On December 27, Taobao and Jingdong announced on the same day that they would support the refund function only, which was also regarded by the outside world as an important manifestation of learning from Pinduoduo Xi, you must know that the refund without return function has always been one of Pinduoduo's killer features.
It is not difficult to understand the move of Taobao and JD.com, and the recent performance in the US stock market value has already laid the groundwork for all this. At the end of November, China's e-commerce industry ushered in a historic moment, and Pinduoduo, which was once looked down upon, surpassed Alibaba in market value for the first time. As of the close of the U.S. stock market on December 22, Pinduoduo's market value was as high as $192 billion, surpassing Alibaba's $191.7 billion, still ahead of the former big brother.
Pinduoduo's overtaking also made the founders of Ali and Jingdong "unable to sit still". First of all, Ma Yun posted on the intranet, "Congratulations to Pinduoduo on its decision-making, implementation and efforts in the past few years" "I firmly believe that Ali will change, and Ali will change." All great companies are born in the winter. Immediately afterwards, Liu Qiangdong also posted on the intranet, saying, "Now the organization is huge, bloated and inefficient, and it does take time to change." ”
Founded only 8 years ago, Pinduoduo, which has risen outside the Fifth Ring Road, can no longer be ignored by anyone. How did it get to where it is today? All this is inseparable from the layout of the founder Huang Zheng.
Zheng Huang, born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in 1980, graduated from Zhejiang University with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2004, he joined Google in the United States and has accumulated a wealth of experience in the Internet. After returning to China in 2006, he participated in the establishment of Google's China office and contributed to Google's business development in China.
However, Huang Zheng was not satisfied with this. In 2007, he left Google to start his own business, and successively founded an e-commerce agency operation company and a game company, accumulating rich entrepreneurial experience. In April 2015, he founded Pinhaohu, a new model of social e-commerce. This model quickly gained market acceptance, and Pinduoduo rose rapidly.
In September 2016, Pinhaohu and Pinduoduo announced their merger, with Huang Zheng serving as the chairman and CEO of the new company. In July 2018, Pinduoduo went public in the United States. Under the leadership of Huang Zheng, Pinduoduo has continued to grow, ranking among the top three e-commerce platforms in China, and launched the "Three Kingdoms Killing" with Alibaba and JD.com.
In March 2021, Huang Zheng announced his resignation as chairman of Pinduoduo and said that he would combine his personal interests and devote himself to research in the field of food science and life sciences. According to Pinduoduo's partner committee mechanism, Huang Zheng can still maintain actual control of the company, but he no longer participates in the company's daily operations, and it is a fait accompli that he has retreated into the background with a large self-reduction.
Although Huang Zheng has nominally left Pinduoduo, his influence and contributions still cannot be ignored. His entrepreneurial spirit and innovative thinking laid the foundation for Pinduoduo's success, and Pinduoduo continues to grow and develop along the course he set. This is also a testament to the success and sustainability of the business model established by Huang Zheng. Although the rise of Pinduoduo is not unrelated to the current economic environment, there are still many points worth referring to about the development of Pinduoduo.
To this end, we have read Huang Zheng's public speeches, interviews, letters to shareholders, public accounts, etc., and sorted out Huang Zheng's 64 thoughts, which are divided into three parts: business management, entrepreneurial experience, and business thinking, hoping to bring inspiration to you. Following, Enjoy~
1. Business management
1. Consumption upgrading is not to let Shanghainese live the life of Parisians, but to let people in Anqing, Anhui Province have kitchen paper and good fruits to eat.
Only people in Beijing's Fifth Ring Road will say that the third wave of mobile Internet population brings sinking people, and Pinduoduo focuses on the largest number of people in China. The mobile Internet is not necessarily the sinking of users, but the leveling of users, which allows the majority of Chinese people to have the same ability to obtain information and transaction as first-tier cities, which cannot be done in the PC era.
2. Pinduoduo attracts people who pursue high cost performance, he will buy a Hermes bag, and he will also buy a box of mangoes for 9.9 yuan, which has nothing to do with spending power.
Affordability is a universal demand. For example, my mother is already a rich mother, but when she goes out to buy groceries and paper towels, she still cares about the difference of one or two dollars, but she also buys a high-end iPhone.
3. Traditional companies use one, two and three lines to divide people, and Pinduoduo satisfies many aspects of a person.
