Since we are both reborn, of course I would choose the rich woman!

Chapter 191 Jian Xiaojie: What's the price? (6k subscription required)

Lu Yao spent a lot of time and effort to reach a cooperation with ByteDance.

In fact, many of the things that Lu Yao is doing at this stage lack a core platform. Without a strong social system like Penguin as a foundation, the player stickiness of a game will always be a problem.

It is unrealistic to build a strong social system by yourself.

Because social content in the Internet field is the absolute Achilles' heel of Penguin.

Any company that wants to enter this industry will encounter almost crazy attacks from penguins.

Two years ago, MiTalk, created by Lei Jun, crashed three times in one day. How could a company that started out as an Internet company and wanted to enter the Internet field, with a server cluster that could support tens of millions of users, be unable to handle a mere 10 million MiTalk users?

Later, Mr. Lei publicly stated that MiTalk had completely lost to WeChat, but MiTalk’s historical mission had not yet ended.

MiTalk was merged into Xiaomi Interactive Entertainment by Xiaomi, and will be reorganized and launched again three years later, but WeChat has already achieved its magical power. Neither Xiaomi Interactive Entertainment nor MiTalk could escape the fate of decline, and MiTalk was completely shut down in 2020.

Xiaomi began to focus on building the Internet home car ecosystem.

Wei Xueying of Shunwei Capital did find Lu Yao, hoping that Lu Yao's "She Le Ge She" could join Xiaomi Interactive Entertainment and fight against Penguin together with them.

But Xiaomi Interactive Entertainment alone is not enough.

Lu Yao also needs a strong platform that can break through the siege and help them reach another level.

ByteDance is Lu Yao’s choice.

After Wei Xueying finished talking with Lu Yao, she went back to talk to her superior. Then Wei Xueying's direct superior, Mr. Shang, quickly contacted Lu Yao and helped Lu Yao arrange this meeting through the relationship with Shunwei Capital.

The person who came forward to negotiate with Lu Yao and others this time was Mr. Liang, the co-founder of ByteDance.

Mr. Liang is in charge of product development within ByteDance, and is responsible for many current important products and businesses, including Toutiao, Toutiao accounts, advertising system, user growth system, etc.

ByteDance's Mr. Zhang spends most of his time working with the technical team to tame algorithms.

ByteDance is particularly willing to spend money on talent discovery. Just this year, ByteDance poached a large number of technical personnel from Baidu. Mr. Zhang even publicly stated that the number of algorithm engineers per unit area in ByteDance's office is the highest in the world.

Therefore, ByteDance let Mr. Liang, who is in charge of group affairs management, be in charge of this meeting, which shows how much importance he attaches to this meeting.

Early in the morning of December 3rd, Lu Yao dressed himself up carefully.

He wore a loose and somewhat old-fashioned suit, which made him look serious yet casual. Then he set off with Mr. Shang from Xiaomi Interactive Entertainment, Jian Xiaojie and Liang Yilan to Yingdu Building in Beijing to meet with Mr. Liang from ByteDance.

When we arrived at the location, Mr. Liang from ByteDance was already waiting downstairs to greet us in person.

The moment the car door opened, Mr. Liang came over to shake hands with Lu Yao and the others and said, "Thank you for coming all the way here. Let's find a quiet place to have a good chat!"

As the middleman, Mr. Shang laughed and said, "I think Mr. Lu is also a pragmatic person. Why don't we talk about this in your company's conference room?"

Mr. Liang laughed and said, "Ah? Really?"

Lu Yao smiled and said, "Of course, let's talk business first."

Mr. Liang immediately leaned over and extended his hand: "Then please come to my humble abode."

Surrounded by a group of employees, Lu Yao and Mr. Liang arrived at the office of ByteDance together. At this stage, ByteDance is far from the Internet giant it later became. It is still just a company with relatively great potential in Yingdu Building.

But there are countless companies with such potential in a city like Beijing where every inch of land is valuable and full of opportunities and future.

In fact, there are not many companies that are really optimistic about ByteDance at this stage, because what ByteDance is doing is actually stealing, or even destroying Penguin's jobs, so many investors are not optimistic about ByteDance at this stage.

Their Series C financing this year was led by Sequoia Capital and New Micro Fund.

The majority of Sequoia Capital's domestic funds are made up of Alibaba and Ant Financial, and the majority of New Micro Fund's capital is also made up of Alibaba...so ByteDance's C-theory investment is purely Alibaba helping the penguin cultivate a competitor.

This is also the reason why Mr. Liang of ByteDance always talks to Lu Yao in person.

Because ByteDance also conducted internal background checks, the resources, channels and capabilities that Lu Yao currently possesses are exactly what ByteDance needs.
and so.

Although Lu Yao was very worried about whether he could make this event a success, what he didn't know was that Mr. Liang also had the same concerns.

