Wang Tao, the founder of DJI
Author | Qiu is in charge of the machine
Source | Qiu is in charge of the machine
（ID：qiuchuji_1993)
There is a kind of person in the world who is a great dreamer.
Like Musk, two science fiction novels set off his space rhapsody, and he ran and chased this path for the rest of his life.
There is a kind of person in the world who is a perfectionist.
Just like Jobs, he is not only harsh on others, but also critical of himself.
There is a post-80s youth in China, like a composite of the two, which has set off a terrifying wave in the scientific and technological world.
He is the founder of DJI, Wang Tao.
A comic book in his childhood planted the seed of "helicopter automatic flight" in Wang Tao's heart, and has since taken root.
In order to realize his dream, he dropped out of The Chinese Normal University and enrolled in the University of Science and Technology of Hong Kong, where he studied hard and practiced hard.
After completing his studies, Wang Tao went to Shenzhen to start a business, started in a warehouse, and suffered for seven years, shocking the industry with the world's first consumer-grade aerial photography integrated drone.
Then, Wang Tao led DJI to first take Europe and the United States, and then turned to China, and finally won the throne of the martial arts alliance in the civilian drone market.
Up to now, DJI has occupied more than 80% of the global civilian drone market, with a valuation of more than 20 billion US dollars, and has established a drone empire with more than 10,000 employees.
As the founder, Wang Tao is also worth more than 40 billion yuan, ranking third in The list of China's post-80s richest people.
What is the secret of DJI's success? Wang Tao's once testimonial may allow us to peek into the leopard:
"In our parents' generation, China has always lacked products that can impress the world, and Chinese manufacturing has never been able to get rid of the situation of relying on cost-effective advantages to obtain the market." The success of enterprises in this era should have different ideas and values, and DJI is willing to focus on making really good products and reverse this situation that people are not too proud of. ”
One
Chasing dreams
Dropped out of HCCI and enrolled in HKUST
Interest is the best guide in life
Wang Tao was born in 1980 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. His father was an engineer and his mother was a teacher, and he went to sea to become a small business owner.
Due to his parents' busy schedule, Wang Tao was placed to board at the teacher's house after the third grade of primary school.
Lacking the company of his parents and no other friends, Wang Tao could only play games and read comic books in his spare time.
At that time, there was a comic book called "Brain Grandpa" that impressed Wang Tao, and a red helicopter on the book was like a carved seal, which left a mark on Wang Tao's mind.
Wang Tao loved the book and read it repeatedly, and a dream slowly emerged in his heart:
"If only I could make something that automatically controls helicopter flight out!"
Since then, Wang Tao has had an infinite reverie about the sky. He loves model airplanes and spends most of his spare time reading books related to model airplanes.
At the age of 16, in order to motivate Wang Tao to score high, his parents promised a reward for a remote control helicopter. Wang Tao studied desperately and finally got the gift he dreamed of.
However, it didn't take long for Wang to break the remote-controlled helicopter, and it was only a few months later that he received parts sent from Hong Kong for replacement.
In Wang Tao's imagination, the remote control helicopter should be like an elf that can be manipulated at will, can hover in the air without moving, and can also let it fly to any position.
But in fact, the helicopter, which was difficult to control, fell shortly after takeoff, and the rapidly rotating propeller left a scar on his hand.
Wang Tao's dream of building a remote-controlled helicopter became clearer at this time.
After graduating from high school, Wang Tao was admitted to East China Normal University and chose to study in the Department of Electronics.
It may be that they want to accelerate the realization of their dreams, or that the school curriculum is biased towards theoretical learning and lacks the opportunity to combine practice. When Wang Tao was in his junior year, he decided to drop out of school.
He issued admission applications to Stanford, MIT and other world famous universities, but because the undergraduate results were only moderate, these world famous schools did not look up to him, and finally only the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology threw an olive branch to him.
There was no way, Wang Tao had to retreat to the second place, and entered the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to study electrical and computer engineering.
In 2005, when Wang Tao graduated from HKUST, he decided to take the flight control system of a remote-controlled helicopter as his graduation design topic.
The core problem he wants to solve is a childhood dream: to allow the model aircraft to hover freely.
However, the graduation design topic is generally decided by the school, so Wang Tao asked two classmates to help persuade the teacher, and the teacher saw the desire in Wang Tao's eyes and finally agreed to his request.
In addition, Wang Tao also applied for a fund of HK$18,000 from the school, struggled for 5 months, stayed up all night, and forgot to eat and sleep.
Unfortunately, in the graduation show, his helicopter fell from mid-air shortly after taking off, and finally got only a "C" score.
Because the graduation project results were too poor, Wang Tao even lost the opportunity to continue his studies at famous European universities.
But people have misfortunes and blessings, and when Wang Tao is lost, he meets a noble man, Li Zexiang.
Li Zexiang
Li Zexiang has many years of experience in studying in the United States, and after returning from his studies in 1992, he became a professor in the Department of Electronic computer engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and later served as the director of the Automation Technology Research Center.
In 1999, Li Zexiang founded Gugao Technology during his tenure at HKUST, which is currently the largest supplier of motion controllers in China.
During the period of founding Gugao, Li Zexiang has been looking for a way to better meet the needs of the industry in engineering education, which he later summarized as "new engineering" education.
In an interview with LatePost in June this year, Li Zexiang said that new engineering education should cultivate "people who can use technology to create new things."
Therefore, Li Zexiang is very interested in some talents who are good at research, have hands-on ability, and can integrate resources.
When Wang Tao was showing his graduation design, Li Zexiang was on the scene, and he took a fancy to this offspring at a glance.
Therefore, under the recommendation of Li Zexiang, Wang Tao became his senior disciple and continued to pursue a postgraduate degree at HKUST.
Just like Musk successfully launched a rocket after three failures, Wang Tao did not give up his dream after failing to show his graduation.
Unconvinced, he continued to study day and night. Sometimes in order to do experiments, Wang Tao even skipped class, often staying up until 5 a.m.
In January 2006, Wang Tao finally created a prototype flight control system that could successfully control helicopter flight.
For this insistence, Wang Tao later said: "I feel that there is an element of innocence in my personality, and I have liked a thing since I was a child, that is, I hope to turn it into reality." ”
Two
Dormant
"The multitude rebelled and separated" and endured for four years
Only love can withstand the long years
In his spare time, Wang Tao put his invention of the flight control system (hereinafter referred to as the flight control) on the model aircraft enthusiast forum to sell, and did not expect to receive the order soon.
Wang Tao was ecstatic, which was a recognition of his years of dedication.
In order to better develop products and improve the practicality of flight control, Wang Tao, who was still studying, decided to start a business. Professor Li Zexiang, who has always advocated applying what he has learned, is also very supportive of this.
At the beginning of 2006, Wang Tao came to Shenzhen with 200,000 yuan and 2 classmates sponsored by his family and established DJI in the 20-square-meter warehouse of his uncle's magazine.
At that time, the model aircraft players on the market were either professional players or veteran enthusiasts. Everyone is buying racks in the East Market, Buying Flight Controllers in the West Market, Buying The PTZ in the South Market, Buying Paddles in the North Market....... Then assemble it yourself into a whole machine.
And DJI's initial target was flight control.
A simple schematic diagram of the interior of the aircraft
Like most startups, DJI had great difficulties in its early days.
The first is that talent is difficult to recruit.
Although DJI left the warehouse and moved to a three-bedroom house in Lianhua North Village, Shenzhen. But the still dilapidated office environment directly shuts out many outstanding talents, barely leaving behind a professional and technical background, Wang Tao even has to take them to the door by hand.
The second is the instability of the team.
Wang Tao is a workaholic, and he will often suddenly call over to talk to employees about ideas, no matter what time it is.
Therefore, in order to avoid his phone, someone will put the mobile phone in the iron box after work, so that the phone shows that no one is answering, but that it cannot be connected. Others, more aggressive, opt for a direct shutdown.
Why doesn't anyone want to work overtime? One is that they can't stand Wang Tao's surprise attack, and the other is that everyone thinks that Wang Tao is harsh on his work, but he has uneven distribution of equity.
In terms of equity distribution, Wang Tao early advocated distribution according to the technical level. But the whole company is the most technical, of course, the majority of the head, so others complain about it.
Finally, the vision is unclear.
The early stage of hard technology entrepreneurship needs to be tormented, because from theory to mass production is a relatively long-term process, and the same is true for flight control.
After a year of suffering, the product has not yet shadowed, the young people who joined DJI in the early days began to become impetuous, and the company's vision was unclear, and everyone began to play a wishful thinking.
