Zhang Dezhao, CEO of Kechuang Zhixingzhi: This era is the biggest background and the hardest resource

Zhang Dezhao, Chairman & CEO of iWalk
 
PhD, postdoctoral, professor-level senior engineer at Tsinghua University
Tsinghua University Innovation and Entrepreneurship Tutor
The main drafter of a number of national standards for smart cars and the roadmap for the development of smart connected cars
He has led the development of a number of ADAS algorithms and systems and achieved mass production support
Accumulated data experience of more than one million kilometers of road test mileage in Tsinghua University

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Teenager sitting on a street corner fantasy
Although his family was poor as a child, Zhang Dezhao misses the era when he had a lot of time to waste.
 
The classmates walked around the streets and ran around after school vacation. He preferred to sit on a street corner in a daze. He could sit alone from dawn to sunset, and from time to time he would look at the wild ideas in his mind and smile.
Another hobby is reading books. Buying books is a lot of expense for Zhang's family. Fortunately, a classmate in the class opened a bookstore at home. Zhang Dezhao, who never found it difficult to study from school to the college entrance examination, was moved, "I will help you with your homework, your family's Lend me the book." Under the blessing of this "innovative business model", Zhang Dezhao got acquainted with Jin Yong and Gu Long, and changed his life against the sky and acted for the sky in the fantasy rivers and lakes they built.
His two favorite characters are Guo Jing and Li Xunhuan. The former taught him what family and country are. "At that time, I didn't understand why Guo Jing insisted on defending his country. Why is it not beautiful to live in seclusion on Peach Blossom Island? Only when I grew up did I understand what a 'big man' is." ; The latter taught him that there are some things in life that cannot be let go, and for this one, everything else can be let go.
As for childhood dreams, "Guangdong people are more pragmatic, they either get promoted or get rich." In the hearts of Meizhou Dolls of that era, Hong Kong was the center of the universe, and people's life was broken, that is, what Li Ka-shing looked like. Zhang Dezhao's hometown of Dapu County is only a few dozen kilometers away from Li Ka-shing's ancestral home, Chao'an. Hong Kong businessmen give back to the village to build bridges, pave roads, build hospitals and schools.
In the midst of the gongs and drums, Zhang Dezhao had his first dream: "At that time, I thought, I want to become such a person, a rich man who can help the villagers."
With this dream in mind, Zhang Dezhao filled out Tsinghua Economic Management during the college entrance examination, and filled in the automobile major at will when the teacher scolded "you can't only fill in one major".
The evil hand of fate turned the switch. Zhang Dezhao was admitted to the Tsinghua automobile major. He was very open to it.
Unexpectedly, from undergraduate to doctorate, Zhang Dezhao stayed in Tsinghua automobile major for 9 years.
 
What about falling behind? Chase!
 
In 2002, Zhang Dezhao moved to Tsinghua Garden. The landscape before him is full of desolation. It is a huge gap of at least 30 years between China's automobile manufacturing industry and foreign advanced enterprises, and it is a despair that can't be seen at a glance. Especially for the top students majoring in automobiles at Tsinghua University, this desperation is dazzling: a car factory recruits workers, master students, salary 6,000 yuan/month, provides double dormitory, undergraduate students 3,000 yuan/month, provides four-person dormitory, Only doctoral students enjoy the privilege of single-person dormitories; graduates of this major often change careers after graduation, and the Internet and finance are the first choices. The other party offered an annual salary of 200,000; another senior doctoral student entered the car factory after graduation and was responsible for the calibration work. "Undergraduates can do it, which is a complete waste of resources"...
The industry is lagging behind, leading to the decline of talents. Under the grief, Zhang Dezhao has become a rare outlier. With the continuous improvement of research ability, the horizons of global investigation and research have become wider, and most of his peers have felt powerless under the irrefutable huge gap. Torch: "The gap is indeed large, but there is also a large space for catching up. Can this gap be narrowed through the efforts of generations?"
"Some things have to be done by someone." Tsinghua's school leaders and automotive department leaders attach great importance to academic construction in the direction of automobiles. "China is a big automobile country, but not an automobile power. Can Tsinghua students do something? In addition, school leaders often It is said that Tsinghua students want to go to the big stage and go to the places where the motherland needs them most. These two sentences have a great influence on me. "
With fully inspired ambition and full of enthusiasm to serve the motherland, Zhang Dezhao set his ambition and vowed to contribute to the improvement of the technical level of China's auto industry through his own efforts.
In 2011, Zhang Dezhao decided to start a business after graduating with a doctorate. Several like-minded classmates, with the encouragement of their mentors and loneliness, entered the cruel business battlefield in a shirtless state of "almost nothing".
 