Low price is just the way Pinduoduo acquires users in stages, Pinduoduo's understanding of cost performance is "always outside the expectations of consumers", the core of Pinduoduo is not cheap, but to meet the user's feeling of taking advantage.
Pinduoduo tries to do the integration of consumption and entertainment, and Pinduoduo's mission is to be more affordable and fun, so that consumers can buy more and more affordable things, and then be happier in the process.
The core competitiveness of Pinduoduo is that the people in the Fifth Ring Road cannot understand it.
4. Pinduoduo will not do procurement and sales, nor will it do logistics and distribution, and upgrading the supply chain is a long-term strategic focus of Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo's ultimate model is to enable the upstream to do mass customized production.
5. The expansion of the whole category is still the traditional traffic logic, and the upgrade is also, and the upgrade is a perspective from which the people in the fifth ring road look down. I don't think Pinduoduo wants to upgrade its brand and want all categories, it's not right, we have to do things that are always matched, so that the right people can buy the right things in the right scene.
6. Pinduoduo does not want to do service e-commerce at present, because physical e-commerce is large enough. Service e-commerce is traffic thinking, that is, traffic is poured in, and different services are used to consume this traffic. The emergence of Pinduoduo is because there is no need for old thinking, and under the people-first thinking, think about what this person needs first.
7. Pinduoduo's assessment of operation employees is the first in retention and repurchase, and the second in GMV.
8. Q: For Pinduoduo, is the only way to meet people's spiritual needs through lottery and red envelopes?
Lucky draws and red envelopes are the simplest forms of entertainment. It's a very good way, but we're really trying to do a fusion of consumption and entertainment.
9、 In fact, today, Pinduoduo is very easy to do such a thing, for example, for users in Beijing, it will make a different interface, for users in the inner ring of Shanghai to make a different interface, according to your geographical location, you will feel tall in an instant, but this is not quite in line with our values, this efficiency is very low, a bit contrived, you are to please and please, what we should do is for the largest number of people what they need, we are not allowing more and more users to have more and more abundant products, our overall algorithm matching is not getting better and better。
It is true that the largest group of people in China are not high-level white-collar workers in our district. But as our capabilities get stronger and stronger, we should gradually get better and better, and eventually we will always cover this part of the users. But we don't have to deliberately make something for the sake of some people, or to cater to a certain kind of public opinion, and say that you see I have this too, this is meaningless. On the contrary, it is precisely because we are like today that there are so many consumers who support us.
10. Our company has a value called: integrity, duty. Especially the "duty" article at the back.
The meaning of duty is to blame oneself. That is, if something goes wrong, the first thing is to find your own problems, not to blame others. The second is that no matter what others do, I have to do my part. For example, in business, for example, if you have obtained a certain monopoly position in a certain part, will you be able to stick to your duty and only make reasonable profits; when there is a disagreement on a matter, or when a cake is to be divided, it is difficult to achieve this fairness, can you first think about doing my duty and not taking advantage of others?
This kind of culture is actually more difficult to establish in the beginning. Because in many cases it is against human nature, from a young age will be born to grab food and this, because everyone is like this, so if you can do your duty, then to a certain extent, you will win more friends, and then more people will gather around, and others will feel that it is a very happy thing to cooperate with you.
11. In a very practical sense, you should not force yourself to the place where it is easy to make mistakes. Like someone asked me before, "What should you do if your business is in crisis?", as if you are driving a car, the speed is very fast 150 kilometers per hour, and there are still 20 meters to hit the wall, you say what can you do? This is no way, so what you can do is to do prevention in advance, before you hit the wall, your speed is only one hour and five kilometers, then you still have a way to brake.
The first and most important thing is that you don't force yourself to that part, don't force to that part, so that you can have a calm space to let yourself have a normal heart. When it comes to our company, there are some very secular standards. First, you have to have enough cash reserves, when you don't have enough cash reserves, you may make decisions that are more inclined to short-term interests and quick success; second, when you are growing at a very fast rate of users, are you able to improve the quality of service, and the investment in the entire back-end can be strengthened, rather than blindly pursuing user growth, rather than waiting until everyone thinks you are not good and then go back to remedy. I think these things are a bit like the philosophical level, but when it comes to reality, it's also very down-to-earth, you just look at the financial statements, look at the user's statements, and you don't let yourself fall into a dilemma.
