Ma Huateng Tencent entrepreneurial history situation?

From the beginning of the venture to the present, Ma Huateng led Tencent step by step development and growth. Ma Huateng said in a sharing, hundreds of billions of companies fall is a very common thing. People have to be awake, others are not unable to beat you, the more enthusiastic the applause outside the more dangerous.

The real crisis never comes from the outside, only when we ignore the user experience, we will encounter a real crisis.

I should say that when I was 20 years old, I was a very introverted programmer. I didn't like to manage people, I didn't like to be interviewed, I didn't like to deal with people, and I was most comfortable when I was sitting alone at the computer. People around me, my parents, including myself didn't think I'd run a business, manage a business, because I didn't look like that in any way.

My only capital is that I've written tens of thousands of lines of C code and I've taken on a few projects. I would love to create a product and have a lot of people use it, but there was no way for my old company to provide such an environment, and it seemed that the only way to fulfill this requirement was to start my own company, which is why I was forced to choose to start one.

Almost all of my partners who started the business were my college and high school classmates, and in the process of starting the business, quarrels were inevitable because of disagreement, so mutual trust was very important. At that time, I put up the main start-up capital, some people want to add money, take up more shares, I said no, according to my judgment of your ability, you are not suitable to take more shares. Because a person's future potential should be matched with the due shares, and if it is not, there will be problems.

In order not to form a monopoly, dictatorship, their sum is a little more than me. Of course, if there isn't a backbone and the shares are divided equally among all of them, something is bound to go wrong when the time comes, and it's just as much of an end.

After I started my business, I realized that it was totally different from what I thought before. Before that, I saw many books about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, which were very inspiring and desirable. But in reality, what we often think about in the early stages is how to solve the next month's salary and rent, and where to get the income from in a year.

At this stage, we did a lot of outsourcing work, helping others develop software, and in turn making a little bit of meager money. My business card says Engineer Title, not Boss, otherwise it's hard to show my partners that I'm working in person.

Then QQ was born, because I was in the communications industry before, so QQ is also related to communications, the initial image is a network pager. At that time, I wanted to do 30,000 users, so I went to the school's BBS one by one to pull users, and I could only pull a few dozen people a day. At that time, I thought according to this speed to 30,000 people may want to 2 years later, by then the company may be dead, the project is smashed in the hand.

So I went online to promote myself, and finally the users came up, because our software is well-written and does not go down; no one to chat with me as a companion to chat, and sometimes I have to change my avatar to pretend to be a girl, and I have to appear to be a very lively community.

During this process, IDG Capital and Pacific Century CyberWorks invested in us, giving us $2.2 million for a 20% stake in the company. After getting the investment, we all worked very hard because we didn't want our investors to lose money. We all know that venture capital is certainly a lot of money-losing projects, but out of a strong sense of honor, Tencent feels that investors lose money on other projects I don't care, but must not lose on our head, don't want to give people as a negative case.

The back is very smooth, financing and then listed, but Tencent's initial market value is not high. Later I saw a lot of entrepreneurship said: if the valuation is low, simply bet on not on. I think this is very irrational, for the listing of this matter to have a long-term vision, do not just look at a year and a half.

Tencent's three major nodes

In Tencent's development, there are three very important nodes, one is MSN, one is 360, and one is WeChat.

The first major node, we are fighting with MSN, which was once QQ's biggest rival, but eventually it died. Now let's analyze the reasons:

First, it's not our death, is not catching up with socialization, it is for Facebook to beat off; second, MSN's Chinese localization did not do a good job, a revamp of the Chinese fonts on the display of the mess, but also often happen to steal the number of the situation, security and local operations are not pass.

Of course, the most fundamental reason is that we local entrepreneurs have our lives in the product, whereas international companies do not.

The second major node is the QQ and 360 fight. Since the founding of Tencent, we have never been hit by such a huge security crisis. During this time, I spent many sleepless days and nights with my colleagues, laboring, aggravated, helpless, and a deep sense of weakness.

At the time, some believed that Tencent was experiencing its most dangerous challenge ever. Over that period of time, a sense of common enemy festered within the company, with many identifying 360 as the enemy. But without 360's outburst, Tencent wouldn't have had so much pain, so much soul-searching, and so many epiphanies later.

The big difference between Chinese companies and U.S. companies is that Chinese companies have to compete out of a very hostile environment, which requires superhuman will and very much wisdom to do so.

After this incident, I realized that in the past I was always thinking about what was right, but in the future I have to think more about what can be recognized. In the past, I have enjoyed the speed and passion of running to success while pursuing user value. But in the future, I want to embed more reverence for the public, the industry, and the future in my culture.

The third major node is our own WeChat. The world is very cruel, how big giants will fall at any time, after the fall you can still touch its body temperature. Even as powerful as Facebook, the stock fell to 70 billion at one point because people were worried that its shift to mobile was problematic.

We were also nervous when we did WeChat, and there were three teams within Tencent doing it at the same time, all called WeChat, and whoever won was on it. In the end, the team in Guangzhou that came from E-mail won, and the team in Chengdu was very disappointed that they were just one month behind.

