Tsai Chongxin has been thinking about Zhou Xin’s words about how e-commerce can provide more value-added services.
He has been engaged in the financial industry for many years and has his own understanding of the nature of finance.
As he thought more deeply, he gained a new understanding of the true value of NewPay, and also figured out why Zhou Xin, the only company in NewPay, only accepted the A/B share structure when accepting external investment.
After the success of Quora, every company under Zhou Xin's name has received widespread attention in the industry, and NewPay is no exception. Tsai Chongxin worked in a private equity fund in the Lion City before joining Alibaba this year.
After the news of NewPay’s external financing came out, it spread from Wall Street to the Lion City in a very short period of time.
When Tsai Chongxin heard about the A/B share structure, he just sighed about Zhou Xin’s emphasis on NewPay.
His understanding of electronic payment at that time was only the payment itself, which was the extension of banks in the online world.
"The problem is that the greater the value of NewPay, the harder it will be for Newman to retain control of NewPay. What is he going to do?" Tsai Chongxin's only doubt is this.
While reviewing the contract at Pony Ma, Zhou Xin met with the founders of Sohu, NetEase and Sina respectively.
It is difficult for a company to succeed in one era. It can span two eras. In Zhou Xin's impression, the only Internet companies in China are Tencent and Alibaba.
Baidu relies on the wealth accumulated in the Internet 1.0 era to support itself.
When he saw the representatives of Sina, Zhou Xin realized that there was also Sina. Sina was also active from the 1.0 era to the 2.0 era with the help of Weibo.
Compared with Sina, which could only be regarded as a second-tier company twenty years later, Sina now is a well-deserved top player in China's Internet industry.
This year, it received a total of US$80 million in financing from domestic and overseas investment institutions such as Goldman Sachs. When Alibaba can only get 5 million US dollars and Tencent can't even get 2.2 million US dollars, it can get 80 million.
What disappoints Zhou Xin is that the chairman of Sina who came to see him didn't pay much attention to the Internet itself. Most of his thoughts were on how to take the company public.
It's interesting to say that Sina was formerly known as Sitong Lifang, and later Sina.com was established after the merger with Huayuan Consulting. In other words, Sina.com is only one of the sectors of the company Sina, so the founder of Sina.com is not the chairman of Sina.
The person who came to see Zhou Xin was neither the chairman of Sina nor the founder of Sina.com, but the chief operating officer of Sina.
Of course, this guy was pretty awesome. He soon became the CEO of Sina. After marrying the daughter of a big shot, he quickly resigned from the CEO position and completely disappeared from the public eye.
Because Sina is now focused on listing the company, it is facing a sharp decline in the market value of Nasdaq. Even if Goldman Sachs is behind them, Goldman Sachs is not sure of listing their operations.
Therefore, the overseas investment institutions behind Sina hope that each of them will transfer some shares to Zhou Xin at a price lower than the valuation at the time of financing, and use Zhou Xin's reputation to endorse them.
When it is listed on Nasdaq, they can find new investors (leeks) to help them take over.
Zhou Xin knew what was going on when he heard this. The people from Goldman Sachs Asia wanted to use his fame to end the mess caused by him.
Investing US$80 million in Sina was no problem during the Internet bubble period, but now, it is increasingly showing a tendency to fail.
Most of these 80 million were invested by Goldman Sachs Asia.
After chatting with Sina, Zhou Xin did not accept the other party's proposal. To put it bluntly, he didn't like the money and didn't think Sina had much long-term investment value.
Sohu and NetEase both hold similar ideas. NetEase's current business is very complex, almost one-to-one compared to Yahoo. What Yahoo has, they have.
Sohu is similar. Anyway, everyone who builds portals learns from Yahoo's business format.
Of course, they also copied Quora and Riot Games, the Internet companies run by Zhou Xin.
It's just a matter of frustration that the concept of genuine products in China is limited and pirated resources are too easy to obtain. Neither of the two video game stores do this.
"Newman, I envy you very much, and even admire you a little. Although you are much younger than me, you do many things that I want to do, or some things that I should do, but you did it first.
Not only on the Internet, but also as a product like Quora, when I saw it for the first time I thought, it’s so perfect.
Taking into account both business and academic aspects, Quora's academic attributes are not that strong, but at least it plays a good role in popularizing science. Later, when I was working in China, I realized that it was very difficult to take care of these two things at the same time.
If the threshold is set too high, the number of users will be small. If the number of users is small, content cannot be guaranteed, and a vicious cycle will form. If the threshold is set too low, the quality of the entire community cannot be guaranteed.
