Lei Feng network (search "Lei Feng network" public concern) by: This article author Shi Beishao (WeChat public number: digital_meme), who once worked for pea pods, after entering LinkedIn, left LinkedIn to become the chief content officer of Zhengyang New Media.
The news that the pea pods application distribution business was acquired by Alibaba finally confirmed that things had finally come to an end. I have been writing a science and technology column and talking about many companies. In fact, it is not easy to talk about companies that I once worked for. Pea pods are a very special company in China. It is still necessary to write pea pods that I have seen. Because the media and the outside world have too little to know about it, it is better to take this opportunity to talk about the company. This article has my own perspective, the peas I know, and the more typical views from my partners.
I see pea podsBrands
In China's Internet start-up companies, pea pods are an alternative, and the outside world is the easiest place to perceive its alternatives. It is its brand. There are many places for brand alternatives, such as:
In an extremely competitive application store or in fact more appropriately described as the “software download station in Android mobile phones†industry, it is probably the only company that firmly believes in relying on products to gain market recognition. In fact, it was before 2014. It is also achieved that such brand tone is recognized in some people;
I worked at LinkedIn in China. I was asked how I feel working in a foreign company. I said that LinkedIn has done well in its localization. In fact, pea pods have more "foreign companies" than LinkedIn.
Before financing 120 million U.S. dollars, brand and market communication basically depended on cats and aunts. Many people liked pea pods because they liked a few cats in the pea pods office or because they watched the aunt video (fn).
These three phrases contain a bit of joke, such as the "software download station for Android phones," which many peas won't accept. In fact, objectively speaking, the business of pea pods was put on the PC era more than a decade ago. In fact, it was similar to the role of Huajun Software Park : Many white PCs who just used a PC did not know what software to download, so they went to the download station. A bunch of software to use it.
Unlike other app stores or software download stations, pea pods have a very good name (91 assistants, Baidu mobile assistants), pay more attention to design and experience, less advertising, when it comes out with a call "peas washed white When claiming to “help users to apply cottage applications and advertising applications†to the official version of the App, its original intention was to really help users to wash away cottages and advertising applications. When competitors launched similar products, they washed away from The application of other application stores, and the replacement of the version of their own store - the version replaced with their own store is entirely based on commercial interests: In this way, other stores can calculate the distribution of an application and the game share into their own products. Then, in reverse, show the developer how much your distribution and income capabilities are.
There is also a small story that best reflects the pea pod temperament , interviewed by Phoenix Technology:
The pea pods started as an incubator project in an innovative workshop. During the process, they found that their potential for commercial value was great. They were independent in April 2010. At first, it was not called pea pods and called peas. However, the peas' domain name has been registered and it costs 100,000 yuan to buy it. Wang Hua, an innovation workshop management partner, said that this is too expensive. Both Wang Junmin and Cui Wei said that the peas are awesome. Wang Hua asked them: You took 1 million angel investment, spent 100,000 yuan to buy a domain name, you do it? After they thought about it, they changed their name to "pea pods." Later, Wang Junxi told me that the $100,000 domain name was indeed too expensive.
After getting 1 million, preparing to take 100,000 of them to cybersquat the domain name. This kind of thing reminded me of the fact that after leaving Apple, in order to design a logo for NeXT, Jobs spent $100,000 to invite Enron to broadcast for the United States. Paul Land, who has designed Logo for companies such as IBM, FedEx, and Westinghouse, has made a name. In domestic startups, dedication to the brand like pea pods is extremely rare. It is said that a poster was posted on the wall of Y Combinator: Can this event help you achieve 7%/week growth? The implication is that if you can't achieve 7% growth, you don't do it.
Although Jobs is not successful at NeXT, YC is probably one of the most successful startup incubation periods. You can't say that Jobs's $100,000 budget to draw a logo is a waste, and YC only emphasizes that growth is the truth. Later facts proved that Steve Jobs eventually proved himself in design, experience and business, but that was more than a dozen years later.
Welfare: Very, very good
The internal welfare of pea pods is one of the best I have ever seen in domestic startups, not one. There may be a gap with Silicon Valley companies, but at least domestic companies are very close to the Silicon Valley company. Just to name a few:
If you have won the Best Employee of the Year Award (internalally, this award is called "Super Pea"), the prize is a foreign industry conference that can be selected and related to science and technology. For example, you can go to WWDC, Google I/O, SXSW... As long as you grab a ticket, round-trip tickets, hotels, and fares can be reimbursed. Note: This benefit is permanent, not just one year after Super Pea was elected. As long as you are elected to Super Pea, and you are still working on pea pods, this benefit exists (I heard that the policy has been adjusted since 2014 and changed to only once.).
