Unitree Robotics goes before the STAR Market committee today, on track to become China's first public humanoid robot company. As its first institutional angel investor, it is a good moment for us to revisit the early bet. Jack Zhang, founder of @GeekParkHQ, wrote ~4,000 words on how, in 2018, he wired nearly the entire first fund into @UnitreeRobotics. x.com/GeekParkHQ/status/2060… The highlights: 1/ How a 30-second clip on an obscure WeChat account started the whole bet. 2/ The first meeting: 3 hours, no deck, no desks, just a hallway couch. (Not even Unitree's!) 3/ Why hydraulics were a dead end for any commercial product, and electric the only road. 4/ How Wang Xingxing rebuilt a top lab's research architecture for under 20,000 RMB on motors he sourced and characterized himself. 5/ "I would not have written the same check for the same founder building the same robot in Palo Alto." 6/ How Unitree's two largest backers today - Lei Jun @Xiaomi and Wang Xing @meituan both met Xingxing in 2017 and passed. (Their stakes today: ~$800M.) 7/ What GeekPark did when the structure broke and Unitree's cash was about to run out. 8/ Why Xingxing bet from day1 that research labs were the right first customer. 9/ What matters to GeekPark more than the Unitree bet itself. Full read:

4,000 new millionaires, including cafeteria staff. Some SpaceX stories you probably haven’t heard: 1. The founding document is a spreadsheet made on a flight home from Moscow. In 2001 Musk flew to Russia to buy a decommissioned ICBM. The plan: send a small greenhouse to Mars as a publicity stunt. The Russians drank vodka with him, quoted an absurd price, and by one account a chief designer spat toward the group. On the flight back Musk built a cost model. Raw materials were about 3% of a rocket’s price. SpaceX was incorporated the next year. 2. Scotty’s ashes never made it to orbit. The first launch site was Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific, because no US range would take them. Flight 3 in 2008 carried the ashes of James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty in Star Trek. The stages collided after separation. Scotty did not get beamed up. 3. The company was saved on December 23, 2008. Flight 3’s failure left money for exactly one more rocket. The replacement stage got dented inside a C-17 mid-flight; the team repaired it instead of waiting, and Flight 4 reached orbit six weeks later. Even then, payroll was weeks from breaking. On Dec 23 NASA called with a $1.6B cargo contract. Tesla’s rescue financing closed the next day, Christmas Eve. Both companies had about three days of runway. 4. The landing barges are named by a science fiction writer. “Of Course I Still Love You” and “Just Read the Instructions” are sentient starships from Iain Banks’ Culture novels. A trillion-dollar company outsourced naming to Scottish sci-fi. 5. They used to catch rocket parts with fishing nets. A payload fairing costs about $6M, so SpaceX equipped boats with giant nets to catch them as they parachuted down. Then someone realized fishing them out of the seawater worked fine. The nets retired. 6. There is still a car in orbit around the sun. The 2018 Falcon Heavy test needed a dummy payload. Musk used his own Roadster, with a mannequin at the wheel, “Don’t Panic” on the dashboard, and a Hot Wheels version of the car mounted inside the car. It has completed multiple laps around the sun. Its owner now trades on Nasdaq as SPCX. $135 a share. Roughly $1.8 trillion. Bigger than Aramco. 4,000 new millionaires, including cafeteria staff. Eighteen years ago it was one failed launch and one missed phone call from zero.🚀

Worth revisiting: @luoyonghao at GeekPark IF last year. Full 1h20m now up. His call at the time - Shenzhen as the single best place on earth to build hardware - was debatable when he said it. And it isn't anymore. (File was too big for English subs, so you'll have to lean on real-time translation - but it's spicy enough to be worth it if you care about China hardware)

Living in SF since 2023, I’ve come to think the Bay Area’s biggest mental health challenge isn’t burnout. It’s spending a decade becoming world-class at something, then waking up to find a model getting surprisingly good at it too.

Invented in California. Manufactured in China. Most technologies start as luxuries and end as commodities - That is the hardest part. Repeatedly

WWDC26 won't change Apple's positive 2H26 share-price trend, but it will test the staying power of the bull narrative ‒‒ 1. Apple's core bull narrative right now is an almost intuitive market consensus that few people push back on: "Even if Apple is temporarily behind on AI, it will ultimately catch up and come out ahead." 2. Based on my latest supply-chain checks, I believe Apple's business momentum will remain strong through year-end, which should further reinforce the narrative into something like: "If Apple is doing this well without AI, just imagine once it has AI." 3. So regardless of what Apple says at WWDC26, as long as this core bull narrative stays intact, Apple's positive 2H26 share-price trend is unlikely to change. 4. That core bull narrative has its weak spots, but I think it has a good chance of holding at least through end-2026. How much longer it can last is what makes WWDC26 genuinely worth watching. 5. The key takeaway from WWDC26 will not be the short-term share-price reaction after the event. It will be whether Apple, using the same Gemini, can deliver better AI applications, agentic workflows, and on-device & cloud hybrid experiences than Google. 6. If the answer is yes, it would help extend Apple's core bull narrative. If the answer is no, it would suggest that Gemini sets the ceiling for Apple's AI experience. The stock may not necessarily turn bearish, but the "Apple will ultimately come out ahead" narrative would start to face growing scrutiny.

trying to #connect more founders / community leads actually building with AI in Southeast Asia right now. especially if you’re: - based in #Singapore or coming through in August - building in the AI-native layer (not wrappers, actual product bets) - from China or with China context - the cross-market lens is underrated here - doing the unglamorous work: evals, deployment, customer 0 to 10 - early enough that you don’t have a deck but you have a working demo - thinking seriously about what AGI transition means for your specific market We’re putting together a ~500 person meetup in Singapore this August. Want to connect before August with people who know the Singapore landscape - where the opportunity reads differently from this side of the world! reply or DM.

Landed in Shenzhen - the first thing I saw before the plane even pushed back.😂 The AI industry in China is grinding so hard.