Ten years ago, in Beijing's Chaoyang Park, the basement of the Sony Dream Science and Technology Museum, two big red sofa chairs, surrounded by forty or fifty people sitting on the ground, most of them were engineers and product managers with a look of science and engineering. It was the summer of 2011, the concept of a product manager was just booming, the smartphone market competition had not yet exploded, and some people were still using Nokia. One of the red sofa chairs, Zhang Peng (founder of Geek Park), who put the Polo shirt collar up and wore it, asked another, the brand-new entrepreneur Lei Jun, "Why do you want to make a mobile phone?"
Lei Jun said that he had used 58 mobile phones, but had not encountered a good product, so he wanted to do it himself, and felt that he could do it well - he completed the IPO during his 16 years in Kingsoft, and the experience and ability were endorsements. That day was a week away from the release of the first xiaomi. He said that the future smartphone market will mainly examine the "triathlon": hardware, software and Internet services. Do not seek individual first, but seek overall results.
(Lei Jun shares the scene of the event in the early basement of Geek Park.) ）
Compared with today's huge product empire and ecosystem, millet at that time was more like a seedling. Zhang Peng asked the audience, who of you was persuaded by Lei Jun? Less than half of them raised their hands. Lei Jun was very calm. "At that time, most people didn't believe he could do it," Zhang Peng said later, "and we believed it earlier, so we invited him to come."
It was a time of heroes.
Sina Weibo surpassed 50 million users in just 14 months. An app called Talkbox went live, becoming the world's first voice IM application, and a few months later, two SNS products launched voice functions, one called Mi Chat and the other called WeChat.
In those years, geek park 'basement activities' emerged in an endless stream of new products, Zhihu's beta version was also released in this basement, and the 50 people on the scene became the earliest users of Zhihu.
Focusing on product, curiosity and "non-consensus" – this laid the foundation for Geek Park's original ethos, which hosted the first China Internet Innovative Products Awards in 2010, the predecessor of The Geek Park InnoAwards and IF Conferences. Today, unicorns and even technology giants standing in various vertical fields, such as Xiaomi, Meituan, WeChat, Zhihu, ByteDance, DJI... They were both on the podium at the Geek Park Innovation Conference and AtnoAwards in their early days.
In the process, Geek Park has also become a community of tech innovators, attracting a steady stream of business variables. In these companies and founders, we see something in common – following first principles, respecting essence and common sense, curiosity and change.
On the stage of geek Park's annual Geek Park Innovation Festival (GeekPark IF), many entrepreneurs have judged the future and shared their thoughts. In 2014, Wang Xing, CEO of Meituan.com, shared his "four vertical and three horizontal" theory at IF, and the entrepreneurial field is inseparable from the "four verticals" - entertainment, information, communication, and business; and "three horizontal" means that every five years there will be a big technological change affecting the above four areas. "Now we need to add another horizontal, and the fourth horizontal is the Internet of Things."
(Wang Xing told the story of "four verticals and three horizontals" at the IF conference.) ）
2014 is the tenth consecutive year of Wang Xing's entrepreneurship. The US group, which rushed out of the Thousand Regiments War, has just achieved annual profitability. At that time, Wang Xing aimed at the new technology "mobile", and the combination of meituan's social and business shifted faster to the combination of mobile and social.
A year later, Meituan merged with Dianping; for the next five years, "mobile" reshaped all of China.
Zhang Yiming, who sat on the floor and listened to others share in the basement of Sony's Dream Exploration, also quickly saw that the emergence of the mobile Internet made the physical world have more digital projections in the online world. At the same time, the cloud began to be able to process massive data, more and more massive cloud storage, cloud computing was born, and strong technical needs followed. However, he believes that it is not enough to have technical conditions, and there must be strong business needs to bring about the application of technology on products.
In 2014, most people also understood today's headline app as a media company, a news app. People don't understand why he emphasizes "machine learning." Zhang Yiming believes that the recommendation mechanism and information flow form brought by machine learning can bring a lot of great value to the reading of information and the acquisition of information, and contain huge energy. So he was pushed to the IF conference by Geek Park, and shared the stage with Elon Musk, who was only known to a few people at the time, about the "non-consensus" future in their hearts. Today, 7 years later, they have successfully turned non-consensus into consensus.
There are more than just winners on the road to innovation. Geek Park never "chases" the big guys – our eyes follow the ever-changing innovators and record many real journeys.
In 2015, Hammer's Smartisan OS attracted a large number of fans, won the "Best User Experience Award" by The Geek Park InnoAwards, and Luo Yonghao was very excited that day, repeatedly rubbing the trophy and chatting about the user experience for half an hour, which was the innovation he was most eager to be understood.
But at the beginning of 2018, Lao Luo, who appeared on the IF stage again, seemed a little depressed, and as soon as he came on stage, he said, "I am afraid that it will not affect you well." At that time, Hammer, which had just obtained financing, invested part of its funds and manpower into TNT's research and development, boldly expanding the existing development direction of Hammer as a mobile phone brand - and ultimately did not succeed. A year later, Hammer Finally went bankrupt, Lao Luo was in debt, and in 2020, he began a live streaming journey with goods. He has said that if he is lucky, he hopes Geek Park will witness his growth as an entrepreneur. The good news lately is that his debts are about to be paid off. This year, Lao Luo told Geek Park that if he was given some more time, he would hurry up to pay off the debt and let us wait for his return.
