Four sentences to know Wu Dan ——
1. Born in 1987, a native of Wenzhou, he is currently the president of Hero Interactive Entertainment, a new three-board game company.
2. Zhen Fund has 3 years of investment experience, studied under Xu Xiaoping, and cast explosive mobile games such as "Gunfight for All" and "Blade of Shadow".
3, big funny ratio, no shelf, love games.
4. One of the 30 entrepreneurial upstarts under the age of 30 in 2017.
▲ Wu Dan has only one requirement for photographers: shoot thinner
Before the interview, Wu Dan learned that he was selected as the entrepreneurial upstart under 30 years old in 2017, and then laughed. He said that in the past, when he invested in Zhen Fund, at the end of the year, he came to screen the founders for the entrepreneurial state to participate in the selection, and this time it was finally his turn.
On June 16 this year, Wu Dan was promoted from CIO of Hero Interactive Entertainment to president, and he is only 29 years old. In his previous career, the big boy born in Wenzhou had become a vice president of investment at Zhen Fund, but still insisted that he was "carrying a bag for Xu Xiaoping".
In the three years of his "bag", he led the investment in popular mobile games such as "Shadow Blade", "Superhero", "Gunfight for All" and so on. After switching to Hero Entertainment, he decided to buy the entire Gunfight for All team.
Today, Hero Interactive Entertainment has received investment from B-round Pulse Capital and C-round Huayi Brothers in 2 years, plus the A-round Zhen Fund, Sequoia China and China Renaissance Capital, and the board of directors is simply a reality show for star investors.
I have the business genes of Wenzhou people who are not suitable for investment banking
Whether it is an early investment or a later hero mutual entertainment, Wu Dan considers himself a typical Wenzhou person with a strong spirit of adventure in business.
When he was studying, Wu Dan once felt that life was very sad. Because he was too playful, he might not be able to get into a good university, and his parents sent him abroad to study in high school. In the mixed days of high school and high school, in the third year of high school, Wu Dan worked hard and finally was admitted to the top University of Toronto in Canada.
It may be because this "overtaking" experience made him blindly confident in his learning ability, so he fell into the same "idle" state in his freshman and sophomore years. By the time he reached his junior year, when Wu Dan wanted to catch up, his grade point had fallen behind that of his classmates around him, and it was already difficult to enter a good investment bank after graduation.
Looking back, the finance-related major that Wu Dan chose to enter the university at that time was actually very different from his real ideal career, and he was not suitable for investment banking.
Wu Dan felt that he had Wenzhou's business genes. For example, when he does venture capital, he does not think too much about returns, but will take risks to invest in some projects that he finds interesting. In his view, a good entrepreneur will never worry about short-term investment returns. Rather than a standardized career, he prefers to play the role of an entrepreneur.
This trait was actually reflected in Wu Dan when he was a child.
For example, when he was a child, he loved to play basketball, and whenever the game got stuck, the last killer ball had to be shot by himself, which was very similar to the major decisions that must be faced when starting a business. And when the team is behind, he will also be particularly energetic - facing desperate situations will inspire morale.
Wu Dan said that too many students around him are taking the typical professional manager development path: graduating to go to investment banking, doing PE, and being responsible for super-large-scale late-stage trading. This kind of daily document work is not the life Wu Dan wants. If there is anxiety in all walks of life, he said, then he would rather choose to face the challenging anxiety of uncharted territory every day.
People so smart to run to make games must have a future
However, even if he loved to play first-person shooters such as "CS" since he was a child, Wu Dan would not have thought of really taking games as his life's work at the beginning. After all, it was quite different from the educational philosophy he had received in college.
Fortunately, by chance, once when skiing, Wu Dan met a friend named Du Yi.
Du Yi was an international student at Columbia University, and had been working for two years at the famous game company 2K Games (the production company that made well-known games such as the NBA 2K series and Civilization 6). After leaving his job, Du Yi returned to China to go to a game company called "Five Minutes", responsible for web-based social games.
Wu Dan thought to himself, such a smart person has run to do the Internet and make games, and this industry must have a very promising future. Coupled with Du Yili's invitation, in 2010, after graduating from the University of Toronto, Wu Dan entered a five-minute game - a basic position, with a monthly salary of 3,000 yuan.
At that time, the five-minute hottest game "Happy Farm" is estimated to have been played by many people. Wu Dan's daily job is to do data analysis - how many aunts stole vegetables today, why didn't they steal, etc., and from time to time to think of some new ways to play out, which is very trivial and basic work.
▲ Raised hands that have planted vegetables in this field
The popularity of Happy Farm brought in a monthly income of 3 million yuan for five minutes, and for a time, the team was somewhat inflated. Wu Dan, as an employee in a basic position, quickly became aware of a series of problems facing the company.
First of all, the success of Happy Farm has a great element of luck, but the company did not establish a perfect content production mechanism later, resulting in taking some money and planning to make 6 games in one go, but in the end none of them succeeded;
Secondly, most of the team is young people, who lack experience in decision-making and judgment, but because of the expansion of self-confidence, experienced gamers are not recruited in time, and the team structure is too single;
Finally, the same social game companies at that time, such as Le Element, Kaiying Network, etc., all took Tencent's investment, but they did not want to "hold their thighs" for five minutes. As a result, Tencent "reproduced" "QQ Farm", and "Happy Farm" was quickly defeated.
