Recently, the Cambrian period has been a bit turbulent.
On the evening of March 14, Cambrian officially announced that Liang Jun, the company's core technical personnel, notified the company to terminate the labor contract on February 10, 2022. The day after the official announcement, Cambrian's stock price plummeted by more than 18%, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange also issued a regulatory work letter to Cambrian.
Cambrian's announcement on the departure of core technical personnel
The outside world is even more curious about Liang Jun's abandonment of millions of stocks, and even raises questions about the profitability and future development of Cambrian itself.
A month ago, a similar thing happened to ideal cars.
Ideal Auto announced on February 25 that the company's chief technology officer Wang Kai left for personal reasons.
Leaving after only 17 months on the job, this has to make the outside world worry about whether the technological development of the ideal car will be disrupted, especially the impact on the upcoming second model.
Although after the departure of the two core technical personnel, Cambrian and Ideal Automobile said in unison that there was no significant impact on the company's research and development. But the departure of the core technical personnel of these technology companies has triggered a lot of discussion, why did these technology giants leave? How much will their departure affect the company? And after leaving, where did they all go?
The conflict of "rights and interests" behind the departure
Generally speaking, the job position can intuitively reflect the importance of the relevant personnel in the company's R&D system. Therefore, whether the technical personnel are in the core position is the primary factor for identifying the core technical personnel. To put it simply, judging whether it is a core technology can be judged from three aspects: whether it is in a core technology position, whether it has made important scientific research contributions, and whether it has outstanding work experience.
According to public information, Liang Jun joined Cambrian as CTO in 2017. During his service in cambrian, Liang Jun participated in research and applied for 138 invention patents and 10 PCT patents, of which 14 invention patents have been granted, and the rest are still in the examination stage.
Before joining Cambrian, Liang Jun successively worked for Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen HiSilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd., and in the first year after joining Cambrian and serving as CTO, Cambrian cooperated with Liang Jun's former owner Huawei in the mobile terminal chip business.
For the departure of Liang Jun, Cambrian said in the announcement of the departure of core technical personnel that there are "differences with the company".
Some industry analysts analyzed in an interview with the Titanium Media App that the current cambrian information only said that there were differences. Although the specific information is not disclosed, it is certain that the two parties are emotionally unhappy, and there may be different judgments on business capabilities.
This was also confirmed by cambrian board office people in response to the media, who admitted that the difference between Liang Jun and Cambrian was that "the company hopes to focus on the wide landing of products and seize the opportunity period, while Liang Jun hopes to invest more in technology and research."
According to the financial report data, Cambrian achieved a net profit attributable to the owners of the parent company in 2021 of -847 million yuan, an increase of 94.98% over the same period last year.
For the performance loss, cambrian gave the reason that it was mainly due to the increase in R&D expenses, share payments and sales expenses in management expenses. Among them, in order to ensure the high-quality iteration of "cloud edge" chip products and basic system software platforms, the company continued to increase investment in research and development.
Cambrian disclosed in the performance forecast that it expects the company's research and development expenses in 2021 to be 1.044 billion yuan to 1.276 billion yuan, an increase of 35.89% to 66.09% compared with the research and development expenses of 768 million yuan in the same period of the previous year. As of the date of this announcement, the number of Cambrian R&D personnel is 1228, accounting for 80.37% of the company's total employees.
Obviously, in order to maintain a high market capitalization, high growth, and get rid of the continuous expansion of losses, Cambrian is more inclined to find demand to develop new products, while Liang Jun hopes to deepen the underlying technology to seek a breakthrough, but this requires huge investment and it is difficult to see output in the short term.
Sun Yanjun, CEO of Feiyuan Technology, also said in an interview with the Titanium Media App that the external announcement is often a relatively decent reason, and the actual reason is mostly the conflict of authority and the imbalance of interests.
Titanium Media App through the collation of some of the large factory CTO, technical leaders, scientists and other core technical personnel departure information in the past two years found that the published reasons for departure are mainly two: personal reasons and conceptual differences.
For example, su Jing, the former director of Huawei's intelligent driving product department, left her job, and the outside world speculated that on the one hand, it was the influence of improper remarks before, and on the other hand, it was also the inevitable result of The overall takeover of the intelligent car business by Huawei's consumer BG after Yu Chengdong took over the automotive business.
In fact, the departure of the CTO of a high-tech company is not unusual in itself. According to incomplete statistics, since 2022, there have been a number of core technical personnel of listed pharmaceutical and chip companies leaving. Jiang Han, a senior researcher at Pangu Think Tank, said in response to a media interview that the departure of core technical personnel of listed companies is a normal phenomenon.
The reason why the departure of a company's core technical personnel will cause a huge market sensation, titanium media App through observation found that one of the key reasons is that the company itself is in the industry there is a huge point of controversy. For example, the question of Cambrian's own business caused by Liang Jun's departure is actually a commercialization problem commonly faced by the entire industry.
