Huang Zheng, an ascetic monk: Behind my luck is my persistent efforts.

(The article comes from the official account of WeChat WeChat-Guanzhi Research Institute)

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People's minds are easily polluted. When you judge a thing, you need to know the background and facts. What you need after understanding is not wisdom, but whether you still have the courage to judge with reason and common sense when facing the facts.

-Huang Wei

Pinduo, founded in 2065438+September 2005, is a "dark horse". After five years of development, it has grown rapidly, breaking the dichotomy between Ali and JD.COM in the e-commerce market.

Especially since this year, Pinduoduo's share price has hit record highs, and Huang Zheng's worth has been rising. In June this year, he surpassed Jack Ma, the former richest man, and became the second richest man in China, ranking second only to Ma Hua Teng.

Many people think that his success is due to his good luck, strong circle of friends and the help of celebrities such as Ding Lei, Duan Yongping and Ma.

But apart from the help of the nobles, the most important thing is Huang Zheng's efforts and persistence. No matter when I was a student or when I started my business later, I didn't dare to slack off in my life in order to become better and not be eliminated.

If the perfect score is 100, he will force himself to pay 120.

0 1

The era of reading: the era of ascetic monks began.

From 65438 to 0980, Huang Zheng was born in a very ordinary worker's family. His parents are not highly educated, and they are both doing ordinary jobs in the factory.

Although Huang Zheng's life is not very rich, he studied hard and got good grades since he was a child. He gets the first place in almost every exam and loves mathematical logic.

/kloc-At the age of 0/2, Huang Zheng participated in the National Olympic Mathematics Competition, and achieved excellent results in the competition, and was later admitted to Hangzhou Foreign Languages School.

He became the only student who attended Hangzhou Foreign Language Middle School in his primary school for ten years.

At that time, Hangzhou Foreign Language School enrolled about 160 students, most of whom were the best in Hangzhou. Those who can come here to study are excellent talents, and their families are either officials or rich.

And Huang Zheng, as a child of an ordinary family, it is not easy to come here with strength.

While studying in Hangzhou Foreign Language School, Huang Zheng began to get in touch with western culture and education and communicate with students all over the world.

Because he is staying full-time, he studies with a group of excellent children every day, communicates with each other and influences each other, which makes Huang Zheng have different values and worldviews from ordinary people.

Compared with his classmates, Huang Zheng felt that he had no advantage, and it was not easy to stand out. But if you know how to use the strategy of "Tian Ji Horse Racing", you can still create something extraordinary in the ordinary.

For Huang Zheng at this time, there is no other way, only through learning, let oneself strong, thus forming their own advantages.

Therefore, Huang Zheng usually puts almost all his energy into his studies. From junior high school to senior high school, he carried out his study plan step by step every day, as if games and entertainment had nothing to do with him, and he kept moving towards his study goal.

Finally, many good things happen. Because of his excellent grades, he kept the first place in almost all subjects, so he didn't have to take the entrance examination. You can directly send it to the mixed class of Zhejiang University (now Zhu Kezhen College of Zhejiang University) to study computer.

Although the "hard" study life in middle school is over, it seems that universities can begin to enjoy life, but this is not the case.

University life is just a new stage of the ascetic monk Huang Zheng's practice.

Zhejiang University (Engineering) Mixed Class was established in 1984. It is an honorary college for Zhejiang University to carry out "special training" and "elite training" for outstanding undergraduates and an important base for cultivating outstanding talents.

The students who can enter Huang Zheng University are all excellent learners, and the competition between them is fierce.

There is a rule in the college that a certain proportion of students who are not suitable for mixed class teaching mode can choose to study in other colleges during their study. In fact, it is a disguised elimination system.

In the university life surrounded by elites, Huang Zheng deeply felt the cruelty of competition. This kind of competition is much more difficult than in middle school, but at the moment, Huang Zheng can only bite the bullet and rush forward.

If you don't want to be eliminated, you must work harder than others Huang Zheng didn't dare to relax, so he had to work hard, continue to work towards the goal, and strive to maintain excellent results in all subjects.

In her freshman year, Huang Zheng participated in a training program jointly organized by Zhejiang University and melton Foundation, and was selected by virtue of her strength.

