Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Before leaders conquer the world, they have to conquer themselves first. Learn about global leaders' stories and find principles you can apply to your own life.
hello everyone.
Welcome to Conquered the podcast
about how global leaders conquer
themselves before conquering the world.
I am your host, Alex Wu.
I apologize for taking so long to update.
I have been traveling, but I'm glad
that I took the time to, to really
do my research and interviewed a few
people, a few insiders, if you may.
I've read a lot of the biographies about
this person in Chinese and as well as some
articles in the Forbes magazines and a few
more recent interviews done in Chinese.
In this, In this third episode, we're
talking about Wang Tao or Frank Wine
Founder and the CEO of DJI, who built
a kingdom of drones that took over
the world by storm to this date.
In spite of the efforts of the US trying
to ban the brand multiple times, DJI
still dominates the world and controls
over 70% of the consumer drone market.
Its technology and the design are still
far ahead of the competition in 2026.
DJI expect to bring in over $15 billion
in revenue selling drones and cameras,
and they're still a private company.
Wang Tao, the stubborn engineer who was
so persistent in making a helicopter
hover 20 years ago is still at the
helm of DJI plugging along every day.
He is the inspiration for so many
Chinese engineers to conquer the
world with innovative products.
Wang Tao keeps a very low public
profile, and he often wears round framed
glasses, like in this photo with a
small tuft of beard on the center of
his chin and a golf cap on his head.
He didn't look like an engineer.
But an artist.
Most of the Chinese media refers to him
as Wang Tao, and most of the Western
media calls him Frank Wang inside DJI.
He prefers Frank.
I believe throughout this episode,
I'm going to use these two names
interchangeably, so don't get confused.
Wang Tao and Frank Wine,
they're the same person.
I want to start by quoting him
during an interview back in 2016.
The world is just too
dumb, unbelievably dumb.
After I started working, I
realized there are just too many
unreliable people and things.
The world is actually much
more foolish than I imagined.
Even many well-known figures, people
we once saw and still see
as almost godlike, their
level really isn't that high.
I question myself all the time.
Am I just losing my mind here?
I constantly ask whether my judgment
is off, but in the end I still
come back to the same conclusion.
This world is pretty dumb.
I appreciate Steve Jobs ideas,
but there's no one I truly admire.
All you need to do is to
be smarter than others.
There needs to be a
distance from the masses.
If you can create that distance,
you will be successful.
That might sound extremely
arrogant, but back in 2016.
DJI dominated the consumer
drone market by taking almost
80% of the global market share.
DJI was like apple for drones,
so don't judge him just yet.
Probably by the end of this episode you
will understand where he is coming from.
In this episode, I will
cover a few things.
First one, Wang Tao's obsession with
helicopter since early childhood.
Second, his prolonged cottage days
that lead to the founding of DJI
three, his controlling character.
And number four, how DJI entered
the US market with Colin Guinn.
Number five, what technical capability
sets DJI, apart from competitions and
six, how Wang Tao created and poured
his heart into Robo Master, a robot
competition that aims to inspire the
next generation of engineers, but also
served as a critical recruiting machine.
And seven, how DJI continue to
dominate in drones even to this date.
But first we go back to where
the Flying Dream started.
Wang Tao was born in 1980 in
Hang Zhou Zhe Jiang province.
His father is an engineer
and his mom is a teacher.
His parents later would start
a business in Shenzhen, and
they were doing quite well.
The whole family relocated to Shenzhen
when Wang Tao was in elementary school.
Fun facts.
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba,
was also born in the city of ou,
but Jack is a generation older
than Wang, Tao on the other hand.
Huang Jung, for those of you who don't
know the founder of ping duo duo.
A publicly traded company that owns Temu
was also born and raised in Hang Zhou.
In fact, Wang Tao and Huang went to
the same middle school and high school.
It is called Hang Zhou, foreign
Languages School, or Hang Wai.
It is one of the most respected
schools in Zhe Jiang province.
Wang and Huang were one year apart.
I don't think they have ever met.
The school is a boarding school.
Wang Tao was sent there partly because
his parents were really busy running
the business in Shen Zhen and they don't
have much time to take care of Wang Tao.
According to Wang Tao himself,
his obsession with drones started
with a red helicopter that he saw
in the Children's picture book.
He got hooked immediately
and he dreamed about having a
model helicopter of his own.
I quote one out here, quote, when I
was in my first year of high school, my
parents finally bought me one remotely
controlled helicopter, but for a year
or two, I couldn't get it to fly.
Either I assembled it
wrong or some parts broke.
Back then, I thought to myself one
day I want to build something that
is easy to fly many years later.
DJI made the Mavic Mini.
It's light only 250 grams, foldable
and nimble enough to avoid obstacles.
If you could travel back in time and
hand that thing to my high school
self, I would probably have slept
with it in my arms every night.
Ha Ha.
End quote.
So Wang Tao is a great student in
school, but he is not exceptional.
He got into East China normal
university in Shanghai in 1999.
Through the National Entrance Test.
It is a well respected
comprehensive university, but its
engineering program is mediocre.
Wang Tao picked electrical
engineering as his major.
However, he feels more and more
frustrated as years go by because his not
learning things that he wants to learn.
So he drops out in junior year.
He simply couldn't stand wasting any more
time at East China Normal University.
He then started applying to top
engineering schools in the United
States like Stanford and MIT.
He did not get in either of those,
but fortunately he applied to Hong
Kong University of Science and
Technology as well, and he got in.
Notice that Wang Tao did not choose
to get the bachelor degree first and
apply to a graduate program abroad.
He did not want to compromise.
So two observations that I made.
First, he knows what he wants and
he is not afraid to pursue it.
Remember in episode one where
I talked about John ing of ance
switching majors from electrical
engineering to software engineering.
Wang Tao talk took it to another level.
He dared to start fresh at a
completely different university.
His parents probably got really angry.
Second, he is super confident in himself
and ambitious, almost in a naive fashion.
He was aiming for Stanford and MIT.
The best engineering
colleges in the world.
He is shooting for top of
the world quality apparently.
I think that explains why he
aims to create world class
products later in his career.
Anyway, before we put his college
days at East China, normal
University behind him there were
two more things worth mentioning.
One is that he met his wife there
in college and secondly, he acquired
his design taste through art classes.
There's not much coverage on this
fact, but I find it crucial to Wang
Tao's future success in product design.
I quote a commencement speech by the East
China normal university principle in 2023.
Frank Wang, our alumnus and founder of
DJI spent three years at our University
studying in the Department of Electronics.
Beyond his passion for innovation
and entrepreneurship, he
also had a deep love for art.
His wife also, our alumna, not
only graduated from the same
department, but later pursued
graduate studies in fine arts.
During their time at the
university, she fully understood
and enthusiastically supported
Wang's technological explorations
in their abilities and characters.
They embody a fusion of east
and west and a seamless blend of
art and technology, their shared
qualities, humidity, diligence.
Originality and aesthetic sensitivity
are reflected in the elegant form
and agile spirit of DJI drones,
which now lead the global industry.
The dozen or so ergonomically, refined
and elegantly crafted wooden chairs
placed throughout our campus were
personally designed by Wang and gifted
to his alma matter that is amazing.
Wang Tao actually designed
some wooden chairs.
I asked, I couldn't find any pictures,
so I just asked AI to imagine
what that chair might look like.
So I put it up here.
What do you guys think?
Let me take a tangent here
and talk about another world
class entrepreneur James Dyson.
I was reading James Dyson's biography
when I was working on Wang Tao's episode,
and there's so many parallels that I
can draw between Dyson and Wang Tao.
Dyson attended the most prestigious
art school in London, Royal College
of Art, and developed engineering
knowledge later in his career.
They both stand at the intersection
of great engineering and great
design, Dyson with the vacuum cleaner
and the Wang Tao with the drones.
They both have a unique taste in product.
Both of them are about absolute control
over every little detail of the product.
And finally.
