Kechuangren · Younuo Technology COO Sun Gang: I can't find the right answer to the wrong question, and seek a beautiful future where everything can be seen

Sun Gang, UINO, COO
Graduated from Tsinghua University. After graduating from university in 1994, he joined IBM China as a customer service engineer; joined Cisco China in 1998 as a consultant engineer, senior service manager, etc.; left Cisco in 2008 and successively served as vice president of Daktronics China and vice president of GDS; In 2013, he joined UINO Technology and embarked on the road of entrepreneurship.

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18 years of career from hardware engineer to vice president
In 1994, Sun Gang, who graduated from Tsinghua University, spent many sleepless nights in anxious waiting. Although he was born in a top university, he was only a pending seat in IBM's application sequence. Fortunately, the torture did not last long, and Sun Gang took the first step in his career and life at the company he wanted.
In his 18-year career, Sun Gang has walked very steadily and rarely detours: During his 4 years at IBM, Sun Gang started from the installation of mainframe hardware and peripherals - "it's actually repairing printers" - and grew into a technology that can take charge on his own. Support engineer; jumped to Cisco, spent 10 years traversing the technical positions from pre-sales to after-sales, grew into the first senior service consultant in China, and finally jumped to the management level, even during the maternity leave of a certain airborne boss, experienced A few months as the role of senior service boss in China.
This experience, dubbed by Sun Gang as role-playing, made him deeply feel the gap between himself and a mature manager, "Business thinking is lacking, and I find that I only know what business is, but not why it is. Such". In order to further improve himself, since 2008, he has successively become the second-in-command of Daktronics China, a Singapore-listed company (complex solution sales and full-chain management of advanced services and overall company operations), and vice president of GDS (responsible for cloud computing). Construction of the Computing Division from zero to one).
At this stage of growth, the ability is gradually complete, the vision is fully opened, and the fire of entrepreneurship is naturally ignited - especially, there are friends who spare no effort to fan the flames: Chen Aohan, Sun Gang's friend who has worked with Cisco for many years, with a man named Ma Lie's new friend, several friends who use 3D games to develop production management systems, came to the door.

Hard-core thinking about people, machines, and the future, and finally decide to sell a house and start a business has a classic image in the field of technology entrepreneurship: holding a hammer to find a nail, and metaphorically looking for a scene with functions. Most of the time, these words are ironic.
However, when the thinking intensity and depth are sufficient, companies that grow based on deductive methods tend to have a higher ceiling than those derived from empirical methods (such as benchmarking in Europe and the United States, old bottles of new wine, etc.).
The founding team of Younuo Technology is really outstanding in thinking ability. Of course, according to Sun Gang, who is habitually humble (even a little Versailles), it is because "people are generally too old, people in their 40s can't afford to lose, they can only Think carefully."
Initially, Sun Gang and Chen Aohan did not directly join Ma Lie's team, but contributed their wisdom in the form of external brains. The theme of the three people's brainstorming has been extended from "How much imagination space does a 3D visualization system engine have" to hardcore and even metaphysical topics, such as "Is the future world dominated by humans or machines?"
"With the deepening of thinking, there is a consensus on the value of 'the digital world is presented in a way that humans can understand', but if the future is a world dominated by machines, then the value of enhancing human understanding like 'visualization' , will dissipate and disintegrate sooner or later, and we are all reluctant to do things that point to nothingness.”
In the end, the three reached a consensus: for a long time in the future, people will be the main body of decision-making and the power controller of the physical world.
At the end of 2013, after a long period of deliberation, Sun Gang officially joined Younuo Technology, which had been established for more than a year. In order to raise partnership funds, Sun Gang, 43, sold his house in Beijing.

▲The first office of Younuo Technology has a car wash shop on the bottom floor and a foot room on the third floor. The unique pattern of "washing and washing" makes many customers discouraged: "Hey, am I going wrong?"

