Those Years When I Was Forced to Top the Forbes List

Chapter 402 The Sudden Arrival of Weibo

On April 9, news of JD.com raising another $78 million in funding made headlines on major portal websites.

Most of the headlines were converted to RMB to create a sensation.

6.03 billion!
In fact, another DCT investment intention reached on the evening of the 6th was no smaller than this, amounting to a full $5300 million.

However, this is just an intention; everyone still needs to go back and raise the money.

This figure is not Mr. Chen's ultimate goal, but merely a preliminary preparation for DCT's financing roadshow in Shanghai. With the 5300 million from these large institutions warming up the atmosphere, it should be a natural thing to attract more capital.

Just as the news about JD.com was gaining traction, General Manager Chen happened to be in his office reviewing the expenditure documents.

JD.com's Series C, Phase III, -$600 million.

JD.com's Series D funding round, Phase 1, -$10 million.

Knowing that Liu Qiangdong urgently needed money to build a warehouse, Chen Xuebing promptly transferred the money to him.

An expenditure of 1.237 million.

The group has also spent a lot recently. It originally had more than 5000 million yuan in funds after the Chinese New Year. However, the money was almost used up for building renovations, short selling in Hong Kong, and personnel expenses. In addition, after paying the loan of 9.7 million yuan, it was left with 8.5 million yuan.

The expenses are quite substantial, but the entire group isn't worried at all.

The company's core profitability still rests on Changzheng Capital.

The stock market has risen again recently.

Today, Monday, the Shanghai Composite Index opened in positive territory and continued to rise, gaining 2% before 10:00 AM and breaking through 3400 points.

The current stock market can't stand seeing stocks in the red. At the opening, there were more than 100 stocks in the red, but the investors who shorted their stocks in the morning felt that they couldn't let the day go to waste. They had to trade stocks that were underwater to make a big profit. So they quickly surrounded and reduced the number of stocks in the red to just a dozen or so. The ones that were still in the red were those that had recently been rumored to be on the verge of collapse and were too difficult to trade.

No one is calling for calm anymore; now the voices on all the major stock forums are saying: 10,000 points!

This is the time for the Chinese stock market to return to its true value! Among the world's major economies, ours is growing the fastest, tripling our GDP in 10 years! And the Olympics are just around the corner!

Why not 10,000 points?

Before 10 a.m., the Shanghai Stock Exchange's trading volume had already reached 100 billion yuan. Eastmoney predicts that today the Shanghai Stock Exchange will siphon off the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and the Hang Seng Index, and the trading volume of a single market will exceed 250 billion yuan for the first time.

A surge of emotions.

Chen Xuebing knew that the stock market wouldn't keep rising like this forever; if it did, it would reach 6000 points by the end of May.

Knowing the peak, there will definitely be major setbacks along the way if we continue to climb at this speed.

However, under such sentiment, it is indeed very suitable to create a short-term leading stock.

The arrangement of Wang Dongsheng releasing positive news in the afternoon, coupled with the advance investment of funds by Changzheng to drive up the price, suggests that "the market maker knew the inside story in advance."

It's time to attract the restless funds in the stock market, drive up the price a few times to the daily limit, and then start selling off.

I also called Liu Yonghao and asked him to try to postpone the livelihood reshuffle meeting to April 20th, which happens to be a Friday.

The following Monday was the Hong Kong meeting he and Wu Guangzheng had scheduled for April 23, which he and his mainland team were able to attend over the weekend.

After completing a series of arrangements, I had lunch with Wu Jiesi in the restaurant on the second floor and we talked about the company's bylaws.

Just after finishing her meal, Ren Ying approached him with a copy of an email sent by Steve Jobs.

[What about your mobile internet? Why did the N95 sell 30 units in China in just one week? Why not promote new smartphones and make their business model obsolete?]

Chen Xuebing glanced at it and smiled.

"Passed away? You've started adding emotion to your translations now?"

Ren Ying rolled her eyes: "It means 'passed away,' but his wording was 'make their business models obsolete.'"

Chen Xuebing silently memorized a word, then smiled and said, "Tell him: Focus on your own business and don't worry about our market. The sales revenue Nokia is taking is a slow poison; I'll give them a peaceful death. By the way, how do you say euthanasia in English?"

"There are several ways to express euthanasia. Active euthanasia is the act of voluntarily ending one's life through medication. Passive euthanasia is the act of passively stopping life-sustaining treatments. Another form is Physician-Assisted Suicide, where a doctor provides medication to assist a patient in committing suicide."

Ren Ying's words made Chen Xuebing think seriously for a few seconds.

What kind of euthanasia did Nokia suffer?

If it was a past life, it was Active Euthanasia.

However, in this life, it should be Physician-Assisted Suicide.

