Manus' story is a bit dreamy and relatively recent, recording a few feelings and details. 1/ In 2024, ByteDance will offer $30 million to purchase Monica, which is not cheap for a browser plug-in product. Xiao Hong's previous SaaS project was sold for several hundred million RMB. This may not be enough confidence when facing a $30 million offer. If Monica had sold it at that time, there wouldn't have been Manus' story. Delivery takes time, and with the Monica framework, compared to starting from scratch as an AI agent, it will be a different time cycle for team building, financing, and product development. In the past two years, the competition in AI has been intense, and the landscape has been refreshed every few months. Things have changed in just one year. The Manus product has been under development for over a year and has been online for less than 10 months. 2/ Even if it's a "multi billion dollar" acquisition, there are still many people who question whether Xiao Zha is "stupid and has more money", and who question whether Manus has much technical content. This is similar to the cryptocurrency industry, where those who look down on Chinese people are often also Chinese. The core of Manus is to perceive user needs and innovatively open up the track of universal agents. If To C's products can be integrated into Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp products, this acquisition is worth it. Of course, Zuckerberg has always been willing to spend a lot of money on acquisitions. When Instagram was acquired for $1 billion, the team consisted of only 12 people; Later, it acquired Whatsapp for $19 billion and Scale AI for $14.3 billion. 3/ Apart from a few founders, ZhenFund is the biggest institutional winner behind this acquisition. Liu Yuan invested in Xiao Hong for multiple rounds, accompanied him for 10 years, and had some withdrawals; Zhen Ge had invested in Ji Yichao's project a long time ago and later introduced him to Xiao Hong; Zhang Tao and Yusen are netizens from the blog era (Yo! Group friends). Zhang Tao has actually done EIR and was introduced to Xiao Hong by Yusen. The story of the last investor driven restructuring team is that Wuyuan Capital made Suhua and Cheng Yixiao work together for Kwai; This time, ZhenFund brought Zhang Tao, Ji Yichao, and Xiao Hong together to create Manus. Good investors are the boosters that support entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams. This kind of mutual achievement story cannot be seen in the cryptocurrency industry. VC institutions in the cryptocurrency industry will only urge you to issue coins quickly and care about when you will be listed on Binance. Although both are aimed at exiting and making money, the difference between the two markets is still vastly different. 4/ I forgot who mentioned it a few days ago on the website (I can't find that tweet), saying that they saw Manus' recent actions, such as disclosing revenue data and conducting product reviews, indicating that they were probably in the process of financing or discussing acquisitions. This intuition is too accurate. Finally, congratulations to many people!