Among the GGV Fellows, we had the honor of inviting GGV OMEGA student and Moka CEO Li Guoxing. GGV Capital entered the market in the early days of Moka's development, witnessing its growth into a rising star in the FIELD of ATS and HCM today. Today, Moka CEO Li Guoxing will share his and Moka's entrepreneurial stories.
Founded for 6 years, he became the leader of the HR SaaS ATS industry
Moka (Beijing Cirias Technology Co., Ltd.) was established in 2015 and has undergone more than six years of development. The company aims to provide enterprises with the ultimate experience, data-driven intelligent HR SaaS products, and is committed to empowering enterprise talent strategies through first-class technology and services. At present, Moka has two products: one is the Moka recruitment management system (referred to as "Moka recruitment"), which is a product that Moka has mainly sold to the outside world since its inception; the other is Moka People, which was launched at the end of 2020, covering high-frequency business scenarios such as organizational personnel management, leave management, approval management, salary management, performance management and other high-frequency business scenarios required by enterprises, and opening up the whole process from recruitment to personnel management.
Why choose HR SaaS as a track
The reason for choosing the HR SaaS track is because when I returned to China from the United States, I found that although many domestic Internet companies have a strong momentum of development, most of the company's official website recruitment pages are still stuck in the relatively original static page stage, and it is impossible to directly submit resumes through the official website, whether from the perspective of candidate experience or employer brand, the domestic companies at that time were obviously lagging behind American companies. We saw an opportunity and decided to start Moka.
Supporting Moka to become the underlying logic of the industry TOP
First of all, we believe that talent is the most important asset of enterprises, and it is of great value and significance to solve the problems related to talents in enterprises.
As more and more young people enter the workplace, companies begin to pay more attention to the play of individual value. For enterprise software products, rather than focusing on the needs of decision makers and ignoring the experience of other users, we decided to focus our work on each individual at work. Our mission is to make everyone's work experience better and for everyone to achieve more in the organization.
Further, for Moka, the longer-term vision is to build world-class HR products that win the recognition of 100,000 organizations and their employees. Focusing on customer pain points and continuous innovation are the core of the products we will always adhere to.
Moka is a company dedicated to building a "strong culture" organization, and last year we further proposed the "Moka Leadership Principles" (inspired by Amazon's Leadership Principal) based on values, placing higher demands and expectations on managers.
Specifically, there are five things:
I would like to share with you the two principles of "going deep into the front line" and "Bar Raiser". "Going deep into the front line" is to hope that managers can go deep into the front line work, and they need to have a deep understanding of the business, so as to avoid making wrong judgments and decisions because of the separation from the front line business, and also to avoid the situation of bloated bureaucracy in the organization. As for Bar Raiser, in order to build industry-leading products and services, we need every Moka person to pursue higher standards in their work and produce higher quality work, rather than being content with mediocrity. To do this, leaders need to create such an atmosphere and establish high standards. Human nature is inert, and these high standards will make people not "bound". But it is precisely this atmosphere that can make truly remarkable breakthrough products that make customers really satisfied.
Entrepreneurial advice for start-up and developing enterprises
I have two tips for startups.
First, the start-up/early stage must define a very clear target customer group. From my point of view, I think the more focused the customer base, the better. Moka's early ATS products were very focused on Internet companies, and in the early days, they focused on relatively small companies. The advantage of this is that the more focused your customer base is, the stronger their commonalities, and the stronger the commonalities, which means that you are more able to make a good product that makes them particularly satisfied. Because it's better for a small customer base to love your product very much than for a larger group to just like your product in general. Defining the target customer group, in addition to the common company size, industry, etc., can also have a more flexible way. For example, when we at ATS expand the traditional industry, if the HR number one or purchase decision maker is after 80, we will definitely do it, because such people will be more inclined to choose our future-oriented innovative products.
Second, provide differentiated value for target customers. The target audience is clear, and the most important thing is to figure out what differentiated value you can provide. When we investigated HR in the early days, we found that a common problem with ATS products on the market was that the experience of USing HR was very bad. In the next few years, we focused on the point of "experience", providing huge differentiated value to customers, and gradually formed a very good reputation in the HR group, which in turn brought about rapid business growth. Regarding the power of word-of-mouth, I will give you an example, Moka's penetration rate in the Internet industry has reached more than 10%, that is, more than 10% of Internet companies are using Moka products. Specific to the regional market such as Hangzhou, this amount reaches more than 20%. The reason for this effect is that the Internet circle in Hangzhou is closely connected, HR basically flows in a small range, and the word-of-mouth effect is more obvious in such an area. Behind the good reputation, it also comes from Moka's focus on customer groups and provides differentiated value to customers.
After the company has spent its inception, found PMF, and entered the development period, the most important advice I give you is to strengthen the emphasis on organizational capacity building.