But when the two sides met and sat down, it was immediately obvious that this was a situation of "the man was in love and the woman was interested".

After a brief chat in ByteDance's office, ByteDance's CEO Liang discovered that this young man's ideas in many aspects coincided with ByteDance's.

Mr. Liang suppressed his excitement as he introduced the core competitiveness of his company: "The number of activated users of our company's Toutiao has increased from 2 million at the beginning of this year to nearly million now, a nearly -fold increase in one year."

"The number of active users of Neihan Duanzi is even higher than that of Toutiao. Not only that, our company has already launched a charge into new areas. In terms of the pioneering role of the domestic Internet, although Bytedance is not very big at present, it definitely has unlimited potential."

In such occasions, of course, you can say whatever you want as glamorously as possible.

But the reality is that ByteDance’s direct competitor is WeChat’s official account.

WeChat official accounts have made micro-business popular in the circle of friends due to their powerful social attributes, and official accounts have also become a new favorite for businesses to place advertisements.

In 2016, the price quoted for Mimi Meng’s first public account exceeded yuan, and there are many public account owners like Mimi Meng in the WeChat ecosystem.

And what about Toutiao?

Because of the interest algorithm, the information flow recommendations within Toutiao have created one information cocoon after another, which limits the development space of "text media bloggers". More Internet companies actually regard Toutiao as a traffic-generating platform.

Lu Yao conducted a special research that year. From 2014 to 2017, many online novel sites, online video sites, and even online pirated sites were frantically diverting traffic from Toutiao.

A certain online novel website even made a comeback by attracting traffic from the headlines, generating over five million in revenue a year.

And what about Toutiao itself?

In order to maintain the initial heat, he had to bleed to the outside world and thus maintain his own "bubble".

This is also why the industry has no confidence in them. Even if they have more money, it will not be enough if they keep burning money like this.

In fact, burning money was one of the main reasons for the rapid rise of "ByteDance" and "Pinxixi". "Burning money" plus "grasping the pain points of human nature" and "viral marketing spread" can form an extremely terrifying fission effect.

If ByteDance only relies on "Toutiao", it will not be a rival to the WeChat ecosystem.

However, jokes with connotation will soon die out due to the "overpraise".

So around 2016, ByteDance was very passive.

In order to quickly find a new breakthrough, they came up with three short video apps at once - Douyin, Xigua, and Huoshan.

In the end, only Douyin happened to be booming at a time when the domestic economy was booming. The desire of the majority of netizens to show off and the need of young netizens to show their own personality made Douyin quickly become popular among young people. Because it is cooler, more high-end and more pretentious, Douyin became the new darling of young people.

Although Kuaishou, which also took the rural route, later became very large, in the eyes of many short video players, "Diaosi" has become an indelible label on Kuaishou products.

Lu Yao pointed out the difficulties ByteDance is facing now, which gradually cast a shadow on the excitement on Mr. Liang's face.

After he finished speaking, he smiled and said, “Boss Liang, I’m not here to pour cold water on you.”

"My game company has also been hit hard by Penguin recently, and all data are declining. In China, if a single party wants to engage in this kind of business on the Internet, Penguin is a huge obstacle that we cannot avoid."

Mr. Liang sighed and agreed: "Yes."

Lv Yao: "You mentioned that you are also developing products in the video field, but the software in the video field needs more interesting and novel content to fill it, such as entertainment anchors, appearance anchors, emotional anchors, game anchors, outdoor anchors, plot anchors, etc."

"Video is a more powerful broadcasting medium than text. I think the direction you have chosen is right."

Lu Yao changed his tone and said: "But I still say that this kind of product is a huge obstacle that we cannot avoid."

Mr. Liang was overwhelmed by the sharp situation pointed out by Lu Yao, so he said: "So we are very happy to hear that you are coming here! You have games, anchors, and energy! If we can cooperate, it will definitely produce an effect of 1+1 greater than 2."

Lu Yao didn't put on airs: "It's a shame that we met earlier to have this chat!"

"My idea is this: my investment company will invest 5 million US dollars, and I only want a % stake, and I promise not to participate in your management."

Mr. Liang, who had a round face and wore glasses, couldn't help raising his eyebrows.

This condition is too generous.

They raised US$20 million in Series C funding in the middle of this year, but sold off % of their shares.

This time, Lu Yao invested 5 million US dollars, but only asked for a % stake.

If the conditions in front are so generous, it means that there must be some restrictive conditions in the back.

really.

Lu Yao approached and said: "We will not participate in the main management of ByteDance, but we hope that the injected funds will be used to promote our company's games, including but not limited to investment promotion, event hosting and even event funding and hosting."

President Liang frowned and pondered. This request was actually not too excessive. It could even be said to be very reasonable. While helping Lu Yao's company operate, their exposure to new customers would also increase.

