Rebirth of the Wild Age

In another time and space, Baidu's first all-hands meeting was held in the guest room of Peking University Resources Hotel. The company has only 7 employees, namely Li Yanhong, Xu Yong, Liu Jianguo, Guo Dan, Lei Ming, Wang Xiao, and Cui Shanshan, known as the "Baidu Seven Swordsmen".

Because the hotel room is too small, everyone can only sit on the bed and have a meeting, which is even more popular.

But ten years later, only Li Yanhong was left of the "Seven Musketeers", and all the other six left.

Unfortunately, because Sogou was founded too early, none of these "Seven Musketeers" were recruited. Because everyone except Liu Jianguo and Xu Yong were in their freshman year, sophomore year, or graduate school one or two, Song Weiyang couldn’t send people to the school to stare at any time—in fact, he didn’t remember the alma mater of these people. .

Song Weiyang wanted to hire Liu Jianguo, Baidu's chief technology officer, and knew that he was a teacher at Peking University. Unfortunately, when Sogou was founded, Liu Jianguo had just gone to the United States to be a visiting scholar, and he had been there for two years, and was pulled into Baidu by Li Yanhong when he returned to China.

This is not a coincidence, but Li Yanhong gave a lecture on search engines at Tsinghua University before he resigned and started his business. As the developer of China's first large-scale Chinese and English search engine "Skynet", Liu Jianguo was invited by Li Yanhong to attend the lecture. Although it did not finally take place, the two sides have established preliminary contacts.

The first time Li Yanhong decided to found Baidu, he thought of Liu Jianguo. The two sides discussed through e-mail for several months. Therefore, Liu Jianguo was the "first swordsman" Li Yanhong personally recruited, and Liu Jianguo easily recruited his student Lei Ming as the "second swordsman".

After Lei Ming joined Baidu, he was not only responsible for technology, but also served as Li Yanhong's assistant to the president. This man is the chairman of the Student Union of the Computer Department of Peking University, a core member of the National 973 "Skynet" project, and serves as the head of the indexing and retrieval group of "Skynet". He gave up the opportunity of a full scholarship at seven foreign universities to join Baidu, resolutely followed Liu Jianguo to join Baidu, and is also the leader of the technical research team of Baidu's "Lightning Project".

We can imagine the situation of Lei Ming, assistant to Baidu's president, leader of the "Lightning Project" technical research team, and engaged in technology and administration. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was the first person under Li Yanhong.

A few months after the completion of the "Lightning Project", Lei Ming was the first to be kicked out of Baidu. In Li Yanhong's original words: "The company has grown in size, and some technical personnel have become impetuous, uneasy to engage in technology, and have begun to feel about management work. Interest." A few years later, when Li Yanhong talked to reporters about the "Lightning Project", he said nothing about Lei Ming's contribution.

As for Xu Yong, that was Li Yanhong’s entrepreneurial partner and was the second to be kicked out. This man is even worse. When Baidu was founded, he held 25% of the shares and was responsible for finding the market to attract customers. As a result, he resigned before Baidu's IPO, which was only one step away from the "victory of the revolution."

From the experience of these people, we know Li Yanhong's management style. It is absolutely about people making the best use of them, so that employees can reach their full potential, but they must be thrown away after they are used up. Whoever threatens the most is to leave.

This will make it easier to understand why everyone says Zhang Chaoyang is a "good person", because Zhang Chaoyang never takes the initiative to let anyone go. Zhang Chaoyang made the decision by himself, and delegated only half of the power. Many good suggestions could not be listened to. In the end, even cross-border fashion and entertainment circles, employees couldn't stand the choice to leave.

None of the "Baidu Seven Swordsmen" joined Sogou, but only Liu Jianguo and Lei Ming, which made Song Weiyang feel sorry, because they are truly cutting-edge technical talents in search engines. As for the other "five swordsmen", it doesn't matter. Li Yanhong is the boss and Xu Yong is a partner. Neither of them can be recruited. The other three are ordinary school students. Their reputations depend on their status as veterans. Their abilities are not against the sky, and they are not as good as many of Sogou's current executives.

