At the beginning of this month, Leifeng.com has heard the following three pieces of news about Kuaishou:
1. Chen Dingjia has long been dismissed, and may have left;
2. Cheng Yixiao has cultivated many people from Ali, and the Kuaishou main website is already owned by Yu Yue (Yu Yue is a pseudonym, after many inquiries from Leifeng.com, he should be Gai Kun, the former Ali algorithm leader);
3. Kuaishou’s commercialization line is in great turmoil, and the level of business leaders is undergoing a major layoff of 12-5 (people). The interpretation is that Wang Jianwei is making room for his own people;
4. The above information will be verified before January 19 at the latest.
Leifeng.com originally wanted to see the results again. Last night, Kuaishou announced the resignation of CTO Chen Dingjia on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The first article has already happened, so we can take it seriously.
1. Chen Dingjia has no real power for a long time
Did Chen Dingjia leave suddenly?
In fact, not at all, because he no longer has a business site after the last restructuring.
On September 28, 2021, Kuaishou announced the biggest structural adjustment since its establishment: the establishment of the main station production and transportation line, with Wang Jianwei in charge; the simultaneous establishment of the e-commerce business department, commercialization business department, internationalization business department, and game business department Four divisions.
The company has adjusted from a functional structure to a business department structure, and the CTO is destined to be emptied. This logic has been mentioned in Leifeng.com’s previous article “Jingdong No Longer Needs a CTO”, and it is almost inevitable after a company develops to a certain scale.
Similar history has also been repeated in companies such as Tencent, JD.com, and Baidu.
To be more specific, in the past, each product department of Kuaishou needed R&D support. Based on the premise of the functional system, the support they needed could only come from the department in charge of Chen Dingjia; under the new business department structure, each product department has Its independent research and development, products, operations, marketing, and a series of personnel including technology, they will make their own choices as long as they have a choice.
In this case, Chen Dingjia, who has been deprived of power, has three choices as CTO:
One is resignation;
The second is to become a “vase”, show up in public, and promote the technical concept of Kuaishou;
The third is to lead the team to open new businesses, and open new maps for increment.
The first is not a good way, and the other two, one too light and the other too heavy, are not good either. Many CTOs have struggled before, so many veterans can’t handle it, and it is also difficult for Chen Dingjia to handle it.
In fact, it is not that there is no fourth route, but this fourth route is involuntary, the decision is in the hands of the CEO, and it is destined not to be Chen Dingjia’s choice, which will be detailed later.
Chen Dingjia
Chen Dingjia, like most CTOs, chose the third path – to open a new business.
So what business can be opened in the past two years? Of course, it is cloud. In recent years, Baidu Wang Haifeng and Byte Yang Zhenyuan have gone through the pitfalls of “technical No. 1 cloud development”.
In the second half of last year, Chen Dingjia recruited Kuaishou’s powerful Yu Bing to officially announce cloud business to foreign officials.
There is nothing wrong with Chen Dingjia’s general direction of breaking the game, but the problem is that the audio and video cloud track has already been rolled into the sky, and the PAAS products that Kuaishou is currently making are also the most exciting products in this rolling track.
From the perspective of technical capabilities, there is no problem for Kuaishou to choose the audio and video cloud to enter the To B track. A person close to Bing once told Leifeng.com that Yu Bing’s audio and video system in Kuaishou is one to two years ahead of the entire track (including Douyin), and is at an international level.
The technical strength is there, but if you want to play the game of to B, can you rely on technology alone? How much effort the chess player will put into it, and how much strength the Kuaishou will put into the strategy, seems to be the key.
Compared with Tencent, Baidu, Ali, Huawei and a series of companies that have deployed cloud business for many years, Kuaishou is obviously a little bit powerless. Even if it is a late star, Kuaishou’s “mortal enemy” ByteDance has been laying out the cloud business market for many years.
Under such circumstances, Kuaishou only entered the market for the first time around 2021, and it has to be said that it has lagged behind a lot. What’s more, the cloud business is a business that requires huge investment in the early stage, which is not “friendly” to Kuaishou who is still on the verge of profit and loss.
A Kuaishou employee once commented on Kuaishou’s cloud business, “Audio and video are so complicated, Kuaishou comes to share the cake at this time, not necessarily to divide the outer cake, or just to divide the inner cake.”
We cannot say that this is Chen Dingjia’s problem. The cloud itself is a matter that requires long-term investment.
As the CTO, Chen Dingjia obviously can’t wait any longer. Kuaishouyun is still in the “children” period and can’t see the future yet.
In addition, within the company, it is Yu Bing, not Chen Dingjia, who really has the status in the audio and video arena. Even on the new road of cloud, it is still difficult for Chen Dingjia to escape from the false job or the setting of a vase. What is even more tragic is that after Chen Dingjia was cut off by the reform of the business unit system, it was difficult for him to have a voice in each business unit, and his work was limited everywhere. He had to lobby the business unit to use his own cloud, even in BAT. It is very difficult to promote, Not to mention the extremely turbulent Kuaishou at the moment. At the same time, as the person Su Hua single-handedly supported, Chen Dingjia was always in an awkward position after Su Hua resigned as CEO.
