The print media is discussing why Newman is always able to create products that are completely different from other Internet companies.
Internet companies are paying more attention to this issue. For the media, Newman's creative secrets are just a gimmick to attract readers, but for Internet companies, it is the key to their life and death.
Everyone is facing a serious crisis, and Riot Games is the first to get out of the crisis with just one game.
This is very attractive to Internet companies.
“Under the current situation, Time Warner needs a CEO who can lead Time Warner out of the current predicament, not a CEO like Gerald Wright who has no innovative spirit and ability.
If it were 1995 now, Gerrard could maintain Time Warner's status, and even lead Time Warner to a further step by relying on his skill in capital market operations. But now it is 2000, and the capital market has lost patience with the Internet and has lost interest in mergers and acquisitions between Internet companies.
The mergers and acquisitions of Yahoo and eBay were halted, and the stock prices of Microsoft and Cisco could not escape the fate of plummeting. The capital operation stories of the past could no longer attract investors to pay. The only investor who had not lost interest was Newman. The capital market used money to support Newman. vote.
The only one among Internet companies that can still attract investors is Newman. Originally, we thought that after Time Warner acquired Quora, Newman would lose its previous aura and remove the title of the best product manager.
In the face of the crisis, Newman put the crown that had been acquired back on his head, even more dazzling than before. Investors once again realized that Quora could remain stable because Newman designed all the core links for it. operations.
Newman's loss of Quora is far less serious than Quora's loss of Newman. Therefore, I think we need a new CEO to lead Time Warner out of its current predicament. If Gerald Wright cannot do this, then we will replace him.
What Time Warner needs is innovation, and only an innovation story told by Newman himself can attract investors. So I think we need to show good faith in inviting Newman to run Time Warner. "
At Time Warner's internal board meeting, everyone reached a consensus that Gerald Wright should be removed. His ability is not enough to control the precarious Time Warner.
All the directors agreed with Newman's appointment as chairman of Time Warner and believed it was definitely a good thing. No matter how expensive it is to hire Newman to take charge of Time Warner, the stimulation of the capital market can easily earn back the money.
Newman's return to the helm of Time Warner is equivalent to giving Time Warner a shot in the arm in the capital market.
The problem is that it can't be done, it's too difficult, because Zhou Xin is not short of money and can't offer the chips that can make Zhou Xin's heart beat.
"I also wanted to invite Newman to run Time Warner, but the problem was that I couldn't do it. After the president of Yahoo resigned, they also wanted to find Newman to run Yahoo. I heard that Yahoo offered a sky-high annual salary of US$100 million, but Newman remained unmoved.
It is almost impossible for Time Warner to convince Newman. "
Zhou Xin really looked down upon the US$100 million, not to mention that the US$100 million was mainly based on equity incentives and only had US$10 million in cash.
Even 100 million US dollars in cash is not worth it to Zhou Xin now.
Because the essence is that Yahoo used his reputation to raise its stock price, and it was the shareholders behind Yahoo who made the profit after raising the stock price. They paid a small price to borrow Zhou Xin's reputation.
In one year, or even less, it is almost impossible to completely reverse Yahoo's decline. Yahoo made too many wrong decisions during the past Internet bubble, and a large amount of money was spent on wrong acquisition projects.
In fact, Zhou Xin only needs one move to help Yahoo reverse its decline, and that is to acquire Google. But the problem is that it will take at least three years to acquire Google to see results, and Yahoo paid a price of US$100 million for a profit of US$100 billion.
There is absolutely no need for this.
“Newman, congratulations, Riot Games has once again achieved success. Even if free video games reach 50% of the scale of paid video games in the future, Riot Games will become an existence as valuable as Quora.
When Goldman Sachs provided listing services for Riot Games, it did not subscribe for more shares of Riot Games. We did not fully understand the market value of Riot Games at that time.
