"Madman" Zhan Ketuan

Zhan Ketuan, born in Minhou, Fuzhou in 1979, is the former chairman of Bitmain and the richest man in the cryptocurrency world.

He is thin, has a bad temper, and is addicted to alcohol, but he does not have high material desires. 80% of the time he wears a pair of New Balance sneakers and a gray polo shirt.

This is it

In the 2019 Hurun Rich List, he ranked 100th with a net worth of 30 billion, becoming the "richest man in China's blockchain industry." Wu Jihan's net worth is 17 billion.

Zhan Ketuan's office is filled with more than a thousand books, mainly books on philosophy, history and business management. His two favorite books are "The Three-Body Problem" and "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind". (Wu Jihan's office is very simple, with only a model airplane in the corner.)

Zhan Ketuan likes to read management books. In the introduction that Zhan Ketuan wrote for himself, he not only excels in chip design, but also adds that he is good at business management.

In September 2019, Zhan Ketuan started a new round of corporate management structure adjustments "imitating Huawei", and the HR director from Huawei was the operator.

It is said that Zhan Ketuan was not satisfied with the several rounds of proposals submitted by HR. But this did not affect his good mood. Bitmain's US stock listing is in full swing. If nothing unexpected happens, Zhan Ketuan's wealth will be an astronomical figure after the listing. Zhan Ketuan's most important AI business also won a 200 million yuan order for Fuzhou City Brain.

What few people know is that at the 10/1 festive military parade, Zhan Ketuan was invited to the scene as a representative of outstanding entrepreneurs, along with Li Yanhong, Lei Jun and others.

After the speech on October 25, the price of the currency soared. Zhan Ketuan posted a circle of friends to thank the big boss for personally pushing up the price!

Everything seemed to be going well until four days later.

Bitcoin is my destiny

On October 28, Beijing Bitmain Technology Co., Ltd. suddenly underwent industrial and commercial changes, and the legal representative was changed from Jihan Wu to Micree Zhan.

To this day, no one knows how this was done.

The storm came immediately. At 11 a.m. on October 29, Wu Jihan sent an internal email to Bitmain employees, announcing his decision to remove Zhan Ketuan from all his positions at Bitmain, effective immediately.

Even more ruthless is that the email requires that no Bitmain employee should follow Zhan Ketuan's instructions or attend meetings convened by Zhan Ketuan. If there is any violation, the company will consider terminating the labor contract depending on the severity of the circumstances; if the company's economic interests are damaged, the company will pursue civil or criminal liability in accordance with the law.

Following the email "Removing Zhan Ketuan from all positions", Wu Jihan immediately sent a second email to employees, which was to remove the current HR head (who was the original Huawei HR who led the structural adjustment) from his position, reappoint the original HR head, and hold an employee meeting. (The third email was sent on November 2, which was to increase the salary of all employees)

At the staff meeting, Wu Jihan listed Zhan Ketuan’s "crazy behavior", such as insisting on mass production of immature 10nm chips, which resulted in the company's loss of US$1.5 billion.

Wu Jihan was very excited at the conference, he emphasized that he was the believer in technology, Zhan was just obsessed with power and vanity; AI was what he first thought of, Zhan Ketuan wanted to do CPU. This was surprising, because Zhan Ketuan has always been a crazy supporter of AI technology in the eyes of the outside world, while Wu Jihan opposed it.

A core investor once said that Bitmain's advantage lies in the complementarity of its two founders. The subtext may be that the two people are so different.

This sentence sounds quite ironic today. In the old-fashioned media stories, from the beginning of their business, Zhan Ketuan and Wu Jihan have been creating an image of a good story in the cryptocurrency circle of meeting, knowing each other, complementing each other, and succeeding.

A few months ago, Zhan Ketuan recalled the beginning of his business at a general meeting.

He said that he came up with the name "Bitmain" in a taxi, and the alternative was "Bitcoin Mainland". This is different from the outside world's impression that Wu Jihan is the soul founder of Bitmain.

In fact, since the establishment of Bitmain, Zhan Ketuan has been the chairman and responsible for almost all internal activities and speeches, with a confident and generous style. Some new employees feel that Zhan Ketuan is the real founder and soul of Bitmain.

After getting off the taxi, Zhan Ketuan chose a name and went to register his company with the industrial and commercial authorities. Bitmain was born.

