▲ Su Hua, CEO of Kuaishou. He is at the helm of Kuaishou, which currently has more than 600 million registered users and more than 85 million daily active users. Beijing News reporter Wang Jianning photographed
Beijing News reporter Zhang Wei Intern Zhou Xiaoqi Editor Su Xiaoming Proofreader Wang Xin
At the Kuaishou headquarters located at the "Center of the Universe" Wudaokou, su Hua, the founder and CEO of the company, was called "Hua Ge" by many employees. They don't call him "Su Zong" or his student screen name "Big Bug." In fact, the CEO, who was born in 1982, prefers to be called "Hua Tsai", and if he is called "Uncle Hua" one day, he will have to be "sad for half a day".
The Kuaishou helms has grown rapidly over the past few years. At present, there are more than 600 million registered users, known as the "national application" and "traffic giant".
In previous years, Kuaishou was as low-key and introverted as the programmers who founded it. Since the second half of last year, Su Hua and his Kuaishou have begun to try to go to the crowd and face the media, telling the public what Kuaishou really looks like.
"We prefer that Kuaishou is a mirror of this world, reflecting the most complete and accurate appearance of the world, and we don't want to let more elites like the picture appear in the mirror because the elite's voice is greater." The seemingly cute, glasses-wearing CEO said that Kuaishou's original intention is to record everyone equally.
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"Grassroots Recreation"
In the past year or so, Kuaishou has often appeared in the field of public opinion.
A few months ago, the People's Daily commented that it was necessary to face up to the "just needs of grassroots entertainment." The kuaishou user group is very close to the geographical distribution of Chinese Internet users, so it can produce such a large viscosity to the so-called "grassroots users". "In the context of unbalanced regional economic development, we should recognize and respect the consumption needs of culture and entertainment at different levels."
In June last year, another article called "The Cruel Story of the Bottom: A Video Software in China" burst the circle of friends. The author examines the "rural scene" presented by Kuaishou users from an elite perspective. At the end of the article, it is concluded that on the one hand, there are high-speed railways and high-rise buildings in the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and on the other hand, the chaotic and sinking Chinese countryside in the fast hands. Two plates as symmetrical as black and white make up a complete China.
At that time, after reading the article, Su Hua flashed a thought, whether to talk to this author, and then think about it or don't bother people, forget it.
In terms of topic pull, that article has a remarkable effect, and there is a view that it is a soft article for Kuaishou. Su Hua denied this fact, and he also went backstage to see the data, "without any fluctuations." "The seemingly overwhelming hot discussion, compared with the coverage of Kuaishou, is only stirring up a certain circle of society after all."
However, when Kuaishou was talked about more and more, Su Hua realized that what he was doing may be a certain deviation from people's cognition. Before that, he felt that it was better to bury his head in the product, "the product and technology are more important things."
Kuaishou began to try some changes - Su Hua and his partners no longer hid behind the product, they decided to pull out and take the initiative to tell everyone what Kuaishou looked like.
For a while, Su Hua and Cheng Yi, another founder of Kuaishou, laughed and mentioned in many public occasions that the geographical distribution structure of Kuaishou users is basically the same as the population distribution structure of China's mobile Internet. China's first-tier cities account for only about 7% of the population, and the other 93% of people live in non-first-tier cities. The real world is made up of all kinds of people.
In July last year, Su Hua was interviewed by the media for the first time. Previously, there were only a few keywords about him on the Internet: "graduated from Tsinghua University", "worked in Google and Baidu"...
Once, the reporter of the "New Economy 100 People" of the venture capital circle talked to Su Hua about the article, using an analogy, "When you were very young, no one paid attention to you. When you're big, you're still burying your head in the sand and pretending that no one else can see you, but people will kick you in the ass. Su Hua laughed after listening.
For more than a year, Kuaishou has stopped "burying its head in the sand."
In the second half of last year, Kuaishou's commercial promotion department and marketing department were established successively. In the past year and a half, the number of employees in Kuaishou has expanded from more than 200 to nearly 1,000, but the proportion of engineers in employees has not changed, or more than 80%.
"It's about to be 1024," Su Hua said with a smile.
In the office area, the front desk set does not set up a logo, but the large orange logo is hung on the east wall of the Science and Technology Building of Tsinghua Science and Technology Park. Coming out of wudaokou subway station, you can see the location of Kuaishou in the distance. On the focus screens of subways, buses and elevator entrances in first- and second-tier cities, there are fast hands.