Melton Foundation is an international exchange organization for college students. It was founded by William melton, the founder of VeriFone and CyberCash in the United States. It is one of the earliest international exchange projects that Zhejiang University participated in.

At present, the Foundation has five member universities: Friedrich Schiller University, PolyU, Tela University in Raffron, Chile, Dillard University in the United States and Zhejiang University in China. These five schools select new members from their freshmen every year, and Zhejiang University has only five places a year.

The most unique feature of this plan is that after being selected, you will get a computer and a year of free online time, and you can establish online contact with peers in other regions through email. Then everyone will fly to a member country every year, stay together for about 10 days, have meetings together, study and discuss together, and of course play together.

Huang Zheng is a very caring person. He attaches great importance to the annual party, and every time he gets something different.

By closely observing the lives of peers in other countries, he deeply realized that different races and cultures in the world are so different. Their starting point, way of thinking and way of doing things are completely unknown to him and unimaginable.

When I chose my major in my junior year, because Huang Zheng's long-term earnest learning attitude and excellent grades were appreciated by the teachers, all of them entered the laboratory of Pan Yunhe, a computer science expert who was then the president of Zhejiang University and an academician of China Academy of Engineering. The instructor of his undergraduate thesis is Chen Chun, an academician of China Academy of Engineering.

During his four years in Zhejiang University, Huang Zheng still focused on his studies, getting up on time, studying on time, and going to bed on time, all at his own pace. In others' eyes, he lived a busy high school life, not a college life.

But Huang Zheng didn't agree. He knew that to achieve the goal in his mind, he could only work hard, work hard and try again.

Finally, when she graduated from college, Huang Zheng successfully applied for a postgraduate course at the University of Wisconsin.

02

Three rounds of practice of starting a business

After graduating from graduate school, Huang Zheng chose to work at Google and became a programmer and product manager at Google.

Although when he joined, Google was still in the struggling stage of listing. But soon, Google successfully went public. Later, Google developed rapidly. As an employee with original shares, Huang Zheng's net worth doubled instantly and became a multimillion-dollar millionaire.

At that time, many colleagues around Huang Zheng lost their goals because of the huge wealth brought by Google's listing, and began to enjoy life carefree. Huang Zheng could have used this wealth to enjoy life, but he still maintained his asceticism style and kept a self-disciplined pace of life as always.

It was not until 2007, that is, Huang Zheng's third year at Google, that Huang Zheng saw the upsurge of domestic entrepreneurship and came up with the idea of returning to China to start a business.

He could have lived a leisurely life with the money earned by Google, but he chose to embark on the road of entrepreneurship, which means that a new round of practice is about to begin.

So, Huang Zheng started his first venture in his life and founded the 3C e-commerce website-Youku. The website is controlled by BBK.

When Eurocool.com was founded, it only sold BBK e-learning products and OPPO Blu-ray players. The phone number left on the earliest domain name contact of the website was the switchboard of OPPO.

In order to find out some sales problems, Huang Zheng personally went to Gome and Suning as shopping guides, and solved many sales problems of Ouku through face-to-face contact with a large number of customers.

And ou ku. With the growth of the company, rival-JD.COM met the powerful Huang Zheng.

JD.COM has cultivated the habit of consumers through continuous financing, logistics construction, loan first and payment later. The expense rate of selling household appliances has dropped to 8%, and the net interest rate has dropped to 5%. All 3C e-commerce companies, Suning and Gome were defeated by JD.COM.

At this time, Eurocool, which was established for three years, has an annual GMV of 60 million, while JD.COM has exceeded 654.38+0 billion. JD.COM has an absolute advantage in 3C field.

In order to achieve long-term development, in 20 10, Huang Zheng decided to sell Ouku.com to Guo Quji, the boss of Lanting Jishi. Guo Quji is one of the founding members of Google China.

After selling Eurocool.com, in order to survive, Huang Zheng led the original technical team to start e-commerce operation.

In the book Geeks and Gringotts written by Ma Yun, sidney harman said that the only meaning of failure is to learn from it.