After various attempts failed, resignation became inevitable.
Leifeng.com first heard about Chen Dingjia’s resignation, in fact, in November last year. Although Kuaishou has only officially announced the news now, many parties have already seen that the trend is unstoppable.
2. Eliminate people with inconsistent thinking
The location is inappropriate, do people have to leave? If Big Brother is still there, it may not be. This is the fourth way we are talking about.
Chen Dingjia, who was single-handedly selected by Su Hua, also came from an algorithm background. Most outsiders know that the two are alumni of the same level of Tsinghua University, but few people know that Chen Dingjia and Su Hua are actually elementary school classmates.
Chen Dingjian could understand everything Su Hua said, and he was the executor of the technical route that Su Hua dreamed of.
Before joining Kuaishou, Chen Dingjia worked in Tencent for more than ten years, which was mentioned in Leifeng.com’s previous article “A Brief History of China’s Advertising Engine”.
At that time, Wang Yi, the algorithm master, upgraded Tencent’s advertising system in all aspects, bringing out two children, one is Chen Dingjia and the other is Liu Xiaobing. Later, Chen Dingjia became the CTO of Kuaishou, and Liu Xiaobing became the core person in charge of byte commercialization. (As a preview here, about how Liu Xiaobing and others built Byte, the business algorithm empire, Leifeng.com will soon write another article “Who Makes Huge Engine Make Money?”, welcome to add the author WeChat Congc_a to communicate.)
At that time, Chen Dingjia was not outstanding among Tencent’s technical leaders. A Tencent employee who was close to Chen Dingjia at the time commented on him, “Chen Dingjia’s technical ability is very average, and he is not ranked high in Tencent.”
In contrast, many Tencent employees spoke highly of Liu Xiaobing, “He sees problems very sharply and has a high sensitivity to the situation.”
However, Su Hua had a lot of trust in Chen Dingjia.
Su Hua may also know that with Chen Dingjia’s qualifications, it may be difficult to convince the crowd of Kuaishou’s technical leaders, so he has been deliberately cultivated many times, and the internal horse racing has him as a judge. He establishes prestige.
Regardless of whether Chen Dingjia really “sides” with Su Hua, the people on Cheng Yixiao’s side will not regard him as one of their own.
Kuaishou under the dual-core system certainly has more room for trial and error, but the negative effects brought about by the power struggle between the two must not be ignored.
Moreover, it wasn’t once or twice that Cheng Yixiao squeezed out the technical talents Su Hua recruited. Before that, there was Xiang Liang, and then there was Wang Meihong. The previous article on Leifeng.com has detailed it, so I won’t expand it here.
And Chen Dingjia’s resignation is more like Cheng Yixiao’s clean-up of Su Hua’s remaining “power”.
At the same time as the “big purge” at the CTO level, Kuaishou is also undergoing a “small rectification”.
Leifeng.com has learned that since the beginning of January, Kuaishou has been undergoing a new round of layoffs. Commercialization is the key department of this round of optimization, covering grassroots and members of different levels of management.
A headhunter told Leifeng.com, “Quite a lot of people from Kuaishou’s management have come out to look for opportunities recently, such as those at the rank of M3.”
Another person close to Kuaishou gave a clearer answer. The commercialization department is undergoing major adjustments, and at least 5 of the 12 important department heads have been killed.
According to the current structure diagram obtained by Leifeng.com, the Kuaishou commercialization department has a total of 12 secondary departments, but there are already two people in charge of the two departments at the same time, and two people should have left their jobs. Temporary escrow at the same level.
Kuaishou Commercialization System
Why is there such an adjustment?
What Leifeng.com heard was, “The new officials took office three fires, and the abolition and rectification this time is actually Wang Jianwei making room for his own people.”
Those who were forced to leave might not be Su Hua’s people, but at least they couldn’t reach an agreement with Cheng Yixiao in terms of ideology and behavior, and Cheng Yixiao needed someone like Wang Jianwei who could implement his management philosophy.
Wang Jianwei
However, many employees of Kuaishou don’t think so.
After Su Hua left, the welfare of Kuaishou employees continued to decline, which of course has the impact of the macro environment. But objectively speaking, many of Cheng Yixiao’s practices are difficult to satisfy Kuaishou employees. Layoffs may be inevitable, and compensation cannot satisfy employees.
The recent wave of layoffs has aroused the anger of many people, and many Kuaishou employees have hired lawyers to prepare for the worst.
In this round of abolition, commercialization is a key department, and the scale is still difficult to estimate, but the proportion is not small. A Kuaishou employee revealed last week, “It has been notified by the supervisor to optimize, and HR compensation negotiations may not be round.”
Some employees can only express their dissatisfaction by missing Su Hua, saying, “It seems that when Brother Hua left, the taste will change.” He also explained, “When Su Hua was in office, treating employees well was a corporate culture of Kuaishou. But now, Everything seems different.”
3. Fight for veterans and deploy newcomers
After Chen Dingjia’s resignation, Yu Bing and Yu Yue will share Chen’s responsibilities as CTO and report to Cheng Yixiao.
