Hangzhou Resuscitates "Did You Die?", Kicking Off a New Talent War

The app "Are You Dead?" which quickly "became popular" due to its name and was soon removed from the entire network has new developments.

On May 24th, "Shangcheng Release" in Hangzhou announced that after widely listening to public opinions, the "Are You Dead?" app has been officially upgraded to the "Are You There? Are You There?" Peace - of - Mind Guardian Platform and was first put into use in Nanxing Sub - district of Shangcheng District.

This app that directly addresses the pain points of the current single - living population was initially just an attempt by founder Lü Gongchen in his spare time. Now, it has officially entered the right track of operation.

Three months ago, an email from Shangcheng District facilitated this "mutual pursuit". At that time, Lü Gongchen had just experienced the app being removed and being fired from his previous company. Suddenly, he received an email from a staff member of the Data Resources Management Bureau of Shangcheng District, inquiring about the intention for cooperation. Half a month later, the company quickly settled in Hangzhou and found a practical implementation scenario.

Why Hangzhou again? The answer points to an emerging field that various regions are vying for - OPC (One - Person Company). Behind this, the logic of the "talent war" among cities that has lasted for many years is quietly moving towards a new turning point again.

01

Talent Grabbing

Regarding why he chose Hangzhou, Lü Gongchen once specifically mentioned that the local new policy's talent evaluation criteria for "OPC super individuals" are no longer in the traditional dimension, but rather "professional ability, application level of AI tools, innovation ability of business models, and content influence". In other words, it focuses on ability rather than resumes.

Image source: Photographic Network_501280081

OPC, as the name implies, means one person is a team, an industrial chain, and a business closed - loop. Not long ago, Shangcheng District in Hangzhou took the lead in Zhejiang in introducing a special policy for OPC, investing 100 million yuan in special funds annually to support the entrepreneurship of "super individuals".

Before the policy was introduced, Shangcheng District provided a 150 - square - meter office with three - year rent - free for it.

Different from traditional self - employed individuals or freelancers, OPC is a human - machine collaboration system of "super individuals + AI agents". In the wave of the AI boom, it has reversed the past expectation of local governments that "bigger is better" for enterprises, enabling small enterprises to become the "guests of honor" of the government and play the role of a "booster" in the development of the local AI industry.

Previously, an incomplete statistics by the media showed that more than 20 cities or their district - and - county - level governments have issued OPC construction plans, among which top - tier cities such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen occupy the main positions. When the boundary between individuals and enterprises becomes blurred, the strategies of cities for talent grabbing also change accordingly.

One view is that "whoever can attract individual entrepreneurs can convert the population quantity into innovation density". Cities are willing to adjust the talent support threshold for OPC, undoubtedly focusing on the possible innovation ability it may bring.

Looking across the country, the competition among top - tier cities is becoming more intense, pushing the "talent grabbing" of cities to a new chapter.

Since this year, Guangdong has launched the "One Million Talents Gather in South Guangdong" campaign at the provincial level. On the basis of attracting more than 1.1 million college graduates last year, it plans to attract more than 1 million this year; Beijing has provided 1 million square meters of entrepreneurial space and 10,000 sets of youth talent apartments to encourage young talents to start businesses; Shenzhen upgraded the internship service for graduates earlier and provides free accommodation for up to 15 days...

As a "leader" in talent attraction in recent years, Hangzhou has also joined the "battle": at the "highlight" Youth Talent Exchange Conference in March this year, 1,200 employers led by "Six Little Dragons" enterprises launched more than 30,000 high - quality jobs, an increase of about 10,000 compared with last year; during the entire "Spring Talent Attraction Service Month", Hangzhou held nearly 100 job fairs in 9 provinces, aiming to build an "employment and entrepreneurship - friendly city".

On one hand, cities are getting more deeply involved and "closely" attracting talents. On the other hand, the logic of talent attraction is changing. Many people point out that compared with the previous focus on the growth of "quantity", cities are paying more attention to the "quality" of talent attraction, especially focusing on how to match with local industries and serve industrial upgrading.

The pursuit of OPC by cities is a prominent manifestation of this change.

02

Ecosystem

This more in - depth "talent - grabbing" war in the industry is further expected to solve the dilemma of the "chicken - and - egg" problem between talent attraction and industry introduction in the past.

Image source: Photographic Network_501636235

Pan Lu, a research manager at the Culture, Business and Tourism Research Institute of Shanghai Hualüe Think Tank, once wrote an article analyzing that top - tier cities have a large number of professional talents with in - depth industry know - how, such as senior engineers, architects, creative directors, and financial analysts.

In the past, their experience and wisdom were locked in the cubicles of hierarchical enterprises. Now, with the empowerment of AI tools, they can start a business at extremely low cost in the form of OPC and quickly transform "tacit knowledge" into AI applications in vertical fields.

Correspondingly, China's AI industry is moving towards a new stage of large - scale and commercial development. The industry is exploring how to transform the advantages of AI technology and industry into the driving force for high - quality economic growth. OPC is expected to act as the "trigger" to promote the implementation of applications.

Hangzhou has obvious advantages. The foundation of digital economy development accumulated in the past and the ecosystem established by enterprises such as Alibaba happen to become the "reservoir" for the development of the local OPC industry.