Yu Jun, the "father of Tieba", currently works at Sogou, and he came to apply for the job himself. Song Weiyang didn't know where to find him.

This man graduated from the Department of Chemistry in Tongji. When Sogou was founded, Yu Jun was importing in a state-owned enterprise, and then selling imported chemical raw materials and customs declaration in a private enterprise. This was incomparable with search engines. In 2000, Yu Jun moved to an Internet company to collect and edit data on analytical instruments. At this time, he finally came into contact with search engines and became very interested in it. He even changed his screen name to "Search Engine 9238".

Yu Jun moved to a small company again and wanted to apply for a search engine product manager, but was sent to do database planning.

Depressed, Yu Jun sent a cover letter to more than 10 Internet companies, and spread the cover letter on the Internet: “I want to step into the search engine industry for a long time, but I have no choice but to invest in it, so I have this article. If there is a company that wants to do the best Chinese search, I sincerely beg for a chance to participate. I love searching and become obsessed. As long as I do search, I don’t care about the location (no matter how high or low, high or low, first-line and second-line). , It’s only relevant to search), pay no attention to salary (maintaining personal local food, clothing, housing and transportation is the bottom line), no attention to work intensity (anyway, I am used to the 14-hour work day)."

His personal resume is: "Search Engine 9238 (Internet name), male, 26 years old, Sheng Hai, five-year study in the Department of Chemistry of Tongji University, reading many books, and traveling more."

At that time, Sogou established the Shenghai branch, and Yu Jun was recruited as a small employee by mistake, participating in the "Sogou Encyclopedia" project, responsible for the editing and review of encyclopedia entries.

When everyone was busy copying and pasting "Encyclopedia", Yu Jun first proposed that the "star" category should be added, and he nominated himself as one of the product managers of Sogou Encyclopedia, and was responsible for finding celebrities from all walks of life to make entries. It took him half a year, under the name of Sogou’s product manager, to get in touch with hundreds of celebrities in China and obtain a large number of celebrities’ first-hand information. By the way, he earned the only commercial income for Sogou. Ten thousand yuan).

Is always shining gold.

Without Song Weiyang's knowledge, Yu Jun was transferred to the capital headquarters to serve as a product planner for the company's "Internet Product Department". As soon as he submitted a proposal for the development of "Sogou MP3", "Baidu MP3" went online suddenly, and Yu Jun was immediately appointed as the deputy leader of the "Sogou MP3" project planning team.

Not long ago, Yu Jun took out the "Sogou Tieba" product planning book, but it did not attract anyone's attention. Because Sogou already has a blog, Tieba is similar to BBS and blogs, and it seems to be something with no future.

Yu Jun jumped several levels directly and sent the planning book to Ding Ming's e-mail address.

Ding Ming felt a little bit interesting, but he didn't reply immediately, and when he was eating and chatting, he mentioned it casually to Song Weiyang. Song Weiyang learned that the "Father of Baidu Tieba" had joined Sogou a long time ago, and the employees from the bottom got up step by step, and now they even put forward the "Sogou Tieba" plan.

Song Weiyang immediately asked Ding Ming to contact Li Mingyuan, call Li Mingyuan to be Yu Jun as his deputy, and let the two of them work together like Yuan Shikong.

Who is Yu Jun?

When he left Baidu that year, someone said directly that "Li Yanhong lost half of Baidu."

Before Song Weiyang left Beijing, he took the initiative to call Yu Jun to eat, and he had family meals in the courtyard.

"Chairman!" Yu Jun looked particularly excited. He never dreamed that he was just a small employee and could be summoned by Song Weiyang alone.

"Sit down." Song Weiyang smiled.

"Thank you, Chairman," Yu Jun just sat down and brought a cup of tea in deep thought. He quickly got up and said, "Thank you!"

Song Weiyang asked: "How long have you been in Sogou?"

Yu Jun said: "It's exactly three years after two months."

"I heard that you have been sleeping in the company, is your body eaten up?" Song Weiyang asked warmly.