But this caused a slight gap in their status, which made Mr. Liang feel a little uncomfortable.

It’s just because ByteDance’s prospects are indeed unclear now, so Mr. Liang hesitated and didn’t say what he was thinking.

Lu Yao only took a glance and saw what Mr. Liang was thinking, so he smiled and said, "Since we want to achieve a certain level of cooperation, we naturally need to make the connection between the two sides closer."

Mr. Liang raised his eyebrows again, so much so that the glasses on his face kept jumping. Lu Yao said, "I will give you 3% of the shares of my MCN company and game company respectively."

The combined shares of the two companies are 6%. Although the market valuations of shares of different companies are different, they have clearly made a profit this time.

This time they came and gave us all the face and money, and they did things very openly.

After thinking for a while, Mr. Liang was really speechless: "Okay! Then let's finalize the contract today."

After that, the two sides went through the legal market and made some adjustments to some details.

At around 1:00 p.m., the two parties happily signed a contract of mutual assistance in offense and defense. Then, Lu Yao, as a shareholder and specially hired content director of ByteDance, signed a cooperation contract with Xiaomi Interactive Entertainment.

Good luck to the tripartite cooperation!
……

Mr. Liang was particularly happy to have completed such a big cooperation. In the afternoon, he actively hosted a meal for Lu Yao and his group, and also called some senior executives of ByteDance.

At tonight’s celebration dinner for the collaboration, Lu Yao also met Zhang Xiaonan, who later became the person in charge of product development at Douyin and the CEO of Douyin.

In ByteDance's executive team, which is full of top programmers, the delicate and rosy-skinned Zhang Xiaonan seems like a unique landscape.

If there weren't such beautiful ladies with strong aura as Jian Xiaojie and Liang Yilan present, she would undoubtedly be the brightest pearl at the banquet tonight.

It’s no wonder that among ByteDance’s many hardcore apps, an outlier like TikTok would pop up.

Zhang Xiaonan, who had a delicate and gentle appearance and a graceful temperament like jade, immediately attracted Jian Xiaojie's attention.

Especially tonight, Zhang Xiaonan wore a pair of pink-framed glasses and a loose white shirt, with the hem of the shirt tucked into a pair of washed jeans. She looked particularly delicate and pure!
But Jian Xiaojie has seen countless girls and knows that many girls who wear glasses will look very different when they take off their glasses.

So at the banquet tonight, Jian Xiaojie kept looking for Zhang Xiaonan to drink, and later she even sat next to Zhang Xiaonan and they had a very pleasant chat.

Liang Yilan had a particularly good chat with Mr. Liang from ByteDance.

I was especially surprised when I found out that Liang Yilan was the person in charge of advertising and media promotion channels among Lu Yao's partners.

They talked so much today, but they still didn't know that Liang Yilan was actually responsible for this.

Although ByteDance’s products have exaggerated daily active users, their profits are actually quite average. The reason why their user growth is increasing so fast, in addition to the bonus of their algorithm advantages, is also related to the fact that today’s Internet giants have not yet settled down.

When Toutiao's business model matures next year and it really starts to make huge profits, Baidu's Baijiahao, Penguin's Penguinhao, Alibaba's Dayuhao, and NetEase's NetEasehao will all begin to emerge in a flood of places.

Yes.

Alibaba, which secretly invested in ByteDance, also launched its own digital media product, but this product seemed more like a follow-up product to gild someone's reputation, and it didn't cause any waves anyway.

After the big companies join the battle, the era of text media will prosper briefly for two or three years, and then will be completely replaced by short video content platforms.

ByteDance is also very clear about its assessment of the current environment.

They even know clearly that the current big companies are waiting for ByteDance to explore a mature and reliable business model, and then quickly rely on their own size to crush ByteDance with scale.

It feels like they are piglets, being stared at by several butchers, just waiting for the New Year.

Now with the addition of Liang Yilan, a new force that has a considerable number of advertisers, they can reserve more bullets in advance.

So Mr. Liang started to get closer to him directly: "We are from the same family!"

"What a fate!"

Liang Yilan also showed her full charm, and she could come up with all kinds of high emotional intelligence speeches, which made the atmosphere of tonight's banquet particularly good.

After three rounds of drinks, Lu Yao began to "take advantage" of the alcohol and said: "In fact, I am also concerned about your product. I noticed that many small Internet sites are stealing our traffic, so why can't we open a recharge platform within our software?"

"Then I recruited all the small websites on the Internet and made money with them."

Then everyone started talking.

When it comes to stealing traffic, ByteDance’s internal attitude is actually quite complicated.

Some people think that this is something that is bound to happen in the process of their product development. Some people hate these traffic-stealing behaviors, but now is not the time to crack down on them because they need these people to boost the popularity of their products.

