Li University retired, Wang Yaqing lost power, Zhang Chen faded out, Liu Qiangdong could not find the ideal CTO in his heart.
The author | Ma Xiaoning
Editor| Hu Zhe
"I want to ask you to be the CTO of JD.com!"
Liu Qiangdong said this to at least three people. According to Leifeng's understanding, two of them accepted and one refused, which also made JD.com's two CTO and a technical executive who was not a CTO but was better than a CTO.
From the founding of JD.com to today, Liu Qiangdong has always been on the road of seeking a CTO. What kind of stories have you experienced in the middle of this, and what problems have occurred?
1 Lee University, no appointed CTO
Lee University
As the first person in charge of JD.com's de facto technology system between April 2008 and April 2015, Li University is a figure in the history of JD.com's development, and even in the history of China's e-commerce technology system, it is impossible to get around in any way.
Li University is thin and lean, a bit like Ma Yun, he was born in a small mountain village in Wuling Township, southern County, Sichuan Province, when he was a child, his family was poor, only studying hard.
In 1988, at the age of 18, Li University was admitted to the Mathematics Department of Shandong University with the highest score in science in the county college entrance examination to learn control theory. At that time, he would never have imagined that four years later, in 1992, in the distant north of Jiangsu, there was a young man surnamed Liu who was born poor like him and was also a county college entrance examination winner, and entered Chinese University with the excitement of changing his fate.
In June 1995, after obtaining a master's degree from Chongqing University and passing the system programmer certification, Li University entered the computer newspaper, which was the most influential IT media in China at that time, and Li University was in charge of the educational software company Ku Li Xiang, a joint venture between computer newspaper and IDG at that time; in June 1999, Li University was transferred to Tianji Network derived from the computer newspaper website, and began to transform the technical support platform of Tianji Network, thus starting his Internet career.
At that time, the Internet industry was still far from developed in China, most of the Internet users were IT industry and computer enthusiasts, and Tianji Network, which had innate advantages, also became the world's largest Chinese IT portal at that time, and the technical system built by Li University supported the website to win the "Top Ten Websites in China" for 5 consecutive times. Li University later returned to the Computer Newspaper Group to help Computer Newspaper establish a modern information collection and editing system.
In 2005, Li University was awarded the honorary title of "National Labor Model" by the State Council and the National May Day Labor Medal in the same year, and he is probably the first private enterprise technician in the history of China's Internet to become a "National Labor Model" because of his contribution to network application technology.
At this time, Li University, of course, would not have thought that in November of that year, there was a small website called "Jingdong Multimedia Network", which was celebrating the small milestone of "the daily order processing volume steadily exceeded 500".
In 2007, the second year after Baidu's listing, the site's firm stock price supported countless people to invest in the tide of Internet entrepreneurship. And also in this year, Fujian Cai Wensheng successfully sold the navigation station 265 to Google, so that he had more abundant funds to invest in the Internet, he found Li University, who had left the computer newspaper at this time and was found by IDG partner Wang Shu to 163888 as CEO, 163888 and Tianji were Wang Shu's star projects, when the CEO of the 163888 was called Zheng Li, and the COO was called Zhang Jian.
N years later, Wang Shu Cai Wensheng Zhang Jian Li University are in this blockchain in this jianghu to re-churn in their own way, has retired as an independent investor Wang Shu as since he supports the promotion of the innovation possibilities brought by the blockchain, Cai Wensheng is personally running to bitcoin ten thousand coins Hou, Zhang Jian is the founder of the famous transaction that is mining project Fcoin, and Li University founded magnetic cloud, the blockchain as a technology to promote the digital transformation of the entire Chinese enterprise. This world is not big.
Li University rushed from Chongqing to Beijing, and Cai Wensheng gave Li University an investment and let him, as the founder of the project, launched an online medical business.
Although Li University students are frugal in nature, although they have achieved a lot of career success, when they arrived in Beijing, they actually chose the "shared rent" method of north drifting for young talents who have just debuted. And he never expected that the major turning point in his life was not in some Internet medical entrepreneurship, but in his roommate.
Lee's roommate at the time, at an e-commerce startup called 360buy, had just taken financing, but the company was not large. Li University has done hoyodo.com (good and many) in the same period as Tianji.com and 8848, which is the earliest batch of B2C websites in China, so li university is a real veteran in the e-commerce industry.
Li University also made an e-commerce entrance collection platform called my160, which is a domain name with half letters and half numbers, which is indeed in line with the earthy aesthetic of the Internet in that year.
By the way, after many years, JD.com finally gave up the original domain name 360buy.com that was often mistaken for zhou Hongyi, and launched a new www.jd.com that cost 30 million to buy, making the pattern look new.
But you may not know that to this day, if you enter www.360buy.com this URL, you can still accurately come to the main site of JD.com.
To some extent, this shows that Liu Qiangdong is a person who cherishes the history of JD.com and has a very emotional side, and he uses this unique way to collect fragments of history, which is particularly delicate, which is not Wang Xing's patent. And only by understanding this side, Liu Qiangdong is not just the person who solidified in the stereotype of "overbearing president".
The founder of 360buy, or Liu Qiangdong is more comfortable, he was struggling to find a good technical leader. In 2007, Jingdong was found by Chang Bin of Today Capital, and Xu Xin, a partner of Today Capital, auctioned out tens of millions of dollars to promote Jingdong and Newegg to fight on the track of 3C e-commerce, and the entire Jingdong has not lacked a sense of direction, but lacks the technical leader who turns Liu Qiangdong's desire for success into a stable and easy-to-use Internet platform, not to mention the builder of the technical system.
Until one day, the emergence of Li University, vice president and technical leader of the previous well-known website Tianji Network, and at this time, it was starting a business in the Long Horizon Building on Suzhou Street in Zhongguancun, which was within walking distance of Jingdong. All kinds of information hinted at Liu Qiangdong, this person may be the high-level technical talent that JD.com needs.
Therefore, Liu Qiangdong took the initiative to contact Li University and invited him to chat together. By the way, Liu Qiangdong is not what the outside world calls "a rough person who does not understand technology", Li University remembers very clearly, Liu Qiangdong personally told him that in order to work-study, he had taught himself programming and completed a software development order of 500,000 during his college years, and Liu's university major was sociology, and before the poor rural era of northern Jiangsu, he must not have access to computers.
