Making Binance: Ultimate Efficiency and Simple Tools

星球君的朋友们

Odaily资深作者

2023-12-14 04:27

This article is about 6710 words, reading the full article takes about 10 minutes

To go from 0 to 3 trillion dollars, all you need may be a Telegram group chat and Google Docs.

Original author: Han Yang (@HanyangWang), anchor of LateTalk

remote collaboration

The previous article mainly discussed Binance’s staff scattered around the world. What is curious is: how do these people collaborate? Does Binance have some unique way of working that allowed it to rise quickly?

The short answer is: Binance does have a unique way of working. Binance’s unique way of working seems to be that it doesn’t care about collaboration and management when it is growing at its fastest. Since the rocket that has been put together in a hurry is still flying to the moon, there is no need to care about whether the assembly method is crude before it slows down.

In the early days, Binance had a Telegram group chat for all members. The group chat is very flat. For example, if Ji Yi needs to design a poster, she will directly @ the relevant person in charge in the group. After the person in charge is finished, he will directly post the results in the group. Almost everyones information is in this group. In other words, Binance’s collaboration is carried out around the entire team. If there is documentation, it will usually be on Google Docs. Just like Bezos requires employees at Amazon to write documents instead of slides, CZ also began to hope in 2019 that the entire company use Google Docs documents for collaboration as much as possible. Only conference reports can use slides.

I asked jokingly, are you not afraid that the information will be leaked to the US government who wants to sue Binance? One of the interviewees replied: Binance runs directly on AWS, how can it be so troublesome?

In addition to the all-member group, Binance also has many groups, such as a separate Chinese group. The majority of the group is still in English, but many Binance employees speak Chinese, so there are also many private communications based on WeChat. Perhaps using WeChat is a more convenient option, but it is not a risk-free option - WeChat may implement stricter review of blockchain topics in group chats (private chats are not restricted).

For some urgent work, a small group will be formed. For a product-related issue, developers will join, and in some cases the legal team will also join the small group. After everyone is together, we will synchronize matters and whether we need to make an appointment. Binance employees call it the “TG group collaboration model” and think it is very efficient. Some employees said about Binance’s group chat style at that time: “I can’t stand the direct chatting in the group, and everyone says who is right and who is wrong in the group. Everyone believes that this is a good way to maintain efficiency. The hidden rule is not to chat privately, if something happens Everyone said in the group, stay transparent.

A former employee joined Binance in 2019. His first feeling was shock: the entire company was too transparent and seemed to trust everyone, including new employees. At the first meeting, he learned about the product progress and next steps of each department. And no files will be inaccessible. This made him feel that no advancement is difficult; as soon as CZ or He Yi gave an order, the required resources were immediately allocated and work started on the same day. Most outstanding startups can achieve transparency and strong execution in the early stages. But Binance’s situation is more complicated: on the one hand, it is only a two-year-old startup; on the other hand, in 2019, Binance already has employees in more than 40 countries or regions and has served more than 1,500 people. The worlds largest blockchain exchange with one million users. If you look at it from the perspective of two years of establishment, Binance’s transparency is not surprising at all; but if you look at its size, this kind of transparency and execution is really not easy. One part of the body has become a giant, while another part is still growing.

Although this collaboration model based on group chat seems very simple, it does not mean that it is convenient for fishing. The effective working hours of most employees are maintained at 12-14 hours a day, and they even have to run two steps to the toilet. You still have to work at 11 oclock in the evening. If you cant find anyone at this hour, you will be considered inappropriate.

As a rapidly growing company, the workload can weigh people down in their chairs. What time a Binance employee gets up every day usually depends on what time the first one will be. But this is also closely related to the time zone of cooperation.

When someone joined the company, the first day meeting was 10:30 in the morning in the East 8th District, but later it became 9:30 due to the time difference - and finally it became 2:00 in the afternoon because the superior went to Dubai. Some people also start their first meeting at six oclock in the morning for cross-border collaboration. Daily meetings are generally not long, about half an hour. The day is not over until the days daily report is issued at 11 p.m. For companies like Binance with offices scattered around the world, the most time-friendly time zones are generally Europe and Dubai. Theyre in the middle of different time zones, so they do a good job of balancing the East and West time zones - which is where a lot of Binances people are.