Therefore, at a time when the outside world is paying attention to the difficulty of AI landing, it is not difficult to understand that Liang Jun, a core technician who has both a technical background and has brought significant commercial progress to cambrian matchmaking, has caused great doubts.
The corporate shock caused by the departure of technology executives
If the shock caused by Liang Jun's departure is an example, what impact will the departure of core technical personnel have in a general sense?
The above-mentioned securities industry personnel analyzed that from the perspective of technology research and development itself, the departure of core technology executives may lead to changes or swings in the direction or strategy of the company's technology research and development; from the perspective of technology research and development team management, the departure of core executives may gradually take away a number of middle-level technical backbones, after all, this is still quite common in the technical team.
Sun Yanjun believes that the departure of core technical personnel depends on their value in the company's strategy. If the company's technical direction is changing, the original technical backbone may not be able to keep up with the new direction, then the departure of the old technicians may give the new people a free opportunity.
Observe the core technicians of these high-tech companies, both internally grown and imported from the outside. In the process of introduction, "there are direct recruitment, higher level, and some cases first ask candidates to help as consultants, cooperate while familiarizing, and then introduce later." ”
However, the introduction of core technical personnel from the outside will have a problem of "integration", and it is common to not be integrated. After Wang Kai, CTO of Ideal Automobile, left his job, some internal employees told the media that "the final delivery of the self-developed plan is not bad", and "Wang Kai's sense of participation is not strong".
Sun Yanjun introduced to the Titanium Media App that there are generally two situations in which integration cannot be achieved, one is inconsistent in the lower cognitive system; the other is that there are differences in interests. The integration of the core team usually takes more than half a year to reach a relatively tacit understanding, so the core of most entrepreneurial teams is people who are already familiar. If it is an external CTO, you can first familiarize yourself with the run-in in the form of a consultant and then join.
Most of these high-level technical talents were given certain symbolic meanings at the beginning of their introduction. For example, ideal car has always emphasized the humanized experience, but also once criticized for the lack of intelligence, Wang Kai returned to China in 2020, the entry of ideal car is also regarded as an important symbol of the company's research and development acceleration and increased investment; when Zhang Wensong joined Didi, the outside world also commented, "This is also a landmark event for Didi to become a technology-based company, and Didi will become a new depression to attract technical talents." ”
However, since it is coming with a certain stage mission, it is not difficult to understand that it is not difficult to leave at a certain time. For example, the departures of Xi Xiaohu, Ye Jieping and Zhang Wensong have been described by the media as the result of "Didi's technology-driven concept being gradually marginalized".
Where did the tech bulls go after they left?
Since it is not difficult to understand the departure, where did these technical bulls go after leaving? It has also aroused the attention and speculation of the industry.
By sorting out the whereabouts of the core technical personnel of several large factories after leaving their jobs, it is found that starting a business or joining the next big factory is the most mainstream direction of these technology bulls.
The core technical personnel of some large factories have left their jobs
Entrepreneurs such as Wang Gang left Alibaba, although according to the technical confidentiality agreement, in the past five years can no longer engage in the field of unmanned driving related work, but also chose to start a business in the field of clean robots close to the field, and has received financing; Tencent's former AI Lab dean Yao Xing left his job to create a company called Yuanxiang Weisi.
Ye Jieping, who joined the next big factory, joined Shell as vice president of technology and chief scientist after leaving his job; Wang Changhu, former head of Visual Technology of ByteDance, joined the real estate company Longhu Real Estate after leaving his job.
As the proportion of technology in investment increases, investment institutions have also become a choice for technology bulls to leave. For example, Zhang Wensong chose to join Hillhouse Group as an operating partner after leaving Didi; gong Shihai, former CTO of Dianping, also joined Zhonglin Capital as an investment partner at the beginning of this year after experiencing a period of entrepreneurship, participating in the investment in corporate service direction and providing technical direction and technical management support for Zhonglin Investment Company.
Compared with those who only have investment experience, former executives of large factories with technical backgrounds and experience in the business of large factories not only have a better chance to discover high-quality projects, but also have more advantages in helping the invested enterprises operate.
In addition, Sun Yanjun also told the Titanium Media App that the overall opportunities have been decreasing in the past two years, and some CTOs have left as freelance or technical consultants in the form of individuals or small teams.
epilogue
From the perspective of enterprise management, the core team of an enterprise must have certain changes, bring new ideas with new people, flow water without corruption, reduce entropy, and avoid the loss of key figures.
But if you zoom in to an industry, it is not difficult to understand the departure of technical core personnel. For a high-tech company, technological innovation is only one of the keys, which will also be affected by business models, market environments and other factors because of the different fields.
Therefore, we see that when these technology giants leave, they are not only personal reasons, but also affected by external forces such as strategic changes and policy changes of the company, and the development trend of the industry is often reflected behind the flow of talents. Of course, in turn, the flow of talents forms an ocean current, which also affects the cold and warm weather of the entire industry. (This article was first published on Titanium Media App, author/Han Jingxian, editor/Zhang Min)