Crossing Podcast hit 40,000 users! The one thing I think we did right, and a whole bunch of feelings

Not a crossroads of confusion or doubt, but a crossroads of possibility.

👦🏻 Author: Koji

🧑‍🎨 Design: NCon

A couple days ago, Crossing hit 40,000 subscribers on Xiaoyuzhou! Genuinely thrilled.

Also a bit sentimental. Thinking back, from zero to forty thousand — a year gone in a flash, like a white horse passing through a crevice. But flipping through these 60 episodes, that same stretch of time suddenly carries real weight.

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We used a new feature just launched today on Coze Space (coze.cn) to turn this article into a five-minute podcast. Give it a listen?

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1）

I think the single smartest thing we did was this: stick to a weekly schedule.

Going weekly introduced a rhythm into my life that I'd never experienced before. My co-host Ronghui and I — whatever storms blew through our personal lives — propped each other up and got an episode out every single week.

People crave certainty. When the outside world offers so little of it, we manufactured our own through that weekly cadence — and it became a surprisingly powerful emotional anchor.

Surprise cake for the 40k milestone, celebrating "in the cloud" with Ronghui — gave her a virtual party hat in the video

2）

Much like a traditional weekly magazine, we deliberately avoid banking episodes in advance.

So every week we build from scratch — hunting for topics that are both valuable and timely.

For example:

• Year-end retrospectives: ByteDance Dancing, Alibaba Restless, the AI "Six Little Dragons" Shaken — A Year-in-Review on Foundation Models with LatePost; The 2024 AI Top 10 You Never Saw Coming — A Conversation with CyberZen's "Big Brain"
• Year-ahead previews: Kicking Off 2025: The Critical Year for AI, the Founding Year for Agents — A Conversation with Yusen Dai of ZhenFund
• Deep dives on hot topics: 20 Questions to Understand DeepSeek and the "Second Half of AI"; Behind the Manus Hype: 20 Questions to Understand AI Agents
• New product launches: Agent Neo Launches — First Conversation with CEO Derek and CMO Guai Zi: The Starry-Eyed Teenager Building the Ultimate AI Creation Tool
• ……

3）

Which means going weekly demands that we stay sharp to change.

How do you stay sharp?

Remember back in the Web 2.0 days, there was a term — "product locusts"? It described people who swarmed every new product the moment it launched. Why "locusts"? Because they'd crawl through every feature, generate "trash" test data, and mess with PMs' understanding of early users and behavioral analytics.

I've always encouraged people to be "product locusts." Only by curiously trying new products can you stay sharp on users, on the market, on opportunity.

One perk of doing Crossing: I get to be a lazier "product locust." Because when founders and big companies drop new products and want KOL and media feedback fast, more and more of them think of us.

Crossing's first offline event: "Podcast Hundred-Day Feast" in Shanghai

4）

Case in point: today we discovered Coze Space dropped a new feature — turn content into a podcast.

We love stress-testing new AI products with extreme tasks, pushing their boundaries.

This time, we fed Coze Space all 2 million-plus words from our past 60 episodes to see if an Agent could condense them into a sub-five-minute two-person podcast. Have a listen:

By the way, last year after NotebookLM launched, Crossing did an episode — After NotebookLM Went Viral, We Summarized 10 Use Cases and Revisited an Old Question: How Will AI Transform Content? — back then NotebookLM only supported English. Today you can try those same tasks on Coze Space.

5）

Back to Crossing. Weekly output costs serious time and energy. We've stuck with it because the payoff is strong enough.

So what value has it brought?

The podcast gives me two kinds of value: cognitive and emotional.

Cognitive value is obvious — the topics we discuss, the guests we invite, they're almost all people surfing the cutting edge of this era.

Emotional value?

First, what I wrote at the top: "Weekly releases became a certainty anchor for life." Wind or rain, Monday means a new episode.

Second, because our guests are all "active doers in the AI era," they share this trait: they radiate optimistic energy. Immersing yourself among people like that — you get watered and changed by their overflow.

Third, every conversation feeds our curiosity and our instinct to question. It makes you feel alive, feel yourself being collided with and sparked into vividness.

Crossing salon "Seeing the AI World 1,000 Days From Now" at Stanford Center at Peking University

6）

So doing a podcast (and yes, also doing WeChat articles and short videos) serves yourself and serves others.