12. Pinduoduo grows out of the cracks, after it grows out, and it is not easy to open up a space, and it also breaks some existing interests, when you break the existing interest pattern, some people are bound to be uncomfortable, some people are not satisfied. I think it's a result of competition.
On the other hand, as a platform in the process of iterative evolution, in fact, it is difficult for you to achieve 300 million or 400 million people, including millions of merchants, without contradictions, and some contradictions will emerge in the middle.
The fortunate thing about Pinduoduo is that to a certain extent, we have seen the path taken by Ali and other predecessors, and it is possible for us to avoid some of them and alleviate some vicious problems, which is equivalent to a rehearsal by others, which is where we take advantage. But during the whole process, I think it is very difficult for us to jump, and we have to endure the road that others have walked and the suffering they have suffered. It's just possible that I'm learning Xi from other people's experiences, and I can go a little faster, but it's impossible to jump this historical development.
13. I think that in a group of people to continue to maintain a reliable collective, a reliable company, the most important thing may be to have a good culture. What about this good culture, in fact, can the people who founded it at the beginning establish a good value, and in the subsequent development process of the team, they can continue to strengthen this, and use this thing as a cornerstone of sustainable development.
14. From the initial point of view, this "fighting" model, in history, earlier than "fighting", there were various variants of group buying, other "fighting" Wait, in fact, there are a lot of them, and after we do it, there are many, many people doing it, but one thing, when most people are doing this thing, they think that this is a marketing method, this is a way to get traffic, but we feel from the beginning that this is a new way of interaction, which is an entry point from the change of interaction mode on the demand side to the change of organization mode on the back end.
15. The model of Pinduoduo and Taobao is fundamentally different.
Taobao is the traffic logic, the main body is search, and users have to find products by themselves, so a large number of SKUs are needed to meet the long-tail demand. Pinduoduo represents matching, recommending goods to consumers, with limited SKUs, but to meet structural richness.
Taobao has always advocated C2B but can't do it, because Taobao's thousands of people and thousands of faces are equivalent to personalized search, but the search itself is long-tail, and it is difficult to do reverse customization. Pinduoduo, on the other hand, concentrates massive traffic into limited commodities, and then reversely customizes it after it has a scale, which greatly reduces costs. This is the difference between Walmart and Costco, and Pinduoduo's ultimate positioning is to do different Costcos for different groups of people.
Pinduoduo and Taobao are dislocation competition, competing for different scenarios of the same group of users, and dislocation will grow faster. Pinduoduo doesn't want to be a second Ali, the existence of Pinduoduo itself is a pattern, you can say I'm low, say I'm low, but you can't ignore me.
16. For the unknown field, I usually take a more primitive approach, that is, to experience and feel by myself, and use common sense to judge.
Most of the knowledge is useless, and when you encounter a problem, you will solve it. I don't plan for the next five or 10 years, I think about a goal that is far away and a goal that is very near.
The vast majority of people are better than me in the vast majority of ways, and I am better than very few people in very few ways. For example, the ability to isolate external pressure, return to the source of rational thinking, and sometimes the ability to think backwards. In the past, I found that I was not naturally easy to be afraid when many people were afraid, but easy to be pessimistic when the public was enthusiastic.
17. Our team may be 20 years behind the Ali team, I think we may have the opportunity to make a different Ali in the new form of traffic distribution, new user interaction form, and new internationalization.
I'm not just a dream, I've also analyzed, that is, the first thing you see, that is, the entire e-commerce market, its form is actually undergoing a lot of changes, today's successful form of Ali may not be tomorrow's successful form, but people's needs still exist, and will be further amplified, so the potential market is very large. Second, the older generation is always old, and the younger generation or the part of us that is gradually entering middle age will always come to that point, not me, but also some other people of the same age as me, so what I should do is to say that I have a normal heart, do what I should do in a down-to-earth manner, and strive to become the most reliable one in my generation.
18. Our strategy is not to break a monopoly to create a new monopoly, but to break a monopoly to provide a new choice. The rapid growth of Pinduoduo is also the inevitable result of every company in the industry striving for the right to long-term survival.
