Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1168
In the past 20 years, commercial buildings have sprung up from the soil of the Internet. These huge business machines cost hundreds of billions of dollars in venture capital institutions and are jointly forged by millions of people, covering various fields such as people’s necessities of life.
But not everyone enjoys the dividend equally. These companies are pyramids with distinct power structures, and the top of the Internet giants are at the top of the towers. They have an enviable side—with tens of millions of annual salaries that grassroots employees cannot reach, they are the representative group in the story of making wealth on the Internet; they are also a group of people in a huge organization of tens of thousands of people who can be seen by the public; they Decisions made can affect the fate of a business or even a company.
Regardless of whether they have gone through precise calculations or not, these people who can sit at the top of the big factories have stepped into the most magnificent wave in the business world in the past two decades at a relatively early stage – the Internet, where search, e-commerce, social networking, and short videos were born. Wait for the opportunity of tens of billions of dollars, or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Their career paths and fortunes have been altered as a result.
They don’t have the anxiety of money and wealth, but they are constrained by the large corporate system and the slowdown of business growth, which makes them feel exhausted, both physically and mentally.
They have more choices, more ambitions, and more ideas than the average employee of the company. At some point, this becomes a burden.
Some choose to leave. In 2021, Guo Qing is already the vice president of Meituan and a member of S-team (the highest decision-making level). He is 42 years old and decided to start a business. At the time, Wang Xing and other Meituan executives warned that the future was full of risks. But what guides Guo Qing is Bezos’ principle of the least regret in life – on the day he leaves this world, does he hope that he will invest in a new wave of technology, or will he enjoy stable economic returns and glory in a big factory?
“What I’ve done can’t excite me anymore.” Guo Qing said.
“LatePost” interviewed a number of senior executives who had left the big factory, and the headhunters, investors and employees who had contact with them. Their starting points, experiences and personalities are different, but they all step on the upward node of the times. Their workplace stories are the epitome of the past 20 years of the Internet – they have witnessed and participated in how unproven new technologies have been formed, iterated, defeated their opponents, and won market share with the blessing of capital. It has swept and changed the lives of millions of people in the past few years.
different choices
Opportunity doesn’t usually lie on crowded avenues, it can be hidden on grassy paths. Most people ignore them, only a few see and have the courage to choose them.
A former Internet executive said that if a person joins in the exploration period, growth period, maturity period, or recession period of a large factory, the rewards are completely different.
Guo Qing started his career in a state-owned enterprise in the telecommunications industry. For his first job, he thought very simply. The family conditions were not particularly good, so he found a promising job that could support his independent life. Later, when he was working at ChinaHR, a retired global sales leader from the investor Monster (an American online recruitment service provider) came to communicate and taught some about the career development and system construction of the sales team. Only then did he know what a career is. Planning, “Oh, there are so many scientific theories.”
After many years of working in the workplace, he has accumulated a certain amount of material. After “having a house and a car”, Guo Qing’s adventurous side appeared in his bones.
Figure: Guo Qing
In 2020, at the same time that Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen announced his retirement, Guo Qing became a member of Meituan S-team. The following year, to the surprise of many, he gave up the position and decided to start an unknown life.
This is exactly what happened eight years ago. He left Wanda Group, a big company at that time, and went to the startup company Meituan to be in charge of a marginal business. His salary was reduced by 60%, and his rank was downgraded two levels in a row. No one around him could understand him.
In 2004, Gao Ziguang, who had just left school, joined a company on the eve of the outbreak, Tencent. At that time, Tencent was not yet a social empire, with only four or five hundred people in the company. Gao Ziguang did not join state or foreign companies with his peers. He said: “When I went to the computer room, I saw QQ hanging on every computer, so I planted the seeds of interest.” future.
He didn’t know what kind of door this would open, but he was lucky enough to step into this wave of technological change.
