2024-08-18
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Zhu Xiaorui is an "Iron Lady" who combines technology, industry incubation and investment
Although Zhu Xiaorui has a high "success rate" in investing in and supporting student entrepreneurship, her principle is not to encourage students to start their own businesses. "Because I know that starting a business is very hard, especially hard technology entrepreneurship. If a student tells me that he wants to start a business, I will do my best to discourage him."
Text｜"Chinese Entrepreneurs" reporter Kong Yuexin
Editor: Ma Jiying
Source of header image｜Interviewee
In the business world, Zhu Xiaorui is a somewhat unfamiliar name. But in the hard technology venture capital circle, she is an "iron lady" who combines technology, industry incubation and investment.
She is the former chief scientist of DJI, chief scientist of RoboSense, the "first Hong Kong-listed laser radar company", co-founder and investor of robotics company Dadao Zhichuang, and founding shareholder of Yiqing Innovation, a developer of autonomous driving navigation technology.
Zhu Xiaorui smiled at the camera Source: Interviewee
In 2006, Zhu Xiaorui received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah in the United States. In 2007, she joined the Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School as a teacher and was promoted to full professor in 2014.When she joined the Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, it was a critical period for Shenzhen City to promote the upgrading of manufacturing industry. Zhu Xiaorui was a witness and participant of this process.
Zhu Xiaorui not only co-founded star companies such as DJI and RoboSense with her students, but she has also been deeply engaged in the field of hard technology and has several unicorns in reserve.
Relaxed is the first impression Zhu Xiaorui left when she was interviewed. Even when she recalled the most difficult moments in her entrepreneurial process, she was smiling. It is hard to imagine that she is a strict teacher that students are afraid of. "When they work on projects with me, I am very strict with students. Many students are afraid that I will scold them."
In the early stages of helping students start their own businesses, Zhu Xiaorui summarized her work in two points:One is to control the direction, and the other is to "scold people".
Zhu Xiaorui told "China Entrepreneur" that before students started their own businesses, she would always "suppress students" unless the students themselves were particularly passionate about entrepreneurship.
“Working in hard technology is very hard, you have to sit on the bench for at least 5 to 10 years.Moreover, there will be many problems and difficulties in the process of starting a business. Only passion can make people delve deeper in this direction. Even if they don’t make money at the moment, they will be happy because of product progress, etc. "Zhu Xiaorui said.
Precisely because hard technology entrepreneurship is extremely difficult, Zhu Xiaorui said that she "dares not scold" any students who have already started their own businesses.
Zhou Shaojun, a partner at Dongfang Fortune Capital, which invested in RoboSense's angel, A and D rounds, said, "When the company encountered difficulties, Zhu Xiaorui would stick to her ideas, encourage the founders and help them to the best of her ability. Even when things were very bad, she would never give up."
Zhu believes that it is very important to find the right role for oneself.Compared to "entrepreneurship mentor", Zhu Xiaorui prefers to define herself as a co-founder.
Zhu Xiaorui has experienced the entire hard technology startup cycle since she started participating in DJI's early entrepreneurship in 2007. When the embodied intelligence trend came, she also welcomed a new identity and new challenges.
At the end of 2006, Zhu Xiaorui graduated with a Ph.D. and in 2007 joined the Shenzhen Graduate School of Harbin Institute of Technology as an associate professor. He was also the first full-time professor of automation at the Shenzhen Graduate School.While teaching and guiding students to work on projects, she was also worried about their employment issues after graduation.
"We put a lot of effort into training students (doctoral or master's degree holders) and taking them on research projects. However, at that time, there were not many technology companies and few companies had R&D needs, so students could only work in sales positions after graduation." This made Zhu Xiaorui feel helpless. "What I learned in school is not useful after I start working."
Zhu Xiaorui feels it is a pity. "I put all my energy into training these students, but after graduation, my students are of no use to society. It's quite boring."
The problems that trouble Zhu Xiaorui are not limited to this.Before she joined, the Shenzhen Graduate School of Harbin Institute of Technology had only part-time professors, and new students enrolled every year. For a long time, there was a situation of "too many monks and too little porridge" - there were few teachers and many students, and the professors' topics were not enough for all the students to do research and write papers.
