DeepSeek founder’s doubt leads entrepreneur Luo Yonghao to embrace his gift of gab

Founder of defunct smartphone brand Smartisan said DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng told him he was among the best in China at ‘earning a living by talking’

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Published: 6:00pm, 23 Jun 2025

Meeting in a hotel lobby in Beijing in January, DeepSeek Founder Liang Wenfeng posed a soul-searching question to Luo Yonghao, a former English teacher turned entrepreneur: why would someone whose best asset is his eloquence start a technology company?

The exchange – recounted by Luo in Beijing on Saturday at an event hosted by Founder Park, a community for tech entrepreneurs – came just before DeepSeek’s large language models began attracting global attention for offering high performance at low cost. Liang, 40, had helped Luo’s team resolve technical issues with accessing the foundational model DeepSeek-V3.

Luo also provided more details about Liang’s character amid intense national interest in the entrepreneur.

“If you talk about a question he hasn’t thought about, he’ll talk with you about it with wide-eyed curiosity and seriousness,” Luo said of Liang. “The level of curiosity about something he doesn’t understand, and a strong desire to learn about it, are common in students but hard to see in adults.”

Luo Yonghao became well known in China for his big boasts as CEO of his smartphone start-up Smartisan. Photo: Sohu.com

Luo, 53, rose to prominence in the early 2000s for his charismatic teaching at New Oriental Education & Technology, best known for its English-teaching services. He later launched several ventures, including the blog aggregator Bullog.cn – shut down by authorities in 2009 – and most famously Smartisan Technology, a smartphone brand once known for its ambitious promises that went bankrupt and sold its patents to TikTok owner ByteDance.

Luo has since become a fixture in China’s short video, live-streaming and television scenes.