Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 Noise Reduction NoNoise, author 丨 Sun Jing
When he announced that he would return to the technology world in the next year, Luo Yonghao himself probably did not expect that this return road would be longer than expected.
Before he could make his way into AR/VR, he had to go back to the podium and sell live training sessions. Although it is only a scene, each issue only talks about one and a half hours, clear-eyed people can still see that Lao Luo is short of money.
Some former employees of Hammer Have heard rumors that the financing of new projects is still advancing, and Lao Luo's return to the technology circle may be postponed until April.
However, while looking for money, there is another problem on the table, that is, "saving people". The souls of Hammer Technology in the past have been scattered in the rivers and lakes, can Luo Yonghao still respond to everything?
01
On the afternoon of January 21, 2022, before the last snow in Beijing could melt, another light snow fell.
In a secluded office park outside the North Fourth Ring Road, "Noise Reduction NoNoise" met Wu Dezhou, the "second position" of the original Hammer Technology. At the time, he was busy engraving a physical antibacterial pattern onto the car leather pattern.
Wu Dezhou is now the CEO of Shark Pattern Technology, a startup focused on physical antibacterial, which is far from the mobile phone industry he has been working in for 20 years, and the public attention is not as high as that of mobile phones.
In fact, just an hour before we met, the mobile phone industry that had been silent for a long time just popped up a big news - Meizu sold itself, and Geely took over.
"Very normal. In the mobile phone industry, the space for small brands has long ceased to exist. I felt it especially clearly when I made my last phone." As soon as this topic opened, the air was instantly less restrained.
Wu Dezhou was a little sorry for the situation of his former peers, which reminded him of the hammer mobile phone. "We know how to make a good product, but in the later stages of development, it has evolved into a supply chain competition."
This is an unexpected situation for Wu Dezhou in 2016. That year, under the soft and hard bubble of Lao Luo for 7 months, he left his post as the general manager of Huawei's honor products and boarded the small boat of Hammer Technology, which was full of holes and carried the sails of idealism.
The outside world sees individuals abandoning a big tree that can be cooled off, and middle-aged people who do not know that they are unwilling may be eager for a jungle adventure.
On the Huawei platform, the "Honor" mobile phone is named after Wu Dezhou, and the Honor classic series is also developed by him with the team. But the further you go, the more repetitive the work becomes, and the more tempting it becomes to look at the outside world.
Huawei engineers who are not bad for money may be to challenge themselves and prove themselves. Luo Yonghao happened to provide this stage, although the time was short.
From Serving as the vice president of product line & hardware research and development of Hammer in May 2016 to leading the merger of Nut Mobile into ByteDance in early 2019, Wu Dezhou became the final general of Hammer To accompany Lao Luo to the end.
When Lao Luo once again rumored that he wanted to enter AR/VR and do the next generation platform, we first thought of Wu Dezhou.
Some AR entrepreneurs have said that if you only look at it from the perspective of hardware and supply chain, making mobile phones should be similar to doing XR (AR/VR/MR). Wu Dezhou happened to be in charge of product development and hardware when he was at Hammer Technology. At that time, Lao Luo praised him, calling him "one of the most valuable employees of the hammer" and a "natural winner", and said that the hammer before Wu Dezhou's arrival was "not even as good as the cottage machine in Shenzhen Huaqiang North".
This time Lao Luo has to rely on AR/VR to turn over, is there any possibility that he and Wu Dezhou and the cadres of the former Hammer Section "Dream Team" will be side by side again? At least from Wu Dezhou, we see that this possibility is not very likely.
"He also knows what I'm doing", Wu Dezhou's current attention is on the commercialization of physical antibacterial technology, which is his first entrepreneurial project. Shark pattern has landed in the field of medical catheters and disposable medical gloves, and will soon create a "model" case in the field of mother and baby.
"In a hurry," he said, he said he was surrounded by a sense of urgency that the technology should serve the pandemic faster. At the capital level, Shark Pattern is conducting a new round of financing.
Lao Luo is no stranger to shark pattern technology. In December 2019, under the guidance of Wu Dezhou, Lao Luo held a press conference on "The Old Man and the Sea". At that time, as the "chief fool officer" of shark patterns, Lao Luo mysteriously had a "black technology" in Amway. But it didn't take long for the collaboration to come to an abrupt end.
At that time, Wu Dezhou had led the Hammer Section No. 500 people and incorporated them into bytes.
Asked when he last saw Lao Luo, he paused, "I haven't been in touch for a while."
02
Neglect of contact may be the status quo of many old Luo ministries.
Hammer phones used to be the link between this group of followers, and their common label is "natural pride", where some people are eager to make a splash, and some people are eager to prove themselves.