This summer, if you walk into the movie theater, you will see car repair workers who share their lives on Kuaishou, housewives who are keen on food, and urban white-collar workers who like pets appear on the big screen, telling the audience: "Art should not belong only to the elite." Life, there is nothing high or low, everyone deserves to be recorded. ”
▲ On October 31, Su Hua, Tsinghua Science and Technology Park Science and Technology Building, was interviewed by the Beijing News. Beijing News reporter Wang Jianning photographed
programmer
This is part of Suhua's solution to social problems. Before becoming CEO of Kuaishou, he had only done one thing – solving technical problems. Like all coders, programming, and bug fixing.
When he was 12 years old, after graduating from primary school, Su Hua was already at home in a small town south of Zhangjiajie, using the Xiaobawang learning machine to knock out the first line of code of his life. At that time, the post-80s and post-90s were taking this popular learning machine to play "Super Mary" and "Contra". He recalled that as soon as the power supply was plugged in, it was a week, "as soon as the power supply was pulled, the code was gone!" ”
He felt the beauty of code — "it is an expression of human thought and inspiration." The most addictive part of the code is that the modules can be reused. He used the analogy, like building a house, you repair a house, I repair it, I have to start over, there is no way to repair it on your house, but writing code is different.
However, after becoming CEO, he had to suppress the part of his body as a programmer.
In the first quarter of last year, because of more other matters, he stopped the maintenance of all the code of Kuaishou. He hadn't written code for a year and a half, and he always felt itchy and sore.
But I resisted. "Writing code takes a lot of quiet, focused time, what if I write it and write a bug?" Do I fix it or not? He added, "It's going to drag down the team." The brethren write better. ”
Those days of being a mere programmer are a long way off.
Halfway through his PhD at Tsinghua University, to take care of his family, he had to drop out of school and go to Silicon Valley to become an employee of Google. There, he felt for the first time what "technology is the first productive force."
He cites a simple comparison: Google indexes tens of billions of pages of content, allowing users to find what they're looking for in a second. But while he was studying, if he wanted to find a paper, he had to go to the library to go through the shelves, copy it, and bring it back to read. "Just to find this information, it takes about two hours, and with Google, it's a minute, or even a few seconds."
After two and a half years in Silicon Valley, in 2008, Su Hua began his first venture as a video advertising system. In layman's terms, it is to help video sites integrate the needs of advertisers. At that time, video content production and sharing had not yet flourished, coupled with the financial tsunami, and the first venture failed.
With no money left, Su Hua walked into Baidu and became one of the core engineers of Baidu's Fengchao system. There, he stayed from the end of 2009 until April 2011. Baidu, he said, gave him the experience of leading a team.
The second time I started a business to do a search engine, I failed again. The technology was later acquired by Alibaba and integrated with UC Browser.
On the other hand, Cheng Yixiao, known as "Tiantongyuan Zhang Xiaolong", resigned from Renren. Almost all the GIFs that were popular in Weibo and QQ space at that time were made with this tool. However, at that time, no one knew the name of Kuaishou.
▲ Su Hua and Cheng Yi smiled. Image from the web
Later, Su Hua, who failed to start a business in a row, was led by investors and met Cheng Yixiao, who wanted to do video social networking.
It was the summer of 2013. Su Hua still remembers the scene when the two first met. At a hotel in Beijing, they talked from seven or eight o'clock in the evening until two or three o'clock in the morning.
"There were relatively few people in the Kuaishou community at that time, but I still saw people who I couldn't see in my daily life, some of them were talented, some of them were cute, some of them were funny. It can present a variety of people, and I like this state a lot. Su Hua said that this was the part that impressed him at that time. But in the end, when everyone comes together, it is a comprehensive decision-making.
Zhang Fei, the first investor of Kuaishou and a partner at Morningside Capital, later analyzed the reasons for the success of this "meeting" and said that if an excellent person is very smooth, it is difficult to understand himself deeply and think deeply. Before, Su Hua experienced a lot of bad things, his mentality changed a lot, and he began to realize the boundaries of his own ability, and also realized that he needed good partners and partners.
Su Hua agreed with this statement, "Life is only thirty-six thousand days, and you cannot and should not learn everything." You should rely on the team, rely on more excellent people, and work with you to solve the problem. ”
Kuaishou 006
The later story is as "cheesy" as all the early stories of the beginning of the business, Kuaishou initially had only 11 people, starting from Huaqing Jiayuan, which is known as the "folk Silicon Valley" in Wudaokou. Sharing a three-bedroom house with other companies, each employee has only one square meter of space, which is as tough as all startups.
