The entrepreneurial story of DJI founder Wang Tao

DJI is a drone brand founded in 2006 by Wang Tao, a graduate student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Now I will take you to learn more about the entrepreneurial story of DJI founder Wang Tao. The Entrepreneurship Story of DJI Founder Wang Tao_About the Entrepreneurship Story of DJI Wang Tao

He is the industry leader in consumer drones, occupying 70% of the global market share; He is the first billionaire in the global drone industry. DJI, which he founded in his dormitory, is quietly leading the global drone revolution. Wang Tao, 35, is a dark horse and has become the richest self-made man born in the 1980s with a net worth of 30 billion yuan.

Being rejected from studying abroad and having no goals, starting a business in the dormitory

Wang Tao was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang in 1980. Because of his good family background, he had been fond of model airplanes since he was a child. A remote control helicopter. In his imagination, the helicopter was like an elf that could be controlled at will, able to hover in the air and fly wherever he wanted, but in fact that was not the case at all. The helicopter, which was difficult to control, fell off shortly after takeoff, and the rapidly rotating propeller left a scar on his hand.

At that time, I wanted to make something that could automatically control helicopter flight. After finishing high school in Hangzhou, Wang Tao was admitted to the Electronics Department of East China Normal University. By his junior year, Wang Tao, unwilling to be mediocre, dropped out of East China Normal University and applied to world-class universities. His goals were Stanford and MIT, but they were both rejected. In the end, only the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology sent an admission notice, and he studied in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering there.

In 2005, at the age of 25, with no goals in life, he began to study the flight control system of a remote-controlled helicopter. Wang Tao, who was preparing for his graduation project, decided to take the flight control system of a remote-controlled helicopter as his graduation project topic. He found two classmates to persuade the teacher to agree to their research direction. The core problem he wanted to solve still originated from his childhood dream? Allow the model aircraft to hover freely.

With 18,000 Hong Kong dollars in funding from the school, Wang Tao and the others were busy for more than half a year. However, during the final demonstration stage, the plane that was supposed to be hovering in the air fell down. The graduation project failed. He got a C. This poor grade even cost him the opportunity to further his studies at a prestigious EU school.

Fortunately, Wang Tao’s concentration was recognized by a professor and he was able to continue his postgraduate studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. While studying, he led two classmates who were doing graduation projects together to establish DJI Innovations Technology Company in Shenzhen, and began to focus on the research and development and production of helicopter flight control systems.

I think there is an element of innocence in my character. I have liked something since I was a child and just hope to turn it into reality.

From 3 people in a residential building to 4,000 employees

In order to do research, Wang Tao has sacrificed everything, even skipping classes and staying up until 5 a.m. In the end, he created a prototype of the flight controller in his dormitory. In 2006, he and two of his classmates came to Shenzhen, the manufacturing center of China, and officially started their entrepreneurial journey to change the world in a residential building.

At the end of 2006, the company was in crisis. Lu Di, a close friend of the Wang Tao family, generously invested US$90,000 (Wang Tao said that this was the only time in the history of DJI that it needed external funds) to help DJI tide over the difficulties. Later, Lu Di went to DJI to take charge of financial work, and today he has become one of DJI's largest shareholders. Forbes calculates that his 16 shares will soon be worth $1.6 billion.

In 2008, the first mature product interview. The first relatively mature helicopter flight control system XP3.1 he developed was launched.

In 2010, important figure Xie Jia joined DJI. Xie Jia was Wang Tao's middle school classmate. After joining, he played an important role in the development of DJI and was responsible for marketing. He was also an important assistant to Wang Tao. He once sold his house to invest in DJI. Today, the 14 shares he holds are estimated to be worth US$1.4 billion.

In 2011, DJI North America Branch was established. Quinn, an American, was running a start-up company engaged in aerial photography business, and later helped DJI establish DJI North America branch in Texas, aiming to introduce drones to the mass market. At that time, he proposed a new slogan for the company: "The Future of Possible".

At the end of 2012, the night before dawn. DJI already has all the elements needed for a complete drone: software, propellers, brackets, gimbals, and remote controls.

In January 2013, DJI Phantom was released. It's the first pre-assembled quadcopter that's ready to take off: it flies within an hour of taking it out of the box and doesn't disintegrate on the first drop. Thanks to its simplicity and ease of use, the DJI Phantom has leveraged the non-professional drone market.

Non-standardized CEO

In DJI, Wang Tao has two identities, one is CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and the other is CTO (Chief Technology Officer).

It is difficult to define whether he is a qualified CEO. He rarely faces the media, rarely participates in public events, and even misses press conferences. But when it comes to products and technology, Wang Tao is almost obsessed with pursuing the word "perfection".

Two years ago, Wang Tao once said in an interview: "I am a product maker. I just want to make the product good and let more people use it." ?

