The ebb of an era: Wuzhao joins Baiwang, Ye Jun takes Deep Sky Sequence to challenge his former employer.

01. The Man Known as "Wuzhao": The One Who Forged DingTalk Out of Lakeside Garden

To understand the talent flow of DingTalk today, we have to start with one person — Chen Hang, whose alias is "Wuzhao". His tenure at Alibaba is longer than that of Ye Jun. In 1999, Chen Hang, who was still a senior undergraduate, joined the Alibaba founding team at Lakeside Garden in Hangzhou as an intern, with Wu Yongming as his mentor. He was also the first intern in Alibaba's history. After graduating in 2000, he went to Japan and worked at HP Japan for about 11 years as the chief technical architect and product lead for enterprise-level search engines. In 2010, he was invited by Wu Yongming to return to Alibaba, where he took charge of the main search of Taobao and Etao successively. From 2012 to 2013, he took over "Laiwang", Alibaba's social product positioned as a rival to WeChat. This was a battle that Alibaba invested huge resources in: 1 billion yuan of resources were allocated, a mass recruitment strategy was launched, and every employee was required to invite 100 external users within one month. Jack Ma personally endorsed the product, and Liu Chuanzhi, Shi Yuzhu and Jet Li were invited to join the platform. The result was that it failed to shake WeChat's market position at all, and the project was declared a failure.

02. How DingTalk Took Shape: What Wuzhao Did for DingTalk

2014: Six People, One Apartment, A Strategic Pivot

After the failure of "Laiwang", Chen Hang did not disband the team. In January 2014, he led 6 core members to withdraw from the C-end social battlefield and turned to B-end enterprise services. On May 26 of the same year, the team officially moved into Lakeside Garden — the apartment that had previously incubated Alipay, Tmall and Cainiao — to launch closed development. The product was initially named "Work Circle", and was finally named "DingTalk". The 0.1 beta version was released in December 2014, and the official version 1.0 of DingTalk was launched in January 2015.

Core Insight: Deduce Product Functions From The Demands of Enterprise Owners

The most critical judgment Wuzhao made when building DingTalk was to capture a very simple pain point. In China's enterprise service market in 2015, the scarcest resource was "certainty": processes were missing, IT infrastructure was weak, and what business owners were most anxious about were two things — did the other party actually see what I said? Is the task I assigned actually being pushed forward? DingTalk gave the answer with "DING" messages, read/unread status, enterprise address book, approval and attendance functions. These functions that were later criticized by many as "strong management and strong control" precisely responded accurately to the most real governance anxiety of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises at that time, and allowed DingTalk to find a breakthrough from "-1 to 0".

Result: From 0 to 300 Million Users

• In January 2015, DingTalk 1.0 was officially launched, and its user scale continued to rise afterwards;

• By the end of 2017, registered users exceeded 100 million, exceeded 200 million in 2019, and the number of enterprise organizations exceeded 10 million in the same period;

• From 2015 to 2020, Chen Hang served as General Manager/CEO of DingTalk Business Unit, obtained Alibaba's highest annual performance rating of 4 points, and expanded the user scale to 300 million during his tenure;

• DingTalk became a "national-level" enterprise application, and also provided Alibaba with a real entry point in the enterprise service market.

The "Madhouse" Culture: Results Brought By Paranoia

Wuzhao's management style is the foundation of DingTalk's temperament. DingTalk's recruitment notice directly writes "Welcome to the Madhouse", the back of the team T-shirt is printed with "BE CRAZY", and the slogan is "Either be awesome or get out". He himself works more than 15 hours a day, and it is normal for him to work from 8 a.m. to the early morning. The line he said at the 2018 mobilization meeting "I don't know what you do if you go home before 10 p.m." is still a widely quoted meme in the Internet industry. Objectively speaking, without this paranoia, craziness and obsession with product details, it would be very difficult for DingTalk to rise from the ruins of "Laiwang".

2020: The Turning Point, "Cloud-DingTalk Integration" and "Promotion in Name But Demotion in Reality"

In 2020, Alibaba implemented the "Cloud-DingTalk Integration" strategy, and DingTalk was upgraded to the "Large DingTalk Business Unit" and merged into Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Business Group. The standardized product route that Chen Hang adhered to began to conflict with the group's requirement of deeply integrating Alibaba Cloud's dedicated cloud architecture and providing customized services for large customers. In September of that year, he left the position of DingTalk CEO and became the assistant to Zhang Yong, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group — an arrangement widely regarded by the public as "promotion in name but demotion in reality".