In other words, we don’t know you well enough, and other founders wouldn’t be able to bring Riot Games to where it is today. "Henry Paulson, a powerful figure at Goldman Sachs and a senior member of the executive committee.
In other words, the current mechanism of Goldman Sachs was formed under his single-handed leadership. He will go through the government-enterprise revolving door to serve as the government’s Minister of Finance in 2006, and single-handedly led the acquisition of Quora by Time Warner.
With Zhou Xin's position, Goldman Sachs Vice President Jerrel, the person in charge of Riot Games' listing, Zhou Xin could ignore him, but Henry, Zhou Xin must take it seriously.
Just because he would serve as finance minister in the future, Zhou Xin also needed to build a good relationship with him.
In Zhou Xin's memory, Henry made many wrong decisions during the financial crisis in 2008. He may not be able to let Henry go further on the wrong decision-making path.
"Even without free games, Riot Games has a very high value. It exists entirely based on video games. The high growth of video games in the past decade, coupled with the increasing share of online distribution of video games.
Riot Games' video game community ecosystem is also becoming more and more complete. From one game to ten games and now to thousands of games, you can find corresponding reviews from Riot Games' rating system.
The accumulation of data, the development of the electronic game industry, and the encroachment of online and offline channels determine that Riot Games has an extremely broad future.
It’s just that it’s difficult for people to see this. They will only focus on particularly prominent points, such as the Internet bubble. They will think that all Internet companies have bubbles.
Even if Riot Games' financial condition is very good, investors will not analyze Riot Games carefully because it is in good financial condition, but will subconsciously think that its financial condition is worrying because it is an Internet company.
What I do is just make investors re-recognize Riot Games through the direct benefits brought by free games. In fact, the potential future revenue of free games does not have such great appeal, which can help Riot Games' stock price rise by 40%. "Zhou Xin said very frankly.
Riot Games did not rely on investors' money to promote itself like other Internet companies after its establishment. Instead, it almost relied on players to attract a lot of attention and compete head-on with Yahoo Games to attract a lot of attention.
After forming a positive cycle, Riot Games has been relying on its excellent community ecosystem to continue to attract customers, and there has always been revenue, so Riot Games has achieved breakeven very early.
And as more and more video games are sold through Riot Games, profits have maintained a high growth trend.
After the financial reports of many Internet companies have been exposed, and there have been phenomena of concealing and modifying data, Riot Games' financial reports can also stand the test.
Henry thought for a while and knew that he should speak directly to Zhou Xin and not beat around the bush: "Newman, reading financial reports is a basic skill for investors. The previous decline in Riot Games' market value was not because its financial reports were not good, nor because it was suspected of having a cash flow crisis. .
The fundamental reason is that investors doubt whether Internet companies can find a profit model sooner or later after expanding their scale as advertised.
To put it simply, investors did not care about the revenue and profits of Internet companies before. The valuation system also revolved around users. However, whether users can really create enough value in the future was completely proven around the millennium. Fake.
No matter how large the user base is, it may not be really valuable. Quora only has hundreds of thousands of official users, while many Internet companies have millions of members. Could it be that these Internet companies and their users will be able to create in the future what Quora users will create? Is it of equal value?
The reconstruction of the valuation system is the fundamental reason why the market value of all Internet companies has plummeted. Everyone no longer believes that users are the key, and they no longer believe that winning users is the most important thing for Internet companies.
Quora played a key role in this. The success of Quora made Wall Street realize that the value between users is different, and the value that users can tap is also different.
The bursting of the Nasdaq bubble this time only further clarified this understanding, and the financial situation is just the excuse used by the media to find reasons for the results.
If Internet companies can find a clear path to prove that they can make profits from users in the future, they will be able to maintain cash flow from investors.
Recently, a new argument has emerged on Wall Street, that is, Newman's company needs to adopt a different valuation system from other Internet companies.
