How did Zhang Xiaolong, who was criticized for the Internet tragedy, become a myth step by step?

Vice President of Tencent?

Father of wechat?

Xiao Xuan, tell me about Zhang Xiaolong in my eyes.

Is a programmer who is addicted to staying up late and can't give up smoking.

Because I like the lyrics of Blue Lotus, I must ask Xu Wei who bought the copyright and hung it at the door of QQ mailbox.

He is also the kind of person who likes the graffiti of his colleague's little daughter and hangs a graffiti painting at the door of QQ mailbox like a blue lotus.

It is the "lonely back" in the WeChat startup page.

It was Zhang Xiaolong who said "Dongguan Day" at the dinner table.

16 years ago, People's Daily said that Zhang Xiaolong was just a "tragic figure".

16 years later, Zhang Xiaolong was called "the existence of God" by the industry.

What kind of person is he?

1994, Zhang Xiaolong, a young man from Hunan, just turned 24 and graduated from graduate school. He was assigned to work in a telecommunications company. At that time, having an iron rice bowl was more important than anything else, and all the friends around me envied it. He refused on the grounds that the office building looked depressed.

The iron rice bowl is gone, but Zhang Xiaolong has a good life in his own world. A computer has several packs of cigarettes, and a program is high, so he stays up all night.

Then I played with a Foxmail mailbox. After three years of day and night, the number of users of this product rose to 4 million as soon as it was launched, making it the only product in China that can compete with Microsoft Outlook. Zhang Xiaolong flipped through, knowing that Tencent had only 654.38 million+users at that time.

Although Foxmail is awesome, it is free software, which not only doesn't make him a penny, but also takes a lot of time to maintain.

Lei Jun, then general manager of Jinshan, also took a fancy to Foxmail and wanted to buy Zhang Xiaolong.

So1one day in September, 998, Lei Jun, who discovered the secret BUG in Foxmail, sent a letter to Zhang Xiaolong according to the email address left by Foxmail software. Zhang Xiaolong also responded quickly and left his phone number in the email. Lei Jun first told Zhang Xiaolong about the BUG he found on the phone. Zhang Xiaolong responded on the other end of the phone: "Many people have complained that there is something wrong with the secret, and I don't know what the problem is. Thank you. " . It is this subtle level and courtesy.

On the phone, Lei Jun learned that Zhang Xiaolong was working in a system integration company in Guangzhou. Lei Jun began to cut to the chase. Can Foxmail be sold to Jinshan? Zhang Xiaolong responded, 654.38+0.5 million. This telephone conversation is almost over. Lei Jun recalled that 6.5438+0.5 million was the price acceptable to both parties on the phone at that time. Originally, I planned to invite Zhang Xiaolong to discuss the specific details in Jinshan, Zhuhai, but because Lenovo was busy investing in Jinshan, the R&D personnel sent to negotiate with Zhang Xiaolong felt that such a software could be made in 654.38+0-2 months. Then it disappeared. In this way, Lei Jun and Zhang Xiaolong passed by.

Li Xueling of YY once described it like this: "1997, as long as you stand at the intersection of Huang Zhuang, Guangdong and shout, I am Foxmail Zhang Xiaolong. Passers-by can block you like a mailbox. "

Zhang Xiaolong's fame is unimaginable, but it's true that he has no money.

FOXMAIL only brought Zhang Xiaolong the feeling of being at a loss. Writing software was a challenge for him at first. But when the software was written and needed to be improved little by little, he lost interest. He thinks this is what commercial software will do.

There are many people who are keen on writing free software like Zhang Xiaolong, but most of them are as hungry as him. "I don't know what to do next. Maybe in half a year, if we can't find a suitable development opportunity, we will just go to the United States, "Zhang Xiaolong said.

The People's Daily even named Zhang Xiaolong as a tragedy in the Internet wave. But who is Zhang Xiaolong? I have to kneel down when I make my own software.

More interestingly, People's Daily just approved Zhang Xiaolong, and a month later announced that Foxmail was acquired by Boda Internet Company for120,000 yuan, and Zhang Xiaolong was appointed as the chief technology officer of Boda Company. This number, even today, is not a small number.

Five years later, Foxmail was acquired by Tencent, and Zhang Xiaolong and his team moved in.

Tencent at that time was not much better. On the one hand, it was threatened by MSN, on the other hand, it was attacked by domestic peers. Even QQ is too busy, so the mailbox has been idle, and the user experience is so bad that Ma Hua Teng doesn't want to use it himself. At this moment, he thought of Zhang Xiaolong. After all, Foxmail made by others alone, I don't know how many pieces of QQ mailbox were dumped.

After Zhang Xiaolong took the helm of QQ mailbox, the first thing he did was to rewrite all the cores of QQ mailbox: "We will give whatever users want, and don't want it any more!" At that time, most mailboxes could not send oversized attachments, so Zhang Xiaolong focused on this pain point. QQ mailbox took the lead in supporting the sending of 2G oversize attachments, and the number of users soared.

Two years later, QQ mailbox became Tencent's seven-star product.

In 20 10, an App“kik "based on mobile phone address book, which realized free SMS chat, was broken in only 15 days and 100000 users. At that time, Apple 4 had just been released, and the craze for smart phones had just begun in China. It's time for Zhang Xiaolong to feel for himself.

