Founder’s Lessons: Dr. Hong Tang, Former Chief Architect of Alibaba Cloud (Part 1)
Hong shares his journey across Ask.com, Yahoo, and Alibaba Cloud
About
Welcome to the tenth installment of Tsingyuan Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview. This week, we’re highlighting our venture partner Dr. Hong Tang. Our conversation covers his personal journey, the lessons that shaped him, and his vision for the future. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future. Read past interviews here.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Read Part 2 on Hong’s Learnings here.
Meet Dr. Hong Tang
Interview edited for clarity and length.
“Before you answer a question, make sure you know it is the right question.”
Part 1: Hong’s Background
Hong introduces himself
My name is Dr. Hong Tang and I’m a Venture Partner at Tsingyuan Ventures.
I grew up in Suzhou, China, one of the ancient cities of the world known for its history, culture, and scenery. I went to Zhejiang University for undergraduate study. I was enrolled in a special program called a Mixed Class, which consisted of talented students from all the engineering departments. It offered a more rigorous program than the normal departments, and they used mostly English textbooks. I did the two-year Mixed Class, and then regular curriculum for two years.
After I got my bachelor’s degree, I came to the U.S. for my PhD at UC Santa Barbara. You can see a pattern in the cities I lived in: Suzhou, Hangzhou (Zhejiang University), and Santa Barbara — in my early years I was always drawn to very beautiful cities.
Hong shares his background
My initial PhD study area was high-performance computing (HPC). But in the middle of my PhD study, around 2000, my advisor co-founded a search engine startup called Teoma with his Ph.D. advisor from Rutgers.
My advisor joined that project because we wanted to apply some of the HPC optimization techniques to the core of the search engine system, which is a link graph solver. The links between web pages are represented as a matrix and you want to find characters of its internal structure. But I was quickly drawn to the system aspects of the entire search engine. For example, how to go to the internet, download pages, process and index them, and serve those results in real time to users.
There were all kinds of interesting problems that hadn’t been solved before. So I pivoted my PhD topic and started working on how to build reliable and scalable Internet services, including both the online serving part (when people send a query, how do you quickly get the response) and the backend processing part (how to efficiently process so many web pages).
In 2001, the dot-com bubble burst, and Teoma ran out of money. The original VC sold it to Ask Jeeves (later renamed to Ask.com). So I returned back to UCSB and finished my PhD, based on the learnings I got from that little adventure working in the startup.
After graduation, I decided to join Ask again. It was almost a no-brainer for me, because I knew most of the people there, my software was still being used in production, and I already had a lot of ideas for what I could do. Because of the trust I had with the people there, I was given a lot of freedom and autonomy. They let me start an R&D team on the West Coast, so I built an engineering team from scratch and we rewrote the core offline processing infrastructure for Ask.com. Gradually, my responsibility expanded to other in-production pieces like crawling and index processing. That was a really fun time.
But after Google IPO, they had a very fast expansion and quickly became the clear leader in the search engine business. So in 2008, Ask.com made the decision to license Google’s main search results, and they were giving up on building the core infrastructure. That was definitely not good news for me.
Joining Yahoo and Alibaba
I decided to leave and join Yahoo’s Hadoop team, essentially an open-source implementation of Google’s infrastructure, similar to what I had done at Ask. Hadoop was expanding really quickly, growing from a prototype tool targeted at researchers to enterprise-grade and used by many companies. But it was also a challenging time for Yahoo business-wise because of the 2008 financial crisis. There were hiring freezes. There was also a big brain drain of the Hadoop team to social network startups like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, because they all needed Hadoop to process their web logs. This became frustrating. We had a lot of ideas but the progress on execution was really slow.
It became clear that I wasn’t really happy at Yahoo, so I decided to look for new opportunities again. Towards the end of 2010, I joined Alibaba Cloud. At the time it was a newly-minted business unit inside Alibaba group with a grand goal: to build a technology foundation for both Alibaba’s own businesses needs and for its ecosystem partners.
The system we built is called ⻜天 in Chinese, or Apsara in English. Initially, it was largely influenced by Google’s infrastructure design. But gradually, we built out the entire stack for cloud computing, which puts more emphasis on security, multi-tenancy, DevOps, and other cloud services. We realized that Apsara is actually a new kind of operating system. It manages the hardware resources like data centers, networking, and servers at the back end, and also provides core services and programmability to developers.
Today, Alibaba Cloud is the #1 cloud provider in China. It’s ranked third or fourth in the world, depending on what metrics you use. Initially, I was the engineer manager leading the core engineering team, and then I became Chief Architect. That was a really fun journey and I stayed there for eight years. But in 2018, I decided to leave for personal reasons. I wanted to spend more time with my two very young kids in the U.S., instead of traveling all the time. I started looking, and was fortunate enough to find a role within Alibaba Group as the Technical Advisor for Alibaba’s executive vice chairman Joe Tsai.
By that time, I was already on a path to be a technology generalist, so expanding my knowledge horizontally instead of vertically into one domain. I wanted to have more exposure in the business world, so it was a great opportunity for me.
Joining Tsingyuan Ventures
After one and a half years, the pandemic hit. I decided to quit Alibaba and spend more time with my kids, because they were at home all the time. That’s how I’ve ended up with Tsingyuan Ventures. Tsingyuan appeals to me because it is a tech-centric VC, and I’ve become broadly interested in many different tech fields. I also like the intellectual challenge of the fast-paced investigation, analysis, and decision making.
Early experiences that shaped him
I was lucky to get exposed to computers at a very young age. I grew up in the 70s and most families couldn’t really afford a computer. Parents also didn’t pay much attention to extracurriculars. I attended no extracurriculars other than the typical math, physics, and chemistry clubs. The only other thing I did was the computer club in my middle school. I remember my first serious program was an assembly program for an Apple II clone (中华学习机) which did the scaling and transformation of Chinese fonts. That was my first memorable programming project.
I became really addicted to programming and wrote many kinds of rudimentary games.The most complex one was probably a Tetris game. My parents and relatives were very supportive of me. One of my aunts worked in the hospital, and they had an Intel 386 computer in one of their offices. She would let me in during the night after people left so I could program.
She would let me in during the night after people left so I could program.
Another fortunate moment for me was that I was selected at Zhejiang University for an international fellowship program called the Melton Foundation. The internet was just starting, and they wanted to select students from universities all over the world and see if there could be a new kind of fellowship that happened through online meetings and communicating over email. Because of that, I got the first computer in my life. It was an Intel 486 with very good specs. I also started taking some responsibility as the IT admin and tinkered with computer systems. The few of us in the university were probably the first batch of young people to have access to the internet in all of China, so that was super lucky.
On working in rapidly-changing industries
You always have to focus and look at the outside world. Early on at Ask.com, we had a very good habit of looking into what the research community was doing. We still had our PhD research mentalities and often attended conferences to see what new research ideas we could learn. It was also a good recruiting venue to meet fresh PhD students. Later in my career, I noticed not many companies do that. Towards the later half of my tenure at Ask, we also started looking into the open source world. It became a trend at that time, since we saw a lot of open source stuff coming up.
Continue reading Part 2 on Learnings
Click here. Hong discusses handling stress, contrasts between Chinese and U.S. tech companies, reading recommendations, and his best advice
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