The story that happened to NetDa Wei is a special case in the sample of life in the Internet age. He experienced the most glorious commercial successes of his time and witnessed the enormous impact of technology, but all of this worked on him, leaving him with an uncommon personal choice. His existence is an interesting validation – in what ways does business affect a person? What does the Internet age we have experienced together mean to a witness?
Wen | Yurmyn
Editor| Li Li
Create mythical mysteries
Everyone was curious about David Wallerstein. He has generated more than 7,000 times the return on investment for shareholders, one of the highest records in human venture capital history. However, how he invests is a mystery. The founder of Skype introduced him to a project, the other party is doing a vertical flying machine, he listened to a brief introduction on the phone end, and had an initial judgment in his mind, a purely commercial project, is a service for rich people. Many investors will be interested in such a project, but his reaction is very cold, and it sounds like he is going to hang up the phone in the next second.
Facts show that he is an outlier in the business world. He came to China to work in the 1990s and gave himself a Chinese name that will never be renamed," which means "the online world has done something." He is a Senior Executive Vice President at Tencent and has been a member of the General Office, the highest decision-making body. It had been 14 years since he had been in the job, and he had only applied for a change of title, citing the fact that it was too much trouble to introduce himself. At the high-level internal meeting, his request for the new title was, "Give me a title that starts with C, C will do anything", and the discussion at the meeting is full of gossip, what do you want C? CXO that kind? As a result, the matter was settled, and his choice was based on "the letter X sounds cool", a title that satisfies his expectations for his job, "both serious and crazy".
As a result, the world's most talked about technology companies created a top position in the most casual way, the Chief eXploration Officer. It's a job founded only at Tencent, and his work projects perfectly avoid the hottest outlets of the moment, and fall on those unpopular tracks – food, energy, water and air, and early diagnosis of disease. Investors like to use "sexy" to describe high-yield areas, use "smart" to describe the return of money, but his investment is neither sexy nor smart, sounding even has nothing to do with making money, studying how artificial intelligence does water quality testing, how machine learning can help grow cucumbers and small tomatoes, almost all of which are the most difficult long-term projects.
Not only that, but a larger proportion of his time on his calendar is spent on these things — attending UN-Habitat's seminars on urbanization, organizing international workshops, inviting academic and industry representatives to discuss how AI can address earth-level challenges, filming the documentary Zero Water Day, writing a book called "Reimagining the Planet," discussing human environmental challenges with former Icelandic President Grimsson, talking to academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering about carbon neutrality, and promoting the application of AI to coal-fired power plants. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions...
There is no KPI, no daily meetings, no participation in performance appraisal, active withdrawal from the management of the main business, only long-term projects, but he has the highest level of voice, and his opinions also affect the company's strategic decisions. His presence has become Tencent's most mysterious question: Why does a company have such an outlier at the top?
In fact, a look at his professional resume reveals that several of the company's life cycles were directly related to him. His sense of opportunity is extremely acute, and more than once he has performed miracles with his enigmatic business instincts:
In 2001, NetHub helped MIH, an investment group headquartered in South Africa, to buy more than 40% of Tencent's shares at a valuation of US$60 million (later reduced), and Tencent retained the decision-making power of the company. The deal returned more than 7,000 times over a 20-year period, making it one of the most profitable deals in the history of human venture capital;
——In 2005, NetHub proposed to incorporate "Customer Engagement" into the company's strategy, and the following year it became one of the company-wide performance appraisal KPIs, and it remains to this day. It changed the direction of the company and the style of its products, ultimately contributing to a lot of internal innovation;
At the same time, NetDawei has contributed to Tencent's investment and mergers and acquisitions in a number of game companies such as Riot Games, the parent company of League of Legends, which has changed the memory of a generation's Internet life, and the world map of the game industry has since been completely subverted.
NetDa's life is circulating a kind of delayed proof. Standing at each key node, the path he chose was the "side door left way" that others could not understand, but the rate of return was extremely high. He views business in a way that is very different from most people's. Eating in a restaurant, he will silently estimate where the food he eats will come from, how it will be transported, how it will be stored, how much electricity it is expected to consume to store it, how these factors will affect the market transaction price... When he sees the performance curve climbing upwards, his first reaction is not happiness, but a sense of crisis, forcing himself to look for potential problems, "What factors will make the curve go down?" Even his adolescent anxieties were special, haunting him not by common love, family, or academic problems, but by "what if the world war breaks out again."