They both met their wives
in college for some reason.
That is quite common in the
founders that I've covered so far.
If you listen to the first episodes Zhang
Yiming and Jensen Huang met their wives
in college too, so very interesting.
Now, back to Wang Tao's journey.
The year is 2003.
Wang Tao is already 23 years old.
Most people are finishing
college at this point.
Wang Tao was just starting over at Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology
H-K-U-S-T in short, his third choice
in hindsight, he was exactly
where he needed to be.
A university that was quietly building
the future of hardware in Asia.
H-K-U-S-T in the early two thousands was
barely 10 years old, founded in 1991.
It is young and hungry.
This is not an old theoretical
ivory tower institution.
This is a university designed from day
one to compete with MIT and Stanford.
And unlike universities in mainland
China at the time, engineering at
H-K-U-S-T is not about passing exams.
It was about making things and
making them work, not just in
the lab, but in the real world.
In a broader context after the Asian
financial crisis of 1997, policy makers of
Hong Kong realized that the city needed a
new engine of growth beyond real estate.
Banking and financial services.
They wanted Hong Kong to become
competitive on knowledge,
innovation and technology.
Universities can be engines of economic
transformation and innovation ecosystems.
H-K-U-S-T is at the center of
that initiative and at the center
of the engineering department
of H-K-U-S-T is one professor.
I am quoting the following
from the school website.
Professor Lee joined the school
of engineering in 1992 in the
formative days of H-K-U-S-T.
After 13 years of exploring robotics
and artificial intelligence research
at Carnegie Mellon University,
uc, Berkeley, MIT and NYU.
As early as 1998, he
set up the university's.
Automation Technology center.
In early two thousands, experiential
learning began to feature in Professor
Lee's teaching at the school of
Engineering, one of the first students to
take his class providing training for the
Hong Kong section of Robocon, a robotics
competition organized by the Asia Pacific
Broadcasting Union was Frank Wong Tao, who
later became the founder of DJI in 2004.
The first year the Hong
Kong contest was held.
The H-K-U-S-T team did not win,
but the students' interest had
been fired up and the next year
they did triumph, subsequently
earning a place among the top three.
In the Asia Pacific final, in Beijing
end quote, professor Lee would play
a very important role in Wang Tao's
journey and the DJI's early days.
So let's put a pin in it
and we will come back later.
I do know that Professor Lee is from
Hunan, which is where I'm coming from.
That's a special connection.
Shout out to Professor Lee.
By the way.
Yeah, when he speaks you
can clearly tell that he has
accent a Hunan accent for sure.
More about Robocon.
This robotics competition really
opens the door for one top.
He got really into robotics,
and it became his life of work.
I actually found an old YouTube video with
some footage from the 2005 competition.
It was quite interesting.
The competition was very open-ended.
Robots with different designs, the
contest is about winning by scoring more
points rather than destroying opponents.
H-K-U-S-T beat Japan in the quarterfinal,
but lost to Beijing Institute
of Technology in the semifinal.
Wang Tao was in his junior year,
and you could see him wearing
an orange vest in the video as
pointed out in this screenshot.
More context about Robocom.
It is not a popular context,
even among engineering students.
There are no actual credits
for school and it does not
lead to research papers either.
Students who join are
really a group of geeks.
They need to integrate mechanical
design, electronics, software control
systems, and testing in a real
project, which is exponentially more
complex than typical lab assignments.
Students also have to work long hours
together, power through breakdowns
and failures, creating bonds and
problem solving confidence that
shape habits for future careers.
Wang Tao benefited tremendously from this
experience and later he would hire so many
past uh, Robocon participants to join DJI.
And as we will get into later, Wang
Tao would start his own robotic
competition to compete with Robocon.
After two years of practice at
Robocon Wang Tao is ready to pursue
his childhood dream, to control a
model helicopter In 2006 for his
final thesis, rather than asking his
professor for ideas, he picked his own
topic model, helicopter hover control.
It is a very challenging topic.
The unmanned model helicopter is
extremely hard to control because
there are so many variables affecting
the stability of a helicopter.
Most of the researchers were able
to control the model plane to.
Take off and land, but very few
were able to make the helicopter
hover at a certain height.
At the time, there were less than 10 labs
in the world that could get it working.
Yet Wang Tao decides to take on
this challenge head on with two
classmates, and of course, he worked
very hard for a few months, but
unfortunately, the dissertation
presentation went really poorly.
His helicopter couldn't even take off.
He got a C.
A few years later the instructor who gave
Wang Tao the sea on the project recalled
the incident in a blog post quote.
What happened was Wang Tao spent half
an hour trying to get the helicopter
to fly, but it never lifted off.
The project was flight control system with
very little theoretical work behind it.
If the helicopter couldn't
fly, it essentially meant
the system wasn't working.
And with other students watching
nearby, giving him a high
grade would have been unfair.
If Wang Tao had managed to get it
airborne, even if it crashed afterward,
I wouldn't have given such a low grade.
I still remember the beats of
sweat on Wang Tao's forehead and
the look of Desp buyer in his eyes
as I turned and walked away end
quote also in Wang Tao's own words.
This was a really difficult project.
If you wanted a high grade, you
normally wouldn't choose it.
I picked it purely out of interest, and
because I genuinely believed I could
make it work during that time, every
day I told myself, tomorrow it'll fly.
In reality, it had never taken off before.
The final presentation.
I just hoped that on the day
of the presentation, maybe
I could pull off a miracle.
After that, over the winter break,
I pushed hard for another three
weeks, day and night, completely
immersed and finally got it to fly.
In the end, I was just
three weeks short end quote.
And that's a perfect example
of fake it until you make it.
But it was unfortunate because Wang
Taos goal is to go to MIT Stanford
for graduate school, but this is now
a dead end because he did so poorly
in the final thesis presentation.
Professor Li Ze Xiang
is here to his rescue.
Here's a quote from a
Forbes article quote.
Robotics Professor Li Ze Xiang
noticed Wang's group leadership
and technical understanding and
brought the headstrong student
into the school's graduate program.
I couldn't tell that Frank
was smarter than others.
says Li, who served as an early
advisor and investor to DJI and
now owns about 10% as his chairman.
But good performance at work was not
necessarily comparable with good grades.
Lee was absolutely right.
Um, Wang Tao got his control
unit working in no time.
Even better.
He was able to sell the unit for more than
$6,000 and it only cost $2,000 to make.
Li Ze Xiang encouraged Wang Tao to
start a company to sell this thing.
That's always been Li's plan to encourage
his students to embrace entrepreneurship,
to embrace the market, and for Wang
Tao himself, watching his parents
running a business since he was little.
I think
he wants to run his own company too.
So in November, 2006, da Jang Innovation
is founded in Shezhen DJI for short.
Wang Tao has some seed money from
his parents and open shop in a
spare warehouse generously provided
by his uncle In the early days
of dj, I Wang Tao has no vision.
No money and no real product.
But for some reason one of his family
friends, Ludi invested $90,000 in
the company and became the CFO.
It was reported that Ludi owns 16% of
DJI, around 2015 worth about $1.6 billion.
Wang Tao recruited a few college
graduates to help him build
more flight control units.
He taught these early
employees everything, but
he's very hard to work with.
He has a very high standard for
everything and he's especially
paranoid about product quality.
He likes to work well into the night and
expects other people to be there with him.
He's crazy about every little detail,
including how tight each screw should
be, and there are hundreds of screw.
In 2007, most of the early team members
left the company and started their own
drone companies, inspired by one Wong
Tao, but ended up competing with DJI.
Rumor says that the early team members
left because they were not satisfied
with the equity that Wang Tao offered.
But according to Wang Tao himself,
it was merely an excuse because later
he discovered that those employees
were poached by a competitor long
time ago, and they started working
secretly for that competitor
already while still employed at DJI.
Anyway this would not be the last
time that Wong Tao fights over
equity numbers with partners.