Therefore, only quora can achieve its current form, and all latecomers who imitate will not have a chance. Even China does not have similar products, but there are countless Internet companies in China crowded with making similar products.
Suspicion has Sohu's advantage, and we can't relax a little, because as soon as you relax, your competitors will surpass you.
I envy Quora for being able to do this and ensure the high quality of community members. In my opinion, it is a bit like the model of ancient Rome. In ancient Rome, didn't only citizens have the right to vote, and civilians did not have the right to vote?
Official users of quora are citizens, and ordinary users are civilians. "
After Zhou Xin met Zhang Chaoyang, he felt that he was very casual, not like a student of physics, but like a student of art. The emotional color was much higher than the rational color.
Zhang Chaoyang’s long speech was not finished yet: “When I learned that Time Warner acquired Quora, I wondered if there would be a chance to acquire Quora from Time Warner after Sohu went public and became bigger.
I thought about it again, you have made Quora so perfect, what should I do to optimize it even more perfectly after acquiring it? I have never thought of a plan. Even if Sohu has the ability to acquire Quora in the future, I should think of ways to optimize Quora before acquiring it.
In addition, I am also a member of CAAS, and I specially brought my CAAS badge. "After Zhang Chaoyang finished speaking, Zhou Xin noticed a CAAS badge on the chest of his white suit.
After the establishment of CAAS, physical badges were launched. The basic badge can be purchased for US$19.99. This price is also to commemorate the establishment of CAAS.
More advanced badges can only be upgraded through membership. After reaching a certain level, CAAS will give them to you. The basic model is a copper badge with the words CAAS surrounded by a snake.
“I was able to study abroad at MIT only through the CUSPEA project established by Mr. Li Zhengdao.
So the scholarship program you donated to CAAS or the scholarship program donated to the Committee of 100 all makes me admire you. When I list Sohu, I will also donate a scholarship program to CAAS. "
Zhou Xin didn't care whether Zhang Chaoyang's words were true or false, but the fact that the other party was wearing a CAAS badge made Zhou Xin feel good about him and made him willing to invest some money in Sohu.
Why was he unwilling to invest in Sina? The operating officer of Sina who came to see him did not impress him. Another reason was that his previous experience with Weibo was extremely poor.
Of course, from a functional perspective, the user experience of Weibo is far better than that of Twitter. Twitter doesn’t care much about what Jian Zhong and his gang say.
After talking to the three major portals, Zhou Xin invested US$2 million in Sohu for 10% of the shares, and invested US$2 million in NetEase for 10% of the shares.
In terms of market value, Sohu and NetEase are far more than 20 million US dollars. In addition to Zhou's new investment of 2 million US dollars, he also has his reputation.
Fame cannot be measured by money.
Especially at this time, with Zhou Xin's fame, investors will buy it when he goes to Wall Street for road shows.
This is also the fundamental reason why Zhang Chaoyang and Ding Lei are willing to accept this valuation.
After chatting with the three major portals respectively, Pony Ma signed the financing contract and walked into the conference hall where Zhou Xin was.
After it was confirmed that Tencent had received the money and that it was out of the most urgent life-and-death crisis, Pony seemed much more relaxed.
"pony, sit down, I want to hear what you think about how QQ can achieve profitability?"
Pony Ma smiled bitterly and shook his head, "I really don't know. After we made this product, the number of users grew much faster than we imagined.
After we built QQ, we hung it on the Huajun Software Park. Once launched, qq quickly became the most downloaded application in Huajun Software Park.
Only about half a year later, our server at Pengcheng Telecom was completely unable to withstand the explosive growth in the number of users.
QQ was officially launched on the market in February last year. Within two months of its launch, my founders and I realized that we could not support this product by ourselves.
So we have been thinking about how to achieve profitability, but it is really difficult.
Going back to the nature of the Internet, if you want to achieve profitability, users will turn to other instant messaging software.
QQ has the best user experience on the market and has the largest number of users, but once we charge, users will abandon QQ mercilessly. "
After pony Ma finished chatting with Zhou Xin, when he came down to sign the contract, he realized that Zhou Xin had an extraordinary understanding of Tencent.
Because the official name of qq at this time is OICQ, qq is just a nickname for users for convenience. In addition to qq users, Zhou Xin, as a person who has just returned to China, only knows qq very well, can he shout out qq very familiarly Nick name.
Therefore, Pony Ma guessed that Zhou Xin found huge value in QQ, value that they could not find.
Even with this speculation, Pony Ma still chose to sign the contract and did not raise the price because he could not afford to gamble and did not have the capital to negotiate with Zhou Xin.