Another detail that shows that Liu Qiangdong attaches great importance to technology is that Leifeng Network has visited, whether it is Jingdong's early or later several very heavy technical leaders and more subdivided technical line leaders, almost without exception can accurately recall his first contact with Jingdong, it is Liu Qiangdong himself, but the meeting place has become a place such as a café in Times Square from a teahouse in Zhongguancun.
Li University quickly cleared Up Liu Qiangdong's technical background, which was really "poor" - at that time, Jingdong only had more than twenty technical personnel, in addition to the operation and maintenance personnel, responsible for the development of more than a dozen programmers, at that time they bought a simple ASP "personal website system" on the Internet and went online, there was no technical accumulation, and there was no forward-looking deployment. At this moment, the biggest demand is to find a technical leader to stabilize the website that often crashes.
But this person is difficult to find, in 2007, China's Internet senior technical talents are very lacking, even if there are also those than Jingdong to have a larger and more background of the site to go away, and Jingdong did not have a strong influence in the e-commerce circle later, Liu Qiangdong himself has no technical connections.
For Liu Qiangdong, Li University has both experience in managing well-known websites, and has enough resumes, academic qualifications, and even honorary titles such as "National Labor Model", there is no doubt that Liu Qiangdong immediately confirmed that Li University is the person he is looking for, and he invited Li University to join Jingdong on the spot.
Although from today's review, joining Jingdong is definitely the sooner the better, and Li University also recalled to Leifeng Network that he joined Jingdong, really think that China's Internet has developed from an information platform (Tianji Network) to a trading platform (Taobao, Jingdong), so he is very optimistic about the future of e-commerce projects.
But one of the most specific problems is that Li University came to Beijing at the investment and invitation of Cai Wensheng, and although this project seems to be developing mediocrely, it is unethical to say that it is not moral and cannot be compared to Cai Wensheng. Under the temptation of JD.com, Li University did not immediately agree to Liu Qiangdong, but insisted on serving JD.com in the form of a "consultant" for the next year.
Looking back from now on, this detail, and even the insistence that it is likely to lose the opportunity to join JD.com, is another plus for Li University in addition to its technical ability and in Liu Qiangdong's eyes, that is, to talk about credibility and heavy commitment. And this kind of quality is very precious to Liu Qiangdong, who is more bloody and has also been beaten at the bottom. This makes Li University's career in Jingdong after that, although it has also been turbulent, although there are also external disputes and internal volumes, it has never lost the basic trust of Liu Qiangdong and has been in Liu Qiangdong's inner circle, which is also one of the basic reasons why he can start and end his Jingdong career well.
As a result, Li University did not officially join JD.com until May 2008, becoming the first high-level technical leader of JD.com.
Years later, a friend who was under the command of Li University and has now become a top industrial Internet analyst told Leifeng That he believed that joining JD.com was the best and would not have a better choice in Li University's life, and it was also a choice that JD.com needed very much at that time.
At that time, the problem of Jingdong's technology department was complex and simple, that is, there was no technical foundation at all, although the previous website could be cobbled together, but there was no user experience to speak of, and it was extremely unstable, although the so-called "Red June" that is, 618 did not appear until 2010, but at that time, Jingdong's technical structure was barely strong in daily operation, and once it was done with some promotion, it was often a problem.
Li University was definitely a regular military background at that time, so the first thing to do in Jingdong was to take 5 young people to find a hair embryo villa to do closed development, work 6 days a week, you can go out on Sundays to let the wind out, but you have to come back at night, usually only sleep for three or four hours a day, play the bunk for three months, redesign a front desk system for Jingdong, replace the previous personal website system, of which 50% of the code amount is from Li University itself. The so-called 007 work method is from this, in the entrepreneurial road of Jingdong, Li University has irreplaceable technical value and spiritual significance, and this fighting spirit is also inherited from the computer newspaper era, in the computer newspaper era, Li University also has a bitter past because of perennial overtime hospitalization of his hepatitis, the word labor model, worthy of the name.
According to the design of Li University, the design capacity of this system is an average of 100,000 orders per day, while the average daily single volume of Jingdong was 5,000 at that time, and on November 1, 2008, the new system was launched, and the average daily single volume of the day reached 10,000 singles.
This made Liu Qiangdong very satisfied, and the trouble of system collapse in a short period of time should completely disappear.
In 2010, Jingdong's technical team of more than 200 people, in the introduction of strongmen at the same time, the entire technical team also began to do front and back office split, Liu Qiangdong from ebay to dig Ma Song to help the front of the mall research and development, from Amazon to dig up senior development manager Jiang Haidong, responsible for logistics warehousing direction of THE IT system construction, thus, Jingdong technology system from the original Li University - Xiao Jun two-person transfer combination upgraded to the front desk of Li University - Ma Song and the background of Jiang Haidong - Xiao Jun combination.
Xiao Jun is actually the first technical staff of JD.com, and in our previous JD Technology Five Questions about the ups and downs of JD.com's unmanned driving business, Xiao Jun and his partners have made a colorful appearance.
Compared with Xiao Jun, who loves fun cars and is easy-going, Ma Song does things more directly, and more foreign companies do things, and the implementation is the set of agile development, so there are many bumps in the cooperation with the local Li University, but the victory is excellent in technical ability, and the work is a good hand, so although it is constantly moving, it is always entrusted with heavy responsibilities. At the end of 2011, Jingdong built the Dudu R&D Center, and Chengdu Renmasong took this opportunity to return to his hometown to establish the Chengdu R&D Center, and hatched two important platforms of JD.com: the JD third-party merchant platform (POP) and the JD collaboration platform (Tongdong). In 2013, Ma Song returned to Beijing and presided over the technical support system of Jingdong Mall during the Jingdong 618 period, which was called the father of 618 by posterity, and Ma Song left JD in 2019 and is currently the founder of Qi Ant Technology.
A year after the split of the front and back office, Jingdong technicians exceeded 1,000 people, the front and back end of each exceeded 600 people, of course, the front and back office cooperation is not without bumps, Li University and Ma Song, Jiang Haidong and Xiao Jun, Li University and Jiang Haidong have a de facto game relationship, and there have been very fierce conflicts internally.
