Lei Jun personally revised drafts and provided training, Xiaomi's autonomous driving head reveals behind-the-scenes story

When Chen Long stood under the spotlight at the Xiaomi launch event explaining intelligent driving technology, few in the audience knew that just days earlier, Lei Jun had sat at his computer helping him polish the speech word by word. This detail feels like a metaphor—in the grand narrative of Xiaomi's car-making venture, Lei Jun has always been the director who both writes the script and directs the actors.

Chen Long is the head of Xiaomi's intelligent driving foundation model. The behind-the-scenes stories he recently revealed in interviews show another side of Lei Jun as a manager. Not the kind of boss who issues orders from on high, but a hands-on practitioner who personally uses his computer to help subordinates revise drafts and provide presentation training. This meticulous involvement is actually quite rare among major internet companies—most founders at this level have long since focused only on strategic direction, leaving specific execution to professional managers. But Lei Jun clearly still maintains that startup-phase excitement, with a desire to control every detail.

What's more interesting is Chen Long's description of Lei Jun's management style: relatively tolerant of young managers and scientists, but constantly pushing them, demanding phased results. This balanced rhythm is like training long-distance runners—giving you enough room to make mistakes, but never allowing you to stop and catch your breath. Chen Long initially wanted to return to China because he liked the Xiaomi SU7, never expecting the interviewer to be Lei Jun himself, with a conversation lasting over an hour. That discussion covered cutting-edge autonomous driving technologies like end-to-end and VLA, and Lei Jun's depth of understanding of these concepts surprised Chen Long—this wasn't just a businessman who talks about vision, but a product manager who could genuinely dialogue with technical experts.

What ultimately won Chen Long over was Lei Jun's judgment about the future endgame and the strategic logic behind Xiaomi's people-car-home ecosystem. These visions sound grand, but when it comes to specific execution, they can be broken down into verifiable technical milestones. This pragmatic idealism is perhaps what makes Xiaomi's car-making narrative most compelling—it's not telling an unreachable science fiction story, but using an engineer's approach to turn the future into reality, step by step.