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It is an honour to share our story here. Before everything I can help wondering why do we have a community for women in data
It is an honour to share our story here. Before everything I can help wondering why do we have a community for women in data science but not men's? And why do we celebrate women's day but not men? So I guess the biggest assumption here is women's perspective needs to be addressed more, and which I totally agree with. So while men have a lot of great qualities for us to admire, women offer some very nice perspectives that can help contribute to a resilient organization and build a better society. The two keyword that's on my mind that I want to share with everyone today is empathy and authenticity. Referring to authenticity, I'm here referring to the power of vulnerability. First, I want to talk about empathy. As an organization, we learned this in a hard way. We are a young tech and we have always felt that we are this confident and determined superhero, if you will, that we are solving the world challenges. We are solving the world transportation problem. and started in year 2012 as a taxi hailing app. We didn'tjust limit our vision. We see in big cities how hard it is for people to commute, to go home, to go to work, how jam the roads are, and how polluted the air is. So we had the stream. We want to fix the world transportation problem and make every ride better and make the cities more beautiful. That's something that excites us every day here, and it keeps us moving. And after yea rs of effort, we had become this world largest mobility and local services platform offering over 10 billion trips a year worldwide and making, we did make every ride more convenient and more efficient than before. On this platform, we are the largest ev charging network and 25% ofthe EVs are running on this network. In short, we felt good about ourselves until year 2018. Two tragic safety incidents happened on this network that completely changed us after a period of painful soul searching, and we realized we didn't really understand what business we're in. We were overly obsessed by the percentage point that we improve every day on all aspects, like on efficiency aspect, on safety aspect. However, we overlooked the damage of one extreme case and we overlooked the dark side of humanity. We learned the transportation is notjust about technology and big data, but also about individuals and lives. We learned it in a very hard way. We learned that by being this confident and determined superhero cannot solve everything. We need loss of empathy, loss of empathy to understand who the, who are, the people we are really serving to connect with them that can help us to be who we really want to be. So we did a few things. We invited hundreds of thousands of users and drivers into our own town halls to share their concerns. We went to different companies to study their safety standard. Went to airline companies, taxi companies, per trillion companies, food companies. We even went to McDonald's. And where we expanded internationally, we remind ourselves we can cookie cutting everything because every market have their own needs and we truly respect the local users. So we tailor make our product and service for different market. And we also made a very tough decision for an internet company. We switched from the traditional classical light internet model to a hybrid online and offline model. So in different, different city, we set up the ground team for safety, for crisis management, for, for service. And that completely changed our cost structure. However, we think that's for the longer good. Lastly, we are even more committed in technology. We keep investing autonomous driving because we think that's the oust solution to cure other road accidents. So after trying everything, the results has been very promising. We have launched over 300 product features for safety, and the international safety incident got lowered 80%. But we know this is not just the end, it's the beginning. And second lesson we have learned is to be more open and authentic. After the incident, we faced a huge public scrutiny, which was suffocating to be honest. And one day our engineering had a very cool guy, I like him a lot. He came to my office and said, gene, can we just not listen to those voices? Can we just focus on what we are doing and give us one years of time and we will fix everything? And I totally understand him. Everyone want others to think we are capable, we are perfect. And when we don't have a solution, when we don't have a solution, the natural tendency is to escape from scrutiny and do the things that we consider, right? However, the fact is nobody is perfect. And the challenge we are facing is so complex. We are facing the darkness of humanity. There are so many problems that we, we couldn't figure out ourselves. So we need to open up and invite those voices and we need to show our vulnerability and be the authentic self so we can engage more people to come in and help us. And that's what we did. So instead of pulling our own hair inside of the office and, and of trying to figure out what's the best policies to set up for the platform, we actually created online forum to invite passengers and, and drivers and users in. And there are a lot of very sensitive topics. For example, shall we set up video or audio recording function inside of the car for safety purpose? And how do we handle data issue? Can drunk passengers can under a ride by themselves? In the old days, we may think in the office by ourselves, and I think we'll present a perfect solution to everyone just like a superhero. But after all these, we learned this should be a community co-design project because it involves everyone. When we face complaints, we did something very different. Of course, as a service company, we, we have lots of complaints from our users and even from our internal staff as a management, to be honest. And we did a very controversial way. We, we did something called Live Rose to show it sounds scary, right? It was scary because it was a live talk show that in front of hundreds of thousands of people, we invite our passengers and users come to openly laugh of our silly policy or our mistaken algorithms. And for our young staff to laugh at management issues. To be honest, it was painful for me. And I even got complaints from our staff that I called for too many meetings and I speak for too long. So today I need to mind myself, don't speak for too long. But everyone else seemed to have a good time. l,| think it was worth it. And I do think that's the most creative and effective way to really let the sharpest and a most honest opinions out. And looking back, we think we did the right thing. And everyone here at DIDI becomes more courageous and confident because we see when we show our vulnerability, when we are open, when we invite people to come in, we see more kindness from our users, we see more help from our users. And that was extremely rewarding. And that makes this organization more resilient because no organization strong and perfect from the very beginning. We need our users to come in and help us together. And that also got us through Covid 19 because at the end of 2019, our business went back to the peak again. However, in two months' time when Covid came, we lost 80% of our business. But we didn't panic. We were a resilient. We are a resilient organization now. So everyone stay together and fall through this. And now the bus business is back to peak. And more importantly, everyone here is more committed, committed and passionate and more confident about the mission we have, making every ride better and making our cities more beautiful. In Didi, we have a Didi Women's Network. The slogan is Be Great for you, which is a platform we try to encourage career women. And a lot of times I got young girls coming into my office and ask me, Hey Jean, how have you grown into you today? Can you give me some tips? And I honestly share with them, I'm just a normal working woman and I have a lot of my own schedules, my own struggles. Like | always feel I'm the socially awkward person. I, it's hard for me to find topics in social events. I, I think a lot of girls experience that. And, and I constantly feel guilty. I don't have enough time with my three young kids and even every breakfast I struggle between whether I should have another piece of chocolate muffin or controlling my weight. My point is I'm just a normal person. But I do believe normal people can create greater good. Just like the women drivers on our platform. They're single moms, they're retired. A chef, you know, they try to support their, their family. They have patient at home, they have young kids at home, but they all try to do something. And when they face challenges, they didn't really, you know, back off. They actually stand up and face those challenges. And so, so everyone can be, you know, at the same time, vulnerable, bad, resilient, and at the same time, empathetic and confident. I do believe the grain has come from normal people and for women's journey, you know, from a young girl to a career woman, to a mom. All these experiences expands us and it wakes us up and makes us more resilient, makes us more empathetic, authentic. The world is full of uncertainties ahead. And I do believe with these qualities, we can ride through the cycles together and we will make a very different history. Thank you. Happy Women's Day
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