19. It's like a table of people eating, the table is empty when Taobao just gets up, and when Pinduoduo gets up, there are already 5 people on the table, you have to go up to eat under the table, but the people at the table don't want you to come up, and the people under the table don't want you to go up, I will inevitably suffer a double blow.
20. Pinduoduo is a thing that keeps iterating, its front-end form is particularly simple, so simple that all people feel that they can quickly make an exact same, the most important thing is actually the back-end operation, that is, when to iterate the matching algorithm behind it, when to go to the depth, and what kind of iteration to carry out at what speed.
21. We will not have special changes because of whether we are listed or not, we are doing things seriously around the needs of consumers every day, and we will not say that suddenly there is a code in the stock market that seems to be different, or that Huang Zheng has a market value on his head, has this person changed?
In fact, nothing has changed, the difference between us today and us tomorrow is just one day, not like the public feels many times, as if it is a difference in nature, I don't think there is. So at this point, I think we will continue to follow the original path, even activities like listing, like today, all our employees are going to work normally, and they will not take holidays because of listing.
22. Q: Do you have any expectations for the market value of Pinduoduo, and how many billions of dollars do you hope to make?
It wasn't expected, and I think it's a by-product. If the goal of doing a company is to become bigger, in order to do a high valuation, I think this is putting the cart before the horse, no company survives for this reason, it must be that you create unique value for consumers in this society, for merchants, or for a larger society, and this value is reflected by price, so price fluctuates around value, and price is always a by-product of value, so what we should do is always focus on long-term value. Going public is going to be a bit of a disruption, and what we have to do is isolate ourselves from those distractions.
23. The emergence and development of Pinduoduo is not because of how powerful our ability is, how perfect the platform is, or even how hard we work, but because she grows in a sunny direction, which is inclusive, people-first and more open. Moving away from the zero-sum competition empire mindset to a mindset that creates incremental value for consumers and society based on continuous innovation is the sunshine we see.
2. Entrepreneurial experience
1. At the beginning, one of the projects I started my business was e-commerce, which is a bit like a BtoC vertical mobile phone website, but the good thing about our team is that we feel that entrepreneurship is not a one-shot deal, it is a process.
We always felt that we had no experience in entrepreneurship, and that business should be Xi, and we used to study and learn knowledge, and we went to primary school, middle school and university.
We think that entrepreneurship should also be like this, and there should be a gradual process of progression, and you have to do the front things well before you can do the back, so Pinduoduo seems to be fast in the past two years, but in fact, our core team has been together for ten years, we used to go to primary school and middle school, and now we are only starting to go to college.
2. Warren Buffett said that buying stocks is buying part of the company, and it is necessary to have a long-term holding mentality to find good businesses and partners.
This is very similar to starting a business, on the one hand, we must pay attention to the business model, choose the right business model, and spend a lot of time studying the details of this business model.
On the other hand, it is necessary to choose a good "partner", and when investing, the founder and CEO should be regarded as their future partners, and see if they are willing to work with them for a long time.
3. In addition to paying attention to good business and good team, investment also needs to care about whether it is a good price.
It's also similar to starting a business, where Charlie Munger made Warren Buffett realize that it's better to buy good companies at a reasonable price, rather than spending time picking up cigarette butts (cheap, some residual but often not so good companies).
In the same way, a good company should put in the effort to solve/overcome the right and difficult problems, rather than picking up a bunch of sesame seeds everywhere.
4. Living is the first priority of entrepreneurship, and at the same time, it must be evaluated from another angle, that is, whether you can win and whether you have enough strength to win.
Just as investment should pay special attention to the business model, the choice of industry and business model often determines a large part of the outcome, that is, it takes a lot of time to study what is the right thing and then think about how to do it right. It's better to move in the right direction step by step than to run in the wrong direction.
Entrepreneurship is often the same as investment, and choice is more important than effort. Moving forward on the right path, even if it is a little slower, but the continuous return like compound interest in investment is also very powerful.
5. Entrepreneurship is indeed one thing that I enjoy, because it is a bit like playing a game, it is more poisoned, and there are some friends running towards a common vision and goal together. One of the more interesting things about entrepreneurship itself than playing games is that you don't just say you're happy and happy, but that while you're happy, it's likely that you're making an impact and making some changes in the world. This thing itself is actually a stronger sense of accomplishment in my life.
