Zuckerberg's original startup team was his college roommate at Harvard, and they were pretty much ready for software development before they got the investment.

Zuckerberg's first platform for anonymous social software is undoubtedly Mphone, which is the smartphone with the highest market share at the moment.

If the definition is further narrowed down to college campuses, Mphone's lead will be even more exaggerated, with one out of every three smartphones in the world being a Mphone, and the ratio in universities will become 5 to 1.

Zuckerberg's team first started with the investment and added a lease of the new cloud's underlying services, and then hired a commercial manager who would specialize in connecting with the e-payment platform.

At present, there are more and more electronic payment companies, and major Internet giants and traditional consumer enterprises are trying to enter this field, but for the vast majority of Internet companies that intend to access electronic payment functions, they still have no choice but to choose NewPay.

According to a survey conducted by a commercial organization, a company has access to multiple electronic payment channels at the same time, and NewPay accounts for more than 90% of both the number of transactions and the total amount of transactions.

Practical factors have led to NewPay's advantages in the field of electronic payment becoming more and more obvious.

"Although Amazon Pay, C1it have advantages in commissions and service fees, we still have no choice but to choose NewPay.

Because whether it is our actual experience offline or the survey conducted at the Boston Regional University Forum, it shows that NewPay has an absolutely strong position in the field of electronic payment.

Not to mention that we narrowed down the scope to the Mphone platform, after the overlap of the three identities of Mphone users, college students, and electronic payment users, I even suspect that the usage rate of NewPay has reached 100%.

We now have enough cash on hand that there's no need to choose an unknown payment platform for this service fee advantage, even if it's backed by a big name like Microsoft or Citibank. Zuckerberg said.

After recruiting a commercial manager in charge of connecting with the payment platform, the five-person team began to operate at high speed.

The only person who had to be paid was the business manager, and the other three people on the team were all Zuckerberg's roommates, and they had no salary and only options.

Of course, after getting the investment from Goldman Sachs, even if they don't have a salary, they seem to be full of energy.

Sean Parker, one of the original founders of Facebook and Zuckerberg's roommate, said: "I just think we chose Newcloud for our infrastructure, NewPay for our payment software, and Mphone for our smartphone distribution platform.

I always feel like Newman's products are all around us, like air.

So I wanted to try if we could not choose NewPay. ”

David Ibersman, the commercial manager they hired, used to be an analyst at Oppenheimer's Ventures, and the five of them were crammed into a crowded office, and everyone could only stand, David stood in front of the whiteboard and pointed at Newman and said:

"Getting rid of Newman's influence shouldn't be something for a small company like us to consider, doesn't Yahoo want to get rid of Newman's influence? Didn't AOL want to get rid of Newman's influence?

Could it be that thousands of Internet companies in Silicon Valley who plan to make a career in the field of mobile Internet are willing to be coerced by the ecosystem built by Newman?

Products released in the Mphone app store are subject to a pro-rata commission, NewPay is subject to a service fee per transaction, and an advertising fee is required to get better ad space in the Mphone app store.

Xinyun also has to charge, of course, this charge is reasonable, you go to rent a server, they provide far less service than Xinyun.

Newman's ecosystem in the field of mobile Internet is so sound that with the key application of electronic payment, Newman doesn't have to do anything, and other Internet companies are helping him.

When I was working at Oppenheimer, we saw quite a few Internet companies that wanted to break this situation, and even had Internet studios that specialized in helping Mphone users jailbreak, and they wanted to get investment to help more Mphone users jailbreak.

Of course this is illegal, and we did not invest in this project. However, the ecology built by Newman in the field of mobile Internet is more sound than the personal PC ecology built by Microsoft back then, after all, Microsoft did not make computer hardware and offline software supermarket stores.

Newman has done it all, and the ecosystem he has built is nested and very tight, unless he doesn't use his ecology directly, I can't think of any way to do without NewPay.

This is not something we should think about, personal likes and dislikes should not affect business decisions, Yahoo and Newman fought to the death in the Q&A community in the late 90s, isn't it also one of the most important content contributors to the Mphone ecosystem?

What we have to do now is to do a good job of the product, attract more users, and how to make users happy. ”

David's words brutally helped the entrepreneurs in the ivory tower to realize more clearly the facts they knew but were unwilling to accept, and built an unbreakable ecosystem for young people who were not many years older than them.

"I also heard when I took an elective course on the Internet that NewPay estimated that it had lowered its market share in order not to be sued in the name of antitrust by federal courts," Edward said. ”

David agreed: "I've heard similar statements that when other Internet companies are eager to say how high their market share is, NewPay's statistics show that their market share is only more than 60 percent, which is seriously inconsistent with the facts."

Later, our company learned how they did statistics, and they went to the city with the lowest market share of NewPay to do statistics. ”

Zuckerberg interrupted the pointless chit-talk: "So we need to talk to NewPay, NewPay's service fee is relatively high, but we have no choice.

In addition, when we first started the business, we also considered which platform to launch our app, and the result of the discussion was still Mphone, right?

Since they have all chosen Mphone, what is there to worry about choosing NewPay? ”

Why Zuckerberg's team doesn't like Newman, it's not that they don't like Newman, they actually regard Newman as an entrepreneurial idol, but this mentality is contradictory, as a Harvard student, it is normal to have a natural antagonistic psychology towards Berkeley students.

They hope to re-follow the path of Newman's entrepreneurial success and eventually build their own ecosystem, which has become a buzzword for Internet entrepreneurship with several Mphone developer conferences.

When investment managers and entrepreneurs talk about their long-term goals, they are building an ecosystem.

When you want to build your own ecology, but you have to help someone else's ecology, this feeling is frustrating.

Zuckerberg said, "The last question we're going to talk about next is what is our software called? ”

“AChat？”

“MeetU？”

Everyone expressed their opinions, almost all of them revolved around the two core elements of anonymity and chat, and for a while there was silence, and no one could convince anyone.

Finally, Edward said, "I think it's better to call it FaceChat, or FC for short."

Although we are an anonymous social software, users who finally talk about sparks always end up moving from anonymous to real identity, from online to offline, and finally see each other's faces.

FaceChat is a great way to distinguish us from other anonymity apps on the market. ”

In the end, the name Face Chat was unanimously recognized by everyone and became their product name.

Zhou Xin learned from Li Jingyi that Facebook has become a face chat in this era, and he can't help but feel that the changes he has brought are too great.

Tencent didn't make games, Ali didn't make Taobao, and even Facebook became a Facebook chat.

However, according to Zhou Xin's understanding, Tencent will definitely not go back to making games, but it is hard to say whether Ali will go back to Taobao. Just because you don't do it for the time being doesn't mean you don't do it all the time.

After the launch of Face Chat, it started with the Boston metropolis and quickly exploded in the national college circle.

There are more than 50 schools in Boston, including top universities such as Harvard and MIT, as well as secondary universities such as Northeastern University and Boston University.

Face chat this software is very similar to the Soul of the later generations, the user is anonymous, and then there is a square, the square is similar to a post bar, everyone can post on the square, and then the official will guide the hot topics of the day.

Zhou Xin sighed when he experienced face chat, Zuckerberg is indeed a top genius, and he can still make face chat without Facebook.

"This idea is also a bit interesting, enter your real information in the background, and unlock a real message as many conversations as you want.

Genius indeed. After a brief experience, Zhou Xin sent an email to Warren Jensen of Xinxing Investment, asking him to pay attention to this company, and Xinxing Investment can invest in this project.

Yes, Zhou Xin didn't vote at first because he didn't think it was necessary, after all, without Facebook, he didn't know how far Zuckerberg could do with an anonymous chat software, and he wasn't interested.

Zhou Xin feels that Dingtian has achieved a valuation of hundreds of millions of dollars, after all, the valuation of the ceiling of similar software POSTSecret is there.

After the experience, Zhou Xin changed his mind, and he realized that entrepreneurs who can become top tech giants have two brushes, even if he changes the world line, but the light they can shine cannot be hidden.

Face chat is a software that is simple and simple, it is a simple version of Soul, but it adds some interesting features, that is, to unlock real information.

You can set a series of information such as your occupation, identity, name, city, etc., to unlock them, including your personal photo.

Then set up a step-by-step unlocking method, for example, after sending ten messages to each other, you can unlock a message, and the more you send, the more information you will unlock, until all the information you enter is unlocked.

It is equivalent to a process of gradually exploring the identity of the other party during the chat.

The number of unlocked messages here is fixed, and every 10 messages sent to each other is a ladder, but the total number of personal information that can be unlocked is set by yourself, and the order before and after is also set by individuals.

That's a lot of creativity.

What makes Zhou Xin feel even more amazing is the profit model, and the profit model of face chat is also very simple, charge members, after charging members, others need ten messages to unlock your personal information, you can discount, you only need the other party to reply eight messages to you, and you will unlock it.

This monetization model does not change the way the software is played, but also gives users the urge to pay.

The only problem is that Facebook Chat is not a good model for advertising, and if you only rely on membership fees, the upper limit is limited, so Facebook Chat is certainly not as high as the valuation of Facebook in later generations, but the value is definitely still there, and it is not a problem to enjoy a market value of tens of billions of dollars in Ameriken's financial system.

Compared with Chinese Internet companies, the biggest advantage of Silicon Valley's Internet companies is that they can be unimpeded on a global scale, and once their business model is formed, they can quickly harvest it on a global scale.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, all of them.

Face Chat gained 10,000 users in just one week, and in half a month, the number became 100,000, and it is growing at an unimaginable rate.

When that number turned to 100,000, in Zuckerberg's small rented office, five people were holding a simple celebration, and Zuckerberg said, "It looks like we're doing a good job."

In two weeks, we have more than 100,000 users, including 10,000 paying people, which means that it is now bringing us $100,000 a month, which is a staggering number.

According to the person in charge of the Mphone app store and my private communication, this ratio is very rare, and it is one of the highest paid apps outside of games since the launch of the Mphone app.

Before we celebrate, we need to think about a new question, that is, whether we want to bring in new investment institutions and expand our market share quickly, or whether we will rely on our own income to expand slowly. ”

If there is no Zhou Xin, there is no second answer to this question, it must be to quickly find venture capital, attract investment, quickly expand the scale, and replicate the successful model in the United States and blossom more.

After the success of Zhou Xin, entrepreneurs, especially those with a stable profit model, do not want to introduce venture capital institutions too early, because it means that their equity is diluted and their interests are taken away by venture capital institutions.

Zuckerberg also faced a similar problem, with Zhou Xin in front, he wanted to rely on stable revenue to develop slowly, but because the success of Face Chat depended on product innovation and lacked sufficient moat, he was afraid that he would be plagiarized by other competitors and catch up.

Zuckerberg continued, "We're now making $100,000 a month, and that number will grow as our user base grows.

At the moment, most of our revenue is focused on increasing hardware resources, because our user base is growing faster than we thought, and I plan to double our headcount in two weeks, which means we'll hire five more people.

Then we moved to a bigger office, and then the cash flow of $100,000 would not be enough to support us to do so much. ”

(End of chapter)