A former Jingdong person who interviewed us told us that in addition to having a set of technologies, Li University also handles personnel frictions in the company very sophisticatedly, which is a master, which is also the high emotional intelligence side of Li University in the case of JD.com entering the golden period of development, and there are more technical personnel with cattle x resumes to join. At its peak, there were vps or senior directors on nine technical lines who reported directly to Lee University, which was actually the de facto first CTO of JD.com.
However, one of JD's problems seems to never be solved, that is, the growth rate of peak single volume will always exceed the assumptions of Li University or Liu Qiangdong, so, in a sense, the speed of technology construction seems to never keep up with the demand for business growth, but follow the breathlessness of chasing behind, which also makes the outside always have an impression of "JD is not good at technology".
For example, a very famous JD production accident in history occurred in 2011.
In 2011, JD.com's daily order volume peaked at 500,000, far exceeding the capacity of the system designed by Li University in 2008-2009. Bloomberg Businessweek recorded that on November 1, 2011, the book was reduced by a limited 3-hour promotion, and many users put the books they wanted to buy into the shopping cart before the promotion began.
Books are a long-tail commodity, each book is not stocked much, and the inventory is locked when the order is submitted. Therefore, when the user submits the order at a high rate, the user who starts a little slower will find that the full reduction is invalid, so the customer begins to refresh wildly, and for a while the system request exceeds the limit that the system can carry at that time, and the system is paralyzed.
Li University told Leifeng Network that the system concurrency exceeds the extreme value, which actually involves two problems. The first problem is that e-commerce promotes through artificial festivals, and the system capacity is designed according to the final volume, but during the promotion period, due to the influx of a large number of users, and due to the stuttering and constantly refreshing the page, the number of online people at the same time surges, which greatly exceeds the designer's expectations.
The second is because the price during the Jingdong promotion period is quite favorable, many scalpers go to Jingdong to buy things and then take it to Taobao to sell, and these scalpers will use some computer programs to automatically grab goods. The system sets complex rules in order to prevent scalpers, and scalpers will launch destructive attacks on the system, which also puts more pressure on the system itself.
But no matter how you explain, the user experience is solidly ruined, Liu Qiangdong's face is also poked on the desktop, so there is a very famous "knife and tea" incident.
The so-called incident is that some people said that after this big accident, Liu Qiangdong placed two knives and two cups of tea on the table, and invited Li University, who is in charge of the IT front end, and Jiang Haidong, who is in charge of the IT back end, to drink tea. This means that if the problem can be solved, please drink tea, and if the problem cannot be solved, he will have to use the knife... Rumors also said that Li University was on a business trip, escaped a disaster, and later personally went to Liu Qiangdong to bear the guilt of Jing, so only Jiang Haidong participated in the tea party, and Jiang also left his post after that.
Jiang Haidong
However, when LeiFeng.com asked Li University to verify this fact, Li's account was that Liu Qiangdong did not really dance with a knife and get a gun in the office, he just posted a picture with a knife on Weibo to show his attention to the matter and kill a hundred people.
However, it is quite paradoxical that when Leifeng Retrieved Liu Qiangdong's Weibo, it found that the earliest existing Weibo was sent from 2012, that is, this legend was sent in November 2011 and will always be a legend.
Returning to the truth, the positive value of this matter is that Liu Qiangdong began to reflect on whether the separation of the front and backend of JD's technical management will be the origin of many problems in JD's system architecture.
Liu Qiangdong may also think about the problems displayed by the fact that the background inventory data update is not timely and the front desk users frantically refresh the common run on resources, in the end, is it just caused by the poor communication between Li and Jiang? Or is it that JD.com's entire supply chain lacks intelligent attributes to make supply chain predictions for different categories of inventory problems?
This confusion seems to be unsolvable for the time being, and it did not break out until 618 in 2012, which ended with Jiang Haidong's departure during this shopping festival with high exposure on JD.com, when the industry speculated that Jiang Haidong's departure may be related to the delay in JD logistics distribution by users, as well as the large organizational structure changes of JD.com over the years.
In 2011, JD.com can indeed be said to have undergone drastic organizational changes, including former Bank of America Merrill Lynch Investment Bank director Yingchun Yingchun joining JD.com as vice president, lan Ye, former executive vice president of Acer China, as JD.com's CMO, former Baidu executive Shen Haoyu as COO, and former Oracle global vice president Wang Yaqing as CTO.
Yes, you read that right, at the end of 2011, JD.com had its first CTO, this person is called Wang Yaqing, not Li University.
2 Wang Yaqing The foreign CTO is not happy
As mentioned earlier, in 2011, the Jingdong technical team broke 1,000 people, while more and more people are involved in solving problems, these strong dragons from different systems also have their own personalities and demands, so there are often contradictions, which is actually a common phenomenon when the strong entrepreneurial platform is expanding rapidly, that is, there are external volumes, internal volumes, and finally see who rolls to win.
Liu Qiangdong realized more clearly than before that the technology system needed a person with higher potential energy, and the title of senior vice president of technology at Lee University was already somewhat unable to hold the field.
In any case, this invitation must first be addressed to Lee University.
So Liu Qiangdong found Li University and said the words to Li University: "Old Li, I want to ask you to be the CTO of JD.com!" This is also the tacit understanding between the two sides when Li University was invited to join JD.com, and after a few years, Liu Qiangdong really had to cash in.
As mentioned earlier, Li University is four or five years older than Liu Qiangdong, so Liu Qiangdong calls Li University Old Li, and Li University will also call Liu Qiangdong Old Liu after people, but in front of people, Li University always calls Liu Qiangdong as Qiangdong. It can be seen that these two people have a strong respect for each other, and many things Liu Qiangdong proposed to Li University are also supported.
But this time, Li University rejected Liu Qiangdong, quite resolutely.
In this regard, Li University frankly told Leifeng Network that there was indeed a lot of friction in the Jingdong technology system at that time, which was not unrelated to a group of talents with high starting points who wanted to set roles and boundaries for themselves after they came in. But if this friction is not controlled, it will develop into internal friction, and from this point of view, JD.com does need a high-level technical talent that coordinates the overall situation, that is, a real CTO.
Li University told Liu Qiangdong at that time that he was not desireless and even wanted to be a CTO, and he also had enough qualifications from the qualification sequence that has supported the growth of JD.com's technology for so many years, but from the perspective of a bystander, appointing him as a CTO is not an optimal choice for the whole world.