These thoughts drove him to make different choices all the time. Fearing a world war, he went to Japan for a year with the money he earned from his part-time job, and then went to university and chose to major in international relations, wanting to study how to avoid conflict between countries, especially what role he could play. In his early 20s, he came to China, studied at the Central University for Nationalities, went to the countryside of Yunnan and Guizhou to investigate the living conditions of ethnic minorities, and later joined MIH as vice president of business development in China, becoming an investor, he wanted to use business to show his value: "If a small company in South Africa can have the opportunity to participate in China's Internet development, then not only China can gain, South Africa will also benefit from it, and countries can achieve win-win results and avoid conflicts." 」
Investing in Tencent was the most valuable deal he had ever made, but back then, it was the craziest decision. It was 2000, a time when all the news was talking about the dot-com bubble, when China's hottest Internet giants were the three major portals, Sina, NetEase and Sohu. Tencent's instant messaging is still a marginal field, the founder is only in his 20s, neither background nor fame, renting an office in Shenzhen's SEG Technology Entrepreneurship Park, worrying about not being able to afford a server all day long. But NetDa sensed an opportunity, and his judgment was based on his own instinctive curiosity — when he went to an Internet café, the company's chat software OICQ was installed on every computer desktop, and every Chinese business card he saw had a string of OICQ numbers printed on them.
OICQ's registration page is the source of Tencent's WeChat public account
The first negotiations ended in failure. This time, he met another group of business outliers. The money-starved young men rejected his investment demands for a controlling stake. In the winter of the Internet bubble, money is the biggest problem, Tencent's existing investment has retreated, found a variety of possible investors, no one is willing to invest, almost to the point of life and death line that can not be maintained, but they insist on not retreating to control their products. Ma Huateng gave the network a big look at the newly launched QQ user growth curve, when about 500,000 new registrations were added every day, equivalent to the population of an ordinary city in Europe, as long as they can survive, the number of registered users can exceed 100 million after half a year.
"At that time, I had been investing in China for many years, I had seen different projects, and I thought that the negotiations would go as smoothly as usual, and people were always happy to see a foreigner invest money in themselves. But after talking to them for about five minutes, ten minutes, I felt like I was walking into the wrong room, they were describing a world that I couldn't understand at all, these people were far smarter than I was, they were thinking in a way I had never seen in my life, and I was completely calmed down, a feeling I had never felt before." "I had only one thought at the time, this is the smartest group of people I've ever seen on the planet, and I have to find a way to work with them," Netda said.
That's the only goal of that investment — people. "Thank you", "goodbye", "we don't consider cooperation", these Chinese expressions did not send away this persistent investor, he relied on his full tongue-rolling Chinese, with the most general reason to stay: "Half past five, it's time to leave work, you are not hungry, let's go to dinner together!" 」
In this way, a group of curious young Chinese entertained a curious foreigner and invited him to eat Cantonese cuisine composed of various animal offal. They couldn't afford Maotai, but that didn't stop them from giving the new friend a glimpse into the power of Chinese liquor. 21 years later, net Dawei talked about that night, the biggest impression is drunk, back to the hotel still have to struggle to get up to do PPT, the next morning, he returned to the office of young people with a new proposal PPT, talk to them about the cooperation between QQ and his own interactive TV.
In fact, it was an extremely crazy adventure, the proposal was not reported at all, it was just a possibility. But he wanted to use this small possibility to win over the people he wanted to invest in.
The young man sitting in the audience listened to him talk about what the future might look like. When he showed the slide that used the Internet to change the TV, Ma Huateng suddenly turned his head and said to the people next to him, "This matter is still more meaningful!"
This is the most important recognition of NetDa's career. Soon after, Tencent accepted mih's investment, and the 7,000-fold return on investment made it one of the most legendary investment cases in the history of the Internet. A story has ended here, an investor has set a record for the highest return, and his career has since reached the top, so what should be the next choice?
From this juncture, his life began to move towards another outlier choice. The year the investment was completed, NetHub joined Tencent, which had only 45 people at the time. At the time, it seemed like an unbelievable choice. Before changing jobs, he was the vice president of China of an international large company, and the food, accommodation, and transportation in China were of the highest standard, and he had no worries about food, clothing, housing, and transportation. But he chose to join the startup, which could not even afford a server at the time, faced with the instability of not being able to turn around at any time, and followed a group of young Chinese people to stay up late, work overtime, and go to the roadside food stalls together.
To this day, this choice has finally been verified, and he has created a new meaning for his life. Tencent has grown from a small company that no one wants to invest in to more than 1.2 billion users worldwide. NetA has experienced this process first-hand and is a direct participant in many key decisions.
In the fast-changing investment industry, people want to get the secret of success from him, and they want to see the next opportunity to get rich overnight. In fact, he didn't hide his secrets, but his choices still seem bizarre today. Since 2014, NetU has stopped investing in social, financial and gaming, and has begun to transform into earth-level problems. He gave these projects the name FEW, which stands for Food, Energy and Water – all off-the-beaten-path projects.
"The most important thing is not business." Net Dawei told "People". "What I'm really interested in is people, and I believe that's the essence of business. Based on the care of people, you can have the best business strategy, to judge what is the most important, what is the most valuable, and what we should do with technology and capital."
Let the numbers return to people
The most recognizable person in a company is the "C-level people", CEOs, CFOs, CTO, CMO, etc., they are like stars on the business stage, often crowded with followers, hands and feet are eye-catching, usually do not appear alone in public, and different assistants help them arrange their itinerary, dock business, and manage their daily lives. However, even with the title of CXO, NetDa Wei still does not look like a "C-level person".
He likes to open the door for others in the elevator, talk to passers-by, run to the roadside stall when he is hungry, and talk to the boss while eating. Every time he went to a meeting at a place, he always spent the most time wandering the street. He likes to speak Chinese, although his Chinese has too many tongue-curling sounds and non-standard three-tone sounds. In the bustling wet market, he is like an old neighbor, nagging at the fruit vendor, where did you get this banana? How is it so fresh?
Everyone who knows NetDa Wei says that this kindness is his personal trait. Chen Yan is Tencent's first interaction designer and one of the company's earliest employees. When I first joined, the company was a strong programmer style, and the room was quiet. The office has changed completely because of the arrival of NetDawei, who likes to chat with people, who will enthusiastically display his Japanese and give them their own rock albums.
He brought his personal traits to the start-up tech company, where he often mentioned the idea of warming up technology and returning code to people. Every time he returns to China, he brings back some R&D and product experience, one of which is Tencent's strategic concept of "user engagement" since then.
That was the early days of the Chinese Internet, and most of the software was used on the PC side, but computers were also a new concept that was unfamiliar to most people. Programmers are writing programs for the first time, and users are using software for the first time, and they don't know each other. Few people will reflect on how to write the program from the user's point of view, at that time the more common idea is to let the user learn the complex rules of the computer, in order to enter Chinese characters to first recite the five strokes of the font recipe, requiring the user to remember the complex use rules of the software, click, double click, right button in different positions What are the different meanings...
NetDa Wei took Chen Yan and them to communicate with Silicon Valley designers, talking about the trend that was just beginning to be popular in Silicon Valley at that time - how to change technology from the user's point of view? NetDa encourages programmers who are accustomed to facing code to face real users, asking all employees to participate in a "Follow Me Home" project, everyone should participate in user research, sit in Internet cafes to see how people surf the Internet, or go to ordinary people's homes for an hour to see how they use software in real environments. One of these programs continues to use today's new employee orientation, where everyone participates in customer service listening and processing feedback from frontline users.
"When I first proposed 'follow me home', there was no way, and at that time we didn't know how to understand the needs of users. I found this approach, which is similar to anthropological fieldwork, to be appropriate." Net Dawei said. "More importantly, in this way, I want to create a direct emotional connection between product managers and their users, meet the people who use their products, and hear their real voices." A lot of Internet companies have data analytics, and you get a report, millions of users, how many male users, how many female users, but you're not associated with users, they're just a number to you — there are ten thousand users, OK, I don't feel it; there's one guy complaining about the product, well, I don't care. Only direct emotional connections can keep you caring for others, otherwise over time, you will not see the user and lose the enthusiasm for making the product."
In 2005, he encouraged the company to spend 2 million yuan to build China's first user experience room, and proposed a series of specific user research methods. This project is very similar to the psychology laboratory, there are two rooms, one is the experience room, one is the observation room, a one-sided mirror is installed in the middle, the user sits in the experience room to operate the computer, and a camera will be placed next to the computer screen in front of it, recording the mouse trajectory of the person using the application, and sometimes using the eye tracker to do eye tracking tests, observing which positions the user's pupils are focused on the page and staying in which parts for the longest time.
