The print press is discussing why Newman has always been able to create products that are very different from other Internet companies.

Internet companies are paying more attention to this issue, and the creative secret of Newman is just a gimmick for the media to attract readers, but for Internet companies, it is the key to their life and death.

Everyone is facing a serious crisis, and Riot Games is the first to emerge from this crisis with just one game.

This is an attraction for Internet companies.

"In the current situation, Time Warner needs a CEO who can lead Time Warner out of the current predicament, not a CEO like Gerard Wright who has no innovative spirit and innovative ability.

If it were 1995, Gerrard would be able to maintain Time Warner's position and even lead Time Warner to the next level with his skillful knowledge of capital market operations. But now in the year 2000, the capital market has lost patience with the Internet and has lost interest in mergers and acquisitions between Internet companies.

The merger and acquisition of Yahoo and eBay was stopped, and the stock prices of Microsoft and Cisco could not escape the fate of plummeting.

The only Internet companies that can still attract investors is Newman, originally we thought that after Time Warner acquired Quora, Newman would lose its previous halo and take off the best word among the best product managers.

In the face of the crisis, Newman put the crown of the acquisition back on his head, even more dazzling than before, and investors once again realized that Quora was able to maintain a stable operation because Newman designed all the core links for it.

Newman's loss of Quora is far less serious than Quora's loss of Newman, so I think we need a new CEO to lead Time Warner out of its current predicament, and if Gerard Wright can't do that, then we'll replace him.

What Time Warner needed was innovation, and only the story of innovation told by Newman himself would attract investors. So I think we need to show sincerity and bring Newman to the helm of Time Warner. ”

At Time Warner's internal board meeting, there was a consensus that Gerard Wright should be removed from office, who is not capable enough to handle the stormy Time Warner.

The appointment of Newman as Chairman of Time Warner was met with the approval of all directors and was considered to be an absolute good thing. No matter how high the cost of bringing Newman to the helm of Time Warner is, the stimulus to the capital market will casually earn the money back.

Newman's return to the helm of Time Warner is equivalent to injecting Time Warner with a shot in the arm in the capital market.

The problem is that it can't be done, it's too difficult, because Zhou Xin is not short of money, and he can't open a chip that can make Zhou Xin's heart move.

"I also wanted to invite Newman to take the helm of Time Warner, but the problem was that I couldn't, and after the resignation of Yahoo's president, they also wanted to find Newman to take charge of Yahoo, and I heard that Yahoo offered a sky-high annual salary of $100 million, and Newman was still unmoved.

Time Warner wanted to convince Newman, but it was almost impossible. ”

Zhou Xin really doesn't look down on this 100 million US dollars, not to mention that this 100 million US dollars is mainly based on equity incentives, and the cash is only 10 million US dollars.

Even if it is $100 million in cash, it is not good for the current Zhou Xin.

Because the essence is that Yahoo used his fame to pull up the stock price, and it was the shareholders behind Yahoo who made a profit after pulling up the stock price, and they paid a small price to borrow Zhouxin's reputation.

In a year, or even less, it's nearly impossible to completely reverse Yahoo's decline. Yahoo has made too many bad decisions during the dot-com bubble in the past, and a lot of money has been spent on the wrong acquisitions.

In fact, Zhou Xin only needs one trick to help Yahoo reverse the decline, and that is to buy Google. But the problem is that it takes at least three years to see results from the acquisition of Google, and Yahoo has paid $100 million for hundreds of billions of dollars.

There is no need for this at all.

"Newman, congratulations, Riot Games is once again a success, and even if free-to-play video games reach 50% of the scale of paid video games, Riot Games will be worth as much as Quora in the future.

When Goldman Sachs provided Riot Games listing services, it did not subscribe for more Riot Games shares, and our understanding of Riot Games' market value at that time was not in place.

Or maybe we don't know you well enough, and other founders wouldn't have been able to bring Riot Games to where it is today. Henry Paulson, a powerful figure at Goldman Sachs and a senior member of the Executive Committee.

In other words, Goldman Sachs is now a mechanism that he has led to form, and will go to the government as finance minister in 2006 through the revolving door of government and enterprises, and single-handedly lead Time Warner's acquisition of Quora.

With Zhou Xin's status, Goldman Sachs Vice President Jerrell, the person in charge of Riot Games' listing, Zhou Xin can ignore him, but Henry, Zhou Xin must be taken seriously.

Just for the other party to serve as the Minister of Finance in the future, Zhou Xin also needs to have a good relationship with the other party.

In Zhou Xin's memory, in the financial crisis of 08, Henry made a lot of wrong decisions, and he may not be able to let Henry go further on the wrong decision-making road.

"Even without free-to-play games, Riot Games has a very high value because it relies entirely on video games, which have grown significantly over the past decade and have been distributed online.

Riot Games' video game community ecosystem is also becoming more and more complete, from one game to ten games to thousands of games today, you can find corresponding reviews from Riot Games' rating system.

The accumulation of data, the growth of the video game industry, and the encroachment of online to offline channels have determined that Riot Games has a very broad future.

It's just that it's hard for people to see that, and they just focus on the points that stand out, like the dot-com bubble, and they think that all internet companies have bubbles.

Even if Riot Games is in a very good financial position, investors will not carefully analyze Riot Games because it is in good financial condition, but will subconsciously think that it is financially distressing because it is an Internet company.

All I'm doing is making investors rediscover Riot Games through the direct revenue from free games. In fact, the potential future revenue of free-to-play games is not as appealing, and it can help Riot Games stock price rise by 40%. Zhou Xin said very frankly.

Instead of relying on investors' money to hype up Riot Games, as other Internet companies do, Riot Games has attracted a lot of attention by relying on players' tap water and head-to-head showdown with Yahoo Games.

