When the ideal rises again

In 1994, the golden age of cinema, pirated copies had flourished enough to keep pace with Hollywood, and everyone was shocked when "True Lies" and "Forrest Gump" appeared on every dorm computer.

The wind blowing on Xiaoping’s southern tour two years ago had already bred into a torrent that year, and everyone from Mohe to Hainan Island was talking about one thing: going to the sea to make a fortune. Unlike the "Daoye" and "Wanyuanhu" of the 1980s, this time, all intellectuals took action: Since the ideal doesn’t work, let’s go into business! They gave themselves comfort:"Seize your own destiny."

The complete commercialization transformation of Chinese society began from then on. Opening advertising companies, opening various factories, making steel, making medicine, prospecting for minerals, digging for oil, engaging in real estate…

In that year, Ma Yun first heard about the Internet, Ma Ma was working on paging software development in Shenzhen Runxun, Lei Jun had just joined Kingsoft, and Liu and Liu were still in college, setting up a stall to make money in their spare time. These people who shocked the world 20 years later still don’t know what their future destiny is. Younger, Wang Xing, Zhang Yiming, are still in middle school.

Three years later, "The Shawshank Redemption" appeared on street stalls in Beijing under the name "The Thrill of 1995" – no one knew it was also shot in 1994 – and for the next two decades, it shone brightly, killing generations.

These people watch Hollywood blockbusters while watching the Internet transform China.The list of the rich list is constantly changing, with six of the top 10 in 2019 becoming those who engage in the Internet.

One day, my neighbor Lao Guo drank half a bottle of red wine and said, "Under the torrent of the times, there will always be some lucky ones who will be selected." Her daughter-in-law glanced at him and said quietly, "But you have to climb through the eighteenth layer of hell first, just like Andy."

Lao Guo’s daughter-in-law was a beautiful young dancer who had played hot roles in several obscure TV dramas. When she met Lao Guo, Lao Guo was working as a marketing consultant in a major central enterprise. The first year, Lao Guo’s company went bankrupt and was kicked out by his ex-wife. Since then, Lao Guo no longer touches the Internet and no longer dreams of starting a business. He only does two things: accompany his daughter-in-law and earn money to buy a house. At most, he has 20 suites in Beijing and a string of shops. In 2016, they immigrated to the United States with their 6-year-old son. Every time he came back for a drink, he would say: "This is the end of my life". Everyone got used to it and laughed.

Beginning in 1996, a few Internet entrepreneurs, like Lao Guo, mostly followed the American style: drinking American wine, copying American models, and taking money from American investors. An old fruit disappeared, and more young people rushed up. They have a common label: knowledge hero. Open mouth Silicon Valley, close mouth Wall Street, English words often pop up.

Li Xiang is an obvious outlier. In 2000, when Li Xiang graduated from high school, China officially joined the WTO, and the golden decade of economic take-off began. On the one hand, there was the multiplier development of import and export trade, and on the other hand, the rapid development of urbanization. PCs, digital products, real estate, automobiles and other goods quickly entered urban households, and the opportunity of vertical Internet was bred in it.

This child who grew up in Shijiazhuang has seized this precious decade. But he does not have the advantages that Internet predecessors such as Zhang Chaoyang, Ma Yun, and Li Yanhong have: international vision + knowledge reserve. These advantages are almost decisive, helping them quickly connect with Shanghai’s foreign capital and management system. When they stand in the center of the stage as intellectual heroes, Li wants to silently climb the grid at home with his friends.

His English was not good, he did not go to college, and Shijiazhuang could not help him gain a broader perspective, knowledge, and connections. Even if he was not compared with those famous people, he had no advantage compared with countless young people of the same age in Beijing and Shanghai. But this young child, from assembling the first computer in the first year of high school to writing reviews of the use of various electronic products, showed two obvious characteristics:Unusual sensitivity to the product and a passion for continued effort.

The limitations of his vision and the lack of external resources have instead influenced his nature.Independent, focused, and furthering.In addition, he did not go to college, but made a living by selling literature. He found a way to express himself that would both attract users and suit him.Simple, direct, concrete, and authentic.Rhetoric does not exist, nor is it necessary, just 1234.