Gao Ziguang has been at Tencent for ten years. His relentless quest for new things drove him to rotate between positions. His first position at Tencent was a QQ back-end engineer; three years later, he joined Tencent’s search project “Ask” and became the first technical engineer of “Ask”; he was later transferred to Tencent’s Weibo department as an engineer. Technical and product director, and was the first to propose to make a full mobile video product – Weishi.
As time went by in 2014, the Weishi project he built was not successful within Tencent, Gao Ziguang was a little frustrated, “The opportunity of the mobile Internet was not well seized.”
Figure: Gao Ziguang
Before making another career choice, Gao Ziguang inspected several promising industries at home and abroad. The ultimate goal is to anchor two tracks, O2O and Internet of Things (Internet + hardware). Both Meituan and Xiaomi were founded in 2010. In 2014, both companies reached mid-size. Meituan has become the No. 1 in the group buying market, but the food delivery business has not yet defeated Ele.me, with a team size of about 8,000 or 9,000 people; Xiaomi’s mobile phone sales have become No. 1 in China, and just released hardware products other than mobile phones, such as TV boxes , the team size is comparable to Meituan, but the halo is bigger.
Gao Ziguang approached the two companies. Xiaomi gave the offer one step in advance, and he joined Xiaomi. When he mentioned his resignation, Tencent’s leaders retained it and patted the signed stock agreement on the table that day, “This is what the boss added to you.”
“It’s really exciting,” Gao Ziguang said, “but now that you’ve figured it out, you have to keep moving forward.”
Different from Gao Ziguang and Guo Qing. Qiu Guangyu has a near-perfect resume, and those who have seen him say he is a typical good student. In his senior year, he was admitted to the University of Washington with a perfect score on the GRE. In his second year of college, he became interested in finance and made a bold move – giving up a full scholarship from the University of Washington and taking a loan of $50,000 to transfer to New York University. After graduation he “followed the crowd” to JPMorgan.
Figure: Qiu Guangyu
Eight years after graduation, Qiu Guangyu went to several financial institutions. At that time, the projects he invested in were traditional industries such as retail, industry, and banking. The location changed from the United States to Hong Kong, China, and life did not change much.
Until 2014, Qiu Guangyu came to mainland China on a business trip and found that he could even use the APP to make appointments for door-to-door cleaning. This made him feel that the industrial age had come, and he was still farming in the agricultural age.
He accepted the invitation of Zhu Jingshi, senior vice president of Didi, which is a brand new and exciting career journey. Among the few large-scale battles on the Internet, Qiu Guangyu directly participated in two battles, namely the taxi-hailing battle between Didi and Uber, and the short-video battle between Kuaishou and TikTok. The business is getting harder and harder, and the opponents are getting stronger and stronger.
key battle
Large companies have a well-planned rank system. If a person wants to climb from the bottom to the top, cross eight or nine levels, and eventually become the No. 1 position in the business department, he often needs to fight a recognized victory in the company. To become a member of the core management team, you may also need to fight a victory in the company’s main channel.
If a company catches one technology wave, it will become an industry giant, and if it catches two technology waves, it will become a world-renowned company.
So do people. On this ascending career experience curve, there are people who create opportunities for themselves to make the leap and seize them.
Gao Ziguang, born in 1982, is Xiaomi’s first post-80s vice president to be promoted from within. His ascent path is that after achieving good results in Xiaomi’s secondary channel IOT (Internet of Things) business and Xiaomi Youpin e-commerce business, he was transferred to the main channel mobile phone to be responsible for the new retail business in China. After being transferred to China for a year, he was promoted to the vice president of the group after fighting the biggest battle in his career.
Gao Ziguang is good at problem solving. Facing an unfamiliar battlefield, he can always find an unexpected entry to conquer it. In the battle of Weibo between Tencent and Sina, Gao Ziguang saw the opportunity of short videos and started the Weishi project internally; in the battle between Xiaomi and Huawei for offline channels, he used his online ability to digitize the offline retail system.
