文 | 首席人物观，作者 | 小葵、未未，编辑 | 江岳
On April 1st, in order to celebrate the 4th anniversary of making a friend, in the live broadcast room, Luo Yonghao took one year of use of the founding version of SU7 as a fan benefit, and standing next to him was his former 001 employee, Zhu Xiaomu.
"We made this ourselves, not Xiaomi, we made it ourselves. Luo Yonghao explained seriously in front of the camera. After the interaction between the two disappeared, people quickly found that this seemed to be more like a drainage weapon in the live broadcast room. Similar tricks are commonplace in the live streaming industry.
This is the 4th year that anchor Luo Yonghao has been in the industry. There are too many meetings, and people have long since lost their curiosity, excitement, expectation or embarrassment when they first met him in the live broadcast room, and all emotions have disappeared in the day-to-day patterned product introduction, as well as the cumulative GMV data that is increasing day by day in the live broadcast room.
Just like the youth and enthusiasm that many people once projected on Luo Yonghao, they finally bowed their heads to time and reality.
The other, who used to have a completely different personality from Luo Yonghao, but had a lot of intersections for various reasons, and was often compared with Lei Jun, has become one of the few bigwigs who are still active on the stage with his influence through the time cycle. Of course, it's just that few people compare them anymore. - Just like no one really compares Porsche and Xiaomi SU7 in terms of parameters and performance.
After all, a comparison object that is not in the same order of magnitude does not have comparative value.
01 Field
13 years ago, Lei Jun and Luo Yonghao frequently interacted on Weibo because of mutual appreciation. Later, Luo Yonghao was even invited to visit the Xiaomi headquarters and chatted with Lei Jun for 3 hours to discuss joining the house. Of course, because of the difference in philosophy, there was no result.
The iconic iPhone 4, released by Steve Jobs in June 2010, ignited a boom in entrepreneurship across the ocean. Lei Jun and Luo Yonghao stepped into the same river. Who is more like Steve Jobs was once a hot topic of debate among fans of the two.
At least from the beginning of the story, the big difference between the two is mainly the time of entry. Lei Jun smelled the direction of the wind earlier, and Xiaomi Technology was incorporated in March 2010. Luo Yonghao announced that he would make smart phones in April 2012 - a period of more smartphone entrepreneurs and capital influx.
Sympathy was once the theme of the two entrepreneurs.
When Lei Jun released the Xiaomi mobile phone M2 in October 2012, entrepreneur Luo Yonghao appeared at the press conference with a high-profile sign of "I am a rice fan". Four years later, in October 2016, when Hammer Technology released M1, a netizen dug out this old photo and joked that this might be the photo that Lao Luo wanted to delete the most.
"No, it won't".
Luo Yonghao simply denied it on Weibo and said: Even if I am a rice fan, I am not ashamed. Finally, don't forget to sublimate: within ten years, you will kill those tattered foreign brands you know. "Netizen" Lei Jun quickly forwarded it with the text-
The common dream of our generation of entrepreneurs: to make touching products and make Chinese proud of their products! Everyone work together and come on!
2016 was a perilous year for both smartphone entrepreneurs. There was a problem with the hammer capital chain, at least 6 times it was rumored to go bankrupt, 5 times it was rumored to be sold, and the core executive CTO Qian Chen left. Luo Yonghao looked for money everywhere, and at most borrowed more than 96 million to "rescue the company", in his own words, "including individuals who went out to 'sell themselves' and sold tens of millions of dollars into the company." Among the people who borrowed money from him, even Jia Yueting was included. It was the eve of the exposure of LeTV's capital chain crisis.
In January 2016, Lei Jun set the key words for Xiaomi for this year: focus, make-up lessons, and exploration. But obviously, the only word that is really remembered by the outside world is "make-up lessons". More specifically, the supply chain. The five-year-old company has begun to expose some problems in its operation mode. Xiaomi Mi 5, which was originally pinned on high hopes, suffered a catastrophic shortage, and the person in charge of the supply chain had a bad relationship with Samsung executives, which led to the latter being angry and decided to stop cooperating, Lei Jun personally came to the door to make amends, and asked the relationship to organize the bureau everywhere, and drank 5 bottles of red wine to apologize, and finally redeemed the cooperation. Eventually, he had to take charge of the supply chain himself.
Experiencing a snowstorm at the same time seems to have made the fates of the two closer together.
In October 2016, Luo Yonghao praised Xiaomi's concept mobile phone MIX on Weibo. When Lei Jun released Xiaomi MIX2 in September 2017, this screenshot appeared in PPT. Among them, the words "quite shocking" were amplified, and Lei Jun also said: Seeing Luo Yonghao say this, he was still a little excited.
