How Xiaomi’s founder went from being just another programmer to leading a $54b IPO

Lei Jun launched Xiaomi’s first phone in 2012. Photo credit: Xiaomi.

This article is an adapted translation of the original story on Bufanbiz.

He gave up napping in school lest his classmates outperformed him. He dabbled in computer programming in the dot-com era, pursuing dreams and fortune. In his quest to seek out new things, his ambitions propelled him to switch gears again and again.

Lei Jun, it seems, is always looking for the next breakthrough.

Eight years ago, when he was 40, the founder of Xiaomi could have retired. He worked his way up at Kingsoft, a software provider, and led the company for 16 years. With his wealth estimated at US$45 million, he got Kingsoft listed, sold a few others, and invested in a dozen or so companies. In many ways, he was already a success story in the Chinese tech world.

But it did not take long before he started dreaming again. His goal? Create a company that could rival Alibaba and Baidu in market capitalization.

Alibaba’s Jack Ma built an ecommerce empire that was valued at US$20 billion. Pony Ma of Tencent launched an initial public offering in Hong Kong just five years after starting his QQ messaging service.

Kingsoft paled in comparison to these tech behemoths. Its value stood at only US$90 million when the company went public.

Little wonder that Lei has always been trying to catch up.

A huge blow

Born in a village in southern China, Lei obtained a computer science degree from China’s Wuhan University in the late ’80s. After graduation, he followed in the footsteps of many IT professionals who believed that working as a programmer offered a pathway to success.

But harsh realities set in after Windows entered the Chinese market in 1994, dealing a huge blow to WPS, a flagship word-processing software product by Kingsoft. The taste of failure took a toll on Lei – he would while away by sleeping on a sofa all day until dawn.

Luckily, he soon had an epiphany that helped turn the company around. Products, he realized, were at the heart of a company’s success.

Equally important, he thought, was a thorough understanding of market demand. Switching gears to focus more on marketing, Lei and his team at Kingsoft began selling products with a strong market appeal, including a video player and an online dictionary.

After four weeks of rest, I still felt burned out.

Chasing Pony Ma