He is that doctor.

"Forget it, tell Jobs that we are in a difficult situation right now, but we still have the will to launch a counterattack. Material prices have dropped recently, so ask them to cooperate with us to push the suppliers to lower their prices further. Also, they need to reserve some production capacity for us in the second half of the year."

Ren Ying suppressed a laugh: "Your stance has undergone a complete transformation."

"Because I suddenly realized that if we were as arrogant as Nokia, we would be the ones to be euthanized. We should be more humble and ask them for some conditions."

After Chen Xuebing finished speaking, he picked up his phone and dialed Lin Bin's number.

"Has the verification process on Weibo been completed?"

"The core testing process for the internal beta test is complete. We opened the internal beta test channel on the press conference page and connected 300 users through invitation codes. The company also mobilized another 200 people. Our initial architecture was well done, and we found almost no technical vulnerabilities or performance bottlenecks in the areas most prone to problems, such as real-time message push and feed stream refresh."

"How is the feedback from beta testers regarding the feature experience?"

"I don't know about that. Are you at the company? I'll have the team come up for a video conference, and Manager Yang will report to you."

"Okay, let's invite Lu Weibing too."

Twenty minutes later, Lu Weibing, who was yawning as he entered the conference room, saw that the video conferencing system was already connected and that the chairman, president and vice president were sitting opposite him. He immediately perked up.

"Chairman! President Cai, President Wu!" Lu Weibing waved with a smile.

"Mr. Lu, this won't do," Chen Xuebing said.

Lu Weibing immediately strode to his seat and sat up straight: "The chairman's criticism is correct! I was late, mainly because of last night."

Chen Xuebing shook his head: "This is a strategy meeting for technology companies. Everyone's heads are held high like fighting roosters. How can this meeting go well? Have you ever seen anyone learn well while standing at attention? Everyone should relax where they should relax, so that they can use their skills where they should be used."

“Uh…” Lu Weibing was taken aback for a moment, then remembered that President Cai had called him a couple of days ago to talk about the spirit of technology companies. He hadn’t taken it seriously at the time, but now he suddenly realized the chairman’s attitude. “Well, okay, I’ll think about it carefully. I’ll come to Shanghai this weekend to give you a report in person. Xiao Yang, turn on the slides, let’s get started on the meeting.”

Lu Weibing didn't express any opinion or make any corrections on the spot. Instead, he realized the problem with work efficiency, which shows that he is a smart and teachable person.

The slideshow opened, showing the homepage of Qidian Weibo.

(Image for reference only)
Aside from the change to a sky-blue base color, it's basically identical to a certain version 1.1 of a previous Weibo post.

About 10% of the changes were made.

In terms of functionality, there is no need to elaborate.

"Chairman! Leader! I am Yang Dequan, the Weibo Operations Manager!"

A young man in his early twenties stood in front of the screen opposite the camera and reported in a serious and methodical manner:
"Our page layout, page design, and information architecture were finalized in March. The recent version changes mainly include the following points!"

"Given the dispersed nature of early users, we have enhanced the group and topic features based on interests or location to help users quickly find like-minded individuals and create a small community atmosphere."

"Secondly, we have added more caching architecture. The caching strategy for basic user information is permanent, user relationship chains are cached for 5 minutes, single Weibo posts for 1 hour, popular Weibo lists for 10 minutes, and user timelines for 2 minutes, ensuring that users can view more information with minimal data usage."

"Third, the dynamic flow design has been changed from the original read-spreading mode to a push-first mode. When there is a significant delay when influential users post, a tiered asynchronous queue is used to push posts from fans who have recently been active in the comments first."

The young man's voice trembled slightly, perhaps because it was his first time having group leaders attend the meeting, and he was quite nervous.

His personal convening of this project meeting must have been quite unexpected for those below him.

This project has been in preparation for six months.

Chen Xuebing only expressed his emphasis on the project to Lin Bin, and very few people in the entire Qidian Company knew about it.

The project started with a dozen or so people last year, and now it has less than thirty people.

In fact, apart from the service architecture being designed by the team, Lin Bin provided modification suggestions throughout the entire design process for this project.

He even provided the domain name.

Microblog.com and weibo.com, two domain names.

Since the closed beta began in March, there has been no publicity whatsoever, with only limited discussion in the comments section of the Singularity official website press conference and on some forums.

The reason for remaining silent until now is to keep a low profile.

He doesn't need any preparation or publicity. He just needs to avoid attracting the attention of other major companies before the official launch, and ensure that there is a Weibo hiatus for Qidian after the official launch.

Now, he has become the distributor of smartphone traffic and can declare war.

After the young man opposite him finished his introduction, Chen Xuebing's thoughts returned to their normal state.

