Making Binance: Extreme Efficiency and Crude Tools
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Making Binance: Extreme Efficiency and Crude Tools
From 0 to 3 trillion dollars, all you might need is a Telegram group and Google Docs.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Hanyang Wang, host of LateTalk
Less than 200 days after its founding, Binance became the world’s largest blockchain exchange. Some founders treat their company as a product that needs constant refinement—but Binance rocketed to growth before any such refinement could take place. The remote team expanded rapidly from dozens to over a thousand people. The rocket wasn’t just flying higher; it also had to avoid disintegrating under the strain of such complex collaboration.
Before Binance, GitLab—the open-source software company with over two thousand employees—was the gold standard for remote work. It authored what is nearly the most comprehensive remote work guide available: “GitLab’s Guide to All-Remote,” covering everything from non-linear work schedules to evaluating remote performance.
Today, startups have more options than GitLab did. The pandemic-driven shift toward remote work has fueled rapid growth in collaboration tools: Zoom receives over 800 million monthly visitors; Microsoft Teams’ daily active users nearly doubled within a year—from 145 million in 2021 to 270 million in 2022; and collaboration tool Linear secured a $35 million Series B led by Accel in 2023. Every founder understands one thing clearly: if you want efficient remote collaboration, don’t skimp on investing in collaboration tools.
But Binance is an exception. It proves that explosive growth and sophisticated collaboration tools can be entirely unrelated. For a long time, Binance's entire management operated through group chats. If something needed discussing, it was brought up in the group. Otherwise, everyone got back to work. Urgent matters prompted creating smaller subgroups. All documents were stored directly in online files. In the face of hypergrowth, all traces of professionalism vanished. In 2020, relying solely on group chats and online documents, Binance supported a total trading volume exceeding three trillion U.S. dollars.
From zero to three trillion dollars—you might only need Telegram groups and Google Docs.
Remote Collaboration
The previous article focused on Binance’s globally dispersed workforce. This raises a natural question: how do they collaborate? Does Binance have unique working methods enabling its rapid rise?
Simply put: yes, Binance does have unique ways of working. Its distinctive approach seems to be not caring much about collaboration or management during periods of peak growth. If a hastily assembled rocket is still flying toward the moon, there’s no need to worry about whether the assembly process looks crude—until it starts slowing down.
In its early days, Binance had a company-wide Telegram group chat. The structure was extremely flat. For example, if He Yi needed a poster designed, she would simply @ the relevant person directly in the group. Once completed, the designer would post the result right back into the same group. Nearly all information flowed through this single channel. In other words, Binance’s entire collaboration revolved around this massive group chat. Any documents were typically stored on Google Docs. Just as Bezos required Amazon employees to write memos instead of slides, CZ began advocating in 2019 that the whole company use Google Docs for collaboration whenever possible—only major presentations were allowed to use slides.
I joked: “Aren’t you worried about leaking information to the U.S. government, which might sue Binance?” One interviewee replied: “Binance runs directly on AWS. If they want to go after us, why bother with leaks?”
Besides the main group, Binance had many others—for instance, separate Chinese-language groups. While English dominated the main group, many Binance staff spoke Mandarin, leading to frequent private discussions on WeChat. Using WeChat may be more convenient, but it’s not without risk—WeChat enforces stricter content moderation in group chats regarding blockchain topics (private messages are unaffected).
For urgent tasks, smaller ad hoc groups were created. A product-related issue would include developers, and sometimes legal team members too. Once everyone joined, they’d sync up on next steps—and decide whether a meeting was necessary. Employees called this the “TG group collaboration model” and considered it highly efficient. One employee described Binance’s chat culture at the time: “If you disagree, call it out directly in the group. Right or wrong—it’s all discussed openly. The unwritten rule was: no private messages. Everything happens in the group, transparency first.”
A former employee who joined Binance in 2019 recalled his first impression: “shock.” The company felt incredibly transparent, seemingly trusting even new hires completely. During his first meeting, he learned about every department’s product roadmap and upcoming plans. There were no access-restricted files. He said it made him feel like “nothing was hard to push forward.” When CZ or He Yi issued instructions, resources were allocated immediately, and work started the same day. Many top startups achieve strong transparency and execution in their early stages. But Binance’s case was more complex: on one hand, it was still just a two-year-old startup; on the other, by 2019, Binance already employed people from over 40 countries and served more than 15 million users as the world’s largest crypto exchange. Judged by age alone, Binance’s transparency wasn’t surprising—but given its scale, such openness and execution speed were remarkable. One part of its body had already become a giant, while another was still growing.
