"Compared with before, I have a feeling that it is becoming easier and easier to obtain investment for Internet startups. In the past, only foreign capital was active in venture capital in China. As domestic Internet companies continue to invest in Nasdaq and Hong Kong stocks, Listed on the market, domestic private capital is slowly entering this market.
According to my experience in Silicon Valley, there will be more and more active private capital in the future. Previously successful entrepreneurs will most likely make some investments in the Internet field after completing their wealth accumulation. Because he himself has achieved success through entrepreneurship in the Internet field, and he also knows this field very well.
Under such a premise, he will be more patient than ordinary investors and have better judgment about the project itself. And this type of investor can also bring more resources to the company itself.
For example, Xin Zong, Xin Zong is the best case. Before Xin Zong invested in Tencent, no investment institution was optimistic about Tencent. The only investment institution willing to invest in Tencent also regarded Tencent as the benchmark product of ICQ. Maybe it was QQ. If it is valuable, some companies may be willing to acquire qq.
After Mr. Xin invested in Tencent, whether it was the idea of QQ show, which almost immediately helped Tencent find a profit model for its original business, or the later product Enterprise QQ, which was also Mr. Xin’s idea, we just realized his idea through the product. .
To this day, companies in Silicon Valley will copy our products. Whether it is ICQ or Microsoft's MSN, they have launched their own enterprise instant messaging products.
At the same time, on the basis of enterprise instant messaging, we further relied on the Mphone platform to create WeChat on the mobile side, forming a more complete ecosystem.
It can be said that, except for Mr. Xin, Tencent would not be able to develop as well as it does today with any investor.
What I want to say is that successful entrepreneurs in the Internet industry are transforming and investing. Their product acumen and resource integration capabilities may not be as strong as those of Mr. Xin, but they will definitely be stronger than investment institutions in the financial field.
I am very optimistic about the future development of Chinese Internet companies. Chinese Internet companies often lack opportunities, and there will be more and more such opportunities in the future. "
After Pony Ma finished speaking, the audience burst into warm applause.
The vast majority of those who will attend Internet conferences are Internet practitioners, either entrepreneurs or executives of Internet companies.
Only a few are workers in government-related fields and investors from financial institutions.
For Internet practitioners, what they most hope to meet is investors like Zhou Xin who can provide help in all aspects.
In the past two years, which company has attracted the most attention is undoubtedly Tencent. Even if NetEase and Sohu were listed on the Hong Kong stock market, they did not receive as much attention as Tencent.
Because Tencent is the only company in China's Internet industry whose business model has been copied by Silicon Valley. And under the direct competition from Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and other Americen Internet giants, Tencent went to Americen to carry out business and competed with each other in the other's homeland. Not only was it not defeated, but it became more and more successful.
Almost everyone knows and understands Tencent’s story from traditional media propaganda.
In addition, Tencent’s qq also has a large audience in China.
Internet practitioners in the audience had previously speculated that Enterprise QQ was Zhou Xin's handiwork, and Tencent staff members also leaked it on online forums. This time it is officially certified.
Everyone is envious and jealous. Everyone is an Internet company. How can you take off instantly after receiving investment?
Before Zhou Xin’s investment, who among you knew about Tencent? At most, you know qq, but qq itself has limited value. Why are investment institutions unwilling to invest? Because ICQ has not found a profit model, so there are few companies doing this.
A promising area is portal websites. Internet entrepreneurs in China are rushing to build portal websites. .com is the mainstream, which makes entrepreneurs think that Tencent is picking up the slack.
It's just good luck that I stepped on the wind. Only Tencent makes instant messaging software. When Zhou Xin wanted to invest in domestic instant messaging software, Tencent was the only choice.
It is precisely because of the two cases of Tencent and Alibaba that Internet entrepreneurs and investment institutions have realized Zhou Xin's vision and resources.