Later, Wang Recalled: "I didn't know how big the market would be, and our idea was simple: develop a product that could feed a team of 10 to 20 people." ”
In this way, in 2007, conflicts within the DJI team began to erupt.
Some employees have turned to the partners they have negotiated, and some people have begun to secretly hang the company's belongings for sale on the Internet, and even more after leaving their jobs, they should cooperate with internal employees to sell DJI pirated flight controllers.
In an interview with Late Post, Li Zexiang admitted that when the DJI crisis broke out in 2007, everyone was gone, and finally only one cashier was left.
At that time, Wang Tao, who was in a hurry, asked Li Zexiang for advice, who was giving a lesson to the students of hitchhiker's Shenzhen Research Institute, and Wang Tao waited helplessly outside for two hours alone.
Li Zexiang helped Wang Tao analyze the problem, encouraged him to cheer up, and also gave Wang Tao some help in terms of talent and funds.
In terms of funds, in fact, at the end of 2006, Wang Tao's father's friend Lu Di invested about 90,000 US dollars in DJI, and later became the financial leader of DJI; Xie Jia, a middle school classmate of Wang Tao, also sold his house to raise money to invest in DJI, and later became the market leader of DJI.
This time, Li Zexiang and Zhu Xiaorui, a doctoral supervisor at HIT, invested 1 million yuan in DJI.
In terms of talent, in addition to Zhu Xiaorui becoming the chief scientist of DJI, in 2007, coinciding with the graduation of the first batch of students of the Shenzhen Research Institute of HIT, Li Zexiang mobilized many people to join DJI.
You must know that these people are all regular troops specializing in electronic automation, and DJI's core technical team has finally been established.
Soon, with everyone's efforts, DJI released the helicopter flight control XP2.0 version that year. For the first time, DJI Flight Controller achieved over-the-horizon flight, breaking through the original field of vision boundaries.
In 2008, DJI made another breakthrough in technology and polished the XP3.1 flight control system. It allows the model aircraft to automatically hover in the air when it is unmanned.
Wang Tao's dream for many years has finally come true at this moment!
Wang Tao and Li Zexiang conduct flight tests on Mount Everest
With this set of flight control, DJI soon received some orders, about 20 units per month, according to the calculation of 20,000 yuan per unit, there was more than 4 million yuan of revenue a year, and the company began to break even.
Just when Wang Tao was soaring on the road of helicopter flight control, a colleague two years younger than him began to develop a multi-rotor model, he was Peng Bin, the founder of Jifei Technology.
Before 2008, domestic aircraft models were mainly fixed-wing and helicopter, and few people made multi-rotor aircraft models. Peng Bin, who started his business in 2007, started a four-rotor model aircraft at the beginning and quickly achieved 20 million revenue in 2011.
After Jifei launched the multi-rotor aircraft model, Wang Tao also noticed. He immediately bought one and came back to study, but the result could not be hovered, and soon the plane exploded.
Wang Tao and his team agreed that there was no future for this thing, so they abandoned further research on multi-rotor and continued to develop helicopter flight control.
Immediately after, DJI launched a new generation of helicopter flight control Ace one in 2010. The weight of the Ace one is only 100 grams, which is 1/7 of the XP 3.1, and the unit price is also very close to the people, down to about 1000 yuan.
Soon, the Ace one sold thousands of units a month, becoming another major product line of DJI.
DJI began to gain fame in the domestic drone industry.
Three
amazing
Be innovative and lead the way
The best competition is that I have him none
Although the Ace one sells well, for DJI, the market is not big enough and the profits are not rich enough.
After all, DJI's helicopter flight control is mainly used in the field of aerial photography, but the cost of helicopters is not affordable for everyone.
At this time, an agent of DJI in New Zealand inspired Wang Tao.
The agent told Wang that they sold 200 gimbals (mobile phones, cameras, camera support equipment) every month, 90% of which were hung on multi-rotor aircraft models.
At the same time, on the world's famous model aircraft enthusiast forum DIY Drones, many netizens began to discuss multi-rotor flight control. Wang Tao felt that this was a business opportunity, so he re-studied the multi-rotor flight control.
According to zuolin and right fox, at that time, Wang Tao planned three directions for DJI's products: image transmission, flight control and gimbal.
On image transfer.
