Author: Alice, Shenchao TechFlow
Recently, an interesting phenomenon has been observed in the AI circle: more and more female executives are stepping into the spotlight.
On December 30th, Meta announced it would acquire Manus for $2 billion, bringing 90s-born COO CZ Chen into the public eye. With an undergraduate degree from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and a master's from Columbia, she started working in 2018, first at Vanke, then at an FA agency, and made her final career move to Manus in 2024, achieving financial freedom directly.
On January 9th, at MiniMax's bell-ringing ceremony, standing alongside the 36-year-old founder Yan Junjie was a woman born in 1994, Yun Yeyi.
This 31-year-old COO now has a net worth of HKD 4.8 billion.
What is Yun Yeyi's background?
She studied electronic engineering at Johns Hopkins University, with minors in economics and mathematics. After graduating in 2017, she joined SenseTime, rising from financing manager to assistant to CEO Xu Li, and then to director of the innovation business department, experiencing SenseTime's journey from unicorn to listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
In 2022, when Yan Junjie decided to leave SenseTime to found MiniMax, Yun Yeyi followed almost without hesitation.
Her value goes beyond just following.
MiniMax's prospectus shows that Yun Yeyi handles almost everything outside of technical R&D: product, commercialization, board matters, operations, management... Her annual salary is $1.479 million, more than all other executive directors combined, a figure that speaks volumes.
It's not just in China; globally, the influence of women in the AI circle is undeniable.
Daniela Amodei, with a background in English literature, after working at Stripe and OpenAI, co-founded Anthropic with her brother Dario in 2021, serving as president, focusing on daily operations and commercialization, driving the marketization of Claude products.
Lila Ibrahim, former Intel executive, joined DeepMind in 2018 as its first COO, responsible for daily operations, partnerships, social impact, external affairs, and government relations.
Mira Murati, the Albanian-born former CTO of OpenAI, came to the U.S. on a scholarship at 16, moved from the Model X team at Tesla to OpenAI, and eventually left to found Thinking Machines Lab, valued at $9 billion...
This scene feels familiar.
From 2017 to 2021, during the golden age of crypto, a dazzling array of stars emerged, including a prominent presence of female CMOs and COOs.
The most well-known is undoubtedly Binance co-founder and CMO He Yi (now co-CEO). From Shanghai to Tokyo, then from Malta to Paris and Dubai, she was present at every strategic shift, helping the company become the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Lisa Loud, from Apple engineer to PayPal's Canadian market head, jumped to BitMEX as CMO in 2017. Subsequently, BitMEX once became the world's largest crypto trading platform for derivatives.
Cynthia Wu, COO of Matrixport, former vice president of product development at HKEX, brought traditional finance experience to crypto financial services, helping the company become one of Asia's largest digital asset service platforms.
......
Back then, crypto was the world's asset focus, and the spotlight naturally fell on these female executives at the center of the stage.
But the tide receded, and the protagonists changed.
Now, AI is the focus of the spotlight, so we see Daniela Amodei on the Forbes rich list, and Yun Yeyi radiant at MiniMax's listing ceremony.
Fundamentally, Crypto and AI are strikingly similar: "both cutting-edge and rudimentary."
Cutting-edge is reflected in the technology itself: blockchain reconstructs trust mechanisms, AI reconstructs productivity—both are underlying technologies that can change the world.
Rudimentary is reflected in the founder profile: mostly technical backgrounds, fluent in code, but unfamiliar with marketing, especially government and public relations.
This is the value of female COOs/CMOs. They are the bridge between technical geniuses and the external world, capable of deep dialogue with technical teams and telling compelling stories to investors and users.
Daniela Amodei translated AI safety philosophy into executable business strategies, allowing Claude to break through in the shadow of ChatGPT; Yun Yeyi brought MiniMax from the lab to the C-end market; He Yi long served as the chief customer officer, personally answering user questions and building trust.
When a product moves beyond the pure technical stage and increasingly needs to face the C-end, the advantages of female executives become more apparent.
After all, PR and product require not a confrontational mindset, but empathy.
From another perspective, capable female executives vote with their feet. They go where they can utilize their talents and create value. If they start leaving an industry, it indicates the disappearance of commercial certainty in that industry.
The problem in the crypto industry is obvious now: a lack of talent who can translate technology into products accepted by the masses. Mass adoption and positive externalities remain empty talk. Observing any emerging industry reveals this pattern: when female executives with technical understanding, business acumen, and narrative skills begin to rise, the industry truly shifts from technology-driven to commercialization and mass adoption.
Their emergence marks the true maturity of an industry.
The AI circle has already undergone this transition. Female executives like Daniela Amodei and Yun Yeyi are driving productization, moving AI from lab algorithms into daily life and the business world.
As for the crypto industry, if it can't retain "elites who can speak human language," then it deserves to remain stuck in the mud of PVP.
The flow of talent is the风向标 (wind vane) of the industry.
Where they go, value is created; where they leave, bubbles often burst.
