“Shenzhen is not the arena, actually. Shenzhen is like the supermarket. Imagine you're a chef, you go to the supermarket to get the best parts, but your battlefield is not in Shenzhen. Your arena is somewhere else.”
The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Pan is describing how he thinks outsiders should use Shenzhen's electronics industry. The real work, he says, happens in your own town or your own field, which may be farming or energy rather than electronics. Shenzhen is where you collect the ingredients.
Transcript
Yeah, I think for the last 18 years, we're trying to help people to build hardware. But for the last three to four years, I think we are trying very hard to convince people not to build hardware. Interesting, which means like if you design something in North Korea and use GLC to deliver the boards, it might still be too slow. But you look at existing gadgets, look at existing hardware and customize it, or just put your firmware, put your data, your model into that to be part of. Your context, that's much faster and more reliable.
Yeah, so it's kind of like a zoom out effect of like, uh, so it's like going more holistic in terms of just being like a service provider of like, you know, put in file, get gadget back. It's like, no, no, let's let's look at the best solution that will actually allow you to go to market, go to get scale quickly, that sort of thing. So it's almost like an advisory role, that kind of piece of it.
If I put into a picture, it's like Senzen is not the arena, actually. Senjen is like the supermarket. Imagine you're a chef, you go to the supermarket to get the best parts, but your battlefield is not in Senjin. Your arena is somewhere else. Maybe in your hometown that you need to fix some local challenges, maybe in your industry, which is not intronics, which might be agriculture, which might be like entricity. Now you use the resources in Senzen, but you cook a quarter zone that fit into your scenario. I think that might be a much better way. So it's Senzen is not competitive with everybody. But I think at least us, I think we are trying to enable people to innovate with Senjin.
That's good. I really like that. It's like, you know, you're talking to me and you're like, Chris, what value are you going to bring by growing a new varietal of like scallions, right? The world, like, yeah, they might be great scallions, but the world probably doesn't need that. But if I make something that has scallions that I can go and shop for and find the best ones at Chenzhen or elsewhere, piecing that all together, I could maybe kind of move up the stack and build all that stuff as well. Yeah, it is. I like that analogy quite a bit.
Yeah, I think let's see Senzhen as a common base, but the frontier is all over the world.
Well, we would be remiss if one of those big ingredients is servos. I recently bought an SO101 kit from Seed, put it together. Oh, thank you. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's beautifully, beautifully documented, very easy to assemble. The kit was great. And now I have a little desktop robot follower and leader, leader, and follower arm. Obviously, that is, I think, one of the most like the simplest examples of the many, many robots that you guys are building and really just physical AI more broadly. Like, what is your high-level view of this, right? Like, you know, you're the boss man. Where do you see this all going within Seed and within the industry?
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