Editor| Guo Liqi hu nannan
Head illustration | Xiao Li
Entrepreneurial insights
"Entrepreneur Insights" is a column regularly launched by China Entrepreneur every Sunday, scanning the cutting-edge business insights of outstanding entrepreneurs at home and abroad.
The content recommended in this issue mainly revolves around big data and artificial intelligence. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang proposed that at present, we are moving from the Internet of Everything to the growth of all things, technology not only to solve the problem of universality, but also to assume more social responsibility; Zhou Hongyi, chairman of 360 Group, said that with the joint efforts of manufacturing and the Internet industry, China's automotive industry must be able to lead the world; Fu Jixun, managing partner of Jiyuan Capital, believes that China has walked through the COPY to China in the PC era and copy from China in the mobile era, and has entered the technology-driven era. As a result, investing in technology has become a big trend; Tesla CEO Elon Musk emphasized at the annual shareholder meeting that Tesla is a hardware company as well as a software company.
Ali Daniel Zhang:
To do deep digitization, you have to jump out of the original track
Photo: Shi Xiaobing
At the 2021 Yunqi Conference held this week, Daniel Zhang, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, said that after 12 years of reincarnation, the Yunqi Conference is now "moving towards cloud native, towards a variety of applications based on cloud native, and can be developed and implemented at low cost and high efficiency".
The following is an excerpt from Daniel Zhang's speech:
For Ali, our understanding of cloud computing actually starts from big data, from our application of big data, everyone understands Alibaba's past and present lives, and it also starts from the combination of e-commerce, payment and logistics with our years. The birth of each of Alibaba's businesses is based on our application of big data and is a product of big data drive.
Once upon a time, when AI swept the world, we said what was AI? AI is "Alibaba Intelligence" for Alibaba itself, because each of our businesses is driven by such intelligent capabilities, which has brought about the development of our business. Because of this, we have done a lot of exploration in many areas based on AI, whether it is today's speech, vision, images to natural language, decision intelligence, all aspects of the integration with the business.
With the depth of entry, Ali has found more and more that instead of only solving its own problems, it is better to jump out of its own business and the original track to see what is the common problem facing society and what is the productivity of the entire social foundation, which is also a very important consideration goal for us to define cloud computing as the productivity of the social foundation and vigorously invest in research and development in the middle. Versatility and foundationality, and finally inclusiveness, are very important modes of thinking in the whole process.
Today, we see that in the process of intelligence, software and hardware research and development, we have worked together with industry partners to form a new scene in the entire field of China's digital economy. But I especially want to say that in the face of the future, we especially need to build and make better efforts to build our digital economy and digital technology industry ecology. Although today Ali has a layout and investment in various fields from a technical point of view, it is very important that in each field, we always believe that the open and cooperative ecology is the source of the development of the entire productive forces, and only by facing the world and facing the society in all fields and partners can we work together to create the prosperity of the entire ecology, and can we achieve a broad ecosystem represented by "one cloud and multiple cores" and represented by software integration. This is the basic productive force for the whole of China to move towards the digital economy and to the digital technology-driven, which is the most important guarantee.
For the entire development of science and technology, Ali has its own thinking: on the one hand, it is to do our technology deeply, which can really solve the problem of universality and solve the problem of universality; on the other hand, we definitely do not only solve the business problem of universality and universality. We also always put social responsibility, social responsibility, and the creation of social value on the surface of our problem thinking. In this sense, today we explore the exploration that can be done in addition to the commercial and industrial progress brought about by scientific and technological progress, which is also a very important direction of efforts in recent years.
Alibaba's understanding of Puhui actually has two aspects: on the one hand, how to enable more participants and technology workers to join us as contributors to digital technology. The first point of inclusiveness today is to be able to build an infrastructure around the cloud and big data, so that more technology workers and technology partners can join us in becoming contributors to the power of science and technology.
