A Spring Weekend Evening Discussing AI Progress and Opportunities in 2025 | Shanghai Offline Salon Recap
We talked until 11 p.m. again.
We can't predict the future, but Crossing and the AI Hacker House we launched hope to bring the community together, provide a platform for a new generation of AI entrepreneurs to connect, and collectively seek out, discover, and unlock more opportunities.
Last Sunday evening, April 20, in Shanghai — at AI Hacker House right beside Caohejing Development Zone Park, Crossing hosted its event "100 Days of AI Upheaval: After DeepSeek, Manus, and GPT-4o, Where Does VC Go in 2025?" as promised, meeting up with friends old and new!
We had a lot of sign-ups for this event. Given capacity limits and to ensure quality of discussion, we did some curation of the registration list. If you couldn't make it this time, don't worry — we'll have more events coming up, so stay tuned.
Before the official start in the early evening, quite a few friends had already arrived, inside and outside AI Hacker House 👇
Once things kicked off, Koji gave a brief talk on the event's theme — after DeepSeek, Manus, and GPT-4o, where does VC go in 2025? To summarize for those who couldn't be there: the mobile internet era gave rise to many remarkable companies and products, driven significantly by technological innovation and community energy. If 2023–2024 was a period where many entrepreneurs and VCs were still watching and experimenting, then DeepSeek, Manus, and GPT-4o have given more people confidence. We can't predict the future, but Crossing and the AI Hacker House we launched hope to bring the community together, provide a platform for more people to connect, and collectively seek out, discover, and unlock more opportunities.
For the first panel, we invited Wang Tianfan, Partner at BAI Capital, and Can Zhang, Managing Director at Linear Capital, to analyze market conditions and development trends from an investor's perspective since Q1 2025.
The second panel featured founders sharing what entrepreneurs have cared about most in recent years: PMF (product-market fit). We had Tian Le, Founder & CEO of Aiyu Intelligence, a startup in AI + legal; Tony Gu, Founder & CEO of FreeSpirit, a startup in AI + sales; and Changyin Zhou, Founder of Vozo.ai, a startup in AI + video that has gone global. They shared how it felt when they found PMF, and the right — and wrong — decisions they made to get there.
We also specially invited friends from Amazon Web Services to share their insights on the entrepreneurship ecosystem and the support they hope to provide founders.
After the talks came the "open mic" segment — a signature of Crossing's offline events. With time running tight this round, we invited four speakers:
First up: Peter, Founder of Lightyear Reach
Second: Sunhao Sun, Founder of WonderMe
Third: Kevin Zhang, an investor whose newsletter Eastwind features in-depth analysis on technology and investing.
Fourth: Patrick, Partner at Old Friendship Capital and early employee at Silicon Valley tech company Robinhood.
Two panels plus four open mics — we didn't expect the event to stretch to nearly 11 p.m., with plenty of folks still on site chatting and debating. We're thrilled to see AI Hacker House, as a physical space, gradually hosting so many friends. Keep following our events, and see you next time!
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