Zhou Xin said: “Yes, Internet services will face the same problem, that is, once payment is involved, users will subconsciously reject it.
So have you ever considered value-added services? I helped QQ think about two ways.
The first way is to provide value-added services for individual customers. Users' use of QQ chat is only a basic service.
You can provide additional images to the user. You see, the chat box is on the left and the user's personal avatar is on the right.
We set up a free avatar for him, and if he wants to have more and better-looking avatars, he needs to pay. "
Zhou Xin drew a picture and showed it to Pony Ma, who asked doubtfully: "Is this really possible?
Will anyone really be willing to pay for an avatar? "
Zhou Xin nodded: "Definitely, it's also clothes, all you need to wear is clothes. Why would someone spend high prices on luxury goods?
A richer and better-looking virtual image is equivalent to clothes in the virtual world. "
Out of trust in Zhou Xin, Pony Ma still wrote down the idea and said, "I'll go back and give it a try.
The question is how do users’ money come into our hands? There is no electronic payment in China yet. "
This is a new problem and one for which no company currently offers a solution.
The thing Zhou Xin is talking about has a very familiar name, called qq show.
The qq show was originally not going to be launched until January 2003, but q coins were already available in May 2002 before the qq show.
There was no electronic payment at that time, so how did users recharge Q coins? With the One-Card, the legend launched grandly in 2001, the One-Card has spread throughout China.
Under the influence of Legend, Jun.com, a company specializing in card recharge, was also established in 2001. Shanda Card initially only included Shanda's games, and later gradually accepted the recharge business of other Internet companies.
Junwang has been targeting all Internet companies for point card recharge since the beginning, and has cooperated with hundreds of ISPs, IDCs and major telecom operators to directly promote it to retailers, newsstands, Internet cafes, supermarkets and even convenience stores in front of schools. and bookstores.
So when QQ Show was launched in 2003, there was no need to worry about users finding a place to recharge.
But it's different now.
The legend is not there yet. There may be point card recharge, but this thing is not popular enough. It is basically only available in big cities.
Zhou Xin said: “You can learn about game point cards and learn how to recharge miracles.
As for how to promote it to more cities and regions, it's up to you to think about it. "
Pony Ma silently wrote this down. Miraculously, he had vaguely heard of it. It was a popular online game recently.
Zhou Xin continued: “The other way is to do enterprise QQ.
It specializes in providing services to enterprises and customizing the development of enterprise qq for them.
Let me give you a few examples. QQ is one-on-one communication. Have you ever thought about launching a multi-person chat service?
That is to say, create a group. In this group, many people can chat in it, and then there are several administrators who can control everyone's speaking permissions. "
Pony Ma quickly understood: "Similar to an online chat room?"
Zhou Xin said: “Yes, but some online chat rooms are anonymous and some require authenticated login.
As for the group chat function of QQ, you can develop it specifically for enterprises, then sell the service to enterprises and help them deploy it locally.
I can tell you my thoughts. To put it simply, it’s Enterprise A. You sell them internal instant messaging software, which can support one-on-one chats, and can also support the establishment of groups. It can be divided into departments, and it can also There is a dedicated leadership group.
There can even be a dedicated group for certain tasks.
Then the most critical function is to send files. They can share files in the group or send files one-to-one.
At the same time, some check-in functions will be added. For example, after he arrives at the company, he can log in to enterprise QQ to check in.
Because it involves file transfer, it takes up a lot of your bandwidth resources, so just help them deploy it locally, and then they can only log in locally. In this way, if employees use enterprise QQ to check in, they can only check in at the company.
You first build mature enterprise QQ, and then sell these to big companies. Their demand for this product must be very high.
Compared with emails, the response frequency of QQ messages is much higher.
You can even add a read function for messages sent by leaders. For example, if I send you a message through QQ, you only need to click on it and a "read" message will appear next to the message, which both parties can see.
You have shifted from the business of to C to the business of both to C and to B. The business of to C makes profits by selling avatars, and the business of to B makes profits by selling services.
And the enterprise QQ I am talking about is a product that is not available abroad. If you try it well at home, you can promote it abroad.
In my opinion, we can start with Neon. Neon companies have extremely high demand in this area. "
The enterprise QQ mentioned by Zhou Xin is a simplified version of DingTalk deployed locally.
In this era, companies that can afford enterprise-type QQ and deploy organic rooms must be companies of a certain scale.
Regarding the QQ show that Zhou Xin mentioned before, pony Ma was thinking, can it be done? He was suspicious.
But for the enterprise QQ that Zhou Xin was talking about now, his eyes lit up when he heard it, especially when he read it.