Li University said that first of all, he and Jiang Haidong have a competitive relationship, if he comes to serve as the CTO, the relationship between the two teams will become more tense, but it will be detrimental to the overall situation, so it will not get a good result. Secondly, the development of Jingdong is too fast, he and a group of relatively early to join the growth rate of talents, has not been able to catch up with the company's growth rate, in order for the company to be healthy and rapid development, we must introduce new senior talents from the outside, and to attract talents, CTO is very important, is a benchmark, is the banner.
In Li University's own words: "This person must have a strong understanding of forward-looking technology, and constantly integrate these advanced productivity in the process of the development of JD.com's technology system, such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, etc. From the perspective of that time, I did not have an advantage in this article, and I did not have overseas resumes, which also involved a problem of international vision." ”
These words may feel a bit "virtual" written today, but the truth is so, Leifeng Network crossed to some old Jingdong technical people to verify this problem, they can at least confirm a point - Liu Qiangdong did invite, Li University did refuse.
Li University's words deeply touched Liu Qiangdong, and he put aside his historical feelings and personal relationship with Li University, and found that what Li University said was indeed more reasonable. Therefore, at that time, Liu Qiangdong concluded that if Jingdong wants to go to a new stage of development, it must find a CTO with both seniority and technical level. In fact, the history that followed proved that this judgment did not necessarily stand the test of history, but it was indeed the only conclusion that could be drawn at that time.
Wang Yaqing, Oracle's global VP and head of China, entered Liu Qiangdong's vision.
Wang Yaqing
Wang's background is that he studied at Tongji University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, received a master's degree in automation control from the University of Connecticut in 1995, and served at Oracle for 13 years as Oracle's global vice president, in charge of research and development in the field of databases and cloud computing.
Famous universities + returnees + large factories, as well as Oracle's database, cloud computing research and development background, almost completely in line with Liu Qiangdong and Li University outlined "with an international vision, but also have sufficient reserves for future-oriented technology", from the perspective of resume gold content, it is indeed far more than Li University, as well as a number of colleagues in the Jingdong technology system.
In February 2012, JD.com set up the position of CTO for Wang Yaqing, who came from the job, saying that Wang Yaqing would promote the integration of IT technology with JD.com's existing industrial departments, and improve the stability of the overall architecture by integrating existing technologies and platforms to establish a unified technical direction and data architecture.
As soon as Wang Yaqing took office, he deployed a 20 million yuan Oracle Exadata minicomputer server, which is one of the main enterprise-level servers launched by Oracle, and JD.com's developers have never had the "luxury" to use this server before.
This also led to the fact that some people later commented on Wang Yaqing, saying that he "came to Jingdong and the only thing he did was to buy a batch of old owners' servers."
Li University later told Lei Feng That using this sentence to satirize Wang was not in line with the laws of history. At that time, the amount of data, storage, computing power, etc. of China's Internet was still at a low level, and the so-called "de-IOE" problem would only break out intensively after five or ten years, so for JD.com, which was still using miscellaneous servers at that time, using these advanced and mainstream equipment was at least on the path of progress, rather than retrogression, which was not Wang's mistake.
In addition to hardware investment, Wang Yaqing also brought a group of talents in the direction of big data and established a big data department. The head of the data department was Mark Wang's subordinate at Oracle (later went to Google Research), and the chief scientist was Pang Tao, an expert recruited from Microsoft's Asia Engineering Institute. The entire company's technical elite is concentrated in the data department, and JD.com spent 700 million yuan to buy the payment company Online Banking Online, and this team was also incorporated into the data department.
The establishment of Jingdong Cloud also has the credit of Wang Yaqing. In order to carry the instantaneous mass access caused by various promotions, the e-commerce system needs strong scalability. In the peak period of the platform, it is necessary to rely on new servers to cope with peak instantaneous traffic, but in the trough, these resources will be wasted; at the same time, the resource utilization rate of different batches and models of machines is widely different, and the resource waste caused by resource fragmentation is serious. Wang Yaqing found He Ganglai, who had just parted ways with Chen Tianqiao, as the leader, and the title of He Gang when he entered Jingdong was the chief scientist of Jingdong Mall, and then he got the title of vice president of technology of Jingdong Group under the impetus of Wang Yaqing, but in terms of reporting relationship, He Gang reported to Li University, and Li University reported to Wang Yaqing. It is said that He Gang's life in Jingdong Cloud can be said to be extremely bumpy, and we will expand in the articles on cloud in the Jingdong Five Questions series.
However, although many seeds were left behind, Wang Yaqing only stayed in JD.com for ten months.
The official reason for leaving is family reasons, but since then, Wang quickly joined Ali and became the CEO of Ali Health, which shows that this is just a fig leaf.
For the short life of Wang Yaqing's Jingdong, there are many rumors, some people think that the Jingdong backstage system was paralyzed again during the 618 mid-year promotion, Liu Qiangdong could not bear it, but in only half a year, it was unrealistic to let Wang Yaqing completely change the original technical structure of Jingdong, so the correctness of this rumor is really questionable. And the corresponding big promotion has a back pot man like Jiang Haidong.
One of the parties recalled that Wang Yaqing also attended the executives' morning meeting normally that morning, and then he had a conversation with Liu Qiangdong and left the company that afternoon, and the personnel change came quietly.
Li University has answered this question to Lei Feng network in person, he believes that Wang has no problems in technology, there is no big problem in the direction of technology forward, Wang's problem is mainly to rush to control the situation, this practice may be normal in Silicon Valley, but in China it will be seen as too eager to seize power. For example, Wang hoped that at that time, he adopted his own technical route for the transformation of a financial-related core system, which naturally encountered some resistance, so Wang made out-of-the-counter moves, which were regarded by Liu Qiangdong as "engaging in office politics in the company" and were rejected by a vote on character. People close to Wang Yaqing believe that the pace of Wang's reform at that time was somewhat large, and the cake of many elderly people in Jingdong was moved, and many irregularities in Jingdong at that time were caused by historical reasons, and could not be transformed in a day's work.
Some people have doubts about the feelings of Li Yaqing's career and Wang Yaqing's career, and even think that Li is happy to see Wang's downfall. Some people also believe that as the top person in charge of the technical system, Li and Wang did not fully communicate and hand over.
But in fact, it is not difficult to find from another angle that whether it is Liu Qiangdong or Li University, in fact, it is based on Li University as the first time in the history of JD.com to hire the role of the B post of an external CTO, that is, if the new person picks up people smoothly, Li University will slowly fade out, and if the new person does not take over, Li will continue to be responsible for the time being.
