Reborn 2005: The Internet Myth

At 7 o'clock in the evening, Wang Zheng finally took Catherine to the dance held by the Stanford Entrepreneurship Center.

The location is right inside Stanford School, very easy to find.

Because today is a relatively formal dance, Wang Zheng wore a decent black formal suit, and Catherine also wore a royal blue shoulder dress.

Catherine is not ugly. In fact, in terms of appearance, Wang Zheng thinks she is more beautiful than Elizabeth Holmes. After all, she was chosen to be his secretary because she was pleasing to the eye.

Regardless of her status, it would not be a shame to take her to the dance.

The theme of this dance is Entrepreneurship Season. It is June and another batch of top students have graduated from Stanford. Some will stay in Silicon Valley and join the surrounding companies, large and small, and some will choose to start their own businesses.

The Stanford Entrepreneurship Center is their best choice.

Free offices and free legal advisors, as well as a series of support policies, are very friendly to Stanford student entrepreneurship.

The main purpose of this dance is to invite some successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, heads of investment institutions, and students from the school who are interested in entrepreneurship to communicate and interact in the name of Stanford.

This is also of great benefit to Stanford itself, because Stanford itself also has an investment foundation.

While strengthening the connection between the school, entrepreneurial students and successful business leaders in Silicon Valley, if a good project is incubated at Stanford, it is a good thing for Stanford itself - they will definitely not let go of the first round of investment.

Stanford Vice President Louis Bryan, who is also the head of the Entrepreneurship Center, personally stood on the stage to welcome the guests. After all, he wrote the invitation letter himself.

Louis is not that old, he is 56 years old but already has silver hair, but he is still very energetic.

When the old white man saw Wang Zheng, he immediately hugged Wang Zheng, laughed and said, "Phil, I knew you would come tonight."

"Not many people can receive your invitation."

This old man has been the head of the Stanford Entrepreneurship Center for almost ten years and has indeed a very high reputation in both the business and academic circles.

Since the last meeting at the Crowdfunding Network party, there was another phone call in the middle. It was Louis who called to thank Meta for specifically providing twelve paid internship places.

And since Meta’s financing was successful, Wang Zheng has attracted much attention in the business circles of Silicon Valley.

Although he is very low-key in comparison, the business at hand cannot be hidden from investment institutions.

In fact, a lot of venture capital invests in people, rather than investing in businesses. Some businesses may look good, but it may not be possible for another person to succeed.

Seeing the success of Meta's financing, these venture capitalists from Midland began to develop overseas smoothly, so some people were interested in investing in his WeChat business and even Altron's modular computer room business.

Moreover, he owns nearly 90% of Meta's shares and is now a full-fledged billionaire, a billionaire.

It’s not surprising that Louis would take the initiative to make friends—the educational and business circles of Midland are extremely tightly bound.

Hearing Wang Zheng's flattery, the old man was obviously very pleased. He laughed and said: "Phil, I want to introduce someone to you in a moment. Wait for me inside."

Although Wang Zheng was a little confused, he didn't think much about it and took Catherine to the ball.

There are already quite a few people inside. It hasn't officially started yet, and the music is still soft piano music. Many obviously immature but "elite people" in suits or long skirts are holding wine glasses and looking for people to talk to.

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These are of course the students at Stanford who are aspiring to start a business this year.

Stimulated by Zach's founding of Facebook and the good economic situation of Midland, more and more young people have joined the army of Internet entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, thinking that if they come up with a good idea, they can find investment and successfully make it.

The product then goes through Series A, Series B, and Series C financing until it goes public.

After walking from the door to a slightly secluded corner for a while, Wang Zheng dealt with the past four or five young people with "I still have something to do."

Of course, young people who are rejected are not discouraged.

Although Meta has some reputation, Wang Zheng is still a bit low-key and rarely appears, so not many people know him. Moreover, he looks relatively young, and entrepreneurs who are eager to find investment do not pay much attention to him.

That probably means that if there are jujubes but no jujubes, you can hit the same pole. If you can’t hit the jujubes, you can find another one.

At around eight o'clock in the evening, as a piece of jazz music played, Louis Bryan walked onto the dance floor with a beautiful woman on his left and right, and stepped on the drums. The dance officially began.

One of them Wang Zheng actually knew was Elizabeth Holmes.

It's not surprising that she appears here. After all, she is a successful entrepreneur who went out from Stanford.

When Brian stood still and faced the crowd, the music immediately stopped. After greeting everyone around him, Brian smiled and said, "Thank you all for coming to the Stanford Entrepreneurship Center June Ball. This is a meaningful day."

"In the past few decades, Stanford has maintained this tradition and maintained close ties with the Silicon Valley business community..."

Bulla Bull spoke eloquently for three or four minutes, and after the applause, he announced that the dance officially started.

This kind of semi-formal dance is actually a more relaxed communication channel, allowing entrepreneurs to meet the big names in the Silicon Valley business community, and also allowing the Silicon Valley business community to see Stanford's heritage.

Wang Zheng had never learned to dance. Even if Catherine said he didn't mind, he didn't want to go up and make a fool of himself. Catherine rolled her eyes in anger.

He didn't care either. How could a secretary still want to overturn things?

However, looking at the crowd, he did see a few familiar faces, including Zach from Facebook, Elizabeth from Crowdfunding Network, and the person in charge of Sequoia’s last participation in Meta financing.

The other ones are not very familiar. Just like Waiguoren, it looks almost the same to Daxia people. Daxia people actually have some prosopagnosia when they see Waiguoren.

Facebook may not be having a good time lately, so Zach is not very happy.

His Facebook hasn't left the campus yet, but Meta came out of the blue and occupied a large part of Facebook's living space, and MySpace is increasing its investment to compete with Meta.

As a result, Meta seemed to be fine, but Facebook's user base continued to plummet.

A typical fish in the pond is Facebook.

This is the same as when Wang Laoji and Jiaduobao fought and accidentally killed He Qizheng.

This is mainly due to the factor of product strength. Facebook's product strength was actually quite average during this period. The reason for its rapid development was actually luck accounting for a large part.

Before Facebook, MySpace and Friendster had already competed with each other. When it comes to social networks, Juyou was the leader at this time.

However, during the development process of Juyou.com, the opportunities were not very good. Financing did not bring good results, but accelerated losses. The more people joined Juyou.com, the more photos they needed, and the more storage services they needed.

many.

Limited by technical factors, Juyou.com does not have plug-in A2V image formats like the Meta community, which can significantly reduce storage costs. Facebook also has this problem, and its losses are becoming increasingly serious.

But Zach is young, has an academic background, has a story, is creative, and is favored by capital, so there are always funds to extend his life, giving Zach time to develop more interesting features.

Juyou.com is different. The vertical track of the Internet is a typical winner-take-all situation. Therefore, in this situation of ebb and flow, it will soon be unable to compete with Facebook. This is how the Facebook family was formed.

A dominating situation.

The development of Facebook in the later period was basically a replica of Goose Factory, copying, copying, buying, buying, buying - except that Goose Factory had demographic dividends and environmental factors, and could be turned into a gaming platform, while Facebook had no chance to develop games.

But the social business is basically surrounded.

But now that Wang Zheng is here, it is the new Meta who is building the siege.