Reboot 2003

Chapter 180 088: Bulk Giants

The most critical issue in investment is money. Under a mature trading system, if a kindergartener likes a company, he can buy it directly through an investment bank, as long as he has money.

However, mergers and acquisitions in the Internet field do not start to make money when you buy them—the bad merger of Time Warner and AOL seems to illustrate this point. The logic of the Internet means that its products need to be deployed delicately from traffic entry to commercial realization. The understanding of this stage of the Internet is 'ecology'.

The word ecology is not unfamiliar to most netizens, although it is a bit inexplicable to users, many Internet people who are used to writing business plans are too lazy to think of ideas to fool users, so they directly move it to advertising words, users Often I watched for a long time and didn't know what they were talking about.

But 'ecology' itself is a business idea, and it is different from 'decentralization' in that it has boundaries - it conforms to the idea of ​​decentralization to a certain extent, but it must have a core business as the backbone, there is Only with this tone can other businesses form a business system together.

For example, Google's ecology is always search and advertising, Tencent's ecology is communications and platforms, and Shanda's ecology is entertainment. Among them, Shanda is relatively weak, and the ideas of the other two will not be much different after 20 years. There must be such an ecological core——

Just looking at revenue, it seems that Galaxy Music is more promising.

After all, Shuixie Getai seems to be really good. It can be used not only as a traffic portal, but also as a content platform and monetization node, but it is still too complicated. There were several discussions within the group last year, and the conclusion was that users are the mainstay That is to say, the galaxy software department still needs to be an ecological center. If there are more users, it will naturally feed back other projects. This is also the main reason why galaxy software can grow to this point.

Therefore, with the unanimous approval of the top and bottom decision-makers, although most people don't know what "free software" means, in short, just before February this year, at the same time as the investment in Facebook, the investment department held a meeting , set this goal.

Then there is the investment.

Of course, if you want to invest with the goal of cashing out, you don't have to worry about so much, but since you want to do ecology, you still have to have your own way.

This way - companies with strong management capabilities often choose to acquire, but Galaxy Software is not a company that is good at integration and management, so the idea of ​​​​the investment department is to invest in some small websites with relatively low commercial value, and then use the platform to Put them together.

And this set of ideas—in fact, there are ready-made examples that can be copied.

Although Mr. Li Kaifu, who founded Innovation Workshop a few years later, is still at Microsoft, this year he will "choose a tree for a good bird" and go directly to Google Tianchao...

But this model actually originated from Meilijian before the bubble. It was called Idealab. During the .com boom, it created a set of industrial chains that used search engines and portals to roughly drain traffic, and then quickly went public to cash out. Baidu’s bidding ads came from them. Learned.

Although this system seems to be a bit inferior to investors in this era, but because Galaxy Software has a reborn boss, there is no need to worry about missing truly valuable projects. A lot of traffic——Now that the popularity of 82 Navigation is quite mature, it is suitable to be used as a website incubator, and it is a natural ecological cornerstone for Galaxy Software.

And with this system, you can start to formally invest...

In China, Galaxy Software first invested in Donews, the news community that criticized Galaxy Software last year. Donews was established in 2001. The founder Liu Ren has repeatedly stated that they are an IT news community that pursues fairness and objectivity. The traffic is not bad. In order to ensure that they can Try to be fair and objective, the founder Liu Ren even said that he would not accept any investment...

As a result, I scolded 'Galaxy music is too unique' in the report last year. Although it can't be regarded as a slap in the face, but after the Shuixie Getai came out, I felt a little embarrassed. In an event at the end of last year; Liu Ren ran to talk to Mr. Sun Toast, President Sun of Galaxy Software saw them and said he was willing to invest 200 million, but Liu Ren justly refused.

However, Mr. Sun later offered another 1000 million price tag, and the condition was changed to a direct acquisition, with a ratio of 51%. It has also become the exclusive sponsorship of Galaxy Software. The contract states that we operate independently, and the news will definitely get better and better in the future... In fact, it is just a priority investment and cooperation agreement.

After that, I voted for Dianping. This website came out the year before last, but now the domestic web2.0 has not yet become popular, and I don’t know where c2c is. I just voted for 300% of 20 million, which is like giving away for nothing.