Fruit drink snacks will not be eaten for free. Before moving to Dongsheng Science Park, all three meals were free, and colleagues also specially developed a meal ordering system for exclusive use by internal staff. You can order any food you want in a partner restaurant. Theoretically, you may want to order more or less. However, the disadvantage of this kind of welfare is that it is prone to waste.
In order to encourage everyone to buy books and buy genuine software, a certain amount can be reimbursed. Using pirated software will be disdained by colleagues (fortunately I bought genuine).
It is very important to recommend a formal employee to enter the job and the specific figures will not be said. Some colleagues get their bonuses soft, and when the traffickers get their hands, the money is higher than the salary.
There are many others that are not listed one by one. We can see from the welfare that the pea pods are good to the employees from the bottom of their hearts and try their best to be good to the employees.
Internal Culture: Free, Open, Transparent, Flat, and Engineer Culture
Many of the founding teams of pea pods came from Google. Wang Junyi has been at Google since his internship and graduated. Pea pods are the fans of Google culture. Because of the almost full embrace of Google culture, the internal culture of pea pods is extremely free, open, transparent, and flat.
Many start-up companies claim to be free and transparent, but the free openness and transparency of pea pods is reflected in the true belief in and respect for every employee and their implementation in action:
1. Prior to announcing the financing of 120 million U.S. dollars in Softbank, DCM, and Innovation Workshops, Mr. Wang will disclose financing information to all employees in the internal All Hands (Plenary Session). The details disclosed include the financing amount, company valuation, and the relationship with Softbank. The details of the DCM contact, in fact , the vast majority of reports on the valuation of the pea pods at the time of the round of financing were wrong because the pea pods did not provide valuations when they released press releases and interviews ; later Goldman Sachs added a multi-million investment, and Jun Hao shared with everyone in the plenary session how he met the Goldman Sachs investors and why they were willing to accept Goldman Sachs after the financing was finalized.
2. The major problems encountered within the company are that the management will very frankly answer the staff's questions. After the major project is completed, the project leader will share with everyone and answer the corresponding questions. So if the project is not doing well, the pressure on the project leader is also very great, because in addition to the boss will question you, you may have to face the challenges of everyone else. Similar scenarios are often seen in companies in Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel didn't sell his Facebook shares soon after Facebook was listed, causing Facebook employees to be dissatisfied. Zuckerberg specifically invited Peter Thiel to Facebook to respond to why he was selling Facebook. problem. Very sharp, but they responded with a very open mind.
3, pea pod engineer culture is very strong, in the company, product designers and engineers are project-led; operations, markets, business status are ranked second. Although pea pods call product managers "product designers," pea pods' product designers have little support for operations, marketing, or business activities, and such design requirements are fully outsourced. On the one hand, outsourcing is costly. On the other hand, the cycle is relatively long. Because the designers are not in the side, the communication costs are much higher. The second problem caused by the leadership of engineer culture is that it is difficult to recruit outstanding operational talents. Most of the revenue from the app store comes from the game business. The game business is the heavy operating business. The salary design, internal collaboration, and resource allocation of the pea pods are not friendly to the operating talents. Compared to companies such as Tencent and Xiaomi and game companies, The competitiveness of operational talent is very limited. As far as the domestic environment is concerned, it is far from being “evolved†to product technology alone, and it will continue (peapods once ranked second in the industry, but that’s where giants and smart phone manufacturers haven’t begun to When it comes to the market, the business will be in the first echelon or even the first place. Engineer culture can also be extended to the company's internal tools, pea pods are equipped with Google Drive Suite: everyone's files are placed in Google Docs/Slides/Sheets and shared by the company's owners by default. For example, I often search the Internet at Junjie. What documents or slides do you place on Google Docs... Project Management Use Asana, make appointments directly with colleagues, and make appointments with Google Calendar. Everyone can see other people's schedules and find free time to make reservations. Habits are so good. After using the internal working environment, almost every colleague who left the pea pods will be very uncomfortable. Because even if the internal communication passes a file, each time you download, save, open, modify, and return it to the other party, the other person goes through downloading, saving, opening, revising, and then going back again. Repeatedly, the time is spent in the download. , save, and so on. After I left the pea pods, it took at least half a month to get used to Outlook and Microsoft Office. Even if we adapt, we still miss the collaboration tools that were so smooth in the past.
4. The internal structure of pea pods is very flat, and the company still maintains three tiers even when it is between two and three hundred. Grassroots employees are separated from the co-founders by only one person. Some pea pods within Google have also been used. For example, internal assessment uses OKR instead of KPI; each hand holds an All Hands; employees and bosses regularly communicate one-on-one (1:1). There was even a small festival called TGIF, which meant Thank God It's Friday. Every Friday afternoon (later changed to Saturday), you get something delicious and fun, everyone relaxes and exchanges feelings. HR people are trying their best to think about attractive topics to attract everyone. In fact, if we do it every week, we have limited communication. I later went to LinkedIn to have these cultures. This is a culture inherited from Intel and basically becomes the standard for Silicon Valley companies.
