Zhang Shuxin, 1963, Fushun, Liaoning.
Zhang Shuxin was admitted to the Department of Applied Chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China in 1981. For a chemistry girl, the person she admires most is the great Marie Curie. Her dream in college was to be Marie Curie in China.
But to be a great chemist like Marie Curie, one must have the utmost patience and endure the ultimate loneliness and loneliness. Zhang Shuxin, a big grinning northeastern girl, became the first female president of the student union of the school when she was in college, and the leader was a group of heroes, who was dealing with all kinds of people and so on. Asking her to calm down and shake the bottle in the lab, she found that she couldn't do it at all.
When she graduated, she asked her heart: What am I going to do in this life?
Like a philosopher, after torturing her soul, she suddenly realized: In my life, I want to do what I like to do independently, and only by releasing my soul and letting my mind be free can this life be worthless.
I have to say that Zhang Shuxin, who is only in his twenties, can figure out this philosophical problem of life that many people have not been able to think through in their lifetime, which is very, very remarkable.
Her life is destined to be wonderful. Because, a person who works honestly and step by step, how can life not be wonderful.
After Zhang Shuxin graduated, he went to China Science Daily as a reporter. As the president of the former university student union, he has super social skills and is a promising job as a journalist. She proved with her strength that she was the best reporter in the newspaper.
After the newspaper proved her worth, restless, she jumped to the High-tech Enterprise Bureau of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to engage in corporate strategy research. In the course of her work, she witnessed countless corporate myths in Zhongguan Village, and many young people who had nothing became millionaires through struggle.
Zhang Shuxin could no longer sit still. She knew that she had to go out and be the bravest of the tidemakers in the great waves of the times.
In 1991, Zhang Shuxin opened a planning company called Tianshu. When she was the president of the student council in college, she successfully planned many activities and was highly praised by teachers and students. Opening a planning company, Zhang Shuxin once again brought into full play the strengths cultivated during his college years.
Her most successful planning case was to join hands with the China Cancer Foundation to invite Cui Jian to perform. Cui Jian, China's first generation of rock musicians, a song "Nothing", made him famous. But then he was banned for three years. And that charity performance, which was invited by the Cancer Foundation, made him popular all over China again. The event was a great success.
Zhang Shuxin earned the first pot of gold through a number of successful planning activities.
Zhang Shuxin can always walk at the forefront of the times and seize business opportunities.
Soon after, she found that the paging industry was just beginning, which was a very good opportunity to enter immediately and decisively.
At that time, the paging industry was a profiteering industry, and Zhang Shuxin did 7 pagers in Shandong in one breath, which allowed her to earn millions in a very short period of time.
And when she found that the paging industry had changed from a profiteering industry to a low-profit industry, she decisively withdrew.
She is like a swordsman with a unique martial art, killing into the crowd, the sword light flashing, the whole body retreating, dashing and flowing.
Like Ma Yun, Zhang Shuxin's contact with the Internet is also a trip to the United States.
At the end of 1994, Zhang Shuxin and her husband Jiang Zuoxian went to the United States to study.
One day, at a classmate's house, she saw an address book with an E-mail address printed on it, and learned about an Internet access company called AOL in the United States. This is Zhang Shuxin's first exposure to the Internet. She dimly felt that the Internet was an opportunity.
Played in the United States for three or four months. By then, Mr. Yang and David Ferro had founded Yahoo, the largest portal in the United States. Everybody is talking about the internet.
What finally made her up her mind to return to China to do the Internet was that in one night, she received calls from more than 30 classmates one after another, and when she asked, she learned that these classmates found her on a BBS in the class. The phone bombing that night changed Zhang Shuxin's life.
At the beginning of 1995, Zhang Shuxin returned to China and took out his cash savings of 7 million yuan. In order to quickly seize the high ground of China's Internet, she borrowed another 8 million yuan from the bank.
Compared with Jack Ma's 100,000 yuan of start-up funds in China's Yellow Pages, Zhang Shuxin's 15 million yuan of start-up capital is indeed a big deal. If Ma Yun is a small shrimp rice, that Zhang Shuxin is a big shark.
She quickly registered a company whose name, for Internet veterans at the time, still sounds deafening to this day.
It is Yinghaiwei.
I had never been able to figure out why it was called "Yinghaiwei", but later I learned that it was a transliteration of the Information Highway, which means information highway.