Because remote work does not involve commuting, and meals are taken out, most of the time from morning to night is solid work. In comparison, 996 is not an exaggeration. But even if the collaboration model based on group chat is not inefficient, it cannot escape meetings: any company with thousands of people scattered across various places needs a large number of meetings to communicate with each other. Someone recalled that the peak period was when he had ten meetings a day. I really didnt do anything all day long, just meetings. A few groups will control the frequency of meetings and strive to allow grassroots employees to have no more than five meetings a week. But this is not the norm.

Perhaps too many meetings affect work, but meetings are necessary for remote collaboration, so CZ and He have very high requirements for meeting efficiency. In 2018, CZ will directly teach employees how to make more efficient reports: speeding up reporting by listing key points in text. Meetings with him should not exceed thirty minutes unless there are special circumstances. Every quarter, CZ will do QBW (Quarterly Business Review) with business department heads: results, progress, challenges and issues. Essentially just quickly letting him know if something needs help from a higher level. Someone said: If you dont make the point in the first sentence, CZ will definitely interrupt you.

The marketing department led by He Yi began to strengthen the pursuit of efficiency very early. Because the market department is the most global department of Binance, it has the highest demand for information synchronization. The marketing department’s weekly meeting at 10 o’clock every Wednesday night: more than a hundred core personnel attend the meeting, and each project leader has to speak. Speakers only have one slide and one minute to speak. The content of this page is simple: the most important results and progress of the past week, and what will be done next week? In particular, is there any work that requires the cooperation of others? For example, if there are activities that require translation support from various regions, then they must be notified in advance. The meeting was short and efficient, and it took more than forty minutes to conclude.

The problem of cross-cultural communication will also be encountered at Binance. Asian teams are relatively less concerned about the difference between working hours and rest times than European teams, especially remote work, which blurs this point. They had to get along with each other. Most Binance employees would agree that this is a company that does relatively little training, but it will give employees one hundred dollars a month to learn English in a software called italk. CZ’s habit of loving reading has also extended to the company. On the second anniversary, Binance gave each employee a Kindle e-book reader with a customized Binance shell, and there was also a subsidy for buying books. He even held reading sessions for those in charge.

What is more disturbing to individuals may be that remote work without offline work at all will cause a loss of connection between people. Many people don’t think it’s a big deal until they work remotely full-time. But walking alone every day, there are not many real people around you that you can meet offline. After a long time, it will still make people long for more face-to-face communication.

How to work

But even with all the pressure and intensity, Binance’s growth rate continues to attract more people to join.

When Binance was first established, there was a window period during which interested candidates could get interview opportunities by directly approaching the founders. The standard interview process at that time was four rounds. In addition to CZ or He Yi, there were also one round each for direct superiors, colleagues at the same level, and HR. At Binance, HR does not have a veto power - this may make many programmers from big companies very happy. But having said that, when you find a big boss like CZ or He Yi through the Internet, and the first round of interviews is with them, then the other rounds are just going through the motions.

An interesting detail is that many people who joined Binance during this window said that most of the interviews with CZ or He Yizai had nothing to do with work, and were mainly about empty things like life, ideals, structure or vision. . CZ will even carefully share his enthusiasm and opinions about blockchain with the other person after interviewing him. Maybe CZ and He Yi will agreeSam Altmans view: Value first, aptitude second, specific skill third.

Initially, employees will use their own computers, but later, for safety reasons, new employees will be assigned a 13-inch Macbook Pro. Compared with other companies in the same period, Binance will provide higher salary packages. Many people admit that if they had not joined Binance, they would not have been able to join a major company based on their academic qualifications and experience; the salary under normal circumstances would not be too high. If you are willing to go to Dubai, the salary can be higher and there will be a monthly subsidy. However, the remuneration of different departments is very different. Contract remuneration is the best, followed by technology, and marketing department is the lowest.

Binance has a semi-annual review. If you do well, you can get a bonus of 4-6 months, and if you do poorly, you can get a bonus of two months. So many people can basically get 20 salary every year. This is a very generous treatment for most job seekers. Compared with Temu, which is still growing rapidly, it can only offer candidates a salary of 14-16. However, later the reiview became once a year and the bonuses were also reduced.

Good definitions are expressed through scores. At Binance, employee performance is graded from 1-6. 1-1.5 is the best superstar, each team has at most one or even none. Normally it is 2-3 or 3-4. If the score is less than 5 points, you will face a PIP (performance improvement plan) with a one-month inspection period. If it still doesnt work, it will be optimized (a euphemistic expression for expulsion). But this situation has been rare for a long time.

