The former CEO of Ali Dingding will leave his post to start a business

The track is hot, the background is strong, and the team is strong. The unrecruited team has attracted the venture capital circle, and the valuation has reached several billion yuan.

The former Ali Dingding CEO WuZhaowill leave to start a business. The new company is called "Two Hydrogen One Oxygen (Hangzhou) Dgital Technology Co., Ltd.". The entrepreneurial direction is in the field of cross-border overseas. The current investor has been identified as Yuanjing Capital.

Wuzhao is a key figure in Alibaba’s To B business. The DingTalk created by him is currently the enterprise service application with the largest number of users in China (400 million individuals and 17 million organizations). The pre-resignation rank is M6/P11, plus Going to the sea has been a hot spot for investment in the near future. This time, leaving to start a business has attracted a lot of rush from the venture capital circle.

It is understood that the no-recruitment team has already met with a number of top venture capital institutions. A person familiar with the matter said: "The valuation has risen to several billion yuan, and not many can invest in it."

Another person in the investment industry said: "Whether you can invest in it is to recognize your face, not to recognize money." It means that only acquaintances can grab the share. Taking the currently determined investment Fang Yuanjing Capital, its founder Wu Yongming is the original Alibaba co-founder, and the invested companies are mostly Alibaba background entrepreneurs, such as the original UC founder He Xiaopeng’s Xiaopeng Motors and the former Alibaba Cloud executives Tuya Smart, founded by Wang Xueji, etc.

Asked Alibaba and Wuzhao himself, Quentin, Alibaba's public relations director, responded to this: "I asked WuZhao. He is still in Ali and has not left. Ali Group is reforming its internal mechanism to encourage diversified innovation. This no-recruitment venture is an attempt under the new mechanism. Blessing no-recruitment, let us wait and see."

In addition to the "Ali flavor" of the employer, he has joined Alibaba for nearly ten years and WuZhao to take Dingding. The entrepreneurial team also assembled a number of Dingding employees.

It is understood that the core backbone of the venture together with Wuzhao include: Ren Qing, former vice president of Ali Dingding (nickname: Yitong), former head of Ali Dingding marketing department, Gan Cong, and former chief architect of Ali Dingding. , CTO Zhu Hong (flower name: a millet).

The above-mentioned people were all key figures in the period of Dingding.

Yi Tong, former vice president of Ali Dingding, has served as Dingding hardware manager and general manager of open platform and commercialization, and has played a core role in many major changes of Dingding. At the end of 2017, Dingding tried to develop hardware for the first time, and successively launched a variety of devices such as attendance machines, routers, and smart screen projections. At that time, Yitong revealed to 36 Krypton: “Ali has almost no hardware genes. From prototype to mass production, hardware is challenging the impossibility. This is the biggest difficulty."

Zhu Hong (Yi Su), the former chief architect and CTO of DingTalk, used to be the head of the internationalization team of DingTalk and the head of the "Intelligent Collaboration and Video Cloud Division". In 2018, DingTalk went to CES in the United States for the first time, and when he officially decided to enter the international business, Zhu Hong was appointed as the head of internationalization. In September 2020, when Alibaba Smart Cloud announced the latest strategic adjustments, Zhu Hong took over the "Smart Collaboration and Video Cloud Business Unit", focusing on product development and expansion of enterprise smart collaboration scenarios.

The former Ali Dingding CEO WuZhao

The non-recruitment of several DingTalk executives to leave their jobs and start their businesses is directly related to Alibaba's adjustment of To B's business since last year.

The integration of DingTalk and Alibaba Cloud-first took place in June 2019, when Alibaba issued a new round of organizational upgrade notices, announcing that DingTalk was incorporated into the Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Business Group, and reported to Zhang Jianfeng (Xing Xing).

More drastic adjustments occurred on the evening of September 27, 2020, when the Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Business Group released an email to all employees, announcing the latest "cloud and nailing integration" strategy, and setting the originally independent Dingding company as the Dingding Business Unit, Is directly managed by Zhang Jianfeng (Xingdian), President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, and Chen Hang (nickname: Wuzhao), the former CEO of Alibaba Dingding, leaves Dingding to serve as assistant to Alibaba's board of directors and CEO Zhang Yong (Xiaoyaozi).

This organization and personnel escalation was called an earthquake at the time. Many DingTalk employees expressed views such as "shocked, disagreeable, and risky approach". The core reason is that DingTalk's core goal is the large-scale expansion of users and enterprise organizations, but Alibaba Cloud, which has been developing for ten years, needs more business. The growth of chemical indicators will inevitably produce friction after the two merges.

This is also the essential reason for Wuzhao's departure this time. “Alibaba Cloud wants to achieve high income and DingTalk needs to be large-scale. After the merger of the two, it is inherently difficult to take care of both.” A former DingTalk employee told 36 krypton, “If you want to really integrate business, To adjust from the top, people must move."

Some Alibaba Cloud insiders also gave a positive signal about the merger between Alibaba Cloud and DingTalk: Alibaba Cloud used to sell IT products, only affecting the corporate CIO/CTO. DingTalk was doing the transformation of the corporate organizational structure and affecting the CEO. Mergers are easier to hit customers.

After merging into Alibaba Cloud, DingTalk has already produced obvious adjustments in its product direction.

Since its establishment in 2014, DingTalk of the "No Recruitment Era" has grown from a simple enterprise IM communication application to a variety of software (OA management, document collaboration, HR SaaS), hardware (attendance machine, router, smart screen projection) , A behemoth of industry solutions (retail, catering, logistics).

After the gradual departure from DingTalk, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence President Zhang Jianfeng said when he revealed DingTalk’s new positioning last year that he would develop DingTalk with a platform-based approach, allowing DingTalk to become a “new development platform” outside of the collaborative office platform. ".

This transformation can be understood as follows: In the past, DingTalk used to make applications and hardware, and its service targets were all corporate users. Although it was inevitable to burn money, it could achieve growth of users; In line with the model of Alibaba Cloud's underlying computing resources, DingTalk will play the role of the upper-level development system, and the service target must focus on developers.

For those who are familiar with Dingding and Nozhao, it is not surprising that Nozhao resigns. When creating Dingding, Nozhao has a distinctive personality and a sharp style. He has never shied away from comparing WeChat with Dingding, and has repeatedly emphasized "Working back to Dingding". Nail, life belongs to WeChat", criticizing the lack of attention of corporate employees using WeChat to work, and once publicly stated that "Tencent does not use WeChat to work internally" has sparked heated discussions.

In the ten years in Ali, Wuzhao has suffered from the pain of "communications" in social projects, and has also gained the "Dingding" rapid growth and dominance of the To B market. Now, the mission to Ali and Dingding has come to an end, and he finally has a career and story that truly belongs to him.