Yessica Klein
8 min read
09 November 2025
James Lo’s entrepreneurial journey began in Hong Kong, where, as a teenager, he was a pro-democracy student activist and founded a charity to help peers access higher education. At 18 he moved to London to study at the London School of Economics, expecting to return home after his studies, but instead he found himself pulled deeper into the city’s entrepreneurial and civic fabric. His first company, Mana, was born from a desire to democratize access to mentorship and expertise, scaling quickly but struggling with monetization. After exiting the business to help his family, James launched Ethos with cofounder Dr. Daniel J. Mankowitz, a former DeepMind scientist. Their venture uses AI agents to interview experts and transform those conversations into a growing knowledge graph that supports research, sales, hiring, and investing - creating a future where AI expands human opportunity at scale.
What first pushed you toward entrepreneurship?
When I was 16 in Hong Kong, I rejected all my university offers to join the protests in favor of democracy. That period gave me my first taste of building something from scratch: I started a charity that trained students for university, and I loved it. By the time I came to the LSE to study politics and economics, I already knew I wanted to explore entrepreneurship at some point.
Your first company, Mana, grew quickly. What was the motivation behind it?
The motivation was social mobility. I grew up in a family that experienced a steep financial decline: my father lost his job during the Asian financial crisis, and we kept moving into smaller homes. I was on scholarship at a school full of wealthy kids while also meeting people from very different backgrounds through activism. I saw both privilege and precarity up close, and I realized that many people never even glimpse what “good” looks like. Mana was an attempt to change that. We built a platform where well-known and successful people offered one-to-one mentorship calls to anyone. It resonated. We reached number one on Product Hunt and grew to 100,000 monthly active users. But monetization was tough, because those who most needed the service were least able to pay.
Why did you eventually leave Mana?
In 2023, my father faced serious financial difficulties, and I needed to pay off his debts quickly. That meant exiting the business. It was also a turning point: I had lost faith that education as a business model could scale in the way I wanted. The social purpose and the economic model just weren’t aligned. That realization led me into a period of depression but also deep reflection.
I realized the deeper problem was matchmaking people with economic opportunities. At McKinsey and later at SoftBank, I had seen how much money was spent on expert networks. Firms were paying $1,000 to $2,000 an hour for conversations with domain experts, but the process was archaic: emails back and forth, no transcripts, wasted data. When I met my cofounder Dan, a staff scientist from DeepMind, we connected the dots: what if AI agents could discover relevant expertise, interview experts and structure the insights into a knowledge graph? Suddenly you have a foundation not just for investment research but for hiring, sales, fundraising and beyond. That became Ethos.
How has London’s ecosystem changed?
When I started Mana in 2020, the environment was dominated by a zero-interest-rate bubble: crypto, SaaS, the creator economy. Raising money was possible, but most of the exceptional companies were being built in the US or Asia. UK VCs were cautious, very metrics-driven and hesitant about consumer businesses like education. Fast forward five years and London feels transformed. Big firms like Sequoia and General Catalyst are embedded here, and European and US teams are integrated. The AI wave has also produced genuinely global companies out of the UK. Today it feels realistic to say we can build a global leader from Europe.
“In London, you can go to a dinner party and be the only founder in the room. That diversity cuts through the tech bubble very fast.”
And how has London itself shaped the way you build?
First, geography: London sits between US and Asian time zones, which makes it easy to hire internationally and serve customers globally. Second, culture: it’s an antidote to Silicon Valley’s bravado. In London, self-deprecation and humor are essential. That humility builds what I call a “respawning muscle,” the ability to reset quickly after failure and keep iterating.
What might outsiders not expect about building in London?
The lack of tech density is actually a strength. In San Francisco, everyone is a founder or investor; in London, you meet people from healthcare, fashion, the arts. That diversity forces you to explain your business clearly and without jargon. It keeps you closer to customers and reality.
How do you personally manage the pressures of being a founder?
I’ve had dark periods, but I treat every venture as another shot on goal. It’s like football: you just need to score, not count how many attempts you miss. I detach from specific solutions and focus on the problem. Solutions change, but the problem endures. That mindset keeps me grounded.
My mind is constantly on the business, even when I’m with my fiancée or walking past a billboard that sparks an idea. Founder anxiety can be healthy if you channel it, but it can also tip into obsession. I think some imbalance is required when you’re chasing that first milestone: you have to be fully absorbed to make it work. Mindfulness practices can help, but for me the obsession itself has often been the driver.
What’s your long-term vision for Ethos?
Right now we’re revolutionizing investment research, but the vision is much broader. We want to deploy best-in-class AI agents across sectors: agents powered by compensated human expertise. As AI scales, human insight should become more valuable, not less. The ultimate goal is to build infrastructure that continually matchmakes people to economic opportunities throughout their lifetime. If we succeed, we’ll have built a business model that both creates value and advances social mobility at scale.
“The best investors only help when you ask.”