The solution given by the school at that time was to let half of the students choose to work on projects in Shenzhen's counterparts with R&D needs. After trying for a year or two, Zhu Xiaorui found that because the companies had too little R&D content, the students' R&D content might be too watered down for their papers, and some even had trouble writing their papers.
Zhu Xiaorui thought that it would be better to send students who were interested to start-up companies, so that they could at least have the opportunity to do research and development. However, since there were relatively few technology innovation companies at that time, Zhu Xiaorui thought of encouraging students to start their own businesses.This was also Zhu Xiaorui's original intention to incubate the company and start a business with students."My initial goal was more about training students."
This opportunity came soon.
In the second half of 2007, Wang Tao, a graduate student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who wanted to develop drones, contacted Zhu Xiaorui, introduced by his colleague Li Zexiang (a part-time professor at Harbin Institute of Technology). Zhu Xiaorui said that at that time, only her research direction (mobile robots) matched Wang Tao's entrepreneurial direction, and Wang Tao wanted to see if Zhu Xiaorui could provide technical support.
In Zhu Xiaorui's impression,Wang Tao is very passionate about drone-related content.As early as 2006, Wang Tao, who was still studying at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, asked his classmates to raise some investment and registered a company (DJI) in Shenzhen for fun. Due to heavy academic workload, Wang Tao did not officially operate the company or recruit formal employees, but only hired one or two interns during the winter and summer vacations.
After starting graduate studies, Wang Tao had relatively more time, and Zhu Xiaorui could provide technical support. In 2008, Li Zexiang and Wang Tao re-established a company in Hong Kong and held 100% of the Shenzhen DJI he had previously registered. Zhu Xiaorui and Li Zexiang invested a little money as the company's start-up capital, and Zhu Xiaorui served as DJI's co-founder and chief scientist.
In the first few years after DJI was founded, Zhu Xiaorui served more as a co-founder, helping Wang Tao sort out what kind of products the company should make, what kind of people it would need, where to find these people, how to find them, and what to do next.
DJI's emphasis on R&D just meets Zhu Xiaorui's needs in leading students on research projects.Therefore, when students finish their first year of basic courses and start working on their projects, those who are interested in drones and other topics go to DJI. This is how DJI started.
As a startup, the first product is crucial.
DJI's initial target users were helicopter model aircraft players. At that time, model aircraft were all fixed-wing and very difficult to control. Many people wanted to play with them but couldn't fly them. DJI's first generation product was a flight controller, which was installed under the helicopter model aircraft, making the model aircraft easier to operate like a point-and-shoot camera.
DJI product experience store Source: Visual China
Zhu Xiaorui recalled that when designing the controller, she didn't know how many airplanes (model aircraft) crashed during the test flight. In the end, she had to ask students and R&D personnel to learn to fly model aircraft first. This not only restricted DJI's product development progress, but also made it difficult to recruit team members. "Many people couldn't even pass the simulator test flight, let alone the real aircraft." Zhu Xiaorui said. In the early days of DJI, there were only a dozen people in the team, most of whom were Zhu Xiaorui's students who came to work on the aircraft project, and there were very few full-time employees.
It was not until 2010 that Zhu Xiaorui's first batch of students graduated. Some of them were optimistic about DJI and stayed in the company to do research and development full-time, becoming DJI's earliest R&D seed employees.
Now that the R&D difficulties have been resolved, finding a larger market has become a top priority.
Early flight controller developers were mostly players in the European and American markets. In Zhu Xiaorui's opinion, this market is very niche and not enough to support the growth of a company. "For many people, even if they have a controller, (flying) is still too difficult. The total user base is there."
The turning point came after 2010. At an academic conference in the United States, Zhu Xiaorui saw an American laboratory conducting experiments using quadcopters. After returning to China, Zhu Xiaorui excitedly shared with Wang Tao, "I saw something good."
In 2012, DJI produced the first version of the quadcopter, officially launching a complete product. "From then on, we started to develop the product with ease of use in mind, which is actually what we have always subconsciously believed: only by achieving the ultimate ease of use can we achieve scale," said Zhu Xiaorui.
