Unplanned Venture Podcast

https://unplanned.live/ep02In an era when AI is changing everything, Levy Cheng built a company around the one thing it can't: the human desire to understand your own fate.Levy Cheng is the founder of FateTell, a consumer AI app combining large language models with Chinese fate-reading (命理), targeting overseas markets. He's also spent ten years practicing Zen meditation. In a world of sprint-and-pivot AI founders, he's one of the stillest people we've met.In this conversation:→ Why he's been waiting since 2017 for reasoning models to make AI fortune-telling accurate→ The "millennial need" thesis: fate-reading as universal and ancient as food and shelter→ How Bazi (八字) is actually just ancient observational astronomy — the same underlying logic as Western astrology→ The "car and road" metaphor: destiny vs. fate, autopilot vs. steering→ Why AlphaGo is the right analogy for what happens when AI meets traditional masters→ Chinese cultural export: from Black Myth: Wukong to Li Ziqi to FateTell→ Three things FateTell will never build→ Live Jiaobeï divination throw at the end — will FateTell become a unicorn?hosted by Tongtong Chan and Clara Jiang.

Everyone talks about being AI-native. Qiajin Shen actually built it.In the debut episode of Unplanned, Tongtong and Clara sit down with Qiajin Shen, founder of ideaFlow — the company behind 造梦次元, one of China’s fastest-growing AI content communities with 10M+ users.We talk about how a 50-person startup made AI part of the org, not just the workflow; why AI-generated comments were killed after three days; and what “aliveness” means when your product is built around AI characters.We talk about:→ How ideaFlow routes the entire idea-to-code pipeline through AI agents — and what that actually does to headcount→ Why "context infrastructure" is the unsexy prerequisite to every AI-native org (and how a missed recording permission delayed an entire article by a night)→ How AI picked the same logo as their best designer, with better reasoning→ Why AI auto-comments got killed three days after launch — and what "aliveness" means for social products→ Why your avatar shouldn't be your agent (ideaFlow's Digimon theory of digital identity)→ All needs are old needs: why the deepest roots last the longest, and how Tongtong recognized ideaFlow's users because she used to be one→ AI as amplifier: imagination, judgment, curiosity — the three things worth protectingPlus: the elderly man in Northeast China who asks Doubao to remember where he put his blue box. The user eating an orange whose AI noticed. Three investors and a founder comparing AI-organized download folders.Guest: Qiajin Shen — Founder, ideaFlowHosts: Tongtong & Clara — Investors at FutureX Capital // NYX ventures