At that time, they found that in the early software dialogue window, the program often jumped out to ask whether to delete a program and check for error code, which was valid information for programmers, but the user was confused. As a result, users often don't hate the software, but just get stuck in such incomprehensible details and have to give up. This forces developers to think, what are users thinking?
Tencent became the first Internet company in China to focus on "user experience". This first-mover advantage stems from the personal experience of NetDa Wei, whose status as a foreigner makes him more sensitive to the differences between people. When he was studying at the Central University for Nationalities, he liked to chat with locals when he went to Guizhou to investigate. Later, when he came to Tencent, his enthusiasm even spread to the restaurant near the office, every clerk knew this foreigner, and every time a new dish came out, the boss would always send him a plate, "This dish is for you to try!" No money! Just tell me how!"
These personal experiences are fundamental to his understanding of business. "User participation is a term we commonly use today", Net Dawei said, but the user portrait in his mind comes from people he really contacts, they are also part of the Chinese Internet users, "maybe he is a small town youth, maybe he does not have so much money, maybe his family and friends are far away from him, he wants to work alone outside, his job may be working in a restaurant, the daily schedule is fixed, every morning riding a 30-minute bicycle to work, 10:30 pm to leave work, back home at 11 o'clock, There was an hour left for him before he went to bed. So, what can we do to make this hour of his worthwhile meaningful? What kind of spiritual value can we offer him?"
When thinking about business, Web Dawei said that he imagined a spider web in his head, and the seemingly unrelated web area was gathered together by a thin line to become a huge web of intertwined roots, and all the thin lines eventually pointed to the same starting point. On Tencent's network, the first fulcrum is instant messaging, which allows people to meet another person through the Internet, and this technology connects people separated by two places, which is also the company's "core DNA". But this spider web also needs another fulcrum of spiritual value, the web thinks of games, he understands games as "people-to-people connection", playing games together can make people work together to pursue victory, this technology can make a person in their own world, become a hero.
After some experimentation, NetDa contributed to Tencent's acquisition of a large number of top international game manufacturers, which made NetDawei create career success again in a new way. However, what he believes to be the greatest sense of accomplishment in his career is a small thing that happened after this.
Once the company arranged for him to participate in the ribbon cutting, drove over the road and then into the mountain road, twisting and turning to enter the small village in the mountainous area, Tencent rebuilt a primary school for students in the Wenchuan earthquake-stricken area. When he arrived at the new campus, many students waved at him. "When you look at their faces, you feel, wow, the existence of this company has really changed people's lives, and business is often initially thinking about survival, trying to survive, surviving the initial struggle period, and business success can allow you to do more things, which is remarkable, isn't it?" 」
Netda is in Mianzhu City, Sichuan Province
New spider webs
In recent years, NetHub has often represented Tencent in events and given speeches around the world, but there is often a strange sense of dislocation in his speeches. The people in the audience want to hear the secret of Tencent's success and how to get a methodology for high ROI, but he is talking about the earth's plight, climate change, ecological disasters, agricultural development, water resources and air pollution, and the only passages related to business models argue that why strictly following the ROI mindset is harmful to the ecology of the earth?
"When I was almost 40 years old, I realized that a lot of things on the planet were actually left unattended, and very few people looked at them from a global perspective." These problems are FEW — food, energy and water , "FEW affects every country, every region and every person on earth... If we do not solve the PROBLEM OFFE together, every country, every region, every city will become a victim."
However, dealing with the challenges posed by FEW is difficult, and there are potential linkages between the three, such as the indirect consumption of large amounts of energy by investing in fertilizers to increase food production, which may exacerbate water pollution. He believes that solving the survival problem of the next 10 billion people is a geo-level challenge that requires an enhanced and resilient infrastructure system architecture and a set of systematic solutions. He would love to initiate such a topic and discuss it with others. But even he could feel the embarrassment that no one had spoken about. "I could see their expressions as if they were saying, 'What are you talking about agriculture?' Aren't you a tech company? Talking about energy, talking about water resources, it's boring! Dude, let's talk about Bitcoin!" "When I talk about water, they seem to expect me to tell them something like 'how to make cryptocurrencies out of water.'"