This breakthrough gave the DJI team a clear understanding of the future development model, and they wanted to try to find an investment.
Around 2010, domestic Internet investment was booming, and the investment idea of first burning money and investing explosively and then seeking returns was gradually accepted by the capital market.
"Before, we did business in the most traditional way, that is, we collected some money after selling products, and then rolled over the profits." Zhu Xiaorui believes thatIf you want to expand rapidly, you must have "hot money" to invest explosively.
But the problem was that there was no concept of hard technology at that time, and only a small number of institutions in Shenzhen showed signs of looking into hard technology.
It was not easy for DJI to find investment at that time. Zhu Xiaorui visited a circle of investors and said, "Everyone said they didn't understand it and couldn't invest."
Finally, with the help of Li Zexiang's "face recognition" and Wang Tao's family and friends, the company finally found several "individual investors", each of whom invested 1 million yuan to raise the initial capital. "They (investors) didn't understand what we were doing, but 1 million yuan was not a big sum for them, and they thought what we were doing was interesting, so they invested." Zhu Xiaorui laughed and said that she didn't have the qualifications to "recognize" at the beginning.
Soon after the first round of funding arrived, DJI's quadcopters became a hot seller in the North American market as Christmas gifts. Zhu Xiaorui admitted that this was partly due to the market development capabilities of the North American team at the time.
After the product sold out, DJI began to attract investors’ attention. In early 2013, Sequoia China became an investor in DJI’s Series A financing.
The rise of DJI has greatly increased Zhu Xiaorui's popularity in the technology circle. At the same time, the domestic hard technology wave began to rise, the track gradually became hot, and many investment institutions began to pay attention to and invest in the hard technology field.
After graduating with a doctorate, Qiu Chunxin did not want to miss this wave of hard technology craze, so he gave up his original goal of staying in school, chose to start a business, and sought support from his mentor Zhu Xiaorui.
Zhu Xiaorui's advice to Qiu Chunxin is,It is difficult for one person to succeed in starting a business. At least a core team is needed.Zhu Xiaorui called another student, Liu Letian, and Qiu Chunxin to have a meal together near Shenzhen Overseas Chinese Town, and "happily decided to start a business together." Qiu Chunxin served as CEO, Liu Letian as CTO, and Zhu Xiaorui as the company's chief scientist.
RoboSense Factory Source: Interviewee
In October 2014, RoboSense was established. When it came to raising funds, compared to the period when no one (investors) were interested in DJI, the situation was completely reversed. "The initial investment in RoboSense can be said to be my 'face'," Zhu Xiaorui said with a smile.
The first to cast a vote of confidence was a Shenzhen-based investment institution - Oriental Fortune.
Zhou Shaojun, partner of Oriental Fortune Capital, recalled that he was managing Oriental Fortune Capital's first angel fund at the time and was exploring some early-stage projects. After being introduced by a friend, he learned about the startup company RoboSense and thus came into contact with Qiu Chunxin and Zhu Xiaorui.
At that time, RoboSense had almost nothing but some ideas, but Oriental Fortune Capital still decided to invest."Looking back now, it's quite funny. Someone from Oriental Fortune came over and said they wanted to meet me. They even took a few photos with me," Zhu Xiaorui recalled. But in Zhou Shaojun's view, Zhu Xiaorui has become a trustworthy "business card" in the field of hard technology. "DJI was already very famous at the time. I think Teacher Zhu is amazing, and her students are amazing too," Zhou Shaojun said.
After receiving the first round of investment, Zhu Xiaorui and the company team began to carefully think about the direction of product development. Zhou Shaojun and the team of Oriental Fortune often discussed with them how to start the company. "At that time, technology investment had just begun, and investment institutions and entrepreneurs were full of enthusiasm and wanted to do something together." Zhu Xiaorui said.
Although with the initial influx of funds, RoboSense still faces the challenge of going from 0 to 1.In 2015, while developing mechanical LiDAR products, Qiu Chunxin and others were also thinking about building an automotive-grade LiDAR that could be mass-produced. They targeted the "chip-level" two-dimensional MEMS (micro-electromechanical system) chip scanning architecture, but at that time there was no MEMS chip in the world that met their design requirements, so they had to develop it themselves.
