Rui Xu

I come from the Xu clan of Liuhe, Nanjing — Zhongshan Hall (中山堂). In 1368, my ancestor led the Ming dynasty army to defeat the Mongols and recapture Beijing, then settled the clan in Nanjing. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, my great-grandfather fled the city with his children. The rest of the family who stayed behind were killed when Japanese forces occupied Nanjing and massacred its civilian population. My grandfather drifted through Shanghai and several cities in Jiangsu before eventually settling in Hefei. That’s where I come from.

I grew up with a very traditional Chinese education. By middle school I could read classical Chinese without much trouble — Confucius, Laozi, texts from the pre-Qin era (700–200 BC). I was good at math, physics, and chemistry too, but in China everyone is good at math, physics, and chemistry, so that doesn’t count for much.

At ten I found my dad’s Apple II — probably something America threw out and donated to China. I taught myself BASIC and C on it. I learned C before I learned English, so my first English word wasn’t “hello” — it was print. I spent years thinking printf was the plural of print.

I went to Hefei No. 1 High School, same school as C. N. Yang. I did well in competitions — first prize in physics, second in math and chemistry, and represented Anhui province at the national team competition in computer science (second prize).

Then I bombed the Gaokao.

I ended up at Harbin Institute of Technology. Great school, one of the best for CS in China. But Harbin is in Manchuria, about as far north as you can go before you hit Siberia. Picture a kid from LA getting shipped off to Anchorage for college. That’s how it felt.

Four years of Soviet-style training at HIT — the school was literally founded by Imperial Russia — and I was ready to leave. I memorized 20,000 GRE words, got a good score, all set for America. Then SARS hit. The U.S. Embassy shut down. No visas, no exceptions.

Plan B: South Korea. I got my master’s at Seoul National University and spent two-plus years at LG Electronics, where I worked on one of the first Linux-based mobile phones — this was five years before Android — and helped draft the HDMI 1.4 spec.

In 2008 I went back to China and joined a semiconductor startup called C2 Microsystems as the founding engineer and software lead. We were using DSPs and co-processors to accelerate multimedia — the engineering team was a bunch of Israeli guys from Zoran Corporation. What we were doing wasn’t that different from what Nvidia ended up doing. We just burned through $20M in 2008–09 and got acquired before it mattered.

After that I went to Intel — a glorified corporate foot soldier, software AE — bouncing between Mountain View (serving Google) and Tokyo (serving Sony). I worked on some of the earliest Android, Google TV, and Netflix apps for phones and TVs, back when nobody really believed a TV needed apps.

At thirty — after eighteen years of writing code — I decided I didn’t want to program for a living anymore. Also, my girlfriend (now wife, now mother of two) was studying in LA, so I enrolled at UCLA Anderson for an MBA. During the program I joined the early team at Amazon Lab126— back when it was still crammed into a law firm building behind the Cypress Hotel in Cupertino — and became one of the early product managers on Amazon Fire TV. That’s how the PM chapter started.

Some products I led:

• Xiaomi Mi Box — the best-selling TV box in the world. Not one of. The.
• Lenovo Smart Display — the first smart speaker with a screen. CES 2018 Best of Innovation. Sundar Pichai launched it on the main stage at Google I/O. Its sibling, the Smart Clock, won CES 2019 and sold out repeatedly.
• ByteDance — Smartisan R2, Dali Smart Lamp, and a bunch of apps. The lamp became the top-selling smart education device in China — nearly a million units in nine months — then got killed by the government’s education crackdown. It didn’t survive long enough to see the AI boom.
• BOE display TCON chip

To be updated.

I have two kids: Emilia (灵瑶, Língyáo) and Elon (镒泷, Yìlóng). No relation to that other Elon — any resemblance to billionaires, living or tweeting, is purely coincidental.

Their Chinese names encode two systems at once. One is our family’s zìbèi (字辈) — a generational naming rule passed down for centuries, like semantic versioning for humans. The other is my own hack: binary counting. First child = 0b01, “líng yāo” → 灵瑶. Second child = 0b10, “yī líng” → 镒泷. My wife has made it clear this binary tree will not be expanding further.

Emilia was the vocalist of a Beijing children’s band called Potato Kingdom (土豆王国小乐队) — she was four and a half at the time, which means she had a more successful music career before kindergarten than I have had in my entire life.