Despite appearing primitive, this group-chat-based collaboration didn’t make slacking off easy. Most employees maintained 12–14 hours of productive work daily, even needing to “run to the bathroom.” Being unavailable by 11 p.m. could get you labeled as unsuitable—especially if someone remarked, “It’s only this time!”
As a fast-growing company, sheer workload kept employees glued to their chairs. An employee’s wake-up time usually depended on when their first meeting was scheduled—but this also closely tied to collaborators’ time zones.
One person started with a 10:30 a.m. meeting in China Standard Time (UTC+8), then shifted to 9:30 a.m. due to time differences—eventually moving to 2 p.m. after their manager relocated to Dubai. Others began their day with a 6 a.m. meeting to accommodate cross-border coordination. Daily standups were brief, lasting around half an hour. Only after submitting a daily report at 11 p.m. did the workday truly end. For a globally distributed company like Binance, the most convenient time zones were Europe and Dubai—geographically and temporally positioned between UTC+8 and U.S. West Coast, making them ideal hubs where many Binance staff were based.
Because remote work eliminated commutes and meals were mostly delivered, most of the day was effectively working time. By comparison, 996 seemed mild. Yet despite the efficiency of chat-based collaboration, meetings were unavoidable: any company with over a thousand people scattered worldwide requires extensive meetings to communicate. One employee recalled hitting a peak of ten meetings per day: “I literally did nothing else but attend meetings.” A few teams tried limiting meeting frequency, aiming to keep frontline employees below five meetings per week. But this wasn’t the norm.
Perhaps because excessive meetings hinder productivity, yet remote collaboration demands them, CZ and He Yi placed high expectations on meeting efficiency. As early as 2018, CZ taught employees how to deliver faster, more effective updates—using bullet points to speed things up. Meetings with him rarely exceeded thirty minutes unless exceptional circumstances applied. Each quarter, CZ conducted Quarterly Business Reviews (QBW) with business leads: focusing on results, progress, challenges, and blockers—essentially a quick way for him to identify issues requiring executive attention. As one person put it: “If your first sentence doesn’t get to the point, CZ will interrupt you.”
He Yi’s marketing team was among the first to emphasize efficiency. As Binance’s most globalized department, it had the highest demand for information synchronization. Every Wednesday at 10 p.m., the marketing team held a weekly meeting: over a hundred core members attended, and each project lead spoke. Speakers had only one slide and one minute. The content was simple: the most important achievement from last week, what’s planned for next week—and crucially, whether support from others was needed. For example, if an event required translation across regions, that had to be announced in advance. The meeting was concise and efficient, wrapping up in about forty minutes.
Cross-cultural communication challenges also arose at Binance. Asian teams generally paid less attention to boundaries between work and rest hours compared to European counterparts—remote work further blurred these lines. Adjustment came through mutual adaptation. Most Binance employees agreed the company offered relatively little formal training, but it provided each employee $100 monthly to learn English via the app italk. CZ’s love of reading extended into the company culture. On its second anniversary, Binance gifted every employee a customized Kindle e-reader and offered subsidies for book purchases. He even hosted reading sessions for managers.
A deeper personal challenge stemmed from fully remote work eroding human connection. Many believed prior to full-time remote work that this wouldn’t matter. But over time, working alone every day with few real-life interactions left people craving face-to-face engagement.
The Way of Work
Still, despite the pressure and intensity, Binance’s growth continued attracting new talent.
During Binance’s initial phase, ambitious candidates could apply by directly reaching out to the founders. The standard hiring process consisted of four rounds: direct supervisor, peer colleague, HR, and either CZ or He Yi. At Binance, HR lacked veto power—a feature likely welcomed by many engineers from big tech firms. That said, if you managed to contact top executives like CZ or He Yi online and had your first interview with them, the remaining rounds became mere formalities.
An interesting detail: many who joined during this window said their interviews with CZ or He Yi involved little job-specific discussion. Instead, conversations centered on life, ideals, vision, and mindset—somewhat abstract topics. After interviewing someone, CZ would often share his own passion for blockchain and personal views in great detail. Perhaps CZ and He Yi agree with Sam Altman’s view: values first, aptitude second, specific skills third.
Initially, employees used their own laptops. Later, for security reasons, new hires received a 13-inch Macbook Pro. Compared to peers, Binance offered higher-than-average compensation. Many admitted that without joining Binance, their academic background and experience wouldn’t have qualified them for top-tier companies—or commanded high salaries. Relocating to Dubai meant even higher pay plus monthly allowances. However, compensation varied significantly across departments: derivatives offered the best package, followed by tech, with marketing at the lowest tier.