In the 100-300 stage, a high degree of attention needs to be paid to the iteration of the core executive team. Moka tripled in revenue in 2018 because it was too smooth, but ignored the iteration of the executive team, resulting in a very difficult 2019. That's why I would advise other startups to make their teams change every year, iterate on the executive team, and inject fresh blood into the team. Moreover, it is very difficult to find executives, and for inexperienced entrepreneurs, they will definitely step on the pit, so it is even more necessary to plan in advance and promote recruitment
At the stage of 300-500 people, corporate culture and building echelons are very important. The way to build an echelon can be internal cultivation or external recruitment. It may be easier for a startup to recruit younger and smarter classmates in the early stages, because he is doing a good enough job in the IC position that you want to promote him to manager in the development of the company. But in fact, this thing is very difficult, because there is a big gap between the IC and the manager. Many people can't cross the past, or it will take many years to cross the past. The speed of internal cultivation is likely to not keep up with the speed of the company's development.
Essentially, we promote and develop people inside the company at an additional cost (including resources, time, and opportunity costs) to help them grow, hoping that they will be able to develop and be effective in the organization over the long term. External recruitment is often able to recruit suitable or over-matched people, which is the most direct way to enhance organizational capabilities, so as to more effectively support the rapid development of the business. Therefore, when building a team echelon, we should be cautious, do not overly value the potential of employees, rely too much on internal promotion, basic quality is important, but experience is also very important. It is not advisable to pay too much attention to human potential and basic qualities and ignore experience.
If the team grows to 500+ in size, special attention needs to be paid to improving the efficiency of the organization. Establishing and implementing key process mechanisms and focusing on the creation of internal tools are all things that need attention.
Share your personal growth as a founder
I believe that the founder is the ceiling of the company, and the founder's cognition determines the pattern of the company. Therefore, as a founder, you need to continue to grow and improve yourself in order to help the company develop faster. In my experience, a person's bottom growth is the most important. The growth of the bottom comes from objective and accurate self-perception and a strong willingness to change. Both of these are indispensable and very difficult to do.
Self-awareness
Many well-known people have experienced moments of great setbacks due to lack of self-awareness, such as Jobs who was kicked out of the Apple he founded, and Dalio who misjudged the situation during the 1983 US debt crisis, which led to the near bankruptcy of Bridgewater. But both founders have grown rapidly after experiencing setbacks and achieved even more remarkable results. This roller coaster of personal growth has a more accurate model description, called the Dunning Kruger effect, which refers to a person's state of falling from the peak of ignorance to the valley of despair and then gradually climbing to a stable plateau.
It can be seen that setbacks are actually an important opportunity to revise self-perception. When experiencing pain and setbacks, what we have to do is not to let negative emotions erode ourselves to stagnation, but to think about the pain, and in turn take this as a perfect opportunity for self-tempering, and the change of mentality is very important.
Unclear self-perception is often related to ego. EGO is too big and too small is not good. EGO is too easy to overconfidence, overestimate self, difficult to accept feedback from the outside world, ignore their own shortcomings, and do not see the strengths of others. If the ego is too small, it will fall into inferiority, insecurity, strong defense mechanisms, and too much emphasis on other people's opinions. It is important to cultivate one's own mind and find a state of balance.
Change your will
Regarding the willingness to change, the first thing is not to set limits on yourself. I think that human potential is infinite, and you must not feel that there is anything you can't do. Because if you think that something is impossible, then there is really no possibility at all, and if you think it is possible, there will be a glimmer of hope. As long as you are really willing to change and be willing to make efforts, there will be some gains and changes, and remember to have such a sense of faith. The other is to know exactly what you want and be willing to pay for it. If you have a clear idea of what you want and you feel that some of your flaws or problems will prevent you from getting it, you will have a strong willingness to change yourself. The so-called "desperate desire to succeed, willing to pay an extraordinary price." Everyone's definition of "success" is different, the focus is to find your own definition, what you want to pursue most in this life is only your own can figure out. Finally, after you have made it clear that you want to change the problem, you must be prepared for long-term efforts. I think it's already remarkable that a year can make some changes in one aspect. You have to continue to deliberately practice these changes for one year, two years, three years, so that you can really solidify them and form qualitative changes.
How to choose a startup partner
For how to judge whether the founder/partner is reliable, I summarized 3 points:
To think clearly is to see whether a person has a clear idea of doing things, and whether they can see the essence of a thing. To do it is to see whether a person's execution is strong enough, execution is a very comprehensive ability to reflect, not just dare to fight hard, the best way to judge this is to see whether this person has been successful in the past. If the first two determine the lower limit of the company, then the ambition determines the upper limit of the company, and the ambition of the founder of the company basically determines what kind of company the company can grow into. For example, Zhang Yiming can make ByteDance bigger, and a very important point is because he is ambitious enough to do it against Facebook very early.
In addition to the above 3 points, in fact, the core and the bottom is still the entrepreneurial spirit, the resilience of entrepreneurs, eclecticism, positive optimism, etc., Ben Horowitz said that the 8 years of entrepreneurship only 3 days of good times, founders have to experience a lot of pressure, dilemma, accidents every day, no extremely resilient and positive mentality may be crushed in minutes. As long as you don't give up, you must have a chance, and when you encounter difficulties, you must not forget why you set out.
Finally, when looking for people, try to maintain cultural consistency, ability and personality complement each other.
*The views expressed in this article are for informational purposes only and do not represent the position of the Agency.