At that time, the demand was not large, and Wang Tao also felt that he could not do it for a while, so he found Yao Haiping of Kuxin to help DJI do outsourcing, and then slowly conquered it himself.
On the flight control system.
After more than a year of research, DJI unveiled the multi-rotor flight control WooKong-M at the Aviation Museum exhibition in September 2011.
This multi-rotor flight control is extremely cost-effective, and soon DJI has crossed the two thresholds of annual income of tens of millions and a single product income volume of more than 10 million, and DJI has entered a state of no shortage of money.
On the gimbal.
At the beginning, DJI's gimbal, like others, used the steering gear gimbal solution. But there are many problems with this solution: the response is slow, and the image is still shaky.
In order to solve the jitter problem, Wang Tao and his team tried many solutions, and after combining factors such as price and endurance, Wang Tao creatively proposed to use brushless motor direct drive to control the gimbal.
In January 2012, DJI officially released the Zenmuse Z15 gimbal at the Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany, which is the world's first brushless direct drive gyro stable and stable gimbal, and the world's first civilian high-precision gimbal.
Later, Zhao Tao, technical director of DJI, recalled the scene of the exhibition: "I was numb all over my body, and I was extremely excited when I saw the plane with the Zenxer gimbal and GoPro camera standing still. ”
Consistent performance leads to excellent results.
Once launched, The Zenmuse Z15 became popular in the industry overnight, and the products starting at $2,000 instantly had tens of thousands of orders. In 2012, with a single product, Zenmuse Z15, DJI's revenue exceeded 100 million.
Wang Tao is a very crisis-minded founder, and although DJI has become a top supplier in the professional aerial photography market, he has set his sights on the low-end market.
At that time, everyone was competing in the professional drone market, and the consumer market of the ordinary people was still blank.
In order to prevent competitors from sneaking into this market, coupled with the maturity of all aspects of technology and supply chain, Wang Tao decided to develop a consumer-grade drone.
"We wanted to make a cost-effective product that didn't require players to assemble it themselves and take off at any time. At that time, the main consideration was that this product could enter the low-end machine market before our opponents, and did not want to make money. Wang Tao later said in an interview with the media.
After a year of research and preparation, DJI officially launched the epoch-making "DJI Genie Phantom 1" in January 2013 , the world's first consumer-grade aerial photography integrated drone.
What are the advantages of this product?
First of all, the product is amazing.
Wang Tao himself is a person who attaches great importance to industrial aesthetics, and DJI has long invested in product design.
In the internal WeChat work group, Wang Tao once shared a sentence in Jobs's "Lost Interview": "The real magic is to grind a product with five thousand ideas, and a good idea needs a lot of processing to become a good product."
As a result, the Phantom 1 is quite impressively sculpted in the product.
Secondly, the price is close to the people.
When doing helicopter flight control, Wang Tao has opened the flight control, gimbal and image transmission projects in order to do aerial photography, and even accessories such as motors are also done by themselves, plus after the launch of the iPhone, the price of sensors has dropped sharply, and DJI has sold drones for 1,000 US dollars.
Compared with the previous drone model of more than 100,000 yuan, this price can be said to be extremely close to the people.
Therefore, the Phantom 1 has attracted great attention from model aircraft enthusiasts as soon as it was launched.
At that time, DJI internally thought that the first month of 3,000 units of orders came to an end, did not expect that the popularity of Phantom 1 exceeded the Zenxel Gimbal, and the orders in a few days had already exceeded 10,000.
As the pioneer of consumer drones, DJI quickly became the first in the industry, and since then it has been a blockbuster!
Four
Absolutely dusty
Annihilate the opponent and be unique
I have to beat myself
Once any blue ocean field shows great prospects, a swarm of sharks will flock to each other and fight each other until it becomes a red sea.
After DJI's success in the consumer drone field, many competitors saw the opportunity and rushed to the track.
Let's start with foreign competitors.
DJI's competitors abroad are mainly 3D Robotics in the United States. 3D Robotics was founded in 2009 by former wired editors Chris Anderson and Zodi Munoz.
Anderson is also the founder of DIY Drones, the world's largest model aircraft forum.
At the end of 2012, 3D Robotics received its first $5 million angel investment, and Anderson officially left Wired to devote himself to the operation of 3D Robotics and began to develop multi-rotor drones.