On the other hand, we hope that more ordinary people will not only become contributors, but also beneficiaries. In the face of the twin world of the future where digital and physical worlds are highly integrated, we need to constantly stand at the forefront of science and technology, exert the spirit of exploration, and constantly create the future, which requires a lot of imagination. Once upon a time, when we talked about cloud computing and the use of big data, we all thought of replacing the original world, and what we thought of was because there was such a generational replacement, so that human society could take a step forward. For Alibaba, we hope that in such a practice, we will continue to discover new and unknown worlds, and use our imagination to not only make the original world and the original technology better, but also to define new technologies, create a new future, and work with everyone to develop a new digital world.
(Source: China Economic Network)
Zhou Hongyi:
Lidar will drop to cabbage prices within three years
Photo: Deng Pan
Internet car manufacturing is in the ascendant. This week, 360 Group 2.9 billion yuan into the news of Nezha Automobile caused market concern, 360 Group founder, chairman Zhou Hongyi said in an exclusive interview, hope that more Internet companies to participate in the car, at the same time, he believes that after intelligence, the network security and physical security of the car will become inseparable, need to be paid attention to.
The following is an excerpt from Zhou Hongyi's interview:
At present, the ability of domestic cars and joint venture cars has been made between Bozhong, the gap in technology has disappeared, China and other countries are standing on the same running line, and even in the field of charging technology, we have taken a half-position ahead. China has the world's largest supply chain of batteries and motors. At the same time, there is also the support of various raw materials such as rare earths, and the source of the future intelligent car-related industrial chain was also born in China, which makes the domestic intelligent car field compared with Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea, and is not backward.
In the future, whether the smart car experience is good or not will not depend entirely on the technology of the car itself, but also on cloud computing, Internet of Things, 5G communications, big data, artificial intelligence, etc. If Chinese Internet companies can export digital technology to traditional car companies, then China's auto industry will have great digital and intelligent advantages in the future in the face of the auto industry in the United States, Japan and Europe, so there are opportunities for overtaking in curves or lanes change to overtake in China.
Only when more enterprises come in and invest technology and talents in this industry, then China's intelligent automotive industry can develop faster and change faster than foreign counterparts. If there are more Internet companies to participate in car manufacturing, it will be a great thing for the development of China's automobile industry and the development of China's advanced manufacturing industry. I believe that in the future, China's intelligent manufacturing and intelligent networked automobile industry will be able to lead the world under the guarantee of safety and the joint efforts of China's manufacturing and Internet industries.
Let's not see smart cars as just a separate revolution in the automotive industry, but as a genetic recombination of the automotive industry, the energy industry, the digital industry, and the Internet industry. At the same time, smart cars are also a consumer revolution, the current smart car cost is the highest is lidar, but I believe that in the next three years, Huawei and other companies will be able to make lidar to cabbage price.
According to Moore's Law, in the future, all devices related to electronics, chips, and electrical appliances can be doubled in performance every 18-24 months, or the price will be reduced by half under the premise of unchanged performance. Therefore, the smart cars of about 100,000 yuan in the future can also be equipped with assisted driving and automatic driving systems that are not inferior to luxury fuel vehicles.
By exerting the power of science and technology, subverting the business model and user experience of traditional fuel vehicles, in fact, it is possible to make intelligent new energy vehicles with reasonable prices and affordable to the people, and can also ensure its driving performance, riding comfort, intelligent cockpit human-computer interaction and automatic driving system, which are not inferior to other brands of cars with several times or more than a dozen times the price.
Automobile intelligence and networking not only subvert the automobile architecture, but also change the security, so that the network security and physical security of the car become inseparable, and network security problems can directly lead to physical security consequences. There are four main aspects: 1. 2. The number of codes has increased, and the number of security defects in in-vehicle systems has proliferated; 2. The Internet of Everything increases the attack surface, and hidden dangers in the cloud will threaten vehicle security; 4. The degree of networking of car companies continues to increase, and the supply chain security risks are huge; Big data drives intelligence, and data security risks climb.
(Source: Sina Technology)
Jiyuan Capital Fu Jixun: Invest in hard technology now,
Much like the previous Battle of the Thousand Regiments
Source: Respondents
Fu Jixun, managing partner of GGV Jiyuan Capital, recently shared his many years of investment experience around hard technology in an exclusive interview with the media. He believes that the investment technology track must first understand this industry, and this "understanding" is to understand technology on the one hand; on the other hand, to understand entrepreneurs. In addition, Fu Jixun said that if there is one area of investment that can be continuously strengthened, it is scale, and with scale, it can accompany and empower invested enterprises for a long time.
