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author gao yulei

in 2010, the movie "the social network" received eight nominations and won three awards at the academy awards. from the perspective of the internet entrepreneurship theme of the movie, it was unprecedented. the movie tells the story of the early days of facebook (now called meta), but even such a successful work was opposed by the founder mark zuckerberg after its release. in his opinion, the movie did not reflect the real facts of the company, and the screenwriter sorkin also admitted that he had never met zuckerberg in person.

but this is a movie after all, and the audience will not take it completely seriously. many of the entrepreneurial histories of chinese technology companies that grew up at the same time as facebook have been distorted and misunderstood by the outside world.

history is written by the victors, but the history of startups is not necessarily the same. generally speaking, if the company and the founder are relatively low-key, it will be written and disseminated by the company's former management, former mentors, former investors, or even by marketing gurus who were not involved in the startup.

the reason i say so much is because a company i am very familiar with, dji, has been repeatedly told about its entrepreneurial story. behind these different versions of the story, there are often legendary "strategists", "godfathers", "executives", etc. recently, a very popular case online is zhu xiaorui - this scholar, investor, and entrepreneur has been interviewed by media including 36kr and "china entrepreneur" magazine. what is very eye-catching is her title of "former chief scientist of dji" and the important role she played in the early development of dji, which makes me curious. because of my understanding of the company, after communicating with many founding employees and former employees of dji, more questions followed.

who is dji’s “chief scientist”?

i became interested in zhu xiaorui because of a report in china entrepreneur magazine. in the article titled "female scientists behind dji are hatching unicorns in large scale", the reporter interviewed zhu xiaorui. according to her own description, she is the former chief scientist, co-founder and founding director of dji and "hatched dji". she also described the story and details of her relationship with dji founder wang tao, and the unusualness of it caught my attention.

zhu xiaorui has stated in many media interviews that he had served as dji's chief scientist.

when i was working for another media company 10 years ago, i started reporting on dji in its early days. since then, i have continued to follow and made many friends working in the company. i can be regarded as witnessing the gradual growth of dji. dji has always remained humble, low-key and pragmatic, and its founder wang tao rarely accepts media interviews. the limited information i obtained mostly came from employees of the founding team and former executives.

zhu xiaorui provided a different perspective and facts. so i consulted several friends who participated in dji's early entrepreneurship, and the answers they gave were intriguing.

two employees who have worked at dji for more than ten years and experienced the start-up phase told me that they found this news very strange. they were discussing and asking about it internally, and they had never heard of such a "chief scientist" before. "at dji, we have worked hard all the way through product research and development. this title is not something that anyone can take on, and there is no such position internally now." at the same time, the above-mentioned employees said that the dji co-founder team we usually refer to should not include zhu xiaorui, and she has not participated in the company's strategic and business decision-making process at any stage.

another former employee with a double-digit employee number said: i know teacher zhu. she sometimes came to the company, but i don’t remember her actually participating in project development or planning, so i can’t say she was a chief or not. i remember that she did send a few students to the company and helped recruit people from the hit headquarters. these students also learned from the project from the beginning. one or two of them stayed in the company and became the main r&d force, but they should have left the company a long time ago.

can dji’s success be “mass-hatched”?

about some details mentioned in the report (the following screenshots are from the "china entrepreneur" article)

this idea of ​​being inspired by an accidental opportunity to start a business can be said to have first come from jin yong's martial arts novels, and later became common in entrepreneurial chicken soup articles.

founder wang tao once restored this process in one of his few early interviews, "a new zealand distributor told us that she sells 200 gimbals a month, and 95% of customers install the gimbal on multi-rotor aircraft. at first, we did not consider multi-rotor aircraft because their load capacity is not very large and the flight time is not very long. however, when the distributor told us this information, we seriously considered making a flight controller for quadcopters."

it sounds like it's more because of the market demand conveyed by agents and other channels that dji began to pay attention to this field. then it experienced layers of technological breakthroughs in image transmission, flight control, and gimbal, and was ahead of a number of competitors and players. only then did it release the zenmuse z15 in 2012, and later launched the world's first consumer-grade aerial photography drone - dji's four-rotor all-in-one phantom 1.

obviously, the article is a bit too dramatic. the two-year entrepreneurial journey of dji is “interpreted” as a person’s “gold finger”. this narrative also appears in many other versions. this not only oversimplifies the entrepreneurial process of escaping death, but also invisibly allows the “gold content” of some personal titles and labels to be constantly hyped up by marketing, as if dji and similar successful models can really be “mass-hatched”.

i am not sure what role zhu xiaorui played in the companies she later incubated and currently holds. in the interview with china entrepreneur, zhu xiaorui described her work at dji as a mentor. but as the former employees who experienced the start-up process of dji said, the current stories about the start-up of dji are a bit "mentor-oriented". as far as i know, the start-up process of dji was very difficult and was explored step by step. this process cannot rely on so-called "teaching" and "guidance".

why has self-marketing become a business with the support of big companies?

perhaps after so many years, zhu xiaorui's account of that year has some personal interpretation and perspective. but she did witness the founding of dji and provided help at the time, which is worthy of respect. looking at the industry, many completely "empty" self-packagings are more worthy of reflection.

a few years ago, a widely circulated joke in the investment industry was that for a period of time, entrepreneurs from alibaba often claimed that they were the person in charge of a certain business. some investors even said that they had met at least ten persons in charge of the juhuasuan business. however, if you dig deeper, some people were only responsible for a certain function of the product, and some people only assumed the responsibilities of the person in charge for a period of time in the operation.

in 2018, chen benfeng, the founder of a domestic browser called redcore, also exaggerated his work experience at microsoft and iflytek. he described the basic position of a test engineer as a core r&d engineer and even won the microsoft annual contribution award. he also exaggerated his internship experience at iflytek to a founding team member. as a result, the lie was exposed by the media and the industry, and even the product was not independently developed.

after 2010, especially with the wave of entrepreneurship in mobile internet, o2o, and new energy vehicles, it is more common to beautify academic qualifications, work experience, and work achievements. there have even been cases of entrepreneurs deceiving investors, investors deceiving gps, and company co-founders deceiving each other.

in this impetuous capital and public opinion environment, companies that truly invest in scientific research and innovation and are not keen on hype and speaking out often become victims. for example, in the huawei and chen chunhua incident, huawei was unable to bear the harassment and finally issued a fierce statement: "huawei has no relationship with professor chen chunhua, huawei does not understand her, and she cannot understand huawei."

with dji's leading position in the global drone market and its achievements in technological breakthroughs and product innovation, telling dji's entrepreneurial stories and experiences has become a business. this is similar to what happened to huawei in the chen chunhua incident, either using real or fake stories to earn traffic, and eventually earning revenue by selling courses and books, or using the "self-hatched" big company name card to charge forward on the road to more investments and ipos.

stills from the movie "the social network"

dji's low profile has also objectively contributed to the spread of false information. the company rarely accepts interviews to tell the company's story, and almost no real co-founders or "executives" come out to tell chicken soup stories. more people can only understand this company through its products and technology.

whether it is false information on social networks or the role of beautifying oneself in entrepreneurship, the reason is nothing more than profit, even huge profits. and after the short-term social dividends obtained? those who are "behind" always have to stand "in front".

back to the movie "the social network" mentioned at the beginning, those who co-founded facebook with zuckerberg eventually left the company, but they did not spend the rest of their lives indulging in the halo of facebook. they started new careers in venture capital, virtual currency and other industries.