He Ran Out of Money.
He Took Notes.
The winter Nathan Xu spent in Amsterdam, he ate on coins scraped from a savings jar. He was a finance student from Wuhan on exchange at Vrije Universiteit, and the money had run out in the particular way it does when you're 22 and far from home. He ate anyway. He stayed anyway. That willingness to sit inside discomfort - to not call it quits just because the pantry was bare - became the thing he'd lean on for the next decade.
After graduating, he tried banking. He didn't last. Then he tried startups: one to help Chinese students apply overseas, then two more whose names don't matter because both collapsed. Three swings. Three misses. Most people count to two and walk away. Xu counted to four.
In 2021, Xu partnered with Charles Liu - a Shenzhen factory owner who'd spent years making smartwatches - and launched iZYRec, a $50 miniature recorder. It sold reasonably. Then ChatGPT launched. Xu looked at iZYRec and then looked at what AI could do to a recorder. He saw a different product entirely. "I wanted to create a beautiful business," he said later, "and software gives it a moat and sustainability."
In 2022, he moved to Shenzhen - an unusual decision for someone building toward Silicon Valley. But Shenzhen is the only city on earth where you can hold a supply chain in your hands. The complete ecosystem for sourcing components, customizing cases, testing firmware - it's all within 30 minutes of any direction. Xu wasn't trying to look like a Silicon Valley founder. He was trying to build a real product fast.
"In the next decade, every single person is going to have a wearable AI device. It will be more popular than smartphones."
Nathan Xu — Forbes Interview, 2025The Plaud Note launched on Kickstarter in June 2023 - a 50-day campaign for a credit-card-sized device that clips magnetically to an iPhone case. Within 36 hours: $200,000. By the end: over $1 million. No PR firm. No Series A. No celebrity co-founder. Just a product that did one thing well enough that people told each other about it.
By 2024, Plaud had $100 million in annual revenue. By the time most founders are still arguing about product-market fit over their Series B, Nathan Xu was turning a profit. Not break-even. Profit - margins he compared to Apple's.