This B post really played a role.
3 Zhang Chen who opens high and walks low
After Wang Yaqing left, the relevant work of the CTO fell on the shoulders of Li University, and at the mid-year strategy meeting and the summary meeting at the end of the year, Li University reported to Liu Qiangdong as the final person in charge of the technical line.
Li University has a classic syllogism about the relationship between technology and business, the first stage: technology follows the business, which is easy to understand; the second stage, technology and business side by side, this stage to speak with data, under the promotion of Li University, for each business department of JD.com to develop 3-5 indicators, each core indicator includes 100-300 small indicators, each month will do monthly business meetings, each department PK these indicators.
The third stage is to lead the development of the entire company through technology.
Li University believes that he has done more things in the first two stages, and about the third stage, he thinks that although he has done it, he has not done enough, for example, he has made a dashboard, opened the mobile phone to see the company's business situation at a glance, which warehouse has a problem, where the packaging congestion. There are three colors on the dashboard to mark the status of the service: yellow warning green normal, red alarm. In 2013, Liu Qiangdong went to Columbia University to study, and it was through this dashboard that he knew the daily operation of JD.com.
However, specific to JD.com's innovative business, especially in the innovative business starting from technology, Li University has repeatedly mentioned that his vision is still not enough. Have both self-confidence and not blind optimism. Lee University has its own measure.
Li University is also the founder of the entire Jingdong technology culture, Leifeng Network in the interview, there are two points impressive: one is that Jingdong's technology rating is created by Li University, from T1 to T8, Li University rated itself as T6, in this regard, his explanation is that the technical level and management ability is separate assessment, play T6 by themselves, can attract more people with higher technical level than their own to join Jingdong. Second, Li University helps the entire technical team to establish a fighting spirit and technical self-confidence, JD.com's vision is to make shopping happy, and Li University's vision for JD Technology is that the best people come to JD.com, encouraging individuals to be the top of the industry in their respective fields. Li University is also very good at doing ideological work, at that time, Jingdong's technical level and opponents are still a gap, Li University often invites executives and backbones to meet after work to cheer up, but also eats and dinners, wine tables, and everyone shouts out the slogan of snow shame, boost morale, and inspire people.
Li University also attaches great importance to the establishment of technical authority, more than one and Li University colleagues have given feedback to Leifeng Network, if the business department through the superior to shorten the construction period or improvement degree, will be stopped by Li University back, Li University has only one reason, this can improve efficiency in a short period of time, but in the long run the loss of technical authority, in fact, more than worth the loss.
The historical situation of Jingdong is that each business can establish a technical department, and each technical department will write a set of systems for its own use, and Li University has done a lot of work to open up the system, and found a lot of people with strong architectural ability and can work, such as Wu Yuanqing with Tsinghua background. Wu Yuanqing, who is now the CTO of JD Health, has done a milestone thing in JD.com, that is, it took two years to sort out and transform the countless call interfaces in JD.com's countless systems.
At the end of 2014, the first best CTO industry selection jointly selected by two professional media, Lee University was elected as the best CTO of the year, as the uncrowned king, no one before, and many people after that.
At the end of 2014, the suggestions of simply supporting Li University as the CTO were endless, but this time, Li University took the initiative to find Liu Qiangdong and said that he wanted to leave his job to start a business, Li University's view is that the Internet decade from 1995 to 2005 is the decade of information Internet, the Internet of 2005-2015 is the decade of e-commerce Internet, 2015 will open the decade of industrial Internet, and the integration of knowledge and action of Li University is one. Today, he is the founder and CEO of Magnetic Cloud, a benchmark enterprise in the field of industrial Internet.
Li University's voluntary resignation made Liu Qiangdong realize that he still had to find a CTO. Liu Qiangdong and Li University agreed that they would work together to find the next CTO for JD.com.
The resume of the new CTO should at least not be worse than Wang Yaqing, at least it must be the technology VP of the global multinational company, which can well lead the development of JD.com's innovative business, and this person is not easy to find.
In March 2015, an external opportunity came – the Yahoo China R&D Center was disbanded in March 2015, and Zhang Chen, head of the R&D center and yahoo's global vice president, became a popular candidate for JD.com's CTO on the recommendation of headhunters.
Zhang Chen
Zhang Chen has a good background and a sense of war, Li University has a new career pursuit, all aspects are suitable, Liu Qiangdong is very satisfied with Zhang Chen, however, on the eve of Zhang Chen's decision to join, Zhang Chen proposed an additional condition, that is, he hopes to bring some people from Yahoo China Center to Jingdong.
Yahoo China R & D Center of this group of famous school graduates, with rich experience in Internet products R & D personnel became the object of competition of major companies at that time, one of the group of people followed the then Yahoo China R & D Center VP Zhuang Li to Cheetah, when ordinary employees did not get the news, then Cheetah President Xu Ming from Zhuang Li Tsinghua classmate Zhou Jie (Zhou Jie himself is an advertising background, bought a lot of cheetah stock for a period of time) where the news of the dissolution of Yahoo China Research Center was going to disband, So I preemptively found someone to chat with one by one in the café downstairs of Yahoo, and invited some of the people over.
Zhang Chen also wants to bring a group of people from yahoo China R&D center to join JD.com, which is reasonable, and everyone wants to use it without cooking. But in the beginning, Jingdong only wanted to find a CTO, and did not want to extend more, in the face of this serendipity, pick up or not.
In the end, Jingdong chose to package all the pick-up, that is, in May 2015, Zhang Chen joined Jingdong, but did not immediately appoint him as CTO (6 months later, in November, Zhang Chen became the CTO of Jingdong), just before Zhang Chen joined, Li University retired from JD.com as a lifelong technical consultant.
According to an old friend of Li University who has close contacts with Li University to LeiFeng Network, at the farewell party, Liu Qiangdong highly praised Li University's technological contribution to Jingdong, awarded Li University the title of lifelong technical consultant, and also gave a large number of options as a reward, Liu Qiangdong also publicly promised that Li University, a lifelong technical consultant, can go to any place in the world for a vacation at public expense, and Liu Qiangdong also frequently raised a glass at the cocktail party after the speech, hugging each other from time to time, and both people can read from each other's eyes that they are reluctant and unforgettable. Li University kept mentioning Liu Qiangdong in the dinner with his old friend the next day, although I did not give you the title of CTO, but you exceeded my perfect imagination of the CTO.