Since 2016, the online sales of Xiaomi’s mobile phones have reached the top, which makes Xiaomi, which is too dependent on online sales, gradually tired, and Xiaomi began to make up for offline channels. The group has three times wanted Gao Ziguang to go to the front line of the mobile phone business.
The first two times, Gao Ziguang refused on the grounds that he would not sell mobile phones. When Wang Lingming was in charge of Xiaomi China, Gao Ziguang even attended two or three regular meetings of the sales department in China. With a technical background, he feels that he really cannot integrate into the offline mobile phone sales system, which is quite a culture of rivers and lakes.
This time, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun said to him, “Mobile phones are the foundation of Xiaomi’s life. Even if Xiaomi Youpin collapses due to the transfer, it must defend China.”
Gao Ziguang decided to take on this difficult task. Unlike Weibo, which is only a defensive product of Tencent, “the sales of Xiaomi mobile phones in China are the foundation of Xiaomi. If they lose, it will be a disaster.”
It was difficult for Xiaomi’s channel distributors to make money in the past. In order to expand the store on a large scale, Gao Ziguang must solve this problem that Xiaomi cannot avoid.
On the one hand, Gao Ziguang has strengthened the control over the offline distribution system. In June 2020, Xiaomi integrated the original scattered offline sales channels, abolished the most loosely managed Xiaomi franchise stores before, and dispatched employees to experience store managers for authorized experience stores that were not originally operated by Xiaomi but had larger sales; On the other hand, Gao Ziguang used digital means to increase the turnover rate of stores, and he built a retail team of hundreds of people first and then.
In one year, Xiaomi opened 10,000 offline stores, and the digital upgrade of the store system has come to an end.
At this point, Gao Ziguang’s task has been completed.
Guo Qing, whose English name is Kevin, is called “Old K” by everyone. He grew into core management in Meituan’s non-main channel business, as well as non-product, technology and other high-leverage positions – when he joined Meituan in 2014, he was the sales director of Wine Travel.
Guo Qing’s “Meituan taste” is very strong. He disassembles people’s decision-making basis into information, computing power and algorithms. Computing power mainly depends on human hardware conditions and cannot be changed, but the quality of decision-making can be improved by actively inputting more information and establishing a scientific algorithm system.
Algorithms are the methodology that Meituan often talks about. He said, “In Meituan, I can see that Xingge and Lao Wang have a very scientific algorithm system. Even if my algorithm lags behind, I don’t feel ashamed and I am willing to put my face down. study.”
One of his subordinates said that when other GMs (general managers of business divisions) held meetings, they would put all kinds of data when they came up. Old K would start with the methodology.
He summed up a set of life algorithms called “BBS”, namely “stop doing list, basic way, learn from best”, of which “learn from best” has become the code of conduct for the business group in the store.
In the beginning, wine travel was just an innovative business of Meituan, which was inconspicuous and did not have many resources. Ctrip is a big company that has been listed for 15 years. This is not a competition of equal strength. Meituan can only take a detour and set a differentiated market strategy – Ctrip focuses on high-star hotels, and Meituan cuts in from low-star hotels. Meituan even gave up Ctrip’s most high-end business travel hotel segment in the first phase.
At that time, the cost of one night on Ctrip was more than 20 yuan, and the commission for one night of Meituan was only more than 10 yuan. Meituan Wine Travel needs to establish a set of products and operation systems suitable for the low-end market.
In 2015, Guo Qing, as the head of wine travel sales, took the team to Huangshan for a three-day and three-night meeting, and made another decision that was extremely critical to the wine travel business—from a group purchase model to a reservation model.
Guo Qinghe’s team spent three days listening to a large number of user recordings and complaint materials, and found that group buying is a weak performance relationship. After users buy coupons, they need to call the hotel to confirm whether they can receive them. This affects the user’s experience. Finally, Meituan fully shifted to a reservation model before Ctrip. Users only need to book in advance to check in smoothly, regardless of whether the hotel has vacant rooms.
