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It took more than 40 days for Renren.com, which emerged in China, to slide into a traditional blog product, and it could only compromise on the promotion strategy for the time being and seek to stabilize its position first.

However, the YY network on the side of the United States is booming, and it has completed the 40-day road of Renren in just 15 days.

In the final analysis, the current show has a high penetration rate of digital cameras among Chinese people, and college students can take selfies.

Three months ago, Liu Qian, the deputy chief financial officer of YY, took the time to register a new company in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of YY Network Technology, before acquiring AGEIA and returning to China. This company was then used to take charge of all of YY's business in the United States, as well as to inject capital and provide financial supervision for Professor Jeff Hinton's research institute.

However, so far, YY has only a few offices in California, and the main R&D department and operation department are in the Boston branch on the East Coast.

From Professor Jeff Hinton's Institute of Artificial Intelligence, to the R&D department of YY with Zuckerberg and others, to the operation department temporarily presided over by Edward Savirin, they are now all working in rented office buildings near Harvard University.

Since the end of May, Brother Zack, who is a technical nerd, bets with his new classmate Gu Cheng on the efficiency of the implementation of the algorithm, but he has to admit defeat and give Gu Cheng a free job for a summer vacation.

In those two months, Gu Cheng moved the design architecture of Renren in China as a whole, and asked a group of code farmers represented by Zack to redesign and optimize, trying to make a version that conforms to the cultural atmosphere and user experience of the United States.

Gu Cheng is eclectic in employing people, and has absorbed a large number of computer science students he just met at Harvard.

Although most of these people are stunned young people who have just entered their sophomore year, and they are completely unusable in the eyes of other IT peers, Harvard students are quite heroic after all, even sophomores, who have made great achievements in doing a summer vacation as a paid internship, and have done a good job of localization.

Harvard is not a strong school of science and engineering, the quality of students is awesome but there are not many professional counterparts, as soon as the summer vacation is over, Zuckerberg aims at MIT next door with the acquiescence of Gu Cheng.

Then MIT students also discovered that there was a social networking site run by the boss of a NASDAQ company to be listed, and the internship salary was very high, and there were many opportunities provided, and the business seemed cool and promising. It's a pity that at the beginning, it was occupied by the silver pewter head of the Harvard department.

MIT people have always disagreed with Harvard in science and engineering, thinking that Harvard is a bunch of liberal arts people who are forced to gangster Wall Street. So how can this situation be endured?

After YY.com successfully infiltrated the eight universities of the East Coast Ivy League in just over half a month, the working boys of the MIT department were all beaten and asked their friends to ask for help from their seniors. YY Miguo Company has to take a good assessment to recruit a few code farmers, otherwise it will not be able to digest so many high-end labor.

Of course, in this process, Li Ying, a new friend that Gu Cheng met when he was in the United States, the famous MIT courtesan "Massachusetts Rose", also contributed a lot, selling friendships and acting as a broker to attract people. These are all afterwords and need not be repeated.

……

Speaking of YY's "great future" in the United States, it was not Zuckerberg's technical team that made a big effort at the beginning, after all, today's YY network has borrowed a lot of the architecture of Renren.

What really led the instant expansion of YY was the YY operation team represented by Edward Savirin.

Gu Cheng knew that Saverin was also a talent, so while recruiting Zuckerberg, he also extended an olive branch to Saverin, and let him follow him with all his strength since the summer vacation.

Compared with Zuckerberg's guy who lost a bet and was caught, Saverin is a free body, a wealthy second generation, and made $300,000 from his own oil futures last summer, which is naturally worth a lot of money. Gu Cheng took the opportunity to give him a performance option worth $1 million, which is theoretically equivalent to the bet between Gu Cheng and Zuckerberg, and can be regarded as fully respecting Saverin's worth. Saverin has got both money and face, so naturally he won't make more moths.

According to the performance option issued by Gu Cheng, as long as Saverin can preside over the operation work, so that YY can develop an opening rate of more than 50% in the Ivy League schools within two months, and run out of the East Coast and infiltrate Stanford and UC Berkeley in Silicon Valley within one semester, then Saverin can get the original shares of YY Network for $1 million.

Eduard Savirin is indeed a strong man, he himself is the child of a wealthy Brazilian businessman, and after studying at Harvard, he has been committed to joining various top clubs and clubs, and has a very strong social promotion ability.

HISTORICALLY, EDUARD SAVIRIN'S ABILITY TO ACQUIRE THE FIRST 1 MILLION USERS OF FACEBOOK HAS BEEN INDISPENSABLE. IF IT WEREN'T FOR SAVERIN, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN DIFFICULT FOR ZUCKERBERG TO TURN FACEBOOK INTO THE LARGEST SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE IN A MID-TO-HIGH-END UNIVERSITY IN THE UNITED STATES IN ONE SEMESTER.

AS FOR LATER, AFTER FACEBOOK DOMINATED THE CIRCLE OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN THE UNITED STATES AND FURTHER EXPANDED TO THE WHOLE SOCIETY, SAVERIN'S VISION AND SKILLS BEGAN TO SEEM INADEQUATE. SO MUCH SO THAT IN THE PROCESS OF FINALLY TURNING FACEBOOK FROM A MILLION-LEVEL COLLEGE STUDENT APP TO A NATIONAL APP WITH HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF USERS, THE BIGGEST CONTRIBUTION WAS SEAN PARKER, WHO LATER JOINED HALFWAY. (Of course, we will have to rely on additional venture capital from Peter Thiel)

As early as 2000, before the Internet bubble burst, Sean Parker built a pirated music sharing website Napster in the United States, which once gained tens of millions of users. But later because of copyright issues, the world's three major record companies were surrounded and sued, and after Sean Parker was ruled against the federal court, he went bankrupt and liquidated because he couldn't pay the compensation from the three major record companies anyway.