This strange feeling gradually spread in his life. NetDawei works between Shenzhen and San Francisco, often flying every few weeks. Fires have often occurred in california's mountains in recent years, including one time an hour's drive from San Francisco, where more than 50 people have been killed. Net Dawei was eager to talk about these personal topics, but found that everyone seemed to care, and the hot topic of each of their gatherings was: What do you think of Bitcoin?
"We seem to be living in a strange time, imagining things that seem to be more real to people, and this is the 2021 we are going through." Netda says he feels that the world he is involved in building seems too powerful. "The internet is a great tool for people to exchange ideas and facilitate communication, which is fine, but it seems to have gone a little too far."
NetUwei's personal growth and the life cycle of his company have undergone a kind of synchronization. When he was a young investor in his 20s, he described himself as "very competitive", "self-centered", "at that time I only thought about how to survive", he was not a person with a prominent family background, everything had to rely on his own struggle in exchange, and the start-up Tencent, like himself, had no background, wanted to succeed, and relied on his own technology to seek a foothold. However, his transformation occurred after winning success, and Tencent had a global influence, which gave him a sense of smallness.
"I care about people, but I also want to be famous, I want to make money, I'm not so pure, but the changes that have happened to me in business have proved that kindness can be cultivated." 」 It is precisely because I have seen great successes that I feel small, because I see the bigger world, I am convinced that people can solve bigger problems and help more people." "I think it was Tencent's success that changed me, and the business experience I was involved in trained me to really care for others," NetDa wei said.
The crisis heralded by those senses of strangeness appeared on his cognitive radar, and he realized that he and Tencent needed a change. The spider web in his head began to restart, and it was the answer to business success — he had to find new ways to care for people.
Three of his companions in the process thought with him, who later formed the backbone of the exploration team. One of them is Eleanor Chang, who joined the netDa Wei team a decade ago, and before that, after graduating from Stanford University, she worked for many years at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, where she also led strategy and investment at eBay.
After talking to NetDa, her idea was that most of the business did not fit in with her previous field, and the reason that affected her willingness to join the team was an accident. During the interview, she had a migraine and had to leave early because of the pain, and later she received a flower from Netda with a card attached to it to wish her a speedy recovery. During the second interview, NetDa spent a while caring about her recovery and sharing with her the methods he had researched to alleviate migraines. This little thing touched Eleanor, "I was surprised to know that I didn't know him at that time, I was just one of the candidates", "I felt his sincerity, he really cared about everyone as a concrete person".
This perspective, always based on care, made the small team decide to adjust its direction after repeated discussions, starting in 2014, to a completely unfamiliar, more extensive Earth-level issue, and a major core is human health. Previously, the focus on people was focused on spiritual life, QQ and WeChat have provided a considerable amount of emotional value, and then they plan to pay attention to people's real lives and let people live healthily.
One of the focuses is the early diagnosis of the disease. To truly understand this area of expertise, NetHub recruited Kyle Kurpinski, a bioengineer who previously received his Ph.D. in stem cell and tissue engineering research at UC Berkeley (University of California, Berkeley) and later served as executive director of the Translational Medicine Program at his alma mater and UCSF (University of California, San Francisco).
After officially joining the company, One of the entry tasks assigned to Kyle by netDawei was to fly to China, just as he urged programmers in the office to participate in "Follow Me Home" 21 years ago, he asked Kyle to investigate different hospitals in China, go to the actual medical environment, chat with specific people, sit down and observe how Chinese see a doctor. Therefore, the first day of the biology doctor becoming an investor sat in the waiting hall of Peking Union Medical College Hospital, it seemed that the Chinese how to see a doctor, and he also made an appointment with doctors from different departments in advance to observe the real use of the emergency room. The question that NetA asked him to investigate was: What are the difficulties a person will encounter when he sees a doctor, and how can we help him?
In fact, he did not investigate any unusual conclusions, all of which are the most familiar medical experiences Chinese: patients have a long time to seek treatment, waiting for a whole morning, seeing doctors for five minutes; medical needs are overly concentrated in large hospitals, large hospitals are overcrowded, small hospitals are oversized; data from different hospitals are not shared, patients often need to repeat examinations to and from different hospitals; doctors have limited diagnosis time, often need to make key judgments in a high-pressure state...
