Qi Junyuan, the founder of Teambition, is also a successful entrepreneur. The predecessor of Teambition was actually a collaboration tool he made when he founded the last project. In 2013, the project was announced as a failure, and this collaboration tool was fortunately retained and developed and grown. It was acquired by Alibaba on March 26, 2019. In his eyes, nothing has been particularly difficult in the past six years. Whether it is self-learning programming or running customers from province to province, he thinks this is what entrepreneurs should face. After being acquired, Teambition also experienced some internal adjustments and was silent for a period of time. This conversation took place in the 7th month after the acquisition. This is the first time that Qi Junyuan spoke in an exclusive media interview in recent months. The mental journey at the beginning of the business.
Teambition is an accident. Entrepreneurship has always persisted.
InfoQ: You were very interested in entrepreneurship when you were a freshman. What is the reason? ? Or, who influenced you during your growth?
齐俊元： I think this process is a coincidence, because my understanding of entrepreneurship at that time is very different from today.
When I was in my third year of high school, I took the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Autonomous Enrollment Examination. Because of the high written test scores, I hope I can choose the major I want to go to. In the past, my blind selection must also be biology, because I participated in a lot of biology science and technology innovation competitions in middle school. I was passionate about biology, but two things changed my mind.
The first thing happened when I went to Singapore to participate in the International Science Challenge. At that time, my project had won many awards in China, and the evaluation was also very good. The core is to reduce the extraction of DNA fragments in combination with specific scenarios. Cost and time, but a professor in Singapore told me that with advanced equipment, a simpler, labor-saving and time-saving method can already be realized. This incident has a great impact on me, because they have better tools, so it is easier to succeed than us.
The second thing is that I was very interested in Silicon Valley at the time. I usually read many related articles. One of the stories is that Xerox invented the mouse and GUI (graphical user interface, GUI), Apple model I used it in the past and was very successful. I thought that if a company as successful as "Xerox" can be made and a laboratory supported by this company, then this laboratory will definitely be one of the best in the world. So, I want to start a business and become a company.
Later, I gradually discovered that an enterprise is actually an organizational form that better balances the interests of shareholders, employee development and founders’ dreams, so it is a more efficient organizational form that can support a group of people. create. A more classic example is that Elon Musk used the form of enterprise management to build SpaceX, which actually promoted the progress of aviation more effectively than more research institutions. This is my current understanding of entrepreneurship. In fact, we are using this organizational model of enterprise to achieve our goals.
InfoQ: Why didn't you choose your favorite field of bioscience when you started your business?
齐俊元： I have considered it, so I made a health file. It was a company established in my junior year. The original form of the Teambition product was a tool we were using at that time, but it didn’t. Considering to commercialize it, but I believe it will be a tool everyone needs. Our thinking at the time was that work may not be liked by everyone, but if the tedious things in the work are removed, the work itself is a creative process, which is very hilarious. Therefore, we think everyone should have such a tool.
In 2013, the health records project was stopped, and it was not ended intentionally, because people left and customers were not using it, so it ended slowly. After stopping, we put all our energy on Teambition and began to seriously consider futureHow to grow.
I was quite impressed that in the two weeks since Teambition went online, Jiaotong University, including the Zizhu Park next to it, registered more than 200 teams, because Teambition was not a company at the time, but a team concept. More than 200 teams completed registration in two weeks, which impressed me deeply.
InfoQ: Are these registered users running down by yourself?
齐俊元： A teacher in our school gave a lot of support. He said he liked our things, so he organized a group for us, borrowed the classroom, and let us do the press conference , The people who came to attend (the press conference) may have told others around them when they went back. Slowly, the number of registered people started to increase, so we were quite excited.
InfoQ: When you were in your senior year, your classmates should be busy with postgraduate entrance examinations and job hunting. Are you still doing this, haven’t you been anxious?
齐俊元: No, I am very committed. But at that time, one of the two co-founders went to Beijing and the other went to graduate school. I still have feelings about these, so it didn't affect me. At that time, there were some people who were very helpful to my condition. One was an engineer who was working on a health record. He neither asked which project was more important to the company, nor did he ask what he wanted to do, but he fully supported my decision; The second is my university roommate. He didn't go out to find a job at the time. He thought what I did was interesting and he came to help me. Therefore, the three of us are the early co-founders of Teambition.