If the timeline is extended, Lei Jun's "little excitement" becomes easy to understand.
For a long time before the frequent interaction between the two, Lei Jun was the target of Luo Yonghao's bombardment. "For a long time, Lei Jun has always inquired about 'running the king of points' and 'dick is not dick'...... After all, he is an engineer, but he doesn't understand user experience in his bones. At that time, Luo Yonghao had not started a business, and his public image was still that fat man with a hammer. In November 2011, he angrily smashed three problematic refrigerators in front of the headquarters of Siemens in Beijing, and the person has been standing ever since.
Dissatisfied with the quality of Siemens, and then publicly hammered it, the premise of this story is: Luo Yonghao himself is a user of Siemens. After all, when he was a teacher at New Oriental in 2001, he was already able to earn 600,000 a year. In the Wanliu area, which later became the highland of Haidian's price, the money could buy a 100-square-meter house at that time.
Price and brand are the most natural filters for users. Later, when Luo Yonghao finalized the price of more than 3000 yuan for the hammer mobile phone T1, he also determined the user group that the hammer wanted to strive for: the group of people who would use Siemens refrigerators instead of Haier refrigerators.
This product carries Luo Yonghao's understanding of the beauty of industrial design, the control of nitpicking details, and the contempt for traditional industrial production. Along with it, the "dystocia" of T1 has become inevitable. Luo Yonghao had to stay in a hotel near the Foxconn Park in Langfang for a month and a half.
"Although the reactions of the dicks are very strong, they are actually not the target users of the Hammer phone. Luo Yonghao once threw out a conclusion from a lofty position. However, when the Hammer T1 shipment was delayed by three months, the chargeback rate soared from the initial 2% to 90%. The IF International Design Gold Award cannot retain the "elites" who turned around and left.
A few years later, anchor Luo Yonghao conducted a reflection on management style in an interview with People magazine:
"I don't grasp it so carefully [now]. First of all, we are now doing services, not products. "We are now serving our customers, and the main acceptance criteria are the final transformation and dissemination. The quantitative criteria that he values don't require me to be morbidly detailed, as I am when I make a product. "
A morbid detail maniac. To some extent, Luo Yonghao is making a hammer for "himself". At that time, he could only allow the product to come out if he let it pass his own level. – although on a business level, this means a lot of risk, and a lot of unnecessary costs.
Lei Jun is completely different from him. He also delved into products and was even called the most successful product manager in China, but judging by the slogan "make users scream", he wanted to satisfy a larger number of users - for greater commercial success. After all, a successful product doesn't come from imagination, but from market demand.
As a result, in the early days of MIUI, many of the needs fed back by users will appear directly in the next updated version. The label of high configuration and low price has also been firmly welded to Xiaomi products since the generation of Xiaomi mobile phones. According to the book "Battlefield Notes on the Xiaomi Ecological Chain", the strategy of the Xiaomi ecological chain is to meet 80% of the needs of 80% of users.
The different endings of the two founders in the mobile phone track may be written from this. What determines this division is the differences in personality, ability, opportunity and even luck of the characters, and the differences that fall on the product concept are even more stark: who does their product serve?
Success or failure also leads them to a different future.
The basic disk of the mobile phone has become the confidence of Lei Jun to enter the game. And the 600 million debt of Hammer Technology made Luo Yonghao enter the live broadcast room. He put aside all his pride, sold goods according to the rules, made enough money to pay off his debts, and announced in 2022 that he would start his business again and devote himself to the AR field.
But 2 years have passed, and Luo Yonghao has not found a new identity label that is clear enough for himself.
After the release of Xiaomi SU7, Luo Yonghao sent a warm compliment. However, on Lei Jun's social platform, Luo Yonghao has been replaced by new friends.
On Weibo, Lei Jun's latest response to "Friend Business" is about Yu Chengdong. ——The latter ridiculed Xiaomi SU7 for installing a mobile phone holder, which is not good for in-car navigation, and Lei Jun quickly launched a vote on Weibo "Do you want a stand". The other two "friends" who appeared at the press conference were Porsche and Tesla, and as for the friends who worked together, they also became the founders of the three "Wei Xiaoli". In 2024, everyone's common goal is to sell new energy vehicles at a lower price.
There's more to come. Under the pressure of Lei Jun's entry, the bosses of automobile manufacturers have walked into the live broadcast room to communicate with users. In the traditional automotive marketing model, this is almost unimaginable. It can be said that before Xiaomi Auto gained a foothold, Lei Jun first verified his influence.
02 Timing
Luo Yonghao believed afterwards: The failure of the hammer is an inevitability.