"It's okay, anyway, I haven't had a girlfriend. It's convenient to live in the company and commute to get off work." Yu Jun smiled.

I am not afraid that someone is a genius, I am afraid that a genius will work harder than you.

Yu Jun is a hardworking genius. He is not only as simple as sleeping in the company, but also working more than ten hours a day. He voluntarily asked for overtime, often worked until midnight, then went straight into his sleeping bag to rest, washed and ate breakfast the next day, and worked with other employees.

What kind of blessing is 996?

Yu Jun’s blessing is to work more than 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It has been two years since he was transferred to the headquarters, and he hasn't rented a house in the capital. It is really the company as his home, and even the rent of the house is saved. And he still doesn't find it hard, because doing search engine related work is his dream for three years, and being able to work at Sogou is a blessing.

Song Weiyang said: "The body is the capital of the revolution. I will give you a day off and go to the hospital for a full-body examination. I will ask you to put a bed in the company. You can rest whenever you are tired. You will work every day in the future. Do not exceed 12 hours."

"No need, my body is great." Yu Jun was a little moved.

Song Weiyang asked again: "Why would you want to post?"

Yu Jun replied: “I planned the MP3 project some time ago. In order to find out the preferences of netizens, I checked the search logs of the company’s backend. I found that many people were searching for the same keywords, and these people have the same hobbies. So I just thought, why not bring these people with common interests together? Chairman, you said that now is the era of web2.0, everyone is the creator of Internet content. If you put people with common interests together to communicate , This can create more information that is not available on the web. In the long run, fans of common interests can form a fixed circle, **** to attract more people, and it can also facilitate the information query of ordinary netizens, and the traffic will become very scary. . This is also a manifestation of web2.0."

"A great idea," Song Weiyang praised, and then asked, "How are you going to post it?"

Yu Jun said: "The first thing is to stay close to users. Users are the root of the post. We must be wary of excessive commercialization. If the content in a post is all advertisements for selling products, then the post is dead and loses its worth. Vitality."

Song Weiyang couldn't help laughing. He remembered the "Twelve Baidu Product Managers" left by Yu Jun in his previous life: 1. The product manager is the user first; 2. Look at the problem from the user's point of view... 6. Decide what not to do. It is often more important than deciding what to do; 7. It is difficult for users to be educated. It is necessary to cater to users instead of changing users... 12. Don’t give users what they don’t want. Anything that is useless is a kind of harm to users. .

The result is particularly ironic. After Yu Jun, Baidu's first product manager, left, those who succeeded Baidu product managers violated all of these 12 items, and no one was left!

Song Weiyang asked again: "If you were asked to be the director of the company's Internet product department, what would you do?"

Yu Jun said: "Search engines are the core of the company~www.readwn.com~ All products must be built around this core. In this way, search engines can promote product prosperity, and product prosperity can also contribute to the search business. Continuously launching new products and continuously consolidating the influence of search engines can achieve the company's long-term and healthy development."

Song Weiyang continued to ask: "Now Sogou has decided to post it. If you are in charge of the post project, what will you do?"

"The first thing is to build the project team," Yu Jun said, "I need to personally select people. In addition to the technical staff, other members must have sufficient familiarity and analytical skills with the project. I don't look at qualifications and education. Just looking at the fit with the project, I will ask people from the blog, and I want to recruit staff from the BBS station outside."

"Haha, I have already hired a BBS station clerk for you." Song Weiyang couldn't help being amused.

People like Yu Jun are half-way renunciations. They have been dealing with chemistry for more than 20 years, and they don't pay too much attention to technology when doing projects. It was also because of this that he recruited Li Mingyuan, who was still in his junior year, to Baidu when he was working on the post bar. As a result, he recruited a "prince" for Baidu and recruited one of Baidu's youngest vice presidents.

"Go into the house and eat," Song Weiyang said, standing up, "When you post your results, you will be promoted to deputy director of the'Internet Products Department'. This is what you deserve, not an employee who lives in the company. It's easy to find, you really made the company your home."