Huang Zheng Leaves Office: A Pilgrim To Science And Technology

I look back on the past,

I can only see the sadness and joy of its tortuous irrigation,

All disappeared in an ancient desert.

That's what I've done,

But completed the ordinary life.

——Meditation by Mu Dan, a poet of Southwest Associated University

One summer night, when Huang Zheng was walking, he looked up and saw the stars in the sky. He suddenly remembered Vincent Van Gogh's words, "I don't know what is certain in the world, but I only know that as soon as I see the stars, I will begin to dream."

When the inspiration flashed, Huang Zheng at that time had not found the direction. Until 2020, he and the founding team of pinduoduo jointly donated to establish the charitable public welfare fund, named "Fanxing public welfare fund". On the evening of the 17th, Huang Zheng, the founder of pinduoduo, announced his resignation as chairman of pinduoduo and transferred his voting rights to the board of directors. At the same time, he promised that his shares would continue to be locked up and not sold for the next three years.

The news shocked the outside world. Six years ago, Huang Zheng founded pinduoduo. Three years later, he was listed on Nasdaq, with a market value of over 100 billion US dollars. Just as he announced his resignation, pinduoduo released financial reports for the fourth quarter and the whole year of 2020: by the end of 2020, the number of active buyers of pinduoduo had reached 788.4 million, surpassing Alibaba to become the largest e-commerce platform for Chinese users.

However, Huang Zheng seems to have no attachment to wealth and fame. It may be the most inspirational story in the history of capital market that the torrent retreats bravely to seek the inner ideal.

Engage in Science

Pinduoduo's first time in the spotlight needs to go back three years.

On July 26, 2018, Shanghai was shrouded in thunderstorms. At 4:30 p.m., it's only five hours before pinduoduo goes public. Huang Zheng, CEO of pinduoduo, did not appear in New York. In his office on the 28th floor of Shanghai's jinhongqiao center, Huang Zheng was interviewed by three rounds of media, even though his voice was a little hoarse.

At 9:30 p.m., pinduoduo landed on Nasdaq, stock code: PDD, with an offering price of $19, and a total market value of $24 billion. Huang Zheng chose Shanghai, where the company is located, to let consumers on the platform and New York "ring the bell at the same time.". The opening price of pinduoduo was 26.5 US dollars on the first day of listing, which was 39.5% higher than the issuance price.

Under the absolute leading position of Alibaba and Jingdong, the story of pinduoduo rising in three years to the capital market is not new. However, from the data disclosed, it has become the third pole of domestic e-commerce.

Pinduoduo's listing has broken the fastest listing record of Chinese Internet companies. It took only 2 years and 11 months to go online on NASDAQ in September 2015. However, the new e-commerce era is only the beginning, leaving pinduoduo with a series of problems, including platform governance, logistics system, service experience, ecological construction and so on.

However, Huang Zheng in more than three years, let all this become possible. From the number of users, pinduoduo has surpassed Taobao. And a few years ago, Alibaba's position in the field of e-commerce can be said to be no one shaken.

"Pinduoduo is still a three-year-old boy, and he dare not say that he has succeeded. I am very grateful to the predecessors of the Internet. Pinduoduo just planted a new crop in the fertile soil of e-commerce. " When Huang Zheng was listed in the stock market, he admitted in an interview with the 21st century economic reporter that he would surely experience all the hardships Taobao has experienced.

Fortunately, relying on the reconstruction of the supply chain and the deep cultivation of the sinking crowd, Huang Zheng came out of this smoke filled battlefield. In his letter to shareholders, Huang Zheng turned his eyes to ten years later. He believes that with the increasingly fierce and even alienated competition in the industry, the traditional competition with scale and efficiency as the main orientation has its inevitable problems. We must take action on the lower level and fundamental problems and find the answer on the core technology and its basic theory.

In his letter to shareholders, he gave an example of the scientific research fields he would devote himself to for a long time after he resigned as chairman of the board. For example, through the control of agricultural product planting process, explore the reliable and effective control of the potential harmful heavy metal content of potato, sweet potato, tomato, etc., at the same time, the possible and beneficial trace elements can be controlled and standardized.

"You can't be a scientist, but you may have the opportunity to be an assistant to a future scientist. That's also a very happy thing." Huang Zheng said.

Care about food and vegetables

Feed horses, chop firewood, travel around the world

From tomorrow on, care about food and vegetables

I have a house, facing the sea, spring flowers

This is not only the intention in Haizi's poems, but also the problem that Huang Zheng, who is less than 41 years old, is thinking about. Nobody knows whether pinduoduo has become his ideal company? When a lot of people are still looking forward to the peak of pinduoduo's market value, he is just brushing his clothes.

In fact, he resigned as CEO in July last year, hoping to go more ways, read more books, get rid of the commercial competition dominated by efficiency and scale, and care about food and vegetables as much as possible. Huang Zheng and pinduoduo's founding team donated shares to establish Fanxing charity fund in accordance with the IPO commitment. Together with the team, they donated 113548920 common shares of pinduoduo listed company (about 2.37% of the total shares of the company), and the fund is an irreversible charitable fund managed by an independent client to ensure that the charitable fund is fully used for public welfare purposes.