Although he admits that he is not a good manager and fights too much in areas such as interaction and UI design that are not so significant for business, in his opinion, these are not the root causes of Hammer's failure.
Timing will largely determine the outcome. He agreed with one of Mr. Wu's evaluations of himself. "He (Wu Xiaobo) said that when Luo Yonghao made mobile phones, the growth of the whole industry had reached how many percent per year. He said that people who know the laws of business know that they can't enter the market anymore at this point in time, and it's too late. "
The feeling became clearer as the hammer made it. Luo Yonghao also brought out Jobs as evidence, like him, a "wise and martial god", he can never get it back on Mac, "it's too late, it's too late".
A similar argument also appeared when Lei Jun announced the construction of a car.
It was the spring of 2021, Lei Jun announced the news at Xiaomi's spring new product launch conference, and said that this was the last major entrepreneurial project in his life, "I am willing to bet on the achievements and reputation accumulated in my life to fight for Xiaomi cars." In the past 75 days, Xiaomi has conducted 85 industry visits and communications, and conducted in-depth exchanges with more than 200 automotive industry veterans.
According to Lei Jun, Xiaomi plans to invest 10 billion yuan in the first phase of car manufacturing, and will invest a total of 10 billion US dollars in 10 years.
But another set of data is equally eye-catching: entering the game in 2021 means that Xiaomi is 7 years later than new forces such as Wei Xiaoli and 18 years later than Tesla. Cars are different from mobile phones, and the user's consumption decisions and use cycles are longer, and the core question that the "late" Xiaomi needs to answer is: who else can it sell the car to?
The answer was vague for a long time.
BYD in 2021 has already shown its ambition to dominate the new energy vehicle market, and this year, it sold 593745 new energy vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 231.6%. In the years since, it has maintained a aggressive offensive trend, and sales have continued to climb — in a way, it has played the role of Xiaomi in the smartphone market back then.
"There is a late benefit, there is a late-mover advantage. Lei Jun will not officially respond until the beginning of 2024. At this time, the SU7 was less than 100 days away. The first round of answers is about to be revealed.
Lei Jun should understand the importance of "timing" better than most entrepreneurs. "Pig on the tuyere" has become a familiar word in the entrepreneurial tide. He advocated following the trend, so he named the investment institution he founded "Shunwei Capital".
His emphasis on timing may be partly due to the fact that he learned his lessons at a young age.
In 1999, at the age of 30, Lei Jun had become the general manager of Kingsoft, leading Kingsoft to fight Microsoft, which became the theme of that year — and the source of pain that followed. "We've been fighting with Microsoft for three or four years, and when we look around, you're nothing, and we're all busy doing the Internet. I found that all our efforts were not too valuable. "
At that time, the wind of the Internet had already blown to Zhongguancun. Zhang Chaoyang and Robin Li are starting their own stories. In the face of the huge imagination displayed by the Internet, Kingsoft's duel with Microsoft in the office software business does seem outdated.
Subsequently, Lei Jun founded Excellence.com and grabbed an Internet ticket. Different from Bole Qiu Bojun, Lei Jun caught up with the wind of the times - and miraculously maintained to this day.
Therefore, back to the spring of 2021, when the car was announced, Lei Jun probably knows better than most people what kind of challenge "late arrival" means. But for him and Xiaomi at that time, if they didn't take this step, the pain of 1999 might be repeated. After all, the smartphone market, where growth has peaked, is already difficult to tell a new story. Stick to the same place, and the plot of "looking around and finding that everyone is gone" will come one day.
In contrast, Luo Yonghao's tuition on timing is more costly. He understood it even later. - After the collapse of Hammer Technologies.
Luo Yonghao summed up an important lesson from that failure: for commercial companies, the perfect match between timing and volume is a necessary factor for success.
In an interview with People magazine, he said: If it was not Apple, which had a market value of more than 10 billion at the time, that released the iPhone in 2007, but a small genius company in Silicon Valley that collapsed or was acquired, it would probably be the fate of the company. "Because it's roughly the equivalent of a teenager walking down a street full of robbers with a clear plastic bag of cash. "
Looking back at Hammer Technology, there is no hard-core scientific and technological innovation, and after missing the opportunity of competition, there is no ultra-high cost performance, and failure is inevitable.
These rational reflections are in stark contrast to Luo Yonghao's performance at the last hammer technology conference. It was May 2018, and 30,000 people braved the rain to crowd into the bird's nest to watch the annual new product launch. After getting out of the capital chain crisis, the success of the nut series serving a more mass market has relieved Hammer Technology from the brink of life and death.