Luo Yonghao used his own flickering to form this "dream team", and with personal traffic, he brought this group of people to the center of the stage of the mobile phone industry, so that they broke the circle and became Internet celebrities, and their names were known to more people. And they give back to the spirit of craftsmanship, and achieve mutual achievements with hammers.
But at the end of 2018, Hammer sold its own bytes, and this bond was broken.
Li Jianye, former vice president of industrial design of Hammer, went to Alibaba in August 2018, and his most proud work is no longer the horizontally arranged packaging box design of accessories that won the "IF Design Award" during the Hammer Section, but the design of the torch of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
There is a detail, Lao Luo's Weibo certification is still "Hammer Technology CEO", Li Jianye's Weibo certification was also "former Vice President of Industrial Design of Hammer Technology", but now, it has become "Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics Torch Appearance Designer, Alibaba Chief Industrial Designer", which is also a complete farewell to Lao Luo.
Prior to joining Hammer in 2013, Li was Philips Hong Kong's youngest Chinese product design consultant. He said that he was similar to Lao Luo's philosophy and believed in Lao Luo's ability to tell stories, so even if T1 was not good at that time, he was still willing to give it a fight.
Lao Luo was also very important to Li Jianye in the early days, and the two even stirred up the "best CP", but later it was reported that the two often quarreled. Hammer powder also complained, Li Jianye designed the edges of the hammer, sharp enough to cut fruit, too inhuman.
Li Jianye's departure seemed inevitable.
Xiao Peng, another soul of hammer and former UI design director, went to OPPO in 2018 as the design director of the sub-brand realme, and has rarely appeared to the public since then.
In 2021, realme shipments reached 60 million units, which means that Xiao Peng's design concept affects at least 60 million mobile phone users. This is a figure that is difficult for the hammer section to reach, after all, the total shipment of hammers is more than 3 million.
In fact, when he was found by Lao Luo in 2012, Xiao Peng had never heard of Luo Yonghao. As the most popular Chinese designer on a famous design website, Xiao Peng is usually obsessed with design and has a stable job at Baidu. It was Lao Luo's ultimate pursuit of product experience and aesthetic concept that impressed him, and thus became the third person as an employee of HammerKe 0002 and the small office on the 9th floor of the New Zhongguan Building.
Peng Jinzhou, an important figure and president of the late hammer section, took the upper hand after leaving the hammer in 2018, created Ono e-cigarettes, and also invited Chen Guanxi to do endorsements - this is a wish that Lao Luo buried when he made the hammer.
Peng Jinzhou is also a Huawei department, former vice president of glory, and has joined the headphone brand Fiil founded by singer Wang Feng. Even with the star platform, Fiil has never improved, and Peng Jinzhou has returned to the old mobile phone line with a complicated mood.
The outside world commented that Lao Peng was a low-key "honest man", and at the moment of the storm in the hammer section, the 600 million yuan emergency investment and related cooperation from the Chengdu Municipal Government were said to be negotiated by him. When Lao Luo was saddled with 600 million yuan in debt, Peng Jinzhou invited Lao Luo to be a partner of Ono e-cigarettes.
But his luck is a bit back. Twenty minutes after Ono's new product was announced, a ban on online sales of e-cigarettes was introduced. The whole industry is like falling into an ice cave. According to people familiar with the matter, Peng Jinzhou also went to OPPO later. However, According to Tenrencha data, he is still Ono's largest shareholder.
There is also Zhu Haizhou, who was a famous technology evaluator and went down to Hammer as a product manager, left Byte in 2021 and went to OPPO sub-brand OnePlus to continue to be a product manager. Fang Chi, employee of Hammer 0010 and DIRECTOR of UI design, and Zou Wei, vice president of software research and development, are still in Byte.
However, people close to Byte revealed to "Noise Reduction NoNoise" that the new stone laboratory, the department of the original hammer team, had undergone several layoffs before the double reduction policy landed, from six or seven hundred people at the end of 2020 to more than 100 people, and was scattered to the byte business lines, the status of "edge".
The people who used to quarrel every day in the hammer building are now in the past. Only Zhu Xiaomu, former vice president of the User Experience Center, is an exception.
As an employee of Hammer Section 0001, Zhu Xiaomu is known as the "Prince" internally, and is the person who "sang the double reed" with Lao Luo at the press conference, and is also the most loyal follower of the latter.
Many people know that Zhu Xiaomu was a "fan brother" when he taught English to Lao Luo, and heard that Lao Luo wanted to do a thing of "killing apples", this "turtle" with small pigtails, and joined the hammer family without much thought, even if he started work only to do miscellaneous work.
