On the road to starting a business, who hasn’t stumbled?
However, they didn’t collapse because of a fall, but learned a lot of entrepreneurial experiences and lessons from their failures and cheered up again.
Today, let’s take a look at 10 Internet tycoons’ entrepreneurial experiences!
— — Lazy cat president
This paper takes stock of the entrepreneurial projects that 10 Internet tycoons have failed, and the wealth of experience they have learned from them.
It is these experiences that have made these internet giants achieve today’s achievements, and these experiences are more precious for entrepreneurs now.
Before his success, he founded tricolor company and went bankrupt because he could not make a profit.
Lei Jun — — Founder of Xiaomi, now valued at $45 billion.
When he was in college, Lei Jun read a book about Gates and Jobs’ early entrepreneurial legends, The Fire of Silicon Valley, which greatly touched him — — "I was deeply attracted by the story of Jobs.
After working hard in Wuhan Electronic Street for a period of time, I felt good about myself and began to dream: I dreamed of writing a set of software to run on every computer in the world, and I dreamed of setting up the best software company in the world. "
So, he founded Tricolor Company with three friends in his senior year. Unfortunately, the company was forced to dissolve in half a year.
In this regard, Lei Jun has three reflections:
First, there must be a clear profit model.
In the company’s business, the three-color company has no fixed model. When it sees anything to make money, it makes a sum. "At most, there are fourteen people, and the business scope is quite wide. They have sold computers, made imitation Hanka (a kind of computer hardware), and even took over the work of typing and printing."
Therefore, their funds have been very tight. When I really have no money, I even earn a living by playing mahjong with the canteen chef to win food tickets.
Second, we must have a forward-looking market awareness.
In fact, they were close to success. At that time, Lenovo Hanka created a brilliant profit of hundreds of millions, so Lei Jun and his partners decided to copy this product.
However, after the product went on the market, they met a more powerful shanzhai king and made their products "shanzhai" again. Moreover, the company was large in scale and low in price, which finally crushed the three-color company.
Third, we must have certain team management skills.
When the company was founded, "four people, each with a 25% stake, were all very happy. A few days later, the problem came, and everything needed to be discussed repeatedly. Later, the general manager was even re-elected twice. "
And such a management structure, it is impossible to form an effective decision.
Chen Ou — — Founder of Jumeiyou, with a market value of $2.4 billion. Once founded GG game platform
When studying at Nanyang Technological University, Chen Ou built an online game platform GG with a computer.
As a professional player, Chen Ou invited two top Warcraft masters who have never played against each other: WCG champion Moon and ESWC champion to have a peak matchup, and the platform for the matchup is GG. This won him the first batch of users.
However, with the increase of the number of users, Chen Ou, which has no capital reserves, is increasingly embarrassed, and the sponsors it can get are a drop in the bucket, and investors are dismissive of this fledgling entrepreneur. This makes the development of GG difficult.
At this time, Chen Ou wanted to go to Stanford to study for an MBA, so he introduced a professional manager to take care of the company and sold part of his equity.
Subsequently, the professional manager introduced other angel investors, and through the operation, Chen Ou’s equity was only over 30%, and he lost control of the company and was finally squeezed out of the company.
In his second venture, Chen Ou set up a game company in China, and its business model imitated that of the United States, with advertisements built into social games. However, due to the great difference between the domestic market and the United States, the company soon declared bankruptcy.
These two entrepreneurial failures have given Chen Ou two gains:
First, the company needs to have a good equity organization structure.
Second, simply copying foreign models will not work.
Zhen Ronghui, the founder of Worry-Free Future, has a market value of $2 billion. Invested in voice mail and magnetic materials.
Zhen Ronghui — — As a consultant before starting a business, I am a professional manager with an annual salary of one million.
In the tide of rapid economic development in mainland China, he conceived the ideal of "billionaire", so he worked part-time as a voice mail delivery system and invested in magnetic materials. But both ventures ended in failure.
These two experiences made him learn a lot. In conclusion, he said:
First, starting a business requires a lot of energy, and you must do it full-time; At the same time, the team is also very important.
Second, starting a business can’t just start from products. Good products don’t mean having customers, and customers need complete services. Therefore, entrepreneurship needs to change from product orientation to customer orientation.
Wang Xing — — Founder of Meituan. com, with a valuation of $7 billion. He founded the intranet and was forced to sell it.
In the winter of 2003, Wang Xing, a doctoral student in the United States, took a long vacation from his tutor and returned to China to start a business.
After several failed projects, Wang Xing found that the acquaintance socialization among students was a cut-in point, so he set out to build the campus network.
On the website interface, they copied Facebook, which was criticized by everyone. However, because Facebook’s design is very user-friendly, the user experience of the intranet is the best compared with the competitors who independently design the interface. This has retained many users for them.
At that time, the subway in Beijing was inconvenient, and it was very troublesome to go to the railway station by car.
Therefore, during the winter vacation, Wang Xing launched a registered campus network in Tsinghua, Peking University and the National People’s Congress, and took the bus to the railway station for free. At the same time and at the same place, 50 people will start.
In order to make up the number of people, students spread the word everywhere and registered fellow villagers. Some boys even took the bus to the railway station instead of taking the train to get to know a girl.
With this move, the campus network got 8000 seed users, and everyone began to be active on this website.
However, due to his first venture, Wang Xing did not have his own theory, his understanding of the Internet was not deep and he lacked a clear profit model. The capital side was not optimistic about the project of the campus network.
