested candidates are welcome to reach out: hiring@runta.com
🎬 Our video podcast is now live on Koji's WeChat Channels, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, YouTube, and other platforms.
📒 The transcript will be published on the CrossingCrossing WeChat official account.
00:00 Rapid-fire Q&A: Age, MBTI, zodiac sign, alma mater
01:32 Runta raised $20 million in Seed funding. How did you secure personal investments from Jeff Dean and Fei-Fei Li?
05:04 Why did a16z unusually dedicate an entire blog post to a Seed-stage company?
07:33 Why did Token Maxxing shift to Token Minimizing within three to six months?
12:55 Why leave your position at Kong to become a CEO for the first time?
17:50 Why is Agent Infra more likely an opportunity for startups rather than a business for public clouds?
18:49 Facing Anthropic and OpenAI, where does Runta's differentiation lie?
21:05 Why are E2B and Daytona-style sandboxes ill-suited for long-horizon agents?
25:12 Companies claim to have hundreds of agents — how exactly do you draw the boundaries of an agent?
26:23 How is AI eroding human permission boundaries?
28:39 Why is a catastrophic agent incident inevitable?
32:28 Runta does 95%+ of its development through Vibe Coding. Where are human engineers still irreplaceable?
33:28 When agent security fails, is the root cause more likely in the model, the harness, or the execution substrate?
37:27 "Model capabilities are already sufficient" — why will the next battle be fought over infra?
42:16 Guanlan joined Cloudflare and Kong early — how should young professionals pick winning startups?
45:14 With limited information, how can young people truly understand a startup before an interview?
48:31 $3 million for angel investing — who do you back?
50:10 Claude Code or Codex?
54:30 5 pieces of good news, 5 pieces of bad news
Subscribe to "Crossing": 🚦 We track the industry transformations and new entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the new wave of AI technology.
🚦 Crossing is Steve Jobs's metaphor for Apple — standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, where great products are born. AI is transforming every industry. We seek out, interview, and bring together a new generation of AI entrepreneurs and active builders in the AI era. Together with them, we explore and embrace the new changes and new possibilities.
👦🏻 Host Koji: I founded Crossing and launched AI Hacker House, a community space for the new generation of AI entrepreneurs. I serve as Venture Partner at ZhenFund. I believe technology, especially AI, represents the greatest value-creation opportunity of our generation. Koji on Jike, Koji's website