Newman's business never has to worry about finding a profit model. Newman can find more than one profit model for his business. "
This is not just Henry's bragging about Zhou Xin, many Wall Street investors have actually proposed this concept and it has been publicly reported in the financial media.
The financial media have coined a new term: Newman concept stocks, which means that Internet companies with Newman’s leadership behind them can enjoy different valuation systems.
Riot Games is a masterpiece, and Time Warner also enjoyed this dividend. However, because Time Warner has other businesses besides Quora, Time Warner fell even more fiercely.
Zhou Xin thought to himself that financial people can still speak, and he was very proud of his words of suppressing first and then promoting. Even if these ideas did not come from him, but from the wisdom of the future, he was still very happy to be flattered.
Chinese Internet companies are much more expensive than foreign Internet companies. Foreign Internet companies have a very poor user experience, and after occupying a monopoly advantage, they rarely optimize the user experience.
Take Twitter and Weibo as examples. From a purely user experience perspective, Weibo’s user experience is far superior to Twitter’s.
"It seems that I should invest more in Internet companies so that other Internet companies can also enjoy the dividends brought by Newman." Zhou Xin joked.
Henry nodded: "Yes, maybe after you invest heavily in Internet companies, the Nasdaq index will rise instead of falling.
Those investors on Wall Street who are about to jump off the building because of their large purchases of Internet company stocks, they all have to thank you. "
Henry continued: "Newman, there are actually two main things I need to discuss with you this time.
The first thing is that Time Warner entrusted me to be a lobbyist. They want to invite you to be the CEO of Time Warner and give you an annual salary of US$1 billion. Of course, there are requirements for this US$1 billion.
After one year, Time Warner's market value determines how much annual salary you can get, with the minimum being $100 million and the maximum being $1 billion.
Among them, 80% is option incentive and 20% is cash. You can consider it.
If it were anyone else, I would definitely tell him that this is a rare opportunity. Job opportunities worth $1 billion are not always available.
But if it's you, I think it's just a very ordinary opportunity. You have too many companies to manage under your name.
It is also very easy to list an Internet company. After you list an Internet company, the income it brings you will not be less than 1 billion US dollars.
The richer you are, the easier it is to make money. "
After hearing this, Zhou Xin thought to himself that Time Warner is indeed a big player, and the chips it offers are unmatched by other Internet companies.
Yahoo can only offer $100 million in chips, while Time Warner can offer $1 billion.
Of course, Time Warner's billion-dollar deal has performance appraisal requirements, but Yahoo does not.
Zhou Xin shook his head: "As you said, I don't have the time or energy.
Most of my energy is focused on the matrix mobile phone. We were originally going to launch an epoch-making mobile phone product this year with a lot of innovations. I built many different functions for matrix to meet the needs of mobile phone users.
This also made development very difficult, far beyond my expectations, so I had no time to worry about Time Warner.
Unlike Riot Games and NewPay, these two companies were founded by me, and I have a very good grasp of them. I also interviewed the senior management teams of these two companies one by one, so I don’t need to get familiar with them again.
Time Warner is different. Time Warner's executives in charge of Quora have all been replaced. It takes me too much energy to just get familiar with it again and then think about its development strategy. "
Jimmy Wells and Larry Sanger, who were initially involved in quora, were quickly sidelined after Zhou Xin sold quora. After being sidelined, they offered to resign, and then sold part of their Time Warner shares to restart the electronic encyclopedia. Start a business.
With the experience of Quora, Jimmy and Larry know better how to make an excellent electronic encyclopedia and how to balance professionalism and universality.
Henry: "Newman, I completely understand your decision. To you, the Time Warner position is really not worth mentioning.
After what you said just now, I am very interested in matrix. Are you still short of money? Goldman Sachs can invest in this project. We lack everything else but money.
Especially now, Goldman Sachs is particularly short of good investment projects. "
Update 4k tonight and another chapter tomorrow morning. Slowly regain the coding status
(End of chapter)