InfoQ: On the road of entrepreneurship, the model is common, there are many demands, and there are customers. Does it mean that commercialization will be smooth?
齐俊元: will not. Because a good strategy must be matched with good execution. Does the organization have enough willingness to implement this strategy, does it have enough capacity to support this strategy, does it have a good enough business model to ensure the efficiency of this strategy, and then allow customers to get better than those in the market (other manufacturers ) A more satisfactory result is the key to commercialization. Strategy alone is useless.
InfoQ: Many domestic SaaS companies will use Salesforce as the benchmark. Have you ever had this idea in the process of doing Teambition?
齐俊元： I can learn, but there is no comparison. Because I think there are about four stages in enterprise services: the first stage is Functional, which is to solve problems; the second stage is called Easy to Use, which not only solves problems, but also allows more people to use it to solve problems ; The third stage is Automation, the machine helps to complete many things; the fourth stage is Intelligence or AR Power, the machine not only completes many things automatically, but also can actively complete some things.
I think Salesforce represents the ultimate in Functional. As a customer life cycle software, from the beginning, only Sales Cloud, later Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and other functions are gradually complete. At the same time, Salesforce has also done a lot of work to meet the customization needs of enterprises. This is a very extreme Functional, but I think it is not as good as the easy to use stage, and it is not a tool that is easy to use for sales or corporate customers. Instead, a new generation of collaborative office software, such as Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox did it.
InfoQ: Then at which stage did you put Teambition?
齐俊元： I think Teambition is between Functional and Easy to Use. Teambition's Easy to Use is very good when solving simple problems, but in fact Functional is not that strong. Going back to make up for the Functional problem, Easy to Use has been affected a bit, so I think Teambition is still working hard to become the second generation of enterprise software in my eyes.
InfoQ: Specialization comes from the main R&D group. Have you considered the difference between the Internet and traditional company R&D groups?
齐俊元： The Internet industry is actually relatively small. There are not many Internet practitioners, and there are few companies. However, there are more traditional enterprises. Financial companies often have a large number of R&D personnel and business The volume is also relatively large, and may also employ a large number of software outsourcing companies or software service companies. We originally thought that everyone would develop like Internet developers and have a keen sense of emerging technologies, but later discovered that this is not the case. For example, we think that agile R&D must go online quickly, but in fact, the stability requirements of certain industries may be more suitable for using a methodology such as CMMI. So after reaching a certain level, we found that we must break the inherent cognition, expand our horizons, and learn more software development methods, understand more specific scenarios, and make tools more universal.
InfoQ: Do you differentiate between different groups of people?
齐俊元: Yes. But one thing better is that we thought of this at the beginning of the business, so we have already thought about this in product architecture design. Even if we serve companies of different sizes and people with different needs, the existing architecture does not require Make too many changes. We spent a lot of time on this matter, and finally came to the following two conclusions:
First, we have the ability to carry the size of the collaborative crowd, and segment the population of different sizes to adapt to more scenarios. . For example, a large company may have millions of employees, and we can divide them into different units for collaboration.
Second, let different collaboration units support different needs with a unified architecture. The best example is the iPhone. Each application solves a specific problem, and these applications exist in the application center. Our logic is to provide everyone with the ability to expand the application in the collaboration unit, that is, when you have more needs, you can create a new application. Currently, there are thirty or forty optional applications on Teambition, which can form templates for hundreds of scenarios, and will continue to optimize and iterate in the future.
InfoQ: Do you think the R&D crowd is more picky about technology and products?
齐俊元： I think this group of people feel a bit like the aboriginals of the digital world. These people are not sent to the digital world, but are here and are helping others to shape the digital world. . We see that many R&D engineers have made their own plug-ins based on Teambition. Some Internet companies also often put forward various demands for us, which places very high demands on us. When we can do this well, it will be easier for us to do other industries.
first talked about financing, and was later acquired
InfoQ: At the beginning of the business, have you ever thought about making the company bigger and stronger or being acquired?
齐俊元：Yes, I always take the company as a product or work to shape, so I care about its values, culture, etc., anyway, I will use the largest investment in the construction within my ability It, including Teambition, has always used the logic of one, three, and five to design its development strategy. For example, it will do three things this year. The first will drive the company’s growth, and the second will ensure growth in three years. The third thing is to form our growth and barriers in five years.