Later, 3D Robotics also hired Colin, the former head of DJI North America, to take charge of the market, who fell out with DJI over interests until he went to court.
Let's talk about domestic competitors.
Just as tesla is the only electric vehicle manufacturer in the United States, DJI's competitors in the United States are mainly 3D Robotics. But at home it is not so simple.
The domestic entrepreneurial environment has always been harsh, and after the consumer-grade drones showed their market potential, various roles have appeared one after another.
Yang Jianjun, who wanted to buy DJI Flight Control for 150,000 yuan, led Zero to hold hands with Tencent and Lei Bai;
Peng Bin took Jifei and SF to cooperate with UAV express;
EHang released the manned aircraft 184, which became the object of media chase.......
All of these men attacked DJI. At the hottest time, there were more than 300 domestic drone companies.
In the face of such a fierce competitive environment, how does DJI stand out?
According to an interview with Late Post, Li Zexiang, a director of DJI, went to Silicon Valley in the United States to consult Michael Moritz, a global partner at Sequoia Capital, before the Phantom drone detonated the market.
Moritz gave Li Zexiang three tips:
The product is the key. As long as the product is good, no matter which corner of the world it comes from, it can be a brand;
If you want to be an international technology brand, you must first start from Silicon Valley in the United States, especially the bosses of Silicon Valley high-tech companies;
If you want to develop for a long time, you must have a talent strategy.
After returning to China, Li Zexiang and Wang Tao exchanged views on Moritz's proposals, combined with different competitive environments and their own resources, and determined the strategy for DJI's development later.
The first is to vigorously recruit outstanding talents.
According to DJI's internal employees, Wang Tao likes to recruit top talents, especially graduates of Tsinghua University and Peking University, which is very similar to Musk.
Later, DJI also spent a lot of money to hold a global robot competition RoboMaster to gather and cultivate a group of young people interested in robots.
The second is to control costs.
In order to balance DJI's development in the United States, 3D Robtics in North America not only transferred most of its production capacity from Mexico to Shenzhen, but also extracted a lot of money from industrial drone manufacturing, launching Solo consumer drones at a price of $1700.
But the DJI Phantom 3 Pro is only priced at $1300. By 2016, the Phantom 3, equipped with universal joints and cameras, had dropped another $300.
The price was not competitive, the performance was not as good as DJI, and finally 3D Robtics decided to shut down the drone manufacturing business and turn to enterprise-level software services.
DJI won the North American market in one fell swoop.
The other is to cooperate with Apple to enhance the brand power of products.
In 2015, DJI launched Phantom3 in Apple retail stores around the world, and executives from across DJI went to Apple's official retail stores to distribute drone training manuals or conduct flight courses.
It is said that at that time, Bill Gates also purchased an iPhone in order to use DJI drones.
Finally, it is to speed up the launch of new products.
In 2016, in the face of high profile from competitors in the market, DJI quickly launched phantom 4 and lowered the price again and again.
Immediately after that, DJI took the lead in launching the handheld folding drone Mavic in the same year, directly blocking the way out for competitors to do small selfie drones.
Mavic drove fans crazy, but it also killed DJI's own newly launched Phantom 4.
With cost control and the speed of launching new products, DJI broke through the siege and rode to the dust, making competitors desperate.
According to Forbes, in 2014 and 2015, there were 122 drone financings worldwide. By 2016, the scale of investment had shrunk by nearly half, and the industry was dead and injured.
Foreign 3D Robotics company laid off more than 150 employees and transformed into enterprise software services. Domestic companies such as Jifei and Zero degree have transformed into unmanned aerial vehicle solutions that serve vertical industries, such as Jifei to do unmanned plant protection in the agricultural field.
As the final winner, DJI occupies 70% of the consumer drone market and has become the absolute leader of the industry, and has continued to this day.
While its performance has improved by leaps and bounds, DJI is also very popular in the capital market.
From January 2013 to May 2015, DJI completed five financing rounds totaling more than $200 million, and investment institutions such as Sequoia China, China Star Light, Vision Capital, Maxing Investment, and Accel Partners were all listed among shareholders.
In 2018, DJI launched another $1 billion financing, which also raised DJI to a new height.
This is the largest financing in DJI's history, and DJI, which has a strong position, has opened a new financing routine: auction financing.
This kind of approach, like a project tender, has been used for financing, which is unheard of in the venture capital circle.