Huang Zheng also expressed his views on the outgoing CEO and the company's adjustment in his letter. Huang Zheng hopes that through the adjustment of the company structure, more management work and responsibilities can be handed over to younger colleagues, so that the team can speed up the growth and make pinduoduo a better and stronger company full of entrepreneurial vitality.

"Pinduoduo carries unique social values and is a public institution. It is not a tool to show individual ability, nor should it have too much personal color. We will live up to our promise, strive to improve its organizational structure and culture, and let pinduoduo continue to evolve in accordance with its own unique destiny. " Huang Zheng said.

Indeed, pinduoduo, as a rising star in the e-commerce industry, it is not easy to break into the leading circle of the industry in a short period of time. One of the reasons why pinduoduo has made such achievements is the rejuvenation and collectivization of a dynamic team. Huang Zheng's resignation does not mean the stagnation of pinduoduo's development, but a new beginning.

As Qing Yuan Weixin, a Zen master of the Tang Dynasty, said, "when the old monk did not participate in Zen 30 years ago, he saw that mountains were mountains and water was water. But when he saw knowledge, there was a man who came in and saw that the mountain was not a mountain, and that the water was not water. Now I have a rest place. I can see that the mountain is the mountain and the water is the water. "

Is it so difficult to understand Tao? It seems not difficult, but few people have seen through it since ancient times. Most people still stay at the first level, only to understand life by intuitive feelings. After experiencing the ups and downs of the wind and waves, the world has been surging through. Looking back, we can still "see the mountain or the mountain" before we can reach the third level.

Also on March 17, the low-key Fanxing public welfare foundation signed a donation agreement with the education foundation of Zhejiang University to set up a science fund to support Zhejiang University in carrying out basic research and frontier exploration in the fields of biology, medical treatment, agriculture, food and so on.

As the first phase of funding, Fanxing public welfare fund will donate US $100 million in the next three to five years for the scientific research projects of "computing + biomedicine", "computing + agricultural food" and "advanced computing". The first batch of projects include the research of super large scale real-time graph reasoning machine, the closed-loop regulation of major brain cognitive impairment, the research of tumor immune new antigen and the artificial cell culture Fish research, etc.

There is no doubt that after leaving office, Huang Zheng will have more possibilities of "life philosophers", and will devote more energy to pursuing the value of long-term doctrine, returning to the most authentic thinking of life, and how to take action and find answers to the most fundamental problems. It can be predicted that Huang Zheng is still full of curiosity about agricultural science and technology, protein and life science.

Stars and the sea

Great internet entrepreneurs have the exploration of "escaping" reality, pursuing the ultimate human dream and going to the "star sea". So far, the Gates Foundation has committed $1.75 billion to fight the new outbreak. In February 2021, the $100 million xprize carbon capture competition sponsored by musk and musk foundation was established immediately.

At the same time, the world's richest entrepreneur is about to resign as CEO of his own business. On February 2, Jeff Bezos announced that he was retiring as CEO of Amazon and would only be the executive chairman. In fact, today's Amazon is also at an unprecedented peak.

According to the recent financial report, Amazon achieved revenue of 125.56 billion US dollars in the fourth quarter of last year, which was the first time that the company's quarterly revenue exceeded 100 billion dollars. What's more, quarterly revenue soared 44% year-on-year, which is an invaluable growth on the scale of $87.437 billion.

no_matter_bezos_or_huang_zheng_ , _when_the_company_enters_the_most_stable_stage_ , _the_impact_on_the_company_may_be_minimized_ ._ Bezos will invest in day one fund, Bezos earth fund and blue origin project in the future. Google x lab has been committed to exploring the unknown of science and technology for many years, and has carried out basic science and innovative technology research driven by human vision.

From this point of view, in the third quarter of this year, after Jesse took over the CEO of Amazon, among the five major U.S. technology giants, except Zuckerberg, who is still only 36 years old and still in his prime, is still the CEO of Facebook, the other four giants have completed the transition from founder to successor.

In a universal sense, Huang Zheng may be regarded as the "chosen son" of the generation born in 1980s. In fact, because of this, he is full of awe for science, life and all the truth in the world. As a new generation of "Xueba" entrepreneurs, Huang Zheng was born in Hangzhou. At the age of 12, he entered Hangzhou foreign language school, a key middle school. After graduation, he was directly recommended to zhukezhen College of Zhejiang University, majoring in computer science. During his four years in Zhejiang University, Huang Zheng was a man of the day, "a good student in the teacher's mouth, a legend in the mouth of his younger brother and younger sister.".

After graduation, Huang Zheng went to the University of Wisconsin. His pure science and engineering background made him believe in the pursuit of truth and essence of life. He described his feelings for his alma mater, Zhejiang University, "focusing on the heart and paying attention to the essence are the four years' learning experience of Zhejiang University, which has given me the greatest wealth and the spiritual strength to support me to keep moving forward."

