An InfoQ Interview
On Zhihu there is a post: Why did Zhang Jike suddenly become famous? One answer reads: “Unruly and single-minded, knocked down young and then fighting his way back to the summit. After all the torment of back injuries, he still faces the camera with the same calm, unruffled air. It is as if he has tasted every glory and every valley, yet remains the same high-spirited youth in fine clothes on a splendid horse.”
The author was once the founder of a startup backed by Innovation Works and other well-known investors. Over two years he went from dreaming to having the dream shattered, from step-by-step growth to gradual decline. After a year in retreat, he fought back from the brink, landed in Silicon Valley at the end of 2014, obtained an O-1 visa at the end of 2015, and joined adRise—a San Francisco startup working on free TV (tubitv.com)—beginning his second entrepreneurial journey.
Last month he returned to China on business. In just over ten days he took part in events arranged by Posts & Telecom Press to promote his book The Traveler’s Circle Startup Chronicle, and appeared on InfoQ’s Big Shots Talk program, where, starting from his own experience, he talked about how programmers can break through and become the A-players Steve Jobs prized. An InfoQ colleague who communicated directly with him said his lasting impression was that he is genuinely modest, even-tempered, and deeply devoted to family. Readers have also called him a model for Chinese people in Silicon Valley—extremely hardworking.
Of course, what outsiders see of a person is not necessarily the whole truth, but outward behavior is always a reflection of the inner self. I think he has been through valleys and through summits; only he knows what he has experienced. Like the vast majority of people, he is an ordinary person—and precisely for that reason he feels all the more approachable. After several rounds of polishing and revision, this interview finally took shape. I hope that in this article you will see not him but yourself—not a model to admire but a mirror to look into.
InfoQ: As a child you moved with your parents across the length and breadth of China—drifting from place to place, living as a “Xinjiang drifter,” a “Guangdong drifter,” a “Liaoning drifter,” and a “Beijing drifter.” Did that experience play a role in tempering your character? How would you assess your own character?
Author: A drifting life cost me a great deal. I seemed always to be a passerby wherever I went, without a stable network of contacts and friends. But it also trained in me, from childhood, a capacity for endurance—or perseverance—greater than most people’s. As a child, every time I arrived somewhere new, I would more or less encounter regional discrimination, especially in Guangdong. At that time Guangdong was economically developed and heavily influenced by Hong Kong. Cantonese speakers lumped everyone who did not speak Cantonese together as “northerners,” and naturally called their children “northern kids.” I was relatively introverted, so when I suffered injustice I sought strength in books.
As for reading, I have no particularly fixed preferences. As a child I loved Fu Lei’s Family Letters, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Jean-Christophe. A little older, besides novels and technical books, I read a lot of classical Chinese history and philosophy—Records of the Grand Historian, The Analects, and the works of the Hundred Schools.
Everyone is familiar with Mencius’s line, “When Heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on a man…,” and with Zengzi’s “A scholar must be strong and resolute, for his burden is heavy and his road is long.” Confucius also said, “The wise are not perplexed, the benevolent do not worry, the brave do not fear.” Liang Qichao has an essay on perseverance in which he says that in a person’s life adversity accounts for six or seven tenths and prosperity for three or four tenths; the two alternate, so after a small adversity there must come a small prosperity, and after a great adversity a great prosperity. This is another way of saying what Laozi meant by fortune and misfortune leaning on each other. Sometimes that is exactly how it is: before you soar into the sky, you must sink and drift for a long time; once you have soared, the next thing may well be a great fall. I will not even go into the stories of Han Xin, Peng Yue, and Ying Bu in the Records of the Grand Historian. Just look at strategists like Zhang Liang and Chen Ping—men who did not boast of their merit and remained cautious—and at how their descendants ended up. The outcomes were strikingly similar. The Grand Historian wrote it in a few cool words: “the fief was abolished.” It makes one tremble. Hence Laozi said: “When things reach their prime, they begin to age.”
InfoQ: You seem sunny and full of positive energy. In difficult moments, have you ever struggled with thoughts of giving up, doubt, or anxiety? How do you handle those negative emotions? What has kept you going in the face of hardship?
Author: Yes. Many times. Negative emotions are like toxins. You can suppress them and dam them up, but if they accumulate too long they can burst through like a broken dam and sweep everything away. I talk to my family, or I cover myself with a blanket and cry alone. Crying is a very good way to relieve pressure.
The difficulty lies mainly in having to make many compromises. Take the path of technology selection I once embarked on: choosing which technology to use—or to phase out—based on the supply and cultivation of talent. I was reluctant to let certain things go, but there was no choice. After all, a company cannot conquer the world on one person’s strength alone.