When DJI enters North America, Wong Tao
and his business partner ended up in
court fighting over share percentages,
and we will cover that story later.
Now back to Wang Tao in 2007,
struggling operationally and
financially on a daily basis.
Professor Li Ze Xiang is there again
to help DJI, but even he admitted
that the company was in a bad shape.
He recalled everyone left
except for one bookkeeper.
A competitor even offered to buy the
technology from DJI for merely $20,000.
Wang Taolk was even a little
tempted but he turned it down
because the offer was too low.
Think about it, $20,000
for DJI back in 2007.
Li Ze Xiang spent a lot of time recruiting
college graduates from H-K-U-S-T and
other top engineering universities.
To work for DJI In 2008, he teamed up
with Zhu Xiao Rui a professor from Har
Institute of Technology to invest $180,000
in DJI Zhu Xiao Rui also became the chief
scientist and she continues to recruit
her own graduate students to work at DJI.
Early days of DJI for Wang Tao is
like climbing Mount Everest, both
metaphorically and literally because the
team has been working hard to make the
unmanned helicopter fly at Mount Everest,
they finally made it in September, 2009.
The success got DJI a fair
amount of media coverage.
And you're looking at the picture uh, they
took near the mountain uh, Wang Tao and
Li Ze Xiang, are the two on the right.
From 2006 to 2009, Wang Tao kept iterating
on the flight control unit called
XP from XP one to XP two to XP 3.1.
They were getting steady orders.
Also with the core team settling
down DJI started exploring
other market opportunities.
They released ACE one, a much
lighter and cheaper control module
in 2009, and that is a big success.
Now it's a good time to really understand
what goes into the flight control
unit that DJI has been focusing on.
Note that Wang Tao was still working
on his master's degree part-time since
2006, and in 2011 he finally graduated
from H-K-U-S-T under Professor Lee.
Wang Tao's master thesis is
available online and it focuses
on the design of XP 3.1.
So that's convenient.
I quote Wang Tao from the
acknowledge page from the thesis.
I am heartly thankful to my
supervisor, professor Li Ze Xiang,
whose encouragement, guidance, and
support from the initial to the
final level enabled me to develop
an understanding of the subject.
Lastly, I offer my regards and
blessings to all of those who
supported me in any respect during the
completion of the project end quote.
In this paper, Wang Tao mainly talked
about the hardware design for the flight
control unit of an unmanned helicopter.
And the control algorithm implementation.
The title is Control Systems
for Autonomous Helicopters.
It is essentially about one thing.
How do you make a helicopter
hover autonomously?
That sounds simple, but in reality, it's
one of the hardest problems in robotics.
You might think all of the robots
are humanoid because how insanely
popular they are right now.
That is far from the truth.
Unmanned, Aerial vehicle or UAV
or drone has always been a focus
area for robotic researchers.
When we talk about drones, you think of
quadcopters with four sets of rotors.
They're popular because they're
much easier to control versus
helicopters with only one giant rotor.
Wang Tao decided to tackle helicopters.
The research is basically a continuation
of his undergrad final project.
A helicopter is naturally unstable.
If you slightly tilt the rotor the
aircraft accelerates in that direction.
And if you're slightly overcorrect,
it accelerates the other way.
Tiny errors quickly amplify To
make autonomous helicopter works.
First, it needs to know what is happening.
Modern drones answer these questions
using a collection of sensors.
Most importantly, something called
an IMU Inertial Measurement Unit.
An IMU contains gyroscopes
and accelerometers.
Gyroscopes are used to measure
angular speed and accelerometers
are used to measure regular speed.
And if you're watching this podcast on
your phone, you're using one already
because every smartphone has an IMU
say, you are watching this on YouTube.
When you rotate your phone from portrait
to landscape, the phone determines
orientation change with the IMU and
the YouTube app automatically switches
to wide screen in Wang Tao's design.
The flight controller uses IMU to
measure acceleration, barometers to
estimate altitude digital compass
for direction GPS for position.
All of these sensors are commodity
components thanks to the evolution of.
Smartphones.
The real magic happens in how
their signals are combined.
Wang Tao has a CPU taking all of the
sensor information in, fusing them
together and sending control signals
to the main rotor and the tail rotor.
It takes the measurement again and
tries to make adjustments constantly.
It runs in a loop, and this
is called a feedback loop.
Again, none of these
technologies are unique sensors,
feedback loop control theory.
All of these existed long before.
So why did Wang Tao succeed?
The answer lies in
integration and iteration.
Wang Tao spent years crashing
helicopters and rebuilding them.
Every crash was a data point.
Every failure helped refine the system.
He learned things that
aren't written in textbooks.
Where exactly should the sensors
be placed to minimize vibration?
And how should parameters change
for different rotor configurations?
How do you tune a controller
differently for a gasoline
helicopter versus an electric one?
How do you make this system reliable
enough that ordinary people can fly it?
These details are what separate a
research prototype from a real product.
James Dyson followed
the exact same playbook.
He spent five years in his
home lab working on prototypes
for bagless vacuum cleaners.
He would only change one thing at a
time, and it took him 5127 failures to
get to the design that worked perfectly.
He didn't even go to an engineering
school, and yet he is the one who
reinvented the vacuum cleaner, and
that is the power of iteration.
Besides hovering, Wang Tao did
one more thing that is critical.
It was only mentioned briefly
in the paper, buried under
math equations and diagrams.
The section is titled
Stabilization of Gimbal.
I quote, currently, most of the UAVs
are for monitoring or taking photos and
videos from air by the onboard cameras.
However, the aircraft is not
a stable platform because of.
The vibrations caused by the engines,
rollers, mechanical structures, and
the inclines required by the flights.
If the camera or cam corder is equipped
onto the aircraft directly, the pictures
of the videos captured will be fuzzy.
So a camera or camcorder is
usually equipped onto the gimbal.
The role of the gimbal is to
make the camera do the movements
of a certain degree of freedom.
To obtain the required shooting angle
and view au Fi filed multiple patents
on gimbal driven by brushless DC
motors, and it was such an elegant
design, and it became the standard for
all of the drones coming afterwards.
Brushless DC motor is one of the most
important inventions in modern days.
It not only powers, rotors on
the drones, drives the gimbal.
It's also one of the key components
in your Dyson vacuum cleaner, your
Dyson hair dryer, your Tesla, or
other electrical vehicles even
the joints on humanoid robots.
In recent years brushless DC Motor
advanced significantly thanks to
advancement in power, electronics
control algorithms, and new
permanent magnetic materials.
According to a pattern filed by
Wang Tao, the brush list, DC motors
have the following benefits, one
reliable performance, reduced wear,
and or malfunction rate, and a
longer service life about six times
than that of a brushed motor due to
commutation with electronics instead
of mechanical commutators two.
No load current because brushless
DC motors are static motors.
Three high efficiency,
and four small size.
Now the year is 2010.
DJI has been growing steadily and
built a reputation among hobbyists.
The market it is in is
still very niche so far.
DJI has been focusing on helicopters only.
But Wang Tao started hearing
more and more about Multirotor
drone, especially quad copter.
The drone with four rotors around
the body, even though it carries
less weight, flies slower.
It is cheap to design and easy to control.
So Wang Tao decided to.
Start investing in quadcopter as well.
Porting over the flight control design
from helicopter to quadcopter is smooth.
And in 2011, they released Buon, a
flight control unit for Multirotor drone.
It was very well received by
customers around the world.
And note that in the early days of
DJI, the majority of the revenue
was coming from abroad, has always
been Wang Tao's plan to conquer
the world with his products.
He is about to find just the right
partner to enter the most important
market in the world, the United States.
I am quoting the Forbes article here.
DJ I started making more advanced flight
controllers with autopilot functions,
which won then marketed at niche trade
shows like a radio controlled helicopter
gathering in the 70,000 population
town of Muncie, Indiana in 2011.