Pony Ma himself was a developer in the early days, and he knew that the read function could be implemented, and it would definitely be favored by leaders.
Zhou Xin continued: "You can sell it very flexibly. For example, the basic version is sold at the same price as the enterprise QQ with only group chat function.
Then the enterprise QQ with the check-in function is priced at another price, and the enterprise QQ with the read function is priced at another price.
In addition, you can have fun with building groups. For example, you can build up to 10 groups for 1,000 yuan, and 100 groups for 10,000 yuan. Then the basic version can have a maximum of 10 people in each group, and the advanced version can have a maximum of 100 people in each group. "
Pony Ma was completely convinced, "Newman, I'm sorry, what you said is so valuable, I have to write it down one by one."
This time I chatted with Zhou Xin again. Pony Ma went to the surrounding area and bought a notebook and a pen to bring in.
Now he was glad that he had brought a pen.
Zhou Xin nodded: “The more complex the pricing rules are, the easier it is for companies to buy more expensive versions.
Or you sell functions together, and the functions that the enterprise wants and the functions that the enterprise does not want are packaged together, and you have to buy two at a time.
These are just business strategies, you can think about them after you go back.
How to do it specifically. "
Pony Ma said: “Really, this is a route we have never considered. From the founder to the employees we later recruited, no one thought that QQ could be used in this situation.
I'm sure there is a market for this, and many companies will be willing to buy our services.
I also thought about some problems, that is, the development of instant messaging software is not very difficult, so our price cannot be too high.
If it's too high, they'd rather develop it in-house. "
Zhou Xin said: “So you need to think about where to start to make this software more technical, so that the cost of their internal development will become higher and higher.
In my opinion, the more complete the functionality you design, the less likely it is that companies will develop it themselves.
What I just said is just superficial. For B business, its threshold or barrier lies in industry experience.
To put it bluntly, anyone can do technology. The needs of the company and the experience you accumulate in the process cannot be copied casually by the company.
For example, the read function I just mentioned. If people have never used enterprise QQ, can they think of doing this function?
Another idea is to break down the barriers between enterprise QQ and QQ.
For example, customer A is engaged in foreign trade, and their company's employees use enterprise-type QQ. When communicating with customers through QQ, they can use enterprise-type QQ to add customer A's QQ.
Then after the employee leaves, all his customer relationships can be transferred to other employees. Customer A's QQ is automatically moved from the employee's enterprise QQ contact list to the enterprise QQ contact list of the employees who are still on the job.
The more such functions, the more irreplaceable enterprise QQ will be. "
Pony Ma felt that his hands were about to get sore from working too much.
He found that Zhou Xin was obviously more interesting when talking about products than when talking about other things.
When we were talking about Tencent's valuation and how much money to invest, Zhou Xin only asked the reason and agreed.
Instead, when we talk about the product itself, Zhou Xin wants to tell you all about the design.
After chatting about enterprise QQ for a while, at the end of the conversation, Pony Ma asked: "Newman, have you used QQ before?
It seems to me that you know our products very well. "
Zhou Xin said: "I have never used your current products, mainly Mr. Wu, who has been sharing some domestic Internet trends with me.
Once before, he accidentally went to an Internet cafe with his friends, and found that almost everyone in the Internet cafe was using QQ, and your beeping sound was heard all over the Internet cafe.
He was very curious about this product and wanted to know what kind of product could win unanimous praise from netizens.
At that time, he asked those people in the Internet cafe, and later wrote a detailed report to me around your products and company.
So I know something about your products.
Including ICQ, which was acquired by AOL at the end of last year, is also very famous, so I have always been interested in instant messaging software.
Riot Games' electronic community also has a bit of an instant messaging nature, but it is a web version of instant messaging and is not made into a program. "
Zhou Xin didn't know if the idea he gave Pony Ma would lead QQ astray.
Under his influence, will QQ cease to be the dominant player in the field of instant messaging and develop into an enterprise management software? Thinking of this, Zhou Xin couldn't help but have more expectations for the future world line he had changed.
After pony Ma and Zhou Xin finished chatting, he returned to the hotel, looked at his notebook, and shared what Zhou Xin had just said one by one with Tencent's founder team.
Everyone has a feeling that their world view has been reshaped.
I think everyone can guess the QQ show. Can anyone guess the local deployment of enterprise QQ?
Also, let’s talk about why two chapters have been combined into one recently. It’s because the average has been almost 3,000 recently, so I want to get the premium badge quickly, but I haven’t gotten it yet.
After you get the premium badge, you will still be issued a chapter of 3-4000 words.
(End of chapter)