In the early days of DJI, Wang Tao once made a wish list. According to the characteristics of drones, three problems must be solved: stability, clarity, and transmission distance. DJI’s subsequent product line was exactly Follow this list.

The three major issues in this list correspond to DJI’s three major technologies: gimbal, aerial photography and transmission system.

In the past, there were many inconveniences in the operating experience of unmanned aerial vehicles, which blocked a large number of ordinary consumers. We believe that with DJI’s technology accumulation, we can launch a highly integrated product that can solve this pain point in one fell swoop and create value. The success of the Phantom series proves that our decision was correct. ?Wang Tao said. ?

In the company, what he emphasizes most is the word "taste". ?In our fathers’ generation, China has always lacked products that can impress the world, and Chinese manufacturing has never been able to get rid of the situation of relying on cost-effective advantages to gain market share. The success of enterprises in this era should have different ideas and values. DJI is willing to focus on making Really good products, how to reverse this status quo that people are not proud of?

This is more reflected in the products and the overall simple style of the company.

The grasp of taste permeates the company. Company employees provide seasonal fruits every afternoon. The pictures of these fruits are processed by administrative department employees to ensure the quality of the pictures.

Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, once wrote on his Linkedin: DJI’s Phantom 2 Vision is basically equivalent to a flying Apple II. ?

DJI also relies on its products to enter the US market and become a brand comparable to Apple.

Apple founder Steve Jobs is one of the few people Wang Tao admires. He compared himself and Jobs to "heroes who think alike." ?He has many excellent qualities, and his methods and ideas have also inspired me a lot, so I will naturally love him. ?Wang Tao told reporters.

Unlike most CEOs, Wang Tao has very few opportunities to talk about products in front of the public. He and DJI’s public relations team control the public’s access to this information because they are afraid of the public. Focusing too much on Wang Tao personally distracts from focusing on the product.

This kind of avoidance goes far beyond the average CEO. He even missed DJI product launches, from the Phantom series to the Osmo handheld gimbal camera to the agricultural and forestry plant protection drones, every epoch-making release. Yes, Wang Tao often only lives in media releases.

For Wang Tao, the product condenses everything he wants to say. Regardless of whether the public accepts and likes it, he is not prepared to explain his story and mental journey during research and development.

Today, DJI’s sales have exceeded 6 billion yuan. Wang Tao was also named by Forbes last year as the richest man in drones with a net worth of over 1 billion US dollars. However, he still maintains the same dressing habits as when he first started his business: He usually wears a shirt, and when the weather is cold, he wears a sweater outside. He only wears a suit when receiving important visitors or attending formal occasions. His iconic peaked cap is always by his side.

Choosing people to be complicit

? Nowadays, some companies are keen on self-promotion and are regarded as role models for the public. They rely on business skills but rarely pursue business ethics. ?When reporters asked about the current financing situation of DJI, Wang Tao said this.

According to data from the US database website CrunchBase, DJI completed two rounds of financing in May 2014 and May 2015 respectively. The latest round of financing was US$75 million, led by AccelPartner, a well-known American venture capital institution.

Unlike other entrepreneurs, Wang Tao has never worried about money since he first founded DJI. For investors, Wang Tao has only one requirement: to understand DJI and its products.

Wang Tao’s first supporter was Li Zexiang, his teacher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He was an early advisor and investor in DJI. He is now the chairman of the company’s board of directors and still held 10 shares last year.

In the early stages of the company, Wang Tao earned his first pot of gold by relying on the helicopter autonomous hovering system model he developed while in school. Because of the scarcity of technology, you could get tens of thousands of yuan from selling a model at that time, while a single DJI product could sell for more than 200,000 yuan. At that time, the product had not yet reached the practical stage, and its main function was to allow leaders of large state-owned enterprises to perform functional demonstrations.

In this abnormal business model, Wang Tao sees no development prospects.

Learning from the New Zealand agent that some individual enthusiasts installed the system on multi-rotor aircraft, Wang Tao saw the new market potential and decided to change the research and development direction and install the autonomous hovering system on multi-rotor aircraft. on the rotorcraft and enhance its practicality.

The other two major shareholders of DJI have a good relationship with Wang Tao. They joined DJI when it needed the most funds in its early days and held important positions in the company. The shares of DJI held by the two people have increased along with the valuation of DJI. According to calculations by Forbes, the shares held by both of them have exceeded US$1 billion.

Perhaps Wang Tao himself is not good at capital market operations, or perhaps he hopes to put DJI in the hands of people he trusts. Since its establishment, DJI has not accepted many institutional investors.

Wang Tao does not want investors to control the pace of DJI’s marketization. After Sequoia led DJI’s Series A round, the news that DJI would launch an overseas listing plan became rampant, and DJI made The response is to focus on the product for at least five years and have no plans to go public.