"That was quite well said. What's your name? Yang Dequan? A man of both talent and virtue?"

"It's the 'power' in 'power'." The young man felt a bit embarrassed, thinking his name sounded a little rustic: "Chairman, you can just call me Billy."

Chen Xuebing smiled.

Billy Goethe.

You should have told me earlier, and I would have done a "Bilibili" project for you.

What's the user feedback like? What are their opinions on this website?

“Uh,” Billy hesitated a bit, “Most users are attracted by this short text, real-time publishing mode, but, limited by the current mainstream blog’s habit of long articles, some users are also unfamiliar with and not used to the simple interaction method.”

He felt the feedback from the internal testing wasn't good, and when the group's top executive personally intervened in the project, he became even more anxious.

Lin Bin had just had some conversations with Yang Dequan, and now he smiled and summarized, "Novelty and confusion coexist."

“That’s right.” Chen Xuebing nodded and said, “What appeal does Weibo have now? As an internet social platform, it has few users, insufficient content updates, and lack of interaction. The homepage is just filled with some news content. It has low participation and a lack of content. Moreover, it is just a small-circle experiment. There are no friends and relatives, no mainstream big names. It’s normal that people are not interested.”

“Project members should realize that this is a platform that only becomes interesting when people are involved.”

"Without a large number of participants, user feedback will be predominantly negative or indifferent, and the website may be marginalized or even disappear."

After Chen Xuebing finished speaking, he asked again:
"Is the mobile app ready? Can it be pre-installed in late April?"

He was fully aware of the progress of this project. The mobile application had been progressing slowly because the Kunlun developer software was incomplete, and many components had to be built from scratch. Only recently had there been any results, but improvements were still being made.

"It's almost done," Lin Bin said. "Since the platform mainly relies on mobile phones for promotion, we need to focus on traffic issues. The first version is lightweight, and local caching on mobile phones is easier, but we are worried about insufficient memory. Therefore, we still choose to carry most of the content in text form. In fact, the interface will be richer when opened with UC Browser."

"UC Browser, with its cloud compression technology, compresses web pages on the server side before transmission, significantly reducing traffic consumption and improving loading speed on slow networks. It also supports full web page rendering. In the 2G era, it captured a large market share, which has now exceeded 60%. UC can become an important channel for us to browse Weibo."

"Also, the team suggested that we should implement an in-app data usage alert. There is a delay in the mobile service being suspended due to unpaid bills. If we implement an alert for data usage that is thousands of yuan overdue, we'll be in the news."

Chen Xuebing scratched the back of his head.

The company's mobile software systems are all worried about data usage, and the advantages of mobile apps are indeed not easy to leverage.

The basic price is 10 yuan/MB, which is a package deal. 100MB costs 100 yuan, and the most affordable 1GB package is 300 yuan. The internet speed is so good that you'll run into debt in no time.

“The exorbitant bills won’t happen. China Mobile has already launched a 500 yuan cap on extra charges outside of the plan. Our contract phone has a two-year plan for 208 yuan/month, which includes 1.1GB of data, 950 minutes of calls, and 120 text messages. This is a trial operation plan. It should be cheaper after 3G is fully rolled out. How about this, I’ll mention it to China Mobile and see if they can offer a high data and low call rate plan for young people to choose from.”

The power consumption of a base station for 1GB of data is actually only about 10 yuan. Adding the transmission network, core network, base station depreciation, and maintenance labor costs, it comes to about 23 yuan.

However, given the initial cost recovery issue, it's unlikely that the price could be reduced in the first year. Even if China Mobile agrees, China Unicom and China Telecom, who are eagerly awaiting the construction of 3G networks, will not agree.

You promised a three-way monopoly, but we haven't even arrived yet, and you're already lowering prices?

With China Unicom and China Telecom's construction delayed by more than a year, it's unlikely that data traffic prices will drop within the next two years.

"You can continue to study the issue of reducing traffic, but Weibo needs to change its strategy. We do use mobile phones as the promotion entry point, but the main operation of the functions should be on the PC. Mobile phones can serve as a way to receive platform information. We want users to browse Weibo on their computers, but push information that users are following and comments and likes that users receive on their Weibo posts to their mobile phones. We want to obtain the most critical real-time information with the least cost. This is the advantage of Weibo's mobile application. We need to make better use of the swipe-down browsing function of our Kunlun system."

Now that you mention it, I suddenly understand.

"Chairman, we need to make some adjustments to our mobile app! When will we officially launch it?"

Chen Xuebing glanced at the time and laughed, "I can't give you any more time. Ten days. In ten days, our group will release a lot of important information one after another. I will put Weibo at the center of the information and create a wave of traffic bombardment."

(End of this chapter)