These characteristics have followed him closely for 20 years and have not changed at all. Interestingly, these characteristics happen to echo the basic values and methodologies of the Internet world. After the third volume of "Three-Body Problem" was published in 2010, a word in it was picked out by Ali’s people and later spread all over the streets: Dimensionality reduction strike.

But this fancy statement had nothing to do with Li Xiang, who neither knew nor cared at the time. He moved forward by instinct and nature – after earning 100,000 yuan for writing reviews, he persuaded his parents to support him not to go to college and used the money to start Bubble.com.

In 2000, it was a crucial step in his growth process: he arrived in Beijing. He went from a small mountain to a large mountain range. In this mountain range, there are countless mountains waiting for him. This young man born in time is about to start his 20-year journey of "grassroots counterattack".

In the early autumn of 2016, at the dinner table of Prince Gong’s mansion, Qin Zhi drank red wine and slowly talked about his relationship with Autohome, as if he was talking about someone else. This jade-faced scholar who graduated from Harvard and came back from overseas knew the rules of business operation and the cruelty and coldness of capital."I can’t fight them. In fact, I left from Li Xiang, and the ending is set."

As early as 2011, Li Xiang had the idea of leaving. At that time, Autohome had been sold to Telstra Telecom, and the founding team had lost its controlling stake in the company. Qin Zhi stopped him: "We have to go public and achieve a market value of 5 billion dollars."

Autohome was a crucial second step in Li Xiang’s growth process. The mistakes he made during the Bubble Net era became his teaching materials, and new and more challenging courses would also emerge during this period.

In 2005, Autohome was founded, and in 2007 it became the first in the industry’s traffic, leaving the car channels of the four major portals far behind. "At that time, the manufacturers held activities and did not bring them to play, and their editors had to take pictures of the cars and create the picture library that no one liked." In the summer of 2016, in the cafe of Sohu Building, Lao Yan said, "In 2007, everyone came back and found that the situation was wrong. They wanted to catch up, but they couldn’t catch up."

In three years, Li Xiang led a group of college students who had just left school to fight three battles: the battle of real pictures, the battle of updating time, and the battle of being the first to publish. In the first battle in 2005, going to the 4S store to take real model pictures instead of publishing the official pictures provided by the manufacturer made Autohome rise from obscurity to the top five in the industry traffic. In the second battle in 2006, articles were updated every morning and articles were updated every weekend, rising from fifth to third. In the third battle in 2007, after participating in the manufacturer’s test drive activity, the test drive manuscript was released on the same day, rather than three days later, rising from third to first.

In 2013, when Li Xiang reviewed this paragraph, he said: "Would you go to the 4S store to take pictures? Would you wake up early every morning to update and work an extra day on weekends? Would you not drink and chat after the test drive, but go back to the hotel to write? These are the simplest and most basic jobs that every ordinary person can do. The question is: are you willing to do it, are you going all out and persevering?"

This experience has strengthened Li Xiang and his team’s belief in one thing:Independent, dedicated, and diligent, achieving 100 points for 60 points can win users, and ordinary people can also achieve extraordinary things.This spirit of the king of the mountain has been firmly etched into the soul of the founding team of Autohome, and has deeply influenced their future choices.

In 2006, Xue Manzi’s investment allowed Li Xiang to connect with the capital for the first time, and it also helped him open up his international vision for the first time. Then, Qin Zhi, who had returned from overseas, was recommended to Li Xiang by Xue Manzi, who brought modern business management knowledge. In 2007, Qin Zhi became the CEO of Autohome, and Li Xiang became the president and reported to Qin Zhi.

This paragraph was later praised repeatedly, saying that Li Xiang had high emotional intelligence and a heart. In fact, this paragraph is exactly the same as the story in which UC received investment from Lei Jun and introduced Yu Yongfu to join. During the process of fighting monsters and upgrading, the two originally ordinary teenagers found that their weapons and skills were not enough, and their strong self-motivation and desire to learn made them convinced to become students in front of the two intellectual brothers and established a friendship. It is not so much that they have high emotional intelligence, but they are "the innocence of young people", but the value and scarcity of this simplicity are often misunderstood.