Zhang Shuxin continued to exert her planning expertise and planned a series of activities, which soon gained great popularity for Yinghaiwei. She quickly became the leader of the early Internet in the country, and everyone followed her.
She did a series of actions to usher in this new era:
She told everyone over and over again in the media: The information industry is an important opportunity for the Chinese nation to rise in the world;
She opened the first private science and education center, where everyone can use the Yinghaiwei network for free and learn online knowledge for free;
She provided the "China Popular Information Expressway" exhibition area to the China Science and Technology Museum free of charge;
She cooperates with Beijing Library to provide Beijing Library Bibliographic Inquiry on the Yinghaiwei website;
During the Atlanta Olympics, she opened a news information channel from Atlanta to Beijing for news organizations;
……
As China's first ISP (Network Service Provider) company, Yinghaiwei carried out a bombardment of Internet popularization among the Chinese people at that time. It can be said that Zhang Shuxin is an outstanding Internet enlightener.
When the domestic Internet was just emerging, many Internet companies held high the banner of "free" from the beginning, as to how to make money, when to make money, it is not within the scope of consideration at all.
Zhang Shuxin is different, she is an extremely clever businessman, from the beginning, Yinghaiwei website began to charge: every user who landed on the website had to pay a network access fee when registering. This is a borrowing from the "American Online" profit model.
This ensures that the website has a steady stream of cash flowing in. So, after more than a year of operation, the company is still profitable even though the operating expenses are very large. This is what is meant to be remarkable.
If zhang shuxin's own funds have been used to develop on a rolling basis, Yinghaiwei is likely to live longer.
But Zhang Shuxin has a dream, she wants to use larger funds to build a physical network alongside China Telecom.
Therefore, in October 1996, she accepted a 50 million yuan venture capital investment from ZTE Group and Beijing Trust, accounting for 60% of the equity investment, ZTEFa Holdings. The equity of Zhang Shuxin and his wife was quickly diluted, accounting for only 26%.
Two years later, the hidden danger of a huge personnel earthquake was buried.
Zhang Shuxin was obviously unaware of the existence of that hidden danger.
Instead, she was excited. Because she has more funds, she can let go of her ambitions.
Zhang Shuxin is Zhang Shuxin, with extraordinary courage. After getting a huge investment, her first big move was to set up a huge billboard at the corner of the street at the southern end of Baiyi Road in Zhongguancun, Beijing, with an investment of 180,000 yuan:
"Chinese how far it is from the information highway – 1500 meters to the north."
It can be said unceremoniously that the most important reason why Zhang Shuxin and Yinghaiwei can still be praised and respected by the first generation of Chinese Internet practitioners until now is this advertisement played by Zhang Shuxin.
This is genius advertising! Its boldness is like the spring thunder rolling through the sky, like the aircraft carrier sailing in the sea, like the red flag of hunting and flying on Mount Everest, like the train on the mangyuan with a long whistle.
It is like a lightning bolt that illuminates the sky of China's Internet and leaves a shocking resonance in the hearts of every Internet practitioner at the beginning.
Zhang Shuxin's status as an Internet godmother has since been established.
She became the leader of all internet people worshipped.
Zhang Shuxin continued to climb the peaks one after another.
Negroponte's visit to China allowed Zhang Shuxin's prestige to reach an unprecedented height.
Negroponte, born in 1943, is an American professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, who has been advocating for many years the use of digital technology to promote the transformation of social life. One of his books, Digital Survival, has been ranked number one on the New York Times book list for weeks in a row. It was this book that laid the foundation for Negroponte's international mastership in the field of computer and communication technology. In China, he is known as a "futurist."
The Chinese government attaches great importance to the visit of such a master with a huge international reputation. And the person responsible for receiving Negroponte's China trip was Yinghaiwei.
Yinghaiwei spent three months preparing for Negroponte's visit to China.
On February 28, 1997, Negroponte officially visited China and attended a lecture on the information revolution organized for him, with Negroponte as the keynote speaker.
The report meeting will be arranged next to Yinghaiwei Company.
The report invited 8 ministerial-level officials to the scene, which shows the high standard.
Such a high-level information revolution report meeting naturally attracted the attention of hundreds of Chinese media.
As the president of the organizer Yinghaiwei Company, Zhang Shuxin was the most star-studded star at the report meeting, except for Negroponte.
All media reports, without exception, mention two key words: Yinghaiwei and Zhang Shuxin.
Life must be full of joy.