The following is an excerpt from Fu Jixun's interview:
If we look at the development of innovation and entrepreneurship in China in the past 20 years, especially in the previous fifteen or sixteen years, the core of the success of the major innovative start-up companies is still centered on the business model. From the early PC era to the mobile Internet, the development of these underlying communication technologies has made the efficiency of information transmission higher and higher, faster and faster, and has also lowered the threshold, which has brought business opportunities and created large Internet companies from BAT to Didi, Meituan, and Byte. Although there have been technological innovations during this period, such as our investment in smart device solution provider AAC Technologies in 2003, which is one of the world's top companies in acoustic components, such companies were few before 2018.
However, in the past few years, China has gone from the incremental market to the stock market, and the competition of investment institutions has also entered the competition of the stock market. At the same time, digitalization is also shifting from the C-end to the B-end, which is because the user side needs the enterprise to better carry out digital operations in the process of deep digitization, which creates various opportunities in software and hardware. On the other hand, geopolitical changes are also a major impact, causing many companies to rethink the stability and predictability of supply chains. In addition, the Chinese dividend has reached a new stage, requiring robots to replace labor. The superposition of these reasons has driven the development of intelligence, hardware and technology in the Chinese market in the past 2-3 years.
When investors go to technological innovation, they must first understand this a little, so that there is a framework to judge what is technological innovation and how to measure value. This "understanding" is the premise of discovering value, and it is also very important that entrepreneurs require investors to have a common language and form a resonance with him. Especially for today's entrepreneurs, having money is not the most important thing, what matters is the ecological resources behind it, the brand endorsement and whether the investors can really resonate with him. As an investor, do you understand him and recognize his vision? All of this requires a certain understanding of technology. I don't necessarily have to agree, I often come up with different ideas from the founder, but he can feel that you understand the big logic of the technology, the suggestions you make are valuable and helpful, and then he is more likely to choose to work with you.
But one thing to be clear is that our decisions don't revolve around the technology itself, not around the tech content of the startup as a whole, but around what kind of value you can create. Technology is only a means for entrepreneurs to do things, a barrier, but it is not absolute value I once talked to Robin Li that Baidu has a lot of technology, many of which are very low-level and very core. For example, around AI, Baidu's ability in all aspects is very strong, but Robin Li and I said that we need to have products, and with products, you have a gripper, and you can make technology valuable. Value is reflected in the product, not in technology. So, what is a product? What can be consumed is the product, and people are willing to pay for the value, which is really valuable.
For example, in the past two years, the enterprise service track is very hot, and SaaS companies will pay attention to the annual recurring revenue, which is to measure the value. SaaS company's product may be a set of software, or it may be software + hardware, I am concerned about how much money SMEs spend on your product, and to what extent it is inseparable from this product. The more inseparable, the more valuable this product is.
When investing, no one can say that they never take a detour. Investing is a judgment of the future, and it can go wrong with the team, with the trend, with the industry, with the company.
Any market has a cycle, and I think investing in hard technology now is a lot like it was before the Thousand Regiments War. At that time, who knew that the US group would finally run out? It is only after a period of time that we have the ability to make a judgment, including the fact that new consumption is facing the same situation now, which is still premature.
Several of our colleagues in our team are now systematically analyzing in-vehicle opportunities. We are looking at which products and technologies need to be accumulated as the low-carbon economy deepens. For example, batteries, which require a certain amount of management and processing power, have recently been looking at thin-film heating related companies. Another example is chips, semiconductors, if the car is going to become more and more intelligent, it needs a lot of sensors, radar, cameras, which means that a lot of information will be generated, and chips that have the ability to process this information are needed. We invested in a company that specializes in visual processing.
I think we don't actually have any so-called barriers in our industry, or it's very difficult to have barriers. The investment industry is theoretically a service industry, as investors, we fight to judge a trend, a project, and then do a variety of empowerment.