The first time to start a business, there are a lot of pitfalls
 
Facts have proved that no one can violate the law of entrepreneurship: those who do not know will suffer losses, and those who do not understand must step on the pit - even if you are a Tsinghua doctor.
 
The lesson of starting a business for the first time was so tragic that Zhang Dezhao only mentioned it in all interviews. Piecing together from the speech clips, it is known that the idea of the first venture was to provide system products such as collision warning, lane departure, 360-degree surround view and automatic parking for car factories.
"People can only grow through pain. During the first time I started a business, I suffered every day, so I grew up faster." Zhang Dezhao said with a smile, "Funding, customer acquisition, sales, management, procurement... I know every word. But I don't know how to do it."
I know there is finance, but I can't even tell the difference between a cashier and an accountant; I think financing is a simple math problem; I realize what it means to be able to negotiate a business at a wine table. Drunk headaches...
In 2014, Zhang Dezhao changed back to the boy who was in a daze on the streets of his hometown and did not say a word all day long. After busying with trivial matters every morning, he started the self-closing mode in the afternoon and thought hard about the future. "The core topic is: Being a supplier to a car factory is not only tiring, but also faces the pressure of lowering prices every year. Where is the new model, what does it look like, and what should we do next?”
The final answer he found was: independently explore the road to commercialization of autonomous driving technology.
 
Second Entrepreneurship: Four Principles Anchor Strategic Direction
Ichiro was founded in 2015, when unmanned driving and autonomous driving had not yet become the darling of capital. "We really have no background, but this era is our biggest background." Zhang Dezhao recalled.
At the start-up stage of the company, the technology-based entrepreneur chooses the model of "touching the scene with the project and taking the service content as the nutrient pool for product precipitation", but the smart traveler is born out of the predecessor of the project system, and deeply feels that this model is very important in the automobile industry. The industry is not sustainable, so it took the initiative to cut off the umbilical cord, and within the first year, it started literally behind closed doors.
Closing the door is not closing the eyes. Based on Zhang Dezhao's profound insights into the field of autonomous driving, the Imox team, which started the second business, has long established a clear strategic positioning and strategic principles, which Zhang Dezhao summarized into four points:
First of all, the technology is accessible, and the standard for technical accessibility is to remove the security officer. "As long as the security officer is still needed, it is not a really big commercialization."
Second, the market size is large enough. In Zhang Dezhao's view, the complexity of each scenario, the overall investment, and the penetration rate achieved within a certain period of time are all equivalent. Therefore, the larger the market size, the greater the commercial returns. The higher it is (the author's note: the successful application of "scale invariance" is not common, focus on sharing).
Third, social infrastructure must be improved, such as laws and regulations, insurance, and public acceptance.
Finally, if driverless technology can really help this industry, Zhang Dezhao has been deeply involved in the automotive industry for many years. , rather than the expertise in various industries, therefore, I Mobility hopes to use driverless technology to empower traditional industries, rather than subvert them.”
Start-ups and founding teams will inevitably have different opinions in the process of reaching a strategic consensus. For example, in order to take into account commercialization and data accumulation, Zhang Dezhao decided to "reduce dimensionality and develop", positioning the scene application in a low-speed closed space, and gearing up for technology that is full of confidence The team is obviously radical in terms of strategic orientation, hoping to do it in one step and do unmanned driving on open roads.
"I understand everyone's feelings. For example, it is difficult for everyone to accept Dr. Tsinghua as a preschool teacher. But decision makers must not be confused." Zhang Dezhao, who has experienced setbacks and baptism, showed his responsibility as a leader, "I take on the greatest responsibility. Responsibility, take responsibility for decision-making results, and avoid wasting too much time on arguments.”
All roads lead to Rome, but the consuming schedules are short and long. Accurate positioning, firm decision-making, and restrained technical risk orientation have helped Zhixing quickly grow from an unknown industry newcomer to a recognized leading player in the industry. In 2016, a car factory found a listed company to build a car, and I-Mobile participated as a spare tire and escort. At the exhibition site, the car of the listed company lay in the nest every two hours, and the car of the I-mobile had zero failure and zero error within 10 days.
Fight to fame.
 
