Missing the opportunity to compete with Robin Li, Chen Pei, the "first person in China's search engine", has been grinding a sword for four years

Chen Pei, who is now sitting in the office of the president of Zhongsou Network (430339), still maintains the entrepreneur's spirit of rushing, and his speech is fast and logical. Without any prompting and preparation, Chen Pei can talk about the technical details of the company's business to the ancient and modern Chinese and foreign idle anecdotes, and smoothly related to the company's business development.

He even opened a live broadcast program "Chen Pei Said" on his company's APP Search Souyue, talking about some hot technology topics every week. However, behind such chattiness and humor, Chen Pei has missed several opportunities to become a Chinese Internet tycoon with Li Yanhong, Zhou Hongyi and others.

From "prodigy" to "the first person in China's search engine"

Chen Pei stood out from the crowd when he was a teenager, won the Beijing Amateur Go Championship at a young age, and was admitted to the Mathematics Department of Zhejiang University at the age of only 16, becoming a "prodigy" in the eyes of many people.

After that, Chen Pei did not "hurt Zhongyong" like a prodigy in the eyes of many people, and his life was still smooth sailing. In 1987, Chen Pei went to Peking University to study artificial intelligence as a graduate student, and then entered a computing center of a department of the General Staff Department to engage in the processing of large data volume information. The results of the research have covered artificial intelligence, expert systems and machine translation, which seem to have become a reality. And with these software systems that were not optimistic at that time, Chen Pei won many awards.

In 1994, Chen Pei made a decision that his relatives and friends did not understand at that time, put aside the establishment and support, left the army to transform and start a business, and played the "Chinese search" that was not well known in that era. Chen Pei assembles computers during the day, feeds the company with the income from selling computers, and works overtime at night to write programs.

Finally, in 1995, Chen Pei developed the intelligent Chinese full-text retrieval system I-SERARCH, which has been successfully adopted by Xinhua News Agency and People's Daily. In 1999, Chen Pei accepted the invitation of HC CEO Guo Fansheng to join HC as CTO. In 2003, the "third generation of Chinese intelligent search engine" launched by him was adopted by the four major portals of Sina, Sohu, NetEase and TOM at the same time, and he was personally crowned by the media as the "first person in China's search engine".

From 2002 to 2005, HC software became the largest search technology provider in China, the Internet industry giants used the search engine provided by HC, and more than 600 Chinese websites became HC partners. For a time, Chen Pei and his team surpassed Baidu and Google and occupied half of the domestic search market.

However, this is also a watershed in Chen Pei's life. After this, many choices made Chen Pei miss the opportunity to stand next to Robin Li and Zhou Hongyi.

Zhongsou has been on the road to listing for ten years

In 2004, Zhongsou Network was spun off from HC. Zhou Hongyi's 360, Robin Li's Baidu and Chen Pei's Zhongsou technical support under the technical support of HC in the Chinese search market. After the split of the Zhongsou network, Zhou Hongyi once found Chen Pei and wanted to invest $10 million in Zhongsou. However, Chen Pei rejected Zhou Hongyi on the grounds that he wanted to do Zhongsou independently.

The story after this is not written by Chen Pei. In August 2005, Baidu took the lead in the NASDAQ bell ringing market, winning the competition Chinese search. Zhongsou Network lost the opportunity to compete with Baidu, which has a market capitalization of billions of dollars.

Zhongsou's road to listing did not reappear until six or seven years later. In 2011, Zhongsou completed the share reform and became a joint-stock limited company. In 2012, Zhongsou achieved profitability for three consecutive years and met the listing requirements. However, it seems that fate has stopped favoring this persistent man. When everything was ready for listing and only owed Dongfeng, the IPO gate was closed, and the listing road of Zhongsou became far away.

Finally, in the middle of 2013, Chen Pei gave up the queue for A-share listing and went to the New Third Board instead. In November of that year, Zhongsou Network landed on the New Third Board.

However, landing on the New Third Board has not brought the huge financial support imagined to Zhongsou. In an interview with the Securities Times reporter, Chen Pei said quite bluntly, "Still thanks to the New Third Board, we raised three hundred million yuan on the New Third Board, which really helped Zhongsou complete the construction of the ecosystem." However, the new third board also gave a big blow to Zhongsou, the stock price of Zhongsou in the new third board is too low, it can be said that it has cut off the road of financing in the capital market of Zhongsou, and Zhongsou can only raise funds by splitting subsidiaries."

The capital market should have a new value evaluation system

For the new third board where Zhongsou is located, Chen Pei also loves and hates. At the time of the IPO of the ChiNext Board, the New Third Board gave Zhongsou Network the entry ticket to enter the capital market. However, at present, the financing function of the new third board is lacking and the liquidity is poor, which makes the Zhongsou network, which is already in a period of large investment in technology funds, have difficult words.

You asked me if I regret going to the new third board, I don't regret it, I thank the new third board, because the new third board helped Zhongsou to make a very good strategic choice.

Chen Pei's gratitude for the new third board seems a little inexplicable at first, but it is true in detail.