In October 2016, after completing the development of mechanical LiDAR products, RoboSense faced the challenge of mass production. To this end, Qiu Chunxin spent two full months in the factory, working with his team and workers to overcome the difficulties. In April 2017, RoboSense achieved mass production of the first 16-line LiDAR in China, officially reversing the long-term monopoly of foreign companies.
On January 5, 2024, RoboSense was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with a market value of over HK$19 billion, making it the world's largest listed laser radar company at the time. This battle also allowed Zhu Xiaorui to earn hundreds of times the book return.
In Zhou Shaojun's opinion, Zhu Xiaorui's ability to invest in another high-return star company after DJI is a reflection of the super combination of luck and strength.
However, Zhu Xiaorui believes that the listing of RoboSense "was part of the original plan."In her opinion, going public is just an expansion of financing channels, and whether the company can achieve healthy development is more important.
Although the listing brought high returns, Zhu Xiaorui said that he did not particularly care about how much money he made. "It's not that I'm so noble, but I really didn't realize it at the beginning."
In her opinion, it takes a long time to start a business from 0 to 1 and then to grow and develop the business. "If we really want a return, we can't stick with it." Whether it is DJI or RoboSense, at the beginning, the team only sticks with the idea of doing things well because they think the project or research and development is valuable.
Zhou Shaojun believes that his cooperation with Zhu Xiaorui can form a synergy. "She has her own insights into technological development. We want to invest in projects with industries or technical backgrounds similar to hers. Teacher Zhu can provide us with very good help and advice. This connection is also a better way to cooperate."
This also helped Zhou Shaojun form his own investment philosophy——Invest in relatively young teams (30-40 years old is the best age for starting a business) with technical background."Later, I gradually realized that we should invest in projects that are slightly ahead of the times, but not too far ahead. For example, it is interesting to invest in projects like RoboSense when they are not very clear at the beginning."
On the other hand, Zhou Shaojun believes that Zhu Xiaorui is also a very good source of projects. "HIT is very strong in the fields of robotics, aerospace and so on in China. Professor Zhu can also recommend some young scientists and students to us."
Judging from the results of the cooperation between the two parties, Oriental Fortune Capital invested in three rounds of funding for Suteng Juchuang, and Zhu Xiaorui also became a personal LP of Oriental Fortune Capital. In 2018, Zhou Shaojun invested in another autonomous driving startup project incubated by Zhu Xiaorui - Yiqing Innovation.
Despite having a high "success rate" in investing in and supporting student entrepreneurship, Zhu Xiaorui has always been very cautious in supporting student entrepreneurship.
Zhu Xiaorui said that her principle is not to encourage students to start their own businesses unless they are very passionate, "because I know that starting a business is very hard, especially hard technology entrepreneurship.If a student tells me that he wants to start a business, I will try my best to discourage him.”
When facing students who have entrepreneurial ideas, Zhu Xiaorui often says, "Think carefully. Starting a business is very hard, and the probability of failure is very high. There are many ups and downs in the process. It's not just about hard work, but also luck."
After she has poured cold water on the students repeatedly, if the students are still able to persist, Zhu Xiaorui will support them; otherwise, she will suggest that the students "find a class to attend."
Before Xing Zhiwei started his own business, he also went through this test. Around 2015, after working at NVIDIA for a few years, Xing Zhiwei found his mentor Zhu Xiaorui again and expressed his idea of starting a business. Before that, Xing Zhiwei and Zhao Xinyu and several other people would get together almost every year to talk to Zhu Xiaorui about their entrepreneurial ideas.
In 2015, with the support of Zhu Xiaorui, Xing Zhiwei, Zhao Xinyu and others invested together to establish a service robot company - Dadao Zhichuang.
Zhu Xiaorui suggested that Dadao Zhichuang’s primary task is to build a team and transform technology into real product capabilities, while also being agile enough to adjust actions quickly in the face of changes in the market environment.