Of course, as I get older, no one can create a lifelong career, but I hope that in the entrepreneurial stage of my life, I can make something that I can look back on in the future, make myself feel proud, and at the same time make myself proud of myself and my friends who started a business together.
6. The loneliness of entrepreneurship is actually shared by many entrepreneurs, because when you are making decisions, because your position is different from others, many times others cannot 100% understand why you do it, or can not have a real complete discussion with you in the same position.
So after starting a business for a long time, you will find a bit of a paradox that when the company is good, in fact, you are often on thin ice every day, but if you feel very safe and comfortable one day, then often the company begins to have problems. It seems like that's really the case.
Therefore, the first possibility is that I am mentally accepting that it is a normal state to tremble every day, such as repeatedly thin ice.
The second is that you return to the original intention of starting a business and what you want, if the business of this thing makes you have a lot of friends and more love, then you will feel warm to a certain extent. So when different people do the same thing, in fact, the starting point may not be the same, so for me, at least I hope that in the matter of doing good goods (that is, Pinduoduo), on the one hand, I can bring together more consumers, on the other hand, I do things with my partners, including partners, at least most of them are more like me, so that the longer I go, the older I get, the more love I get, and the stronger my sense of happiness in life.
7. We are nothing more than a group of people, and we still pursue to do a great thing, so let's sit down and discuss which thing can be more awesome. As a good company, the less action, the better.
8. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates asked a question to the audience in a conversation with their MBA classmates, to the effect that if you treat each of your classmates as a company, and then you have to invest all your current money in a "him", accounting for 5%, which one will you choose? This metaphor is especially appropriate for startups to choose partners, often we want a trusted, long-term partner, not someone who seems to be very capable but never knows if he will stab him in the back.
9. If you just start a business, if you do this (bribery), you can't scale it. In that case, you don't pay bribes, everyone will realize that you are real, and you save a lot of follow-up costs, just like fighting a war, and maintaining stability for many years to a certain extent. ”
Integrity in the country will become the core competitiveness of the enterprise, the longer a company operates with integrity, the higher the barriers to construction, and a group of good people will accumulate internally.
10. There is a special type of asset in the process of entrepreneurship that is the people who are united in a certain culture, and there is also a class of expenses that are used to purchase labor or skills. The distinction and transformation of these two is very interesting, and it is also a particularly high ROI. If expenses become value-added assets, then it is estimated that our CFOs and investors will be unable to sleep with laughter. But what is interesting is that many times when investing, the distinction between such significant and different differences is often sloppy and far less weighted.
11. If a business is particularly easy to do and does not need to pay a big price, it is often not a good business that brings a lot of cash flow in the long run. Good decisions are often hard and come at a painful cost.
3. Business thinking
1. I realized a few things when I was in school.
First, the flying of the golden phoenix out of the ravine is a small probability event. Most of the rich second generation, especially the official second generation, are very good.
Second, Tian Ji horse racing, in the case of overall resource inferiority, can create a local advantage, and then have the opportunity to win the entire battle. Based on this, ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things.
Third, money is a tool, not an end.
2. Duan Yongping's inspiration to me in business and life is that he said that fast is slow, and slow is fast. It is better to do things with a normal heart, and it is actually difficult for ordinary people to have a normal heart.
3. In 2006, Duan Yongping took me to Warren Buffett's lunch. I found that what Buffett said was actually so simple that even my mother could understand it. Perhaps the greatest significance of this meal made me realize the power of simplicity and common sense.
When judging something, you need to understand the background and facts, and what you need after understanding is not wisdom, but whether you still have the courage to use reason and common sense to judge when facing the facts. Common sense is obvious and easy to understand, but we are blinded by prejudices formed by growth, Xi learning, and personal interests.
4. There are two different types of money burning, a VC burns money, a kind of investment burns money, a lot of elevator advertisements are shown to investors, and another is called to consumers, trying to hit the brand, consumers occupy a position in their minds, for the former kind of burning money, the less the better, the latter kind of burning money burns the more the better, if the latter burns money, the more gold coins the better.
5. If I were Zhang Yiming, I would be more radical in globalization, because compared with the previous generation, our generation of Internet entrepreneurs will have a greater vision of globalization than the previous generation, accept international information earlier, and have greater opportunities for globalization. Second, from the perspective of value creation, leading China's information to go out, including China's products going out, is itself to maximize the value created for BAT and the whole country. When your whole company is deployed globally, and in turn uses global resources to focus on the Chinese market, I think it will become more relaxed at that time.