In the face of hardship, confidence and hope are the greatest supports. On that foundation you need execution—you have to walk step by step. It is like The Martian: merely believing you will survive is nowhere near enough. You have to get your hands moving, search for solutions, try things, and find answers in failure.
The source of a person’s confidence and hope is their vision. At Traveler’s Circle, our vision was: to bring the colorful world before your eyes and encourage more people to pursue the childhood dream of traveling around the world. It is a bit of a mouthful, but close your eyes, empty your mind, and visualize that vision, and you will find it is something very much worth fighting for. Every person and every family has its own unique vision. These visions give our lives a supporting pillar, and in difficult moments they preserve our hope for the future.
InfoQ: After your first startup failed and before you returned to your old employer, there was a gap. Was that when you began writing The Traveler’s Circle Startup Chronicle? What made you record that period of your life? What was the greatest growth that came out of the failure?
Author: During that period I practically lived at the National Library every day. I thought about the direction of the future while organizing my old diaries. In the process of sorting them out, the idea of a retrospective took root, and I began writing The Traveler’s Circle Startup Chronicle. At first I only meant to write it for myself and my family. After a while I shared it with the Traveler’s Circle team, who found it very interesting and kept encouraging me to continue. So I serialized it on my WeChat public account, my Zhihu column, and Baidu Read.
The greatest growth the failure gave me was maturity—especially mental and emotional maturity. I stopped resisting certain things I had originally been unwilling to do. I reexamined my life and realized that I might well walk this road for the rest of my life. If so, then from that moment on I should be laying the foundation for my future life. The Traveler’s Circle startup was a process that taught me that I don’t know what I don’t know. I was delighted to discover that I still had a great many things to prepare for, learn, and be tempered by. That maturity of mind stopped me from either overrating myself or belittling myself, and made me seize every opportunity to learn and grow.
InfoQ: Because “the desire to go to Silicon Valley and see a bigger world grew stronger and stronger,” you returned to your old employer. That makes it feel as if you were using it as a springboard to Silicon Valley. How do you assess that choice?
Author: I spoke frankly about my thinking with my two bosses, including their bosses. They recognized my abilities, and so they tolerated my ambition. As far as my personal career development was concerned, that choice was not wrong. Of course, you cannot look back: at the time I had several very promising startups to choose from, as well as some large companies in the industry, and I could have started my next venture. Returning to Juniper and transferring to the United States on an L1 visa was by no means smooth sailing. Many times effort alone is not enough; luck also has to stand on your side.
The situation at the time was quite perilous. First, my boss’s boss—the VP—was suddenly relieved of his authority, “over a cup of wine,” as the saying goes. Then I inexplicably began reporting to a boss in the United States (which was a good thing, but I had to communicate my thinking to him all over again). Then came a headcount freeze in the United States. After much difficulty I secured a slot, and my boss’s boss—the VP—approved it, and then that VP was fired. Then my boss’s new boss—the GM/SVP—had just given the green light when he too left. Later, while I was in the visa process, before I had even set foot in the United States, my direct boss left as well. In short, every step was hair-raising. For a while I had settled into an attitude of doing my human best and leaving the rest to Heaven. I paid little attention to the progress of relocation and simply focused on doing the work in front of me well. Fortunately, amid all the danger, my luck was decent and my work was acceptable, so I could quickly win each new boss’s trust.
So once a choice is made, there is no room for regret; you can only press forward as best you can. A friend once asked me, “If you had not managed to get abroad smoothly, what would you have done?” I said I had given myself two years. If I could not work out the relocation within two years, I would accept it. I could tuck that dream away for the time being and come back to it later; I had other dreams to pursue and realize. But life really does not have that many ifs. What if I had not stubbornly insisted on computer science in my college entrance exam and had gone to a completely different school? What if I had worked hard in college to be recommended for graduate study? What if I had chosen Company X instead of Company Y? What if I had confessed my feelings to XXX? Some people get too tangled up in ifs and too immersed in the past. There is really no need. A person’s choices, and the experiences that follow them, in turn shape that person.
InfoQ: After you got to Silicon Valley, did everything there match your expectations? What are the main differences between work and life in China and the United States? What do you think are the deeper reasons behind those differences?