Because temperament is so unique, it attracts many excellent talents. It is no exaggeration to say that the concentration of excellent talents in pea pods is significantly higher than that of companies of similar size . It's no wonder that when I was talking with a friend who was a mobile advertising platform in the old bookworm bookstore in Sanlitun, she commented, “The pea pods are too shameless, raising the price of similar talents by two or three. Times.†The flat internality made everyone feel equal and respected, and flattening also brought about side effects, that is, the efficiency of decision-making was weakened . Peas pods advocate that everyone should be able to become the project owner, but in many cases the project owner has limited power and there is no right to allocate resources. At this time, you need to grind colleagues from other departments to cooperate with you, because of the face or because the relationship is good. Other colleagues will meet and discuss with you. However, there are also many tasks on hand, especially when it comes to internal resource calls. The understanding of the use of resources is inconsistent. As a result, people need to spend a lot of time to persuade each other and promote efficiency. a lot of.
Developers complain and can't get past
Pea pods are a company with a lot of IQs and can be troubled by emotional intelligence. After many employees who left the pea pods join other companies or start their own businesses, they believe that they will have more experience in this sentence.
If you look at pea pods as a person, it really fits the word "Nerd." Of course, when Bill Gates and Paul Graham attended school, they were all referred to as "Nerd" by others. The term was derogatory and derogatory, and everyone had their own opinions. In dealing with other partners, the “Nerd†temperament of pea pods is very obvious.
Developers complain
A well-known application once received a lot of user negative comments on pea pods. Some comments were made before the application was released (the timestamp was obviously problematic), and some were left to the user when the 1.0 version was very rough. Because of the Matthew effect, even if 2-3 years have passed, the app has been released in versions 2.0 and 3.0, and the user’s Tucao function point has been fixed. However, the negative comments of the product 1.0 are like psoriasis and have been firmly occupied by the comments. First place.
The developer wrote in the past and asked pea pods to process the comment.
The pea pod customer service replied: "The pea pod's commenting mechanism has a powerful algorithm, the system will automatically select the most appropriate comment display," and returned a similar set of remarks.
Developers are very angry: "This is obviously a 1.0 version of the comments, this function point of the user reviews we have long been restored, from the current point of view, the user's comments have been inconsistent with the facts."
Pea pods replied: "We said that we have given feedback to the product department and we will consider improvement in the future."
Developer: "You can match this comment with the corresponding version number. Just like the App Store, comments and versions match. This is more reflective of the facts. We don't ask you to delete it, just hope that you reasonably display more objective The facts to the user."
......
Then there is no more. Every platform has its own deficiencies. This is actually not a big deal. However, when pea pods’ customer service faced complaints from developers, their inner activities were convinced that they had a strong algorithm. “What we do is to use technology to change the ecology. We will not go to labor because you write a letter and lodge a complaint. Intervention rules."
"I believe the power of technology" is a very good vision and slogan. Many people in the pea pods actively embrace this value. The reality is that there are always higher priority and more important functions waiting for the technology to be developed, and the return on investment to optimize this function is too low. This comment has been left there. Later, the application engineer expressed his wish for New Year's at the annual meeting of the DV: I hope that the inexplicable comments on the pea pods will disappear next year.
There are also many developers who have complained about auditing issues. For example, if the uploaded mobile phone screenshots are too similar to the iPhone and it is considered that the banner material does not conform to the standard, it is difficult to make it clear what the standard of review of the material is. This kind of thing seems to be common to all platforms. Existence, but the cost of communication with the pea pods is too high, and many developers feel that the trouble has turned to other platforms to cooperate. In terms of human relations, pea pods are a little out of place.
Why did pea pods not sell in 2013? Why is all the financing in the B-round financing is financial investment rather than BAT's strategic investment? To be independent, not to stand in line, I am incompatible with this world and it is a problem in this world. This is a way of thinking about pea pods. Such a way of thinking may be the best way to make it great. This kind of behavior will make many people feel less comfortable.
Do you want options? Do not
The friend at the old Bookworm Bookstore then commented on the pea cricket and said, "The pea pods are too nice. I heard that you never open people there?" I thought, when I was there, I really didn't seem to have opened anyone, but " I heard that the pea pods were reorganized earlier this year. It should be 'please' a lot of people leave."
Regardless of active or passive departure, as long as the pea pods work for more than one year, employees can get the option. However, if you want to retain options when you leave, you need to pay a deposit. For employees who work longer hours and make more contributions to pea pods, the options are higher. Accordingly, the margin needs to be paid more. .
When leaving the pea pods colleagues, I cannot help but ask you: Did you pay the deposit? Most of the answers are: No. When almost every former employee joins the departure group, everyone also asks gossip about new colleagues: Have you paid the deposit?
