Co-founder of Xiaomi Demos New Smartphone, Just Released [VIDEO]

I met up with Bin Lin, co-founder of Xiaomi, yesterday morning to find out more about the start-up’s product. And coincidentally, yesterday was also Xiaomi’s first day of shipment to enthusiastic customers who have pre-ordered the smartphone in huge numbers.

The office looks excitingly messy, which reflects the busy and startup-ish nature of Xiaomi. As I was guided around the office, small groups were seen cracking their brains looking at boards with scribbled codes/formula I can’t decipher what the hell they are at a glance. But the feeling I received was that the employees at Xiaomi are all into this as a team, building a powerful yet affordable smartphone for the Chinese market.

Xiaomi has a total of seven co-founders, a mixture of active and passive folks in the team. Bin, an ex-Microsoftie and Googler, along with serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Lei Jun, are both experienced co-founders in the software development sector. Another, Dr. Zhou, is a veteran hardware engineer who previously worked at Motorola.

The tour and chats were just a small part of the morning session. The rest of it was spent on the Xiaomi M1 smartphone, which Bin gave me a good demo of, as captured below: