Malvin's Greatest Hits

葬AI葬AI··0·15

The Bible has arrived.

"The Bible Has Arrived"

LatePost published an interview with Malvin today. After deep-diving into it, I'm utterly shaken — learned so much, and my respect for the Emperor of Mian has ascended to new heights.

As the public account that respects Malvin the most on the entire internet, ZangAI has always believed that Malvin will become the next Yiming Zhang, and LibTV will become the next ByteDance.

Since the "quotations" format has been trending lately, I studied all of Malvin's past conversations, compiled 66 quotes in advance, and have the audacity to title this collection The Analects of Mianzi.

Welcome to read The Analects of Mianzi and spread the word. The Emperor of Mian will bless you with good health, smooth sailing, windfall profits from all directions, a skyrocketing future, early elevation to social elite status, a company valuation breaking $10 billion, a Panamera in your garage, a luxury penthouse, financial freedom, world travel, immortality, and eternal life.

Amian 🙏🙏🙏

01

This part is the most important, everyone memorize it

  1. The money in our company account keeps growing, yet people insist we're bleeding to death, that we're about to implode. I'm genuinely confused. Wouldn't I know if we're losing money?

  2. Our turnover rate is certainly not low, but being a low-turnover CEO isn't my ambition.

  3. Let's go, go, go! We can do this, we can do this! Do it now, throw all resources at it!

  4. Didn't I say this last time — why hasn't it been fixed — just leave it — let users see it?

  5. At this rate the company will go bankrupt!

  6. I made a terrible decision. I said everyone could call themselves co-founder, so we probably had 10 co-founders.

  7. Internally we have no titles. And in terms of importance, there are no real co-founders either.

  8. No co-founders have left recently (and none will in the future).

  9. Different times call for different measures. (Paraphrased.)

  10. Hahahahahahahahahahaha!

  11. Go back to working at ByteDance.

  12. I'm building a long-term company, not something to flip and sell.

02

This part is also important — Malvin directly addresses where LibTV's profits come from and the copying accusations

  1. When LibTV launched, we pushed a 3.9-discount annual membership. That's just low pricing — where's the subsidy?

  2. Of course we wouldn't sell APIs at 3.9 discount. I'd be insane!

  3. Users buy 1 million credits but only use 200,000. The remaining 800,000 is our profit. There are also black-market users who reverse-engineer LibTV and turn annual memberships into APIs — then we lose money. So we have to crack down.

  4. Xiaoming (Leon Ming, founder of Youware) posted on WeChat Channels praising our paid acquisition skills. I thanked him immediately for the support, but I want to say we barely do paid acquisition...

  5. We can't even open accounts on mainstream video platforms — we literally can't spend money if we wanted to. Only 3-4% of our revenue comes from paid acquisition. We spend millions of RMB per month on it.

  6. We're not pursuing low gross margins — it's phase-specific low margins.

  7. I thought about reaching out to them (TapNow) to chat, maybe invest a bit, encourage innovation. They ignored us.

  8. At the time we were frantically catching up to Lovart, also facing overseas competition, no bandwidth for video. Wanted to invest in a赛道 we hadn't entered. Later realized — crap, this赛道 is bigger than my main business. Better do it myself, haha.

  9. I'll admit LibTV wasn't the first product to find PMF. Someone else got the PMF signal first, the market saw it, but they didn't out-execute us.

  10. With LibTV, we identified the right product model, showed everyone this is the correct answer for the current version. Now everyone looks the same.

  11. I don't think Interface is the most important innovation, and it's hard to have absolute zero-to-one original innovation. You're constantly evolving and borrowing.

  12. All node-based products look identical to anyone who doesn't know them well.

  13. In business, no one hands you PMF just because you found it first. It's impossible!

  14. In the history of human tech competition, the gap between first discovering PMF and ultimately winning the market is vast.

Actually the key point of this section can be explained with two images:

If everyone in Image 2 rents out their quota like that, how will my Emperor of Mian turn a profit? Strongly condemned. Everyone should learn from Image 1.

03

On money, Malvin says long-termism starts with asking whether you have $10 billion in the bank

  1. If you want to pursue long-termism, first ask yourself if you have $10 billion in your account.

  2. Welcome to join us — we have money too.

  3. If you don't have enough money, can't even afford API fees, how do you compete?

  4. I believe I can raise money, therefore I will raise money.

  5. Actually subsidies work like this: as long as no one else is doing it, we don't need to. Once one person does it, the whole industry goes to hell.

  6. Burn two or three million dollars and you win — competitors are gone. First in China, then got taken down. Once taken down, we survived! Oh right, we survived, and our users came back.

  7. Of course we have to wage subsidy wars. How do you win without fighting? Without fighting, we get eliminated.

  8. Every great company starts out pretty aggressive. How am I impressive without aggression? How do I survive without being impressive?

  9. If we hadn't raised a lot of money, we couldn't have done this at all.

  10. Our first-gen and second-gen products had no paid acquisition, no resources — all based on cognitive judgment. I felt this thing would blow up at this moment, and being first to build it in this window would make it blow up.

  11. During competition, we had fifty or sixty people. Ran out of money, immediately cut to thirty. Layoffs right away. Looking back, I was rational — moved very fast. But at the time everyone was stunned. One second we're crushing it. Next second — huh, layoffs?

04

Lovart may no longer be the top priority, but it gave Malvin joy

  1. Our team couldn't understand why we had to launch so fast. How would they know what happens if we're late? I went crazy. I said we can't be late — being late means no chance! Don't do it and we die!

  2. Lovart is being copied by all kinds of products now.

  3. Our team has no product managers, only designers.

  4. It's deeply satisfying. This is the best part of entrepreneurship for me. We're willing to endure immense pain for it — but the longer you grope in darkness, the brighter the light you see. Oh crazy, this is so good, so good.

  5. Celebration is just getting hyped in your own head for a long time. That's how we celebrate — no time to celebrate, so it's all self-hype, self-hype, self-hype, dancing around at home alone. Yes, the ultimate hype is the current state — just feels so good.

  6. You don't have to be first, but you must be in the first wave.

  7. AI entrepreneurship right now is "cognitive lead + extreme execution." Just execute like hell, execute extremely fast — that's what matters most.

05

On Manus, Malvin has expressed respect

  1. Lovart didn't copy Manus. I didn't even know Manus existed when I built it — how could I copy? The replay feature was indeed inspired by Manus, but that was added right before launch.

  2. I'm very grateful to Manus... We were working on Lovart before Manus launched, otherwise we couldn't have built it so quickly. Honestly, what made us prepare aggressively and feel certain about the direction was when Manus blew up.

  3. As Manus advocates — "less structure, more intelligence" — we deeply agree.

  4. Think about it: if Manus hadn't built Manus after their first product, and we hadn't built Lovart quickly, the company's situation would be completely different.

  5. The random factor might be Manus. Manus happened to get attention and blow up first. Before Manus there was DeepSeek. Not exactly the same, but maybe the collective narrative was calling for this type of product.

06

In this freezing winter for AI applications, Malvin issued the following directives

  1. I also don't think application layers should have high gross margins early on, especially within a year of launch — storage, chips, SOTA models all have 70-80% margins. For applications to also have 70-80%? It's not reasonable!

  2. AI application gross margins shouldn't exceed 30% in the short term.

  3. Endlessly integrating models is inevitable. Driving penetration in this era depends on integrating models. Everyone needs to face reality, okay?

  4. It turns out, people who aren't anxious can't build AI applications well.

  5. I'm very anxious. The team is very anxious too. But if you really want to do AI entrepreneurship well, you need to coexist with anxiety.

  6. My anxious personality — maybe I was chosen by this era. The AI era rewards people who are faster, more anxious, more aggressive.

  7. My advice: push for more aggressive growth. For all entrepreneurs, this is the best era, and the most cutthroat era.

07

Finally, on himself, Malvin says he's a Gemini

  1. I'm a Gemini, so I should be sometimes manic, talking crazy, and sometimes very soft, unable to bring myself to yell at people.

  2. I'm a Gemini, right? Felt great for a couple days, then these past two days — ugh, nothing but problems. When I'm feeling good I'm not even doing anything special, just simple happiness, haha.

  3. I yell at people, I yell. Yell pretty hard when I do, but normally we're close. Sometimes, ugh, this back-and-forth is exhausting, hahahaha.

  4. I'm basically always going crazy in the group chat. And this crazy isn't just yelling — sharing insights, which people might or might not get at that moment, but everyone can feel my energy and passion.

  5. People's assessment of me is that I do have some reality distortion field, pulling everyone who gets close into working.

  6. I'm actually a very passionate person — someone who often shouts with excitement in the office.

  7. I've been through almost every major war in China's mobile internet history... So basically I've been through every battle, and I know who will win, who will lose, why they win, why they lose, what happened inside — I know almost all of it.

  8. Make a huge ruckus, then slip away quietly — that's my wish too.

  9. I'm not entrepreneurship for entrepreneurship's sake. I'm here to win.

  10. What comes by luck will be returned by luck.

So, Liblib, what is your dream?

The Emperor of Mian says: To make the world a little richer.

To express our reverence for the Emperor of Mian, we've also built a Malvin quotations website (libtv.md), which turns his quotes into a fortune-drawing function. All disciples of Mian can seek his guidance at any time. The site also features a Malvin King of Fighters game made by a great disciple.

Welcome to visit libtv.md (desktop browser recommended).

Tonight at 8 PM, we'll also livestream a word-by-word interpretation of the Emperor's quotations.

All disciples of Mian are welcome to join the mic and share your reverence. Amian!

(Cover image generated by ChatGPT, quotes manually transcribed)