Bitmain and Zhan Ketuan’s “Huawei Dream”

In early 2019, Bitmain’s former chairman, Jihan Wu, read an article and became furious.

The content of the article was neutral, but it was rumored that it caused his dissatisfaction because it mentioned that Zhan did not keep his promise to withdraw from specific matters.

The article said: "Wu Jihan and Zhan Ketuan have both resigned from the CEO position, and a project director Wang Haichao has become the new CEO. However, Zhan Ketuan has not completely retired and is still attending project meetings. This means that Bitmain's management may remain in an unstable state for some time to come."

Zhan looked for various people in the company and yelled: Can you learn from Huawei and delete it immediately?

Now, Zhan Ketuan has been removed from all his positions by Wu Jihan, and Huawei, which is famous for deleting posts, is caught in a public relations whirlpool.

A senior media person in the circle of friends said: Any company that is good at deleting posts is not afraid of the manuscripts, but the boss.

Bitmain has the same fear of Zhan Ketuan.

Believe in Huawei

Zhan Ketuan's "belief" in Huawei began in early 2018. Before that, Bitmain did not have many Huawei employees. The number of Huawei employees began to surge because Zhan Ketuan required that people must be recruited from Huawei.

In contrast, Wu Jihan also recognized some of Huawei's systems. He recognized and introduced Huawei's PDT and IPD systems, and gave middle-level management employees a book: "Huawei can do it, so can you: IPD Reconstruct Product R&D."

However, some people also say that Wu Jihan introduced Huawei's system in order to clarify the process, strengthen the independent decision-making and financial accounting of each business unit, and check and balance the interference and influence of Zhan Ketuan. Matrix, another startup company led by Wu Jihan, also uses Huawei's PDT system.

Different from Wu Jihan's pragmatic attitude towards Huawei, Zhan Ketuan's belief in Huawei comes more from the cultural level, especially Huawei's military culture and execution ability.

This belief is selective, and Huawei's "customer-centricity" is rarely mentioned. In fact, Zhan Ketuan's consistent thinking is that as long as we do a good job, customers will naturally come to buy. The idea of ​​"disdaining customers" led to a significant loss of market share for products in 2019 by Shenma Mining Machines, and AI chips also sold poorly.

The former AI sales manager who was fired by Zhan once had a two-hour debate with Zhan on whether the company was customer-centric, but Zhan disagreed.

The former AI sales manager was the only former Huawei executive poached by Bitmain, but due to differences in ideas, he had public disputes with Zhan many times and was treated coldly. Before Wu Jihan was dismissed, he was already in a semi-retired state, and the AI ​​sales business was handled by the HRD from Huawei.

Despite the general lack of recognition among AI chip customers, Zhan Ketuan still believes that companies such as Nvidia and Cambrian are not worth a fight, and that the only competitor for AI chips is Huawei.

This belief reached its peak in the second half of 2019. Zhan Ketuan even began to learn how to issue documents from Ren Zhengfei. He asked his staff to record his speeches throughout the process, convert them into text, and send them to all employees for study.

Huawei employees

After Bitmain introduced HRDs from Huawei and 360 in 2018, the number of employees originally from Huawei began to surge. This HRD directly poached people from Huawei, most of whom were his former colleagues.

The problem this causes is that although the poached Huawei employees have military-style execution capabilities, most of them are not professionally qualified and are not familiar with chips.

Under Zhan's instructions, HRD followed Huawei's example and recruited a large number of fresh graduates. After laying off fresh graduates and terminating the tripartite contract with current students in 2018, it was still preparing to recruit hundreds of fresh graduates in 2019.

At the same time, a large number of brainwashing trainings were carried out, which usually lasted two days and two nights on weekends, and the company's employees were overwhelmed. For example, "Learning from Huawei to Grasp the Locomotive and Improve the Management Level of Cadres", Tang Jiyue, the former head of Huawei's Wireless Product Line Cadre Department, was invited to give a lecture. The content had nothing to do with professional business, but was mainly about corporate culture and leadership.

The first thing that Wu Jihan did after dismissing Zhan Ketuan from all his positions in 2019 was to replace and dismiss this HRD. Then the head of mining machine sales and the head of AI sales from Huawei were dismissed. The head of mining machine sales was actually recruited by Wu Jihan, but because of the poor internal response after the 360-degree evaluation was launched, he was replaced. The head of AI sales was at odds with Zhan and was dismissed by Zhan Software in the early stage.

Currently, there are basically no employees from Huawei in Bitmain's management. The grass-roots employees from Huawei are relatively stable, with little change, "just working hard". In fact, Zhan Ketuan has also dismissed many Huawei managers, and only a very small number of former Huawei employees like HRD can win his favor.

Huawei is a giant company in hardware and chips. Bitmain's mining machines and AI chip competitors also have many former Huawei employees serving as management. Huawei's success is also respected. Bitmain has always claimed to be "China's second largest chip company", second only to Huawei HiSilicon.

What scares the people at Bitmain is Zhan Ketuan’s selective belief in Huawei’s culture, and his clique-forming and boss-obeying style that comes from fear.

At the general meeting, Wu Jihan announced the cessation of the company restructuring that was being carried out by Zhan Ketuan and the former HRD to imitate Huawei, and applause broke out at the scene.

This movement of learning from Huawei has finally ended.