Build for the Memo, Not the Demo — Shawn Chan, China Resources Holdings
Jul 30, 2026 · 24:23
Shawn Chan, a veteran investor at China Resources Holdings who has sat on roughly 200 investment committees, argues that most AI finance products are built to impress for five minutes but cannot survive a room whose job is not to be impressed—the difference between a demo and a memo. He defines the memo as the real document that must survive an argument, with hundreds of pages where half the sources disagree. He recounts how one wrong sentence in a tech company's AI demo erased $100 billion in market value, how an AI invented six court cases for a lawyer's brief, and how an airline's chatbot made a fake policy that cost the airline in tribunal. He identifies six ways trust breaks: treating all sources equally, numbers that disagree, hiding contradictions, melting facts and guesses, unprovable claims, and no accountable human. His five fixes are: every claim linked to its source with trust level, facts and guesses visibly separate, automatic number reconciliation, surfaced contradictions, and a logged human approval gate. The product that wins, he says, is the one that lets a tired finance person trust its output without opening seven tabs at midnight.