He himself only took a million dollars in funds, and did nothing to sit idly by during the two or three years of the cold winter. IT WASN'T UNTIL ABOUT HALF A YEAR AFTER ZUCKERBERG'S FACEBOOK WAS FOUNDED THAT SHAWN PARKER, WHO WAS IN SILICON VALLEY, NOTICED FACEBOOK AND THOUGHT THAT THIS WEBSITE WAS VERY COOL AND PROMISING, AND TOOK THE INITIATIVE TO ASK FOR COOPERATION, AND WAS INTRODUCED BY ZUCKERBERG AS A PARTNER.

Of course, these are all later words, and they have nothing to do with Gu Cheng at the moment. He has been making genuine music all his life, and for a long time, he will definitely not get along with people like Sean Parker who insist on piracy. Even if Sean Parker is pushed by the inertia of history to ask for a part-time job after he becomes big on YY in the future, Gu Cheng will not necessarily use him - unless Sean Parker can change his position and obediently move his mind to making a music sharing website to legitimization.

……

GOSSIP, HOW FACEBOOK WAS PROMOTED IN HISTORY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GU CHENG'S HALF A DIME NOW. He just needs to know who is available and who is not, and then holds the equity in his hands, hangs the incentive on the lips of his classmates, and lets the professional people work hard to do professional things.

As for Zuckerberg, in the future, he will slowly accumulate merit for the CTO position of YY Mi country, and if it is really useful, he will be given an option to be promoted. Social networks, once they enter the limelight, basically no one can turn the sky in the same subdivision, even if Zuckerberg has ambitions and wants to start a new business, Gu Cheng is not afraid.

On September 20th, a Saturday, the semester had just been three weeks old.

Playboy Saverin also spent three weeks shuttling through the flowers, spending no more than two days in each city on average. His contacts in the Harvard Alumni Association and various conference centers were basically dug up, and he went to various schools to participate in activities, and then promoted, found popular campus courtesans to invite guests to dinner and give gifts, and persuaded these girls to join YY to open their own personal space.

THEN, AS IN THE EARLY DAYS OF FACEBOOK PROMOTION IN ANOTHER TIME AND SPACE, HE USED THE OPPORTUNITY TO ATTRACT BEAUTIFUL WOMEN TO TAKE PHOTOS IN THE SPACE, AND THEN INVITED MALE ALUMNI WHO HAD PASSED REAL-NAME IDENTITY VERIFICATION TO LIKE AND EVALUATE, AND ATTRACTED A LARGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE.

At the beginning, Saverin's strategy was not very clear, and after a week of market running-in, he immediately summed up the essentials of promotion:

"During the event, everyone can only like the space photos of their own alumni, and they are not allowed to like people outside the school across circles, and we must ensure a relatively private atmosphere in a small circle, which not only satisfies the vanity of girls who are watched and compared, but also protects their privacy from being accosted by dicks whose social class in the circle is significantly lower than theirs.

Perhaps after the end of the event in the future, the access mechanism for members of the invitation-based circle can be appropriately relaxed to increase the vitality of the circle and ensure purity. But be sure to give each user the power to choose whether or not to block strangers from viewing......"

Then these promotion essentials were copied to Gu Cheng at the end of the report when he sent the report email over the weekend - I forgot to mention that he used YY mailbox, that is, the YY mailbox that was just migrated from Huang Yi's corporate mailbox a month and a half ago.

Gu Cheng, who was on the other side of the ocean, read Saverin's report early the next morning, as well as the circumstantial evidence of other management of YY's subsidiary. (due to time difference)

"In just three weeks, we have managed to attract 26,000 alumni users to register and live monthly in the Ivy League schools. ”

Gu Cheng looked at the results and was very satisfied.

At this moment, after more than 40 days of development, there are more than 400,000 users of Renren Network in China, which is said to be 15 times that of YY.

Even considering that the population size of Huaxia is 5 times that of the United States, it is said that the relative expansion rate of Renren has reached 3 times that of YY.

But Gu Cheng fully knows the gold content behind these two figures, and it is definitely more valuable than the 26,000 people of YY.com.

Because, first of all, YY's chat software and email products have no foundation in the United States, and there is no possibility of cross-border development of users from other brother products. The people who currently use YY to chat in the United States are not as good as the number of people who open YY network space.

Secondly, the 26,000 people that Saverin has grown in just three weeks are all students of the Ivy League schools!

Harvard University has only six or seven thousand students enrolled in the four academic years of undergrading, and the Ivy League schools combined, plus the only Toronto University on the East Coast that can be compared to the Ivy League, these nine schools add up to only about 75,000 undergraduates.

It took Saverin three weeks to bring the equivalent of 35 percent of the Ivy League undergraduate students into the circle, and the future demonstration effect is very terrifying.

If this kind of thing is not done by people with charisma in the Harvard circle, it is useless for outsiders to have no technology. No matter how good the website is, if you are not an insider, the superior people will not even look at it.

In contrast, although the absolute number of registered people on Renren is large, it has not yet had time to establish an elite demonstration force. Many students also feel that this website is a little more novel than QQ Zone, and the threshold for adding people is a little higher.

Gu Cheng felt that it was necessary to learn from Saverin's promotion methods in the United States.