From the combination of soft and hard to data is king
 
Looking back on the development of Zhixer, Zhang Dezhao has shown great strategic judgment. To evaluate the level of strategic judgment, first look at the choice of direction when driving into a no-man’s land and blind field of view, and secondly, how to identify core variables and accurately iterate in the complex noise.
In the first two years of its development, I-Walker mainly focused on software technology, but in the process of development, Zhang Dezhao gradually realized several barriers that were difficult to overcome: first, the integration capabilities of customer car factories were generally insufficient; second, the To B wave was still In the early days, domestic customers' awareness of paying for software has not been fully activated. "Many people think that if you are software, you should be free."
In order to achieve end-to-end function delivery and cater to customers' mental cognition that "hardware is only valuable", in 2017, iMobility officially decided to launch a hardware product strategy. "After I really did it, I found that there is a long-term process of mutual optimization and mutual coupling between software and hardware. Sometimes the software can't handle it, and only the hardware can be improved. Sometimes the hardware can't handle it, and the algorithm can only be optimized. The integration of software and hardware is the right way."
In the past few years, as the application of artificial intelligence technology has become more and more mature, Zhixing realized the importance of data, and the strategy has been upgraded again, "We have developed a closed-loop data system for autonomous driving, which is composed of algorithms, computing power, and data. The triathlon of the autonomous driving brain in the AI era. The data part of Imox covers the most scenarios in the entire industry in the country, including both open structured road scenarios and semi-closed unstructured scenarios. Although algorithms, computing power It is very important, but we believe that the core competitiveness in the future will not be in algorithms. In the field of autonomous driving, everyone’s algorithms and technical architectures will converge, and data must determine the outcome.”
Incorporating data into the core elements of the strategy has had a very intuitive impact on the product direction and scene selection of Ichiro. There are only two ways to obtain data in the autonomous driving industry. One is to rely on self-supporting test teams to obtain data, but Zhang Dezhao believes that this model is expensive and slow. “The cost of each car is about one million, plus the annual operation. cost, and the marginal effect decays very quickly, and it is difficult to scale in quantity.”
The second method depends on the actual use of the product, that is, at the beginning, a low-version software is opened to the customer. In the actual process, the customer continuously returns data and iterates the algorithm through OTA (Over-the-Air Technology, over-the-air technology). The way to improve the functions for customers, so as to obtain more corresponding application scenarios, data and algorithms to achieve a positive spiral.
Zhixing chose the second one. One of the core principles of decision-making is profitability. "We are a commercial organization, and we must consider profitability. The commercialization of multiple scenarios means lower costs and faster access to richer scenarios. data, which means the future survival of self-driving companies like ours.”
Based on this judgment, the scene selection field of Zhixing has broadened a lot.
 