A few months after its establishment, Dadao Zhichuang launched the first generation of security robots and produced several prototypes. In the first half of 2016, the company started angel round financing. At that time, Xing Zhiwei and others had almost no contact with the investment circle. Zhu Xiaorui helped the team introduce some investors, which eventually led to investments from institutions such as Innovation Valley and Meihua Venture Capital.
At the beginning, Dadao Zhichuang mainly engaged in security robots. Around 2019, the security business had tied up with larger integrators and had a stable cash flow. Subsequently, Zhu Xiaorui, Xing Zhiwei and others began to explore new business lines. As the first generation of consumer robot prototypes were collected and entered the application scenarios of the Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee's independent retail, Dadao Zhichuang set its sights on the marketing service field of offline commercial scenarios, and also transformed from the to G market to to B and to C.
With the advent of the embodied intelligence trend, Zhu Xiaorui is also working with the Dadao Zhichuang team to sort out and adjust the company's development path, hoping to seize this opportunity.In Zhu Xiaorui's opinion, compared with RoboSense, Dadao Zhichuang faces relatively greater difficulties. "Laser scanners are not new. They have many applications. RoboSense just upgraded it from 2D to 3D, which can ensure that RoboSense's business has a basic volume. Catching up with the car-mounted market is a greater opportunity for the company. Dadao Zhichuang is new from products to markets, and the difficulties are similar to those of DJI before."
After several years of development, the service robot industry has become more accepting of robots by the public, and some tool-type functional robots have also been widely recognized in the market. After conducting in-depth research and analysis on the market, Dadao Zhichuang also feels that in addition to robots that replace human labor, profit-making robots that can create incremental value for the market will have a broader market space, and unicorn companies will surely be born in this direction.
As a result, DaDao Zhichuang began to focus on technology consumer robots, and commercialized and commercialized the embodied intelligence capabilities accumulated by the company over the years.We will continue to improve the overall marketing effectiveness of technology consumer robots, and then launch smart marketing solutions for offline commercial scenarios with embodied intelligence as the core, and invest our products and services in major shopping malls and transportation hubs, opening up new application scenarios for offline traffic.
Zhu Xiaorui once proposed in her research project that the next generation of mobile robots should be human-machine integrated, that is, when the robot is in a crowd, it will not only look natural, but will also actively integrate into the crowd.
"Traditional robots regard humans as obstacles like tables and chairs. When robots encounter humans, they will avoid them or stop to let the humans go first. But as robots gradually integrate into human society, there is a greater need for robots and humans to interact in life, just like the interaction between people," said Zhu Xiaorui.
In Zhu Xiaorui's view, shopping malls are one of the most data-intensive scenarios in the consumer field. If (DaoDao's products) can be established in this scenario, then the concept of embodied intelligence will be realized. At present, DaDao Zhichuang's consumer robots have been stationed in shopping malls in more than a dozen cities in China and Singapore, and have reached a cooperation with Wanda.
Compared with starting a business, Zhu Xiaorui believes that investing is not her interest."No matter how idealistic a fund is, it is essentially a financial investment, and the ideal element cannot dominate." Therefore, she has no intention of transforming into an investor. She thinks she does not have too much ambition.I prefer to take my time and do a good job.
Zhu Xiaorui's philosophy of "slow work and fine work" has led to the fact that she has only incubated seven or eight companies, and she has joined each company as the chief scientist. She told China Entrepreneur that her criterion for judging the development of a company is not "success" but "stability."
In Zhu Xiaorui's view, a company that can generally last 5 to 7 years and has 1 to 2 products that satisfy a certain customer group means that the company has development momentum and has entered a stable period. "Even if problems arise in the middle, as long as the momentum is there, the company will be able to overcome difficulties and continue to develop," said Zhu Xiaorui.
However, due to "limited time and energy", Zhu Xiaorui has resigned from his university teaching position and is currently the dean of the GAIR Research Institute in Singapore.
In 2023, Zhu Xiaorui also began to serve as the founding editor-in-chief of the academic journal International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Research (IJAIRR). In Zhu Xiaorui's view,Publishing journals will not distract her, but will help her better understand the cutting-edge trends in technology."It's all part of my (career ecology) puzzle."
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