Renren CEO Chen Yizhou said at the second "Entrepreneurship Nation 100" annual awards ceremony that for entrepreneurship, it is more difficult to do trendy things because the general environment is where there is a lot of money and a lot of people are doing trendy things. Be single-minded. When competing, it is not enough to use brains and fast execution. Traditional industries must also be added, plus other things. Big companies think it is too troublesome to work with you, so they will not work with you for the time being. Even so, I I also predict that major companies will be included in the video, which is the same as my judgment a few years ago.
The following is the transcript of his speech:
Chen Yizhou: Thank you, Mr. Nan, and Entrepreneurship State. I have been actively preparing today’s speech on the way here, because there are many entrepreneurs here, and there are many media that pay attention to entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship State, including many investors. I After a little preparation, I would like to talk about it in three aspects: First, I will briefly talk about the biggest environment and biggest trends in our TMT industry now, and the opportunities to start a business under such trends. I thought about it for a long time, and when I came here, Renren posted a status. I want to talk about some aspects of TMT that are not entrepreneurial opportunities, and tell you where the entrepreneurial opportunities are hidden.
I personally think that the first major environmental aspect that the TMT industry has experienced is that China’s Internet has grown rapidly in the past ten years and is now gradually entering a stage of steady growth. If you carefully study the history of foreign and domestic industry development, its growth When the curvature of the curve changes from positive to negative, many new things are different from when the curvature is positive. I have not delved into this matter myself, but as an investor and entrepreneur, I can spend some time studying this. question.
The second is that there is a lot of money in the industry. In fact, if you look carefully, the total number of funds active in China's TMT industry is not much different from the total investment abroad, especially the United States. Huge funds are waiting to be invested in good projects. If you don't, this will lead to some opportunities that may not be good, and will mention the problems caused by too much money.
Third, I found that China has a unique phenomenon in the field of entrepreneurship, which is different from the rest of the world. What phenomenon is it? Veteran comrades who start a business do not retire and continue to work. This is different from foreign countries. Foreign countries have two founders in their entire life. As soon as the company went public, it was handed over to the managers and they started philanthropy themselves. The charity funds of these two people are the best in the United States. I carefully studied the investment methods of their charity funds. Including Bill Gates, people in their prime devoted the rest of their lives to charity. This is unimaginable in China. When a domestic entrepreneur in his prime is less than 60 years old, he goes out full-time to give back his wealth. Society is providing vaccine shots to victims of disasters in Africa. I have not seen such a situation yet. I think the characteristic of China is that we have only lived a good life after 30 years of reform. Most entrepreneurs do not have a strong sense of security. They originally thought that earning 10 million was enough, but later they thought it was still unsafe and they had to earn one 100 million, and I still felt unsafe after that.
It is different abroad. Foreign countries are relatively stable, especially in the United States. The United States has not suffered external attacks in the past 300 years. At worst, a civil war would end in 20 years, so its country is in a relatively stable process. , enjoy life and do good deeds after starting a business and making money. But China is different. What will happen if you continue to work after making money? Entrepreneurship is done by young people, like Facebook. So it is different in China. New domestic entrepreneurs have to compare with China’s first generation of outstanding Internet companies. Wang Xing is the best among the new generation of entrepreneurs, but the enemies he encounters are large and powerful, so it is very difficult for China to innovate. So this is China’s general environment and cannot be changed. Including technology, if you start a business for the third time, you can either continue to work in the company for a lifetime, or you can continue to innovate. Therefore, later entrepreneurs have to compete with the first generation of giant companies that are the strongest, have rich experience, have money, people, and Internet assets. That’s why the three big mountains of Internet in China can never be overcome. Their founders are very smart, and they are still working hard until now. They have no intention of retiring. There is no way. So these are our three major environments.
In these three major environments, how do we discover possible entrepreneurial opportunities in our industry? First, let’s look at which industries are not likely to be entrepreneurial opportunities. We can reduce the probability of failure. Starting a business is like hunting. Mr. Nan just said Tell me, what kind of birds can we hit? I said I don’t know, I only know what kind of birds we can’t hit. I’ll tell you what things are difficult to do and what things are not opportunities. The first thing is that fashionable things are more difficult. , because as mentioned just now, one of the problems in the general environment is that there is too much money. As a result, a lot of people are doing anything that is fashionable. For example, hundreds of video websites were doing it a few years ago. We also did it at the time. Later, I saw 300 companies were doing it, so we withdrew. It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s not that we have less money, or we’re not as capable as others, it’s that we’re not as persistent as others, and the money we raised wouldn’t be enough to do everything. They Just do one thing. So what is fashionable is something that is originally a good thing. For example, if I say which bird is easy to shoot, and everyone will shoot that bird tomorrow, that bird will be difficult to shoot, and they will all be scared away.