These are due to personal experience coupled with Wu Dan's understanding of the game industry, and it turns out that his judgment is correct. After staying for five minutes, Wu Dan left his job and went to Deloitte Accounting.
Later, Du Yi, who led him into the game circle, also ran away from five minutes to start his own business and make games. After Wu Dan learned of this news, he almost worked his feet before and after, and the next day he met Fang Aizhi, partner and CEO of Zhen Fund. As a result, the entrepreneurial project of an old friend became Wu Dan's first investment in Zhenge.
Although the project did not succeed in the end, Du Yi later went to Lilith, but this incident was the opportunity for Wu Dan to join the Zhen Fund, and it was also the beginning of his real thinking about the game industry from a higher level.
Why can't I do game publishing myself?
Wu Dan's ability to become the president of Hero Interactive Entertainment today is closely related to his 3 years of investment experience in Zhen. Among them are two very important "nobles".
The first person is Xu Xiaoping, who plays the role of a teacher and a father to Wu Dan. Although Wu Dan initially "fooled" Teacher Xu, saying that he understood accounting and could help Zhen Fund to do finance, after actually entering Zhen Ge, he still showed his willingness to invest.
Xu Xiaoping was an extremely open person, not only agreed to let Wu Dan do investment, but also supported him to invest in the mobile game industry that the industry did not understand at that time, which led to the famous cases such as "Gunfight for All" and "Shadow Blade" later.
For why he can bet on the blockbuster game, he still has his own set of judgment logic. He casts two main types:
The first must be a blue ocean market. For example, the first-person shooter 'All Gunfight', FPS has a mature gameplay and clear demand for game types in the terminal game, even if it cannot be made into a full category NO.1 in the mobile game, it can also eat a piece of market cake.
Second, it must be a leader or a changemaker. For example, "Superhero", in that era of simple cards, can let card heroes stand up to add special effects, will achieve good results.
The second nobleman is Ying Shuling, the current CEO of Hero Interactive Entertainment. He and Wu Dan used to be friends and enemies, but now the two are "grasshoppers in a boat".
Say that it is an "enemy", because wu Dan often has to compete with Ying Shuling for a high-quality game team as an investment target; saying that it is a friend, almost all the games invested by Wu Dan are ultimately published by Ying Shuling.
With the increase of investment experience, Wu Dan gradually realized that if the game industry continues to develop rapidly, industrial forces such as Tencent Games and NetEase Games will gradually replace the early institutions on the market and become the main force of game investment in the future. Because from the perspective of resource integration, pure financial investment and industrial capital are completely incapable of competitive strength.
Coupled with the rise and fall of so many game companies, Wu Dan's Wenzhou genes made him start to think: Why can't he do game publishing?
Just at this time, Ying Shuling intended to set up a hero mutual entertainment and invited Wu Dan to join, and the latter pulled the former together to Xu Xiaoping's home. Almost in front of Teacher Xu, Wu Dan decided to "jump ship" to join Hero Interactive Entertainment as CIO.
▲ Ying Shuling and Wu Dan
I was the "loving mother" of the company, and my father inspired me
Wu Dan believes that he and Ying Shuling are very complementary in personality and behavior: the other party is offensive, while he is relatively cautious. (Available ♂ here)
Ying Shuling is more responsible for the company's external affairs, such as maintaining channel relations and carrying out large business cooperation. Wu Dan is more inward-looking, responsible for coordinating the work between teams and persuading content providers to continue to cooperate.
The iron-faced selfless Ying Shuling and the well-spoken Wu Dan formed a combination of "loving father and strict mother" in the hero's mutual entertainment. Interestingly, compared to Ying Shuling, who is more likely to be feared by the team members, Wu Dan's side is rarely blocked by information.
For example, when "Endless Battle" was just launched, the data performance was very good, and just when the team was celebrating, Ying Shuling said that he was wondering, because he did not know the game data. When wu dan was asked, he learned that the original data was shared in a WeChat group of the company, and because of "various concerns", Ying Shuling was not in the group, so that later he had to ask Wu Dan to pull himself into the group.
Wu Dan is a relatively easy person to contact, even as the president, colleagues with him are almost no mental pressure. In fact, from childhood to adulthood, his living environment was very free, which is also an important reason why he was able to form an easy-going personality in the end.
▲ Wu Dan loves to joke
This is due to Wu Dan's parents. In fact, before starting a business, Wu Dan's salary was very low, but his parents did not have any objections to this, and they always let him choose a career he liked. In addition to the cultivation of personality, the motivation of his parents is also obvious.
Wu Dan's father was one of the first college students after the college entrance examination system was restored in 1977. Although he had been working as a carpenter in a factory for the previous five years, Wu Dan's father was admitted to the English Department of Zhejiang University through self-study. Later, when Nixon visited China, he was part of a team of full-time translators.
The "inspiration" of his parents subtly had a great influence on Wu Dan, and he would have a strong curiosity to contact new things. If combined with the foregoing, this curiosity is the first step in driving him out of the trajectory of the "professional manager" life.
In the end, Wu Dan chose to enter the game industry, and only then did he have all the stories that followed.