But soon, Kuaishou ushered in several milestones in its development history: in July 2013, "GIF Kuaishou" transformed into a short video community; at the end of 2013, the product adopted artificial intelligence and recommended by algorithms; in November 2014, it was officially renamed "Kuaishou".
Some things have not changed.
Su Hua did not want Kuaishou to become a show. Although live streaming is already one of the main sources of revenue for Kuaishou, he is still reluctant to give live broadcasting a tab in the user interface. He insists that the best form of recording and sharing life is still short videos.
"The world is changing very quickly, a lot of people and things are happening, and we hope to document it." For the individual, it is the record of his life, the memory of life, summed up, is the memory of the times. Su Hua said that helping users record their lives and commercial gains is a higher priority than the former.
Like all users, Su Hua also likes the name "Old Iron". In the eyes of the outside world, "old iron" and "double-click 666" have almost become the symbols of kuaishou, just like "pro" to Taobao. Su Hua doesn't think so, he prefers the intimate relationship between users and fans conveyed by "Old Iron".
"Winter in the northeast is particularly cold, and good friends will do one thing - lick the water pipe! Everyone's tongue sticks together on it... We licked the iron together in winter, and this friendship is called 'old iron'. After saying that, Su Hua burst out laughing.
Su Hua's work number in Kuaishou is 006. Calculated by entry time. The first five were left for Cheng Yixiao and his earliest team. "There was also a classmate who left the company and gave him a vacancy number."
His life now is no different from that of ordinary people. If you are not traveling for business, it is always two o'clock and one line - seven or eight o'clock in the morning to walk five minutes to the company, and then go back at eight or nine o'clock in the evening. The biggest way to relax is to accompany my three-and-a-half-year-old son to climb mountains and visit parks. The biggest confusion now is that there is still not enough time, "too little time with him".
▲Su Hua. Image from the web
A mirror of the real world
In December last year, at the 2016 Entrepreneurship Dark Horse Community Conference, the organizers awarded the annual entrepreneur of the year award to Su Hua. The award speech said: "He is an otaku engineer who insists on using technology to make people understand each other better. He firmly believes that easy-to-use products must be simple and equal to users. It is not so much that Kuaishou discovered a huge group of people who are hidden, but rather that this crowd discovered Kuaishou. ”
This is also Su Hua's vision. He wanted Kuaishou to be a mirror of the real world. "Whether you drive a tractor or a Ferrari, on Fasthand, it's the same."
Now, if there are not many things, Su Hua will spend three or four hours a day on Kuaishou.
He paid attention to a grandfather who pulled an erhu. All of Uncle's videos are selfies, and Su Hua guessed that this might be an old man who had lost his independence. Later, Uncle Slowly had fans, and every night twenty or thirty people watched him live la erhu, interacting with him and chatting. Su Hua felt a sense of accomplishment - they helped Uncle Find Fans through the mirror of Kuaishou and provided companionship for the lonely old man.
He also paid attention to a Tsinghua student. The Tsinghua student shared the details of their life in the new military training and class. A netizen left a message saying, "Oh, I can't pass the exam, and I'm very happy to follow you..."
Su Hua pays attention to a variety of people. Diversity and abundance are the truth of this world, but as a mirror fast hand, it is unlikely to reflect only the good. Sometimes, you have to face the dark parts of the world and human nature.
In October last year, a user named "Jie Ge" broadcast live to the elderly and children in the poor mountainous areas of Liangshan, Sichuan Province, and after the live broadcast ended, the money was collected back, triggering the Kuaishou "pseudo-charity" incident.
In an internal email at the time, Su Hua said that as a platform with hundreds of millions of registered users, our influence is getting bigger and bigger, which also means that we need to better complete the platform management responsibilities and assume more social responsibilities.
Kuaishou once banned all Liangshan public welfare-related accounts. Later, someone came from Sichuan to Beijing and came to Kuaishou with a public welfare license. Su Hua was also embarrassed, and he told the media who came to interview him at the time that a rat spoiled a pot of porridge, and the people who really did good deeds were also suffering.
Next, Suhua is ready to double the number of employees, "2048 is a good number. "As for internationalization, it is also an important part of achieving the mission.
In the next five years, Suhua has a vision to help 1 billion people around the world leave their memories of the world behind every day.
"It's only a small step now, a small step, and it's still far away." Su Hua repeated, revealing a shy smile.
Duty Editor: Zhang Yi'er Yiming
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