Xiangpeng Wan

100 Conversations: I am talking to 100 people about how they build, work and think in the age of AI.

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KPMG Cut Four Hundred Assistant Managers. Amy Decided to Become the Auditor Who Works Best with AI

A text-based reconciliation used to take Amy three days; Excel couldn't handle it, so someone had to check it line by line. This year the job went to the company's Copilot: ten minutes to finish, plus an hour of her review. KPMG next door cut four hundred assistant managers this year, and senior leadership said in a meeting that by 2030 all workpapers and testing will be done by AI, with junior staff becoming AI operators. Amy doesn't think this is all bad news: feeling the pressure is a good thing; what's truly bad is a company that isn't using AI at all, leaving you to repeat the same work day after day. Her advice to herself: stay at the table, and become the employee in audit and compliance who collaborates with AI best.

KPMG Cut Four Hundred Assistant Managers. Amy Decided to Become the Auditor Who Works Best with AI

Salesforce Offered Him Another 150k to Stay. He Said: This Is Not My Ceiling

The day he left Salesforce, the company offered Zheng Qian another 150k raise to keep him. He left anyway, saying the salary was about as high as it goes in London, but that was not his ceiling. Born in 1995, he is building a new company with the same engineers who were acquired alongside him: the market said no to his product twice, and he added one layer, then another, before customers finally paid. Emails converted at nearly zero, so he hired people to make ten thousand cold calls. His outsourced sales team was so won over by the vision that they took pay cuts to join. Ideas, he says, rank behind conviction and team; a brilliant idea is not the starting point of a startup, it is a byproduct.

Salesforce Offered Him Another 150k to Stay. He Said: This Is Not My Ceiling

The Moment Her Life Truly Turned Around, Nothing About Her Situation Had Changed

A failed startup, failed investments, failed research, failed PhD applications. Yue says her world felt like a black swamp dragging her down. Yet the moment her life truly turned around, nothing had changed: the fracture hadn't healed, the offer hadn't come, New York was still muggy. I asked her how she did it. She smiled and said: maybe because I have failed too many times. Today she is a fully funded AI PhD student at Imperial College London, part of the first Asian team to exhibit at the Louvre and the British Museum, and she calls herself a super player.

The Moment Her Life Truly Turned Around, Nothing About Her Situation Had Changed

He Left Investment Banking to Start a Company, and Chose Not to Build a Workplace AI Assistant

He led an AI team at an investment bank, but most of the products died in compliance review. When Zac quit to start his own company, he avoided the white-collar market of document writing, customer service, and coding assistants: that market may end up swallowed by OpenAI and Anthropic. He chose construction instead. When a site stalls for a day, workers still clock in, equipment rentals still run, and money still burns. The messy data scattered across paper, Excel, and phone calls is both the barrier to entry and his moat.

He Left Investment Banking to Start a Company, and Chose Not to Build a Workplace AI Assistant

I Found Something More Fun Than Gaming

A gaming addict who failed several courses in his sophomore year and nearly got expelled, barely reaching 1900 on the Dota ladder. Ten years later, he turned down a postdoc offer from a top American university and invitations from leading AI labs to start his own company. One of the earliest LLM-based multi-agent open source frameworks, its core code written in a single night. He says agent research was the first time he found something more fun than gaming.

I Found Something More Fun Than Gaming