As for the method that Lu Yao mentioned, they had never come across it and didn't understand it very well. Moreover, they didn't have much energy to do this at this stage.

Lu Yao just mentioned it briefly and didn't say anything else.

It was not until 2018, when TikTok established itself as the leading Internet short video platform, that ByteDance began to free up its hands to integrate the source novel section of entertainment, relying on TikTok to bring in volume to compete with Penguin.

When TikTok became the new social darling of young people, ByteDance did again what Penguin had done to ByteDance.

However, Tomato, which ByteDance later created after integrating its resources, was somewhat off-putting. This company really does not have the genes to create cultural content.

Therefore, Lu Yao’s plan is that after TikTok gradually gains a foothold, he can suggest that they reorganize the Toutiao account, combine with small websites in the industry to form a centralized distribution model, impact the large entertainment market and cause trouble for Penguin.

Yes, the most important purpose of doing this is to cause trouble for the opponent.

Rather than going for the purpose of making money.

Although Lu Yao's words at the dinner table triggered some thoughts, they would not have any impact on the current changes.

Afterwards, everyone started to discuss over the dinner table how to market, create secondary works and conduct live broadcasts for "Shoot a Shot".

Lu Yao's arrival will indeed bring more content to ByteDance's products, especially the gaming section.

You should know that since 2012, game live streaming has gradually become one of the important entertainments for netizens on the Internet, especially the currently most popular League of Legends and the later PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

Various technical anchors, entertainment anchors and funny anchors have contributed a large number of Internet hot memes. People from live broadcast stations such as Xiaotuantuan and Wuwukai not only have a large number of fans on live broadcast websites such as Huya, but also siphon traffic from Douyin.

Because many of these games are represented by Penguin, Douyin not only cannot get any benefits from them, but is instead being drained of their blood... This makes Douyin very depressed.

So later, Douyin filed a lawsuit, and the two companies began to slaughter each other at the legal level.

This tit-for-tat situation will not be resolved until 2024.

If there is a game company comparable to Penguin during this period, combined with the huge user base of Tik Tok, what effect will it have?
Lu Yao is looking forward to this.

At tonight's banquet, after the three parties determined the direction of cooperation for the next period of time, the banquet ended happily late at night, and then everyone entered the second game.

We played until almost two in the morning before everyone started to leave.

Before the show ended, Jian Xiaojie said to Zhang Xiaonan with great care: "We have contact information. Let's keep in touch if it's okay."

Zhang Xiaonan was somewhat puzzled. This sister seemed a little too enthusiastic, but it was not easy to say anything in this situation, so she had to agree with a smile on her face.

After several groups of people went back, Zhang Xiaonan said to Mr. Liang, "It's so strange, that sister seems to be interested in me."

Mr. Liang was the one who started the business with Mr. Zhang. Although he has now become a new rich in Beijing with the help of the Internet, he is still a new rich after all and does not understand Jian Xiaojie's strength.

So a smile appeared on his round face: "What's the point of a girl? She must want to be your sister because she sees you so well."

Zhang Xiaonan sighed, what a straight guy!
……

After parting with the people from ByteDance, Lu Yao sat in the MPV and chatted with Jian Xiaojie, Liang Yilan and Mr. Shang.

Everyone was very satisfied with this cooperation negotiation.

Next, the three parties will work together. Xiaomi Interactive Entertainment will use MiTalk and its channels to help promote Lu Yao's game. As for ByteDance's software, ByteDance will specially open a group chat link to MiTalk in the software.

At the same time, Xiaomi will also assist Lu Yao in hosting the first game competition.

The advertising alliance company that Liang Yilan has established on his own will reach in-depth cooperation with multiple parties. At the suggestion of Lu Yao, Liang Yilan also began to form his own advertising recommendation algorithm team to connect with ByteDance.

As they were chatting, Liang Yilan suddenly raised his arm and said, "I've decided! The name of my new company will be "Powerful Engine Business"!"

Lu Yao smiled and said, "It has a bit of the flavor of the Internet."

The atmosphere in the car was joyful.

After a brief silence, Lu Yao suddenly said, "Sister Jian, I have a favor to ask of you."

Jian Xiaojie was dozing in the car with one hand supporting her head. She didn't even open her eyes when she heard Lu Yao's words: "So~what's the price?"

Lu Yao said sternly: "Any price is fine!"

Jian Xiaojie then opened her eyes, her slightly drunken eyes charming and mysterious: "So serious, then tell me what's going on first."

Lu Yao looked around at everyone and said, "Don't spread a word of what I say in the car next."

Mr. Shang and Liang Yilan immediately patted their chests and made the promise.

The driver of this MPV is Jian Xiaojie's man.

Lu Yao continued, "Sister Jian, help me get the person in charge of Penguin's Legend of the Brave project team into the top management of Penguin's game business."

(End of this chapter)