At that time, Wang Xing asked Guo Qing a question, “Can the night capacity surpass Ctrip in three years?”
Guo Qing gave a positive answer. With the right “weapon” in place, the next step is to assess the size of the market, and the speed at which it can gain market share. They estimated at the time that it would be about 400 million room nights.
Three years later, Meituan Wine Travel became the first in the industry as scheduled. At the end of 2018, Chen Liang, senior vice president of Meituan, handed over the full responsibility of the wine travel business to Guo Qing.
After two battles in Didi and Kuaishou, Qiu Guangyu became a rare business executive from an investment bank among Internet companies. Qiu Guangyu is a key figure in Didi’s internationalization. “He did it all by himself to determine the international strategy, team up, and tactics.” A Didi source said.
Didi’s internationalization is a passive defense. Once Uber wins in other markets around the world, it will focus the war on China. Latin America is Uber’s highest gross profit market, equivalent to Uber’s granary. Brazil has naturally become the first stop for Didi’s internationalization.
In the early days, Didi found out the local situation through investment, and then ended up doing localized operations on its own. Didi acquired 99 Taxi, a local Brazilian ride-hailing platform, in 2018. In 2019, when Qiu Guangyu and his team arrived in Brazil, 99 Taxi was in poor condition, with a market share of only 10%, no growth for 3 months, and a net profit loss of 40%.
In the first year, Qiu Guangyu set a market share target of 25% for the team. This is a carefully considered line — any higher and Uber is likely to fight back, any lower and there will be insufficient order density.
In order to avoid Uber’s war, Qiu Guangyu first conducted pilot projects in more than a dozen medium-sized cities, and each city achieved a 25% market share. In the fourth quarter, Qiu Guangyu’s team began to play Uber’s stronghold in Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.
Uber really fought back, but after a year, Brazilian users have formed a user mentality for Didi, and the counterattack has little effect at this time. With the foundation of the first year, by the third year, Didi’s market share in Latin America is basically the same as that of Uber.
But today, “the battlefield is gone, what else can you gain?” said a senior executive of a large factory.
Many Dachang employees interviewed believe that the fast lane for Dachang’s promotion has been closed. Today, the career path of a typical large factory is as follows: a fresh graduate will receive his first promotion in one to two years after joining the company. After that, the difficulty of each promotion will increase, and most people will Stalled at the rank of a group leader.
“It’s like fighting monsters in a game. The farther back you go, the harder it is to fight monsters,” said a person from a major manufacturer.
An employee of a large factory who was born in the late 1980s lamented that most of the time in history, there were no express trains, and the people around them were surging slowly, but today’s young people can see some people who are only a few years older. Lived the dividends and accumulated wealth, “The golden decade has just slipped through the eyes.”
between radical and conservative
Compared with middle-level and grass-roots employees, these people are more adventurous, “not a small account is a big account”.
A senior executive of a large factory said that he could not bear the two states of life. One is that life is very predictable;
From investment banks, Didi, to Kuaishou, Qiu Guangyu seeks to do something bigger and more difficult. A person close to Qiu Guangyu said that when he joined Kuaishou, he set a seemingly impossible goal for Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao.
When the epidemic broke out in 2020, Gao Ziguang judged that the mask was an explosive product for drainage, so he sent people to the market to buy masks. However, domestic masks were quickly sold out, and they could only be collected in cash in South Korea. Gao Ziguang wanted the group finance to approve a sum of 50 million yuan in cash, but the finance thinks “the risk is too great, what if the money is deceived and lost?”
Gao Ziguang took a huge risk. He asked the finance department to send the money to a subsidiary of Xiaomi Youpin, and then let him go to South Korea with a box of cash. Fortunately, there were no surprises, Gao Ziguang said, “If something goes wrong, it will not only be a loss of money, but there may also be legal risks.”
But compared to entrepreneurs, these people are not radical enough. Past history has proven that being conservative can make people lose opportunities, and being aggressive can make people lose their previous success. Big factory executives are somewhere between radical and conservative.