This should have been a beautiful story. Li Xiang built a large mountain and gave the team its soul. Qin Zhilai established a modern management and operation system, which made the company commercialize quickly. But the black swan came, and the 2008 financial crisis almost killed Autohome.

Just as Li wanted to look around for investors, his partners sought to kick him out of the board. If Xue Manzi hadn’t stopped him, Li Xiang might have been out at that time. Modern Business and Modern Capital taught the teenager a thrilling lesson. In 2009, Li Xiang and Qin Zhi decided to sell 55% of their shares to Telstra, which was valued at only $150 million.

In December 2013, Autohome listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with an opening market value of 3.17 billion US dollars, which means that CEM’s investment has increased by 20 times in four years. After the IPO, Li Xiang held 4.9% of the shares, Qin Zhi held 3%, and the largest shareholder CEM held 66.2%, and enjoyed more than 51% of the voting rights. Before this, CEM President Chen Yongzheng began to serve as the chairperson of Autohome’s board of directors in 2012.

In June 2015, Li Xiang set his sights on a bigger hill. He left Autohome, founded it, and took a stake. Qin Zhi chose to stay and continue to fight. In April 2016, when CEM tried to sell most of its stake to Ping An Insurance, Qin Zhi joined Sequoia, Hillhouse and other institutions to organize a buyer group to privatize Autohome, but ultimately failed. Autohome fell into Ping An’s pocket, and a management purge soon took place.

Today’s Autohome has a market value of 10 billion dollars. But those who built the country have left. This experience not only made Li want to achieve financial freedom, but also taught him a lot: how to make products, make revenue, and interact; how to operate a company systematically; how to deal with capital. He said frankly:

"If you start a business again, you must have control, no matter what method you use."

NIO DAY in December 2017 was a major event in the history of modern automobile marketing in China. NIO chartered planes and high-speed rail to transport up to 8,000 people to Beijing Wukesong Stadium. That night, one of my automotive friends, Lao Peng, stood in the aisle on the second floor and watched the scene of the tsunami below, slapping the bar and muttering to himself: "Damn, how will we play in the future?"

When Li Bin and Li Xiang, a pair of happy enemies who have been "in love and killing each other" for 10 years, took the stage to release ES8 as the founder and co-founder of NIO, the two were heroic and eloquent, which not only aroused the screams of the little girl, but also shocked the industry:Is time really about to start over?

In the summer of 2018, an auto boss asked: "What do you think of Li Bin?" The boss cared about Li Bin to find out what new tricks he was up to. Since then, the golden age of China’s auto market has passed, and the consecutive years of growth have disappeared, followed by continuous declines. On September 12 of that year, NIO went public on the New York Stock Exchange, with a market value of $11.90 billion that day.

If netizens were to vote for the 2018 Handsome Entrepreneur of the Year, Li Bin would definitely be elected. Everything is a top match, from investors to teams, from products to technologies, from brands to end points, from education to looks, Li Bin in 2018 is like a god descended from the earth and came out of nowhere. The name of his daughter-in-law Wang Yizhi also spread all over the world, and I don’t know how many young girls hated him.

Li Xiang obviously doesn’t have this charm. After NIO DAY in 2017, he disappeared from the public eye. He didn’t have a top match. Whether it was investors or teams, including offices and R & D centers, the initial configuration could only be considered simple. The news from the car and home was not good either: the SEV project was discontinued, and the first card was blind; another medium and large-scale one that was being prepared at the same time was also surrounded by buzz. "Both products are on the side of the sword", a technical boss said, "General Volt has proved that what will the future of the extended range type be? Nonsense!" That tone was exactly the same as the Chinese CEO scolding the extended range type "nonsense" two days ago.

He met with a lot of investors, almost all institutions, and everyone has no bottom line about the range extension. There are also suggestions within the shareholders, or we should also develop a pure electric one to facilitate financing. Li Xiang was silent.