Each persons manager will be responsible for scoring, but they have to convince their superiors (in the early days, they directly convinced CZ or He Yi). He Yi will check everyones bonus in the early stage. However, one of the most user-friendly aspects of Binance in the early days was that bonuses would take into account everyone’s basic salary. If the basic salary is low, give more bonuses.

Ordinary employees will have a probation period of 3-6 months, and senior executives will have a probation period of 6-12 months or even longer. All positions that require team leadership must be trained to do customer service for two hours a day. This is a style that is more typical of Chinese Internet companies. For example, JD.com once asked every executive to work as a delivery person for half a day every year.

Once you officially join Binance, the only thing you need to do is to help this crazy expansion company, expand even crazier. Unlike many startups that burn money to gain market share, Binance is still a money-making machine while expanding wildly. Therefore, ROI will not be strictly controlled like a pre-profit company. For example, in the marketing department, ROI is only looked at when attracting new business, but not when it comes to brands, media or communities. And they will not use KPIs for management, but use OKRs to formulate plans more like the big companies in Silicon Valley.

go beyond the rules

For Binance, as long as it does not hinder growth, everything can be put aside - including management.

Management is the most important thing for many founders. How do people collaborate with each other? As a result, various collaboration software came into being: Linear, Notion, Lark, Slack... From Silicon Valley to Beijing to Bangalore, entrepreneurs from different countries are talking about the same topic: what is the best management model? (and programming language)? Management books will also be placed in airports in various countries.

But Binance shows a different approach: When a company is in the midst of epic growth, is it really necessary to care about management? As long as growth is not delayed, how about building a company based on Telegram group chat?

Binance isn’t the only company proving that growth has nothing to do with management tools. Chinese e-commerce company Pinduoduo is also known for its rapid growth. according toLater LatePost report, Pinduoduo once had a QQ group with thousands of people for communication, and key tasks basically relied on “word of mouth.” Even when the market value reached US$30 to 40 billion after listing in 2018, Pinduoduos administration was still exporting from the time card machine and then manually importing it into Excel forms to make attendance records. A person who joined Pinduoduo after 2019 believes that the adoption of original management methods stems from the fact that for Pinduoduo at that time, only survival was the most important thing. The same is true for Binance, not only to survive, but also to surpass all competitors. , breaking through all regulations that hinder it. It’s already difficult to live, and it doesn’t matter what tools you use to manage it.

But this does not mean that conventional management models are meaningless. Even Binance felt the disadvantages of extensive growth after the number of employees gradually increased.

When the company approached a thousand employees in the second half of 2020, Binance launched its first migration. Telegram was gradually abandoned, and all employees were gradually moved to Ciscos WebEx. However, this is just a transition, and the final destination is Wea, Binance’s self-developed internal software.

If you have used the software Lark (Feishu) produced by ByteDance, you will find that the two have similar UI interfaces, and even the logos are similar. However, unlike the Telegram era where all employees shared the same software, Wea can only be used by the Binance main site team. Teams acquired by Binance, such as the Coinmarketcap team, cannot use Wea.

And this is also the beginning of Binance gradually becoming less flat and transparent. For Binance, compared to transparency, it is more important to ensure that employees do not leak secrets. The price of flatness and transparency in the Telegram era is that many information leaks have occurred. The uniform distribution of computers with security software installed is directly related to these problems. Starting with WebEx, Binance has canceled the all-member group. And CZ does not allow for large groups of colleagues. But there will also be some interest groups. These groups can only be maintained at a size of a few dozen people and are not allowed to become larger. At the same time, some large-scale WeChat groups of Binance employees have also been disbanded. From this point on, Binance employees will no longer be able to contact each other at any time. Sometimes two Binance employees even get to know each other through the introduction of a third party. For example, two people who work together every day might first recognize each other after being introduced during a blockchain conference.

Coincidentally, Pinduoduo, which once had QQ groups with thousands of people, later became a company with very strict information control: “Employees cannot see the organizational structure or employees outside the department in the internal office system. They are also not allowed to establish WeChat groups.”

It was also during this period that Binance began to stop growing wildly. Issues such as supervision and compliance began to be exposed. Binance is also starting to look more like other giants. Gone are the days when you could apply for a job by contacting the founder directly. Binance began to care more about academic qualifications and experience. It is difficult for people who are not from major companies to have the opportunity to join Binance.

Some employees said that from then on, there were two types of people within Binance: old Binance people and people from big companies.