Yu Bing’s background is quite intriguing.
Although he can be regarded as Su Hua’s senior brother in Tsinghua University, he also joined Kuaishou at the invitation of Su Hua, and built the audio and video technology that Kuaishou is most proud of now.
But strictly speaking, Yu Bing was not someone Su Hua had promoted.
Yu Bing and Su Hua met in 2008. At that time, Su Hua was working on a start-up company and wanted to cooperate with Yu Bing’s company. The former is engaged in advertising and algorithms, while the latter is engaged in video, with complementary advantages, and the two have become acquainted since then.
However, Yu Bing will have to wait until the fall of 2016, eight years later, to join Kuaishou.
As early as 2015, Su Hua had repeatedly lobbied Yu Binglai Kuaishou. However, Yu Bing was working at Hulu, the second largest video website in the United States after Netflix, and looked down on Kuaishou, a short video platform that seemed a bit “earthy”.
At that time, Yu Bing had already made a lot of achievements in the field of audio and video technology.
When the first batch of video websites in China were just established, Yu Bing and his like-minded partners built the core background system and live broadcast system for a certain enterprise.
Since then, Yu Bing has successively led video and infrastructure teams in multinational companies such as Hulu and FreeWheel, and participated in the establishment of video technology companies as a technical partner. He is recognized as one of the pioneers in the field of audio and video technology in China.
Yu Bing
In contrast, Yan Qiang, who is regarded as Su Hua’s direct descendant by the outside world, has been with Su Hua almost all the time since his internship, and only stayed in Ali for about three years.
Yu Bing is different. Although he was invited by Su Hua, he is more like a pure technical leader. He has never taken a team in the Kuaishou system. In addition, Yu Bing’s outstanding ability has always been the key target of the two parties.
It is reasonable for the “winner” Cheng Yixiao to reuse Bing:
On the one hand, give Yu Bing a favor so that Yu Bing can perform his work with more dedication; on the other hand, Yu Bing is the core technology leader of Kuaishou in the cloud field. After Chen Dingjia resigns from Kuaishou, Yu Bing will inevitably take over this A business that is still in its “baby” stage and requires long-term investment.
Compared with Yu Bing’s rich resume in the past, Yu Yue didn’t appear in the public eye until nearly half a year ago.
It is said that Yu Yue was invited by Cheng Yixiao from Ali, and he still uses a pseudonym. The purpose may be to prevent Ali’s non-competition agreement, which is also Cheng Yixiao’s protection for him.
According to public reports, Yu Yue first appeared in Kuaishou’s organizational structure in 2020. At that time, Yu Yue became one of the members of Kuaishou’s 2020 Economic and Management Committee, responsible for managing the R&D department-Community Science Department, and R&D line-AI Platform.
Coincidentally, around 2020, the algorithm tycoon Gai Kun left Ali to join Kuaishou. When Gai Kun was in Ali, his level was P10. Based on this inference, it is reasonable for Gai Kun to join Kuaishou and become the vice president of Kuaishou.
After many inquiries from Leifeng.com, the person whose pseudonym is Yu Yue is indeed Gai Kun.
After joining Kuaishou, Yu Yue has been in charge of the community science line business in Kuaishou. Until November 1, 2022, Wang Jianwei, the original head of the main station, was transferred to be in charge of commercialization, and Yu Yue took over the burden of the main station at the same time.
After this adjustment, Yu Yue’s responsibilities and powers have been further expanded, and he will be in charge of the community science line and the main station and technology business lines at the same time.
Before Yu Yue took over part of Chen Dingjia’s responsibilities, a person close to Kuaishou said, “Now it is the world of Yu Yue who came from Ali. He spans the two business lines of the main website and community science. Now many executives of Kuaishou belong to Ali. “
From the community science line to succeeding Chen Dingjia as part of the CTO responsibilities, Yu Yue only took less than half a year, and it was hard not to let people’s imagination run wild, especially when it happened to be just after Su Hua left.
Although Cheng Yixiao is now quite criticized within Kuaishou, the management who directly reports to Cheng Yixiao may think otherwise.
A person who was invited by Cheng Yixiao to join Kuaishou said, “Cheng Yixiao is a strange person, and he can’t see anything on weekdays, but if he is really a virtuous corporal, he will be scary.”
In order to win over the big names in technology, Cheng Yixiao can go to places thousands of miles away, just to see him. For example, Leifeng.com knew that Cheng Yixiao had flown from Beijing to Hangzhou, just to chat with a tech giant who was still in Alibaba at the time.
The departure of Chen Dingjia can be seen as a sign of Kuaishou’s initial completion of internal rectification to a certain extent, while the promotion of Yu Bing and Yu Yue means the full arrival of Kuaishou’s Cheng Yixiao era.
It has only been more than a year since Su Hua stepped down as CEO.
After Su Hua resigned, Cheng Yixiao, the early founder of Kuaishou, took more than a year to finally completely control the big ship again.
Steering the helm alone is not an easy task. Wherever the big ship will sail in the future, power and responsibility are tied to one person.
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