It was a Muncie that Wang first met Colin
Guinn, a well-built Texan whose angular
good looks once grazed reality TV show
The Amazing Race Guinn who ran an aerial
cinematography startup, was looking
for a way to shoot stabilized video
from a UAV and had reached out to Wang.
By email to see if the young
Chinese company had a solution.
Wang was working on exactly what
Guinn needed, a new kind of gimbal
that used onboard accelerometers to
adjust its orientation on the fly.
So the video frame remained still
despite a drone's shaky flying.
Wang had gone through at least three
gimbal prototypes and one incapable
intern before he had a decent one.
Wang figured out how to connect
the drone's motor to the gimbal
so it wouldn't need its own motor
cutting down on parts and weight.
By 2011, the cost to make a
flight controller had dropped
to less than $400 from $2,000.
In 2006, after initially meeting
DJI executives in Muncie, in
August, 2011, Guin flew out to
Shezhen and eventually formed DJI,
north America and Austin, Texas.
Subsidiary aimed at delivering drones
to the mass market with Wang's blessing.
Guinn was given 48% ownership
of the entity with DJI,
retaining the remaining 52%.
Guinn was put in charge of North America's
sales and much of its English language
marketing quickly developing a new Motto
for the company, the future of possible.
The relationship initially went well.
Wang remembers Guinn as a great
salesman whose ideas sometimes.
Inspired me.
End quote.
When I first learned about this I
couldn't wrap my head around the equity
split 'cause I was under the impression
that Wang Tao is all about control.
Yet he was so generous to offer Colin,
48% maybe because Wang Tao wasn't
that confident in the venture because
no one knows about DJI at the time
in the United States and drones were
such a niche market back in 2011.
Yeah, he wanted to incentivize
Colin to work really hard.
But little did Wang Tao realize
that the timing of his technology
could not have been better.
Around 2010 social media platforms
were entering a new phase of growth.
Smartphones made it incredibly easy to
capture and upload photos and videos.
YouTube and Instagram changed
the way people share content.
At the same time uh, generation of
compact action cameras was emerging.
GoPro founded by Nick Woodman
had become largely popular
among surfers, snowboarders,
and extreme sports enthusiasts.
These cameras were small, rugged,
and capable of capturing high
quality wide angle video in places.
Traditional cameras could not go.
Suddenly people could strap cameras
to helmets, bicycles, and surfboards
to record their adventures.
But there was still one perspective that
remained incredibly difficult to capture.
The aerial view for
decades, just, look at that.
For decades, aerial cinematography
required renting a helicopter, which
could cost thousands of dollars per day.
Only big Hollywood productions or large
television networks could afford it.
For ordinary creators, aerial
footage was almost impossible.
Drones could be a game changer.
And this was what Colin Guinn
saw the potential in DJI to
democratize aerial videos.
DJI happened to be the right product
in the right place at the right time.
That combines flight stability
with camera stabilization.
These drones stop being just flying
machines and become flying cameras.
And in the world increasingly driven by
visual storytelling and social media.
A flying camera turns out to be one
of the most powerful tools imaginable.
So far, we have covered
flight control and gimbal.
There's one more key element to a
flying camera, and that is video
transmission or live video feed.
We're not going to get into the details,
but Wang Tao made these three flight
control, Gimbal and video transmission
the three pillars of a complete
drone product and user experience.
I quote the Forbes article
By late 2012, DJI had.
Put all the pieces together for a
complete drone package Software prepellers
frame, Gimbal and remote control.
The company unveiled the Phantom
in January, 2013, the first ready
to fly preassembled quadcopter that
could be up in the air within an
hour of its unboxing and wouldn't
break apart with its first crash.
Its simplicity and ease of use unlocked
the market beyond obsessed enthusiasts.
So the retail price is only $679.
It does not come with a camera though,
so you would have to buy a GoPro camera
separately, which costs about $400.
In fact, Phantom one does not have
a gimbal nor video transmission.
You have to wait for Phantom two.
To get those capabilities,
but the world still went crazy
about the phantom one initially.
DJI set the internal target
to 3000 units per month.
Then they're getting tens of
thousands of orders every month.
Colin, the CEO of DJI, north
America was working hard as well.
He handled the social
media content strategy.
He started uploading content to YouTube
and brokering strategic partnerships,
most famously with GoPro, the hottest
action camera brand at the time.
I am quoting a story in a Forbes article.
In February, 2013, Colin approached
Woodman founder and CEO of GoPro in the
parking lot at GoPro's headquarters.
As Woodman tried to brush him aside,
Guinn, an enthusiastic salesman, launched
DJ's new Phantom Drone into the air.
The device immediately entranced Woodman,
who grew up piloting remote controlled
gliders in the hills, near his family's
home in Atherton, California, the GoPro,
CEO spent the next hour flying the drone,
delaying a few meetings in the process.
Great story.
I think Colin is a great salesman.
And he's just very creative
and spontaneous in a way.
He's a great showman.
Guinn then arranged Frank and Woodman
to meet a few times to discuss how
the two companies could work together.
Back in 2013, GoPro was one of
the hottest tech companies in the
world, valued at over $2 billion.
DJ I, on the other hand, was
tiny, according to Frank.
Woodman was very arrogant and
insisted on two thirds of the
profit, leaving one third to DJI.
I guess GoPro is treating DJI as a
contract manufacturer basically because
the GoPro brand is very well known in
the us but Frank sees it differently.
He thinks that the drone is more important
and he wants two thirds of the profit.
The official collaboration
did not happen between the two
company and legend goes that.
Guinn said yes to GoPro's
proposal without getting Frank's
approval, and Frank was furious.
Frank was also mad at Guen for taking
too many credits in DJ i's success.
I quote by May, 2013, DJI attempted
to buy out Guinn stake in DJI North
America offering DJI global shares that
would give the American a paltry 0.3%
stake according to court documents.
Guinn demurred pointed out that it
was his office work that led to 30%
of phantoms being sold in the us.
DJI did not leave room for negotiation,
and by December had locked all of DJI
North America's employees out of their
emails and redirected all customer's
payments to China headquarters.
By New Year's Eve, the employees had been
fired and arrangements were being made to
liquidate the Austin offices equipment.
DJI ended the year with
130 million in revenue.
Guinn subsequently sued in early
2014, though the parties eventually
settled out of court in August
for an undisclosed amount under
10 million according to sources.
And here's one more quote from Guinn.
Years later, to say I had nothing to do
with the Phantom would be hilarious, just
as it would be to say I was the inventor
of the phantom would be hilarious.
By the way, the slogan that
Colin came up with the future of
possible is still being used today.
I was able to find the court filings
on this case with a restraining order.
Let's hear Collin's side of story.
I quote, DJI North America's
success was meteoric.
Under Guinn's leadership, DJI, north
America achieved this growth through a
comprehensive business strategy that was
expertly crafted and implemented through
the tireless efforts of Guinn and his
highly talented team, DJI North America
.
Successful strategy included
a five pronged attack.
One, a comprehensive rebranding effort.
Two, a significant internet
and social media presence.
Three, the products use in
the entertainment industry.
Four, the product's, appearances
at trade show presentations.
And five, the development of strategic
partnerships with DJI, north America
achieving critical mass in the
United States, riding the wave of
consumer goodwill and notoriety.
It created and achieving significant
sales in the United States.
DJI North America's success began
to eclipse DJI global itself.
I think that is very telling.
At the time Collins strongly believed
that his branding and marketing efforts
were the main reasons why DJI was
such a success in the United States.
After parting Ways with DJI, he
joined forces with 3D Robotics.
DJ i's biggest competitor
in the US at the time.
3D Robotics was founded by Chris Anderson,
former Wired Magazine editor in chief.
Chris was one of the legends
in personal computer and
robotics, and specifically drone.
He created DIY drones an online community
for drone enthusiasts back in 2007.
Legend goes that in the early days
of DJI, Frank actually spent a lot
of time on DIY drones forums to read
posts to get insights and stay, up
to date on the latest news on drones.
