? The entrepreneurial history of Lai Linfeng, founder of Yulinmufeng and 115.0.com

When it comes to Lai Linfeng, some people may not know who he is, but when you take his name apart and look at it later, maybe you will suddenly realize,

People who have installed their own systems may know that it is Rainforest Woodwind, who is the founder of Rainforest Woodwind and 115.com, and when it comes to Lai Linfeng, it always feels that he is different from the other Internet people,

Wearing a T-shirt and jeans, tall and thin, with a work number plate, he will stare at you intently when talking with you, as if you were a person who was in the Internet, and he is a good person.

Wearing a T-shirt and jeans, tall and thin, with a number plate, he will stare at you intently when talking to you, as if you were a well-designed program;

Only the tattoo on his arm shows that he is a little different from the ordinary white-collar workers in the IT industry, and that's the dragon in a maple forest, which is the pattern of his own design, and it is a metaphor for his vision.

Lai Linfeng, Chairman and CEO of 115 Technology Limited

This is Lai Linfeng, Chairman and CEO of Guangdong One One Five Technology Limited, a 29-year-old young man. From the start of his business he founded two network companies valued at hundreds of millions of dollars in seven years, of which 115 network disk has the largest user base in China, the number of users has reached 35 million, and the end of last year received 100 million yuan of venture capital.

In the wave of the rise of the Internet, in all corners of the world, there has never been a shortage of entrepreneurs, or ambitious people, full of passion, dreams, ability, imagination, perseverance, and patience. But why did this young man, who dropped out of high school, achieve so much in such a short period of time?

In his office, we see a wrestling room attached, and his wide desk, in addition to an Apple computer, empty; the bookshelf on the left-hand wall is also only a black sports car model, he believes that his knowledge comes from the Internet, and does not need to take the book as a decoration.

His friends and employees describe him at work as "like a programmed robot" and "a very rational guy". He has more than a dozen cars, including a Porsche and a Mercedes-Benz, but he often works overtime until the early hours of the morning, sleeps in the company's single dormitory, and then gets up to work again at 7:00 the next day. He always likes to reason with logic about anything he encounters, trying to grasp the most essential core of things. During interviews, he would often start a description with the phrase, "You use logic to reason it out.

But in addition to his love of sharing his ideas, he is also happy to share the fruits of wealth creation with his employees. 115's headquarters in Dongguan is built like a boutique hotel, surrounded by lush greenery, with a garden restaurant-like staff canteen, audio-visual room, drums, snooker room, table tennis, video games, roof golf course, beautifully decorated guest rooms, and even a special image design room for the management of Tickle. An image design room, leisure time for employees to provide beauty salon services.

Lai Linfeng is never a traditional sense of the "good boy", "not according to the cards" seems to be his life portraits. He told reporters bluntly, he did not go to college, his senior year was expelled for fighting. He did not avoid his own entrepreneurial journey: in 2005 to assemble a computer store began to start a business, the same time to open the "Rainforest Wind" forum to become the station manager, because of the modification of Microsoft operating system fame. He asked rhetorically how many private entrepreneurs in the primary stage of China's economy did not have the original sin? And from 2009 into the cloud storage market so far, he has never been afraid of facing the giant competition, because "in the field of cloud storage, who are starting from scratch".

Since junior high school, Lai Linfeng's favorite book has been Jewish History, and he has been impressed by the strength of the Jewish people and the power of pushing knowledge. He especially liked to reason, to ask the teacher what the book said, the teachers think he is a human version of the "hundred thousand reasons". After being dropped out of high school, Lai Linfeng repeated one year of study, and in 2002, he was admitted to the university but did not go to study, he felt that it was meaningless, he is a practical person, knowledge can be accumulated from the practice of learning, especially in the Internet industry is more so.

Also in 2002, Lai Linfeng first came into contact with the computer, and soon he fell in love with the forum chat community. At that time, he especially loved to answer questions for netizens, and when he didn't understand something, he went around to look up information and do tests.

In 2005, he and his friends opened a computer assembly store in his hometown of Xingning, Guangdong Province, and at the same time, he split his name and set up the "Rainforest Woodwinds" forum. At that time, he and his friends put together a few thousand dollars to start the business, the rental of the house only 200 yuan monthly rent, even the forum servers are assembled by themselves, than the cost of ordinary servers 30% lower.

