Yang Zhilin

🇨🇳 Yang Zhilin

🤖 From LLM researcher to a $3.3B AI unicorn: Yang Zhilin founded Moonshot AI, brought Alibaba and Tencent on board, and at the age of 31 he is seen as one of China’s hottest founders. PhD from Carnegie Mellon, stints at Meta and Google Brain, co-authored papers with LeCun and Bengio. His first startup, Recurrent AI, analyzes sales calls for a wide range of companies.

👉 Lesson learned: Deep tech expertise is your lever, but you need a clear business playbook to scale it. Combine research chops with rapid product iteration and strong investors, and you’ll build markets—not just models.