"Persisting in doing the right thing, not the easy thing, that’s his value"Huang Mingming of Mingshi Capital said, "It is relatively easy to make pure electricity, and investors like to hear it, but Li wants to say that I make products for users, not for investors." Huang Mingming chose to firmly support Li Xiang, not only because Autohome proved Li Xiang’s deep insight into users, but also because the Mingshi team has done a lot of research, which proves that Li Xiang is right this time: in China’s current environment, extended range is indeed the best solution.

But this did not convince other investment institutions. In 2019, the situation reversed, and the economic downturn and the bursting of the asset bubble compounded, which made the investment community stay away from the new car-making forces. Zhang Wei of Cornerstone Capital wrote publicly that "they did not create any new value", which prompted He Xiaopeng to respond strongly. Li Bin was caught in a serious crisis. First, the ES8 recall, followed by the collapse of the Shanghai base. Yizhuang and Huzhou state-owned investment banks let him go. By October, NIO’s share price had fallen to only $1.30, and the company’s cash on paper was only enough to last for four months.

This was a year when the Grim Reaper lingered by the door. Everyone’s eyes were focused on Li Bin, not paying much attention to Li Xiang’s difficulties.

Without Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming, can Li Xiang survive this hurdle? The C round of $500 million financing in August 2019 is very crucial for Li Xiang: with this money, he can build the car. Huang Mingming said: "Only super entrepreneurs like Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming dare to pull the trigger at that time." Those who dare to pull the trigger, of course, Li Xiang himself, "Fortunately, the stock price of Autohome is OK, and I still have some bullets to use." This round, he is all in.

In the fall, it was finally offline, and investors and the media began to watch it one by one. Users who placed orders finally got their hands on the real car. It was a sensation, and the comments you could hear were "It’s too tm to drive!"

With the growth of orders and deliveries, the investment share of Li Auto began to become popular. By June 2020, it had reached the level of "breaking the head and not grabbing it". And Wang Xing and his Meituan continued to spend five hundred million dollars. With the help of pulling out the knife a year ago, now Wang Xing has clearly expressed his desire to obtain more shares of Li Auto.

"Many people underestimate Li Xiang. I believe that in the future, he will become a top entrepreneur in China, and he is an entrepreneur who did not go to college… He is different." He told analysts in the earnings call, and his tone was more relaxed when he said whether to eat in his vegetable garden:"Those friends who think Li Xiang’s ideal is to operate a hundred billion-dollar Li Auto, you still underestimate it by an order of magnitude."

In recent years, in addition to expressing respect for Ma Jintao, Wang Xing has rarely praised a person so publicly. On the mountain of smart cars, Li Xiang has shown the potential to soar through the sky after five years of hard exploration. According to the latest end point retail data released by China Auto Data, the cumulative sales of Ideal ONE in January and August 2020 have exceeded 450h, Cayenne E-Hybrid, etc., maintaining the first place in China’s new energy medium and large SUV market (including,,, and extended range electric) for 8 consecutive months.

A group of not so dazzling people, with a few ordinary words: 60 points to 100 points; do the right thing, not the easy thing; crazy to meet user requests. After five years of silent work, Li Auto is listed on Nasdaq, with a market value of $13.90 billion, surpassing Autohome.

In 2020, three new car companies in Jiangsu Province announced the suspension of operations: Sailin, Bojun, and Li Auto, whose factory is located in Changzhou, has almost become a single seedling in Jiangsu.

"In such a difficult industry, it is necessary to train a start-up enterprise to climb up from 18 layers of hell. Only when it comes out of the ground can it be more competitive."

Because of Li Xiang, Li Auto’s people are known for "picking": picking money, picking people, and picking time.

The two of them did the work done by ten people in other companies. Moreover, what was said will definitely be done; the goals set will definitely be achieved.

According to Li Xiang, this is very simple. "Set goals scientifically, do a good job in the process and training, everyone only does the right and important things, and achieve full transparency and sharing of information during the process." But according to Brother Hui, it’s not that simple.

"A car is a product, and an enterprise and an organization are also a product. It needs to be driven by a system, that is, goals, architecture, and operation." Brother Hui is the head of Li Auto’s strategy department. "And the correct generation of these three elements requires the full sharing of corporate culture and management tools."