After Zhang Chen took over li university, he immediately carried out a personnel reform in Jingdong, he brought a group of technicians from large global companies including Yahoo, and changed the key positions in JD.com's business system such as search, big data, and cloud.
Zhang Chen invited Zhao Yihong from Yahoo America to serve as the head of Jingdong's recommended search business with the head of vice president, the recommendation engine is indeed an epoch-making technology, but at that time, Jingdong was more just a site search and site recommendation, a cattle knife to kill chickens, so Zhao Yihong also served as the technical leader of Jingdong's big data direction.
At the same time, it also hired a double-digit Yahoo senior manager-level technology guru, focusing on the three lines of search recommendation and advertising, big data and cloud business.
In these three lines, the search recommendation and advertising come the most people, but the results are the least obvious, and Jingdong itself has little demand for this business, but there are many people like Yahoo, so this objectively causes embarrassment due to people. And this is one of the conditions mentioned when Zhang Chen first joined, under the superposition of the two phases, it caused a wave in the entire technical system of Jingdong.
So that later, the personnel department of Jingdong specially issued a special policy of not recruiting Yahoo people, in addition, Jingdong's recruitment that year also had a 1 drag 2 restriction, that is, a person can only recruit at most two former subordinates in the original company, and there are also Yahoo people who are too closely gathered in Jingdong.
During Zhang Chen's reign, a more obvious effect was the integration of big data departments.
As mentioned earlier, Jingdong's big data business started from Wang Yaqing, who also attached great importance to big data when he left Li University to form a cabinet, and Jingdong invited Weng Zhi back from Silicon Valley.
Weng Zhi, an Internet veteran who has worked at Google for 8 years, joined JD.com as the company's chief technical consultant. The addition of Weng Zhi has allowed the big data of the entire JD.com to begin to be effectively combined with the business.
Big data must be labeled to generate intelligence and insights, and the huge business data owned by JD.com is actually a huge advantage and the basis for generating business intelligence.
But before the wave of deep learning, big data needed a lot of manual labeling to train, so many of the previous big data engineers actually did the work of labeling, and these people were scattered in various teams, and could not improve the efficiency of the entire system. After Zhang Chen put this group of people who did data standards into a department, Jingdong big data changed from potential wealth to cashable digital assets, which significantly improved the efficiency of related work, and the search results and prediction capabilities were also greatly enhanced.
Jingdong's big data began to be divided into JD Digital in the second half of 2017, established the JD Digital Intelligent Big Data Department, and invited Pei Jian, a former Huawei scientist and global Chinese data leader, to serve as vice president of Jingdong Group and general manager of the Intelligent Big Data Department, but Pei Jian stayed for a short time, turning to part-time in early 2019, the rise and fall of Jingdong big data, we will carry out in the follow-up series of articles.
Jingdong Cloud is Zhang Chen's most important foothold in Jingdong, and his microscopic foothold is to support the marginalized He Gang in 15-16 years.
As mentioned earlier, He Gang was invited by Wang Yaqing to do the cloud, but He Gang joined wang Yaqing quickly left, He Gang also had the intention to go, at this time Li University hoped that He Gang's team could strengthen Jingdong's own shortcomings in the underlying architecture such as storage, so He Gang stayed with Liu Haifeng and other grand old people to help JD technology internal reinforcement, including promoting the research and development of elastic cloud platform in 2014. At the same time, especially in the N times 618 after 2014, He Gang and Liu Haifeng are the main supporters. In 2016, there were 4 commanders-in-chief of 618, except for Ma Song and Wu Yuanqing, who were not moving, He Gang and Liu Haifeng were impressively listed.
After Zhang Chen took over the class of Li University, he began to re-promote the independent development of JD Cloud, that is, not only staying in internal support, but also began to export technical capabilities externally. Zhang Chen invited Zhu Ling, who is now in Kuaishou, the 97th grade of Yahoo Beiyan Tsinghua, to serve as the director of JD Cloud, and assisted He Gang as the head of IaaS of JD Cloud.
Leifeng Network has previously reported that whether it is the step-by-step upgrade iteration and release of Jingdong Cloud, or a series of external activities and publicity of Jingdong Cloud, He Gang appeared as the person in charge of Jingdong Cloud and appeared in media reports. During this period, his titles included vice president of JD Group, head of JD Cloud's "Internet +" strategy, general manager of JD Cloud Computing, and even from October 2016 to January 2017, He Gang was directly named "President of JD Cloud".
However, Zhang Chen's embarrassment also lies in the fact that Jingdong Cloud in 2017 was down for more than ten hours at a time. Liu Qiangdong once tried to find some external customers for JD Cloud to conduct free stress tests, but he lost face in front of these customers, so that he gradually became dissatisfied with JD Cloud's business.
So there was also the entry of Shen Yuanqing, then chairman of Microsoft Asia Pacific Technology. Previously, it was said that Shen chen invited Him to join, but Shen Yuanqing made it clear in an interview with Leifeng That he was directly invited by Liu Qiangdong. According to his resume, Shen Joined Microsoft in 1994, during which time he has engaged in and led various businesses, including cloud computing, and has extensive experience in operations, sales, partners, and ecosystem construction. More stories of Shen Yuanqing, we will tell in the following series of articles.
After Shen Yuanqing arrived, He Gang reported to Shen Yuanqing as the technical leader, and the two became superiors and subordinates rather than "partners", and Shen Yuanqing, as the president of the Jingdong Cloud Business Department, reported to Liu Qiangdong that Zhang Chen was no longer responsible for the management of Jingdong Cloud. This is of course one of the prerequisites for Shen Yuanqing to join, but unconsciously, Zhang Chen, the most powerful CTO, has a cruel high and low position in JD.com.
Zhang Chen in Jingdong's high opening and low walking is also a reason that its help to Jingdong's original business is not much, Zhang Chen helped Jingdong recruit a lot of technical strongmen, but these technical strongmen are more in the search, big data and cloud departments, which are not directly related to business departments, and the income is relatively far away, so Liu Qiangdong came forward to ask Zhang Chen to build big data and AI systems at the same time, to see how to improve the code capabilities and technical level of Jingdong Mall and Jingdong logistics and other businesses.