The top executives of large factories often have decades of vocational training and experience accumulation, while many outstanding entrepreneurs in history have never worked a day shift. This is true of Tesla Musk, Microsoft Bill Gates, and Meituan Wang Xing.
A senior executive of a large factory who has left said that he did not have the original intention to change the world, but he would be anxious when he saw others changing the world.
Both Gao Ziguang and Guo Qing chose to start their own businesses after leaving the factory. But none of them are quite scratching the surface. Gao Ziguang’s company, Anxinjia, is still partly relying on the money and resources of Country Garden, a leading real estate company; Guo Qing also chose to join a startup company as CEO, not the founder.
A person close to Qiu Guangyu said that it is hard to believe that he was able to take off his suit and roll in the mud. But starting a business means doing a lot of dirty work, hard work, and exhausting work.
Entrepreneurs need to use the minimum resources to get the maximum results, and executives are used to seeking the optimal solution of cost and efficiency in relatively sufficient resources.
A Didi person interprets this as one of the reasons why Qiu Guangyu faced different situations in Didi and Kuaishou. In terms of internationalization, Didi is very committed and willing. In contrast, Kuaishou is hesitant and discontinuous.
In a large company, as long as it is a business that is valued by the core layer, there are basically “unlimited” resources. When Gao Ziguang was in Xiaomi China, he recruited 400 engineers a year, but the startup company only has so little money, one cent The money has to be broken into pennies to spend.
obtained and unfinished
Over the past ten years, under the leverage of capital and technology, Internet companies have made great strides, and the top executives of large factories have accumulated wealth at the age of 40. But that’s not the end of their careers. Today, when big companies hit the brakes, the value that top executives can create within the system is limited.
One of the options for top executives of a big factory is to join another big factory as a senior executive, be an investor, or simply go it alone.
Within the large corporate system, they harvest skills, wealth and resources. But as long as it is within an organization, no matter the level of authority, individuals always need to cooperate with the goals of the organization and cannot act according to their own wishes.
In 2011, Gao Ziguang, who was still in Tencent’s search department, was about to be dispatched to Tencent’s Weibo division. “The situation is urgent,” Gao Ziguang said. At that time, he and dozens of people under him were transferred into the new department at the same time – which is not common in Tencent. He believes that the logic behind it is that Tencent’s executives at that time judged that the emergence of Sina Weibo threatened Tencent’s lifeline QQ.
Due to entering the game 8 months later than Sina, the team has been passively catching up for a long time. At the beginning of 2013, Gao Ziguang wanted to find a new way to make a short video application based on the mobile terminal – Weishi.
At that time, the sensational “3Q” war between Tencent and 360 had just ended. Tencent advocated the “quality of products” internally, and no project was allowed to be approved at will. However, any large-scale product project must go through layers of checks and be reported to the Tencent General Office for approval.
Gao Ziguang simply pulled his brothers to make a demo (prototype) for three weeks. “The product is the most intuitive and convincing.” This was a product that seemed to be quite advanced at the time. Its shape was similar to Douyin, which currently has 700 million daily active users. Short videos, and Douyin launched in the fall of 2016.
After reporting layer by layer, the project finally arrived at the General Office. At the general office meeting where Ma Huateng, Zhang Xiaolong, and Sun Zhonghuai were all present, after experiencing the product, everyone mainly discussed two questions-will video become mainstream? Why is the video length 6 seconds, not 8 seconds, 10 seconds? Fortunately, at the end of the discussion, Ma Huateng decided on this product. His basis is that after the 4G license is released, video will most likely become a mainstream product.
However, the issuance of 4G licenses did not come as scheduled. High data charges make users reluctant to use the product in scenarios other than WiFi.
This was a fairly successful defense, and it at least bought time for WeChat’s success. But Gao Ziguang, as the person in charge of Microvision products, did not survive the day when the opportunity came. After that, when he and the Tencent team met again, he always talked about it and regretted it.