This gave him a new understanding of the importance of investment direction. If technology can play a greater role in the diagnosis phase of the disease, then existing high pressures and chaos are likely to be alleviated. The work returns to the picture of each specific person's story. The noise, chaos, crowding, helplessness observed sitting in the hospital waiting room, the long waits of patients, the helplessness and rush of doctors, these strong feelings remain in his memory, he said, which changed his intuitive perception of commercial projects, and his work was to solve specific problems, the plight of those he had met.
However, this path has once again become an alternative choice. Compared with the therapeutic field, the investment technology in the field of diagnosis is more complex and the payback period is longer, which is a long-term investment cold. A very famous biomedical investment tycoon in the Bay Area met Kyle and asked him privately, "Why are you investing in diagnosis?" Do you know anything I don't know?"
"We don't really know more than anyone else, it's just because what we've seen proves that this is what people need, and we want to bet on a future like this." Kyle told People.
Delay proof has once again appeared in the career of NetDa Wei. At the end of 2019, the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in the world, how to quickly, effectively and accurately complete remote diagnosis, has become a real problem related to the world, for a time has become a new outlet, and at that time, the existing bellwethers in the market, many of which were the exploration team of NetDawei, began to follow up in 2014 and have already completed the projects of early investment.
But for those who witness it, the greater reward may be a real sense of value. "Back in 2014, when we started looking at healthcare-related projects, we just believed that diagnosis would be very important in the future, and we thought that technology would be good for people to develop in this way. The emergence of the epidemic has made our choices relevant at once." Eleanor said she often feels meaning in her work, especially one of the companies that has developed a home-ready COVID-19 nucleic acid testing agent, and another that provides early detection of cancer, "and when you see their progress, you feel that the work you are involved in can really make a difference and really help the health of others."
The job, which was originally left behind by migraine episodes, also allowed Eleanor to re-understand the nature of his profession – that goodwill and gain do not conflict. "Most people think about investing and thinking about how to make money, but in fact, there is a possibility that making money and doing good things can be both, and your business can have a solid high yield and help a lot of people at the same time." 」
A process of introspection at any time
In the interview, NetDa wei mentioned a change in business success for itself. When he was young, he felt that his family was very poor, and when he grew up, he gave speeches, and he was used to describing himself as "born poor". The idea had held true for him for a long time, because his family was indeed not wealthy by monetary measures, the family lived in a small town north of San Francisco, far from the big city, and his parents had not gone to college, had never been abroad, and lived the most ordinary life in the small town. This feeling of poverty became a certain motivation when he was young, wanting to succeed, wanting to be famous, wanting to make a lot of money.
However, when he became a successful investor, his strongest feeling was that "money may not be the best measure of success", because when he looks back on his career, the most fulfilling moments are often not related to money. He began to re-examine his past life, and gradually stopped thinking that he was "born poor". Although there was no money at that time, there were many luxuries in life that money could not buy - outside his house were all kinds of fruit trees, cherry trees, apple trees, almond trees, the ripe season was full of fruit, and the happiest memory of him and his friends was to throw fruit; the climate was also very pleasant, and there were no wildfires, no floods, and no droughts in California at that time.
Business success gradually changed the way he looked at the world. As a member of Tencent's top management, NetDawei's vision of Tencent is also somewhat different, the most frequently mentioned word in his narration is "friendship", and he describes the relationship between himself and his colleagues as "brother". "I've known them for 21 years, I can remember tencent only 45 people, everyone is almost in their early 20s, they are very fun people, very positive ideas, like to joke, we have a company, work together, the goal is simple, we believe that what we do can survive, so we have patience", "You can call it work, but more accurately, we have experienced life together, there have been victories, there have been difficulties, tragedies have happened, this is life", " The company has gotten bigger, the stock has risen a lot, but what is the reason for leaving people behind? In fact, the answer is not a secret, it is this environment, this way of working based on friendship", "We are very lucky, Tencent succeeded." So the most important thing we should do is to cherish the opportunities we have and leave more positive impact on the world."
Lin Jinghua, the company that discussed the most details of THE FEW business with Hewang, joined Tencent in 2013 after 12 years at McKinsey and was the latest executive to join Tencent's top decision-making level. In his first days at Tencent, he spent some time understanding the company and understanding the founders. What he saw was a culture, "more gentle, more caring, a culture of multi-factorial considerations between altruism and self-interest."