This has also led to Emerging Investment becoming the most popular investment institution in China’s Internet industry. Everyone wants to get investment from Zhou Xinxin. This alone is enough to increase the company’s valuation by 30% in subsequent financing.
Zhou Xin was very modest, but not modest, and he really thought this in his heart: "Pony's words are a bit exaggerated.
Like enterprise QQ, I just put forward ideas. The ideas themselves are not valuable. There are 1.3 billion people in China. There will definitely be many people among these 1.3 billion people who have similar ideas to me.
In the end, being able to implement this idea and turn it into a product is more important than the idea itself.
What I admire most about Tencent is its product strength. What I proposed is a big concept. After I invested in Tencent, I told Pony that I thought it might be a better direction to develop localized instant messaging software specifically for enterprises.
Then I will tell you what core demands of the enterprise need to be solved by enterprise instant messaging software, what issues do I pay attention to as a manager, and how can we solve these problems well.
I actually express my ideas from a relatively macro level. Ultimately, it is up to the entire Tencent team to implement these requirements one by one and turn them into functional points in the software. I later regretted talking to Pony about my ideas. After talking to him, he sent me emails every day to discuss product details with me.
Pony will list the questions like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and he will also list some very detailed questions. He knows that I will not read them all, so he will prioritize the questions and make him feel The most important ones are put in the front row. I don’t have the energy to answer every question.
So I will also choose questions that I know and think are more critical to answer. From the time we decided to start Enterprise QQ to the final launch of Enterprise QQ, we sent at least hundreds of emails to and from each other. "
Ma Yun joked: "Newman, you are the top product manager in the world, and you are teaching Pony how to make products one by one. This is indeed a bit too partial.
If I had known, I should have shamelessly harassed you every day. "
Zhou Xin laughed: "I'm a little irritated, but when I think about Tencent, I hold shares, and helping Tencent is also helping myself, so I still take time to reply to him every day.
And I seem to be born with this talent. I hardly need to think about what form Internet products should take. I can judge whether their approach is feasible by intuition. "
Pony Ma has been in contact with Zhou Xin for a long time, and he feels this deeply. Because he would send emails to Zhou Xin almost every day during the previous period, Pony found that Zhou Xin’s reply time was concentrated at nine o’clock in the morning in San Francisco time. Pony would calculate the time difference when Ma was still in China, and then when it was almost nine o’clock Then send an email to Zhou Xin.
Pony Ma found that no matter what type of questions he had, Zhou Xin responded quickly.
If rebirth is a kind of talent, then Zhou Xin is really right.
Ma Huateng took over: "Before I contacted the new president, I didn't really understand how powerful the most powerful product manager is.
Later I found out that it was really amazing and it was really a talent.
Anyone who has worked on Internet products knows that everyone will have different ideas about a function, and what kind of effect should be achieved to provide the best user experience and best meet user needs.
Enterprise QQ is a B-end product, targeting corporate customers, which is completely different from personal QQ. For personal QQ, we only need to focus on ease of use, and we will do whatever users find comfortable. However, for corporate QQ, we need to take into account both user experience and meeting the needs of the company's daily operations.
It will be very difficult to reach a balance in the middle, just like stepping on a tightrope in the sky. It is difficult to find the balance point.
We need to go through a lot of discussions, and the product team will have different ideas. Many times Zhidong, Chenye and I, our founder team, will have different ideas about the product.
We generally need to make demos with different effects, and then conduct a large number of usage tests to finally determine which idea is more suitable.
The new manager was able to tell me what would be most suitable based solely on his imagination. Sometimes I will tell you what we think, and sometimes I won't. The new president's email will describe the effect he thinks is most appropriate. Sometimes we thought of his replies, sometimes we didn't think of them, and sometimes they were even better than the ideas our team had discussed together for a long time.
Of course it’s not all, probably more than 90%. We can directly use the new president’s ideas.