At that timeWhen I talked about cooperation with Ali, I talked about investment, but later I talked about acquisitions. A big reason is that I feel that today's social and economic development has reached an inflection point. There are many problems that need to be solved. Digitalization is very important among them. Supporting factors, I very much hope that I can answer this question and speed up the whole process.
In fact, as a single startup company, Teambition has only solved a small part of the problem. I hope to solve this problem in an all-round way. Our team already has ideas and architecture. If we can work with Alibaba, we can definitely accelerate the whole During the process of digital transformation, it was based on such a purpose that the conclusion of the acquisition was finally made. This was also a decision to put the importance of the business above the company’s shaping, and the whole process was not so tangled.
InfoQ: How long did you talk to Ali at that time?
齐俊元： I have two or three months in my mind, from September 2018 to almost the end of the year.
InfoQ: After the acquisition, everyone is actually quite concerned about Teambition's development plan.
齐俊元：Teambition is currently in the R&D efficiency department of Alibaba Cloud. Teambition was originally a general-purpose collaborative office platform. Later, it gradually penetrated into vertical industries in order to be more professional. Because we found in the process of commercialization that if we want to give the company enough value, it is best to solve some more practical Professional issues, this was our insight at the time. Many of our competitors are actually more willing to industrialize and package products into industry solutions. If you want to do a very good product in a single industry, I think there are two biggest bottlenecks:
First, the lack of knowledge interaction between industries. Today, we will actually find out why so many industries want to learn something about the Internet, and the Internet people have discovered that you are really good, and I have to learn from you. Today, there are actually many ways and knowledge to interact between industries. Our digital tools are essentially turning good knowledge into tools that can be used on a larger scale for everyone to use, so we should first have this perspective.
Second, I think it is very important, because many times everyone will have a misunderstanding, that is, to do a one-stop solution after industrialization. In fact, in many one-stop solutions, there are so many modules that do not need to be rebuilt at all. Once such positioning is established, it will be very troublesome. So I am very scared when I see one-stop writing, which means that there are many things in it that have not been carefully considered, basically to cater to customer needs.
So, how to understand specialization? Some specific groups of people, such as designers or engineers, may have some professional collaboration needs. At the level of specialization, Teambition first recruited R&D personnel for two reasons: First, R&D is relatively high in digitalization and easy to accept new things; second, R&D people often play the role of propaganda of new technologies and tools. For example, agile development involves not only R&D personnel, but also product managers, testing, operation and maintenance and many other roles. R&D personnel can help us cover the entire enterprise in a faster and more standardized way. Facts have proved that this approach is correct.
After Teambition entered Alibaba Cloud, it began to integrate R&D and performance, and quickly commercialized the tool chain for R&D professional projects, making the strategy evolution faster. In the first six months, we spent the most time doing code hosting product Teambition Codeup (Xingyun) and assembly line product Teambition Flow (flying flow). Among them, many colleagues from the R&D efficiency department participated. Teambition is very good at synergy and The understanding, co-creation and cold start of high-quality products are all very fast. Taking Codeup as an example, companies that can now co-create more than half the next week will choose to stay and use it actively.
With these, Teambition has formed its own product matrix, facing general needs horizontally, represented by Teambition, is a collaborative office software that everyone can use; verticalThoughts can solve the needs of members of different roles in the team, such as product managers to write PRDs, engineers to write technical documents, etc. This will allow more people to start digital office and begin to know the feeling of online collaborative office. On top of this, we also have professional software.
Currently, we are doing two core things: one is to build an open platform, and to work with Ali internal and external partners to make more areas of collaborative office products; the other is to lower the barriers to use so that more people can start Digital collaborative office.
I don’t think programming is difficult, I’m so happy.
InfoQ: I remember that you didn’t learn programming at an undergraduate level. When you founded Teambition, you learned programming specifically. Did you think this was a big deal at that time? difficult?
齐俊元: No, but I am hi. I think the passion drive works better than everything else. If I want to do something by myself, it is actually very easy. I think I learn programming very fast, and I didn't feel difficult at the time.
I remember that when I was learning the front-end, the phased change was that the first step was to use jQuery, and from jQuery to BackBone, I read all the source code of BackBone, but I didn’t fully understand it, I really understood it. After that, I felt suddenly clear. Later, from BackBone to node.js, but node.js has no ability to read source code. As for the back-end, I started with Python because Python is non-asynchronous programming and JS is asynchronous programming. So I was shocked after carefully comparing the principles of node.js with Python. I also read socket.io at that time. Source code. In short, each one quickly complemented my own understanding of software architecture and programming, and the whole process took place between 3 to 6 months.
