The "hidden and unrestrained" of capital power | devoted to the life sciences, huang Zheng looked for the next sea of stars

Recently, the news that Liu Qiangdong stepped down as CEO of Jingdong Group once set off a hot discussion, making the market's attention turn to Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, who had been retired for a long time.

In July 2020, Huang Zheng stepped down as CEO of Pinduoduo, and in March 2021, he further resigned as chairman and was succeeded by Chen Lei, co-founder of Pinduoduo.

After a year, Huang Zheng, who was originally low-key, seems to have completely retreated, and it is difficult to find news. Could it be that Huang Zheng really chose retirement at the age of 40 like his brother Duan Yongping?

Or is it to touch the stones on the road in 10 years, and do the research he aspires to in the fields of food science and life sciences?

However, it is a pity that after Ali and Jingdong completed the secondary listing of Hong Kong stocks, Pinduoduo, which was once one of the three giants of e-commerce, still has no news of secondary listing.

The reclusive Huang Zheng

Recalling Huang Zheng's retreat, it also made the outside world in an uproar.

In March 2021, in the 2021 annual letter to shareholders, Huang Zheng announced that the board of directors had approved his resignation as chairman and was succeeded by Chen Lei, co-founder and CEO of Pinduoduo.

At that time, in addition to Ma Yun's retirement in 2019, Zhang Yiming, Su Hua, Liu Qiangdong, Wang Xiaochuan and other first-generation Founders of the Internet still insisted on being on the front line, not to mention zhang Chaoyang, Ding Lei, Liang Jianzhang and other older generation Internet people who are still active in the business jianghu.

This time, After Huang Zheng is determined to retire and no longer serve as the chairman and the management position of Pinduoduo, Huang Zheng's 1:10 super voting rights will also be invalid, and the voting rights of the shares under his name will be entrusted to the board of directors of Pinduoduo to make decisions by voting, and he personally promises that the shares under his personal name will continue to be locked and not sold in the next 3 years.

Many people believe that there are two people who have a great influence and touch on Huang Zheng, one is Huang Zheng's brother and friend Duan Yongping, who chose to retire at the age of 40; the other is Huang Zheng's previous boss when he worked at Google, Larry Page, who also chose to hand over the baton to young people when he was 42 years old.

It is undeniable that the environment has a great impact on people. Huang Zheng also has the right to make his own choices, but the choice of public figures often has a certain impact on the surrounding things. For example, Huang Zheng retired, and some people think that they are not optimistic about Pinduoduo.

In fact, Huang Zheng is very optimistic about Pinduoduo, he believes that Pinduoduo is still very young, there are still very thick, long snow slopes, and there is still a relatively long period of high-speed growth space. At the same time, he also believes that Pinduoduo should not be a tool to highlight personal ability, nor should it have too much personal color.

Huang Zheng believes that if we want to ensure its high-speed and high-quality development in 10 years, then some exploration is now opportune.

As the founder, Huang Zheng wants to jump out and touch the stones on the road 10 years later. He realized that the traditional competition based on scale and efficiency had its inevitable problems, and that to change it would have to look for answers in the core technology and its underlying theories.

"Mud on the legs" of Pinduoduo

Founded in April 2015, Pinduoduo is a growing Internet company in Shanghai.

Unlike the first generation of e-commerce such as Taobao and JD.com, which have experienced the transfer from the computer terminal to the mobile terminal, Pinduoduo was born in the mobile era, and it started with a retail platform for agricultural products, and self-proclaimed itself as a new e-commerce company with "mud on the legs".

Pinduoduo started with agricultural products, and in April 2015, Huang Zheng founded a fruit self-operated e-commerce company to spell out good goods. In September 2015, Huang Zheng incubated the e-commerce platform Pinduoduo from his game company (Pinduoduo's parent company - Shanghai Dream Technology Co., Ltd.).

A year later, Pinduoduo merged with Pinduoduo to become the current Pinduoduo. After the merger in 2017, Pinduoduo transformed from self-operated to platform, entered a period of fission outbreak, and broke through by the WeChat ecosystem.

When everyone felt that the pattern of China's e-commerce had been determined and the history books had been written, Pinduoduo was born, and in just three years, it gathered more than 300 million users and more than one million sellers, and established a shopping model of "spelling" that had not been used by JD.com and Taobao.

Even Huang Zheng had imagined ahead of time that the "metaverse" side of Pinduoduo was a multi-dimensional space that closely integrated the network virtual space and the real world.