But even so, at the end of the first round of bidding, nearly 100 institutions still submitted margin and bidding applications, and the planned financing amount of DJI exceeded 30 times.
As a result, DJI quickly raised $1 billion in financing, and its valuation jumped to more than $20 billion.
This allowed DJI to be once called a model of "China's intelligent manufacturing" by the media, comparable to Apple.
For a time, DJI was pushed to the altar.
In addition to being well-woven in China, DJI's position in foreign markets is also as stable as Mount Tai.
As early as 2017, the US Army, Navy and Air Force joined forces to block DJI drones.
Embarrassingly, the U.S. Air Force Special Forces quietly procured 35 DJI drones for an incredibly simple reason: DJI is powerful, the price is excellent, and there is no replacement in the United States.
In 2019, a few days after the United States announced the "export ban" on Huawei, it issued a ban warning to DJI, raised DJI's tariffs, restricted imports, and wanted to force DJI to withdraw from the North American market.
In the face of such a hegemonic policy of the US government, the average enterprise either actively lobbied or swallowed up.
But DJI domineeringly shrugged back, you raise my 2% tariff, I will increase the price by 2%, love to buy or not to buy!
The result?
Before the ban, DJI's market share in the U.S. market was 72%.
After the blockade, the market share reached a maximum of 85%.
Yang Guowei, DJI zhuang zhao!
Five
Color
The pursuit of perfection, arbitrary
Some say he's "China Jobs."
When DJI expanded its territory around the world, foreign analyst Michael Bretz once said: "Everyone is catching up with DJI, it is China's apple!" ”
To some extent, DJI and Apple have similarities: both are closed operating systems, both are pioneers and high-end brands in their fields, and both occupy an absolutely dominant market share.
Looking at the founders of the company, Wang Tao and Jobs also have many of the same traits: self-confidence, concentration, pursuit of perfection, arbitrariness...
First, full of self-confidence.
When the media once talked about Jobs in front of Wang Tao, he commented: "Jobs has a lot of excellent qualities, and his practices and ideas have also brought me a lot of inspiration, but I only appreciate it, not to talk about admiration." ”
Even a big guy like Lei Jun worshipped Jobs, Wang Tao just admired it, and his self-confidence was evident.
So who can make him think of him as a kind?
Ren. There is another person in the world who is regarded as a smart person by Wang Tao, that is, Huawei's Ren Zhengfei.
Second, extremely focused
Wang Tao once said: "DJI's success stems from the attitude of always focusing on products. ”
In order to concentrate on doing a good job in products, in external communication, Wang Tao rarely faces the media, rarely participates in public activities, and even misses the product conference.
In Wang Tao's view, he is a person who makes products, and he only wants to do a good job of products and let more people use them, and other marketing and public relations things will be handed over to others to do.
In terms of internal work, Wang Tao works more than 80 hours a week, has a single bed next to his desk, and when he is tired, he will lie down and squint for a while, and wake up to continue working.
As soon as he was inspired, Wang Tao would call and communicate with employees, and many DJI executives had received calls from their bosses in the middle of the night.
This work habit forced many people to retire in the early days of DJI, and many employees complained about it in the later period.
I know there is a question: what is the experience of working at DJI?
Many DJI employees have complained that DJI encourages overtime but does not pay overtime. According to a DJI insider, "I go to work at 9 a.m. every day and basically never leave before 11 p.m. ”
Other words such as "Don't want to find a girlfriend" and "the lights in the R&D department office are still on at two o'clock in the morning" also appear frequently in the comment area.
Third, the pursuit of perfection
In addition to focus, Wang Tao's pursuit of product perfection has never stopped.
For example, Wang Tao has strict requirements for the tightness of the screws. He told employees what it would take to twist a few fingers to get it in place.
Since each screw has different uses and different strengths, Wang Tao bought a bunch of screw glue with different strengths in Hong Kong, and then used different screw glue according to the use of the screw.
The hundreds of screws on DJI's early flight control system were screwed up one by one according to different strengths.
A former DJI employee who has left the company revealed:
"The boss is oriented to the boutique, and for things that are not well designed, he will directly scold "what is this garbage". Of course, this kind of strictness will also allow employees to grow rapidly. ”
Why does Wang Tao pursue perfection so much?