I continued to code for two or three years. After paying attention to the mobile terminal, I went to learn iOS and Android. When the first version of Teambition came out, I wrote 220,000 lines of code alone and deleted 300,000 lines of code.
I don’t remember the difficulties very much, I’m very lucky
InfoQ: Have you experienced the period of mass entrepreneurship and innovation? How do you feel?
齐俊元： I should be that group of entrepreneurs. I was in Shanghai at the time, so I felt that it was not as strong as you (Beijing). After Teambition was commercialized for a while, I went to Beijing to explore the market. At that time, I stayed in Beijing for about three or four months and lived in 798. At that time, I felt Beijing It's very lively, everyone is starting a business, everyone has an idea. I was very happy and made many friends. After thinking about it carefully, I think that maybe this probability has not changed, but that this group of people happened to get together at that time.
InfoQ: What is the probability?
齐俊元： The probability of successful entrepreneurship itself has not changed, but it just happened to have such an atmosphere at that time, so people who want to start a business get together and it will feel particularly lively. From the data point of view, it is true that there are fewer and fewer cases invested by VCs. There may be this trend (many people fail to start their own businesses). I am not an expert in this area and have not studied it carefully. But I know that some of the friends I knew at the time are still starting businesses today. They may have changed projects, but they have indeed grown.
InfoQ: Since starting a business for such a long time, when is it relatively difficult?
齐俊元： My characteristic is that I don’t care much about these things and don’t remember the difficulties. This is originally an entrepreneurship, so it will definitely be difficult. To be honest, it’s a good time for Teambition to enter the market, because before that, Atlassian’s JIRA and other software were the most used software. These softwares may have survived in the market for decades, and these vendors themselves may stillIn the difficult transition period, because a group of younger generations born in the 90s have entered the work scene, they will definitely find traditional office tools a bit difficult to use compared to those consumer apps that have been used to having a very good experience. We are lucky to catch up with this vent.
InfoQ: Do you think you are a lucky person on the road to entrepreneurship?
Qi Junyuan: sure. Everyone gave me great tolerance and opportunities. I am very grateful to the angel investors of Gobi Ventures. They were able to invest in me when I was a junior. Although I can't remember the details now, I clearly remember that I invested more money than I thought I needed. In fact, without this extra money, I might not be so comfortable later. I believe they knew what stage I was at, but they were still willing to invest in me. I felt very lucky.
I don’t like being labeled, it's just a symbol
InfoQ: Because you are very young, many people will label you, such as a post-90s entrepreneur.
齐俊元： I especially dislike it when I hear about it after 90. My core view is that each generation is not that different. The similarity between the post-80s and post-90s entrepreneurs may be much higher than the similarity between the post-90s. Moreover, this label is actually more of a tokenization.
If I were to evaluate myself, I would feel that I am a person with a sense of purpose, clean and transparent. This is also the corporate culture of our company. In everything I do, I hope that the information is shared by others, not deliberately hidden for some purpose.
My goal is to upgrade in stages, and if the stage goal does not change, I am actually very anxious. Because when I grow up, I will find that the number of problems I can see is strongly related to a person's vision. When I was in school, I thought it was a big deal, but later I discovered that it was actually very easy to solve. I will keep asking myself to have a broader vision to understand what problems we are trying to solve.
is followed by hard work. Many questions are not qualified for us to answer. Only by working hard to master the core technology or have enough influence can we have a deep understanding of some things. So, I think it's constantly moving forward.
Interview guest:
Qi Junyuan, founder and CEO of Teambition, outstanding graduate of Shanghai Jiaotong University, member of Sino-European Entrepreneurship Camp, was selected as the 2015 Forbes "Asian 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30" The list and the "Fast Company" 2017 China Business Most Creative Figure.
Teambition, founded by Qi Junyuan when he was studying at Shanghai Jiaotong University, is the creator of domestic team collaboration tools and is loved by more than 7 million users. Prior to this, he had outstanding achievements in the fields of youth science and technology innovation, environmental protection, Model United Nations, and robot production. He is an energetic entrepreneur who is committed to creating outstanding products and pursuing the ultimate in interactive design and user experience. He is willing to share his experience in technology and design for people in major universities and entrepreneurial parks across the country.