Then, Luo Yonghao decided to fight for his dreams and ambitions again, "Anyway, we don't lose money, so we can be willful." That night, he spent only half an hour hastily introducing the most anticipated mobile phone products, and the rest of the time was spent introducing his dream product: TNT. A PC that has been called "redefining the next decade" has a starting price of nearly 10,000 yuan. But perhaps the venue was too large to cause signal problems, and the demonstration of the day was full of bugs, and the hammer press conference site, which has always had a lively atmosphere, once solidified like lard outdoors in winter.
Now it seems that the press conference was like a string suddenly breaking at the most intense rhythm. The moving music came to an abrupt end. In the dead silence, dreams fell to the ground.
TNT was too new for both the market and Hammer Tech at the time. This brings us back to the topic of volume.
The volume can directly determine the risk resistance of a commercial company.
At the end of 2020, before Xiaomi decided to build a car, the company had 108 billion yuan in cash on its books. "I can afford it," Lei Jun said at the time. Three years after making the car, by the end of 2023, Xiaomi's cash reserves have increased to 136.3 billion yuan, which is enough to make Lei Jun, who stood at the SU7 launch conference of Xiaomi Auto, more confident.
At that time, Hammer Technology had never had such abundant cash flow. Therefore, the failure of a blockbuster product can bring a devastating blow.
The winning or losing of the basic market directly affects the founder's freedom of choice. Luo Yonghao later mentioned more than once: If the mobile phone business had closed down two years earlier, the company would not have to owe so much debt. Or, if Hammer is going well and well-funded, he might get into the AR industry sooner. ——Of course,Considering the overall development of the AR industry,This may not allow Luo Yonghao to achieve more outstanding achievements than in the live broadcast room。
A strong enough volume can also make up for some of the shortcomings in "timing".
As a result, the belated Xiaomi car has made the SU7 conference reach a new high in the industry. The popularity directly leads to sales. That night, Xiaomi Auto received a deposit of 100 million yuan.
Subsequently, Xiaomi cars have become a tool for many peers to "rub hot spots". Zhiji and Cadillac followed the cat's example, with the help of Xiaomi SU7's traffic to market a wave of their own new car launches, and on April 15, even Porsche China responded to the topic of "Mische": Perhaps, good design is always smart.
One background: In 2023, Porsche's sales in China will fall by 15 percent.
As a result, some people ridiculed that Lei Jun changed the marketing method of new energy vehicles before changing the new energy vehicle industry.
No matter how the peers expressed their warm welcome in the official WeChat, and no matter how hard the men who sat in the first row of the Xiaomi car SU7 press conference that day tried to show composure and support, a more direct and subtle change is: after the release of the Xiaomi SU7, Weilai, Wenjie, Xiaopeng, Chery and Zeekr, which had been fighting a "price war" for a year, all announced different degrees of price reductions, of which the maximum reduction was as high as 20,000.
Many potential users have also received advertising messages from NIO to promote new cars in the days following the Xiaomi Auto SU7 press conference.
Although he arrived late and expressed his respect for his peers on many occasions, Lei Jun, who entered the automobile circle, is more like the identity of the "organizer". Those photos of the gathering that circulated in the market are just condiments. What can even highlight his right to speak in the industry is Lei Jun's muscular speech on the chip supply chain at the press conference:
"The chip supply chain is our specialty, we have to produce 12 million mobile phones every month, more than one million TVs, if it is a chip, it is not a problem for Xiaomi, this is also Xiaomi's advantage. I believe that others are out of stock, and Xiaomi is also missing, and we are a big customer in any chip supplier. ”
Luo Yonghao, who did not appear at the press conference in public, should be quite touched by this passage. He once said in an interview with Geek Park in 2020:
"When things really go wrong, like when the world is scrambling for a component, maybe it's only if you have a deep enough relationship with the supplier that it will support you, and that will make or break you. ”
03 The Moon and Sixpence
"Some see the dust, some see the stars. ”
In Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, the protagonist Charles Strickland is a stockbroker living in London. He has a revered status, is not good at words, and seems to be a dull and boring man. However, at the age of forty, he left his wife and their daughter who had been married for 17 years behind with a letter of paper and went to Paris to pursue his dream.
A passage from the author Maugham may explain Charles's absurd life: humble and great, vicious and good, hatred and love, can not be mutually exclusive, and exist in the same heart.
Back to Lei Jun and Luo Yonghao, choosing the moon first or choosing sixpence first is related to the growth path of the two. Before becoming peers, Lei Jun and Luo Yonghao's life paths were:
The former was a scholar at Wuhan University, the president of Jinshan Company until it was listed, and as an angel investor, he invested in smash hit companies such as Vancl Eslite and Lakala, while the latter dropped out of school and went south from the northeast, lived in a basement in Beijing, worked as an English teacher at New Oriental, and founded Niubo.com.