Finally, the capital chain broke and the internal team had a dispute, so Wang Xing was forced to sell it.
The failure of this project inspired Wang Xing as follows:
First, the entrepreneurial team must have a clear division of labor, and the CEO must be liberated to pay attention to the trend of the whole industry, times and social development.
Second, rapid promotion is very important.
Third, we don’t need blind self-innovation, and learn the advantages of others quickly.
Fourth, we should contact capital as soon as possible, lower our posture and make some compromises.
Fifth, we must start a business with people we trust. Only trust can keep the team stable in the case of low tide.
Wu Xinhong — — Founder of Meitu Xiu Xiu, with a valuation of $3 billion. He founded the 520 social platform and then stopped operating.
In 1999, Wu Xinhong, a senior high school student, saw a piece of news: a domain name called "business.com" sold for $7.5 million in the United States.
So I borrowed 10,000 yuan from my family and started to invest in domain names. With this investment, he made some money and got to know Cai Wensheng, a later investor.
In 2002, Wu Xinhong, who had dropped out of school at home, found a good domain name: 520.com, so he prepared to copy Tencent and collect money through membership fees, that is, only when you are a paying member can you get the online contact information of the other party.
After doing it for two years, 520 has accumulated hundreds of thousands of paying members, but because the products and operations can’t keep up, most members stop using it after only paying for one month.
Therefore, Wu Xinhong was forced to shut down 520 and sell the domain name.
Looking back on this experience, Wu Xinhong said that there are two lessons:
First, reverse entrepreneurship, that is, setting up a company through a good domain name, is completely unreliable.
Second, more importantly, I was very homely, and I was not sociable at that time. I didn’t know what the real needs of users were, let alone being a dating site.
Liu Qiangdong — — Founder of JD.COM, with a market value of $40.3 billion. He once opened a restaurant in Zhongguancun, but closed after being cheated of money.
After graduating from Liu Qiangdong University, I set aside a restaurant near Zhongguancun.
In the past, the clerk in the restaurant had a low salary, lived in the basement, and usually only ate leftovers. The boss personally controlled the funds.
After Liu Qiangdong took over, he raised his salary, improved the accommodation environment, served the shop assistants with delicious food and hot drinks, and let them do the purchasing and cashier.
This young man who started a business with idealism confused trust with management and suffered the first setback in his career.
Due to the loose management, employees always find ways to embezzle the money in the store, so it took no year, and the originally profitable hotel lost all his investment.
The lesson Liu Qiangdong got from this is that we must trust employees, but trust does not mean that there is no management.
At that time, Chen Yizhou, who was still studying at Stanford, and others designed a combination named ChinaRen according to the characteristics of several popular community websites in the United States at that time, which means combining Chinese and western.
But no one in Silicon Valley wants to invest in their projects. In the end, I only raised $200,000 from my classmates at Stanford.
In March, 1999, they went back to China to register their company. After receiving the investment from Goldman Sachs, they quickly launched the ChinaRen community and obtained tens of millions of dollars in new financing. After financing, ChinaRen began to burn money and smash advertisements crazily.
Chen Yizhou — — Founder of Thousand Oaks Interactive, with a market value of $1.1 billion. He founded ChinaRen community and later renamed it renren.
At first, Chen Yizhou and others were afraid, but investors said that it didn’t matter. After burning, there would be investment, and there would be no way to go public without burning. But soon, the American stock market crash came in 2000, and capital entered the cold winter.
Therefore, the attitude of investors who supported burning money changed greatly, and they told Chen Yizhou clearly that there would be no new investment, so they sold the company as soon as possible. So Chen Yizhou had to sell ChinaRen community to Sohu.
In fact, this case is similar to the intranet:
To start a business, we need to make rational use of the existing capital, and it is best to have our own hematopoietic capacity, so as to survive the crisis safely in the cold winter of capital.
Zhou Hongyi — — Founder of 360, with a market value of $64. Once built 3721, one of the earliest search engines in China.
Before doing 360, Zhou Hongyi once worked as a search engine called 3721, and Baidu also launched a similar service.
The two sides competed fiercely for each other’s territory, so Zhou Hongyi added a module to the client of 3721, which was specially used to delete Baidu’s client.
This module cannot be deleted, which also left Zhou Hongyi with the title of "Father of Rogue Software".
The beginning of this mistake was followed by a wrong decision.
Zhou Hongyi said that at that time, he felt that Baidu had a better search mode than himself, and the Internet in China was also very depressed at that time.
Therefore, in the case of high market share, he chose to sell 3721 to Yahoo, which led to the search of this $1 billion market and was finally occupied by Baidu.
Regarding these past years’ experiences, Zhou Hongyi said: We should not only focus on our opponents, but also focus on users’ needs, and we must stick to our own career and don’t give up easily.
On the road to starting a business, who hasn’t stumbled?
Even Lei Jun, Zhou Hongyi and Liu Qiangdong … … These internet giants have also experienced the lessons of blood, but they have not been devastated by a fall, but have learned a lot of entrepreneurial experiences and lessons from their failures and revived.
There was no successful model at the beginning, so they experienced many failures and finally succeeded with wisdom and will.
Nowadays, starting a business is no longer difficult, and there are many successful experiences to learn from.
In the era of real estate speculation, many people seized the opportunity, so they struggled less for decades.
Nowadays, in the Internet era, it is very important to assess the situation and seize the trend! Pigs on the tuyere can also fly!
Standing in the right place is like stepping on a giant’s shoulder, then success is within reach!