Zhang Chen looked for someone to investigate, and concluded that the level of Jingdong's early system code is not very high, but the migration risk is too large, and generations of people have to repair and repair the roof frame bed, and jokingly called mountain dung mountain, which also leads to frequent problems in the system, for these historical stock problems, it is difficult to solve. In a word, it is more of a matter of basic skills, go home and practice on your own.
As soon as this view came out, it immediately exploded, and the conflict between the local faction and the returnee faction roared up within the Jingdong technology system.
This matter finally ended with Zhang Chen setting up a technical committee and formulating a set of technical standards to be followed by Jingdong's various research and development systems, and flattening the cognition of these airborne technical bulls with the cognition of local engineers, so as to more smoothly solve the system problem from the bottom, but it also triggered a rebound from many local technology giants in Jingdong.
Zhang Chen has served as an executive of a global manufacturer, but within JD.com, this resume is not enough to make the veteran employees of the technical system subservient. Some of the leaders of the technical line have worked with Liu Qiangdong since the early days of Jingdong entrepreneurship, have a deep comradeship, and have a high degree of trust between each other, although there is no direct reporting relationship, but they can directly communicate with Liu Qiangdong, and Liu Qiangdong will also give some additional instructions. Therefore, Zhang Chen, who serves as CTO, is not yet the leader of JD.com's technology culture.
The birth of the X business department is Xiao Jun directly looking for Liu Qiangdong born, Xiao Jun's logic is very simple, give me a recruitment quota to give me a budget, I can also make tall and technical products and services out, before we do not do, not we will not, is that we do not have so much investment.
After the X business unit, there is the Y business unit, which is like a Pandora's box, no one can stop it.
In the back, almost all the business units reported to Liu Qiangdong or business cadres, the technical teams of the business departments fought their own battles, and the CTO was more air-to-air.
4 Behind the technical slogan of technical technology
On the afternoon of February 10, 2017, JD Group held the 2017 Opening Year Conference in Beijing, and Liu Qiangdong conveyed the second 12-year strategy to the entire Group for the first time. At the annual meeting, Liu Qiangdong systematically reviewed jd.com's achievements in the first twelve years, among which the landmark achievement was: in 2016, JD.com successfully entered the Fortune Global 500 (No. 366).
Liu Qiangdong emphasized JD.com's achievements at the meeting, but to some extent, he also urgently asked the answers to some questions .
Liu said that in the country we have more than 200 small and medium-sized logistics centers, with the continuous investment in logistics projects around us, the number of SKUs we manage in the library has exceeded 3 million, in addition to JD.com, only Amazon can do it, in the next 50 years, I believe that the number of SKUs in our library management will exceed 10 million.
This is asking, can the system be hosted?
Liu also said that our 3 logistics network today in addition to fresh, the other has covered 98% of the entire Chinese population, in three years after the completion of our fresh logistics network, Jingdong will become the only company in the world with 3 warehouses with integrated logistics network.
This is asking a huge, virtual-real network, what technology is used?
In short, the end of this passionate and self-torturing speech is one of the strongest voices in Liu Qiangdong's history: we only have three things in the next 12 years: technology! technology! technology!
There is no doubt that the opening meeting of JD.com in February 2017 was an important moment in the history of JD.com, and in the view of Leifeng Network, Liu Qiangdong's shouting was actually an internal self-encouragement for JD.com to make almost no progress in the three years of listing, and the beginning of JD.com's new strategic leap.
Almost all companies listed will encounter the dilemma of not working for three years, Liu Qiangdong, who has always been ambitious, wanted to avoid this, therefore, after the listing in 2014, Liu Qiangdong successively promoted the re-creation of a series of plans for Jingdong, including continuous cloth in the fields of O2O and internationalization and Jingdong intelligence, but none of them were successful, on the contrary, they were successively poached by Xiaoyaozi, such as Lao Ding, Hou Yi and others, of which Lao Ding's defection was the most painful, not only in O2O local life, Jingdong has entered the passive, It also allows Jingdong to start to turn from attack to defense in the offensive cycle of 2014-2016, and has to give up the original situation of Jingdong Intelligence, coupled with the change of the international situation leading to the abandonment of internationalization, Jingdong carefully planned many growth points collectively dumb, into the dilemma of not working for three years, which has Liu Qiangdong ushered in his own Zeng Ming - Liao Jianwen, another big bull professor of The Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
Although the unbounded retail proposed by Liao Jianwen is not highly evaluated, and it is considered to be the dog-tailed sable of Ali's new retail, the core expression of Liao Jianwen's strategic development to Jingdong is actually that around the scene of Jingdong, continuous investment in technology, the formation of overflow, and eventually become part of the infrastructure, sitting on the ground to collect money. This strategy would be quite grand if it could be realized.
As for why Liao Jianwen, the "technical layman", is loyal to technology, he cannot avoid the lifeline of retail, "people-goods-field".
When Liu Qiangdong founded JD.com, the business logic revolved around "selling goods", which was essentially a transaction; while Xu Lei's strategy of taking charge of JD.com's retail was the logic of "field" and relied on traffic;
Liao Jianwen intends to create a new e-commerce logic around "people", to the public, to promote Jingdong to a higher level, to private, or hope to become another change-maker after Liu Qiangdong and Xu Lei.
Since the "person" has been selected, it must be inseparable from the mining and insight of user data. Technology drives business, and that's where it comes. Technology has also become the ultimate weapon of the third generation of JD.com after transactions and traffic.
In this sense, Liao Jianwen, the chief strategy officer, has done the work of Zhang Chen's chief technology officer, forming an atmosphere of full technical input, but it is not centered on Zhang Chen, but is scattered into various business units.
It seems that this is the best era of Jingdong CTO, but in fact, these problems are not something that a CTO can solve, it actually involves the process of JD.com from an early, relatively centralized, and highly efficient e-commerce platform through self-operation to a new type of entity enterprise with no distance, virtual and real integration, character flow, and complex structure.
The problem of the former can be solved by a strong CTO, and the development problem of the latter requires Liu Qiangdong and many people like Zhang Chen and Li University to think repeatedly and try and make mistakes to solve.