Accumulate grain, protracted war, the countryside surrounds the city
When it comes to autonomous driving, most people think of passenger cars and travel services. However, in the eyes of Zhixer, autonomous driving technology can just broaden the business boundaries of "driving". In addition to the travel industry, sanitation cleaning, logistics and distribution, fire protection, border security , national defense operations... are high-value scenarios with a broad base and depth.
Zhang Dezhao vividly described the travel scene as "urban", while other scenes were the base and granary of the I Mobility. Having read "Mao Xuan", he planned the development route of "rural encircling the city" in the autonomous driving industry.
The two bases that were initially defined were sanitation and logistics. The scenes were all over the country and the scale of the industry was huge. However, when the logistics industry expanded, it encountered some problems of "not suitable for accounting", so it turned its direction in time and finally opened up in the field of special vehicles. Soil, stabilized the situation.
The two major bases of sanitation and special vehicles can not only continuously generate data, but also bring positive profit contribution. Zhang Dezhao pays great attention to the hematopoietic ability, which stems from his full understanding of the capital market and the autonomous driving industry. "The cycle of capital withdrawal is generally 5-8 years, but the autonomous driving industry is a marathon and is destined to run for a long time. Hematopoiesis, when the capital decides to withdraw, there will be a lot of troubles, and even take the direction of development, which is what I don’t want to see.”
Under the insistence of Zhang Dezhao, Zhixingzhi had been in a state of slight profit before 2018, and suffered book losses due to rapid development in the following years, but its hematopoietic ability has remained in the first echelon in the industry.
 
Corporate Governance:
Struggle ≠ labor, struggle must be fruitful
As we all know, technological innovation enterprises often mean that management and governance are difficult. As the head of a high-tech enterprise in a period of rapid development with over 400 employees, Zhang Dezhao has his own unique understanding of corporate governance.
First of all, don't let the strugglers suffer. For grass-roots employees, talk more about actual interests and less about promoting style, so as not to let strugglers suffer, "but struggle is not equal to labor, and creating valuable results is the real struggle. The management and employees must reach a consensus on the output of results. Rewards and punishments are clear at a glance.”
Secondly, fight more wars, everyone has challenges, and everyone goes to the battlefield. "If you don't fight, you will have problems if you stay at home."
Third, for the core team, Zhang Dezhao believes in Feng Lun's "ranking, dividing gold and silver, and discussing honor and disgrace". In order to be seated, only one person can take up a key position, and everyone performs their own duties; in terms of distribution of gold and silver, Zhang Dezhao never cares about personal income, and gives priority to satisfying Brother Paoze as much as possible; in terms of honor and disgrace, in Zhang Dezhao’s opinion, it is The most overlooked point is that "the core team is a dragon and a phoenix, and the requirements of life are not only interests, but also honor." Therefore, he pays great attention to the accumulation of personal honors and personal achievements of core team members, and combines the achievements obtained by the Zhi Mo team. Honors are distributed among entrepreneurial partners on a rotating basis.
 
Hope to help more teenagers in the future
In 2021, Zhixing delivered a dazzling commercial transcript, with revenue three times that of the previous year. Specifically on the business side, after taking the order of 100 Robotaxi for T3 travel, it also finalized the order for 100+ xPatrol unmanned patrol vehicles. At the same time, Zhixer also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with GAC Research Institute, and also has project progress with BAIC.
At the same time, at the Beijing Winter Olympics, Ichiro was selected as a service provider. 3 unmanned vehicles equipped with the autonomous brain of I-Walkers-Robotaxi, Woxiaobai sweeper, and large sweeper have all entered the Winter Olympic Park, becoming an important force in the 2022 Winter Olympics security team, showing the world The charm of China's "Science and Technology Winter Olympics".
There have been frequent reports of good news, and Zhixing is also known as the "representative of the leapfrog growth model" in the industry, but Zhang Dezhao did not shake his strategic determination. "The judgment of the marathon has not changed, and the conclusion that it has only run 5 kilometers has not changed."
After walking out for almost half his life, Zhang Dezhao still retains the same background in his heart: he still likes to read, he still hopes to realize his childhood dream, and cut the ribbon for the school and library he donated and built in the midst of gongs and drums.
Of course, there is also the dream of becoming a successful businessman. "One day when I chatted with my lover, I said that I still have a chance to become a business tycoon because I have an accent. She asked me, why do you want to be a business reporter (laughs)?"