Why did Zeng Li Qing mention IDG Capital and Yingke?

This is because he is now in charge of Tencent's external financing, and in the process of Tencent's external financing, he has established a good personal friendship with Wang Shu of IDG.

In addition, it is true that all 40% of the shares were sold to Zhou Xin, for Zeng Liqing, who has studied venture capital for a period of time, he believes that there is a great uncontrollable risk.

In both public and private, he felt that he should discuss it again and consider it after discussion.

Xu Yidan looked at him with crazy eyes: "In the current environment, we don't have the capital to negotiate terms with emerging investments.

We have refused now, and the other party may not be willing to offer this condition when we go back. ”

Zeng Liqing said: "Yingke and IDG said that as long as Zhou Xin is willing to invest in us, they will follow. ”

Xu Yidan: "You also said that under the premise of Zhou Xin's investment in us, we are leaving now, and there is no evidence, why should IDG and Yingke Capital believe what we say."

Could it be that they can find Zhou Xin for verification, or they can find someone from emerging investors for verification?

By the time the verification is over, we can't afford to delay it at all.

As for what you are worried about, QQ is a product that Zhou Xin can copy at will, and he has no reason or excuse to covet Tencent. ”

Seeing that Zeng Liqing still wanted to quibble, Xu Yidan did not give him room to continue to explain, and continued: "Even if Zhou Xin really wants to get control of Tencent, do you still want to convince two of the five of us?"

If the company's development is not good, why does Zhou Xin want to gain control of Tencent?

If the enterprise develops well, why are the five of us divided? Or even the situation of standing on the opposite side? ”

Pony Ma stood up and interrupted: "Don't say it again, Yidan, hurry up and read the contract, we signed it with Xinxing Investment, Li Qing, you immediately call Zhidong to bring the company's official seal, sign and seal."

I know what you're worried about, and I think the same as Yidan, what we need to worry about now is the question of Tencent's survival.

That's what we need to do now, and it's too far away to fight for control.

And, to put it bluntly, we were thinking about how we could sell the company three months ago.

When we were chatting with SEG and Huaguo Telecom's 21CN business unit under the Guangdong branch, as well as the Zhongbei Paging Group in Yanjing, none of them thought about buying Tencent. ”

This kind of five-person company, the legal person is Pony Ma, the official seal is carried with him, the five founders have come to Yanjing, and the official seal has also come.

They also want to sign a contract immediately if someone invests, and before they were looking for venture capital at the Shenzhen Fair, they took the official seal with them.

In 1999, Zhongbei Paging was the largest paging enterprise in North China, and paging was the BB machine business. Zhongbei Paging asked Tencent to make a network paging system, and Pony Ma personally went to Zhongbei as an engineer to help them debug the equipment installation system.

At that time, Zhang Zhihao, the engineer of Zhongbei Paging who was responsible for docking with Pony Ma, helped Pony Ma to sell Tencent to the senior management of Zhongbei Paging, hoping that they would buy it.

It just so happened that Zhongbei Paging was also looking for business transformation at that time, because anyone with a discerning eye could see that the paging business was sunset, and sooner or later it would be cold. It's a pity that Zhongbei paging didn't take a fancy to QQ.

(Later, Zhang Zhihao served as the general manager of Tencent's Yanjing branch.) ）

Pony Ma continued: "The other key point is that Mr. Zhou just told me that he knows how QQ can be profitable. ”

Zeng Liqing and Chen Yidan looked at each other: "I'll look at the contract immediately." "I'll call Zhang Zhidong right away."

As soon as this sentence came out, no one could take care of Yingke and IDG Capital anymore.

Compared with Zhou Xin, these two investment institutions are far inferior, and now Zhou Xin not only gives money, but also points out the future development direction for them.

It's so important.

Coupled with Zhou Xin's fame, no one will doubt that he has no choice.

You must know that several companies established by Zhou Xin in Silicon Valley all have clear profit models, and all of them have achieved profitability.

Before Quora, who knew the Q&A community, who would have thought that it could also make money by paying Q&A, and the later Quora Gold Selection was even more golden. This model cleverly allows the media to create a name, new media, to name this new form of media.

Not to mention the online distribution of video games through SMS verification codes.

Money can only help Tencent survive temporarily, and I don't know how long it can live.

If they can't find a profit model, then they must go public to survive, but looking at the external environment, they may not be able to go public before the funds are exhausted.

Moreover, the listing only burns the investors' money into the money of the shareholders, and there is no essential difference.

If Luckin didn't rely on Chinese consumers, it would be a dead end sooner or later to rely only on the funds raised by the Ameriliken stock market.