One of his observations is that at Tencent, business is "a process of self-examination at any time": "Tencent is very lucky, the founders have this (idea) in their hearts, and they may not say it." It may be that a person who graduated from the same university does not necessarily have a lower level of effort than you, and the company he ended up in may not be known, and there are many lucky ingredients in it. The luckier you are, the more you must understand that many things are fate, not all rely on you, don't be carried away, think of yourself as a god in the universe", "Tencent's DNA is actually defined by the founder, the founder's mind and pattern, humanistic care and world view... It will be heard in every environment in a company, the culture is so shaped, again and again decisions, discussion after discussion, his words make everyone feel, in fact, we should care a little more, why not try it?" 」
It is the sense of trust fostered by this long-term relationship that keeps a group of similar people on the same path. This is probably the most valuable asset a commercial company can have – a unique ecosystem, and what kind of projects does it allow to survive in this commercial jungle? Why did it keep this species alive?
It is precisely because of this special ecology that NetDa has gone further in the direction of "human health" in the past seven years. Their goal is to maximize human health, in addition to early diagnosis, he also set his sights on early prevention, a person's intake of water, food, breathing air all greatly affect the health status, which is the area of the longer payback cycle, but, "for me, nothing is a short-term project." I'm more used to thinking about long-term problems, and I always do."
His exploration team organized the "International Smart Greenhouse Planting Challenge" with Wageningen University in the Netherlands, using the greenhouse simulator to develop automatic control algorithms in a short period of time to improve planting efficiency; he also invested in an agricultural technology start-up company to detect crop growth and environmental information such as soil moisture and temperature around them by installing sensors for farmers' crops, while introducing machine learning real-time analysis of data to form irrigation suggestions and push them to farmers through mobile platforms. This technology can reduce the amount of water used for agricultural irrigation and increase crop yields. He has more ideas: applying AI to improve power production efficiency, using intelligent energy solutions to help people achieve energy savings, meeting various energy needs in a more accurate way of energy matching, exploring geothermal...
AI-grown small tomatoes
"What I see as the Earth problem is a concrete crisis for me, almost a new war, but my frustration is that it is difficult for me to get people involved." 」 Net Dawei said. He began to bring about change in a hands-on way. He doesn't drink bottled water, and he always has a cup in his bag. Since becoming aware of the energy problem, he has become a vegetarian and no longer eats meat because he has estimated that the energy consumed to preserve meat in the United States is too high. Feeling a little anxious when a company that made bottled water went public, he messaged his colleagues that we need clean water, but that the problem shouldn't be solved that way.
However, there was another man who understood his choice. Because the exploration team is small, it is easy to ignore their proposals in the internal group discussions of the company, but Ma Huateng can always pay special attention to it, and every time The Network Dawei proposes to study a new technology, he will follow up the discussion and participate in the reply. In order to make more people aware of the seriousness of the water crisis, he found a professional team and spent three years investing in a documentary about water resources, "Zero Water Day". They visited Brazil, South Africa, the United States and China to shoot live, using images to illustrate the real water crisis in four places. Its goal is to give people a clear picture of the crisis they are in with a real record: according to data released by UN-Habitat, 1 in 5 of the world's population is living in areas with severe water scarcity, and this proportion is expected to increase to 1 in 4 by 2050. After listening to the story of Net Dawei, Ma Huateng said the same thing as 20 years ago, this matter has meaning!
Tencent bought back the copyright of the documentary, and the staff involved said that at that time, the internal evaluation of the documentary, the market value was "cabbage price", "not valuable, not a commercial film", but the old friend supported the alternative choice of NetDawei, not only bought the copyright, but also broadcast in more than a dozen countries around the world, Ma Huateng specially wrote a recommendation for the FEAR project, and also sent a circle of friends. The article about the exclusive interview of the FEED project was published on the Tencent intranet, and the first message was also from Ma Huateng: It is really good!