Although Zhan Ketuan was born in poverty, he has a rare entrepreneurial spirit. He once told his employees: As a Fujian native, I know that I will start a business sooner or later, but I haven't decided what to do. But at that time, he said he would never make chips until he met Bitcoin, "Bitcoin is my destiny." (However, he also complained about why reporters always asked him whether Jihan brought him into the industry)

Although Zhan Ketuan's family was poor and Wu Jihan was not rich either, they started their business with the funds from the family of Ge Yuesheng (an intern of Wu Jihan).

The result was a huge success, but how did Zhan Ketuan become a major shareholder?

Wu Jihan said that he had promised to give Zhan Ketuan's team a certain amount of shares every time the mining machine chips reached the target. At the staff meeting on the 29th, he attacked Zhan Ketuan for taking the majority of the shares for himself and not distributing them to the team, which was the reason why he became the majority shareholder.

This statement is supported by the experience of Yang Zuoxing, the boss of Shenma Mining Machine. The boss of Shenma Mining Machine left Bitmain because Zhan Ketuan was only willing to give 0.5% of the shares, while Wu Jihan was willing to give 2%. Today, Shenma Mining Machine and Bitmain are almost evenly matched.

Regardless of the process, Zhan Ketuan once became the chairman and major shareholder of Bitmain, and Wu Jihan served as co-CEO. After the 1217 incident, Wu Jihan no longer held any position.

The 1217 incident occurred on December 17, 2018, when Bitmain held a senior management meeting, announcing that Zhan Ketuan would serve as chairman, Wang Haichao as CEO, and Wu Jihan would resign from all positions. At that time, the Bitcoin Cash fork caused a sharp drop in the digital currency, and Bitmain held huge BCH assets, so Wu Jihan became the target of public criticism. Subsequently, Bitmain started a large-scale layoff mode.

The 1217 incident was a replica of today's storm, except that Zhan Ketuan was overconfident and left room for maneuver. After half a year of forbearance, Wu Jihan delivered a fatal blow.

Arrogance and forbearance, success or failure is just a fine line apart, and Zhan Ketuan took it lightly.

Beyond Moore's Law

Is it harder to start a business or to maintain a business? For Bitmain, it is probably more difficult to maintain the business.

Since the start of the business, Zhan Ketuan's team has continuously launched new chips, and with the S9 mining machine, it has monopolized 70% of the global mining machine market. In 2017, the price of coins skyrocketed, and money rolled in. How much money did they make? No one can tell. Wu Jihan said at the general meeting that Zhan Ketuan lost $1.5 billion due to the failure of chip tape-out, and he only lost 800 million in investment. So after losing $2.3 billion, Bitmain still has more than a billion in profits.

In the same year, Wu Jihan forked Bitcoin and created Bitcoin Cash, and became well-known as a mining tyrant.

Unfortunately, the Bitcoin Cash he led was forked again by the fake Bitcoin founder, Australian Satoshi Nakamoto, which caused a sharp drop in BCH and other digital currencies.

This is all off topic. Back to 2017. Unlike Wu Jihan's image as a mining tyrant, the media knows very little about Zhan Ketuan. In fact, there is no strict division between the two in terms of external communication. It's just that Zhan Ketuan doesn't like to deal with the media, so it seems that Wu Jihan has become the company's spokesperson and soul.

But in terms of business, there is still a clear distinction between the two. Zhan Ketuan is responsible for technology, supply chain, production, and AI, while Wu Jihan is responsible for investment, mining pools, mining farms, and mining machine market sales. Human resources, finance, legal affairs, etc., report to both of them.

It is said that the two people once reached an agreement that if one person said something could be done, then it could be done, but if one person opposed it, then it would not be done.

At the end of 2017, Zhan Ketuan released the AI ​​chip he had been dreaming about. The industry did not give this chip a high evaluation. An engineer from SenseTime said in his real name on Zhihu that it was not even as good as the low-power ARM chip. However, as an AI chip made by Chinese people, it still received a lot of praise.

Failure did not stop Zhan Ketuan, and his madness for AI continued to escalate.

He once told the head of algorithms that he wanted to recruit 10,000 engineers to defeat SenseTime.

He feels that Nvidia and Intel are getting old, and startup chip companies will die next year, and only Huawei is worth fighting.

He asked the sales staff to threaten traditional security manufacturers that if they did not cooperate with Bitmain, they would not be given the opportunity to cooperate in the future.

In order to recruit AI talents from Taiwan, he accepted a rare interview with two Taiwanese media. There were many details in the interview, but it was limited to Taiwanese media, so it was not widely circulated. It is said that after the report, BitTorrent Taiwan's recruitment progress was unusually smooth, and even because it poached too many people, it had friction with chip giant MediaTek.

