James Lo and the things a CV leaves out

James Lo has a useful qualification for someone trying to improve how people find work: he has been turned down quite a lot. In 2022, while building Mana, he counted at least 50 job rejections and 130 venture funds that had passed. A professional profile tends to leave that sort of thing out. It prefers the university, the employers, the successful fundraise. The result is tidy, and rather selective.

Lo’s tidy version is easy to assemble. He studied at the London School of Economics, worked at McKinsey and SoftBank Vision Fund, and became a founder. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Ethos, a London company using AI to connect people’s expertise with opportunities. In May 2026, it announced a $22.75 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz.

But the interesting part lies between those entries. Lo has spent years trying different ways to help people get access to someone or something that might change their prospects. A student enterprise. A mentorship platform. An expert network. The products keep moving. The question has proved harder to shift.

The arithmetic of rejection

Lo started an educational social enterprise at 16 in Hong Kong. His teenage years also included pro-democracy activism. Those are early encounters with a practical difficulty: wanting a different outcome means organizing people, persuading them to participate, and finding a way to keep the effort going.

Consulting and investing supplied a different education. At McKinsey and later SoftBank, his work included enterprise problems involving Arm and WeWork. These were environments where organizations paid to obtain information and judgment. Expertise had a buyer. Finding the relevant person could be worth a considerable amount of effort.

That background makes the later move into mentorship understandable. The ability to reach someone with useful experience had already become a recurring concern in his career. Mana offered a way to make that contact available more widely. It brought accomplished people within reach of someone seeking advice, through a booked conversation.

The £1.5 million pre-seed round, led by Flash Ventures and Global Founders Capital, gave the venture backing. The rejection count gave it a less polished companion story. Fundraising eventually produces a number fit for an announcement. Getting there supplies a much longer list of people who said no.

There is something refreshing about keeping both accounts in view. The funded founder and the rejected applicant are the same person. A system designed to recognize only the first would miss quite a bit of what the second had learned.

A different kind of access

Mana exposed a problem that goodwill could not settle. People who needed mentorship were often poorly placed to pay for it. The service could attract interest while struggling with the economics of serving its intended audience. Demand for help and a sustainable way to provide it were separate matters.

By 2023, Lo had stepped away. He has described financial obligations to his family as part of that decision, alongside the difficulty of the business model. The experience matters to the Ethos story because it put a price on the word “access.” Opening a door is useful. Someone still has to cover the cost of keeping it open.

On his January 2025 return to the 40 Minute Mentor podcast, the discussion had moved from exiting Mana to building another company. Ethos was still in stealth. Its ambition was already recognizable: connect people with economic opportunity. The earlier venture had changed, but Lo had returned to a closely related problem.

There is a consequential difference in the transaction. Mentorship asks someone to pay for knowledge that might help them later. An expert network finds an organization with an immediate reason to buy someone’s experience. The person with that experience can earn money from the conversation. For Lo, that offered another route toward the access he had been pursuing.

The person behind the job title

His co-founder, Daniel J. Mankowitz, arrived from Google DeepMind. The pairing brought a commercial operator together with a researcher in reinforcement learning. Lo understood the organizational appetite for expertise. Mankowitz brought experience developing AI systems. Their starting point was a business whose purpose could be explained without a technical diagram: find the person who knows the relevant thing.

The diagram becomes useful a moment later. Ethos tries to capture information that a conventional professional profile misses. A title tells you someone’s position. A conversation can reveal which problems they have encountered, which decisions they understand, and where their knowledge might apply. Public work, including papers, code and patents, can add further evidence.

In March 2025, Ethos had more than 17,000 experts signed up and was working with over 25 investment firms and consultancies, according to its seed investor’s announcement. Those were early company figures, attached to a particular moment. They described a working network as well as a proposal.

The wider ambition was to make those connections useful beyond research calls. Expertise might lead to advisory work, a fractional role or a full-time position. Once someone’s experience becomes easier to understand, there may be several reasons to contact them. The company’s task is to make the reason specific enough that both sides want the conversation.

An interview with the interviewer

One of Lo’s public demonstrations put him in an unusual seat. An Ethos AI interviewer asked about his move from McKinsey and SoftBank into building Mana. The subject of the product had become its subject. His own experience was material to be explored.

He described giving the system three starting questions, then letting it probe and follow up. The demonstration illustrates what he wants these conversations to do. A useful answer can contain the next useful question. A form is less accommodating; it generally sits there waiting for the next box.

Another public post supplied a joke at the industry’s expense. People at Ethos had received expert-call requests from a competing expert network, asking about their own expert network. “Life has truly gone full circle,” Lo wrote.

The incident is funny because the machinery becomes visible. Even the businesses devoted to locating expertise need help understanding their own market. Someone has a question, someone else has experience, and a third party tries to arrange an introduction. Lo is trying to make that arrangement easier. Occasionally, it arrives in his own colleagues’ inboxes.

Choosing the person across the table

For all the talk of automated matching, Lo’s fundraising advice is unusually concerned with individuals. He advises founders to choose the individual partner, rather than being swayed by the firm’s identity. The distinction came during his January 2025 podcast appearance. It sounds like something learned after enough meetings to stop being dazzled by the name on the invitation.

“You’re choosing the person and not the firm.”

James Lo, on fundraising

His account of meeting a16z’s Anish Acharya has a warmer register than a financing announcement. Lo described a shared view of technology as an enabler of human creation. He also mentioned their appreciation for Italian red wines. Conviction may get a meeting started; apparently a decent bottle can help it along.

General Catalyst’s account of getting to know the founders includes conversations about philosophy and the arts. These details give the investor relationships some texture. The people funding a system for discovering human knowledge were also spending time finding out what interested the humans building it.

By September 2026, Lo and Acharya were appearing together on 40 Minute Mentor to discuss building and scaling Ethos. The episode’s promotional description reported 84-fold growth and a team of eight. Those are claims from that episode’s presentation, rather than audited results. The conversation also addressed differentiation and the choice of London as a place to build.

The business model has to work for both sides

The May 2026 investment announcement offered a more concrete picture of the network’s reach: over 35,000 experts joining each week, with clients including investment funds, consultancies and AI labs. It also said top earners were making more than $10,000 a month. That last figure describes selected earners, rather than what a typical participant should expect.

The distinction matters to Lo’s underlying proposition. A large pool of profiles is useful only if relevant work can find its way through it. A person’s willingness to describe their experience has value when it leads to a reason for somebody else to pay. The transaction has to satisfy both the buyer of expertise and its owner.

This is where the personal story and the business story meet. Lo has already tried a venture in which the need for access exceeded people’s ability to fund it. Ethos puts paying demand on the other side of the match. Its promise depends on keeping those two sides connected as the uses for expertise expand.

Lo’s career can be compressed into a few recognizable names. The more revealing version includes the rejections, the company he left, the repeated attempts to make an introduction useful. He is now building software to ask people for the details that professional shorthand drops. His own history suggests there is quite a lot worth asking about.