Because many people reflected that the Windows system was cumbersome to install and not easy to use, Lai Linfeng and his Rainforest Woodwind Studio partners optimized and packaged the Windows system to simplify the installation process and improve the performance of the system, and made it available for users to download and use for free on the forum. He then created the 114 La navigation website, and by bundling navigation websites into the operating system, the number of users of the Rainforest Wind forums and website navigation sites increased dramatically, which also brought Lai Linfeng considerable revenue from network promotion and advertising. By 2008, Lai's company's revenue had reached several million dollars per month.

At this time, Microsoft started a piracy crackdown in China. In March 2008, he decided to move his company to the Songshan Lake Hi-Tech Zone in Dongguan, where he rented a 5,000-square-meter building for his office. In August, Hong Lei, the author of "Tomato Garden", who was once as famous as Lai Linfeng, was taken away by the police. At that time, in China, it was difficult to convict a person for unauthorized modification of other people's software without making a profit, but it was known that Tomato Garden was bundled with advertising plug-ins to make a profit, which made Microsoft choose him as an example to others. The same time, Lai Linfeng's new company in Dongguan has just finished renovation.

He is not willing to mention too much about this past experience, and would like people to see the current 115 Technology Co., Ltd. and the former Rainforest Forum as two very different companies, and he has even resigned from all positions in Rainforest since this year, and will be valued at nearly 200 million yuan of the shares of the free transfer of the past partners, and he is just focusing on the development of the 115 net disk. This kind of behavior seems to indicate that he is determined to fight: since the rainforest forum is difficult to walk in the tide, it would be better to withdraw from this non-core business, bet on the huge growth of the cloud storage market.

However, when he commented on his previous venture, he emphasized that his team had optimized the Windows operating system better and put it on the forum for enthusiasts to download, and had not inserted any rogue software into the optimized system, and had not made any direct profit from it. Some pirates will burn these optimized systems to CDs to sell, or insert rogue software into the system to make a profit, and these business practices have nothing to do with the forum.

From 2008 to the present, Lai Linfeng has promoted several major businesses at the same time: the open source operating system YImf OS, 115 aggregated search, 115.com, 114.com and so on, and in the end, he chose cloud storage as a breakthrough for the future of the business, and even 115. The original design of the aggregated search function was cut off, leaving only the net disk function.

"This is all based on the most direct reasoning." Lai Linfeng said. He divided the development of the Internet into two stages: from 2000 to 2008 is the popularization of computers, people have become accustomed to the way to get information from the network. And from 2008 onwards, due to the explosive growth of information, data storage, synchronization and sharing as the core of the demand for personal data services exploded, cloud storage is the biggest opportunity he can see.

As we all know, cloud storage is a money-burning project, which includes not only the cost of server hardware (inspirational entrepreneurship sun), but also the cost of network bandwidth, deployment of servers around the world, maintenance costs, as well as product planning, technical implementation, operation and promotion. But Lai Linfeng almost put his first bucket of money into this new field. He started preparing for the cloud storage project in 2006, and by the time he launched 115.com in 2009, he had personally invested 70 million yuan in the project.

Unlike his peers, who are focused on personal data centers or massive storage space, Lai Linfeng believes that the most basic spirit of the Internet era is sharing, and he hopes to use cloud storage to change the way information is shared, as well as focusing on cell phone terminals to promote the website.

Entering the interface of 115.com, it looks like a community website. Its page description is: more than 8 million circle friends, guarded in more than 11 million circles, chatting with more than 3 million topics, sharing 3000TB of resources. Cloud storage, instant messaging, microblogging, circles, groups, application market and many other functions are integrated here. People can manage their personal data in this website, share videos, music, text, pictures, games, no longer need to send a bunch of links for sharing or take a long time for the other party to receive a batch of files, just one click, the system will upload the content you wish to share and transmit the sharing code to your friends via cell phone or email. When you reply to this SMS to confirm the sharing, an account will be automatically generated and activated when you log in to view it. With this kind of viral spread, the number of users of 115.com quickly exceeded 30 million in March this year, which is by far the largest number of users in China.

Everyone is a traveler on their own path, seeking a connection and a response on the web. In Lai Linfeng's vision, in the future, people can go to see a movie based on a friend's recommendation, buy something based on a friend's online shopping record, and read a text or video based on a friend's recommendation. No matter where you go, you will publish your location, but also upload a picture, use the network disk to bring your relationships together to arrive at a certain place at a certain time.