Chris Anderson, co-founded 3D Robotics
in 2009, raising over $120 million
over the years for the company.
I'm quoting another Forbes
article on the 3D Robotics.
By late 2013 Guinn's relationship with
DJI had soured and he was forced out
after the company shuttered his Austin
Operation Guinn sued and it took his
revenge one step further by joining 3D
Robotics the following February with
his fellow former DJI America employees.
in tow Guinn.
As Chief Revenue Officer set up an Austin
office for 3D robotics that handled
marketing and sales in meetings, he would
always say, I want to fucking kill DJ.
I remembered one former 3D
robotics employee together.
Guinn and Anderson dreamt up
the solo, that's the name of the
drone, to challenge the phantoms.
hegemony instead of white solo would be
black and offer features such as scripted
flight path open code for developers
and responsive customer service that DJI
lacked at the time, despite its relatively
steady do it yourself parts business
that was bringing in $10 million a year.
3D Robotics focused all its resources
on its new drone and acquired Sifteo,
a consumer electronics game maker
with no prior drone experience to form
the project's core engineering team.
I looked it up.
Sifteo makes interactive gaming cubes
that are motion aware with a touch screen.
Definitely a zero experience
in robotics or drones.
That is for sure a red flag and it shows
that 3D robotics clearly underestimates
how hard it is to mass produce drones.
Continuing the quote.
When 3D Robotics launched solo in
April, 2015 at the National Association
of Broadcaster Conference in Las
Vegas, the Verge said it may be the
smartest drone ever extolling the
device, self piloting features and its
control of an onboard GoPro camera.
Drone followers also celebrated that
there was now alternative to the Phantom.
A prospect that worried 3D robotics
main competitor that Spring, DJ I,
founder, and A CEO, Frank Wine, traveled
to Berkeley to talk with Anderson and
offered to buy the company outright.
According to one person who witnessed the
meeting, the 3D robotics, CEO, who was
about to start shipping solo, declined.
3D Robotics was in for
the long haul, I think.
Anderson's confidence
partly comes from software.
He sees 3D robotics as Android and
DJI as Apple, where unlike DJ's closed
operating system 3D Robotics makes its
os open source to attract developers.
He says, if everyone is using
our software, then we not
DJI will control the market.
I think he drew parallels between
the personal drone market and
the personal computer market.
He famously wrote an article titled
How I Accidentally Kickstarted
the Domestic Drone Boom.
But Anderson really underestimated
how hard the hardware is for drones.
Let's see what happens next.
Quote, former employees at 3D Robotics
told Forbes that they noticed issues
with solo as soon as the devices hit
the shelves of Best Buy in June, 2015.
Things were never going to plan after
the solo launch said one, the drone's
GPS system sometimes failed to connect
correctly to ensure stable flight
causing the drone to fly away or crash.
The Gimbal or camera stabilizing
device faced production delays and
the first solos hit the market without
this add-on, making it unsuitable
for photos and videos, the chief use
of most consumer drones making the
gimbal was harder than making the drone
sad Guinn, who noted that the device
didn't get to customers until August
a full two months after solos launch.
Okay.
3D Robotics did not make their own
cameras, but choose to work with GoPro.
While GoPro is the official camera
partner for solo, it has been working
on its own drone for quite a while since
the partnership talk broke down with
DJI, GoPro urgently needs another growth
story following the IPO in June, 2014,
and the name of that drone is Karma.
Interesting Choice.
After a few launch delays, GoPro finally
introduced Karma in September, 2016.
Unfortunately.
All of the shipped karmas were recalled a
month later following a series of crashes.
After calling in multiple experts to
debug the issue, it was determined that a
loose battery connection was the culprit.
So by now consumers lost
faith in both Karma and Solo.
It turns out that Wang Tao
and DJI did not need GoPro.
They don't need Guinn as
marketing partners either.
Wang Tao is very serious about
controlling every little detail.
DJI started working on their
own camera after the GoPro deal
went south in October, 2013.
Phantom Two Vision was launched
with a built-in camera and a live
video feed to smartphone over wifi.
Then in 2014, DJI released Phantom
two Vision Plus with three axis
brushless Gimbal to enable stabilized
video with an improved camera.
In 2015, Phantom Three made the product
much more complete and mainstream with
integrated 12 megapixel camera and 4K
video in 2016, Phantom four was a major
jump in intelligence and autonomy.
The drone could now track subjects
and avoid collisions thanks to
the advanced computer vision
algorithm developed internally.
And don't get me wrong
phantoms were not perfect.
They had quality issues as well, and
they were criticized a lot for bad
customer service initially, but they
kept iterating and improving at a
pace that no competition can keep up.
Also, their strength in supply
chain ensures that they dictate
the retail price and rake in the
majority of the profits in the market.
There was also a story about an internal
meeting in 2016 that I find super
interesting and insightful where Wang
Tao wrote Boeing down on the whiteboard,
and told everyone that DJI ought to
see Boeing as a competitor because
the goal for catastrophic failure
rate at Boeing was one in 5 million.
And um, DJI's failure rate was
one in 2 million at the time.
There's still a long way to go.
And you can see that the fact that
DJI tries to compare themselves to
Boeing it shows that they take product
quality and safety very seriously.
And yeah, they're shooting
for world class quality.
They're trying to make world-class
products and that is far, far
ahead of their competitors.
By the end of 2016, DJI reinvented
itself and launched Mavic Pro.
The game is over for consumer drones
pretty much because it redefined what
a drone could be for the first time.
A powerful aerial camera could fold
down small enough to fit into a backpack
without sacrificing performance.
Mavic expanded the market from hobbyists
to millions of everyday creators.
Cementing DJ i's dominance and changing
how the world captures itself from above.
The product manager behind this
revolutionary product is Tao Ye who
joined DJI around 2012 and quickly
became one of the key leaders at DJI.
In 2020.
He left the DJI and started a
company called bambu Lab, now
the global leader in 3D printing,
it is complete domination by DJI.
Since 2015 DJI had over 70% of
the global consumer drone market.
GoPro very soon cut karma and lost 98% of
its peak valuation in the next few years.
3D Robotics also gave up on
drone hardware and pivoted to
become a pure software provider.
Meanwhile, d J's revenue
number has been soaring.
They made 500 million in 2014 $1 billion
in sales in 2015 and 1.5 billion in 2016.
DJI won the consumer drone war
within just 10 years of its founding.
When I was researching this part of the
story, I kept asking myself why DJI?
It was clearly not sales and marketing.
If that were the decisive factor, then
Colin Guinn and Chris Anderson should have
been able to make 3D Robotics the winner.
They were charismatic,
aggressive, and deeply connected
to the American drone scene.
It was also not brand power.
If brand alone were enough, then
GoPro should have crushed DJI.
GoPro had the hotter consumer brand, a
much stronger presence in United States,
and a huge headstart in action cameras.
So why did DJI win?
I think because consumer drones are
not commodities like computer hardware.
A drone is much harder to get
right than many people realized.
It is not just a flying gadget.
It is an extremely
demanding integrated system.
You're talking about flight control,
gimbal stabilization, camera, battery,
software video transmission, mechanical
design, manufacturing, and reliability.
All have to work together.
If any one of these pieces fail,
the whole experience breaks down.
Also, the consumer drone market
is very small, is way smaller than
personal computers or smartphone.
In practice, this meant there's room for
only one dominant winner, and that winner
is DJI because DJI has the best technology
integration, consumer experience, and the
best cost structure, its products are not
just more advanced, they're more complete.
And at the center of all of
this is of course, Wang Tao.
In many ways, Wang Tao to DJI
is what Steve Jobs to Apple.
Not just a founder but
the soul of the company.
He's the person at DJI who
defines what world class is.
Wang Tao is deeply idealistic.
He has little interest in compromise
and little patience for mediocrity.
What motivates him are world
class technology driven products.
Hardcore engineering brought all the
way to the level of user experience.
That I think is the key.
Wang Tao did not just
care about technology.