Self-serving, because it delivers emotional value and satisfies our hunger to stay curious, to draw vitality and energy from that. Plus, interviewing and producing — that's how you maintain high-quality information input.

Serving others, because this content can bring more people fresh perspectives, information, viewpoints — and what we call: finding your people. Maybe you don't know them in real life, but content becomes a medium for connecting with each other.

7）

This year we're shifting focus to "interviewing and bringing together a new generation of AI founders." The past 10 episodes have already featured a string of founders we admire — distinctive, ambitious, accomplished.

Why this shift?

Because founders transmit the richest emotions, the most charged energy.

And because if you believe, as we do, that the AI era will birth the next great company — then the next Yiming Zhang, Pony Ma, Lei Jun, Xing Wang, or Richard Liu is already out there hacking away in the grasslands right now.

We hope to find them while the wind is still rising from the tip of the duckweed, to capture their thinking and traces here at Crossing.

8）

Crossing has connected us to so many people.

Post-COVID, I feel like I've "revenge-turned extrovert." Especially after launching AI Hacker House — it feels like overdosing on new friends every single week.

Last weekend we held the first "Crossing · Sit on the Floor" at AI Hacker House, and when I saw one group actually run out to the lawn and sit right on the grass, I was overjoyed — this is exactly the scene I hoped for:

Creating an atmosphere that's both relaxed and serious, because only from conversations like that do resilient, lasting connections grow.

Crossing · "Sit on the Floor" gathering at Shanghai AI Hacker House

9）

Right — why the name "Crossing"?

We open every episode with this line:

"Crossing comes from Steve Jobs' metaphor for Apple — standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. Great products are often born here."

But that wasn't the full reason for choosing the name, or even the primary one.

"Crossing" connects to my personal journey.

On one hand, my path cuts across multiple domains. I've always been technical, a product manager. But the two companies I co-founded — The Fair and Tangdao — focused on content and consumer products respectively, and both achieved solid results.

So I deeply believe that "crossing boundaries" sparks unique chemical reactions, that interesting companies and products gestate at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.

On the other hand, for the past 18 years, from my first startup to now — I feel like I've perpetually stood at a crossroads. Not a temporary one, but a persistent state.

Because I've always been in the mode of "seeking opportunity, thinking about what new product to create" — like standing at an intersection, constantly exploring and choosing.

"AI Hacker House," which we launched in Shanghai's Caohejing Development Zone

10）

I genuinely enjoy standing at this crossroads: the crowds surge with curiosity and ambition, and every path leads to unknowns worth anticipating.

Kevin Kelly, in an interview with The Fair, put it this way:

"When your career faces two choices, pick the one that opens more possibilities. You want to keep creating new options, not shutting them down. Don't choose the narrower path. The more choices you have, the more optimistic you become."

In the AI era, we've all collectively arrived at the crossroads once again — but this is not a crossroads of confusion or doubt. It is a crossroads of possibility.

11）

Let's keep going!

We'll keep doing good work at Crossing, striving to provide more inspiration and strength, to create more meaning and value.

For ourselves, and for you all.

🎉 Bonus Round

As content creators and embracers of the AI wave, the question we think about most is: How will AI reshape content creation? And how will it transform content consumption?

For example, Coze Space can turn this Crossing episode — 20 Questions to Understand DeepSeek and the "Second Half of AI" — into a "short" podcast:

It also generates a shareable player page with intro, ready to post as a web link:

https://space.coze.cn/s/UnuTx1IxatQ/

Pretty impressive completion quality, pretty convincing sense of presence.

Reading this far, I imagine you're having the same worries and doubts we do: In the future, will Koji and Ronghui still need to record podcasts ourselves? How exactly will new AI technologies change creators? And what will they bring to consumers?

In this new media environment, how should Crossing create distinctive value? And how should we wisely use AI technology and products in content creation?

We hope, and believe, that features like Coze Space's podcast generator aren't about replacement — they're about expanding boundaries and imagination. Feed it dense long reads, new fields you want to explore, and it renders them as podcasts, web pages, charts — simple, accessible forms. Feed it the "dirty work" you don't want to do, let it knock out 80% so we can pour our energy and creativity into the 20% worth refining.

All of this — let's face the future together, feel it, try it, explore it.

13）

Finally: proactive founders, PMs, developers, and super-individuals — welcome to join the "New Generation of AI Founders" community we launched.