Liang Wenfeng built a $60 billion AI company in three years. He says he did it without making anyone stay late.
The DeepSeek founder revealed his management philosophy during a nearly four-hour discussion with staff, transcribed and obtained by Tencent Technology. His core message was simple: no KPIs, no overtime culture, no performance theater.
“We generally don’t work overtime,” Liang said during the session. For a company that has racked up roughly 173 million downloads since its public launch in January 2025, that’s a remarkable statement.
How DeepSeek got here
DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 in Hangzhou. In under two years, it went from obscurity to directly challenging ChatGPT’s dominance in the consumer AI space.