In the field of e-commerce, I invested in a website called 360buy. The owner of this website, Mr. Liu, met through Gu Wenjie. It is mainly engaged in e-commerce, but it has a physical sales site in Yanjing. The future development plan is still between offline and online. In the end, Galaxy Investment invested 500 million, promising to continue financing in the future, but they want to shift the focus of sales to online as soon as possible, and at least do a good job of maintaining the website.

In addition... this 360buy domain name is too casual, our platform also has a domain name library for you to choose from, what?Your boss Liu wants to be called Jingdong?But Jingdong has already registered for others.

How about this, Mr. Chen of our company will give you a qimei.com for free. Let’s change the name to Chimei Mall in the future. It sounds nice and easy to remember, and the meaning is good...

After such a round of investment, these projects were almost found by the group's senior management - after understanding the business ideas, the answers to the problems never seem to be difficult to think of.

Of course, Boss Chen, who is acting strangely but has always had a high sense of presence, will definitely continue to torment.

First of all, of course, is the Internet of Things that the boss is thinking about, and the first entrance to the Internet of Things is the map, and the map is the AutoNavi map... This is the most mature commercial surveying and mapping organization in China, and it has the digital surveying and mapping qualification given by the state, but now Gaode Map is not a small role that no one cares about. It has received funding from many traditional car companies since its appearance, and it is not short of money.

Chang You went to talk to them about the prospect of cooperation in a bunch of new technologies. Although the people of AutoNavi Maps are quite open-minded, they think AJAX, a technology that just came out this year, seems very interesting, so they symbolically agreed to a sum of 1000 million yuan. Investment, but it is still too expensive. People in the company don't like to deal with this kind of traditional enterprise. I don't know what the boss invests in.

Of course, that’s fine. After all, AutoNavi is in China and is still within the management scope of Galaxy Investment. At least in a mature investment system, you don’t have to worry about being scammed by them, and AutoNavi is already making money.

What is even more incomprehensible is a discuz!The project itself is a content management system localized by a small team from a foreign open source website. It was launched in 03 for a fee-based operation. In 04, it ran into its peer PHPwind. It was in a bad situation because the opponent was free. The future is bleak, but Galaxy Software bought it for 300 million...

If blogs and forums are user-oriented products, then this seems to be a website-oriented product, and even advertisements cannot be displayed, so it is difficult to see where its commercial value lies.

The investment department also doesn't understand Facebook. After all, this company is in a foreign country, and it is difficult to manage. Maybe people will take the money and run away one day. The reason why venture capital is risky is that a small part of it is that the money invested in the project will not be successful. If it is done, most of it is afraid that the money will be cheated by scammers, and most of this is a completely controllable risk. Formal venture capital institutions will have special audit and financial personnel, and the money invested will generally exist in public accounts, Or in the jointly managed accounts of both parties, but even so, risks cannot be avoided. Many entrepreneurs originally wanted to do business well, but when they saw that they could run away with money, they would start to use their brains; For foreign countries that cannot be controlled, venture capital is real venture capital.

Of course, that's okay-the most confusing thing is an open source investment project in Sweden called MySql.

It is an open source database system, and discuz!It's the same thing, and you can't sell U disks like the Linux system. Commercialization is basically something you can't think about.The boss spent 1000 million to invest in 15% of this company, which feels very confusing.

Of course, this is what the boss meant after all. Although everyone thinks it is a bit strange, it is not something they can manage. Inside the company, last year's equity incentives boosted morale. At the beginning of the year, the boss also launched a dividend plan for executives. Everyone The morale is higher... Now how the boss allocates assets is his own business. For everyone, the project at hand is more important.

And in such a busy day, all these acquisitions were completed before the Spring Festival. After that, everyone had a happy year, and then Tianchao Internet ushered in a big news——

In the spring of 2005, the news of Shanda’s acquisition of Sina was made public, and the market was in an uproar. The giant’s merger and acquisition was a precursor to the high commercialization of the industry. In the chaos, Shanda Group had already stood at the vanguard of the times, and it seemed that it was invincible.

In the meantime, analysts have different opinions, and other giants are scrambling to prepare to follow up.

Later, the time gradually approached the middle of the year, winter went to spring, World of Warcraft national server public beta was launched, msn entered the Tianchao market with a high profile, Baidu's listing was imminent, and the Tianchao Internet industry was very lively.

However, when everyone looks back at this moment, they see frequent movements at the beginning of the year, and it seems that they are almost in the limelight like Shanda, and they seem to be acting like giants. Galaxy software... But it seems that there has been no other movement since the Spring Festival.

(End of this chapter)