115 ND is like Google+, it looks like a box, but it can be filled with a lot of content, and it will dramatically change the ease and accuracy with which people can access information. 115 ND provides entertainment, music, and video to better retain users, but at its core, it's a change in the mode of sharing, a vehicle for "cloud life". It is the carrier of "cloud life". To socialize, sharing-based positioning, enhanced user stickiness, the cloud for this inserted the "wind" wings, can quickly fly away from other competitors are trapped in the loss of money to earn traffic "quagmire".

With the past through the flow of advertising revenue earnings model is different, this time Lai Linfeng 115 net disk for the choice of "free + VIP user fees" to differentiate their services to obtain a profit model. The grassroots webmaster's origin makes him put the user experience in the most critical position. Just like when he devoted himself to the Rainforest Wind Forum, Lai Linfeng accumulated more than 2,000 posts in the forum, often on the front line and user communication; in the circle of 115.com, you can easily search the circle established by Lai Linfeng, he initiated a lot of topics, and he will also respond to the problems he saw on the Internet. The 115. experience features almost every month there will be new products or technology upgrades, such as the recent 115 NDN join hands with the beauty show, launched a picture online beautification and editing of the convenience of the function.

At the very beginning, 115.com's most attractive feature, in addition to high-speed downloads, synchronization, and convenient registration (email or cell phone number only need to choose one), is the 15GB of free storage space, and the daily signing of the "shake" game, you can also get dozens of megabytes to hundreds of megabytes of additional space. New space. Other NDs, such as Sina Weibo's MicroDisk, offer 5G of free space, and Huawei only offers 16G of space for specific mobile terminals. This has allowed 115.com to quickly amass the largest user base in the country.

115 was also the first to launch a mobile UID (short for User ID, which uniquely identifies the subject) login for NDN, to ensure user information security. Now 115 net disk client can support Windows and iOS mobile terminal version, but also Android, Symbian, Blackberry and other series of mobile version, users can share files and retrieve the password through the cell phone number, "these two features are the first in the industry to launch."

Just like the rise of video sites, today's cloud-based storage content regulation has begun to attract the attention of the relevant departments. In this regard, 115.com started a large-scale content cleanup in early April this year, mainly using the system to automatically identify and filter infringing or undesirable content in publicly shared files, and strengthening the keyword blocking and filtering functions in the background of the website. Just as people don't step into the same river twice, it's clear that Lai Linfeng doesn't want to get into the gray area of intellectual property rights again.

In addition to the 70 million yuan invested in 115.com, Lai Linfeng also introduced the first round of financing of 100 million yuan at the end of last year, and 115.com's user fees have been maintained at about 1%, with a minimum of 180 yuan/year VIP user fees, this year's revenue is expected to reach hundreds of millions of yuan. Investment VC asked him to maintain an average annual growth rate of 50%, but he downplayed the number of users of 115.com was 20 million at the end of last year, and now it has more than 30 million, and is expected to reach 100 million by the end of the year. This year will also launch the enterprise version of the network disk in addition to covering white-collar, he will also be those who do not have a computer, accustomed to go to the Internet cafe blue-collar people included in the fight for the category, "so that they download in every Internet cafe can be permanently preserved in their own network disk."

From the beginning of this year, cloud storage has become another field of giant scrambling, Baidu, Huawei, Google, China Telecom have entered, and similar to Kingsoft, Cool Disk and other online disk users have exceeded ten million, China provides online disk operators all of a sudden dozens more. With the first-mover advantage and financial support, Lai Linfeng is not afraid of giants entering the market. Because cloud storage is not like instant messaging, portals, games, e-commerce, search products, as long as there is a platform with a large enough number of users, it can be a rough copy. It requires a huge server, sophisticated back-end research and development, as well as a team with tacit understanding, even if all the existing data on 115.com disk completely open, other people copy the same and digested, at least 8 months time, as well as invested no less than 100 million yuan of capital. The Internet giants have different revenue streams and are not necessarily as committed as 115.com to focusing on a differentiated user experience.

In a sense, Lai Linfeng hopes that the entry of the giants will better educate the market and turn cloud storage, which is still in the wilderness of people's perceptions, into fertile ground. As Clinton once said in a speech, "The process is the product", in doing a lot of pioneering work, the results are important, but the idea that the process is the product is a new value, so that a lot of seemingly momentary efforts without utilitarian results, become so important.