Financial confession from a former Xiaomi employee: I am confused about how to deal with options

I graduated from a 985 university in Beijing, and my experience may be richer than many of my peers: after graduating in 2008, I worked in a large enterprise for two years, then jumped to one of the BAT companies as a programmer, and then went to Amazon in 2012. Another two years passed, and in 2014, I left Amazon and joined Xiaomi, but my original intention was because of Alibaba.

In September of that year, Alibaba was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its first-day increase was close to 40%, and its market value reached 230 billion US dollars. Jack Ma (Weibo) soon became the new richest man in China, surpassing Wanda's Wang Jianlin.

This stimulated all Internet people. Not only Americans realized that China could create a great Internet company, but I also realized this for the first time. Although there were Baidu and Tencent before, it felt like the window paper had not been broken. I know some friends of Alibaba who "disposed" of their options before Alibaba went public. Most of them did not expect that the stock would be so popular after the listing.

I feel that since Alibaba went public, the overall atmosphere among domestic programmers has been like this: find the next "Alibaba", the company hasn't gone public yet, get some options, and whether or not you're financially free. Actually, I don't think that much, the main thing is to find a sense of accomplishment.

In fact, looking back now, I finally understand this sentence: When humans think, God laughs.

The Options Illusion

Which one is more valuable, listed stocks or unlisted stocks, with the same value of 1 million?

I took it for granted that private company options would be more valuable. For example, a private company in Series C would generally raise two more rounds of financing before its IPO, and the valuation would generally increase by 2-10 times with each new round of financing.

This is actually an illusion. The risk-return ratio of stocks and options is the same, that is, the risk you take is the same when you predict that stocks will rise 10 times and options will rise 10 times. Whether it can be fulfilled ultimately depends only on the company's own development speed, and has nothing to do with whether the company is listed, such as Vipshop, Tencent, and NetEase.

Even if the same stock is issued, there are many tricks in different forms, such as RSU (restricted stock, which can be sold or given to employees at a low price by the company, and cannot be disposed of within a certain period of time. RSU does not need to be exercised, and it becomes real stock after solidification) and stock options. The former is to issue stocks directly, while the latter is not. Stock options have an exercise price, and only when the stock price is higher than the exercise price can there be a positive return. In general, issuing stocks with RSU is more beneficial to company employees.

Amazon's equity incentive plan for employees is RSU. I got the stock for four years, but I could only get 10% in the first two years and the remaining 90% in the last two years. I resigned without hesitation after working for two years and gave up 90% of the stock. At that time, although Amazon's business in China was at a bottleneck and the senior management was turbulent, we actually supported the business of the US headquarters and were not affected.

Looking back, the year 2014 when I really decided to change jobs was the peak of China Mobile's Internet boom. Regardless of whether they were listed or not, the valuations of Chinese Internet companies were seriously overestimated. Unfortunately, I had never even considered these things before.

2014 was also the year when Xiaomi was at its peak. How strong was Xiaomi at that time? The mobile phone market was number one, and the growth was very fast. Every product it released had the highest market share, whether it was a wristband, a power bank, or a balance bike... The mobile phone itself was a 100 billion market, and the small home appliances in the Xiaomi ecosystem were another 100 billion market if they were done well. The performance of the two major markets was so strong, and my feeling at the time was that all the boasts made by Lei Jun were going to come true.

Ultimately, what attracts me most about Xiaomi is CEO Lei. I think Lei is a passionate and ambitious person. Facts have proved that what he said is reliable: the characteristic of the Internet is that hardware tends to be free, at least the cost of users obtaining hardware services will be lower and lower. On this basis, companies that promote their own Internet services may become the champion of the next era.

At that time, I had two choices: Alibaba and Xiaomi. The basic salary increase was similar to that of Amazon, and Alibaba could give me 4,000 shares. Xiaomi's options were more attractive to me, so I chose Xiaomi without much hesitation.

At that time, the equity distribution within Xiaomi should be related to the level determined upon joining the company. A certain level corresponds to a certain number of options. I didn't worry too much about how much I should be given. I only made a requirement for the amount: the options allocated should be based on the price corresponding to the valuation at that time, minus the exercise price. As long as it reaches a certain number, I will accept it.

As usual, I was not able to make a decision on the same day, and I was mentally prepared. But a little unexpectedly, the next day, HR informed me that they could accept the amount I proposed, and my employment was confirmed.

To be honest, my first reaction was: it seems that I don’t ask for much. Later, according to my understanding, the salary + stock amount of people who joined the company at the same time as me was basically within a certain range, and there would not be a big difference. The difference was that some people asked for higher salaries, and some people asked for more options. At that time, Xiaomi was in the limelight, and the overall salary should be well controlled. In hindsight, if the options could not be cashed in, or could not be cashed in at the price at the time of valuation, I should have asked for more salary.

Screw and generalist

When switching from a foreign company to a domestic company, there are actually two things you should pay attention to. In addition to options, you should consider your personal growth potential.

Working at Amazon is quite comfortable. We start work at 9 am and finish get off work at 5 pm. We can have an extra hour, and there is a 99% chance of not working overtime. We have one time per month to respond to work needs at any time. We even complain about this. In local companies, everyone knows that if you are so strict in clocking in and out, your boss will blacklist you.