While the founders of Tencent were chatting passionately in the conference hall, a second person entered.

"Newman, hello, I am the founder of Alibaba, you can call me Ma Yun, you can also call me Jack, I used to be an English teacher."

Lao Ma is obviously much more confident than Xiao Ma, of course, this is also related to the fact that he has just received financing from Goldman Sachs, and only with money can he have confidence.

Zhou Xin thought to himself, it is estimated that only Jack Ma will directly call him by his English name, and other entrepreneurs probably don't dare to call him that.

"Hello Jack, let's get straight to the point, you wrote in the company introduction that you just got $5 million from Goldman Sachs.

Based on my understanding of Goldman Sachs, the $5 million financing should be close to 50% of your shares, right?

Where did you get your shares and then sell them to New Ventures? ”

Jackma replied: "46.7 percent to be exact, that's not a problem, and if the emerging investment is willing, we will help mediate in the middle."

Let Goldman Sachs sell part of Alibaba's equity to Newman, your side.

In addition, we can directly start the next round of financing and dilute the shares of Goldman Sachs, of course, I want to adopt an A/B share structure and take control into my own hands in the follow-up financing process.

You believe that I am definitely the best person at the helm of Alibaba, and I will definitely be able to make it public under my leadership. ”

Zhou Xin said: "Money is just a number for me, and I don't just look at money when I invest in businesses.

Even if Ali goes public, it doesn't mean much to me, it's just a difference between hundreds of millions more and hundreds of millions, and you need to have something else that can impress me. ”

Zhou Xin really wants to see the present, at this point in time, Jackma's thoughts on Ali's future.

"Ali is now focused on B2B business, and we can see it as moving the Yellow Pages online.

Traditional Yellow Pages are printed on paper and searched by the user through an index. In this way, there are two problems, the first is that the information capacity of paper is limited, and there may be hundreds of enterprises that can be carried by one yellow page.

Alibaba currently has more than 10,000 registered users and more than 20,000 members. ”

Registered members need to pay membership fees, not ordinary members, and the early B2B business models, including Alibaba, Global Sources, etc., are all profitable by charging membership fees from users.

Therefore, compared with other Internet companies, Alibaba's profit model is very clear.

But that's not enough, because the number of merchants is limited, and if you set a high price, other B2B sites will attract those merchants away. Pricing can only be maintained on a lower benchmark.

This profit model is not enough to bargain with investors, and its returns will not be high in the foreseeable future.

Unless you achieve a monopoly, the merchants have to pay you a hefty membership fee.

But B2B is not realistic, because B2B also faces a player, that is, the local government of China, which is also doing B2B business.

Jack Ma first made the Yellow Pages of Huaguo, and later Hangzhou Telecom also did it, and directly gave Jack Ma's Yellow Pages and passed.

Later, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation also made a B2B website similar to the Yellow Pages.

So as long as you monopolize the B2B business and then charge high membership fees, then you will usher in a ruthless blow.

After Jackma had the experience of being acquired by Hangzhou Telecom, he knew that it was pure wishful thinking to monopolize the B2B business in China.

"We are now the e-commerce site with the largest number of users in China, and we are also the e-commerce site with the fastest growing number of users.

Our corporate purpose is to serve small and medium-sized enterprises with e-commerce.

To put it simply, it is a bridge to help foreign demanders connect with the most suitable Chinese enterprises that can provide goods. The next 20 years will be a 20 years of rapid development, and countless small and medium-sized enterprises will be born.

This has been demonstrated over the past two decades, and this growth will be even more intense in the next two decades. However, the domestic industry is obviously unable to digest the production capacity of our manufacturing industry, which will inevitably require foreign consumers to digest the goods made in China.

And Alibaba is a bridge between Chinese enterprises and overseas enterprises, and it will develop with the development of China's manufacturing industry."

There's nothing new about what Jackma said, but it's contagious when he says it.

Otherwise, Tsai Chongxin would not have gone from Investor AB's senior management with an annual salary of 5.8 million RMB to Alibaba as a financial director, with a monthly salary of only 500 yuan.

In the early days, the salaries of Ali employees were borrowed from them by Jackma, who borrowed the money and then paid them back. If a state-owned enterprise in Lanzhou knew that Alibaba had also played such an operation, it would definitely have more confidence when looking for employee loans to send money to itself.

Jack Ma flickered down for a moment, and talked about the future of China from the international trend, from the future of China to Sino-foreign trade, and then from Sino-foreign trade back to Alibaba. Zhou Xin felt a little enthusiastic when he heard it.

