Ant Financial CTO Lu Su: Alipay made me, I did a lot of “screw” things

He is praised as one of the founders of alipay’s technology platform, but he said that “it is not the perfect architecture in my mind”; He was the leader of alipay’s most critical moment — the 17-hour shutdown of its release — but in his opinion, he just did a lot of “screw” work.

He kept his head down but believed in the “right here, right now” spirit; He had a brilliant career in Alipay but thought he was the one who didn’t fall behind.

He is Cheng Li (Lu Su), the first guest in our technology documentary of this season, “Ten Years”. He is a witness of the spectacular development of Internet technology in the decade from 2009 to 2019.

Lu SU: In the past decade, key technologies for the entire digital era have emerged one after another, from being accepted by people to beginning to enter the application. 2009-2010 is cloud computing, 2011-2012 is mobile, 2013-2014 is big data, 2015-2016 is artificial intelligence, 2017-2018 is blockchain. At Ant Financial, we call the key technologies of blockchain, AI, security, IoT and computing “BASIC”. These five key words have come one after another in the past decade and are universally understood. So I think looking back, the last decade was a very critical decade for the technology revolution: a technology revolution to change a real industry, to get all the technology ready.

Lu SU: We think technology is changing in the last decade, but would you say it has done that? It’s just getting started.

Lu Su: I dreamed of being a mathematician from school to master’s degree. After my doctoral study, my supervisor was a teacher of practice and engineering, so under his influence, he asked me to solve many engineering problems. At that time, I made a choice: instead of doing one thing according to my interest, I combined my interest with my good at it. That’s when I basically turned my attention to engineering.

Speaking of the spirit of engineering, what impressed me most when I was young was that my father would take me to the laboratory to work overtime every weekend. He would show me a very big laser, a laser as big as a house, and you had to put a lid on it, and you had to screw it on, and then you had to make sure that there was no air leakage. I’m the one who turns the screws. There are dozens of screws in a circle, and you have to turn them one by one, and you can’t turn them one at a time, you have to turn them round and round. That’s when my dad said I was such a good screw twister.

Lu Su: My father is a physicist, and he does a lot of screwing. When I was doing mathematical research for my master’s degree, mathematics had to be very rigorous, and it could take a long time to come up with a theorem and prove it to be true. We now build a large system, write a bug-free program, is very similar.

Lu Su: Yes, I did a lot of “screw turning”.

Lu Su: 2004, at that time taobao to transform. This project was the most important one for Alibaba at that time, and it was to build A future-oriented Taobao with a new structure. After I joined Alipay in 2005, it was natural for me to want to prove myself to the team. My supervisor trusted me enough to appoint me as lead architect for a very important project at the time.

This was my first project, so when I started as a project architect, I applied the best architecture I could think of, the techniques I knew at the time and the ones I didn’t know. I think since it is such an important project, it should be done with the best technology and the best architecture.

One and a half months into the project, when the function was almost half developed, we had dinner together after working overtime one night. At that time, a colleague sat next to me and said to my supervisor, “There may be something wrong with the architecture you designed. As the project developed, it became more and more difficult for us to add many functions in it. At that time, my supervisor told him that Lu Su was the architect of the project and he was in charge of the technology of the project. There would be no more doubts and the matter would pass.

When I went back that night, I thought about it and decided that the problem was real. And is it really a reliable thing to use so much new technology in such an important project? It was about one or two in the morning when I came to grips with the problem: I thought there was something wrong with the architecture. Not only was there a problem with what my colleagues said, but we shouldn’t have supported such an important system with unproven technology.

So then I had to decide: What now?

At three or four in the morning, I decided to go with the new architecture. I threw together a quick prototype and built a demo system using my best and most reliable techniques.

When I arrived at the company at eight o ‘clock in the morning, I immediately told my supervisor to call together the project team and hold an important meeting. At the meeting, I said that there was something wrong with the previous architecture, and I suggested that our project should change the architecture to a more simple architecture with more reliable technical support. I made a demo according to this architecture. The meeting was very efficient and the final results were: first, everyone supported the new structure. Second, everyone will move their own previous work to this new structure. I was particularly moved after the meeting. We quickly completed the project with the new structure and put Alipay online in May.

This has influenced my architecture style: I tend to be pragmatic and make sure that every system going live is the most successful way. If I had made a wrong decision in 2005, my career might have been completely different. This project may have failed, and it is hard to say what impact it will have on Alipay. It also changed my decision-making style: put the “me” out of the way before making any decisions.

Lu Su: should say pay treasure achievement me. Many important things happened in the whole process of alipay’s development, and I only played a key role in a few cases.

Lu Su: I feel more is the person that pays treasure to develop in the process did not fall behind. In my opinion, the development of Alipay is always faster than I imagined, and you must try your best to keep up with the lagging behind. You always maintain your competence and responsibility, which is actually your growth.