The computer room scene creates a lighthouse. Customers find real problems and insist on real value. "Although I worked for 18 years before starting my business, most of the real inspiration and gains come from the 10 years of starting my business."
As mentioned above, Younuo Technology is a corporate entity based on in-depth thinking and deduction at its root. Its outstanding strategic judgment has helped Younuo to pass one entrepreneurial threshold after another, such as: the choice of launching the market.
In what scenarios can data visualization technology create value? This scenario requires: sufficiently complex, rich enough data, and having sufficient management and decision-making value after visualization... After repeated investigations and deductions, Younuo has finalized two experimental scenarios: visual management of petrochemical plants, and bank data centers. , and officially lock the latter as the main scene in the startup phase after practice.
"The process pipelines of petrochemical plants are complex enough, but they lack process standardization. The process details of different manufacturers and different factories vary greatly. The data center is first and foremost a complex management system, from wind, fire and hydropower to IT hardware to IT software, Management software, secondly, data-rich and lack of unified management, and finally, the data center has a unified standard. In this field, we are confident to greatly improve management efficiency.”
After a simple market size calculation, "the national data center management visualization has a scale of about 8 billion yuan, and the team is very excited and feels that this field is suitable as a start-up scenario." In 2012, the world's first data center visualization product: DCV data center management visualization system officially entered the market. This product helped Younuo to create 40+ head office customers such as ICBC, China Construction Bank, and China Merchants Bank in just two years.
Whether or not to build a beacon customer is a life-and-death battle for To B start-ups, especially for Younuo: "Large customers are not optional, but a must. If you can't win the bank's data center, it is hard to imagine more value. In the visual management scenario, Younuo may die prematurely. But we believe that the problem we want to solve is a real problem - what is a real problem, this is the eternal topic of the core team of Younuo.”