He had a great taste.
Probably from the art classes
that he took back in college.
And by taste, I don't just
mean cosmetic aesthetics.
I mean The ability to judge what
really matters in a technology
product, what customers truly care
about, which details are decisive
which trade offs are acceptable, and
what the final experience should feel
like when the product is done right.
That is the hard part.
The easy part, relatively
speaking, is implementation.
Once you know what the product should
be, strong engineers can go build it.
But knowing what to build, what to
remove, what to prioritize, and what must
never be compromised that is much rarer.
Wang Tao had that ability.
That is one of the reasons he
reminded me so much of Steve Jobs,
both men were intense, obsessive,
and at times extremely difficult.
Both had very strong opinions
about what a product should be.
Both pushed far beyond what normal
managers would tolerate, and both
believed that truly great products come
from deep conviction, not consensus.
Wang Taoo is more technical than
Steve, of course, his, you know, on
some level, both jobs and Wozniak
in a way, in the drone universe.
And that is my take.
Wang Tao eventually articulated
four core values at DJI one,
pursue excellence passionately.
Two, commit yourself fully.
Three, seek truth and four,
uphold integrity in products.
These values were not just slogans.
Wang Tao embodied them himself,
and he expected the same
from the people around him.
And that made DJI a very unusual
company for ambitious engineers.
It could feel almost like a utopia.
If you wanted to build amazing robots,
solve hard technical problems, and
work with other highly capable people.
DJI was one of the most exciting
places in China to be at the time.
The expectation was simple.
Do serious engineering.
Build world class products,
no politics, no excuses.
Of course, the cost of
that culture was high.
Wang Tao could be harsh, even cruel,
and yet many people stayed partly
because the work was meaningful, partly
because the products were extraordinary.
And partly because DJI
rewarded top talents very well.
In good years, bonuses could
equal an entire year's salary
if you were among the best.
Wang Tao made sure that
you are rewarded generously
over time.
Wang Tao also built a system to
scale his product philosophy.
One of the most important roles
inside DJI became the product
manager, but they do not come from
business or management background.
A typical path is R&D engineer, then.
Product engineer, then product manager.
To own a product at DJI, you had
to understand both the customer
and the technology at a deep level,
you have to develop great taste.
Wang Tao himself was and still is.
DJ i's number one product manager.
But to grow the company, he needs
more product managers like him.
For many years, one of Wang Tao's
favorite recruiting pools was
Robocon, the robotic competition
that changed his life in college.
Wang Tao liked students with Robocon
experience because they were hands-on
competitive, technically capable,
and emotionally invested in robotics.
They had already learned how hard it is
to build real systems under pressure.
As DJI became more successful,
Wang Tao gained more resources.
And with those resources, he decided not
only to recruit from robotic competitions,
but to create one of his own.
That is how Robo Master was born.
Robo Master was not just a competition, it
was an extension of Wang Tao's worldview,
his belief in engineering excellence,
truth seeking hands-on problem solving,
and the importance of building a stage for
the next generation of technical talent.
I found a rare speech that Wang Tao
gave at the conclusion of the first
ever Robot Master competition in 2015.
It was hosted in Shenzhen,
and here is the full speech.
Good evening everyone.
This is the first official Robo master
competition we've ever organized,
and it has finally come to an end.
I know many of you may feel that
there is still a lot to improve and
there some small regrets, but I'm very
happy that we've taken the first step.
In Future competitions.
We'll learn from this experience
and take it to a whole new level.
Today I want to talk about why DJI
and myself personally decided to
create Robo Master in the first place.
Over the past 30 years, China
has experienced rapid economic
growth and achieved remarkable
success, but we have rarely created
technology products, literature.
Or art that truly move the world.
We are still mostly
producing low cost goods.
Some companies, even though they're
essentially making small appliances,
are labeled as star companies simply
because they associate themselves
with trendy internet concepts.
But at the end of the day, they are still
exporting cheap cost effectiveness driven
products to less developed markets.
A more honest name for this
would be small appliances 2.0.
I believe we should move beyond this.
China must step into creating higher
value, more exceptional products.
Today, the capital market
is extremely active.
Many companies are no longer
focused on their products.
Instead, they focus on storytelling
hype and making quick money.
People are no longer willing to quietly
dedicate themselves to hard work.
At the same time, utilitarian thinking
among young people is on the rise.
If you ask them about their
dreams, the honest answer is
often, it's not about what I like.
It's about what's worth it.
They choose fields based on trends.
When telecommunications was hot
and companies like Huawei paid
well, they studied telecom.
When finance became popular,
they switched to finance.
Now with the rise of internet startups.
Many people jump in simply because
it's the trend, regardless of whether
they like it or are good at it.
The goal is just to become part of the
elite, but in reality, they don't realize
that only by doing what you truly care
about, can you do something well and
only with higher ideals can you go far.
If all you care about is whether something
is worth it and not whether you love
it, then all that remains is vanity
and the comparison, not real ambition.
In the long run, I believe this
mindset is harmful to China's future.
Looking at DJI's own experience, it
is clear that focusing on product
innovation is what enables rapid
growth, global competitiveness,
and real commercial success.
DJI started as a group of
students pursuing their interest.
We relied very little on external
funding and it never went public.
Within nine years, we reached annual
revenues of $1 billion and captured
about 70% of the global market.
Today, DJI's flying cameras may very
well be one of the first Chinese
products in modern history to
lead global technological trends.
So I hope that the young people
here today can also set higher
ideals and make pursuing their
own interest a core life goal.
After 30 years of growth, China's
economy has developed tremendously.
We are standing on the shoulders of
giants about where is the bottleneck
now, in my view, we lack a large number
of truly insightful and reliable people.
At DJI, the biggest constraint
to our growth has never been the
market nor funding nor capital.
Instead, it's the fact that we face
so many opportunities, a vast blue
ocean, yet lack enough people who
can truly understand problems, think
them through and execute effectively.
People with real insight and a
commitment to truth and innovation
have become extremely scarce.
For companies, reliable
talent is critical.
For a nation's economic development,
it is even more essential.
The average thinking capability
of a company determines
its competitive position.
The same is true for a country.
What defines a reliable person?
It means being able to see the essence
of a problem, and among many conflicting
opinions, choose the best solution.
This is precisely what our
current education system lacks.
Even students who perform well
academically at top universities
may not succeed in the real world.
They often need to be reshuffled.
Our current system evaluates knowledge,
but barely evaluates whether someone
is truly capable and reliable.
Learning knowledge is important,
but we have neglected the
development of critical thinking.
Students are placed on a predefined track.
They're told to keep their heads
down and run faster than others.
They're not encouraged to
look up to question direction
or to design their own path.
Yet these capabilities are
exactly what matters most in
business, art and innovation.
Our system favors students
who are compliant and average.
Rather than those who pursue
truth and independent thinking.
Without these abilities, it's very
difficult to find breakthroughs
in real world creative work.
This is why we created Robo Master.
We want to use this platform to
address the gap in engineering
and technical talent development.
Today we have celebrities in
entertainment, sports, and media, but
we don't have stars who are known for
being truly capable problem solvers.
Formula One racing made drivers like
Michael Schumacher global icons.
Why can't we create a competition
where engineers become stars?
Our goal is to build a university
level competition league, a robot
competition that is exciting,
competitive, and widely watched.
We want to attract young people and give
investors a stage where they can shine.
The competition is team-based, developing
both technical and management skills.
Only teams with real competitiveness
and deep insight can win.
I believe that if competitions like
this are widely adopted, they can
complement the current education system
and significantly increased the number
of capable engineers and the leaders.
After two years of effort, we have finally
created the first Robo Master competition.
This is a platform where truth is tested
through practice, where truly outstanding
individuals and teams can emerge.
We aim to inspire creativity and develop
critical thinking through new methods.
This kind of competition won't
just produce athletes like
Yao Ming or Michael Jordan.