For a start-up company, options may be the most valuable but least valuable thing. The invaluable factor is that once listed, many people can have their wealth free, or at least bend their personal wealth beyond their peers; the most worthless is that if the company fails to do it, it will be a waste of paper.
Although I wrote a six-year science and technology review, I have seen quite a few small and large startup companies, but I am far from professional in terms of options/equity. I believe that pea pods must have been fully researched and carefully thought out before they can make decisions that require the quit employee to pay a deposit in order to hold the option. For many employees who have spent years working hard and behaving in this company, the mood they felt when they left was: tired; if they looked at the next chance, they hoped that they would be safer than they were. Give people the option of not knowing where they want to go.
what? Social security broke?
When I left the pea pods in August 2014, a departed colleague kindly reminded me: “Be sure to remember to look at the HR to remove the social security from the interior of the pea pod so that you can continue to the new company.†I am curious , which also need to remind? It seems to me that I would like to ask, my colleagues added: "HR is too busy, if you do not remind, ta will forget it. Ta is not intentionally will miss your social security, or too much in his hand "It's too busy." This dialogue seems to herald the social security crisis that will occur in the pea pod several months later.
I have not been concerned about social security and have not looked at HR.
My social security did not fail. But a few months later, several pea pods colleagues said that their social security had been paid off, some people began to privately inquire, some people began to ask questions in the internal discussion group, more anxious even went to anonymous social applications to open discussion and Tucao. Subsequently, in November 2014, media began to report that employees had paid off their social security payments, and that employees who had left the company needed to pay deposits and Tucao’s internal management. This also caused a turmoil in the industry.
The pea pods have definitely paid off some employee social security. This is the official response of the pea pods to the media:
With regard to social security issues, due to negligence in the company's operations, it did lead to some employees failing to pay social security for one month. At present, the company has paid back social security in a timely manner and is actively working to help employees eliminate the impact.
Outsiders who work in Beijing all know what social security payments mean.
Each party has its own position. For pea pods that are so sincere and loving to employees, welfare is also the best pea pods. How can we break everyone's social security? - This is too low-level mistakes, and the pea pods are a group of how high their self-esteem, on weekdays only contempt for others from a group of ultra-high IQ groups that can not be overlooked by others? This is not too "pea pods." However, such a thing happened. Social security dismissed employees, angry, angry, aggrieved are natural emotions, this kind of emotion spread to the outside is not surprising.
Jun Hao should also be very injured. In the blog post published on November 21, 2014, Jun Hao wrote this passage:
Sometimes it's unfamiliar and sad to see some comments from pea pods employees in anonymous applications. It's hard for me to believe that these are the ones I selected myself and added to the pea pods. If the result of hard work can only be so - and the people who hold these ideas are definitely not what I want to do, what's worse is to let those who I love hurt or wronged - that we pay for these years Is it worth keeping?
Employees began to feel that pea pods were unfamiliar, and Jun Jun also felt that the employees he had recruited were unfamiliar.
Write lastHalf a year ago, at a dinner with a former pea pod colleague, a pea asked everyone: What do you think of the harvest in pea pods?
When it was my turn, I remember my answer was probably like this: In the year of pea pods I was the longest known, the fastest growing, and the most recognizing that I was a few pounds or two. Although I did not make any achievements myself, this experience made me unforgettable forever. I am very grateful to it.
The colleague laughed and said: "Aren't you commenting a lot on pea pods?" There are opinions because it really cares. Do not care, in fact, too lazy to mention.
If you let me evaluate pea pods in one sentence, I might say: I believe it changes the ambition and sincerity of the world. It wants to be good for everyone, but it is a bit too young and not strong enough to take care of everyone. The world may not have been changed so much by it, but it has made the world aware of one more possibility.
Finally, I quoted a segment of this acquisition that most impressed me, from the former partner of pea pod Yorf:
When Zhang Xiaolong sold Foxmail, I was in Guangzhou Guangshen. He said that he would only sell under the roof of others and sell enough money to buy a suite. Today, everyone also said that Wang Jun, a pair of you is a scholar, so you should not beat the soldiers. He can objectively evaluate his strategic choices, but criticizing him for the snow is boring. It was just that people would be willing to gamble that year. Today, the market is not good. Whatever line of management is needed, the people of the lower liberation and the need for spring and snow will need to cooperate. China has no shortage of Riba people, but it lacks more Zhang Xiaolong and Wang Junyu. It is a bit of idealism, a mind to do a good job of products, take a few steps to detour, and the last detour is just the passing scenery. Another example is Wang Xing. In the end, Jun’e is still young. After a decade or eight, maybe he’s been paralyzed everywhere. This world is probably the way to follow suit and forgetfulness, but it’s always going to be more brain and rational.