Wang Tao is very disdainful of the practice of hyping concepts to gain capital attention. ?These practices are nothing more than trying to gain some benefits from the blind influx of capital. DJI is not a "B2VC" or "B2 shareholder" company. ?Wang Tao said.

In May last year, DJI announced the completion of a $75 million Series B round of financing, led by AccelPartner, a well-known American venture capital institution.

Subsequently, DJI announced that it would launch the world’s first drone fund, SkyFund, together with Accel***, to provide funding to leading companies in fields including robotic hardware and software, computer vision and navigation, multimedia tools and communities, etc. Start-up companies provide comprehensive support including funds, technology and other resources, especially entrepreneurs who use DJISDK (DJI Software Development Kit) to develop applications such as surveying, imaging, agriculture, and inspection.

In the book "Hard Ball: This is How Politics is Played", the author Chris Matthews uses the term "hard ball" to describe the practical and practical strategies that politicians engage in for power and achievement. A bold means of attack.

This word also applies to Wang Tao. In competition with his peers, he is not an easy opponent to deal with.

Like Apple, DJI’s fame lies largely in Wang Tao’s accurate grasp of the needs of the personal consumer market, which is also the key to DJI’s ability to occupy the market. This allowed DJI to present a different development trend from XAG and Sub-Zero, which later entered the drone market, and quickly left behind its competitors, quickly occupying a dominant share in the personal consumption field.

Steve Jobs once said: "The market does not need research, because customers don't know what they want until you give them what they want." ?

In January 2013, DJI Phantom drone officially entered the mass consumer market.

? DJI’s success lies in its creation of the non-professional unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market, and everyone is catching up with DJI. Before DJI, drones were mostly used in professional fields. The products were highly specialized, required high operating requirements, and the products were expensive. As a result, drones could not be popularized. DJI expanded drones to the level of ordinary consumers and quickly created a brand new market. Dr. Wang Xin, Frost & Sullivan’s global partner and president of Greater China, told China Business News.

Before the Phantom, DJI’s main products were aimed at the professional aerial photography market. The products were difficult to operate and relatively expensive.

Wang Tao quickly realized that he may not have an advantage in the professional field. The original intention of launching "Elf" was to prevent competitors from launching a price war. ?We wanted to make a cost-effective product that could take off at any time without players having to assemble it themselves. The main consideration at that time was that this product could enter the low-end machine market before our competitors, and we did not want to make money. ?Wang Tao said in an earlier interview with the media.

This move expanded the market space for consumer drones, and soon the entry-level Phantom surpassed DJI’s other professional-level equipment in sales and became a star product.

The quality of the product needs to be polished repeatedly, and the polishing process must be very painful. In the internal WeChat work group, Wang Tao once shared a sentence from Steve Jobs' "Lost Interviews": The real magic is to use 5,000 ideas to create a product. To turn a good idea into a good product, it takes A lot of processing?.

The emergence of ?Elf? also prompted the reorganization of personnel allocation in the aerial photography market.

In the past, aerial photography had a high threshold and required professionals to complete it. In the past, aerial photography required at least three people to divide the work: pilot, gimbal operator, and ground support. After DJI launched the Phantom, many people can do aerial photography by buying a GoPro, and the market entry threshold has been lowered. ?Zhu Qiuyang, founder of Tianxiang Aviation Technology, told reporters. The impact on professional aerial photography teams has forced many aerial photographers to seek technological transformation.

In addition to the aircraft, the camera is an important part of the entire component.

In this link, DJI’s competitor is GoPro, which is famous for its action cameras. At first, Wang Tao hoped to cooperate with GoPro to develop a product and sell it on GoPro, but the two brands were unable to reach an agreement on the final cooperation. *knowledge.

? They (GoPro) treat us as an equipment supplier, but DJI is not an ordinary OEM manufacturer. ?Wang Tao said in an interview with Forbes that they could not reach an agreement on profit sharing, and more importantly, they were not treated equally during the cooperation process. Therefore, after the Phantom 2, DJI gave up using GoPro cameras.

Subsequently, Wang Tao secured chips from chip suppliers that were of the same quality as those used by GoPro. Starting from the Phantom 3, DJI used its own photography equipment on the series. Soon, the Phantom 2 was eliminated by DJI. Currently, only the third and fourth generation products of the Phantom series are on sale on Tmall flagship store.

A workaholic like Steve Jobs

He works more than 80 hours a week and has a single bed next to his desk.

On the door of Wang Tao's office are written two lines of Chinese characters: Those with brains only and Do not bring in emotions.

He adheres to principles, speaks fiercely, and is quite rational. Now as the head of DJI with 4,000 employees, he dares not slack off at all, and his work attitude is as meticulous as when he founded DJI in the dormitory of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2006.

