Challenging WeChat Is a Death Wish? The Ambitions of a 25-Year-Old AI Founder | In Conversation with Chunyu Chen: Founder/CEO of Intent

🚥 Brandon Chen is doing something many consider a suicide mission: taking on WeChat and WhatsApp — building an instant messaging (IM) tool for the AI era.

As this week's guest on "Crossing," the 25-year-old founder has an extraordinary backstory: dropping out of Tsinghua University, abandoning biology, flying to Silicon Valley on a one-way ticket, and at one point sleeping on floors. Today, his company has won support and investment from multiple veteran internet entrepreneurs and investors, and just launched its new product, the "Intent" App (intent.app).

In this episode, Brandon shares the ups and downs of his two entrepreneurial journeys, his epiphany about dropping out, and his thinking on next-generation IM. Why is he convinced that doing something big is no harder than doing something small? How did poor English become his greatest advantage? In a market monopolized by giants, how will AI reshape the "intent" in how we communicate — and create new opportunities?

If you're interested in AI-era product innovation, a young founder's extraordinary journey, and those "seemingly impossible" grand challenges, this episode should offer you something.

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📒 The transcript will be published shortly on the CrossingCrossing WeChat official account.

🟢 00:01:16 Rapid Fire

Age, alma mater, MBTI and zodiac sign, company and product intro, funding status, revenue and profit, team size.

🟢 00:03:12 First Startup, Dropping Out of Tsinghua

"The most failed thing I did in college? That I was still here studying."

How to calibrate your life's coordinate system? — Stephen A. Schwarzman's insight: doing something big is the same difficulty as doing something small; since both are exhausting, why not choose what makes you happy?

Where does a biology major's path lead?

A business plan for a game engine even better than Unity, which landed 1.2 million RMB in angel investment — then what? The product never got built.

The epiphany: during a VC interview, asked about "the most failed experience in college," his answer made the interviewer laugh.

Why no fear about dropping out? "I wouldn't starve no matter what" — the confidence came from going to Beijing alone in his senior year of high school, and a clear-eyed understanding of where biology led.

🟢 00:14:12 Disenchanting Silicon Valley

From being homeless in Palo Alto, sleeping on a friend's dorm floor, to moving into a sea-view villa in Berkeley — what happened on this journey?

To meet Zoom founder Eric Yuan, he flew to America and ended up waiting two months.

After excitedly presenting his early multi-agent vision, Eric Yuan cut through it in one sentence: at its core, this is still just a Discord bot.

Living in a sea-view villa in the Berkeley hills, far from social noise, listening to Allen Zhang's public lectures daily, watching the ocean, greeting deer — the epiphany about IM happened here.

He covered more than a dozen large sheets of paper taped to the walls with notes from Allen Zhang's lectures.

"Disenchantment" is the beginning of agency: when you realize Stanford people are just people too, with cognition often inferior to China's internet veterans, you dare to step into the arena.

🟢 00:22:27 Landing Two "Internet Big Shot" Investors

"Young people daring to do something this big — not bad."

Meeting the first "big shot," talking ambition: he barely listened to the product pitch, just said "young people daring to do something this big — not bad," and invested.

Meeting the second "big shot," talking users: zero discussion of market, competition, or what if Tencent responds — only one question: how do you do user research?

Is founder networking useful? A friend once judged him as "networking every day," but how does he view the value and phases of networking?

🟢 00:27:02 Challenging WeChat: Why Is IM Worth Rebuilding in the AI Era?

He attempted IM seven times, all failures. Now on his eighth attempt, what opportunity does he see that others don't?

Why is IM a massive opportunity? It commands the highest user time spent and open frequency, yet monetizes far worse than Douyin.

From chat history summarization, AI search, to personal assistants — countless AI features once imagined, why did "translation" ultimately become the entry point?

User pain: a Vietnamese-American mother unable to deeply communicate with her U.S.-born child due to language barriers.

Translation itself isn't unique — what's the advantage of building your own IM? The core is "context": only inside IM can a large model know whether to use casual or honorific speech, or distinguish whether LLM means "Master of Laws" or "large language model."

Data insight: WhatsApp averages 60 messages daily, ChatGPT 10 questions daily, Google Search 3 times daily — IM is the most complete platform recording personal digital life, and a data gold mine.

Why does WeChat have the capability but choose not to do semantic search for "Wednesday" and "星期三"? The "advantages" of big companies are precisely opportunities for startups.

🟢 00:53:53 Dancing with Uncertainty

Unsuited for research: "No matter how badly I'm doing now, it's better than staying at Tsinghua for a biology PhD."

How to manage investor expectations? "Every time I say, I don't know where the market is either. IM failed seven times, maybe the eighth will fail too."

Personal growth: MBTI shifted from ENTP to INFJ, from relying on external exchange to looking inward for answers and caring about others' feelings.

How to manage team anxiety? Using continuous, tiny, but unmistakable "forward motion" to combat uncertainty. From thousands of users to tens of thousands, letting the team know "we're on the right track."

Advice for founders: all constraints are fake — want to do something, do it immediately. Turn an idea into a product over one weekend, then quickly take the market's "slap in the face."

Subscribe to "Crossing": 🚦 We track the industry shifts and entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the new wave of AI technology.

🚦 "Crossing" is Steve Jobs' 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 founders and proactive actors in the AI era. Together with them, we explore and embrace the new changes, the new possibilities.

👦🏻 Host Koji: I founded Crossing, launched AI Hacker House — a community space for the new generation of AI founders — and 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

👧🏻 Host Ronghui: I co-founded Crossing, worked at a dollar-denominated VC, and spent five years as a Silicon Valley correspondent, tracking technological development and business stories. Feel free to chat with me and exchange ideas. Ronghui on Jike