Binance conducted performance reviews twice a year. High performers earned bonuses of 4–6 months’ salary, underperformers received two. Thus, many employees effectively earned 20x annual salaries—an exceptionally attractive offer. Compare this to Temu, another fast-growing company, which typically offers 14–16x. Later, however, reviews shifted to once a year, and bonuses decreased accordingly.
Performance was scored on a 1–6 scale. Scores of 1–1.5 represented superstars—one per team at most, sometimes none. Typical scores ranged from 2–3 or 3–4. Below 5 triggered a PIP (performance improvement plan) with a one-month evaluation period. Failure to improve resulted in optimization (a euphemism for termination). Still, such cases remained rare for a long time.
Managers assigned scores but had to justify them to their superiors (early on, directly to CZ or He Yi). In the beginning, He Yi personally reviewed every bonus. One humane aspect of early Binance was adjusting bonuses based on base salary—if base pay was low, the bonus was increased accordingly.
Regular employees had 3–6 month probation periods; executives faced 6–12 months or longer. Leadership roles required mandatory customer service training—two hours daily. This mirrored practices common in Chinese internet companies; for example, JD.com once required all executives to spend half a day annually as delivery drivers.
Once officially onboard, the sole mission was helping this explosively growing company grow even faster. Unlike cash-burning startups chasing market share, Binance was both expanding rapidly and generating massive profits. Therefore, unlike loss-making startups, it didn’t strictly control ROI. In marketing, only user acquisition campaigns tracked ROI; brand-building, media outreach, and community efforts operated without financial constraints. Management relied less on KPIs and more on Silicon Valley-style OKRs for planning.
Beyond Rules
For Binance, anything that didn’t hinder growth could wait—including management itself.
To many founders, management is paramount: How should people collaborate? Hence, numerous collaboration tools emerged: Linear, Notion, Lark, Slack… From Silicon Valley to Beijing to Bangalore, entrepreneurs everywhere debated the same topic: What’s the best management model (and programming language)? Books on management fill shelves at airports worldwide.
Yet Binance charted a different course: when a company experiences epic growth, is management really that important? As long as growth isn’t impeded, what’s wrong with being a Telegram-group-based company?
Binance isn’t the only company proving that growth and management tools can be unrelated. China’s e-commerce giant Pinduoduo also grew rapidly. According to LatePost’s report, Pinduoduo once used a multi-thousand-member QQ group for communication, with key tasks passed orally. Even after going public in 2018 and reaching a valuation of $30–40 billion, Pinduoduo’s HR still manually exported attendance data from打卡 machines and imported it into Excel. A person who joined Pinduoduo after 2019 noted: “The use of primitive management methods stemmed from the fact that, for Pinduoduo at the time, survival was everything.” The same applied to Binance—not only survive, but surpass all competitors and break through every regulatory barrier. When survival itself is difficult, the choice of management tools hardly matters.
From Disruption to Dominance
This doesn’t mean conventional management models are meaningless. Even Binance eventually felt the downsides of unstructured growth as headcount increased.
In late 2020, nearing a thousand employees, Binance initiated its first major migration. Telegram was gradually phased out, and the entire company moved to Cisco’s WebEx. But this was only transitional—the final destination was Binance’s self-developed internal software, Wea.
If you’ve used Lark (Feishu) by ByteDance, you’ll notice striking similarities in UI design—even the logo bears resemblance. However, unlike the era when everyone used Telegram, Wea was restricted to Binance’s core platform teams. Acquired teams, such as Coinmarketcap, couldn’t access Wea.
This marked the beginning of Binance becoming less flat and transparent. For Binance, preventing leaks became more important than transparency. The cost of flatness and openness on Telegram included multiple incidents of information leakage—prompting standardized issuance of secure devices. Starting with WebEx, Binance eliminated the all-hands group. CZ prohibited large internal group chats. Only small interest-based groups remained, capped at a few dozen members. Meanwhile, larger WeChat groups among Binance staff were disbanded. From then on, Binance employees could no longer freely contact each other. Sometimes, two Binance colleagues met for the first time only through third-party introductions. For example, two people collaborating daily might only recognize each other during a chance encounter at a blockchain conference.
Similarly, Pinduoduo—once famous for its massive QQ group—also evolved into a tightly controlled information environment: “Employees cannot see the organizational chart on the internal system, cannot view colleagues outside their department, and are forbidden from creating WeChat groups.”