Second, what is not easy to succeed? What investors say is not easy to succeed. In fact, when I chatted with investors abroad, they were all very humble. I said, do you have any ideas? He said, we know nothing, and you only know what will happen. We don’t know, we just chose it. If you come up with the project, we will make money if we invest in it. This investor is one of the best investors in the United States. He invested in Facebook and is now on Twitter. So as an entrepreneurial group in Entrepreneurship State, don’t listen to investors easily. Whatever is good will be bad when he says it. So we have to figure it out for ourselves, from what we know best. The third place is not easy to succeed? Opportunities on wireless Internet are not easy to achieve great success. Wireless Internet is now used by many small teams of two or three people to quickly build an APP, build a small application and sell it on Apple or Facebook. It takes one year It is not a problem to make one or two million yuan, but it is not easy to bring in venture capital to do it in a big way. Because I have thought that the opportunities on wireless Internet are different from those on PC Internet. One is that operators spend much more money on wireless Internet than on PC. There are a lot of brands and a lot of research and development on the PC Internet, and soon the army will kill them. Therefore, the three hunting methods I just mentioned, if you hunt according to that method, you will not be able to hunt or you will not be able to hunt with multiple boards.
Finally, I want to talk about what hunting methods you can use to catch a bird. I won’t tell you what kind of bird to hunt, but I will tell you what kind of gun you can use to catch it. As for what kind of prey you can catch, it’s up to you. First, it is possible to succeed in things that are hard to do, things that others are not willing to do, and things that Ma Yun even thinks are hard. It must be hard enough, and if others hear that it is too hard, they will not do it. For example, Jingdong Mall is like this. It is very bitter to give someone a stinky person, just a tie, but bitter things may succeed. Second, what you do should be far enough away, and don’t do things that can make money right away. When I was interviewed four or five years ago, people asked me why I do community work? I said that this thing is firstly painful and secondly divorced. Making money seems a little more optimistic now, but we haven't completely made money so far.
Because of this, there aren't too many big companies doing it, and now unfortunately, even though it's so far away from the money, there are everyone doing it. Third, what is likely to succeed? An asset-heavy company is likely to succeed. An asset-light company has a few engineers with very good ideas. They wrote code for three months and succeeded in building one thing. The important things I am talking about are not necessarily offline assets. The important things I am talking about are various assets that take time to accumulate. For example, two companies in the video field have recently gone public. Why were they able to go public? If you look carefully at all the video websites, they have the heaviest assets. Youku spent tens of millions to build its own IGC. In order to save costs, a lot of money is invested in servers, so in fact they are asset-light and asset-heavy. They are an asset-heavy company within an asset-light company. When you compete, it's not enough to just use your brains and fast execution. You also have to add traditional industries and other things together. Big companies think it's too troublesome to work with you and won't work with you for the time being. Even so, I also predict that big companies will be included in the video, which is the same as my judgment a few years ago.
Finally, what kind of TMT industry do I see? I am optimistic about companies that only use the Internet as a tool, rather than a pure Internet company. Pure Internet companies are asset-light companies. The huge opportunity for the first Internet startup is gone. There are many small opportunities. For example, on Apple's platform, anyone can start a company with an annual revenue of one million. It is easy, but it is not easy to make it big. Therefore, small companies can consider using the Internet and IT technology as a tool that can increase the net profit of your traditional business from 5% to 10%. For example, in the IT and Internet revolution in the past ten or twenty years, Do you know which industry has benefited the most? The answer is the financial industry.
Before the advent of IT and the Internet, the global scale of this industry was very small, because the financial industry is about the flow of money, but before the flow of money requires the flow of information, with the advent of computers, analyzing data has been greatly simplified. In the past, 10 analysts used What was calculated by hand in a year can now be calculated in one minute. Therefore, the market value of financial institutions in the United States, including China, is extremely large. The largest industry in the world is finance, which typically uses the Internet and IT technology to make its own pure profits. An industry that has grown many times. So if you are a person who thinks clearly, with the advent of the Internet and IT companies, you don’t need to think about selling jeans, you can just hit the bank. I think such opportunities are stronger than pure Internet companies.
So I’m not telling you to hunt quail. I’m telling you that you can’t hunt quail in any place. You can’t hunt on a flat plain because animals don’t go there. Let me tell you that if you use a certain weapon in a certain place, you may be able to hunt. I just talked about a few points about where you are likely to fail and where you are likely to succeed.
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