Nate Lee

From Entrepreneur to Explorer

For the past decade, I've been building in tech — shipping products, running projects, and leading teams.

Backed by IDG and other top VCs / Served most of China's leading tech companies / Helped 100+ Chinese and international AI teams grow / Built teams of hundreds across Indonesia and Brazil / Founded Aheadfour, a top-3 tech MCN on Bilibili / Created Effie, an immersive writing app featured multiple times by the App Store / Built a website with tens of millions of monthly visits / Contributed to Shanghai Lingang's super-individual economy initiative / Early-stage consumer investor, backed Molly Tea and other notable brands

More than "doing business," what has always driven me is technology and product. In 2024, I went all-in on building AI products — and along the way, I realized something: to build AI-native products, you need an AI-native organization first.

I had multiple offices in Shanghai, branches overseas — everything kept scaling toward "bigger." I know the power of organizations, and I know their cost just as well.

In 2025, I stepped down as CEO of my companies, retaining only equity and partnership roles. In 2026, I set out again.

This time, I'm making myself the experiment — no longer a general rallying troops, but a sniper on the front line, exploring an entirely new way of organizing:

AI-Native Organization: Minimal people + Maximum AI + Radically flexible collaboration

Nate's AI Brief
Daily · AI research digest for practitioners · ai-brief.liziran.com

As an AI practitioner, I know a common pain point: the real breakthroughs live in academic papers, but most people don't have time to wade through them — especially when hundreds are published every day.

Every day, I screen papers from arXiv and Hugging Face for high-value research and explain in plain language: what happened, why it matters, and how it might relate to your work.

Skip the secondhand summaries. Three minutes a day, straight from the source.

300+
Papers screened daily
3-5
Curated picks
3min
Daily reading time

Toolbox

Small tools I built and use myself. Since I use them daily, they'll always be maintained — feel free to use them.

Photo Slideshow, a minimal floating photo viewer for macOS
Open Source Swift MIT

You have tens of thousands of photos sitting in your library, untouched since the day you took them. Photo Slideshow brings them back — a transparent floating window on your desktop that quietly cycles through your photo library. No need to set aside time to browse albums; just glance up between tasks and there's a beautiful memory.

A menu bar app — doesn't take up your Dock, doesn't block your work, controls only appear on hover. Connects directly to your system photo library or a custom folder. Open and go.

You took all those photos. You should see them.

GitHub
CoverAI, AI video thumbnail generator
Open Source HTML+JS Coming Soon

A great video means nothing if no one clicks. CoverAI generates multiple high-quality thumbnails at once, supports uploaded assets and reference images, and adapts to all platform dimensions. My recent video thumbnails were all made with it.

Preparing for public release.

SubtitleAI, AI video subtitle generator
Open Source Python Coming Soon

AI subtitle tools on the market aren't great — filler words left in, technical terms butchered, awkward line breaks.

This tool is different. Best-in-class recognition model as the foundation for higher accuracy; AI automatically filters filler words for clean subtitles; provide a transcript or glossary for precise term and name correction, or let it self-correct; AI-optimized line breaks and timing for natural rhythm with no flickering.

Outputs SRT and FCPXML — imports directly into Final Cut Pro, and works with other editors too.

Not just "usable" subtitles — broadcast-ready subtitles.

Preparing for public release.

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