He once said frankly: "In our father's generation, China has always lacked products that can impress the world, and Chinese manufacturing has never been able to get rid of the situation of relying on cost-effective advantages to obtain the market." But the success of enterprises in this era should have different ideas and values, and DJI is willing to focus on making really good products and reverse this situation that people are not too proud of."
In an interview with him, Wang Tao also cited the 450-year history of Japanese samurai swords: "Japanese craftsmen are constantly pursuing perfection. Chinese have money, but the product is terrible, and so is the service. If you want to build a good product, you have to pay a bigger price. ”
Fourth, arbitrariness
Like Jobs, Wang Tao was resolute and assertive in his decision-making.
According to DJI's internal employees, from product design to internal management, and even the holding of some large-scale activities, it depends on Wang Tao's decision-making.
This is a character that we cannot judge good or bad.
On the one hand, in the early days of DJI, due to Wang Tao's insistence on the way of equity distribution, most members of the team were extremely dissatisfied and eventually ran away.
In the past two years, many executives of DJI have also left one after another, and it is estimated that they are inseparable from Wang Tao's personality.
In an interview with Forbes, Wang Tao admitted frankly, "I used to be a perfectionist, a bit stubborn, and I didn't know how to express myself when communicating with people, so it was easy to hurt their feelings." ”
On the other hand, in a way, this arbitrary personality is good for startups.
It can leave a group of people who really do things for DJI, and it can also make DJI's decision-making and rapid development, but the premise is that the founder's decision-making must be correct.
Fifth, meritocracy
In 2012, Wang Tao has been struggling with how to solve the problems of the "Phantom" series of stable pictures and 360-degree unobstructed shooting.
At this time, an intern, Chen Yiqi, boldly proposed his own solution.
At that time, Chen Yiqi had not yet graduated from university, and Wang Tao gave him a technical team of hundreds of people and tens of millions of research and development funds.
Two years later, under the leadership of Chen Yiqi, DJI's first deformed drone with 360-degree full-view HD camera function made a stunning appearance.
In order to stimulate everyone's potential and enthusiasm, at the beginning of 2015, Wang Tao came up with the eight words of "extreme dedication, seeking truth and sincerity", which is regarded as the core of DJI's corporate culture.
Wang Tao said: "As long as it is a person in the R & D team, no matter how long you have been in the company, how much seniority, what the position is, as long as you have a idea, the proposal can withstand the torture and questioning of the R & D team leaders, you can lead the team." ”
Six
Write at the end
In the past two years, DJI has been in turmoil and development has slowed down.
First, DJI's internal turmoil is turbulent, a large number of senior executives have left one after another, and the internal anti-corruption wave has often been set off.
Second, since the growth of the drone business has slowed down, Wang Tao has mobilized funds and manpower to invest in another track - automatic driving.
In the past few years, DJI has invested in foreign supercars, established joint ventures in autonomous driving companies, worked as a first-tier supplier of intelligent driving for car companies, and sold radar.
However, due to various reasons, there is still no major breakthrough in the layout.
We don't know if Wang Tao's success in drones can finally be copied to automatic driving.
But Wang Tao's ultimate pursuit of products and technologies is worth learning from every Chinese entrepreneur.
In the current international environment, we need more Wang Tao to overcome the problem of card neck in all aspects of technology.
In the process of great national rejuvenation, we need more Wang Tao to build a national brand with a global reputation.
As Wang Tao said in the circle of friends:
"I am tired of being a second-class citizen of culture, values, and products, and I look forward to our products that can also make the United States five-body land as soon as possible!"
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【Introduction of Qiu Chuji】
Fujian Longyan people, graduated from a domestic business school, and later worked in a number of Internet companies, now engaged in venture capital related work, long-term attention to commercial cattle people. Learn from the cattle people together, continue to grow, and continue to evolve.
Resources:
1. "UAV Jianghu and the First Half of Wang Tao's Life", J Jinhong, Zuo Lin Right Beaver
2, "DJI, is a man is tough!" Yunyou Xiaosheng, pure smile
3. "Dialogue with Li Zexiang: After hatching DJI and Cloud Whale, how to cultivate more technology founders", Cheng Manqi, Late Post
4. "Interview with DJI Wang Tao: How to Get Rid of China's Notoriety", Forbes
5. "DJI Car Doubts", Wang Yijin, 36Kr
6. "Alien" Wang Tao, Jin Hong, Lei Feng Network