Zhou Xin said: "After listening to it, I think Alibaba is indeed a very promising company, and it is no wonder that Goldman Sachs will invest in you."

But we still have to return to the real world after all, and after returning to the real world, I think the B2B e-commerce model has a lot of practical problems to consider.

Let's go back to what you said just now, that is, you lack bargaining power, membership fees can only be on this benchmark, and merchants, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, are very sensitive to price.

If your pricing is high, small and medium-sized enterprises will choose to go to other e-commerce websites, and now Alibaba's rapid development also relies on services and low prices.

Then the more real-world problems you can solve for merchants, the more your bargaining power will be strengthened.

Especially when you are able to solve problems that users can't solve, the amount of money you can collect depends on how much users will lose if they don't choose what you lose.

I'll give you a very simple example, which is building trust between businesses and customers, which comes at a cost.

You are not responsible for guaranteeing, let alone guaranteeing that the customer will pay the company after receiving the goods.

At the same time, you do not guarantee that the quality of the goods provided by the company will be fine.

After enterprises and customers establish contact through Alibaba's website, their subsequent exchanges and cooperation require a lot of costs to build mutual trust, which also involves foreigners, and the cost of communication is even higher.

Enterprises first need to provide samples to customers, and then after providing the first batch of goods, they can only get a part of the payment, such as 50%, or even 30%.

Have you guys ever thought about solving this problem? In other words, you don't just stop at the initial connection between the company and the customer.

Any e-commerce company can do this step, Alibaba can do it, and tomorrow a Bilibili company will be able to do it. There is no threshold, and naturally there is no bargaining power. ”

Zhou Xin's words seemed to wake up Jack Ma, he has been doing an e-commerce website for more than five years, and he has been thinking about how to build a good website, and he has never thought so deeply.

Zhou Xin continued: "After I listened, it seems that you only mentioned how to serve small and medium-sized enterprises, but did not talk about how to serve? Just providing a channel for communication and understanding is not called good service.

E-commerce, I feel that you attach too much importance to electronics, and ignore the two words business, the essence of e-commerce is still business.

I suggest that you can go to the foreign trade industry for a while to know what these merchants really want. ”

This is also what Alibaba did after the bursting of the NASDAQ bubble, and after they had an in-depth understanding of the pain points of the foreign trade industry, they launched Chengxin Tong in 2002 to solve the credit problem in the online trade of enterprises.

Jack Ma, who is only now in the early stages of entrepreneurship, has not yet thought similarly, or rather not so clearly.

After Zhou Xin finished speaking, his heart changed, what he thought about before was to find a way to get Zhou Xin's investment, so that relying on Goldman Sachs and Zhou Xin at the same time, whether it is publicity or future financing, there are very big benefits.

Now Jackma just wants to get as many insights as he can from Zhou Xin, especially about e-commerce itself.

Regarding this aspect, he originally thought that he was the most thorough person, but he didn't expect Zhou Xin to see more thoroughly than him.

He has been engaged in the foreign trade industry since he was in the International E-Commerce Center of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.

Jackma said in an extremely serious tone: "What you said is very reasonable, we really didn't think enough about this part before.

The understanding of the problem is still too superficial, and there is no more in-depth thinking about how to solve more problems for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Let me ask you more, why are you so familiar with e-commerce? ”

Zhou Xin said: "Because I have done NewPay, that is, electronic payment software. The core of all business activities is inseparable from payment, and the essence of many business behaviors can be seen through electronic payment.

We entered the electronic payment options of eBay and Amazon, and we helped them do a function of confirming the right to accounts receivable. That is to say, after receiving the goods, the user needs to confirm the receipt of the goods before the seller can receive the money.

Before the receipt is confirmed, this payment is deposited in NewPay. Of course, if the user wants to return the product, it also needs to be confirmed by the merchant before the user can receive the refund.

Therefore, as soon as you talk about your services, I think that the accounts receivable confirmation model that NewPay helps ebay and Amazon can also be applied to the B2B business model.

There is no essential difference between B2C business and B2B business, only the difference between objects, and I am also a bypass.

NewPay does not have a branch in China, I can give you the contact information of the person in charge of the business promotion department of NewPay, we have branches in Americon and Europe, and these merchants can confirm their rights.

At the same time, we can also act as an intermediary to help transfer the payment to the customer's bank card, indirectly avoiding the risk that Huaguo does not allow electronic payment. ”

To put it simply, NewPay is the intermediary, Alibaba is just the carrier, and enterprises and customers who have reached cooperation intentions on Alibaba can choose to use Alibaba's own NewPay accounts receivable confirmation function.