After joining the ideal from Baidu, Hui Ge, HR and Li Xiang together, built a complete set of management tools: LSA, OKR, LBP, CFR, these management tools and corporate culture together constitute the two focuses of Li Xiang’s current attention: product strategy + organizational development.

"When it comes to corporate strategy, Li Xiang was thinking alone in the past, but now a team of 12 people is thinking about it. In the future, we hope that the members of the organization will think together, but we still have no answer on how to achieve this step."

According to Brother Hui,The ultimate efficiency + online system is the main goal of Li Auto’s organizational development.For example, the current full-process sales rate in the domestic market is 11%. The ideal goal is not only to have a lower sales rate than Tesla, but also to achieve higher user satisfaction than it.

With the organization’s scale exceeding 3,000 people, the need to handle software and hardware research and development and production, manage complex supply chains, and judge the future direction and even rhythm of products and technologies, Li Xiang keenly put forward the new development goal of "ultimate efficiency + online system", and as always, he used the simplest methods and processes to learn tools, build tools, and upgrade all employees.

Fighting monsters has risen to another level, and the newly added equipment in the arsenal has been at the forefront of Internet companies during the same period.

This is a miraculous thing. Can another ordinary person, like him, follow his path step by step and reach the height he is today in 20 years? Most people would say: No, because time and space cannot be copied. But Li Xiang said: Yes, because history always repeats the same story over and over again, but most people turn a blind eye to it.

In 2018, he wrote an article "About work and growth, these are my 100 suggestions", which was posted on Weibo, which made people dizzy. To translate, his enterprise development arsenal is mainly as follows: 1. Clear user portraits and insight into user requests; 2. Make products independent, focused and diligent; 3. Information sharing is the foundation for building trust; 4. Be good to those who work hard and kill those who don’t; 5. The goals are clear and quantifiable, and everyone is clear; 6. The process is clear, the standards are simple, and 100% achieved; 7. The values are simple and clear; 8. The tools are simple and easy to use and iterable; 9. System-driven to achieve extreme efficiency; 10. The founder has control.

Every one is in plain language, you can understand it and learn it. But why can so few people do it?"Most of them are lazy and greedy, and a few are stupid or smart."When I heard Li want to say this, my colleague Dalu said:

"He’s so profound."

In the summer of 2014, Li Bin rubbed his teeth at the Tesla he bought, "This car is really not good", and he decided to do it himself. In the same group as him, in addition to Li Xiang, there was also a group of people: He Xiaopeng, Shen Hui,,,, Zhang Yong, Huang Ximing, Dai Lei,,,…

In the winter of 2016, at a night talk in Beijing, almost all of these people were there except Jia Yueting. I asked a question: "Everyone must have thought that this road is a dead end. If that day comes, what will happen?" That night, everyone had young smiles on their faces, which was simply the most beautiful painting of the past 10 years.

No one thought that day would come so quickly. No one thought that three years later, they would be called "prodigals" or even "liars".

In the summer of 2020, in a teahouse in Minhang, Shanghai, Huang Ximing, who was declared to have "run away from America," said: "I’m not going anywhere, just here… no matter how hard it is, I have to build a car."

"Whether it’s a liar or not, let’s see if it’s all in first," Li wanted to say, "I, Li Bin and He Xiaopeng both invested 200 million dollars." Not only the three of them were all in, but also Bao Wenguang, Huang Ximing, Liu Xinwen, Lu Qun, Zhang Hailiang, and Jia Yueting.

However, why did only Li Bin, Li Xiang, and He Xiaopeng run out so far?

Most of my friends said this: These three brothers are familiar with those investment institutions and have helped "them" earn money, so "they" dare to throw money. Only Lao Lu said this: nonsense! These three people can run out because they have completed the training of entrepreneurs, they have practiced the big market and walked through the big pit.

When I heard what Old Lu said, I quickly raised my thumb and said, Old Lu, you are really awesome. But now, I found that Old Lu was only half right, or even half right, and those friends whom Old Lu regarded as "nonsense" were right!

