Shenzhen is the Technology Capital of the World, with Taylor Ogan – #107

Recorded live in Shenzhen with Taylor Ogan, the founder and CEO of

Snowbull Capital, which invests in Chinese technology companies.

Taylor on X:

https://x.com/TaylorOgan

Previous episodes with Taylor:

https://youtu.be/iehHON07UHI?si=h2c3po5AX9Z9ANaK 

https://youtu.be/fmjR3me5s_Q?si=sPsMFOdKebEOZXQr

• (00:00) - Shenzhen is the Technology Capital of the World, with Taylor Ogan
• (00:53) - Meeting in Shenzhen
• (02:40) - Greater Bay Area Explained
• (06:36) - Shenzhen Boom Stories
• (18:26) - China Tech Reality Check
• (36:49) - China Tech Leapfrogging
• (37:52) - Agentic AI on Phones
• (41:27) - Jobs Wealth and Governance
• (53:03) - Huawei Ownership and US Pushback

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. 

Mechanize is hiring! 

https://mechanize.work/b/hsu 

Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. 

For example: 

Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary 

Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary 

Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.