6. The increasingly fierce and even alienated competition in the industry made me realize that this traditional competition based on scale and efficiency has its inevitable problems. In order to change, we must take action on lower-level, fundamental problems, and find answers in core technologies and their underlying theories...... What am I going to do when I quit? I want to do some research in food science and life sciences.
7. I think many consumption Xi have a lot to do with the family environment in the early stage, and they have little to do with the wealth you have now.
For example, my mother is reluctant to take a taxi until now, she feels that her time is not valuable, taking a taxi is too wasteful, I tell her that this is not safe, she will find a reason, for example, she said that the air is good on the bus, the car is big, etc., the little sisters around my mother, my parents are all such families.
That's probably been a big influence on me until now, including when I think about doing business for myself. What I have always remembered in my head, including what I saw, was how ordinary families like my parents thought or lived.
8. Regarding consumption downgrading, especially in material consumption, no one will take the initiative to downgrade consumption, everyone is "there is no flush toilet, I want to have a flush toilet".
But why do people have such voices, I think it is due to two reasons (and even some people think so), the first is that in the past few decades, China has indeed had a very large market depth, that is, there is a big difference.
On the other hand, the same person has different sides, we talk about how affordable, more fun, how affordable, in my opinion is all people, whether you have money or not, this is a universal demand, of course, different people will have different upgrade needs.
Let's talk about my mother's example, she must be a relatively rich mother, she goes to buy vegetables and paper towels, she will definitely see if there is a difference between one dollar and two dollars, she cares, but at the same time she will also buy high-end ones iPhone, even a good TV, in my mother's case, if you are her son, you observe her behavior, you think it is very normal, but if you abstract it and put it into an article and read it, it seems that this person is divided, but in fact, this thing, I think, is happening every day in thousands of families.
9. We are all products of the times, that is, the situation is stronger than people, and in the big environment, we happen to be in this place, so we will do our duty and do some things we should do, but one thing we must be very clear about is that no matter how we are, we are very, very, very small in the long river of the whole era. Do what you have to do, and the rest is really up to you.
10. When the external environment changes drastically and various ideas surge, it is easy for a person to fall into the confusion of wanting everything and not doing anything. The mind becomes stagnant, becomes prematurely decrepit, and affects the physical state of one's body. To be mentally healthy, young and energetic, just like exercising, there is bound to be a process of persevering and going further when the mind is sore.
11. I don't think Tencent is a strong competition logic, Tencent is more of a businessman logic, and competition is just a by-product of business ROI calculation. Tencent is taking a stake in Pinduoduo not because we can fight Alibaba, but because our investment has paid off. If Tencent invests in JD.com, will JD.com really be able to fight against Ali? Ali will fight JD.com, even without Tencent's investment.
12. Because we are today's Pinduoduo, Tencent wants to come and take shares. Tencent is more like an ordinary financial investor, he will neither be particularly good nor bad to us. I don't think we're Tencent either.
13. I once said to the people at Tencent that Tencent failed to do e-commerce because they understood that e-commerce is traffic× conversion rate = GMV. The traffic logic cannot succeed today, Tencent has the largest traffic in China, and has invested in a bunch of vertical e-commerce, if Tencent has already become according to this logic.
After Pinduoduo came up, JD.com, Vipshop, and Mushroom Street have experimented with similar models, for them, the group is just a tool to create GMV increments, and Pinduoduo is the logic of people, we understand people through the group, through people recommend, and will transition to machine recommendations in the later stage. There is almost no search in the Pinduoduo app, and there is no shopping cart, you can imagine that replacing the information flow under Toutiao with the product flow is Pinduoduo.
So in the early days, everyone was low-priced and group-based, but our starting points and directions were different, and it was different when we grew up.
14. There is no obvious adolescence like a child, and adolescence is a noticeable acceleration at the beginning and a noticeable slowdown at the end. But the company is a gradual growth process. This means that problems don't flare up suddenly, they break out every day.
15. Question: Wang Xing once said that competition in the same direction is competition, competition is not to knock anyone down.