Around this time, Binance’s explosive growth began to slow. Regulatory and compliance issues surfaced. Binance started resembling other tech giants. The days of applying directly to founders ended. Binance began placing greater emphasis on education and experience. Candidates without elite tech backgrounds found it increasingly difficult to join.
Employees began distinguishing between two types within Binance: “Old Binancians” and “Big Tech hires.”
“Old Binancians” were mostly early joiners—often from humble backgrounds but deeply embedded in crypto and Binance from the start. Many held substantial amounts of BNB. “Big Tech hires” resembled the polished professionals seen in Silicon Valley or Zhongguancun—typically not active traders, selling any tokens received immediately.
Though Big Tech hires may seem less crypto-native, they may now be better suited for Binance—because regardless of uniqueness, Binance inevitably faces problems common to large corporations. Bringing in those who’ve seen such issues before becomes a smarter choice. These hires, having worked at major corporations or even governments, bring experience navigating crises and strong capabilities. Many crypto exchanges rise quickly but collapse just as fast. Despite challenges, Binance remains standing—thanks in large part to these later additions. As a Chinese proverb goes: “You can conquer the empire on horseback, but you cannot govern it from the saddle.” Starting in late 2020, Binance shifted gears from hypergrowth to sustainable expansion.
Binance’s challenges weren’t unique—every fast-growing internet company has faced similar transitions. In its early days, ByteDance heavily recruited young frontline workers without big-company pedigrees but driven to deliver results. But after 2020, ByteDance began bringing in seasoned executives like Cheng Xi, former president of Didi’s ride-hailing division, or Zhou Shouzi, former Xiaomi partner.
While hiring Big Tech talent was inevitable, it sparked complaints from Old Binancians: “Before 2020, upward management didn’t exist at Binance.” But starting in 2022, everyone had to master upward management. In the early days, under CZ and He Yi’s leadership, everyone focused on one goal: user focus—creating value and thinking from the user’s perspective. Now, people also ask: Will doing this help my boss? Can I earn credit from leadership to advance faster?
This shift was likely not what CZ wanted. Before the pandemic, he consistently emphasized avoiding office politics, conflict, and encouraging cross-level communication. But once a company becomes large, it cannot escape the problems inherent to size. Corporate bloat has no escape velocity—it’s a fate no giant can avoid.
At a Crossroads
But Binance’s transformation didn’t stop there. Mid-year, Binance carried out a large-scale layoff. The familiar tech industry cycle appeared to manifest in Binance: rapid expansion → mass hiring → contraction and layoffs. What determines whether a company fades quickly or endures long-term often hinges on reflection and rebuilding after the first major downturn.
A company’s growth often outpaces its founder’s learning curve. How big and far can a company go? The founder’s ability to catch up and adapt plays a critical role. Some founders are fortunate—having accumulated deep expertise even before launching. CATL founder Zeng Yuqun gained vast experience at his previous company, so at CATL, he never talked about emulating others’ management styles. More commonly, founders accelerate learning by studying those who’ve navigated similar paths. For example, Li Xiang, founder of Li Auto, proactively sought advice from Alibaba Group’s academic chair Zeng Ming, discussing how Alibaba built its organization and strategy.
CZ belongs to the latter category—he constantly learns from others. Compared to Li Xiang, however, he’s more of a solitary learner, diving into other founders’ minds through voracious reading. Shortly after Binance’s layoffs, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk was released. CZ read it immediately and shared his notes widely, urging everyone to read it. He recognized Tesla as an excellent learning model, noting Musk’s similar values. Possibly influenced by recent layoffs, CZ specifically highlighted Musk’s swift decision to let people go—something Binance should emulate.
Like Musk, CZ, He Yi, incoming CEO Richard Teng, and Binance’s leadership are attempting things no one has done before: How to operate legally while under scrutiny from regulators across countless jurisdictions? How to maintain dominance as the world’s largest exchange in a largely ruleless market? How to manage a remote team of thousands? Many answers cannot be learned—they must be discovered by Binance itself.
On November 22, 2022, CZ stepped down as CEO of Binance. Those familiar with the past five years of tech history might not find this surprising—Chinese founders often step down from top leadership roles. Pinduoduo launched its fast-growing Temu only after founder Colin Huang retired; ByteDance expanded globally with TikTok only after Zhang Yiming gradually withdrew; earlier examples include Jack Ma, who held a grand farewell concert upon retirement. A founder stepping back doesn’t mean complete detachment from the company, but regardless, it marks a new phase and fresh challenge. Binance already faced more unanswered questions than most companies. Now, it has one more.
Whatever the final answers may be, they will surely become case studies for future generations.
@mavislightyear contributed to this article.
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