Actually, there was another rival that was doing a similar app at the time, and they were betting that we wouldn't be so fast. During this most dangerous time, all the executives were trying it out, and any problems were immediately fed back to the group and immediately changed. Everyone worked until 3am or 5am every day. WeChat came out, Tencent got a ticket to the mobile Internet, and it was first class.

The Road to Transformation

In the very beginning of those years of entrepreneurship, I was faced with competition, often simply thinking, why should I be deprived of the opportunity to provide better service to users?

But then I turned to reflect on the lack of openness. Now we're really half-life, doing only what we do best, and the other half belongs to our partners.

What we do best is connectivity, and QQ and WeChat are two of the most important connectors that carry the same connectivity strategy as ever, albeit with different positioning. QQ has a lively style, rich in personalization and entertainment features, and is targeted at young users, while WeChat is mainly for white-collar users.

Based on their different positioning, the two connect slightly different merchants and services, but for Tencent, they **** the same coverage of users of different ages, geographies and preferences, and maximize their connection with services.

In other business, I reorganized, change the previous all hands-on business strategy - search integration into Sogou, e-commerce integration into Jingdong, group purchasing integration into the Mass Dianping, and layout investment in these three companies. In addition, a lot of subtraction and addition, cut O2O and many other small businesses, while investing heavily in Tencent ecological neighborhood partners. In this way, the strategic positioning is more accurate, and more focused on our best social platform and content platform.

Now as long as the non-core track business, others can do, we try to let others do. Because there is still a lack of entrepreneurs in a big business, it's best to leave the business to the people who put their lives on the line, rather than letting the departments below them fight to the end.

In this process, there are internal employees will say: that is not to deprive us of the opportunity to innovate? I said there is no way, either you think clearly to give up, or you go out and do it, or take a competitive approach. For example, the game development studio, 20% of the profit, counting your costs, recruiting more people, the cost is big, how much stock you want to earn, try to create a competitive atmosphere in the market.

In terms of future business expansion, I would ask myself three questions:

First, is this new field something you are good at?

Second, what will users lose if you don't do it?

Third, if you do it, how much of a competitive advantage can you maintain in this new program?

Talent mechanism

The fact that Tencent has come so far should be attributed to its collective strategic intelligence, execution, and spontaneous sense of crisis. A person can not predict and manipulate the times, to know the division of labor, relying on collective wisdom, set their respective division of labor and management authority, group efforts, decisive implementation.

Because, the success of a company is never just a question of enough money or resources, but the key is still the team spirit. Especially the commander-in-chief is quite important, the commander-in-chief is incompetent, tired of the three armies. Traditional industries will have the opportunity to capital-intensive reversal, but the mobile Internet is basically unlikely, this market is not to spell money, spell flow, more is to spell team, spell sense of mission and sense of crisis. Everything depends on whether you can make a good product or not, whether it is Be the Best.

We basically use our own people to develop new business leaders. And once we decide to do it, we will let go of the framework and the implementation to the selected people. We've also tapped operational talent from outside to do this, but the loyalty wasn't there, and in the end it all went away. And it's not realistic to think that any new business can be launched by hiring someone high up to take care of it, you must have an understanding yourself.

For their own people should also pay considerable attention to the talent echelon handover, not only the top, the middle level is actually the same, we are very concerned about this point, will not say that a person completely determine the life and death of a business.

Many of us came from R&D, business and promotion, and it's not realistic to force him to improve. Therefore, in the internal selection, it is likely that the selected person in the industry comparison is not the best, so to do something to compensate for the team, especially into the stage of needing strong marketing and promotion. He has to be told to find very strong deputies, and if he can't find them internally, he has to go out and dig them up.

Every mid-level cadre must cultivate deputies, which is a hard 'backup mechanism'. You must cultivate, otherwise I think you have a problem, tolerate you half a year can, but half a year later you are still like this, then I will help you with the match, you do not agree to also have to agree.

And for finding professional managers, we attach great importance to character, we very much adhere to the first Tencent values - integrity. Do not gang up, do not engage in politicization, is very frank, very simple, seek truth from facts, and always adhere to this approach then things will be much simpler.

A sense of crisis always exists

I think the Internet business and traditional enterprises are very different is that the Internet business can happen in a second a disruptive change. Maybe I suddenly get a phone call and a major accident destroys the equipment we have online.

This would be impossible in a traditional industry, it would take a long time to destroy it, but in an Internet business it only takes a second. This includes the fact that your user data is suddenly circulating to the outside world, which is all but doom and gloom for Internet companies.

So it's very common for a 100 billion RMB company to fall; even at 100 billion, the probability of falling may be higher, and the heavier the burden, the faster the fall. People need to be awake, the warmer the applause outside, the more dangerous.

The real crisis never comes from the outside, and only when we ignore the user experience will we encounter a real crisis. Only when Tencent loses its culture of dedication and hard work to serve users one day will this be a real disaster.

Looking back on Tencent's entrepreneurial journey, I think opportunity is very important, accounting for at least 50% of the total. I don't think I'm particularly smart, and the things I do are all very simple judgments. In this process, the factor of the times is also very important, many opportunities are given by the outside world. In this regard, I feel very lucky, but it also means that we must always maintain a sense of crisis, because others are not unable to beat you.