Wang Xing talked about the borders of his empire, facing each other, but he didn't say where I stopped. Didi and Meituan grew up in a highly competitive environment, but Pinduoduo grew up in a different environment, where we found new business breakthroughs in a saturated field that seemed to have no opportunities, so we didn't need to waste a lot of resources to compete excessively.
Ali JD.com and Didi Meituan, they are empire-style competition with clear boundaries of territory. But I don't think that's how my generation should think. Pinduoduo and Taobao are more like two different latitudes that are slowly merging, and Pinduoduo uses Alipay and rookies.
16. Q: Taobao has been promoting the reform of thousands of people and distribution of headlines in the past two years, which is highly overlapping with Pinduoduo's strategy, so where is the uniqueness that Pinduoduo has been emphasizing?
Taobao is in the right direction. But as one of the most successful companies in the previous phase, it has baggage as it moves into a new era. Their main body now is search, and no matter what reform you do, it means that you weaken search. But search is only a tiny scene in Pinduoduo, not even on the homepage. It's like Baidu wants to do what Toutiao does, and they all face obstacles from their existing success.
It's like I'm Shenzhen, it's Shanghai, Shanghai used to be much better than Shenzhen, it may still be awesome, but I'm young, I don't have baggage.
17. Pinduoduo's growth is thanks to the times. I've worked for other companies before, and Pinduoduo can't just rely on my own efforts. A lot of things are improving in China, and logistics and manufacturing are growing.
More than three years ago, when I was resting at home, I saw that the mobile Internet, especially mobile phones, has brought huge changes to people's daily behavior. Now it's different, everyone is Xi to taking pictures with their mobile phones and chatting with people, but 4 or 5 years ago, people's behavior was different, people would stay in front of the computer for a long time, occasionally go out, the phone was just used to make calls. But a lot of people don't feel the specific changes on the outside because of this, all of them.
Of course, Pinduoduo also has to thank the rise of social networks, mobile payments, and a nationwide logistics system.
18. I don't particularly like the word consumption upgrade, because everyone's understanding of consumption upgrade is different. The average life expectancy in Shanghai's Changning District has reached 84 years, and many parts of China are now living standards with world-class consumption standards. Of course, some people can go up again, for example, they are all French cosmetics and Alpine water, but is this something we need to pursue?
I think that when the gap between the rich and the poor is even greater, whether more people in more regions can have different upgrades in terms of consumption, and fairness in consumption should be more important. In poorer places, there are times when consumer products are less and more expensive. Today's problem is not that our advanced people are not advanced enough, but that the majority of people consume unevenly.
19. Q: Do you agree with Liu Qiangdong's statement that "consumer experience is the most important"?
Fundamentally, I agree with Liu Qiangdong's statement. However, the business experience should be comprehensive with cost-effective, logistics and other experiences. I don't know what the background of the interview is when Liu Qiangdong says this. But Pinduoduo is the result of such a choice. For example, fruits, at a relatively low price, one or two fruits are broken in the logistics. Consumers are acceptable.
For the common people, scolding is also to be scolded, but the refund may come again next time. It's a matter of trade-offs and balances in a company's values. When you can't have both, whether you want face or lining, first calculate whether this thing is cost-effective, and then calculate whether this thing is willing to show off.
Now, unbalanced consumption is the most essential problem. Is this the direction of our upgrading? In most areas, what we should get is fairness in consumption. The unfairness in China is that things are cheaper in first-tier cities than in small places. Electrical appliances in Suqian are more expensive than in Beijing. What really needs to be upgraded is to upgrade from material consumption to spiritual consumption. What really needs to be upgraded are nutritious articles and books. More money, more and more depression.
20. Entrepreneurs will grow old after all, but for a company to continue to survive, it should rely on a self-coping mechanism rather than a person.
21. If everyone else is telling a lie and you say the truth, in fact, the truth and the lie are the same. When I first started my business, I went to raise funds, and the company was in good shape, but what I told was true, and investors thought it was a lie. No matter what number you quote, he will give you an eight-or even five-percent discount according to industry standards. Later, Pinduoduo became a little famous, and I went to finance, and the funny thing is that if you tell a lie, the other party also thinks it is true.
It's like when I was a kid when my dad bought a real watch, and everyone else said it was a fake watch, and then when I got rich, my dad wore a fake watch, and they all said it was real. That's what this world is.