This attempt eventually gained wider acceptance. In 2021, Tencent released a new strategic blueprint, the sustainable social value innovation strategy will become the base of Tencent's development, and announced that it will invest 50 billion yuan for sustainable social value innovation, which includes the exploration of the FIELD of FEW. Ma Huateng wrote in Tencent's annual magazine: "Since the epidemic last year, the acceleration of the digitalization process has aggravated social problems such as the gap between the rich and the poor, the real economy is under pressure, and the aging of the population is also approaching reality, we are facing great changes in the times, and the entire Internet industry is rethinking the future." But I always believe in the power of scientific and technological innovation and goodness", "social value is like a piece of soil, it is the foundation of the development of the entire enterprise, the deeper the root, the user value and industrial value that grow on it, in order to flourish more", "The current industry consolidation gives us the opportunity to face up to the problem of omission in rapid development in the past and rethink the role that an enterprise should play in society." How to make better use of and give full play to our existing capabilities, apply them to more and more needed scenarios, and create value for society is a difficult problem that we are trying to think about."
"I don't think Dawei thought so when he was 25 years old, and he didn't think like this when he was 35 years old, but he went through these turns, upgraded his mission, played a role in the company, the role that the company allowed him to play, supported the role he played, built layer by layer, and became who he is now." 」 Lin Jinghua said, "FEW is some of the seeds we sow," "I dare not say how capable we are, but there is a person of this level who will always help society to do something in such an exploration."
In this ecology, change doesn't just happen to one person. After 18 years at Tencent, Chen Yan has grown from a designer who was immersed in drawing pictures every day when she just graduated, to an experienced user research engineer, and now she is the general manager of the user research and experience design department. She has recently been working on a design for older users, hoping to help older people use the Internet better.
This design for the elderly requires extremely detailed observation and is a volunteer activity outside of their KPIs. "I think in the company's culture, if you want to try some social innovation, it is easier to get support internally." Chen Yan said, "I often encourage our classmates in this way, although we may not be able to see the results in a year or two, but we plant this seed, one day it will germinate."
In October 2020, Tencent's research team went to Hohhot to interview a 73-year-old retiree.
One of the projects that NetHub has been focusing on recently is the vertical flying machine that he almost hung up on. The reason he regained interest in the project was that it was also an outlier option. Daniel Wiegand, the founder of the electric flight company Lilium, graduated in aeronautics from the Technical University of Munich in Germany and is a long-trained aerospace engineer. His life path was originally a standard engineering route, working as an engineer, serving large airlines or the military, until he had an idea: he wanted to apply aviation technology that was only used in the military and large companies to ordinary people, protecting the environment while avoiding traffic jams, and benefiting third world countries that lacked infrastructure. But this project requires professional and technical investment, reasonable personnel management, and most importantly, a long-term investor.
"When he finished listening to my explanation, you seemed to hear that the lights in his head were all on. He became very enthusiastic and excited. I feel that he believes from the bottom of his heart that technology, business, and human innovation can solve the problems of the future of the earth, which is our original intention in founding Lilium, which is also his belief. The first time we spoke on the phone, we hadn't seen each other, but we had hit it off. We knew it might take a decade to go from starting a company to going to market, and another decade to get a wider range of people to embrace the new product, but we knew it was worth it." Wigand said.
Once again, NetHub joined a young team to help them achieve their business goals. Lilium has achieved a successful test flight of the five-seat vehicle, which has been recognized by the European Space Agency. In the fall of 2021, seven more versions of the design were announced, and the company had completed its listing on the NASDAQ, but the most rewarding thing for the engineer happened in the face-to-face moment. At a meeting in Germany, an entrepreneur told him that he had thought his idea was too idealistic to become a business project, but seeing that there were still such outliers insisting, he decided to continue and follow the original ideal.
Lin Jinghua often listens to the Internet Dawei talk about this future aircraft, every time he speaks, this old friend who always rolls his tongue in Mandarin is always very enthusiastic, according to Lin Jinghua's description of him, he is "a person who is always looking for the possibility of Yes". Occasionally Lin Jinghua also wants to say No to him, because the dilemma of business is often beyond imagination, and the technically solvable problems may not be able to land in reality, but he will still add a lot of "You are right" after No(you are right), "I think Dawei is with enthusiasm and persistence, if he wants to solve human problems, he will think of many possibilities", "He is responsible for looking up at the stars, we are responsible for looking at the road below... Fertilize small saplings".
This business venture has been going on for 21 years, and all the witnesses have gone from youth to middle age, but almost all of them say that Netda is still as enthusiastic, cheerful and likes to chat with strangers as when they first met. On his last trip to China for a meeting, he chatted warmly with the waiters at the restaurant. He even began to learn Shanghainese. In this business world, he may be an eternal outlier, but this special ecosystem accommodates him and the future possibilities that are not valued.