▲Younuo Technology’s current office space, cyberpunk digital industrial style, and the founding team’s ultimate pursuit of aesthetics are implemented in countless details. Judging from the results, the strategic positioning based on accurate value analysis helped You Nuo to successfully overcome the calamity. Of course, the process is not that simple. For Unitech, which is always in the wilderness and has no template benchmarks in front of it, the most common question is: what you do is worthless. As an example, as a visualization product, what degree of visual aesthetics should be pursued? Many people have suggested that you don't need to invest too much resources to improve the details of "beauty", but the founding team of Younu has always firmly believed that beauty is a precious value, "the progress of human society and the importance of 'beauty'. Therefore, the process of entering the digital age must also have the driving force of aesthetic progress.”
Strategic upgrade, horizontal empowerment. In the field of data center management, the Sun Gangs began to seek a new round of strategic upgrade, exploring a larger potential market and a wider range of scene values. Various parks first entered the vision of Younuo, " A data center is a data center park, so is it possible to incubate standard visual management products in complex management scenarios such as hospitals and prisons?”
The attempt in this direction did not last for too long. Just like the water test in the petrochemical plant, although hospitals and prisons have certain common elements, there are too many individualized businesses in the details, which leads to a development route related to Younuo. Multiple-choice question: As a small company, do you want to exhaust the scenarios and pursue in-depth services in the field, or expand horizontally and follow a standardized product route?
The founding team started a new round of long exams. Interestingly, this time they decided to look for answers from their peers. After the commercial success of Younuo, a number of companies in the field of data visualization quickly emerged, and there are many plagiarists, but Sun Gang likes it. He is based on a simple value judgment: the more people in an industry, the greater the value. , great potential.
At the critical juncture of strategic decision-making, the survival status of friends and merchants does provide an important reference for Younuo. For example, the product forms seem to be similar but the development strategies are different. Some of them choose to be vertical to a certain field. It generally shows the characteristics of project system and high customization; in other failed cases, Younuo found that "visualization seems to be a thin layer, but there are many key links with technical content, and some companies die in visualization. modeling this part."
Taking the competitors as the mirror, Younuo has a clearer and clearer positioning of its core advantages: comprehensive visualization capabilities, which is in line with the original vision of Younuo "to help people better understand and manage the new world of the Internet of Everything". , highly consistent. "We need to find a method and product with universal guiding significance to serve more people." Therefore, UNO Technology decided to bid farewell to the initial vertical strategy of serving finished products in a certain field, and turned to tools that empower customers with visualization capabilities. Product horizontal strategy.
In 2014, Younuo launched the first product after the strategic upgrade, and also the first IoT visualization tool product. After a series of highly interactive and immersive market detonation activities that are quite avant-garde even today, Younuo has successfully entered a new strategic trajectory and achieved rapid development in the next 8 years.
In 2016, completed 72 million A round of financing, Shanghai Jinpu and Lava Capital invested.
In 2017, released the data center digital management platform Tarsier, and obtained 120 million Series B financing from Yunfeng Fund.
In 2018, ThingJS, a 3D visualization development tool platform, IBV, a visualization product for smart parks, IOC, a visualization product for intelligent operations, and CityBuilder, a 3D map construction tool, were launched.
In 2020, it will undertake the State Grid Winter Olympics guarantee project and become a strategic partner of platforms such as Huawei, H3C, and DataV. Completed the B+ round of 250 million financing, led by Broadband Capital and Chenshan Capital, and followed by Dongfang Fuhai and Hang Seng Electronics.
In 2021, the ThingJS-X zero-code digital twin delivery tool platform will be released and won the "IOTE Gold Award" innovative product.
In 2022, release the one-stop digital twin tool platform Sen Factory ThingStudio; launch the IoT Metaverse platform, IoT Senyouhui; complete the C round of 300 million+ financing, led by China Internet Investment Fund, and the old shareholder Chenshan Capital, etc. Overweight, Taikang, Kailian Capital, GLP Hidden Mountain Capital followed suit.
Kechuang people: Who came up with the name Momodai?
Sun Gang: Well, we all got up together (laughs). The Younuo team is willing to devote energy to the naming. For example, what is the name of what we do? At first, we called it a digital twin. Later, we suddenly thought that digital twins seem to be better. After searching online, we found that someone has proposed this concept. They The plan is more ambitious and includes this part of what we do.
The strategy is clear, and detours are not fatal. The speed of production talents is the key bottleneck. Science and technology people: As an enterprise at the forefront of exploration, how does Younuo reduce the risks caused by trial and error?
Sun Gang: First, ensure that the cash flow on the book is at least 3 months. Second, continue to improve the ability to mine real problems and real scenarios to ensure that they serve real scenarios. Third, pay attention to the financial returns of all products and services, and live a happy life. important.
Kechuang people: In the 10 years of Younuo, what is the most impressive decision-making mistake or the biggest challenge you have encountered?
Sun Gang: Younuo planned a complete strategic development path around 2013, and has persisted until today. That map has been repeatedly proven to be relatively correct, so there is no major mistake in principle.
Detours are inevitable. For example, we think that the technology we have mastered can create a valuable product, but later found that the problem of the value of this scene is not because there is no product, but because of customer perception, which is the wrong problem. get the correct answer.
To say that the biggest challenge is actually the speed of producing talents, which is the biggest bottleneck in the development of Younuo. From more than 20 people to more than 1,400 people, it is difficult to solve both management problems and talent quality problems.
In the end, we found that the core priority is corporate culture, a corporate culture that is valuable, feasible, and strong enough. "Value, professionalism, diligence, humility, sincerity, enthusiasm", after 10 years of development, we have refined these 6 key words as the values of Younuo, and these words have a strong logical relationship with each other: for example, value providing Judgment standard, professional provides goals, and refinement is the action to achieve the goal of professional based on the value benchmark. Younuo has always worked hard to implement corporate values and avoid them becoming slogans on the wall.
Building a mature corporate culture also provides us with core principles for cultivating cadres. It can help cadres recognize and understand problems and take more correct behaviors. The behavior of cadres itself is the consolidation and dissemination of corporate culture. To focus on company building is to focus on cadre training. Of course, core competencies are important, and corporate culture is more valuable to the organization.
Future Planning Turns Younuo into a Real Good Company Tech Innovator: What is the future strategic plan of Younuo?
Sun Gang: We can see it clearly now. By opening up our tool-based software capabilities, we can help more people meet the demand for digital twin visualization in their areas of expertise, and help them better understand and manage the new digital world. And more opportunities derived from it are the core value of perseverance.
In addition, in this process, Younuo must recognize the diversity of needs, the market is stratified, there are large customers and small customers, some customers only need tools, and some customers need to turn key and move in with a bag. We need to provide some Customers provide more thorough service, which is also a position for the future.
Kechuangren: What plans do you have for your personal future growth and development, whether in life or career?
Sun Gang: The trend of this era is not optimistic, whether it is roll or uncertainty, such as the continuously delayed retirement age, I am ready to fight until I am seventy or eighty years old, and of course I cannot rule out early retirement. I even screwed things up (laughs).
There is a high probability that I will continue to work in Younuo. In the companies I have experienced, IBM's management strength and system rationality make you feel that it is a living body that can grow, develop, and make blood by itself. Starting from IBM, I have The rank of the company is getting higher and higher, but the maturity of the enterprise is getting lower and lower. Younuo is still a developing child, and needs more nutrition and stumbling to achieve growth.
I want to work with Aohan, Ma Lie and other friends to make Younuo a good company that can create greater value.