Jiaqi Pan

Jiaqi Pan is co-founder and chief executive of Landbot, a company in Barcelona, Spain, that makes a no-code builder for chatbots and AI agents on websites and WhatsApp. He trained as an engineer and came to Landbot after an earlier company failed.

Reading Rich Dad Poor Dad

“Growing up, my dream was to become Ironman, which is why I studied Electronic and Automation Engineering,” he told Zeroqode. A book changed his direction: Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad, which he said dragged him “into the ‘dark side’ of the business world.”

Failure in Valencia

In 2014 Pan and Cris Villar were each running their own companies in Valencia, Spain. A year later both filed for bankruptcy and shut down, according to Landbot. They teamed up on a live chat for websites. “The system initially was built to chat with people on the website, as a live chat in a small window,” Pan said. Then a bug made visitors to customers’ sites see the entire website as a chat. The pair turned the bug into the product, and the name Landbot combines landing page and chatbot.

The company first offered personal assistance to consumers through conversation, then moved to selling software to businesses when that did not find a market. “The key for us was to try to understand the fundamentals of the business and be honest with ourselves about whether our initial hypothesis was right or wrong,” Pan said. Swanlaab led Landbot’s $8 million Series A in 2021.