If I really want to talk about barriers, I think the only thing that can be continuously strengthened is scale. Because for a startup, it wants not only money, but also long-term companionship and empowerment. I can't say that scale is necessarily a barrier, but the scale effect has advantages that it is difficult to replace. Another important thing to consider when considering scale is whether scale and ability can match. The competencies I'm talking about include teams, decision-making mechanisms, organizational structures, etc. After more money, it may be invested randomly, the trade-offs are not good, and the return must be bad. Therefore, we are still strengthening ourselves in terms of organizational structure and team configuration.
(Source: 36Kr)
Elon Musk:
There is no limit to Tesla's purchase of batteries
In the early morning of October 21, Beijing time, Tesla released the third quarter of this year's financial report, delivering a total of 240,000 vehicles, although the revenue of 13.76 billion US dollars fell short of market expectations, but the gross profit margin of its automotive business exceeded 30%. In addition, the 4680 battery is also about to be mass-produced. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the annual shareholders' meeting held recently that it will achieve annual sales of 20 million vehicles in 2030, more than 100,000 employees worldwide, and achieve sales of 1,500 GWh of energy storage business per year. In addition, he also expressed his views on hot spots such as autonomous driving and sustainable energy.
Here's an excerpt from Musk's speech at the Annual Meeting:
I think over time, all manufacturers will make electric cars, and eventually all manufacturers will make self-driving cars. Tesla is open to licensing (self-driving technology) autonomy because autonomy will be a very important tool for saving lives and preventing injuries, and we don't want to keep it to ourselves. Our goal is to make cars as cheap as possible. We see tremendous cost pressures in the supply chain, so we have to raise vehicle prices at least temporarily, but we do want to actually lower prices over time and make them more affordable.
We will need a large number of batteries, which will be combined with the batteries provided by our suppliers. Some suppliers asked me directly if they would be out. I said no, you want to sell as much as you want, and then supply us, as long as it is our affordable price, we will not limit the purchase amount.
The pillars of a sustainable energy future are basically solar and wind, which are the main ones. This is followed by fixed batteries and electric vehicles. If you have all three, you have a sustainable energy future as long as the sun shines.
There's a giant fusion reactor in the sky that can provide shocking power to the Planet just by catching a little sunlight, and only a small amount of land is needed to power the Planet. A few hundred miles of solar panels will power the entire United States, so it's not that hard. We have a plan to reduce the cost per kWh of batteries, and our suppliers have a similar plan. It's really a complement to our suppliers.
I think the fundamental benefit of Tesla is that it accelerates sustainable energy development, which is a fundamental way of thinking about Tesla's value. We already have three new factories, the Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory has done a really great job, and the current production volume exceeds the Fremont Gigafactory, so I want to give the Tesla China team some applause. It's the best quality, the lowest cost, and at the same time the least hassle, so it's great.
We will also continue to expand our business in Fremont and hope to increase production in Fremont by 50%. Fremont is still where we make all the Model S and Model X. But for high-volume cars, at least in the consumer's continent production is reasonable, otherwise transportation is not conducive to environmental protection, so the basic idea is to let the vast majority of vehicles at least near the customer (production).
Battery material is certainly recyclable, while burning gas is not. Carbon dioxide is an extremely stable molecule. The atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide, I don't know for billions of years, it's extremely stable. So, sometimes people worry about methane, but we don't have to worry too much about methane. Methane quickly breaks down into carbon dioxide. Methane is not a stable molecule, carbon dioxide is very stable. You can think of batteries as essentially high-grade ores, from which lithium and nickel are derived. Tesla has started recycling, and the power company will also recycle because recycling batteries is basically worth it.
Tesla is considered to be a car company, but tesla is both a hardware company and a software company. We also make chips, and we design fully autonomous reasoning computers. We are designing a training computer that will be able to become what we consider to be the most efficient neural network training computer in the world to date.
Artificial intelligence will be a very important part of the future, and autonomous driving is clearly one of the functions. My view of ARTIFICIAL intelligence is also complex, we have to beware of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, it is a danger. But either way, AI is evolving, so we can do our best to make sure it's a good AI.
(Source: Boss Simulcast)