In many interviews with the media, he rarely describes the arduous entrepreneurial history, but he describes the essential origin of pinduoduo in this way: pinduoduo is iterated through algorithms, and business is just a progressive process. Only by doing the things in front of us can we have something behind us. A lot of underwater things can't be seen by laymen, and it is these things that support pinduoduo to keep moving forward. At the beginning of 2020, during the most serious period of the epidemic, Huang Zheng, like most people, had a period of staying at home. He read some philosophy books and had some insights into life.

In his letter to shareholders in 2020, he wrote: "time is more like an irreversible vector. It is a powerful and directional force that silently drives everything we see and feel. No matter how obstinately we yearn for symmetry and eternity, time always creates all kinds of asymmetry, irreversibility and death in the world."

In 2021, he firmly believes in "sticking to the right thing". This time, he keeps his promise and donates US $100 million with the founding team of pinduoduo to fund the frontier science and technology related research of Shanghai Institute of higher research of Zhejiang University. In the future, pinduoduo will continue to make solid investment in agricultural science and technology. From opening up the circulation chain of agricultural products and improving the quantity and efficiency, it will really bring high-end agricultural digital technology to the domestic landing, boost the high-quality development of agriculture, truly benefit farmers, and bring a real sense of value to the society.

"Long live 60 Fen"

In the alternation of management team, Huang Zheng has already made arrangements. When it comes to Chen Lei, who takes over the post of CEO, the outside world is relatively unfamiliar, but Chen Lei and Huang Zheng are the most trusted partners.

Chen Lei, who graduated from Tsinghua University, and Huang Zheng also studied at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the United States, and obtained a doctor's degree in computer science. In 2007, he crossed with Huang Zheng in ouku.com and worked as an R & D Architecture Engineer in the company.

Later, he joined Leqi in Huang Zheng's second venture, and finally became the chief technical officer of Shanghai xunmen Information Technology Co., Ltd., the main operating company of pinduoduo. After the merger of pinduoduo and pinhaohuo in 2016, Chen Lei officially became the co-founder and CTO of the company. In the future, Chen Lei and the management will take over Huang Zheng's work.

From the beginning of starting a business, Huang Zheng tried to achieve success with new ideas and practices, with the strength of team, culture and mechanism. Only by believing in culture and mechanism is the foundation of evergreen organization. From the perspective of long-term development of enterprises, the fading out of founders is good for enterprises. Only when we let go of the earth can we have a chance to be reborn.

At this point, just like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, which is often compared. More than a decade ago, Bill Gates officially retired from Microsoft, and the giant Microsoft at that time had "gone down the hill". During the period from 2000 to 2013, the market value of Microsoft declined from the peak of 600 billion US dollars. Finally, the market value of Microsoft was less than 300 billion dollars, less than half of the brilliant period in 2000. During this period, apple, Google, Facebook, twitter and other rising stars began to rise.

In 2008, Bill Gates passed the CEO of Microsoft to Ballmer. He didn't make it back in the end. Until 2014, Satia NADELLA took over the post of CEO of Microsoft from Ballmer. Under his leadership, Microsoft successfully transformed. At present, the stock market value is 829.778 billion US dollars, surpassing Google, second only to apple and Amazon.

Similar to Huang Zheng, Chen Lei is unusually low-key. So far, he remains a mystery to all media. Similarly, Huang Zheng is not used to showing his charisma in front of the public like most Internet entrepreneurs and enjoys it as much as a preacher. In his view, competitors have never been the focus of business, creating value for consumers.

At the beginning of listing, Huang Zheng told the 21st century economic reporter that pinduoduo is a combination of "Costco" and "Disney", and people who can't understand it laugh at it. But time proves the value.

In the letter from the outgoing chairman, Huang Zheng again said that Costco + Disney's vision will be more concrete and vivid. Although it is only the primary stage of multi benefit and multi fun, we can already feel the "subtle difference in nature" brought by the combination of multi benefits and multi fun.

He saw the increasingly fierce and even alienation of the industry competition. The traditional competition oriented by scale and efficiency has its inevitable problems. To change, we must find the answer based on the core technology and its basic theory. I will devote myself to the research of food science and life science with more personal lifelong interests. "Focus on the long-term development of pinduoduo in the future, and touch the stones on the road 10 years later."

Previously, he had stated in his public account that he had set goals for himself from the beginning of literacy, and then found the optimal path to achieve. So I understand the goal of life very early, and even think about the meaning of life.

However, after many years of entrepreneurship, looking back on the past, Huang Zheng felt that his goal orientation was too clear, and he wasted too much time in pursuing first and striving to be a good student. "60000 is a good philosophy", which he realized many years later, that is, achieving goals and feeling happiness are not necessarily the same thing.

It took six years for Huang Zheng to create a dream of "creating consumption value". Today, with compassion and awe for the future of mankind, and with a reverence for scientific exploration, he will walk into the starry night to seek a broader sea.

In a word, Huang Zheng's inspirational story let me appreciate Schopenhauer's sentence: "either lonely or vulgar." Obviously, Huang Zheng chose the former, because the vulgar are more unfortunate than the lonely. A person who has a firm ideal and can persevere in hard work will surely live a happier life than a muddleheaded one.