After the customer confirms the harvest, NewPay sends the money to the enterprise through cross-border transfer. NewPay will refund the money to the customer only after the customer returns the goods and the business confirms it. ”

Jackma didn't expect, really didn't expect, that Zhou Xin could not only raise questions, but also help them think of solutions together.

"Newman, your solution is very good, it perfectly solves the problem of difficulty in establishing basic mutual trust, and Alibaba can increase user stickiness, NewPay can acquire users, and at the same time charge fees in it.

Enterprises and customers have also greatly reduced costs.

Our business staff also often receive complaints from enterprises, they provide customers with a relatively large number of samples, customers say that these samples will be settled when the first batch of goods are provided after the inspection is passed.

As a result, the customer disappeared directly after getting the sample.

This kind of thing happens all the time. ”

Zhou Xinji replied: "Because there is another very critical point, if Alibaba is only limited to charging according to the number of enterprises, then the number of enterprises is limited.

If you want to become bigger, only by charging according to the proportion of the total foreign trade of the enterprise, the development of China's foreign trade will be related to you, otherwise it will not have much to do with you.

User stickiness is one thing, irreplaceability is another. ”

Zhou Xin plans to let NewPay cooperate with Alibaba to build Alibaba into a model project, and all subsequent B2B businesses involving foreign trade need to be traded through NewPay.

In this way, after China's accession to the WTO, NewPay's transaction volume can quickly exceed 100 billion, and even the unit can be US dollars.

"I'm going to get in touch with the people at NewPay as soon as possible, and we're going to push this thing forward as quickly as possible," Jackma said.

If you are still willing to invest in Alibaba, we would have welcomed it, and now we are even more welcome.

I'm going to talk to Goldman Sachs, and they might be able to transfer the shares to you at a higher price than when they invested in Alibaba. ”

Zhou Xin continued: "Okay, this matter will be discussed by Mr. Wu and you, and I will not participate in specific transactional negotiations.

When the time comes, Mr. Wu will negotiate the amount and proportion of shares with you, and I will confirm it after the negotiation.

In addition, I can give you a little more of my thoughts, and that is the account period.

There are account periods for foreign trade, such as installment payments and installment loans.

You can actually go into the financial business and lend money to the business.

For example, with NewPay participating in your transaction process, enterprise A and customer B do have a transaction, but the order is very large, and company A needs to expand the scale of production to do it, but they don't have so much money on their books to expand the scale of production.

A has only two ways, borrow money to expand the scale of production or give part of the production capacity to other enterprises in the same industry.

The first path is definitely more profitable, and the second path is more secure.

Is it possible for Alibaba to get involved? Banks do not dare to lend to such enterprises, because the risks in the foreign trade industry are too high.

Alibaba was able to confirm that customer B had a sum of money lying on NewPay's virtual account through data interaction with NewPay, and the money was frozen.

Then you can set up a financial company to do this part of the loan business. ”

After Zhou Xin finished speaking, Jackma didn't say anything more, he was shocked.

Because this has touched the essence of financial technology, the essence of financial technology is information plus finance.

To put it bluntly, financial technology is to obtain information that cannot be obtained through traditional business models through technology to assist your business or risk control.

Zhou Xin motioned to the secretary of Xinxing Investment to send the other party out, and then called Wu Shiqiang to come in and say a few words to him about the follow-up investment in Alibaba.

After Jackma and Tsai returned to the hotel, he retold the content of today's conversation with Zhou Xin to Tsai Chongxin.

As a veteran of more than 10 years of experience in the financial industry, his inner shock is stronger than that of Jack Ma.

And Cai Chongxin vaguely felt that there should be a lot of items that could be expanded in the content that Zhou Xin said.

"This trip is really rewarding, Newman deserves to be the best product manager, he helped us figure out what Alibaba needs to do in the next five to ten years in a few words.

It is simply from the strategic level that directly helped Alibaba lay the direction. ”

"Joseph, is it possible for us to poach Newman? If I can poach him, I am willing to give him the position of general manager.

Why didn't I ask him if he would like to come to Alibaba? Jackma regretted it.

Joseph is Tsai's English name.

Cai Chongxin said helplessly: "I came to Alibaba because I was still working for others, so I wanted to start a business." Newman is already an entrepreneur with a proven track record of success.

He has no shortage of entrepreneurial experience, and if you want to poach him, even if Alibaba becomes the world's No. 1 e-commerce company, it is impossible.

Let's think about how to cooperate with NewPay in the future. ”

There's a lot of dry stuff in this chapter, not just dialogue.

(End of chapter)