03. The First Departure: Four Years at HHO

In July 2021, Chen Hang officially left Alibaba and took away a number of core backbones of DingTalk to found "HHO Digital Technology", focusing on cross-border export and smart hardware — smart headphones, pet water dispensers, and small smart hardware products. The startup capital was provided by Yuanjing Capital founded by Wu Yongming, which led the angel round, and HHO was valued at 3 billion yuan. However, the results of this experience were not impressive: this startup company that had many stories but was short of capital for a long time never delivered impressive results. Wuzhao later told the media that those years at HHO made him "learn to strictly control costs, and stipulate that only 1 of the 3 elevators can be turned on". And these four years after leaving Alibaba were exactly the key window for AI technology to move from the laboratory to productization.

March 2025: The Second Return

Alibaba announced the acquisition of the shares held by investors of HHO, and Chen Hang returned for the second time to serve as DingTalk CEO. At this time, Alibaba has clearly positioned DingTalk as "the group's most important AI application in the To B field", and announced an investment of 380 billion yuan to launch a three-year AI initiative. Wuzhao's return was Wu Yongming's heavy bet on this core battlefield. After returning, he remained paranoid: check in at 9 a.m., shorten lunch break to 1:15 p.m., ban WeChat, Weibo and Xiaohongshu, trace the code volume of the technical team, require all management personnel to learn Python, and product managers visit 3 enterprises every week for co-creation. He himself patrols the building at 10 p.m. every night to give likes to colleagues who work overtime. He also launched the "Go to the Frontline" campaign, requiring every product, R&D and operation staff to work as customer service for two hours a day — it was this immersion that exposed the data illusion of DingTalk's customer service that "the manual transfer rate is only 15% and all reviews are five-star", while the actual customer satisfaction was only 30%. Later, he reorganized the customer service team, set up three core teams for data engineering, model training and effect evaluation, raised the satisfaction rate back to 80%, and reduced the cost by 90% at the same time.

On the product side, he launched three generations of AI-powered DingTalk in 437 days

• On August 25, 2025, at the 10th anniversary of DingTalk and the AI DingTalk 1.0 launch event, 5 products were launched at one go: DingTalk ONE (new AI entry), DingTalk A1 (3.8mm AI voice recording card), AI Spreadsheet (enterprise no-code AI application generation), AI Note Taker (supporting 72 languages), and AI Search & Query;

• In December 2025, the AI DingTalk 1.1 version named "Mulan" was released;

• On March 17, 2026, "Wukong", the world's first enterprise-level AI-native work platform, was released. The data disclosed on the day of the launch was quite impressive: the number of enterprise organizations exceeded 26 million, the number of paid organizations exceeded 190,000, 79% of the 5191 A-share listed companies were using DingTalk, and the number of AI applications on DingTalk reached 1.41 million. The release line of "Wukong" is the sharpest self-statement during Wuzhao's tenure: "Today we break DingTalk apart, rebuild it with AI, and forge 'Wukong'. In the past, people used DingTalk to work; in the future, AI will use DingTalk to work." DingTalk's underlying code was rewritten and fully CLI-enabled, so that all capabilities can be called by AI instead of being simulated by clicks. Alibaba also named the three generations of AI DingTalk versions: 1.0 is called "Fern" (breaking through the soil), 1.1 is called "Mulan" (newborn), and 2.0 is called "Wukong" (fully forged). From breaking through the soil to full forging, it took less than 7 months.

June 2026: The Second Departure

The radical reform soon triggered organizational backlash. On June 4, 2026, Teng Yaxin, the core product manager of the DingTalk ONE project, published a 75,000-word long article "Living Inside DingTalk" on the internal network, taking the whole process of ONE from project initiation, daily active users peaking at 3 million to final contraction as the clue, directly pointing out the problems of "blindly catering to superiors, malignant involution spreading, and decision-making being dominated by the personal will of leaders". On June 8, Ma Ruila (Wang Jiamin), former vice president of DingTalk, published another article "Living Outside DingTalk", writing that "I sincerely hope Wuzhao can lead DingTalk to regain its glory, but the price should not be that everyone burns out by extending working hours". On June 10, the Alibaba Partners Committee posted on the internal network "Only with affection, justice and growth can we have Alibaba culture", criticizing the management method of the DingTalk team in severe wording as "not what Alibaba culture should look like" — this is a rare public statement made by the Alibaba Partners Committee on the internal management issues of a single business line in the 27 years since Alibaba was founded. Only 24 hours after the post was published, Alibaba announced the adjustment of DingTalk management on June 11: Chen Hang stepped down as CEO, and Chen Yusen, a tech geek born in 1992, took over. 437 days, that is the full length of Chen Hang's second tenure in charge of DingTalk.

04. Two Former DingTalk Executives Joined Baiwang Co., Ltd. Successively

Three months after Wuzhao left, his next move came to light — and almost at the same time, another veteran of DingTalk joined the same company.