We remember what he said at IF,
Watching the World Cup every year, I won't be happy how many times Italy won the championship, and the defensive counterattack type football team won, which is not what I want to see. We were all careful not to make mistakes, and the other party had flaws, so we just kicked in. You win, So fu* king what? The product must remain aggressive.
From time to time, there will also be some guys with strong personalities at the Geek Park Innovation Conference. "Super Pump" was written by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
This is an assertive entrepreneur and adventurer who has publicly ridiculed transportation safety regulations, fought against competitors who have been working for years, and exploited legal loopholes and gray to gain an advantage. During his tenure, Uber was caught up in the storm of public opinion again and again. Also wrote about bizarre expansions.
On January 15, 2016, in the midst of a fierce battle with Didi, Kalanick came to the IF conference and said that great entrepreneurs will always seek adventure and do things that no one else has done. He was silicon valley's craziest entrepreneur that year. Everyone knows that Uber is not in the upper hand when he comes to China, "When Uber came to China, everyone thought I was crazy, maybe I was really crazy." 」 He believes that in the face of adversity, he can also create outstanding records. However, he also pointed out that China has produced a group of outstanding innovators, creators and entrepreneurs, and "in the next five years, innovation here will surpass Silicon Valley".
Later, Uber lost, but the problems in the field of mobility are not over to this day. The world is still calling for a new generation of power to innovate and solve problems.
In understanding failure, Ed Catmull, who has been at the helm of Pixar for 33 years, is our confidant. He told people on the IF stage in 2019 that at Pixar, he has been working hard to create a culture that encourages employees to understand failure from a positive perspective, "failure is an inevitable existence in the process of innovation". He cites the creation of Flying House as an example, "many (excellent) works were thoroughly developed in the early stages of creation." He said that creation is like this, life is like this, you have to understand the failure again.
(Catmall at the IF Innovation Conference.) ）
"We must give founders room to maneuver, tolerate them, and allow them to make mistakes." Former Apple CEO John Sculley stressed at if the CONFERENCE that innovation needs to be inclusive. He was the one who "kicked Jobs out" of Apple's board. Scully regretted his decision, "It was probably a mistake for the board to let him go, and he and I might have been able to do Apple well together."
(Former Apple CEO John Sculley at the IF conference.) ）
In 1983, Jobs invited Sculley, then CEO of PepsiCo, to be Apple's CEO. Two years later, Jobs personally led the team to invest heavily in the development of the Macintosh did not receive market response, which he blamed Sculley for over-profit pursuit of the product and overpricing the product. Sculley argued that Jobs didn't understand what business was — and the two argued on the board. Eventually, the board chose to support Sculley, and Jobs ran away from Apple, founding NeXT and acquiring Pixar Animation Studios.
At NeXT and Pixar, Jobs, who experienced a series of setbacks such as funding ruptures and product positioning, was humiliated, but those setbacks made him a more humble person — until he returned to Apple in 1996 and became a more charismatic leader.
Jobs showed Sculley the importance of a founder to the success of a business. In fact, after leaving Apple, Sculley invested in 14 companies, insisting that all decisions be made by the founder CEO.
At the Silicon Valley scene of IF in 2016, the 77-year-old Sculley joined thousands of people in the audience to remember Jobs. Jobs in memory "has too many admirable" characteristics -
People think he is a natural speaker, but in fact he has rehearsed many times behind his back and the ultimate pursuit of detail.
No one has worked more hard and harder than he has. To this end, he sacrificed his personal life. Jobs's home was largely unfurnished, with only a bed, pictures of Einstein and Gandhi hanging on the wall, a lamp, and almost nothing else, "and he didn't care."
He was passionate and not starting a business for money.
Today, the age of heroes seems to be coming to an end. Entrepreneurs face a more complex external environment, less explicit technology and market dividends, and many unprecedented organizational tests.
But Geek Park has always been a big believer in the power of science and technology, and we are always willing to stand with innovators to drive great social progress and value creation. This road is not easy, not only requires judgment of the future, the abandonment of yesterday, the full devotion to today, but also the persistence of every tomorrow. In the history of the park, of all the guests invited in the past, there is one person with whom we have the deepest empathy.
He is the founder of Wired magazine, Rossetto. In 1993, when he discussed such a magazine to countless investors, not many people realized that the magazine's target audience existed — unlike today, when readers who focused on technology were not mainstream, and no one cared about their opinions. No investor can understand what they want to do. Without money, they spend the night at a friend's house and begin to wonder if their dreams are right and whether they can be realized.
(Wired magazine founder Rossetto at the IF Innovation Conference.) ）
Life is an obsession. In the large jar of Beijing 751, Rossetto said. When Wired was first founded, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, he was also preaching for the magazine in a similarly large jar. There were only four rows of viewers, and their earliest obsession was to tell the stories of the world's most important people in the form of magazines.
Those endless technological innovators, those who use their identity as entrepreneurs to land their imaginations, are the most important people in the eyes of Geek Park.
Salute to innovation, salute to pioneers, forerunners. Give "non-consensus" space and companionship to entrepreneurs. It's still a meaningful thing, and we want to do better — and in the next era, it will be even more meaningful.
From December 17 to 19, 2021, at the G&G Creative Community in Shenzhen, Geek Park 2022IF Innovation Conference, we continued to walk.
Perhaps the "big coffee" that will change the world in the future is in this year's IF Conference.
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