Some people believe that Zhang Chen's greatest contribution is to integrate this batch of engineering and academic talents that Liu Qiangdong personally collected around the world, that is, the "team of scientists" in the population of Jingdong. In fact, the vast majority of these scientists refer to scientists in the enterprise who are engaged in relatively long-term, basic technology research and development, rather than scientists in the pure ivory tower sense. But although they are at the forefront of industrial scientific research, they have no experience in how to solve the actual engineering problems of JD.com with research results. This is actually a misreading, Leifeng network has almost talked with more than half of the JD scientists, they are all invited by Liu Qiangdong, and these scientists have been hinted at the possibility of taking the CTO.
To put it simply, after Liu Qiangdong issued a call for technology, technology, and technology, Jingdong technical people actually had two typical fates.
The first is to still be troubled by old problems and blame for downtime.
For example, the vice president of Jingdong Mall, the head of technology, and the father of 618, Ma Song, stepped down quite suddenly. During the Double Eleven in 2018, the Jingdong Mall Thailand station suddenly collapsed for two hours, when everyone's energy was focused on the domestic Double Eleven war, and few people cared about a foreign station that did not have much traffic and GMV.
Masson
Unexpectedly, Liu Qiangdong attached great importance to this matter. He immediately approached Marson and asked him to explain what was going on. Ma Song argued that JD.com had adopted a joint venture approach in the Thai market, operated by local companies, with JD.com providing the infrastructure. Before this double eleven, they had a premonition that the shopping festival would bring a lot of traffic, and originally designed a renovation plan for the Thai side to expand the capacity, as long as this plan was adopted, there would be no collapse problem at all. However, this plan requires a cost of 24 million yuan, the Thai side is not willing to pay, Jingdong did not give them expansion, did not expect that the system collapsed during the double eleven.
It's okay not to explain, as soon as you explain Liu Qiangdong, it exploded. He pointed at Ma Song and scolded, "Are we missing the 24 million?" We lost our customers! After two hours of collapse, how many 24 million have we lost? Can you afford it! Ma Song was speechless, said on the spot that he would take responsibility, and then voluntarily left his job.
The second is the embarrassment that the new system has not been established.
When Liu Qiangdong made the strongest sound of the three technologies, Jingdong actually entered a fanatical era of "Great Leap Forward" in technology, with both sincerity based on the desire for self-breakthrough and inevitably wrapped up in fanaticism and chicken blood.
In this era, some technologies are absolutely advantageous to JD.com, such as supply chain, logistics, these technologies and their next-generation reserves, JD.com is at least one position ahead of this era;
Other technologies are basically the same frequency as the times, such as JD Cloud, thanks to JD's complex and chaotic native system, JD Cloud has a super containerization level and hybrid deployment capabilities, which makes JD Cloud at least in the industry mainstream track average level or slightly higher;
There are also some technologies to be broken, such as AI, AI requires a lot of technical talents, very wide, so although Jingdong recruited Zhou Bowen, Pei Jian, He Xiaodong, Mei Tao, Zheng Yu such excellent Fellow scientists, has not formed a pattern of full blossoming, the strongest breakthrough point is still in the Jingdong scene advantage of the obvious advantages of intelligent customer service and other fields.
Originally, the best design scheme for the overall situation of Jingdong technology was to take Jingdong Digital as the arrow with Jingdong Finance as the core, drive and nurture a series of technical sequences to form a cluster breakthrough, trying to form a vast Jingdong "technical iron army" in logistics, Internet of Things, supply chain, cloud computing, and AI, but due to specific historical reasons, the strategy of taking Jingdong Digital as the arrow was inaccurate, and the remaining group could not find a strong enough technical leader, so they had to use the old Jingdong Li Yayun as the "caretaker cabinet" of the technology system. This is also similar to Ali letting Su Quan manage the Big Tmall Taobao system, their task is not to make these businesses as strong as possible, but to pass them on to the next generation of leaders as intact and harmless as possible.
5 Conclusion
In mid-2019, Zhang Chen left the CTO of Jingdong for health reasons, and soon joined Ctrip as the chairman assistant and chief architect of Ctrip under the recommendation of Wu Jiong, the first CTO of Ali, and then although Li Kefeng, Zhou Bowen and other strongmen have taken over the position of chairman of the Jingdong Technology Committee (the stories of Li Kefeng and Zhou Bowen will be carried out separately, stay tuned), but they have not taken a step forward and taken over the position of CTO, on the contrary, they are currently leaving JD.com. At the same time, Liao Jianwen's departure has made JD.com lose its own CSO, and JD.com has entered an era without its own CTO and CSO.
To the technology to benefit, to the strategy to the future, this is a beautiful vision, that is, because of this vision, so ceminos will set up and continue to recruit CTO and CSOs, but the other side of the coin is that to make the CTO and CSOs play a role, first of all, to complete the entrepreneur's own leap, the organization's self-innovation and the business itself thrive, which is inseparable. Relying on the CTO itself to do innovative business is more theoretically feasible.
The ideal CTO in the eyes of entrepreneurs is either a Li Si (Qin Shi Huang's Chancellor) type of figure, through top-level technical design and execution, breaking the wall of independent business departments, realizing the "book with text, car with the same track" of technology and data, and improving the efficiency of internal collaboration. Unfortunately, looking around the world's major technology companies, no CTO has yet been able to overcome Conway's law and change the original mapping relationship between technical architecture and organizational structure. The crazy Colorful Stone 2.0 plan had such a grand plan, but in the end it failed to meet expectations for various reasons.
The success of Li Si is inseparable from the boldness and determination of Qin Shi Huang and his own time and place, and the same is true for enterprise reform.
The ideal CTO is either a spiritual leader, an engineering veteran respected by generations of employees and trusted by his boss, or a presence like Jeff Dean's faith. The closest thing in China is only Baidu model Wang Haifeng.
Jingdong, which has no CTO, after transferring the title of chairman of the technical committee to a number of airborne bulls, finally crowned cao Peng, the "brother" who wrote the first line of code for the Jingdong website and played the floor with Liu Qiangdong, which is not only the reward that Cao Peng has dedicated 15 years to Jingdong Technology, but also the disillusionment of Liu Qiangdong's hope to find the beautiful dream of Li Si and Jeff Dean. This Cao Peng is also the middleman who introduced Li University to Liu Qiangdong, and this world is really not big.
In the follow-up series, we will continue to focus on the history of JD's technological changes, around big data, around the cloud, around the three industrial directions of AI, discuss JD.com's self-evolution in technological innovation, and welcome readers to interact with us, weChat: nanjieyu, the author of this article.