This article by “TGO kunpeng will” original, the original links: our quick quiz | Hi, technology bosses, tell me about your growing experience!
The world’s biggest Internet companies are always in the spotlight, and the stories of their tech executives — ceos, Ctos and product directors — are always fascinating. However, in addition to what everyone knows, they also have a lot of hidden thoughts, habits and quirks about their work and life. TGO kunpeng will launch a “Quick Questions and Answers” series, in which we pose the same question to technology leaders and hope their answers will be instructive and informative.
Planning | | hai-xing liu translation Li Yunong interview | Echo Tang
Topic of the Day: How did you grow to where you are today?
Slack CTO Cal Henderson
Cal Henderson is the co-founder and CTO of Slack, which Henderson and his team started while trying to make an online game called Glitch. But this isn’t the first time Henderson and Slack’s other co-founder, Stuart Butterfield, have started a game and started a company — Henderson joined Butterfield in the early 2000s, He successfully developed a game called Neverending. The game led to the photo-sharing site Flickr. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ “I got into computers when I was about 6 years old. It was my cousin’s Texas TI-99, and I was obsessed with it. Like most computers of the time, it had a BASIC translator. A few years later, I decided that “programming” was what I wanted to do when I grew up. It’s been 12 years since I moved from Vancouver to San Francisco after Yahoo bought Flickr. When I worked at Flickr, I led the team that built some of the most commonly used technologies today, including apis, oAuth, and oEmbed, wrote the now best-selling O’Reilly book, and built the website. I left Flickr in 2009, Worked with Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, also from Flickr, to develop the MMO (massively multiplayer online game) Glitch.”
Affirm CEO & PayPal co-founder Max Levchin
It’s a point of pride for any entrepreneur to start a company and turn a profit, but Max Levchin has done more than that. In addition to serving as CEO of Affirm, he’s also behind a string of well-known and influential startups.
Levchin co-founded PayPal, the now-ubiquitous online payment service, with his partners and served as its CTO before it was acquired by eBay in 2002. But that was just one of many companies Max Levchin founded, including a media-sharing service called Slide, which was acquired by Google, provided initial funding for Yelp and invested in Evernote, where he also served on the board. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ “I consider myself a computer scientist and mathematician, and my philosophy of life is based on first principles. I was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and almost every member of my family was a scientist. I’ve co-founded and invested in hundreds of companies with my partners (mostly through my Innovation and Investment Lab, HVF), most notably PayPal, Yelp, Slide, Glow, and Affirm.”
Richard Wong, Principal engineer at Coursera
Coursera is an online education platform that covers everything from the humanities and arts to computer science to coding, and you can learn from some of the world’s top educational institutions. Still, a lot of work is needed to get Coursera’s catalog up and running — and supporting its 22 million users. The engineering head behind Coursera is Richard Wong, who spent nearly two decades working in technology at companies like Microsoft and LinkedIn before joining the company a few years ago to get a taste of startup life. As someone who loved to travel and learn new subjects, the engineer’s curiosity made him a genius for the company. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ “I wrote my first code in Hong Kong when I was 10 years old, and from then on I thought I would be an engineer all my life. My uncle had an Apple IIe, and he taught me how to type something into the computer and get a response, and I fell in love with the elegance of programming. My parents bought me my first computer after saving their wages for three months. Since then, I have been immersed in the world of computers, while spending a lot of time in the library researching and exploring. I have a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Before that, I was an undergraduate student in Hong Kong. My first job was at Microsoft, where I had the opportunity to work on distributed systems that support hundreds of millions of users, where I worked for 11 years and rose up the ranks of various Microsoft product classes. I moved to LinkedIn, where I worked for four years. Two years ago, former colleagues introduced me to Coursera. Once I joined, I was immediately drawn to this close-knit, fast-paced startup culture. At the same time, I accepted the mission of making knowledge more accessible to people around the world and took root in my heart.”
Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson
David Heinemeier Hansson — DHH, is the developer behind Basecamp’s namesake flagship product. He is also the founder of Ruby on Rails, the framework for sites such as Hulu, Airbnb, GitHub and early versions of Twitter. In his spare time, he is also an international racing driver. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ “I got my first computer, the Amstrad 646, when I was six years old. But I’m no computer whizz. I’ve tried and failed to learn how to program. Mostly, I just play other people’s games on the computer. As a teenager I used to run warez BBS on a pirated Amiga software called Electronic Chaos. It was through this encounter with the Amiga that I became friends with a group of programmers. Watching them work convinced me that this wasn’t going to be my future career. But I still love games, so I build websites to review them. When I was in high school, I started a review magazine called Konsollen, and we ended up with 10 freelance writers and tens of thousands of readers. But we didn’t have the money to buy all the games, so I ended up befriending a manager in a Copenhagen game store who lent me all the new games. It wasn’t until 2000 that I really started my own business — I started Dailyrush.dk, which handled console and computer games. I think that’s true entrepreneurship, creating an incubator without a business plan or funding. But I found that I had to start learning PHP, not because I wanted to be a programmer, but because I wanted to design new features for my website. In 2001, 37 Signals co-founder Jason Fried posted a problem about PHP on his blog, and I wrote him an email to help fix it. He just hired me straight into the company.”
Zhang Zewu, technical manager of IQiyi
Zewu Zhang is currently working at IQiyi PC client as technical manager and member of TGO Club Shanghai Branch. Eleven years of C++ project development and management experience, three years of golang project development and management experience. Familiar with Windows and Linux platform system layer API call and troubleshooting experience, understand reverse and disassembly. Having worked in the securities and futures industry for many years, I am familiar with the research and development of market trading system, financial browser and cloud platform. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ “Growth is a process, which requires continuous progress and deepening, to accumulate and harvest. Your inner voice is the direction you pursue. When I was in high school, I carefully studied cost accounting, human resources, psychology, relativity, calculus and Harvard MBA course cases. College self-taught assembly, C++, etc., “trace back to the source, know what it is, know why it is” as the motto. Therefore, I changed my major from polymer chemistry to IT research and development, and then to the financial circle. Along the way, although there are hardships, but calm and confused. Maybe there will be more changes and challenges in the future, that is what I am looking forward to, my heart direction. I think the most important thing is to always follow my own inner voice and stick to who I am.”
Stone Investment Financial CTO Xie Dongsheng
Xie Dongsheng, CTO of Stone Investment Finance, member of Shanghai Branch of TGO Kunpeng Club, used to be the architect and project manager of eBay China R&D Center, technical director of Fengqu Overseas Shopping, and technical director of Zibang Financial Service Company Luowang Financial Management. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ “When I was 11 years old, I won the second prize in the National Mathematical Olympiad. In order to reward me, my father bought me a Small Overlord learning machine. It was this machine that introduced me to QBASIC, and I began to learn programming according to the supporting tutorials of the learning machine. As a primary school student, I didn’t know what a function was at that time. I thought that “PRINT” meant printing on paper with a printer. When I was in high school, I was lucky enough to be admitted to the best high school in chongqing, where I began to learn C++ and had access to computers. However, from the small overlord jump to 386, the effect of the game can see the difference, but also can use the mouse. My biggest dream was to write a mouse game. Those three years were spent in memory, I was introduced to turboC 2.0, learned about interrupts, resident programs, etc. At that time, there was no Internet, and all the information I had access to was in Xinhua Bookstore, so Xinhua Bookstore became the place I went to the most in my spare time. In college, I was admitted to the Computer department and bought my first computer in my freshman year. By taking advantage of this opportunity, I learned Windows Server/ASP /.NET/Linux/Networking/HTML/CSS during my undergraduate study. After graduate school, WEB 1.0 started to explode, and IN the past three years I have touched all the major technologies in the JAVA world (Spring/Struts/Hibernate/iBatis). In addition, I also set up several technical associations. This period of experience has laid a solid foundation for my organizational and management skills. After graduation, I was also lucky enough to join the first-class team. Working with top-notch people, I have made rapid progress. The company is based in Silicon Valley, which gives me the opportunity to travel abroad frequently, which broadens my horizon. In the process of continuous learning, my ability is improving faster and faster. Thanks for the influence and support of friends and groups around me.”
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