Most of the old Binance people are members who joined Binance at the beginning. Many people have grassroots backgrounds, but they joined the currency circle and Binance very early. Many people here hold large amounts of BNB. People from big factories are the kind of glamorous workers we can see in Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun. They generally don’t speculate in coins, but sell them as soon as they get them.

Although people from big companies don’t look so crypto-native, they may be more suitable for Binance now – after all, no matter how special they are, Binance will eventually encounter problems that many large companies will encounter. At this time, it is obviously a better choice to find some people who have seen such problems. These people from large factories have worked for giants and even governments. They have seen big storms and are very capable. Many blockchain exchanges rise quickly but also collapse quickly. Binance is still standing despite the challenges it faces, and these latecomers play a big role. There is a Chinese proverb: You can conquer the country immediately, but you cannot conquer the country immediately. Starting from the second half of 2020, Binance has also shifted from crazy growth to normal growth.

Binance’s challenges are not unique at all. They have been encountered by other Internet companies that have experienced rapid growth. In the early days of ByteDance, a large number of young front-line employees were employed. They did not have backgrounds in large companies but were motivated enough to achieve results. But after 2020, Byte has also begun to look for more experienced managers in the market, such as Chen Xi, the former CEO of Didi Ride Hailing, or Zhou Shouzi, the former Xiaomi partner.

Although it is inevitable to bring in employees from big companies, this has also caused complaints from old Binance people: Some people say that Binance never had upward management before 2020. But starting in 2022, everyone needs to manage upward. When Binance was just starting out, under the leadership of CZ and He Yi, everyone cared about only one thing: user focus, to create value and think from the users perspective. But now, would it be helpful for leaders to want to do something? What credits can I get from my boss for better promotion?

All this should not be what CZ wants to see. When he held meetings before the epidemic, he would emphasize no office politics, no fighting, and encourage cross-level communication. But as long as you become a big company, no one can completely avoid the problems that big companies will have. There is no escape speed from the disease of large companies. It is an unavoidable fate for all giants.

changing intersection

But the changes at Binance don’t stop here. In the middle of this year, Binance conducted a massive layoff. The common cyclical laws of technology companies seem to be reflected in Binance: rapid expansion - massive hiring - contraction and layoffs. Whether a company is short-lived or has a long road ahead generally depends on reflection and reconstruction after the first major contraction.

Companies often grow faster than founders can learn in the short term. How big can a company be and how far can it go? The founder’s speed of making up lessons and adjustments is a very important part of this. Some companies are lucky enough to have founders who already have a lot of depth even before the company is founded.Zeng Yuqun, founder of Ningde TimesHe gained a lot of experience on his own in his last company, so during the CATL era he never mentioned which companys management he wanted to learn from. More founders are choosing to quickly learn from other founders who have gotten out of these pitfalls. for exampleLi Xiang, founder of Li AutoI once took the initiative to seek advice from Zeng Ming, chairman of the academic committee of Alibaba Group, and discussed with him how Alibaba builds an organization and conceives strategies.

CZ is the latter, and he is constantly learning from various people. But compared to Li Xiang, he is more like a lonely learner, relying on a lot of reading to enter the world of other founders. Shortly after Binance laid off employees, Walter Isaacson’s “Musk Biography” was released. CZ finished reading it immediately and sent the reading notes to everyone, hoping that everyone would read it. He realized that Tesla was a good person to learn from and that many of Musks values were similar to his. Perhaps because of the recent layoffs, CZ specifically mentioned that Musk is very fast in driving people and Binance should learn from it.

But like Musk, CZ, He Yi, new CEO Richard Teng and Binance’s management are also doing many things that no one has ever done: How to make a company that is targeted by regulatory authorities in countless countries and regions operate legally? How can the worlds largest exchange continue to maintain its position in this market that lacks rules? How to manage a remote team of thousands of people? There are too many answers here that cannot be learned and can only be found by Binance itself.

On November 22, 2023, CZ resigned as Binance CEO. People who are familiar with the history of technology companies in the past five years may not be surprised by this. Chinese founders often leave the top positions: Pinduoduo only launched the currently rapidly growing Temu after the retirement of founder Huang Zheng; ByteDance also It was also after the founder Zhang Yiming gradually faded out that he conquered the city through Tiktok; an earlier example was Jack Ma who held a grand performance for his retirement. The departure of a founder from a certain role does not mean that he has nothing to do with the company, but in any case, this is a new stage and a new challenge for the company. Binance already has more questions to answer than any other company, and now it has one more.

But regardless of whether these answers are ultimately correct, they will inevitably enter the textbooks of latecomers.

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