Executives parachuting into a business, or a company, have a lot to adapt to. A senior executive of a small giant pointed out that they brought in high-level managers from Ali, Tencent, etc., but they will find that some people are completely “bringing it”, and the first thing they say is “this is what we do in Ali”.
Didi and Kuaishou, which Qiu Guangyu works for, are two completely different companies in terms of business and culture.
Didi’s online car-hailing business, both supply and performance are realized offline, with high trial and error costs. The whole company has formed a top-down decision-making chain, and the leader has absolute authority; Kuaishou’s short video business is purely online. In business, the cost of missing an opportunity is greater than making a mistake, so the company allows bottom-up innovation, and the two bosses do not have strong control over the business.
A Kuaishou person said that Didi’s methodology is not so effective on the content platform, and Qiu Guangyu needs to re-establish a methodology.
Qiu Guangyu has a gentle style of dealing with people and things. In order to take care of colleagues from all over the world at Didi’s international all-hands meeting, he deliberately started with greetings from different countries. His subordinates at Didi spoke highly of him, and one person he interviewed described feeling “like a spring breeze”.
A person close to Qiu Guangyu said, “When Tony came to Kuaishou, he had to face such a formidable opponent and fight such a big battle, which was too urgent for him.” company, but when you adapt to the rules, you will find that there is still a lot of space.”
Gao Ziguang also had a period of adaptation when he arrived in Xiaomi China. He used to be a pure online business, and if he had an idea, he would directly pull the team and start work immediately. But after arriving in Xiaomi China, many things have to be pushed slowly.
Once, he and Xiaomi partner Lu Weibing were on a business trip together. He asked Lu Weibing, “Didn’t you think clearly about the offline channel reform in China? It’s been discussed for two months, why hasn’t it been implemented yet?” Lu Weibing answered him , “Consensus is important.”
This taught Gao Ziguang a very useful lesson. He said that he will not act rashly on any measures he implements after that, but will repeat his ideas repeatedly on various occasions. He will say it twice, three times, and many times until everyone understands it.
Another high-level executive who left Dachang said that in the first half of his life, he made simple things complicated, and in the second half of his life, he hoped to make complicated things simple. What he does afterward hopes to not only create personal value, but also influence more people.
Last year, Guo Qing and Gao Ziguang both chose to step out of the big factory system to complete their unfinished business.
People need to empty themselves from time to time. When Guo Qing changed from the head of sales to the head of the business unit in Meituan, he would also doubt whether he was competent. In the first six months of participating in product conferences, he chose to just listen and not talk. “I just have this power, but it doesn’t mean I have this power.” Guo Qing picked up a navy blue water bottle from the table, “It’s just like this water bottle, and it can’t be poured out without a drop of water. emptied.”
Guo Qing is grateful for the growth that Meituan has brought him over the years, “Meituan has made me.” Now, Guo Qing hopes to use the power of himself and technology to create value for the society. He stressed that “this is not a hypocritical idea. To me, the increase in knowledge, skills or wealth is just a bonus.”
Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, and in less than 15 minutes of video, Jobs shared how he viewed growth, failure and death. In his speech, he said, “The burden of the successful is replaced by the lightness of the beginner, and there is no longer enough confidence in doing anything. It liberates me and allows me to re-enter a very creative stage of my life and things.” Guo Qing was deeply inspired by these words.
“I wrote it down, and that’s how I feel now,” Guo Qing said.
Gao Ziguang is eager to start a business before the age of 40, which is why he firmly left Xiaomi – time waits for no one.
When he left Tencent, he replaced all Tencent shares with Xiaomi shares, which is equivalent to replacing the “real money” in his hand with “paper money”. Everyone knows the story later. The stocks of Tencent and Xiaomi have gone out of diametrically opposite trajectories, which has shrunk a lot of Gao Ziguang’s book wealth. “On the basis of wealth alone, my return is definitely less than one-fifth of what I have been in Tencent, but who knows the next paragraph?” he said.
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