Afterwards, I didn’t want to bother the new boss. Firstly, I was too embarrassed to continue bothering him so intensely. Secondly, I found that our team had developed a dependency mentality.
When we have a disagreement, everyone's first thought is to send an email to ask the new boss. Then after the new president puts forward his idea, no one wants to argue anymore. Everyone subconsciously thinks that they should follow the new president's idea. Also do demos and tests. This is not good for the enterprise itself in building standardized workflows. "
After Pony Ma finished speaking, the audience in the audience were discussing, because Zhou Xin's keen insight into products was revealed in magazines, interviews with celebrities, or internal employees of Zhou Xin's companies. Everyone has read reports from different sources.
Therefore, in the follow-up audience question session, the first question is: "Hello, Mr. Zhou, I would like to ask you how you cultivate this kind of thinking about products. For Internet practitioners like us, the design of Internet products Is there any way to improve my ability?”
Zhou Xin actually doesn’t know how to answer, because to put it bluntly, his ability comes from standing on the shoulders of giants.
“I think my thinking is more of a talent, and I seem to be born with the ability to capture users’ needs.
As for how to cultivate the day after tomorrow, I think it requires more experience, action-feedback-thinking-optimization. There is such a progressive relationship in daily work to form a constantly improving thinking model. This may be a more important point. . "
"Mr. Zhou, I would like to ask you, from the perspective of an investor, which company do you prefer?" Everyone has similar concerns.
Zhou Xin rarely returns to China and rarely appears in public. For entrepreneurs in China, it is very rare to have this opportunity to understand his ideas.
Zhou Xin replied: “In many aspects, the first thing to look at is the people. Investing in companies is actually the investors. I will look at the founder team.
Second is the business model, because the business model needs to match the founder team. A highly competitive business model requires the founder team to have the ability to iterate quickly. An emerging business model may require the founder team to have sufficient resources. Enterprising spirit.
Different business models have different values for the founder team.
But it’s not of much use if you ask me. I won’t make investments myself, and my ideas will not affect Emerging Investments. They have their own set of logic. If you know Mr. Wu of Emerging Investments, you can ask him more. .
He has advanced much faster than me in the investment field, and I feel like my ideas have fallen behind. "
"Mr. Lei, do you know Matrix and Mphone?" Zhou Xin asked.
After the summit forum ended that day, Zhou Xin asked Lei Jun to have dinner alone in the evening.
Simo is already too old to support the development of Matrix in the next ten years. At seventy years old, he has no problem integrating and selecting the supply chain, and he has no problem doing some macro-level corporate management.
But soon the entire smartphone industry will face high competition, and one mobile phone manufacturer after another will fall behind. In the end, only the top companies in the smartphone field will survive.
In such a highly competitive environment, Simo's age is not enough to support him to deal with such fierce competition.
Therefore, Zhou Xin hopes to find a manager for Matrix, a manager with sufficient capabilities.
Obviously, Lei Jun is the first choice. As a mobile phone brand that can turn Xiaomi from scratch into the top four in China, Lei Jun's ability is beyond doubt. Being able to extend from Xiaomi to the entire smart ecosystem, although Xiaomi grocery stores don’t sound good, being able to build this kind of ecosystem requires strong supply chain control capabilities.
Therefore, in Zhou Xin's opinion, Lei Jun is the best and most suitable candidate. The current Lei Jun and Simo are just right if they cooperate.
Simo has experience, Lei Jun is young and capable enough.
Coupled with Zhou Xin's strategic control, he is confident that Matrix can dominate Samsung and Apple in the smartphone era.
It was just the right time for Rebus and Jobs to face off.
Lei Jun was a little excited when he received the invitation. Did Zhou Xin fall in love with Joyo.com?
At this time, Lei Jun was the CEO of Kingsoft Software and founded Joyo.com. Joyo.com, which specializes in e-commerce in the field of books, audio and video, almost copied Amazon's business model.
(End of chapter)
