We hosted our first ever Agent Builders Night in San Francisco with our friends at Foundry RL, Zhen Fund, and (special guest) Manus AI. It was blast — we heard from Tao on the Manus team about their journey from 0 to 3 million waitlisted users and becoming a global sensation, and then talked about the latest developments in reasoning models, (deep) search, browser agents, and more. We were lucky to be joined by top researchers and founders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Yutori, Firecrawl, Exa, and more.
For future events in SF, head over to our mailing list to be notified!
What’s Agent Builders Night?
Agent Builders Night is a builder-only gathering to talk about AI agents in a super chill environment! 🤖
We are bringing together some of the best product, research, and engineering minds to chat and maybe even spark some spontaneous collaborations.
Presentations are allowed, but we want to mostly jam on what you’re working on over snacks and drinks. Come by if you're building the next big agent platform or just shipped your first project.
What to expect:
- Show off your cool agent demos (bugs and all!)
- Trade tips and tricks with fellow builders in a laid-back setting
- Get inspired by what others are building in the space
- Make friends with other agent builders
The Event
Tao, who brings over a decade of product experience from founding a successful startup (later acquired) and leading product at ByteDance, walked us through Manus AI's fascinating evolution.
The journey began with monica.im, their initial product. Although it was very successful from the start, the team had much greater ambitions. The path to Manus was not a straight line:
- They started with a focused Chrome extension to prove the concept
- Then, they even built a browser themselves, with the goal to disrupt all of work as it’s known today
- Taking their learnings from the browser, it evolved into a general-purpose AI agent, with a remote browser powering each session
This step-by-step evolution allowed them to validate their approach at each stage while continuously learning from user feedback. Tao's extensive product background proved invaluable in guiding these strategic pivots and ensuring each iteration delivered more value to users.
Highlights of the talk
“Intelligence is the product” 🔥
Enough said. Manus is productionizing the first truly general agent—essentially AGI in your pocket! Instead of thinking about automating existing workflows, Manus is selling intelligence as a product.
Scaling law for labor 📈
The Manus team showed off their latest mantra which is “scaling law for labor”: they want to increase the number of work hours per person (done by the agent) over time. Instead of tracking DAUs or engagement hours like in social media products, Manus wants to see each user get 10-100x increase in agent hours, signaling the actual asynchronous work that they are getting out of the product. Huge idea!
Building Manus ✋
Manus is built on top of several off-the-shelf open source and closed source solutions, orchestrated together in harmony to create a magical experience:
- Claude Sonnet from Anthropic as the main LLM
- Browser Use, an open source package to browse and act on the web
- E2B, a platform for running containers for agents
The cost of running agents 💸
The takeaway here: agents use 1000x the number of tokens that AI chatbots do! As a result, Manus has become the one of the largest customers of their cloud providers. As Jensen Huang said during his NVIDIA GTC keynote, agents will need a lot more compute, as most of the computation shifts from training time to inference time.
Our next meetup
We have several more amazing guests lined up for our Agent Builders’ series. If you’d like to be notified for our next event, sign up for the mailing list here. See you again next time!