In terms of the company's internal management, Wang Tao has always maintained a tough style.

The boss is guided by high-quality products, and he will directly scold poorly designed things. What kind of garbage is this? Luo Wen (pseudonym), a technician who has left DJI, said, "This kind of strictness also allows employees to grow quickly." ?

DJI adheres to a work model of rapid elimination. The company encourages employees to work overtime and directly dismisses employees with poor performance. Such a working model and a working atmosphere that advocates a "wolfish" spirit seem to be very inhumane, but on the other hand, it also cultivates employees' awareness of fierce competition. ?In DJI, it is really difficult for people with a glass heart to survive. ?Another resigned employee revealed.

Three years ago, DJI started operating the RoboMasters robot competition. Even though the competition had nothing to do with its main business, DJI still invested a lot of money to host it. DJI initially had two plans for RoboMasters: one was to continue hosting it as a small-scale summer camp; the other was to host it heavily and promote it nationwide. The final decision was entirely made by Wang Tao.

As the founder, Wang Tao’s fierce rhetoric and arbitrary personality also caused DJI to suffer from team losses in its early stages. Almost all of the first batch of employees left the company two years after its founding.

Maybe they have doubts about future development. I used to be a perfectionist, and I didn’t know how to express myself when communicating with others, which could easily hurt their feelings. ?In an interview with Forbes, Wang Tao once admitted that after the company was established, he encountered many difficulties when allocating equity to 3 to 4 team members. His insistence that equity allocation should be equal to employee contributions made team members dissatisfied. ?The employees who received a small share of the shares could not accept it and left. Some members wanted to transfer part of their shares to others, but I refused. The angry words I said at that time hurt their feelings. ?

Everything from product design to internal management relies on Wang Tao to make decisions. His arbitrary personality allows DJI to make quick decisions; this arbitrary management style also leaves a group of people who really do things for DJI. people, promote the rapid development of entrepreneurial companies.

The whole world is chasing a Chinese company

His success is a rare case in the history of technological development.

It is a rare success story in the history of the technology industry for a company to transform its target audience from amateurs to mainstream users, and to dominate the market in the process.

In 2014, DJI sold approximately 400,000 drones. Between 2009 and 2014, DJI's sales grew at a rate of two to three times each year, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Investors believe DJI can maintain this dominance in the coming years.

In 2015, DJI’s net profit increased from US$8 million in 2012 to US$250 million. Today, DJI’s share of the global consumer drone market reaches 70%.

When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos promised to use drones to deliver goods to your doorsteps, skeptics scoffed, but drones are becoming the technology industry’s most important thing The “next big thing”, and now all competitors are catching up with DJI.

In the first five years, he was kept in a boudoir and was unknown; in the next five years, he became famous. DJI, which is now 10 years old, is valued at more than $10 billion.

DJI may become the first Chinese company to lead the development trend of the entire industry. It is precisely because of this dominant position that some media also compare DJI to Apple? But Wang Tao does not seem to care much about this kind of praise.

I admire some of Steve Jobs’s ideas, but there is no one in the world that I really admire.

"The Wall Street Journal" stated that DJI is the first Chinese company to become a pioneer in the world's major technology consumer product fields.

On the official website of DJI, there are words like this that make people cry:

I often think about the emperor wearing the so-called most beautiful new clothes while walking around, but only children dare to point it out. the truth. There are so many problems in today's society, but there are no children who dare to criticize loudly.

In fact, there is no success that can be achieved without hard work, no wealth that can be obtained by relying solely on PPT, and no high technology that falls from the sky. The pursuit of excellence requires countless late nights of hard thinking, the persistence of working 72 hours a day, and even more, the courage to speak the truth out loud.

Our experience proves that if a young person is just starting out and does not try to flatter others or take advantage of opportunities, as long as he works hard, he will surely achieve success. We believe that those who return to common sense and respect struggle will eventually see the opportunities of the times and ultimately change the world.

More than 10,000 companies are registered in China every day, and an average of 7 companies can be created in one minute. However, we can never have too many entrepreneurial teams like DJI, and we will always welcome entrepreneurial madmen like Wang Tao, because this is the future and hope of Chinese enterprises.

The following are two of his entrepreneurial insights:

Wang Tao said that he now seems to be waving a 450-year-old Japanese samurai sword and slashing at a tree. Unlucky business card. He said that when the samurai sword chopped this business card into pieces, "Japanese craftsmen are constantly striving for perfection." The Chinese have money but the products are terrible and so is the service. If you want to make a good product, you have to pay a higher price. ?

?I admire some of Steve Jobs’s ideas, but there is no one person in the world that I really admire. All you have to do is be smarter than everyone else? That requires you to distance yourself from the crowd. If you can create this distance, you've succeeded. ?