Author: I very much like life in Silicon Valley—blue skies, white clouds, green hills, clear water. Some people say this place has good mountains, good water, and good loneliness. I had seen enough clamor in Beijing; a little loneliness is no bad thing. The biggest difference I feel between work in China and the United States is that Silicon Valley places a somewhat excessive emphasis on work-life balance. I am not saying work-life balance is bad—it is certainly good for the individual, though not necessarily for the company. In “The Remains of the Day (Part III)” I wrote:
“This time back, I met a great many friends, both those I had known and those I had not: some were starters struggling to get off the ground; some were establishers who had already secured their place in the industry; some were investors who appear to others lofty and grand; and some were winners who had achieved great success, had no worries about food or clothing, could have retired with honor, and yet were starting again. No matter which category they belonged to, I deeply admired the drive they brought to the work in front of them. I did a live stream with Qin Chao about “getting one’s body over the wall,” and it ended close to eleven at night. The offices of Fengrui Capital were still brightly lit, with several investors still working intently at their desks. Several times I took part in discussions of major matters at friends’ companies; the meetings were often scheduled for ten at night and ended deep in the night, yet the team was still happily at it. Once I was chatting with a friend at LeEco’s U.S. operation. He said his biggest headache was getting American employees to show more wolf-like aggressiveness and less work-life balance. Speaking of wolf culture, Huawei is the company that talks about it most. Despite such sustained, high-speed growth, it is always thinking about “winter.” China’s telecommunications industry was originally ten or twenty years behind foreign countries, and in mastery of core technologies it had been left behind by who knows how many lengths. Huawei’s approach was: you deploy one person, I deploy three; if one of your people works forty hours a week, I ask my “strivers” to work seventy. I admit that I am a slow bird with inferior skills, so if I pit two hundred hours a week (3 x 70) against your discounted forty hours, with a ratio of time and intelligence input higher than 5:1, how can I fail to catch up? The recent rumor that Cisco is laying off 20 percent of its workforce worldwide is the result of exactly this kind of competition. If you look at comparable companies in the United States—I have not been to Cisco, but I have personal experience of Juniper—you will find that, apart from Chinese engineers, a typical engineer works no more than six hours a day. In an extreme case, someone drifts in around eleven in the morning, reads USA Today in the pantry, has lunch, takes a half-hour walk after lunch, strolls back, attends a few meetings, writes some code, and drifts off around four to pick up the kids and go home; in the evening and on weekends, no one can find him. How is that discounted forty hours supposed to compete?
Silicon Valley startups are somewhat better, but they too lack wolfishness, and product iteration is incredibly slow. Once, during a 1:1 review, I sharply pointed out my colleague’s problems, hoping he could compensate for the slow pace of work with greater commitment. However, as an ABC, he had already been institutionalized by the general “slowness” of American society. In some startups I know, the most dependable members of the R&D team turn out to be Chinese and Indians who have not yet been fully assimilated. That is the atmosphere of the entire American tech scene. Perhaps founders in incubators live as if on the edge of an abyss and on thin ice, and thus work themselves to the bone; but once they raise money and hire their first batch of employees, working oneself to the bone gradually gives way to work-life balance.
Diligence and willingness to work hard may be one major reason Chinese technology and internet companies have been able to develop by leaps and bounds. It may also be an important reason American internet giants such as eBay, Amazon, and Uber have been unable to defeat the “local snakes” in the Chinese market—though they prefer to blame policy, government relations, and conspiracy theories. Even if Facebook and Twitter were not blocked by the Great Firewall, they might still have a hard time beating WeChat and Weibo. Google is the exception, but that is because the supposedly “more Chinese-understanding” domestic Chinese search engines are simply rather bad.”
Differences in daily life are mainly reflected in prices. Basic prices in the United States—clothing, basic food, fruit—are about the same as they were ten years ago. That is hard to imagine in China. Another difference is that this place is a paradise for children: parks everywhere, museums of every kind, libraries within easy reach (within a ten-minute drive of my home I can find four or five fairly large libraries), and all sorts of free activities (free storytelling for children, free open-air musicals, and so on). All of this makes the cultural and intellectual life of the next generation extraordinarily rich. I think this is a marker of a developed country; Beijing still has a considerable way to go in these areas.
InfoQ: How do you define success? Do you consider yourself successful now?
Author: I think success is a very personal definition. If I were to define it, then fulfilling one’s own expectations for oneself, time after time—month after month, or year after year—is a kind of success. In 2014 and 2015 I completed the Beijing Marathon and the Portland Marathon, and I think I was especially successful in those two things. I secured a better living environment for my family; that is success. Without false modesty, I have in many matters fulfilled my expectations for myself, so in those matters I have been successful. Yet I also have many failures: according to the official Palo Alto definition, my family currently lives below the poverty line and is eligible for the low-income housing they provide for “poor people”; for the time being I cannot afford to buy a house; I do not have more time to spend with my children; over the past year my technical growth has not been as great as I expected; my physical condition is on a steady decline; my future career—my own career—still has no timetable; and I do not have a study of my own—in this respect I am not even as well off as I was in Beijing. :)
But I feel that after all these years of ups and downs, my greatest personal success is this: I remain full of hope for the future. I very much like a saying: Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. So, do not fixate on winning or losing; fixate on the scenery along the way. :)