22. The increasingly fierce and even alienated competition in the industry made me realize that this traditional competition based on scale and efficiency has its inevitable problems. In order to change, we must take action on lower-level, fundamental problems, and find answers in core technologies and their underlying theories...... What am I going to do when I quit? I want to do some research in food science and life sciences.
23. One way to change the public atmosphere is to directly purge on a large scale, and the other is to use channels, and there is a phenomenon worth discussing in business that sometimes things are expensive but easier to sell. For example, products such as air conditioners need to be installed, and they also need to be recommended, and it may be similar to Xiaomi's Internet direct sales, and it is better to hit the price to the "lowest" than "Gree" to the installers and channels to make enough profits, although it seems that the channel approach raises the price of goods, but in practice, the cost of channels and services may be the most economical and benign way to maintain a certain public awareness.
This kind of channel and service cost is necessary, it will be the cost of maintaining a certain order in the obvious, and ignore this cost of the system may lead to "bad money drives out good money", this kind of violation of the principle of price supply and demand line in economics textbooks is actually very, very much. Charlie Munger has said many times in his book that we can easily find such examples in the fields of consumer goods, commercial software, hardware, etc., and this phenomenon of expensive selling well may even be the mainstream in many fields.
24. Regarding the relationship between the old and the new, many people are Xi to look at it with the idea of life and death, just as for those who sit around the gladiatorial arena of ancient Rome all day, either/or is the whole world. Perhaps gladiatorial images can bring some sensory stimulation, but the symbiotic iteration of nature's diverse ecology is the enduring reality.
25. Whether a business and pattern can be sustainable depends on whether it is beneficial to consumers, whether it is beneficial to workers and value creators, whether it can create irreplaceable value, and whether it abides by its duty and fulfills its social responsibilities.
26. Some objective laws and status quo are not a simple wish, but often require much more energy than you imagine, which is the same as people always dying, and it is a fact that has to be faced.
27. My first and only official job was at Google. I think the impact of Google on me is very big.
First: there are very few companies that put "do no evil" such a non-commercial value to Google, so strongly implanted in a commercial company, Google's success to a certain extent let me see that you pursue something beautiful, or something that seems to be non-commercial, in fact, in the end, in terms of business results, it can also be very good, from the perspective of making money and business success, there are many ways, but by proving that at least one path is better in my opinion, it can also be done very well.
Second: When I joined Google, Google was not yet listed, so you also saw that there were many people who became rich overnight, then this experience was actually close contact and observation of these people around me, which had a great impact on me, because you will suddenly realize that the role of money has two sides, not only can you be free of wealth, spiritual freedom, and then it seems to be positive, it also has a lot of negatives, for many people may lose the purpose and meaning of life at once, and the other part of the person may be because of money, may make him even 10 years in a period of confusion, in the best time of his life, he may be very wasted。 If he had less money, perhaps his overall wealth in life, including his happiness index, might have been higher.
To a certain extent, I think this experience may make it easier for me to be more calm when doing business, because business itself is largely measured by wealth, but at a very early stage, relatively because of Google, I realized that this measurement is one of several latitudes, and it is very likely that if you overemphasize it, it will be harmful to your own life and even to business itself.
28. I hope that every day I can face myself calmly, feel at ease, and feel that I have done my duty. It would be even better if I could also gradually develop the ability to selectively remember, remember the happy and forget the anxious and sad.
29. The torrent of the times is mighty, and the direction is unstoppable...... In the forest, the competition between each local tree is fierce, and the competition between different parts is extremely rich and twists and turns. But if we look at the whole forest, in the end all the trees are in the same direction, which is towards the direction of the sun. The power towards the sun is extraordinarily powerful, and he will transform many things, or open the way for transforming things.
30. The incomplete theorems of Buddhism, quantum mechanics, and mathematical logic seem to be telling us that the whole of life in the world is unknowable, at least immeasurable, unpredictable, and uncertain. It is impossible to describe the normative world with limited rules, things are imperfect and incomplete. In addition, I have a vague feeling that what is seen is largely determined by how we look at it, and that the part may describe the whole, although the whole is unknowable.
Tactics: Achieving the Next Business Miracle Analyze typical business cases and focus on the "tactics" of business management ¥59 Buy
Share | Huang Zheng
Reorganization | Han Zhe
Produced by | Guest Business Studies