It can produce innovators like
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
If this model can be widely adopted,
it will cultivate a new generation of
talent and drive both corporate and
the national technological progress.
To all the participants.
I want to say this, don't just
see yourself as competitors.
Think of yourself as entrepreneurs,
pioneers of a brand new form
of intellectual competition.
The World Cup, the NBA, the Formula one.
All started from nothing in uncertainty.
If you are passionate about this
competition and have ideas, we welcome
you to join us in shaping its future.
Thank you.
End quote,
great speech.
I also highly recommend that you check
out the robo master videos online.
Just a search robo master.
And they have the official website
there's a lot of very intense
high quality videos on there.
They're amazing.
Watching these teams
compete makes you fired up.
The game is different from
BattleBots where it is just
about destroying the opponent.
It is kind of like, um, Doda or
League of Legends with real robots.
There's a lot of team strategy
tactics that go into the game.
And with cameras covering the game from
different angles including the players'
facial expressions, robo Master is trying
to create an experience for the audience
and to promote the stars, the young
engineers, just like any sports or eSports
I think Wang Tao really wanted this to
be the next big thing a league some sort.
He created documentaries reality shows,
and even a series of anime to get
attention from the younger generation.
Uh, He puts a, a team behind this effort.
Robo master competition remains
one of the main tools for DJI
to recruit young engineers.
Participants who show talents during
the competition would usually get
an offer from DJI to join the team.
It serves as a great marketing tool to
position DJI as the innovative and fun
company to work at for college students.
It is still going strong after 10 years
so far.
We have covered the first 10
years of DJI from 2006 to 2016.
That was the startup phase, the period
when Wang Tao, and his team went from
a tiny company making flight control
systems to the undisputed leader in
consumer drones for the next 10 years.
I won't go into the same level of details
because DJI is no longer a small founder
led startup struggling to survive.
By 2016, the company already had more than
5,000 employees and it would only become
much bigger and more complex from there.
But the most important point
is DJI did not stop winning
after the Phantom or Mavic.
The second decade proved that
DJI was not a one hit wonder.
It had developed a real product
philosophy and repeatable way of
building category defining hardware.
First off DJI continued to dominate
the consumer drone market and
kept reinventing the category.
Since 2016, it has launched new
consumer drones at an astonishing
pace, roughly every six months across
different product families such as
Air Mini FPV, Nevada, Neo, and others.
The one that blows my
mind is the FPV series.
The first person view is something
you have to experience yourself,
or, search uh, drone racing.
And yeah, it's very intense.
Over time.
DJI built a highly defensible
product matrix, covering nearly every
major user tier and price range.
Beginners, hobbyists, travel creators,
FPV enthusiasts, prosumers, there is a
dJI drone for almost everyone.
And that leaves very little
room for competitors to enter.
And DJI did not stop at consumer drones.
It expanded into industrial and
commercial use cases as well.
Agriculture surveying public safety
filmmaking, inspections, you name it.
And broadly speaking DJI kept
creating new product lines for
different users and vertically.
It pushed further down and up the
technology stack in order to lower
cost to improve performance and control
the user experience more tightly.
Over the years DJI began developing more
of its own key technologies in-house,
including asics for important modules such
as flight control and video transmission.
Back in 2010, most of the chips inside
A DJI drone were from vendors abroad,
like Intel, Samsung, ti, et cetera.
And since then, DJI started
consolidating chips with custom silicons.
As you can see on this tear down picture.
Most of the ics are developed by DJI
internally, and most of the product
lines are not heavily reliant on
Western component suppliers anymore.
It it also invested heavily in
computer vision and autonomous
flight, enabling drones to recognize
gestures, track subjects, avoid
obstacles and understanding their
surroundings more intelligently.
It also spent years working on
autonomous driving related control
modules involving cameras and
lidar, an effort that was eventually
spun out into a separate company.
All of this points to the same thing.
uh, DJI was never just assembling drones.
It was building a deep
technology platform.
One of the most important proofs
of DJI'S methodology, however, came
outside of drones in recent years.
DJI pioneered the pocket camera
category by leveraging capabilities it
already mastered: Gimbal stabilization
camera integration, miniaturization,
control systems and industrial design,
and created the Osmo pocket line for
vloggers filmmakers and creators who
wanted something far more portable and
intuitive than a traditional camera rig.
Over time, the pocket evolved
beyond a niche creator tool.
And entered the mainstream as a device
for everyday users to document daily life.
Pocket three in particular,
is a breakout product.
There is a story that it's
opening action was inspired by the
satisfying click of a zippo lighter.
That same small mechanical delight when
the device comes alive in your hand.
That kind of a detail captures
something essential about DJI.
Its products are not just technically
strong, but emotionally convincing.
It attracted a lot of the
female customers as well.
Remember historically DJI, drones
are really popular, but just
among male customers, and the
market went crazy about this.
Pocket three camera.
They sold over 10 million units in
less than two years after launch
with retail price at around $500.
That is roughly 5 billion in revenue.
And according to Wang Tao, in 2026
January February, sales already
increased by 60 to 70% year over year.
So it is quickly becoming a big
part of the overall revenue for DJI.
And this is why the second
decade of DJI matters so much.
It shows that DJ i's success was not tied
to one lucky market or one lucky product.
The company has a winning formula.
And I call it, the DJI way.
And that is, a visionary founder
who is only interested in becoming a
category leader also with world class
engineering and supply chain capabilities.
And then lastly, you're
targeting the global market.
Not third world countries, but the
wealthiest countries in the world.
And you might think there is
nothing special about this formula
because Apple, Dyson Tesla, they
all follow something similar.
However, no Chinese
company has done it before.
Like Wang Tao talked about in his robo
master speech, most Chinese companies were
doing low value added manufacturing work.
That's how China was positioned
in the global supply chain before.
No one believes that Chinese
companies could lead innovation.
No one outside of China believed that
no one in China believed it either.
DJI changed that impression.
Not only that, I think DJI inspired
a lot more companies to follow suit.
Bambu lab is probably the
best example of the DJI way.
Tao Ye joined DJI in 2012 and before
he left the company, he led the
entire consumer drone business.
He was the number two guy at DJI.
After Wang Tao around 2020, he saw
an opportunity to revolutionize 3D
printing to make it dramatically better.
At the time, consumer 3D printing
already had a passionate community.
People loved it, but they
suffered ' cause calibration, failed
prints slow speed, noisy machines
air pollution endless tweaking.
It was still a hobbyist product.
Bambu lab turned the 3D printer
into a more complete machine
with high speed motion control.
Auto calibration, lidar, assisted
sensing, multi-material system,
software workflow, and a much more
polished out of box experience.
And that is the same logic as DJI drone.
Take something difficult, integrate
the whole system and make the
complexity disappear for the user.
By 2025, bambu Lab had become the top
selling brand in the global consumer
3D printer market with about 37% share.
Their annual revenue exceeds
$1.5 billion already.
Um, What an amazing accomplishment
by a former DJI product manager.
Robo Rock is another great example.
You may have already used
their house cleaning robots.
We have two robo rock
cleaning robots in our house.
The founder and CEO of
Robo Rock named Chang Jing.
He and I are from the same city in
Hunan, a small city called Yueyang.
So shout out to Chang Jing.
Super, super proud of him.
Robo Rock was founded in 2014.
Um, iRobot back then, was the
dominating brand globally.
But their robots were dumb.
They bumped around, got stuck
missed spots and needed babysitting.
Okay.
Robo Rock attacked the category
with lidar, navigation sensors
mapping better suction mopping
capability docks and software.
Again, the formula is familiar.
Take a frustrating product category, use
engineering to solve the real pain and to
keep improving the whole user experience.
Since 2024, robo Rock has
become the world's number one
smart cleaning robot brand.
According to IDC.
IRobot, on the other hand filed
for bankruptcy in 2025, mainly due
to fierce competition from China.
Insta 360 is the camera example.
Was founded by Liu Jing Kang in 2015.
For a long time, GoPro
defined action cameras.