The spring breeze is proud of the horseshoe disease.
Unlimited scenery in front of you.
If a "darling" must be selected in the early days of the domestic Internet, it must be Zhang Shuxin.
No one expected that at the Negroponte report meeting, in addition to Zhang Shuxin, another person, who did not spend a dime, also seized the attention of the media flash.
He cleverly borrowed the power of Negroponte and Zhang Shuxin to push himself to the forefront of the Chinese Internet and became one of the leaders of the new generation of the Internet.
He is Zhang Chaoyang, the founder of Sohu.
Regarding the story of Zhang Chaoyang, we will tell it in detail later. In Zhang Shuxin's biography, Zhang Chaoyang can only make a cameo appearance and show his face first.
Mount Everest is the highest peak in the world and has attracted countless climbers to conquer it for many years.
On September 30, 2019, a movie starring Wu Jing, "The Climber", was released the day before the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. I went to see it. Although I have seen some photos of climbers climbing Mount Everest before, when I first saw those climbers in the movie, I was deeply shocked.
Every mountaineer spends more than ten hours, through countless hardships, difficulties and dangers, and risks losing his life at any time, step by step to climb Mount Everest. It is said that after actually climbing Mount Everest, you can only stay at the top for a few minutes. Then, start going downhill.
For many people, he once reached the peak of his life, and after that, he began to go downhill rapidly.
It's not human beings who can get it back. That is the "destiny" of a person.
The fate of this thing, to be honest, is very vain; But it just stands there so coldly that you can only obey.
Zhang Shuxin's fate, when he reached the peak of his life in 2017, began to fall sharply at the speed of a parachute. No one could save her.
Many Internet practitioners, before getting venture capital, can still break their fingers and live a life of meticulous calculation. And once you get the venture capital, it immediately expands. In order to realize their grand Internet dream, they began to burn money.
Zhang Shuxin, as the first person on the Internet in China, cannot escape this doomed "curse". Once caught in this spell, the result is 99.99% of the way back, which is a dead end.
After Zhang Shuxin got the money, he dreamed of making a people's network independent of China Telecom. And this one requires huge funds to burn.
You can imagine a scene where there is a stove in front of you, which can only be burned with firewood, but a man throws a lot of money into it. Flames flew high, spitting out blue flames. You're in pain while the man burns and laughs. After laughing, you see him start crying. Because the money burned out, and the stove was extinguished.
At the end of 1997, Yinghaiwei, who was marching forward, suddenly slowed down. Its feet were lame, as if it had been slashed several times, and blood was flowing. Because just in June, the nationwide price of access to the network fell sharply, and subsequently, Yinghaiwei's monthly income plummeted to 300,000 yuan. For Yinghaiwei, which burns millions of dollars a month, this amount of money is not enough to plug the gap between its teeth.
Zhang Shuxin really felt the arrival of the cold winter.
From the feverish summer to the bitter winter, it seems to be such a blink of an eye.
In his Christmas diary, Zhang Shuxin wrote a rather literary text:
“...... Late at night, we had just returned home from the countryside, and there was a heavy fog outside the window. On our way home, all the cars were slowing down due to the fog. The rear lights of the front car reflect the direction of the rear car with a weak penetrating force. When we encountered a fork in the road, the car in front of us turned a corner, our car walked in the front, the vision was confused, we were fully focused and carefully groping forward, followed by a convoy accompanying the car.
"I can't help but think: Isn't this scene exactly what Yinghaiwei is today?"
In just over a year, Zhang Shuxin burned more than 50 million yuan of investment funds cleanly, and lost 10 or 20 million.
The majority shareholder ZTE was furious.
Investing money in you is what makes you money, not what makes you lose money.
Until this time, the arrogant Zhang Shuxin had not realized her danger.
Everything is going on in secret. The surface is calm and calm, and the undercurrent is undercurrent.
June 22, 1998, a day that Zhang Shuxin will never forget in his life.
At 10:00 a.m., the ninth meeting of the first board of directors of Yinghaiwei was held in Xingfa Building.
According to the usual practice, Zhang Shuxin introduced the company's recent operations.
At 12 o'clock, ZTEfa, the controlling shareholder of Yinghaiwei, suddenly proposed to change the debt into equity, and the shareholding ratio rose to 75%. Subsequently, the number of directors of ZTE was increased by 3.
The articles of association of the company clearly stipulate that the selection of the general manager of the company should be decided by more than two-thirds of the directors.
