Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta on the Past, Present, & Future of Software

**Turner Novak** (0:03)
Chetan, welcome to the show.

**Chetan Puttagunta** (0:04)
Thanks for having me.

**Turner Novak** (0:05)
I want to jump right in. First thing on the docket, so you're coming off, you invest in a company called Manus.

**Chetan Puttagunta** (0:11)
Yes.

**Turner Novak** (0:12)
And I saw your partner, Eric, who I had on the podcast this summer. He tweeted something about, it was like a thousand percent IRR. I forget exactly what he said, but it was like, oh, that's a pretty big number. What's the story behind Manus?

**Chetan Puttagunta** (0:26)
Absolutely. And you had a great episode with Eric too. And, you know, Manus was just one of the unique consumer AI agent products that really spiked. And obviously the Meta acquisition has been announced. And, you know, it was an incredible journey to be on that, on that product journey with that team. They're just the six founders, which is a large group of founders. But I think that seems to be a theme in AI, which is like to have a lot of founders.

**Turner Novak** (1:00)
The more founders, the better. So if I meet some of 10 co-founders, it's instant check.

**Chetan Puttagunta** (1:05)
That's right.
You know, are just some of the most resilient, brilliant and kind people that you'll meet. And, you know, the story really starts with, you know, these dates are directionally accurate, if not precise. But, you know, first week of March, they posted a YouTube video with a demo of Manus. And, you know, I saw it in the first couple of hours of them posting it, somebody, somebody I follow on Twitter posted it on Twitter saying, like, I saw this cool demo of an AI agent. I clicked into the YouTube link, saw the video, and then went to the website and signed up for the beta. And I think a couple of hours later, I got beta access to Manus and I used it. And I was thoroughly wowed by the experience. And the reason I was thoroughly wowed, so this is March of 2025, obviously, we're well past the ChatGPT moment. You know, I was a user of ChatGPT, user of Clawed, user of Gemini, user of Cursor, et cetera, et cetera. But what they were presenting was an agent product that could actually get further on task than any other AI product had at that point.
And it really felt magical when I first tried it. And immediately, I texted all my partners, and I said, sign up for the beta of this thing. It's really magical. And then I just reached out to the founders because I wanted to know who they were. And just wanted to know about, like, what they were working on and how Manus worked. Like, how did Manus get so much further on task than a regular AI chat pod? What were they doing? What was, like, their key breakthrough? What was... What did they learn to, like, get there?

**Turner Novak** (2:59)
Yeah. What was it?

**Chetan Puttagunta** (3:00)
And so what they had figured out was, you know, I think at that point, people at the application layer had learned that you could use multiple models at once to do more with a task. What I don't think people had quite tried was breaking up a task into, like, a thousand little tasks. And then for each, like, sub-task, using multiple models in parallel, trying to get past that sub-step. And so they had just taken the idea of breaking a task into sub-components and using lots of models to solve sub-components to, like, such an extreme degree. I don't think anybody had tried that yet.
And so we reached out, and they got on a Zoom with us on a Monday, and explained to us what they were doing, and it was super compelling. And at the time, for some reason, the beta had, like, gone really viral in Japan. And so the team was in Japan, trying to figure out, you know, like, why it was going viral in Japan.

**Turner Novak** (4:07)
So, you had to go to Japan to figure that out, apparently?

**Chetan Puttagunta** (4:10)
Yeah, so they wanted to just talk to users, because they wanted to be like, why is this breaking out in Japan?

**Turner Novak** (4:14)
Yeah.

**Chetan Puttagunta** (4:15)
Interestingly, I don't know if you know this, but, like, when ChatGBT first launched, Reddit Japan actually was one of the places that went viral early. And so there was something about consumer chat bots and consumer AI and the Japanese market that seems to be an early signal of, like, things that can go viral in consumer AI. And so the team was in Japan talking to users, running a bunch of user meetups, because they wanted to know why it was going so viral in Japan. And so, you know, they would just zoom on a Monday, and I wanted to meet them in person. And so they were like, well, we're in Tokyo, so you're welcome to come hang out. And so I think that Friday, I flew out. Before that, a couple of the founders were in San Jose at the time. And so I met them, you know, in San Jose. And then on Friday, I got on a flight, Friday night, I think, I got on a flight to go to Tokyo. And then Saturday night, Pacific time, they presented to the partnership. And then over Zoom, over Zoom. And I was there in person with them in Tokyo. And then after their presentation, Red, who is one of the founders and CEO, Red and I went for pizza and beer and got to a handshake. And then that was like the start of the relationship. They ended up launching the product in general availability first week of April.