The night before yesterday, I asked Lao Lu a question: "In the past 20 years, people from all walks of life have made a fortune. Why is it only the Internet that has really changed China?" Lao Lu smoked three cigarettes, gritted his teeth and said:"Because they reorganized and reconnected knowledge and people."When he said this, his face flushed red and smoke seemed to rise from his head.

That night, we were sitting on a hillside in Libo County, Guizhou Province, looking up at the sky full of stars. We figured out a truth:History is a river that flows by itself, just like the galaxy above.

Starting with Wang Zhidong, Zhang Chaoyang, Ding Lei, Li Yanhong, Ma Yun, Pony Ma, Zhou Hongyi, Liu Liu, Lei Jun, Wang Xing, Huang Zheng, Zhang Yiming, these people are all in this river. Over the past 20 years, they and countless Internet entrepreneurs of the same period have only done two things: reconnect knowledge and reconnect people.

Now, it’s Li Bin, Li Xiang, and He Xiaopeng’s turn to appear, with only one mission: to reconnect all things.

That’s why when Li wanted to talk about starting "Car and Home" in 2015, Huang Mingming immediately understood what he meant. "They" know him well and dare to throw money at him, just because they are all in the river and they know where the river flows.

Of course, what Old Lu said was also right. Thousands of people jumped into the river, and those who were not drowned were like stars, because entrepreneurial ability was extremely scarce. According to Li Xiang’s growth stage theory: ordinary people, excellent people, excellent managers, excellent leaders, and enterprise leaders who did not cultivate to the fourth level were likely to be drowned.

However, most of them are not fraudsters.

After 1994, not only did the word "ideal" cease to be popular, but almost all "big words" became less and less common. By the time Alibaba Tencent took off, "small words" such as "ant", "WeChat", "small two" and "small brother" became more and more popular. In recent years, it has spread to the car circle, and "little ant", "black cat", "big dog", these car series names make people smile.

The more specific the name, the better, the more grounded the better, the latest examples are: Lei Jun brand electric car and Li Xiang brand prawns.

However, after 2015, this generation of entrepreneurs began to use "big words" again: " (future) ", "ideal", "future", "skyline", "singularity", "Weimar", "Nezha", " (leading) ", horizon, Megvii, DJI… Only "Xiaopeng" looks a little "small". If He Xiaopeng is willing to change his name to "He Dapeng", then there is no exception.

Why did "big words" come back into fashion in this generation? Lao Lu said: Because they stood in this river, and someone in front of them lit up the road.

Old Lu is simply amazing, it is definitely worth pulling him to chat on the hillside for another night.

In the summer of 2016, in NIO’s Shanghai office, I asked Li Bin: There is already a listed company, why bother to blog again? Maybe it will go bankrupt. Li Bin said:

"Dude, this is the only chance to enter history."

This sentence has only been heard once in the past 20 years.

At that moment, I felt that history was very fair. Those who were heartbroken and left the desk at the beginning, those who were helpless and lost in the world at the beginning, when the years of struggle, struggle, confusion, and sinking gradually passed, finally a new generation dared to shout out this sentence, what they said in their hearts at the beginning. It’s just that the meaning is very different.

You can say that under the guidance of Internet predecessors such as Wang Zhidong, Zhang Chaoyang, Li Yanhong, Ma Yun, and Pony Ma, they are more certain about the direction of the river and more clear about their mission. You can also say that after knowledge and people have been reorganized and connected, the infrastructure of the country’s modernization transformation has been built, and they are more confident than their predecessors to face themselves and the world.

The value of Li Xiang lies not only in the great possibilities of his personal and organizational growth in this great era, but also in the fact that he has spent 20 years proving that an ordinary child who has not gone to college can follow a brand new path and upgrade himself step by step, creating miracles.

In 2019, when "Car and Home" was renamed "Li Auto", the "Li" logo fluttered in the wind on the flag.At that moment, I very much hoped that Lao Guo would be there to talk to me about what he saw when the ideal arose again.

(First Electric Wang Rui also contributed to this article)