It will be a combination of "Costco" and "Disney" (a combination of cost-effective products and entertainment) powered by a distributed network of intelligent agents rather than the popular centralized super-brain AI system.

It not only efficiently matches information, but also constantly simulates the group mood of the crowd in the entire space, and tries to adjust the entire space to make the group experience more happy.

It is a pity that Huang Zheng left Pinduoduo prematurely, otherwise the enlightenment of the concept of the meta-universe in 2021 may give him more inspiration and enlightenment, and Pinduoduo will do the meta-universe or not a fantasy.

Although the metaverse is very hot, Huang Zhengzhi is not here.

He said that when he was a child, he dreamed of becoming a scientist, and he liked chemistry in middle school, and he wanted to try to combine his favorite chemistry in middle school, computers in college, and business management that he studied on the job, and maybe he could do something interesting again.

Re-embark on the entrepreneurial path

Zhang Chaoyang of Sohu is also doing interesting things.

Since Zhang Chaoyang launched the English class live broadcast "Zhang Chaoyang's English Class" in 2016, this series has accumulated thousands of shows so far and has been tepid. Until the end of last year, he began to teach physics classes on Sohu Video Live, which attracted widespread attention from the outside world.

As we all know, Zhang Chaoyang graduated from the Department of Physics of Tsinghua University and was admitted to the Li Zhengdao Scholarship to study in the United States in the same year. After receiving his Ph.D. from MIT in 1993, he continued his postdoctoral research at MIT.

Therefore, lecturing should also be a hobby of Zhang Chaoyang, from English classes to physics classes, which can not only satisfy his desire to lecture, but also stand for Sohu's video live broadcast.

What does Huang Zheng think is interesting?

In a 2021 letter to shareholders, Huang Zheng revealed that he wants to do some research in the field of food science and life science.

The original intention that drove him to enter food science and life sciences was Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo, which started in agriculture, has made a contribution to the agricultural field in the past few years mainly in the circulation field, and benefits farmers and consumers by improving the efficiency of the circulation field and optimizing the middle of the two ends.

Huang Zheng believes that after all, the improvement of circulation efficiency cannot qualitatively enhance the added value of agricultural products, nor can it substantially improve the level of physical health.

He wanted to go deeper and deeper, step by step, to see what he could do.

Huang Zheng also made a number of ideas for this. For example, through the control of the method of planting agricultural products, is it possible to reliably and effectively control the content of potentially harmful heavy metals such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, etc., and at the same time to carry out controllable and standardized improvement of their possible beneficial trace elements?

For example, if we can have a thorough understanding of the changes and roles of different plant proteins and animal proteins after ingestion into the human body, and then synthesize and produce alternatives to meat through plant proteins, is it possible that this new vegetarian chicken 2.0 will become a healthier and greener stable supply?

Further into the study of protein structure and traits in the human body, is it possible to further develop protein robots along the path of the molecular machines of the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, which can enter the blood vessels of the human brain to dredge and avoid stroke?

In 2020, in accordance with the commitment at the time of the IPO, Huang Zheng and the founding team of Pinduoduo donated about 2.37% of the company's shares to establish the "Stars Charity Fund", which aims to promote social responsibility construction and scientific research.

According to public reports, the "Stars Charity Fund" originated from a quote from Vincent Van Gogh, I don't know what in the world is fixed, but I only know that as soon as I see the stars, I will start dreaming.

After further retirement in 2021, the Stars Public Welfare Fund donated to Zhejiang University to set up the "Stars Science Fund of the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University", and donated 100 million US dollars in the first phase of the future in three to five years to promote its basic research and cutting-edge exploration in the intersection of biology, medical treatment, agriculture, food and other fields.

Life sciences are recognized as cutting-edge technologies for the 21st century. Huang Zheng wants to enter the field of food science and life sciences, and there are many old internet opponents alone.

When Wang Xiaochuan stepped down as CEO of Sogou in 2021, he said that he hoped to contribute to the development of life sciences and medicine in the next two decades; Zhang Yiming also disclosed that he would be more involved in the exploration of projects such as brain diseases.

The vision is beautiful, and the reward to the society is also worth seeing. However, Huang Zheng wants to touch the stones on the road 10 years later, and the loneliness and bitterness faced by this kind of scientific research before it lands are by no means inferior to retaking the road of entrepreneurship.

Author: Li Ying