🚥 This week on Crossing, our guest is Huang Yi, founder and CEO of RoboParty.
Born in 2004, he's 22 years old this year. In just one year, he's completed five funding rounds totaling over $100 million, with shareholders ranging from prominent VCs to strategic investors like Xiaomi and CATL.
He describes this year as "living a compressed life" — condensing a decade's worth of hardship into a single year. He also candidly notes the upside of starting a business straight out of college: "You don't know how high the sky is." It's not confidence that matters, but arrogance; the "peak of Mount Stupid" — that point before you gain clear understanding of an industry — may actually be the optimal moment to start a company.
Few founders are as willing as Huang Yi to share their know-how in such granular detail: how to raise your first check, how to choose a financial advisor, how to evaluate term sheets, how to assess strategic capital versus pure financial investment, where to incorporate your company...
In this episode, we also discuss his starting point — pulling classmates together in his Harbin Institute of Technology dorm to build robots; his two-to-three-day "courtship" of a Zhejiang University engineer to join the team; his philosophy that "the highest form of painting a vision is believing it yourself first"; and his read on the embodied intelligence industry: if embodied AI is a 42-kilometer marathon, robot hardware has completed roughly one-quarter, the cerebellum about half, but the brain may have only covered one or two kilometers.
If you want to understand how this generation of young founders makes decisions, manages equally young teams, and coexists with industry hype, this episode offers a rare case study.
🎬 Our video podcast is now available on Koji's WeChat Channels, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, YouTube, and other platforms.
📒 The transcript will be published on the Crossing WeChat official account.
00:00 Lightning round: Age, MBTI, zodiac sign, alma mater
01:50 Having founded his company just a year ago, why does Huang Yi say he's lived a "compressed life," packing ten years of hardship into one?
02:27 Five rounds in one year, over $100 million raised — what exactly are VCs betting on when they invest in 22-year-old Huang Yi?
05:24 With so many financial advisors on the market, how should founders choose?
07:30 Knowing full well that embodied intelligence is in a bubble, how can entrepreneurs ride the wave without being swallowed by it?
08:30 When holding multiple term sheets simultaneously, how do you pick an investor that fits your present needs while supporting future rounds?
10:02 How does strategic capital from companies like Xiaomi and CATL fundamentally differ from pure VC money?
12:04 Why does RoboParty raise a round every month or two? What determines fundraising cadence?
14:30 Why might the "peak of Mount Stupid" actually be the best moment to start a company?
17:27 What did Huang Yi rely on during his two-to-three-day pursuit of a Zhejiang University engineer to convince him to believe in a team that barely existed?
20:08 After completing their first-generation robot, the team felt it was useless — what happened after open-sourcing it that unexpectedly changed RoboParty's direction?
21:05 With full-stack open sourcing from hardware to algorithms, how will RoboParty build moats and make money in the future?
25:19 Why isn't he optimistic about wheeled robots?
26:55 Descending from the "peak of Mount Stupid," what moments can instantly shatter a young CEO's worldview?
29:33 Moving from the first prototype RP0 to RP1, what was the real problem that shifted the team from arrogance toward reality?
32:25 What real-world usage problems did RP1 solve compared to the previous prototype?
35:46 In the decade-long endgame of embodied intelligence, will the winner be an OpenAI or Zhipu AI-style model company, or a startup that understands robotics more deeply?
37:54 With nearly 150 people, how does RoboParty use a "hive structure" to control management span while remaining compatible with manufacturing workflows?
42:25 How does a 22-year-old CEO manage colleagues who are older and more expert in specific domains?
43:53 Why are talented people willing to take pay cuts from high-paying tech giants? And how has RoboParty achieved nearly zero voluntary turnover in a year and a half?
47:00 With roughly 300 embodied intelligence companies today, how many might remain competitive by 2030?
50:04 With exploration happening across brain, cerebellum, and hardware directions, how does Huang Yi decide what RoboParty builds and what it doesn't?
53:46 Why does RP1 target research and education first, rather than home, factory, or entertainment scenarios?
01:01:42 If embodied intelligence is a 42-kilometer marathon, at what kilometer mark are hardware, cerebellum, and brain respectively?
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🚦 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 proactive actors in the AI era, exploring and embracing new changes and new possibilities alongside them.
👦🏻 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
View this episode's transcript on Xiaoyuzhou