He wrote an email to Ma overnight, suggesting Tencent to do this business. A few minutes later, the email showed a letter from Ma: I'll do it right away.

That year, Zhang Xiaolong was 42 years old, and his peers included Lei Jun, Ma and Zhou. Already a big boss in this industry. Once again, he chose a road he was not sure about.

At that time, Tencent had three teams working on WeChat products. Zhang Xiaolong's team is at a disadvantage in terms of contacts, resources and experience, and most people in the group are a little waiting for jokes.

However, Zhang Xiaolong is not afraid. He called back several programmers who had emailed him before, and the WeChat team was formed.

The whole team worked day and night, and Zhang Xiaolong lived directly in the company. During this time, his addiction to cigarettes became more serious. He resisted the pressure of various interests and went forward bravely.

Like a long-suppressed spring, it swept 4 million users in just 3 months and broke 100 million in 433 days. Better looking than it is not so easy to use, simpler than it is not so fast, and it has become the "public enemy" of the telecommunications industry.

He exploded again.

1987, Zhang Xiaolong, age 18, was admitted to the Department of Telecommunications of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (the predecessor of Huazhong University of Science and Technology) from Hunan.

Huazhong University of Science and Technology doesn't have the Internet environment in the north, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and it doesn't have the postal advantages in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. But this school is like an internet talent. Haha, have you ever heard of the farm, PPTV and who is undercover? Yes, these are Chinese men, and their entrepreneurial income exceeds that of Tsinghua Peking University, ranking first in the country.

Xiao Xuan thought of the reason, probably because of loneliness.

In engineering schools where the ratio of male to female is 7:/kloc-0:, everyone is a social scum. Zhang Xiaolong's college roommates once recalled that because there was no one, there was never a sister to talk to them. They always go to the pond outside the dormitory to catch shrimp in the dead of night.

Open WeChat, and the figure standing opposite the earth is Zhang Xiaolong. Zhang Xiaolong is the one who only looks at his own desires.

Zhang Xiaolong once gave a speech at Tencent for eight hours and twenty minutes, 178 PPT. He always said that others were afraid to go to the toilet. It talks about philosophy and art, sex and violence, and the understanding of human nature. He said that making products is to make users happy, just like God.

A shake of WeChat is a gesture, and a click is a gunshot. Is it cool?

Now Zhang Xiaolong, senior vice president of Tencent, goes to Shenzhen to attend the regular meeting every week. He always refuses to go on the pretext that he can't get up. Ma Hua Teng said, "Let my secretary wake you up in the future." Later, Zhang Xiaolong said, "The road is too blocked. I'm afraid I can't catch up." So Ma Hua Teng sent a car to pick up Zhang Xiaolong every week until he couldn't find any excuse.

He often walks around the office in shorts, and cigarette butts are everywhere in the office.

But once the product is made, Zhang Xiaolong is as paranoid as Apple, with only one button. Wu Xiaobo once asked him where the design concept of WeChat came from. He only said four words: minimalist.

After the birth of WeChat, some people said that he copied foreign software, so he added a sentence on the boot page: "You said I was wrong, then you'd better prove that you are right."

The startup screen of WeChat version 3.0

He lived in a world that he could control, made the product a second self, and brought the team into countless Zhang Xiaolong.

Zhang Xiaolong once said: When I get old, I want to have the voice of leonard cohen.

He is also a veteran rock fan. Every time he interviews a programmer, even if the process is over, do you still like rock? I don't like it

Last year, the gzallen account he quietly opened on Fanbu was pulled out by netizens.

Five years later, Zhang Xiaolong angrily swept the Internet battlefield and trampled on the world. But in his meal, you can catch a cute, lyrical and funny guy.

Small dazzle casually inserted a few words:

Most of the creation of time comes from people who are extremely eager for their looks.

My happiest sentence today is "Apple passed the censorship", which shows that happiness comes from prohibition.

You are like a flower, and life is like a thorn.

The ancients loved the moon, but today people love the sun. The ancients used the moon to express their feelings, but today people express their feelings every day.

Dongguan is a thousand years in a day, and the world is a day.

This year, the number of monthly active users of WeChat has reached 938 million. Tencent's share price has increased nearly fivefold in the past five years, ranking among the top ten in the world and becoming the company with the highest market value in Asia.

The recent attempt of WeChat Lab: Search and see, friends can see it in three days/half a year, and friends don't contact often, and they are all being spit out by the whole network.

There is also a small program that I have to mention. Zhang Xiaolong's phrase "Run out of good products and leave" makes half the product people in China tremble.

However, netizens didn't buy it at all, and they all replied: "If you leave, you won't come back."

At the WeChat open class held in Guangzhou Asian Games Gymnasium, he started from the weather for the first time without any emotional ups and downs, followed by a long and suffocating blank.

This is not normal at all in Zhang Xiaolong. He regarded it as a small program that WeChat broke out again. Because of its certain closeness, it has not been responded by the market. This is his first setback after becoming a god.

"I have been making products for so many years, and I think it is most important to grasp human nature. But it is getting harder and harder for me to judge what is good and what is bad. " Zhang Xiaolong is also worried.

If you want to ask me what WeChat will do next, I don't know, and Zhang Xiaolong may not know either.

Today, Xiao Xuan seems to have written about Zhang Xiaolong, but this paper is full. Isn't it the people we want to live?