Grumpy Lao Luo is not an easy person to get along with. He could scold Zhu Xiaomu on his front foot for making things "all garbage", and in two days he would praise him as "the best product manager in the Eastern Hemisphere". For others, he had long rejected the "PUA", but no matter how Luo Yonghao scolded, Zhu Xiaomu himself still maintained his appreciation for idols, or fanaticism.
In the feudal hereditary power structure, there is probably no one who is more eager to prove himself than the "prince". In 2018, when the hammer music finally dispersed, Zhu Xiaomu ran out to chase the wind, started his own business to make e-cigarettes, and also obtained tens of millions of dollars in investment from VCs such as Jingwei China.
It can be said that after leaving Lao Luo, Zhu Xiaomu finally found his "fulcrum" and proved his ability to be independent.
But when Luo Yonghao needed live broadcast help, he came back again to accompany Lao Luo and became a "signed artist" in the "Make a Friend" live broadcast room. Unconditional support for Lao Luo seems to have become an inertia. Of course, maybe because the e-cigarette business is tepid and doesn't need to occupy all his energy.
At present, the veteran generals who have publicly said that they will support Lao Luo's return to the technology circle with "flesh", in addition to Huang He, the boss behind "making a friend", there is Zhu Xiaomu.
03
"Come on, Xiao Luo, you can still cow B for eleven years." Lao Luo, who started his business at the age of 50, has listened to hundreds of American talk shows on the treadmill in order to prepare for his next venture.
But now, in addition to maintaining the level of talk shows, Lao Luo is more urgently needed to form a new "dream team".
In the first year of Lei Jun's founding Xiaomi, 80% of his energy was looking for partners, which led to the later Xiaomi "Eight King Kongs".
In order to form the "Dream Team" of the Hammer Section, Luo Yonghao also fooled around, and he even recruited Qian Chen, a senior expert who had rejected Lei Jun and worked in Motorola for 13 years.
The team of the Hammer Period is indeed worthy of the stars shining. "This team is very strong, and I think that whether it is building a car or doing other hardware, it has more opportunities than mobile phones." In fact, investors have also proposed this aspect." An insider said that at that time, investors did not even mind burning money, of course, they did not pay for "feelings", but looked at Lao Luo's team.
This is also the reason why Byte directly bought the hammer when it wanted to power the hardware. Zhang Yiming is the best at "investment-style digging". Today's cadres Chen Lin, Zhang Nan and Yang Luyu were all bytes that the company entered after it was acquired by Zhang Yiming.
Luo Yonghao himself was too clear about the importance of "centaurs". As he shouted at Apple CEO Cook before: You remember, there are only two ways to get a product right, either to have a talented team of product managers, or like an Internet company, relying on big data and doing AB testing.
However, compared to making hammers, today's team may be really difficult to carry.
The first is that the market is different. When Lao Luo entered the mobile phone industry in 2012, it was the Cambrian era of smart phones. At that time, the entire industry chain was sound and the industry maturity was high. People who are gathered together by Lao Luo have a clear frame of reference in their hearts, such as "kill the apple" - this is also the bullseye of "natural pride".
But this time to do AR/VR/MR, don't look at the metaverse is a mess, the real landing application is still in the early stages, so that the industry can not say a "masterpiece".
Nor is the product impact of the two orders of magnitude. Mobile phone belongs to mass consumption, a blockbuster, often shipped tens of millions, but AR /VR products, currently also Xiao za's VR headset Oculus, touched the tens of millions of lines. But Lao Luo declared that he would not do VR, and the remaining AR//MR would be difficult to versatility, and it would be more likely to land in the vertical field first.
In addition, from the perspective of time dimension, the mobile phone industry chain is mature, which can accelerate the pace of entrepreneurship, of course, the time to enter the Red Sea and shuffle is also shortened; and doing AR/VR is a long-term investment. Ruoqi founder Misa told "Noise Reduction NoNoise" that Ruoqi's AR products, from research to real landing in the to B industry, almost 5 years.
Whether this kind of long-distance running is still attractive to the people who used to be "born proud", it is difficult to say. If you count from the beginning of the hammer section, the time has passed 10 years, even the young people who have just graduated, now they have entered the ranks of middle-aged people, the fuel of idealism, is enough to support the next "cycle"?
Moreover, for many innings, after experiencing the collapse of the hammer family, their perception of Lao Luo may also be quietly changing. The business world is cruel and realistic, and in order to achieve commercial success, it is obviously not enough to rely on feelings, storytelling ability, and paranoia about products. Lao Luo also said that his shortcomings are particularly short.
After returning to the science and technology circle, whether Luo Yonghao can form a new "dream team" is waiting to see. At just 50 years old, he still has the courage to start another business, and he still has to wish him good luck here.