In the past, people used to say that foreign companies train people to be screws in the screw direction, everything is designed for you, and you just need to grow step by step. I admit that this is true. At Amazon, you do what you do at your level. If your level is not up, even if you have the ability, you may not be able to do what you want to do. This is the biggest benefit and reward of working at Xiaomi for me: as long as I am competent enough, I have a lot of room to play, and I can do many things that I am willing to and capable of.

Generally speaking, for the same project, in the short term, the development efficiency of domestic companies will be much higher than that of foreign companies. Do domestic companies train people better than foreign companies? I have a different view. In fact, I have grown in Xiaomi and Amazon.

Internet projects generally adopt a continuous integration or iterative development process. The biggest advantage of this solution is fast feedback and timely response to changes. When executing this process, there are great differences between foreign companies and domestic companies.

For example, in order to ensure the sustainability of system development, Amazon introduces code review, unit testing, integration testing, and ab testing to ensure quality, and customizes its own tools for each development link to improve the work efficiency of programmers; in domestic companies, in theory, this process is also implemented, but for the sake of speed, only the integration test link is often left, and other links will be weakened and abandoned. It is not difficult to understand why, in the short term, the development efficiency of domestic companies will be much higher for the same project.

So, working in domestic companies, programmers gradually solved the most urgent problems by constantly patching, resulting in so many patches in the system that no one could understand them. The result of a system being constantly patched is a disaster. A domestic company that claims to have the strongest technical strength did this to build an e-commerce platform, but in the end found that no one could understand or maintain its system, so it spent a lot of money to hire engineers from Sun to solve this problem.

Of course, from another perspective, this is also a reasonable choice. In the start-up phase, local companies react much faster than foreign companies, which is the most important advantage. As for the future, when the company is bigger and richer, it can just spend a lot of money to hire people to solve problems.

However, we should note that many groundbreaking solutions for the Internet were basically developed by American companies. For example, Amazon was the first to develop cloud computing to solve the problem of excess computing resources, and is now experimenting with drone delivery to solve the problem of the last mile. Google (Weibo) was even more so. It was the first to encounter the problem of big data processing and published three groundbreaking papers on big data processing. It is now working on robots and machine learning. The infrastructure developed and maintained by some domestic companies is nothing more than taking foreign open source frameworks and making some minor changes to localize them.

In short, when you encounter a problem in a foreign company, you will be encouraged to make a tool to solve the problem, while domestic companies basically rely on overtime and management processes to solve the problem. It is clear at a glance what kind of technical talents the two different models will cultivate.

When domestic companies are at the forefront of technology, who are the people who come up with their technical solutions? A large number of them are poached from companies like Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. In the final analysis, many people trained by domestic companies themselves are simply not capable of doing the job. Of course, domestic people may be more suitable for startups. In general, if foreign companies train talents in the direction of "screws", and domestic companies train "hodgepodge", which one is better?

At present, it seems that a hodgepodge is more popular, especially in the entrepreneurial boom, all-rounders are more popular. However, if fresh graduates ask me for advice, I will still recommend them to go to foreign companies first, because foreign companies will teach you how to work, while domestic companies teach you how to work, and there is a big difference between the two.

The struggle of leaving Xiaomi

At the end of 2016, I had another job opportunity with a multinational company, which would greatly promote my career, so I accepted it. When I left Xiaomi, I couldn’t help but think about what I had gained in the past two years. Amazon’s stock price increased fourfold in those two years. Although the number of shares was small at the time, if I had persisted for another two years and got the remaining 90% of the shares, it might be enough to pay a down payment in Beijing now. Although I am not a home buyer and advocate investing in stocks, which can be cashed out quickly.

Looking back, I have been working for eight years, and my career has been moving up every two years. Did I make the right choice at the right time every time? Not necessarily.

If I had not gone to that seemingly promising state-owned enterprise in 2008 but to an Internet giant, my career would have started at a very high level; from 2012 to 2016, if I had only worked at Amazon or chosen Xiaomi from the beginning, my theoretical return would have been higher than it is now. Some people have achieved the best results by constantly changing jobs, but not everyone has the insight or luck to keep up with the times and the company's trends.

When I left Xiaomi, what I was most concerned about was not whether to stay or go, but what to do with the options I held. Since the company was not officially listed, I needed to pay a certain exercise fee to keep the options. In the end, I had to keep the stocks by holding them on behalf of others. The amount I had to pay was more than 100,000 RMB, which was not a small amount.

I was very conflicted because Xiaomi was in a downturn at that time and options were not as popular as before. Moreover, I was holding them on behalf of others and I didn't know if I would encounter any legal risks. If I left Xiaomi six months in advance, I might pay to keep the options without hesitation, and in another six months, I might have a clearer view of Xiaomi's future.

Later I thought about it, after all, I didn’t have many options, so I consoled myself by thinking that some old employees who held more options might have to pay millions of dollars in exercise fees when they left, and there was no prospect of listing, so buying a house would also become impossible, so why should I worry so much?

In the end, I still chose to hold on. How should I put it? Just like why I joined Xiaomi in the first place, I think it is still: believe in big companies, believe in Mr. Lei.

postscript:

In fact, we interviewed more than one former Xiaomi employee. We chose this one because his experience may be more tortuous: he worked for a foreign company and then returned to a foreign company, and his choice was not the best one in terms of results.

Everyone has a different perspective. His experience is real to him, but it may not objectively reflect the absolute difference and trend between one company and another. Another former Xiaomi employee has a simple view. He continues to be optimistic about Xiaomi because what Xiaomi does is unique. As for the risk of options, it exists everywhere, so he is willing to accept the loss.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.