But Insta 360 did not try to copy GoPro.
It found a different user insight.
Creators do not just want a camera.
They want impossible Shots made easy.
The invisible selfie stick, 360
degrees capture, AI editing,
reframing after the shot.
These are not just features.
They change the creator workflow.
That is product power.
It is not only about image quality,
it is about giving users a new way to
capture themselves and tell stories.
Insta 360 went public in China in
2025, and its IPO surge valued the
company at roughly $10 billion, making
the founder ing Kang, a billionaire.
A very young billionaire.
Insta 360 and DJI are actually
competing head to head.
In recent years, Insta 360
released anti-gravity a one, the
world's first eight K 360 drone.
And DJI released the Osmo
360 camera in response.
Unfortunately GoPro's stock
lost 98% of its peak value.
They're really not that relevant nowadays.
Note that Chang Jing from Rob
Rock and Liu Jing Kang from Insta
360 they never worked at DJI.
I, but I'm certain that they
were inspired by DJI's story.
The following two founders,
though are DJI alumni,
Wang Xing Xing the founder
of Unit Tree Robotics.
Uh, Briefly interned at DJI for about two
months and then founded Unit Tree in 2016.
Uh, Wang Lei founder of EcoFlow
worked at DJI Battery Group for a few
years before founding the Portable
Power Stations company in 2017.
So you get my point.
There are so many other examples.
China is no longer just the factory
behind other people's brands.
China now has founders, product
managers, engineers and supply chains
capable of defining global categories.
DJI proved it first and others
are now proving it again.
And of course.
We should not forget the
city where DJI was born.
Shenzhen holds a special
place in this story.
DJ I's rise would have been
much harder anywhere else.
The speed of the supply chain, the
density of electronics manufacturing,
the availability of components, the
ability to prototype quickly, and the
culture of hardware entrepreneurship
all gave DJI an enormous advantage.
In 1980, Shezhen became China's
first special economic zone.
At the time, it was still a small
city next to Hong Kong, but over
the next few decades, it transformed
into one of the densest electronics
manufacturing ecosystems in the world.
By the early 2000s.
Shenzhen was already the beating heart
of the global three C supply chain,
meaning computers, communications,
and the consumer electronics, mobile
phones, laptops, cameras, MP3 players,
power adapters, batteries, motors,
sensors, plastics, connectors,
PCBs, everything was there.
And what made string engine special
was not just scale, it was speed.
If an engineer needed a custom PCBA
motor, a connector, a plastic housing,
or a small mechanical part, it could
be designed, sourced, fabricated,
revised, and tested extremely quickly.
In many other places, hardware
iteration takes weeks or even month.
In Shenzhen, it feels almost
like software iterations.
It would take hours, days at most.
That is a massive advantage
for a company like DJI.
You cannot find a hub like Shen
Zhen anywhere else in the world.
No wonder not just a DJI,
but bambu Lab instead.
360 and many other hardware
startups were born in Shen Zhen
and went on to conquer the world.
Now, back to DJI's Journey.
As we are wrapping up here, it is
worth noting that the second 10
years brought not only scale and the
success, but a new set of problems.
During the first decade Wang Tao
was trying to prove that a small
team of obsessive engineers could
build world class flying machines.
During the second decade, he had
to confront a harder question.
How do you run a giant company
without losing its soul?
This became one of DJ's
central challenges.
As DJI Grow bigger, Wang Tao began
to feel that something inside
the company was no longer right.
The same, loose, highly founder driven
environment that had once made DJI fast
and creative could not scale forever.
DJI had become too big to
remain an engineering utopia.
The company later uncovered corruption in
areas such as sourcing and procurement.
A few employees even
got into prison for it.
That was a painful but important moment.
It forced Wang Tao to recognize
that building an innovative product
company and building a well-governed
organization are not the same thing.
He began studying uh,
management more seriously.
Including how Ren Zheng Fei had built
Huawei he really admired Ren Zheng Fei.
Over time, DJI improved.
But this was a very different kind
of challenge from making a helicopter
hover or designing a better gimbal.
It required not only technical judgment,
but self-reflection, structure and
discipline at the organizational level.
At the same time DJI was facing another
challenge from outside geopolitics.
As the company became globally
dominant, especially in drones,
it also became a target.
Restrictions and sanctions from the
United States created real pressure
and uncertainty and financial loss.
That undoubtedly affected DJI.
But by this point DJI was no longer
just an American success story
or even mainly an American one.
It had already become a truly
global company with customers
channels and product relevance
far beyond the US market.
I believe in the first decade the North
America market is about one third of DJ's
revenue uh, back then um, there's not a
big presence back in China for DJI even.
But now, I think yeah, DJI has
dominated the Chinese market as well.
They're gonna be fine.
There was also a third challenge.
Uh, People uh, in the media.
Wang Tao is often painted as a tyrant,
and honestly, there's some truth to it.
He can be harsh controlling, and the
relentless, there are many stories
about late night messages, brutal
comments, impossible standards, and
how difficult it is to work under him.
In this picture, you see the
five co-founders at bambu Lab.
They all left DJI around 2020.
So when many talented people left DJI,
the media loved the simple explanation:
they left because of Wang Tao.
Yeah.
There's some truth to that, but many
of them also left because they were
highly capable, highly ambitious and
have been trained inside one of the best
hardware product company in the world.
DJI stayed private.
It did not need to go public.
That meant some of the people
who helped to build it did not
get that same kind of financial
outcome they might have expected.
At the same time, Shezhen was,
and still is one of the best
places in the world for a talented
hardware team to start a company.
Capital was available.
The ecosystem was ready.
So naturally many of these people went
on to build business of their own.
In my opinion, that is not just a
story of losing talent is actually
a great legacy of Wang Tao of DJI.
And here's just to add
some, a little bit of color.
Here's an interesting story.
Back in 20 16, Wang Tao drafted a
DJ i's new headquarters in Shezhen
named castle of the Sky, in which
the cafeteria only serves vegan
food because he himself is a vegan.
So media reported as Wang Tao is forcing
DJI employees to only eat vegan food.
When I first heard the story, I also
thought, wow, he sounded very narcissist.
But in a recent interview Wang
Tao explained that the cafeteria
could only serve a thousand people.
And there are 7,000 employees.
So most of them would eat elsewhere
anyway, and he's just trying to
provide a different option, a healthy
option, and that tells you that his
public image portrayed by the media
might be far from who he really is.
And yet, despite all of these
challenges, governance, geopolitics
departures misrepresentation uh,
DJI remained extraordinarily strong.
DJI did $12 billion in revenue in 2025.
And it is projecting to bring in
$15 billion in 2026 with more than.
$3 billion in profits.
It is still one of the most
important and profitable
hardware companies in the world.
That alone says something profound about
the depth of the company wang Tao built.
What moved me most though
was not the revenue nor the market share.
It was Wang Tao's own reflection
on what he's trying to prove now.
In a recent interview, he said in the
past, what I tried to demonstrate was
this, that a young person bold enough to
dream and act, could create technology
that leads the world through innovation.
Now I want to demonstrate
another possibility.
That an entrepreneur's journey is not only
about exploring outward and conquering
the world, but also about turning inward
and overcoming one's inner demons.
That to me is the real ending of the story
because Wang Tao did conquer the world.
He built a company in Shen Zhen that
reshaped an entire category and led the
world in hardcore technology products.
But in the end, the deeper
challenge was never just about
drones, cameras, or robots.
It was about himself, his intensity,
his standards, his contradictions,
his blind spots, and his need to
keep growing even after winning.
And that is exactly why he
belongs to this podcast, because
conquering the world is not enough.
You also have to conquer yourself.
And maybe that is why I want to
end with one of Wang Tao's, most
revealing lines after 20 years of
building DJI, echoing the famous or
infamous comment he made 10 years ago.
The world is incredibly dumb and
so am I. Thank you for listening.
I hope you enjoy this episode,
and I will see you next time.