After forming a positive cycle, Riot Games has been relying on its excellent community ecosystem to attract customers, and it has always been profitable, so Riot Games has achieved breakeven early on.

And with the increasing number of video games being released through Riot Games, the profitability has maintained a high growth trend.

After the financial reports of many Internet companies have exploded, and there is a phenomenon of concealment and embellishment of data, Riot Games' financial reports can also stand the test.

Henry thought about it and knew that he had to talk to Zhou Xin directly, and he couldn't beat around the bush: "Newman, reading financial reports is the basic skill of investors, and the market value of Riot Games fell before not because its financial reports were not excellent, nor because it suspected that it had a cash flow crisis."

The fundamental reason is that investors are skeptical that Internet companies will be able to find a profit model sooner or later after expanding their scale, as advertised.

To put it simply, investors didn't care about the revenue and profits of Internet companies before, and the valuation system also revolved around users, but whether users can really create enough value in the future has been completely falsified around the turn of the millennium.

No matter how large the user base is, it may not be really valuable, quora only has hundreds of thousands of formal users, and many Internet companies have millions of members, can these Internet companies behind them, their users be able to create the same value as quora users in the future?

The restructuring of the valuation system is the fundamental reason for the collapse of the market value of all Internet companies, and everyone no longer believes that users are the key, and that winning users is the most important thing for Internet companies.

Quora has played a key role in this, and the success of Quora has made Wall Street realize that the value between users is not the same, and the value that users can tap is also different.

The bursting of the Nasdaq bubble is only a further clarification of this realization, and the financial situation is nothing more than a rhetoric for the media to find reasons for the results.

If Internet companies can find a clear path to prove that they can make money from users in the future, they will be able to maintain cash flow from investors.

Recently, there has been a new argument on Wall Street, that is, Newman's company needs to adopt a different valuation system than other Internet companies.

Newman's business never has to worry about finding a profit model, and Newman is able to find more than one profit model for his business. ”

This is not only Henry bragging about Zhou Xin, but indeed many Wall Street investors have proposed this concept, which has been publicly reported in the financial media.

The financial media coined a new word: Newman concept stocks, which means Internet companies led by Newman behind them, and they can enjoy a different valuation system.

Riot Games is a masterpiece, and Time Warner has also enjoyed this dividend, but because Time Warner has other businesses besides Quora, Time Warner has fallen even harder.

Zhou Xin thought to himself that financial people could speak, and he was very proud of it, even if these ideas did not come from him, but from the wisdom of the future, he was still very happy to be flattered.

Chinese Internet companies are much more involved than foreign Internet companies, and foreign Internet companies have a very poor user experience, and after occupying a monopoly advantage, they rarely optimize the user experience.

Taking Twitter and Weibo as examples, purely from the user experience, Weibo's user experience can throw off Twitter's eight streets.

"It seems that I should invest more in Internet companies, so that other Internet companies can also enjoy the dividends brought by Newman." Zhou Xin teased.

Henry nodded: "Yes, maybe after you invest a lot in Internet companies, the NASDAQ index will not fall but rise."

Investors on Wall Street who want to jump off the building because of a large number of Internet company stocks should be thanked. ”

Henry continued: "Newman, there are actually two main things that need to be discussed with you this time.

The first is that Time Warner commissioned me to be a lobbyist, and they wanted to invite you to be the CEO of Time Warner and give you an annual salary of $1 billion, which of course has requirements.

At the end of the year, Time Warner's market capitalization determines how much you can earn an annual salary, ranging from a minimum of $100 million to a maximum of $1 billion.

80% of this option incentive and 20% cash, you can consider it.

If it were someone else, I would have told him that this is a rare opportunity, and that a billion-dollar job is not available all the time.

But if it's you, I think it's just a very ordinary opportunity, and there are too many companies to manage under your name.

It is also easy to go public with an Internet company, and after you go public, the benefits you will bring to you will not be less than $1 billion.

The richer the person, the easier it is to make money. ”

After listening to this, Zhou Xin thought to himself that Time Warner is worthy of being a big dog, and the chips offered are incomparable to other Internet companies.

Yahoo can only offer $100 million in chips, while Time Warner can offer a billion.

Of course, Time Warner's billion-dollar dollar has a performance review requirement, while Yahoo doesn't.

Zhou Xin shook his head: "Like you said, I don't have the time and energy."

Most of my energy is on the Matrix phone, we were going to launch an epoch-making phone product this year, there are a lot of innovations, and I have built a lot of different features for the Matrix to meet the needs of mobile phone users.

This also made it very difficult to develop, far more than I expected, so I didn't have time to worry about Time Warner anymore.

Unlike Riot Games and NewPay, I founded these two companies, and I have a very high level of mastery of them, and I interviewed the senior management teams of these two companies one by one, so I don't need to re-acquaint myself with them.

Time Warner is different, and the executives in charge of the Quora section of Time Warner have changed, and it takes me too much energy to re-familiarize myself with it and then think about the development strategy. ”

Jimmy Wells and Larry Sanger, who were involved in Quora's startup, were quickly vacated after Zhou Xin's sale of Quora, and they offered to leave after being put on the spot, and then sold part of Time Warner's shares to start the e-encyclopedia business again.

With Quora's experience, Jimmy and Larry have a better idea of how to make a good e-encyclopedia, and how to balance professionalism and universality.

Henry: "Newman, I can totally understand your decision, and the position of Time Warner is really not worth mentioning for you.

I've just heard from you, I'm very interested in matrix, am I still short of money? Goldman Sachs can invest in this project, we lack everything else, that is, we are not short of money.

Especially at the moment, Goldman Sachs is particularly short of good project investment. ”

More 4k tonight, another chapter tomorrow morning. Slowly get back to the codeword state

(End of chapter)