He began to explain why the new third board was the best choice for Zhongsou at that time. "Zhongsou's capital road is also more painful, Zhongsou returned from overseas in 2009, because Zhongsou Internet accumulated a lot of technology, using technology to provide services to others also began to make money, so we want to go to the GEM." Because the ChiNext board has capital financial requirements, at that time, Zhongsou was profitable for three consecutive years, and the company thought that we had the ability to go to the ChiNext board, but the result was that the ChiNext board was closed and the IPO was suspended, resulting in Zhongsou being stuck. Is this the time to wait or what to do? The new third board came into being at this time, which is of great help to the search. This kind of help is not only that Zhongsou has the opportunity to raise funds on the new third board, but he has helped Zhongsou make a very important strategic choice. ”

"Zhongsou's income at that time was all on the Internet, and according to our judgment, the mobile Internet would come." If you don't turn to the mobile Internet, Zhongsou may lose the future. However, if you want to transform the mobile Internet, you must give up the existing business model and income, so that Zhongsou may not be able to go to the ChiNext board at all, because the transformation of the mobile Internet will soon enter a state of loss. However, it is no longer possible not to transform to the mobile Internet, and our prediction at that time was that the dividend period of the mobile Internet was coming soon. Fortunately, the new third board does not consider financial issues, so that Zhongsou actually does not only make the choice of the capital market, but the most important thing is the strategic choice. Now, if Zhongsou did not transform to the mobile Internet at that time, there would be no chance at all. Chen Pei said.

Zhongsou began to transform the mobile Internet in 2012, abandoning the PC business and starting a round of mobile Internet strategic transformation for four consecutive years. However, this also directly led to four consecutive years of losses in Zhongsou, and the outside world once questioned it continuously.

For these doubts, Chen Pei used BAT as an example to refute them. He believes that companies like BAT have not been profitable in the five years of their start-up. For Internet companies, they should not only be valued on the basis of profits in financial data.

He said, "At present, domestic A-shares are based on financial data to require a listed company, but this is not friendly to those internet companies that are just starting out, and to a certain extent, many domestic Internet companies have been pushed to foreign listings." Many great domestic Internet companies are not listed and cultivated in China, but foreign venture capital has entered and listed abroad, which is very sad. In a market like the New Third Board, there should be a new value evaluation system for Internet and technology companies, and no longer simply consider financial data. ”

As for the continuous losses of Zhongsou, Chen Pei explained, "Zhongsou is also in line with the development characteristics of Internet companies, with large-scale investment in technology and products in the early stage, investment in user promotion later, and then the establishment of business models to earn money back." Zhongsou has invested in technology for four consecutive years, and the company's ecosystem has been built, and some businesses have begun to be profitable. Among them, like Yunyue, as the paas platform of Zhongsou's mobile Internet cloud service, has achieved rapid profitability and become the first profitable company since Zhongsou transformed the mobile Internet. We believe that Yunyue has no competitors in the future and its profitability will continue to grow."

The "four years to sharpen a sword" of the Search ecosystem

People say "ten years to grind a sword", The four-year transformation of Zhongsou to focus on technology research and development is also considered to be "grinding a sword", and this "sword" is the Zhongsou ecosystem in Chen Pei's mouth.

Chen Pei has a very clear definition of the ecosystem of Zhongsou, "The ecosystem built by Zhongsou is to help enterprises enter the era of mobile Internet. Entering the ecosystem of Zhongsou, enterprises can make their own mobile Internet platform in a selective or customized way, and various modules and functions can be added. In the ecosystem of Zhongsou, entering the era of mobile Internet will become easier for enterprises."

In the ecosystem of Zhongsou, Yunyue is a Paas service and Qiyue is a Saas service. "Zhongsou's Yunyue is the core platform created by Zhongsou, it is the engine, it can create the current Zhongsou Soyue, but also can create another like the entrepreneurial business school of all other platforms, it is to help others produce mobile Internet platform." Therefore, Yunyue has been built for a long time, and it needs to complete the path of the entire ecosystem and enter the operation period in order to show the advantages of the Zhongsou ecosystem," Chen Pei explained the core of the Zhongsou ecosystem.

As for the advantages of the ecosystem that took four years and a lot of capital investment to build, in Chen Pei's view, it is mainly reflected in the technical advantages and system sharing advantages compared with large and small software outsourcing companies.

Chen Pei said that Zhongsou's competitors are software companies large and small in the country, and they develop a variety of mobile apps for enterprises every day. However, we believe that in the future, enterprises should prefer Zhongsou when doing APP, because Zhongsou's Yunyue platform has great advantages over traditional software outsourcing companies. The first is the technical advantage, software companies can do what Yunyue can do, just like everyone can see from the search and search, there are a large number of personalized content services, community services, live broadcast services and e-commerce platform services. These are all platformized by Zhongsou.

Chen Pei explained the technical advantages of Zhongsou in this way: after the platformization, any partner of Zhongsou can launch all these functions online through Yunyue in a very short period of time. But with so many features, if a company finds a software company to develop, it will not be able to invest tens of millions of dollars in a year or two. And The Yunyue that Zhongsou spent four years to build can be achieved, and the cloud computing service platform such as Yunyue is like this, and all the accumulation done in the front can serve many enterprises.

He said that software companies are different, software today to do one, tomorrow to do another, his technical accumulation is not systematic. In particular, some of the technology related to depth they do not have, such as search engine-related technology is more difficult, including community technology is not difficult for software companies, and live broadcast technology is also a dedicated technology, which theoretically requires time and money to polish out. Zhongsou can enable enterprises to use less money and shorter time to launch more content and feature-rich APP, from this level, traditional software companies can not compete with Zhongsou.

In addition, For the platform sharing advantages of Zhongsou, Chen Pei is also quite confident. He believes that if a company finds a software company to do APP, all the technology is independent, and all users rely on the company to promote itself, and the cost is very high. And Zhongsou has a large ecosystem, all the content is shared, users are shared, products are shared, which forms the sharing advantage of The Zhongsou ecology.