For example, the birth of the "Are You Dead?" app was when Lü Gongchen had the idea of "incubating" his own product while working as a product manager in Shenzhen and Hangzhou. He found two developers and finally promoted the product to be launched. In online discussions, the technical threshold of this app is not high, and it is entirely possible to be quickly realized through AI programming.

In turn, the growth of OPC may also feed back to the local industry and build a more complete ecosystem.

Suzhou was the first to publicly propose an OPC development plan at the city level. At the 2025 Jiangsu Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Development Conference and the First Artificial Intelligence OPC Conference held last year, Suzhou took the lead in proposing to support the development of OPC and built a number of OPC communities, computing power platform zones and other carriers for this purpose, and developed a number of lightweight intelligent tools suitable for OPC.

The reason is not difficult to understand: as a major manufacturing city, Suzhou has a stronger demand for AI transformation, and the proportion of traditional manufacturing is relatively high. Therefore, Suzhou focuses on supporting three types of OPC: model innovation, scenario application, and ecological service, and promotes their in - depth integration with local advantageous industries.

Pan Lu pointed out that large enterprises are good at general large - scale models and infrastructure construction, but it is difficult to cover the diverse and strange segmented needs of all industries. OPC is agile and sensitive, and can penetrate into the capillaries of segmented scenarios such as medical care, law, manufacturing, and cross - border e - commerce to develop various "small and beautiful" vertical applications. Tens of thousands of OPCs can fill the gaps in the industrial chain and become the "buffer layer" for the industry to deal with external challenges and the "entropy - reducing body" to maintain internal order.

Some people summarize that this round of "talent - grabbing" war around OPC has derived different paths in various cities. For example, Shenzhen focuses on hardware + AI, relying on the electronics industrial chain to build a "paradise for single - person hardware entrepreneurship"; Hangzhou focuses on e - commerce + AI, relying on the e - commerce ecosystem to give birth to the "era of single - person brands"; while Beijing targets algorithms + AI, relying on top - notch intellectual resources to focus on "single - person R & D breakthroughs". Thus, OPC makes the "chicken" also the "egg", enabling cities to carry out "talent attraction" and "industry introduction" in parallel.

03

Scenarios

Currently, there is a growing "resource pool" of OPC in front of cities.

According to the "2025 China Digital Economy Entrepreneurship White Paper", more than 12 million individual entrepreneurs across the country have chosen OPC. However, there are huge differences in performance among individuals. The media described it like this: with the same AI dividend, some people run faster, while some leave dejectedly; some stably earn 50,000 yuan per month, while some "burn" 100,000 yuan in start - up funds in three months, and the worst one only receives 2 orders in a month.

The reasons are that the pain points of OPC development are repeatedly mentioned by the outside world: the problems faced by small and micro - enterprises, such as weak anti - risk ability, difficulty in obtaining resources, and high compliance costs, also exist in OPC. At the same time, it also shows a tendency of conceptualization and homogenization, such as being mostly concentrated in fields such as AI creation.

Image source: Hangzhou Release

In response, many cities are promoting the construction of OPC communities in order to solve common problems such as cost and computing power through the way of the government or state - owned enterprises "setting up the stage", and promote exchanges, interactions, transaction matching, and the formation of an ecosystem among OPCs.

For example, Shangcheng District in Hangzhou established the earliest OPC community in China, "Honghu Club", which provides workstation space and a 50,000 - US - dollar financial support for eligible enterprises. In Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Suzhou, OPC communities have emerged one after another, becoming the first window for cities to attract OPC enterprises.

For OPC enterprises, the most important production factors have shifted from land and capital to data and algorithms. Attracting a large project is replaced by cultivating a large number of start - up projects. Therefore, compared with the past way of investment promotion and talent attraction that relied on "policies" and "subsidies", the environment where various factors accelerate the flow and aggregation has truly become the "signboard" of cities.

Facing the more segmented needs of OPC, cities that can provide more suitable scenarios will have a greater possibility of growing together with OPC.

When asked why they actively contacted the "Are You Dead?" app, a staff member of the Data Resources Management Bureau of Shangcheng District once mentioned that Shangcheng District has always been concerned about the care of single - living groups and has promoted a series of practices. It has scenarios, data, and implementation experience. The "Are You Dead?" app can mobilize a larger group, and even allow residents to participate spontaneously. The self - voice of single - living people can be combined with the active actions of the government, which can also achieve better results.

The Nanxing Sub - district, which was the first to conduct a trial, has an aging rate of more than 40%. The needs for home safety and emergency support of single - living and empty - nest elderly are particularly prominent. The design of large fonts, simple interfaces, less operations, and high fault - tolerance in the trial version also highly matches the needs.

But this is only the first step. The effect of the upgraded app remains to be verified, and some people have raised doubts: this kind of service is of a public - welfare nature, and the elderly are generally thrifty. There are still quite a lot of difficulties for the app to open up a business path.

Moreover, not every OPC has the same traffic and attention as the "Are You Dead?" app. After OPC reshapes the talent - attraction logic of cities, how to see clearly and be good at identifying talents may be a greater test for cities in this round of "talent - grabbing".

This article is from the WeChat public account "Urban Evolution Theory", author: Yang Qifei. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.