The First One: Wang Qiangyu, Former Vice President of DingTalk, Appointed as Co-General Manager of Baiwang Co., Ltd.

On September 14, 2026, Baiwang Co., Ltd. (06657.HK) officially announced the appointment of Wang Qiangyu as Co-General Manager. The announcement clearly stated his responsibilities: coordinating the group's AI product strategic planning, as well as the technical optimization, product iteration, scenario adaptation and full-link commercial implementation of the large financial and tax model. Wang Qiangyu is a typical technical practical talent from the "DingTalk system". From 2017 to 2020, he served as Vice President of DingTalk and Head of the New Laiwang Business Unit at Alibaba, deeply engaged in enterprise-level collaboration and service products; before that, he was a serial entrepreneur who founded Hongruan, Xunboda, Duanqu.com, Qupai and other companies. After leaving Alibaba, he founded Yisheng Jiankang, leading the R&D and implementation of the Doukou Medical large model and clinical intelligent products — he completed the full path of the vertical large model "from 0 to 1 and then to large-scale implementation", and this methodology is exactly what Baiwang Co., Ltd. lacks. The market reaction was immediate: on September 15, Baiwang Co., Ltd.'s share price closed at HK$12.61 per share, with a single-day increase of 8.15%.

The Second One: Chen Hang (Wuzhao), Founder of DingTalk, Appointed as Non-Executive Director of Baiwang Co., Ltd.

Three days later, more significant news came. On September 17, 2026, Baiwang Co., Ltd. held an extraordinary general meeting, which passed the appointment of Chen Hang as Non-Executive Director with 100% affirmative votes (98,811,368 shares, accounting for about 43.74% of the voting shares), effective from the same day, with a term of one year and an annual salary of 100,000 RMB, no additional meeting allowance. The day after the news was released (September 18), Baiwang Co., Ltd.'s H-share price closed at HK$14.55 per share, surging 24.04% in a single day, with a market value of about HK$3.29 billion. Why can a director seat with an annual salary of 100,000 yuan drive a 24% increase in share price? Because Chen Hang carries the entrepreneurial story of DingTalk expanding from 0 to 800 million users, and what Baiwang Co., Ltd. wants to build, "enterprise operation decision-making large model and financial & tax Token Factory", is essentially the commercial implementation of AI To B — which is exactly what Wuzhao is most familiar with. This appointment is also his first public new position after stepping down as DingTalk CEO. A notable detail: Baiwang Co., Ltd. is almost a gathering place for "former DingTalk employees". Alibaba holds about 11.39% of the shares and is the largest institutional shareholder; former DingTalk Vice President Wang Qiangyu serves as Co-General Manager; DingTalk founder Chen Hang joins the board of directors. With three Alibaba imprints superimposed, the market's imagination space is naturally amplified.

05. The Man Ye Jun: Alibaba's First Computer Doctor

If Wuzhao is the "creator" of DingTalk, Ye Jun is the one who turned it into a profitable business. Ye Jun was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang in 1979, and completed his bachelor, master and doctor degrees in computer application at Sichuan University. During his doctoral studies, he became famous for building the "Wangjianglou of Sichuan University" website, which made him the first computer doctor employee in Alibaba's history. He joined Alibaba as an intern in 2006, officially joined in 2007, with the alias "Buqiong", and has stayed for 18 years. These 18 years, his resume almost covers the whole process of Alibaba's To B business: Alibaba Software, Taobao Open Platform, AliExpress cross-border export, Alibaba International Business Unit, Enterprise Intelligence Business Unit, Government DingTalk Business Unit, and eventually became Vice President of Alibaba Group, President and CEO of DingTalk. As one insider said, DingTalk has gone through three stages — from 2015 to 2020, Chen Hang solved the problem of "scaling up"; from 2020 to 2025, Ye Jun solved the problem of "deepening value". Ye Jun is a typical professional manager, and his biggest advantage is strategic implementation: with a background in enterprise informatization, he is good at sorting out huge and complex software architectures and processes.

06. Before Taking Over DingTalk, Ye Jun Has Laid Three Solid Foundations

1. The "Chief Engineer" of Enterprise Digital Products

During his tenure in the Enterprise Intelligence Business Unit, Ye Jun focused on the digital transformation of large organizations, leading the team to develop a number of enterprise-level products such as Office Cloud, Alibaba Brain, Yida low-code platform, wireless screen projection, talent inventory, asset inventory and Huanxing. Among them, "Yida" is particularly critical — it is the foundation of Alibaba's low-code strategy, and also the technical source of DingTalk's "low-code + ecology" strategy later. Because he has a thorough understanding of all kinds of pain points in the digital transformation of large enterprises, he has the confidence to