Niubo.com and Kingsoft let the two step into the Internet circle respectively, but the accumulated contacts and funds are not the same. Eventually, the two briefly intersected in the mobile phone industry and soon parted ways. After changing the territory, Luo Yonghao walked into the live broadcast room, and Lei Jun plunged into the car circle. ——Judging from the direction chosen after saying goodbye, Luo Yonghao, who is labeled as a dream, seems to have chosen sixpence, while Lei Jun, who is labeled as reality, has chosen the moon.
But the moon probably always hung in Luo Yonghao's heart.
After paying off his debts, he immediately registered a new AR company. This is the future he is optimistic about. TNT's defeat apparently didn't stop him from giving up his obsession with "AR is the next generation of computing platforms". He named the new company Thin Red Line, which translates to Thin Red Line. During the Crimean War, the British infantry regiment once wore red uniforms and successfully repelled Russian cavalry several times its size, earning it the title of "The Thin Red Line". This is also a typical case in the history of human warfare in which less wins more and the weak defeat the strong.
Luo Yonghao still wants to win. In his own way, in his favored field. According to what he revealed when he sold goods in the live broadcast room, he will hold a press conference in September this year to release a tech product, priced at $199 and $299. Judging from the current information, this is likely to be an AR-related product.
There are still people looking forward to seeing the scene of his "reunion" with Lei Jun.
For example, building a car. But Luo Yonghao politely refused in the live broadcast room: Some people say that if you build a car, I will buy it, and come less. That's what you said when I was making mobile phones.
He had actually considered building a car in the past few years, but after evaluating it, he came to the conclusion that it was too late. However, he also expressed warm praise and blessings to the "late" Xiaomi car. After Xiaomi SU7 was launched, he expressed his opinion on Weibo, saying: It is enough to eliminate most of the oil cars, miscellaneous trams, and trams that are not smart enough in the 200,000 price segment. "Xiaomi is likely to follow the affordable mobile phone market and re-enact the epic scene of good money driving out bad money in the mass consumer car market. "
The previous praise may be suspected of commercial praise, but the sentence that follows does highlight the change in his business understanding:
"Businesses that serve the greatest number of consumers are the greatest ones. "
In this cognition, he and Lei Jun achieved a different path.
It's just that the current Lei Jun has no time to sympathize with Luo Yonghao. He is busy serving the wider elite. - Of course, in his statement, wealth is not the only criterion for dividing people. He once described the target users of Xiaomi cars as the elite of the times. Specifically, it is a person who likes advanced technology, has taste, and loves life.
He strives to create a "sense of worthiness" for this target audience. From the appearance of the Xiaomi SU7 resembling a Porsche, to the grand handover ceremony of opening the door in person, these arrangements that point to a sense of luxury and dignity are the most specific language to explain the positioning of Xiaomi cars.
This is also a war that the Lei army cannot lose. He mentioned in the book "Xiaomi Entrepreneurial Thinking" that he was in two "battles", one was the life and death battle of the high-end mobile phone, and the other was the last battle of Xiaomi cars.
Despite a spectacular start in the automotive sector, Xiaomi cars are far from reaching the safety zone.
According to SPDB International's research report, domestic NEV sales are expected to be 11.19 million units in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 27%, and the growth rate is lower than 36.5% in 2023. The price range of 20-300,000 yuan where the Xiaomi car SU7 is located, including Tesla Model 3, BYD Han EV and other strong opponents. Production capacity, as well as the subsequent delivery and use experience, will affect the next development of Xiaomi Automobile.
In the past few years of making cars, Lei Jun has visibly aged with the naked eye. Time, beyond external factors such as wealth, shows humanity its fair side. Compared with the hammer period, Luo Yonghao has also become much calmer. The hammer that was once held high by him now seems to have been silently eaten behind him and retired early.
Luo Yonghao once compared himself to Lei Jun for a while. In a 3-hour conversation with Luo Zhenyu in 2017, he said: Among the mobile phone manufacturers I contacted, many of them had no vision, and only Lei Jun knew me best. He judged our complementarity with it and our value, and he made it very clear.
Seven years later, the dividing line between the moon and sixpence is no longer clear. On the broader battlefield, understanding is replacing rivalry as a tacit understanding between founders.
The story of the mobile phone has come to an end, and Lei Jun and Luo Yonghao have not stepped into the same river again, but the consistent perception of temperature has allowed them to achieve another level of peers. Years from now, when people look back, this may also become a kind of commentary for the present.