Lu Su: Yes, I think it’s a sense of responsibility. From the first day I joined Alipay, I felt that alipay system was on my shoulders. At that time, the system was very primitive, especially in the early years of the year or two, basically it broke every three days, and a lot of times it happened at night, and anything that went wrong was your problem. This sense of responsibility, established early on, has not changed since.

Lu Su: I don’t have any mottos myself, but there are a lot of local dialects in Alibaba, which have a great influence on me. There is a local saying, “At this moment, it is only me”, which I think reflects the whole Ali spirit of responsibility, which I personally think I have, I will stand up for it at the first time.

Lu Su: In 2010, I was under the impression that the annual meeting was held in January. At that time, after the president of Alipay finished his speech, the whole party went dark. Suddenly, a voice rang out. It was the voice of one of our customers, who complained on the phone about our poor service and any problems.

It was the first time I had heard the voice of a real client! And ask questions about our products. These problems were known to us in the past, but we didn’t think it had such a big impact on customers. However, hearing this at that time, it was very touching.

Then the light came on, And Mr. Ma walked to the stage and said, “Alipay, what you do is too bad, very bad!”

It’s Ali. It’s very direct. “I will be the new president of Alipay,” Peng said.

I remember she made a speech, she said: “I am a woman, I have three characteristics: the first characteristic is love dream, the second characteristic is pettiness, the third characteristic is unreasonable. And then he gave us the target. At the time, users had to jump online payments from Alipay to the bank’s website, a success rate of less than 70 percent. “I’m asking everyone to go from 70% to 90% success rate this year,” she said. Don’t tell me you can’t do it. I am unreasonable. You must do it.

After the annual meeting, we had one goal for the whole company that year, that is, how to increase this figure from 70% to 90%, rather than a very ambitious business strategic framework. Driven by this goal, we made a very important innovation: Fast Payments, which is now used for daily payments, was invented then. Thanks to the advent of fast payment, it has gone from less than 70% to more than 95%, making mobile payment possible.

Lu Su: In fact, MY code writing time is very short: in 2004, I joined Taobao and started to write a code that can be used by real users (some of the previous writing is demo code). In 2008, I started to be an architect (at that time, our architect is required not to write code), so I really write code for four years. So after 2009, I went from being a programmer writing code to an architect thinking about technology strategy, and that was a big change.

Lu Su: First of all, I think people with technical backgrounds tend to be rational and reasonable. People in business are basically unreasonable. The example OF Peng Lei I gave just now is that she is unreasonable.

So in this case, I think each has its own advantages: the technical person makes a decision, which is a very sound decision, and he says it will work, basically it will work. But he has one drawback: if he’s too reliable, he’s hard to jump out of.

It was only when I started working as a CTO at Ant Financial in 2013 that I started to give the team some dubious goals. At first, I had no feeling at all, but later on, I gradually found a sense of how to make a seemingly unreasonable decision, but behind it is actually sound. This will require a deeper understanding of the system.

, for example, in 2007 when I met InfoQ China director HuoTai stability, at the time when I talk to him and said, when the pay treasure about LiangSanBaiWan lines of code, I said pay treasure this LiangSanBaiWan code is in my mind, there is a problem I can jump out in your mind: what place is about, the problems of which piece of code.

By 2009, when Alipay was 10 times bigger, my brain had completely lost the feeling and I stopped touching the code. But at that time, I was very clear about how many systems Alipay had and what kind of status process a user would have when they clicked on the system for the first time. Therefore, if there was any failure of Alipay, I would immediately know where there might be a problem. To the back of the time, and there are several transformation, from do architects to management team, including people, organization, system, and to do business, now on the business of the whole system, the value to customers, what kind of impact to the customer, has what kind of impact to the business relations of cooperation, this is need time to accumulate.

Lu SU: I think it could be a decade of constant transformation.

In 2009, I was the chief architect of Alipay. At that time, I thought it was the peak of my career and I was ready to retire. But in 2013, there was a sudden change, I was appointed as the technical director of the company, which was a big change, and it was a new beginning, and I had to learn everything from scratch. After another three or four years, I began to be competent for this position. When I just entered the business circle, I was placed in an unfamiliar place: the global business of Ant Financial was transformed again.

Technology changes every two years, and when you’re just starting to get a feel for a technology, a new technology comes along, you relearn it, you understand it, and you know what the impact is. The challenge for me is that I can’t really understand the technology anymore. So far, I have never written a mobile application, but I have to be very clear about the impact of mobile technology on business.

Lu Su: I find it difficult to predict the future. Let me talk about my expectations. First of all, I think Chinese Internet companies are no less than any other Internet companies in the world in terms of the application and mastery of technology. I am particularly hopeful that China will do a lot of things ahead.

At the same time, as China’s Internet has come to this stage, IT will face new problems, which have never been encountered in any IT market in the past. Through these problems, new technologies, new productivity and even new production relations will emerge. This is what we can expect. We can foresee that in the next five or ten years, we will also see some Chinese technical masters, and maybe some Turing winners, because of the emergence of original technological innovations in China. This is what we can expect.