That is to say, at this time, two-thirds of the board members are already ZTE. It can appoint or dismiss general managers at any time.
Waiting for Zhang Shuxin, there is only one result: resignation.
In the morning, when she made a report, she was full of confidence and proposed the company's next development action.
Life is so full of accidents.
At 3 p.m., Zhang Shuxin walked out of Yinghaiwei, which she had created with her own hands. She glanced back at the company, her eyes filled with grief, anger, sadness, and grievances.
I was the founder of Yinghaiwei, but I was kicked out of the company. Why is that?
Zhang Shuxin may never have thought that as a founder, he would actually be kicked out of the company he created.
However, this is the cruel business society.
When you accept venture capital and enjoy the thrill of venture capital, you must also be mentally prepared for the expulsion of capital one day.
Even if you are proficient in equity design, how about it? The times force you into a corner, and no matter how good the equity design, you have to give way to the interests of the whole.
Of course, after Zhang Shuxin left Yinghaiwei, his life was not in a slump. Her tough life is as good as ever. She went on to start new companies and entered the venture capital and real estate industries. She used her ingenuity to still make a lot of money, and her career was still very successful.
However, Yinghaiwei's article, from her life, is considered to be a turning point.
She also said goodbye to the Internet.
The Internet is an industry with the fastest iterative update, and in a short period of time, a number of new Internet heroes have emerged, such as Zhang Zhidong, Zhang Chaoyang, Ding Lei, Li Yanhong, Ma Huateng, Chen Tianqiao, Zhou Hongyi, and Ma Yun. One by one, they were like comets, shining with dazzling light. People's eyes are gradually attracted to them.
Zhang Shuxin slowly disappeared from people's minds.
For the new generation of Chinese netizens after the 90s or 00s, each of them knows Jack Ma, Ma Huateng, and Robin Li. And when Zhang Shuxin is mentioned, their eyes will look confused. It's an extremely unfamiliar name.
She really disappeared.
However, the seeds of enlightenment that she and her Yinghaiwei sowed on China's early Internet will always be undefeated in the annals of Internet history. Let us thank Zhang Shuxin.
Time is back in the cold winter of 1995.
Ma Yun and He Yibing met Zhang Shuxin in Yinghaiwei. Zhang Shuxin sat behind the large desk in the luxurious office and talked with Ma Yun and He Yibing for half an hour. Ma Yun originally wanted to negotiate some cooperation with Zhang Shuxin. However, for this short man from Hangzhou, Zhang Shuxin was not interested in the slightest. She briefly talked about some of her thoughts on the development of the Internet. However, Ma Yun did not understand at all.
Because Zhang Shuxin was too busy (understandable), Ma Yun just talked roughly with Zhang Shuxin for a while and then quit.
Walking out of Yinghaiwei, Ma Yun said to He Yibing: "If someone on the Internet must die, she Zhang Shuxin must have died earlier than me." ”
In a word.
At that time, Zhang Shuxin was far ahead of most people in terms of thinking and strategy. Her core team, employees, and investors didn't understand what she was up to. She is like a philosopher, the words she says and the things she does make people feel unfathomable.
The martyrdom of the Internet has become an inevitable end.
To do the Internet is not to float to the sky, but to fall to the ground.
Years later, two frustrated people on the Internet got together.
One of them, of course, is Zhang Shuxin. And the other guy, I say it, you might be surprised.
This person is He Yibing, the co-founder of China's Yellow Pages, and Ma Yun's former most important partner.
He Yibing was the one who had been closest to great success. If he hadn't broken up with Jack Ma, he would no doubt now be Alibaba's second-in-command. Even Cai Chongxin must be ranked behind him. He will have hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth.
But he is now a lonely man.
Zhang Shuxin is one of the founding members of Alxa. When the Alxa Zhejiang Center was founded, Zhang Shuxin and He Yibing met.
This was their second meeting.
He Yibing mentioned the cold winter season in 1995, when he and Ma Yun met Zhang Shuxin in Yinghaiwei.
But Zhang Shuxin was completely unimpressed. It is no wonder that at that time, Ma Yun and He Yibing were just no-name pawns, and Zhang Shuxin usually met with big-man-level figures, and there was no impression and forgivable.
The two people talked a lot, mainly about the Internet past in those years, and they were very emotional.
They drank cup after cup, as if at this time, in this scene, only wine could express all their sad emotions.
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