Why do you think the culture is very different from Pinduoduo? If the working hour 966 is similar the difference stands in motivation and leadership vision?
Pinduoduo is a much leaner company, with business units operating independently. Like Tencent, they sometimes assign the same project to two teams and keep the one that performs better—people on the losing side often lose their job. From what I’ve heard from people at both Pinduoduo and Alibaba, competition is much more brutal at Pinduoduo. At Alibaba, it’s more about collecting stock options and securing your position. People work crazy hours there too, no question, but it’s less about outcomes and more about staying in place. That’s not about effort, it’s a management and org structure thing.
Alibaba is a conglomerate while PDD is just e-commerce. They're not really comparable from that point of view. Pdd is also much younger. Pdd has actual requirements of clocking 350 hours per month (so people working there have said they make sure to live close to the office so they can go home and nap during office hours). Alibaba has no such requirements officially but different departments or business units may feel under pressure at times and may pressure staff to work more hours so they can report how hard the team has been working come review time.
Alibaba Cloud's Qwen is widely considered the top open source model maker in the world beating out Meta AI. One of the reason Mark Zuckerberg has gone on this AI talent poaching spree. Just some added context.
Absolutely, I also have a lot of respect for what they’re building in AI. The only thing I’m saying is that Alibaba was massively mismanaged under Daniel Zhang, and turning that around will be very difficult and take time. I read a book by another former Alibaba employee who writes almost entirely about the company’s culture—very interesting—but that culture now seems completely gone. Whether they can rebuild it is really unclear. That said, if what I wrote came off too negative, it wasn’t meant as a blanket judgment—just a reflection of what that former employee described.
Because they are free, I use Qwen and Deepseek when I hit the Qwen character or upload limits to extract stock names from fund docs as lists of which were contributors, detractors, transactions etc.... They do hallucinate when you don't give them text to focus on but are otherwise great at summarizing / extracting info you give albeit its a constantly changing output format (which can be frustrating although I suppose I could give it more than 1 sentence commands to negate this)...
"Daniel Zhang, the architect of Alibaba's downfall"
I love it! Finally someone who said it.
I realized this in 2023, which I consider embarrassingly late, because it was just there in front of us all along: the complete absence of any successful venture during his tenure, they all failed, every single one -- you gotta do it. Then there was the bullshit coming out of his mouth on earnings calls. Nobody pointing this out. It was surreal.
Late 2023, early 2024: I saw an interview with Joe Tsai by some Nordic investor. Tsai seemed very honest - the exact opposite of Zhang. Not much later (early 2024) I read the company had started addressing the fact their ad service was almost unusable for merchants (something that had benefited PDD, as Hayden Capital had pointed out in his PDD thesis from 2022). My conclusion: Tsai is willing to face and address issues, and swiftly. I found it remarkable how fast the tanker seemed to be turning, but I didn't take a position, and I haven't followed the company closely since.
The thing that comes to mind is exit interviews and the difference between actually listening to them vs doing them performatively. What this employee did was basically a public and viral exit interview but he wasn't the first to have observe them.
Most of these issues are now firmly in the rearview. Management is well aware, and the cultural shift officially began in late 2023 when Joe Tsai returned.
Why do you think the culture is very different from Pinduoduo? If the working hour 966 is similar the difference stands in motivation and leadership vision?
Pinduoduo is a much leaner company, with business units operating independently. Like Tencent, they sometimes assign the same project to two teams and keep the one that performs better—people on the losing side often lose their job. From what I’ve heard from people at both Pinduoduo and Alibaba, competition is much more brutal at Pinduoduo. At Alibaba, it’s more about collecting stock options and securing your position. People work crazy hours there too, no question, but it’s less about outcomes and more about staying in place. That’s not about effort, it’s a management and org structure thing.
Well said. There is a running joke that Aliren are mostly stock day traders...
Alibaba is a conglomerate while PDD is just e-commerce. They're not really comparable from that point of view. Pdd is also much younger. Pdd has actual requirements of clocking 350 hours per month (so people working there have said they make sure to live close to the office so they can go home and nap during office hours). Alibaba has no such requirements officially but different departments or business units may feel under pressure at times and may pressure staff to work more hours so they can report how hard the team has been working come review time.
Alibaba Cloud's Qwen is widely considered the top open source model maker in the world beating out Meta AI. One of the reason Mark Zuckerberg has gone on this AI talent poaching spree. Just some added context.
Absolutely, I also have a lot of respect for what they’re building in AI. The only thing I’m saying is that Alibaba was massively mismanaged under Daniel Zhang, and turning that around will be very difficult and take time. I read a book by another former Alibaba employee who writes almost entirely about the company’s culture—very interesting—but that culture now seems completely gone. Whether they can rebuild it is really unclear. That said, if what I wrote came off too negative, it wasn’t meant as a blanket judgment—just a reflection of what that former employee described.
Oh for sure I mean I agree with your thesis.
Because they are free, I use Qwen and Deepseek when I hit the Qwen character or upload limits to extract stock names from fund docs as lists of which were contributors, detractors, transactions etc.... They do hallucinate when you don't give them text to focus on but are otherwise great at summarizing / extracting info you give albeit its a constantly changing output format (which can be frustrating although I suppose I could give it more than 1 sentence commands to negate this)...
Great stuff as always!
"Daniel Zhang, the architect of Alibaba's downfall"
I love it! Finally someone who said it.
I realized this in 2023, which I consider embarrassingly late, because it was just there in front of us all along: the complete absence of any successful venture during his tenure, they all failed, every single one -- you gotta do it. Then there was the bullshit coming out of his mouth on earnings calls. Nobody pointing this out. It was surreal.
Late 2023, early 2024: I saw an interview with Joe Tsai by some Nordic investor. Tsai seemed very honest - the exact opposite of Zhang. Not much later (early 2024) I read the company had started addressing the fact their ad service was almost unusable for merchants (something that had benefited PDD, as Hayden Capital had pointed out in his PDD thesis from 2022). My conclusion: Tsai is willing to face and address issues, and swiftly. I found it remarkable how fast the tanker seemed to be turning, but I didn't take a position, and I haven't followed the company closely since.
The thing that comes to mind is exit interviews and the difference between actually listening to them vs doing them performatively. What this employee did was basically a public and viral exit interview but he wasn't the first to have observe them.
Most of these issues are now firmly in the rearview. Management is well aware, and the cultural shift officially began in late 2023 when Joe Tsai returned.