How KubeSphere’s Founder Turned a Near‑Failure into a Global Cloud‑Native Success

"China's IT software products have not truly gone abroad; I want to create a globally known software product that solves enterprise problems and multiplies its impact," says Zhou Xiaosi, head of QingCloud's Container Platform division.

Zhou explains that he joined QingCloud because of CEO Huang Yunsong, whom he met eleven years ago at IBM and found "very ambitious." After more than twenty years of work experience, he spent seven years at QingCloud, the longest tenure at a single company.

He describes the pressure on a startup: "We must consider how to survive and achieve our goal of becoming a world‑class ICT platform." The core product, KubeSphere, began as an open‑source container platform in 2018 and entered its first commercial year in 2020, with version 3.0 released and work now on version 4.0.

01 Why I Stayed Seven Years at QingCloud

Zhou values a platform that lets him pursue meaningful work. Although not a founder, he was among the earliest employees and felt the difference between being a regular employee and participating in shaping a company's direction.

02 KubeSphere Almost Failed

When KubeSphere was first conceived in July 2017, internal consensus was lacking and the project nearly stalled. Zhou wanted a distributed operating system independent of QingCloud, similar to OpenShift. After a call from the CEO in March 2018, he quickly assembled a small team and pushed forward.

He likens the strategy to "encircling the cities from the countryside": first capture small and medium‑size enterprises with free, open‑source offerings, then expand to large customers. This approach succeeded, with major banks such as the People’s Bank of China, Bank of China, and China Everbright Bank becoming flagship users.

03 The Person He admires Most: Mao Zedong

Zhou admires Mao Zedong as a true entrepreneur, noting the "rural‑encircling‑city" theory as inspiration for startup strategy.

Q & A

TGO1: Your team‑management experience?

Zhou says small teams thrive with a "hands‑off" style, while larger teams need formal processes; eventually a mix of autonomy and governance works best. He does not advocate a 996 work schedule, emphasizing that creative roles like designers and developers need flexibility.

TGO2: Why are hybrid‑cloud and multi‑cloud architectures among the best ways for enterprises to adopt cloud?

He explains that private clouds offer control and data security, while public clouds provide elastic scalability for bursty workloads. Combining both yields hybrid‑cloud solutions. Multi‑cloud avoids vendor lock‑in by distributing workloads across multiple providers.