The AI ​​roadmap of Bitmain, created by Zhan Ketuan himself, is also full of "Zhan-style madness". It takes 7 months to iterate, surpass Moore's Law, integrate cloud terminals, write self-IP, develop self-developed algorithms, use a full stack, make self-made servers, make self-made gate access control, and even mass-produce TOC cameras.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore proposed the "Moore's Law" named after himself, which means that the number of components that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit will double every 18 to 24 months, and the performance will also double. Zhan Ketuan said that we want to "improve several times in 7 months."

If Zhan Ketuan's madness was first reflected in AI, then around the beginning of 2018, he became crazy about Huawei.

Zhan Ketuan began to require that every person recruited must have a Huawei background; he imitated Huawei and completely transformed Bitmain's organizational system; he referred to Huawei and let R&D do HR, HR do sales, and sales do finance; he even began to imitate Ren Zhengfei's format and published internal articles to all employees.

The old employees of Bitmain were so annoyed that they finally faced Wu Jihan’s counterattack before the latest structural adjustment. At the general meeting, when Wu Jihan announced the cancellation of the structural adjustment, the employees burst into thunderous applause.

Immersed in his own "madness", Zhan Ketuan seems to have lost the support of the people.

But this time, Wu Jihan did not leave any leeway for Zhan Ketuan.

take a bow

As Wu Jihan’s speech leaked, more gossip about Zhan Ketuan also came out.

He is addicted to alcohol and many things have to be discussed over the wine table.

He sponsored the Traditional Chinese Medicine Fund, called on employees to take Chinese medicine, and even had a negotiation meeting with important customers turn into a quarrel because of the dispute between Chinese and Western medicine.

Practice Buddhism, meditation, and Qigong. However, the name of the AI ​​brand "Suanfeng" comes from meditation. And so on.

However, behind these seemingly bizarre things, there is another side to Zhan Ketuan.

He said that the reason for acquiring the robotics company was to make a robot that his children would truly like.

We advocate filial piety and require employees to respect their parents.

His madness led to tape-out failures and huge losses, but it was also his extreme pursuit of technology that made him go from having nothing to becoming the richest man in the blockchain industry with a value of 30 billion.

Today, the technical team led by Zhan Ketuan is still in the leading position in the industry, and 5nm chips are being launched one after another. Shenma Canaan's chips are still at 8nm, and can't even reach 7nm.

When Bitmain was in the most difficult time, he insisted on giving bonuses to employees according to the contract.

This "most difficult time" refers to the second half of 2018. The price of coins plummeted, the inventory of mining machines was high, the chip tape-out failed, AI could not generate income, BCH forked, the listing failed, and many other problems were exposed.

It is said that at the least, the company had only tens of millions of cash in its account.

The long-simmering conflict between the two founders finally erupted. Zhan Ketuan attacked Wu Jihan for developing BCH, which caused the company to lose money; Wu Jihan attacked Zhan Ketuan for transferring technical personnel to AI, which caused the mining machine to lose competitiveness and be surpassed by Shenma chips. In multiple meetings, the two sides and their people directly "tear each other" and even had physical conflicts.

At the annual meeting in early 2019, Zhan Ketuan answered questions from employees about BCH. He said that in the future, we should treat all kinds of currencies objectively and neutrally. Wu Jihan immediately stepped on the stage to refute: Your mining machine has lost its competitiveness and the market has been taken away, why do you blame BCH? The scene was extremely embarrassing.

The conflict has intensified.

With that email, everything came to an end. Was Zhan Ketuan’s future over?

On November 2, an insider revealed that Wu Jihan was conducting a strict investigation into Zhan’s finances, which was then denied by Wu himself in his circle of friends. However, he also revealed in the denial that the lawyers of both sides would soon begin a battle at home and abroad.

In terms of voting rights, Zhan Ketuan is undoubtedly in the lead, but in terms of shares, Zhan Ketuan, Wu Jihan and Ge Yuesheng's family actually each hold around 36%. The orientation of the remaining investors may play a decisive role.

What is strange is that he has remained silent from the time when Wu Jihan announced the dismissal of Zhan Ketuan to the time when rumors of a strict financial investigation leaked out. The media called him, but he first hung up and then the line was busy. Yu Yu did not have such patience either.

Because he remained silent, some gossip media even spread irresponsible rumors that he was missing or arrested.

What is Zhan Ketuan thinking?

Does he regret not strengthening his control and leaving an opportunity for others to take advantage of him? Does he reflect on his own madness? Will he set up a new business and continue his belief in Bitcoin and AI?

The "madman" Zhan Ketuan has not yet made his final bow.