Although failure is unpleasant, it still has its meaning. If leaders who have experienced failures still have wisdom and want to cultivate the necessary adaptability, they will look at their failures calmly and prepare to apply the hard-won lessons to the next opportunity.

* Tip:

Sidney harman was born on1965438+August 4, 2008. 1939 graduated from City University of new york, and 1973 received a doctorate in higher education from new york United University.

1953 develop high-fidelity home audio system and establish Harman Kardon Company.

1977- 1978 served as deputy minister of commerce of Carter government.

65438-0980 CEO of Harman Industrial Group. After retiring in 2008, he became a professor at the University of Southern California.

20 10 in August, Newsweek was acquired at the price of 1 USD and assumed liabilities.

Although Huang Zheng didn't succeed in this venture, Huang Zheng's experience was not in vain. Not discouraged, he still chose to take root in the e-commerce industry and wait for the future to take off.

But Huang Zheng knows that after selling Ouku, living is the first thing.

So he and his original technical team started the second project, which is an e-commerce operation company-Qi Le, mainly to help brands such as Taobao and JD.COM to open online stores in Taobao to sell goods and earn some service fees.

It is not easy to do the work of agency operation. While asking for the brand, we have to go along with the e-commerce platform Xiaoer, but in order to tide over the difficulties, we have to go on. It was also during this period that Huang Zheng had the opportunity to contact a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises.

In 20 13, web games became popular, and playing games in China was a popular project at that time.

Netease Ding Lei became the richest man in China in 2003 because he made game products. Tencent's horse has also soared in value because of his game products.

At this time, Huang Zheng also wants to share a piece of the game industry.

It happens that Qi Le has accumulated a certain amount in the business operated by e-commerce agents, and its profit is no problem. So he divided some employees and hatched the third entrepreneurial project-dream-seeking game. This is a role-playing game on WeChat platform.

Just when the company was developing smoothly, Huang Zheng suddenly suffered from otitis media, so he had to temporarily put down all his work and decided to go home and rest quietly.

20/KLOC-In May, 2004, former rival JD.COM went public in the United States, and it has become a giant that can compete with Alibaba.

Huang Zheng, who is practicing at this time, is extremely depressed and thinking about how to rise in the field of e-commerce.

At this time, the social platform traffic represented by WeChat is developing rapidly.

With a keen sense of smell, Huang Zheng found that although social platforms such as Weibo and Aauto faster have huge traffic, there is no corresponding business model.

At this time, WeChat has become a position for WeChat business to make money. Wechat merchants sell masks in the WeChat circle of friends through pyramid schemes.

At this time, Huang Zheng, who was not idle during the period of self-cultivation at home, began to study WeChat business at home. He found that 80% of the consumers of WeChat business are women. Besides buying masks, what other categories do female users like? What are JD.COM and Tmall not good at? Non-standard products. What kind of non-standard products? Huang Zheng thought of fruit for the first time.

After thinking about categories, Huang Zheng began to think about how to use social traffic to sell fruits.

In 20 10, Meituan quickly became a service e-commerce platform that could challenge JD.COM Ali by group buying. What if the group buying model is grafted to social platforms such as WeChat?

The core of the model is that traditional e-commerce relies on advertising to obtain traffic, and the acquisition cost of each transaction user has already exceeded that of 200 yuan.

Huang Zheng thinks that if he wants to continuously acquire new users from social platforms, he is willing to pay advertising fees to users, but users need to bring in more new users to form a group if they want to take advantage. In the end, everyone has his place, and everyone has his place.

Therefore, after pondering for a long time, he decided to focus on social e-commerce, take fruit as the entrance, and set foot in the field of fresh e-commerce in a single mode.

On April 20 15, Huang Zheng fresh e-commerce APP "spell good goods" was officially launched.

Let's start with the WeChat service number. Users first invite friends to join the group through social platforms such as WeChat friends circle. Spelling will take effect when the number reaches the specified number.

Under the group purchase mode, the more users participate in group purchase, the larger the purchase scale, the stronger the bargaining power and the lower the cost.

At first, I went to the wholesale market to get the goods. Go directly to the place of origin to get the goods after a large quantity. The price of good goods is generally 30% lower than that of peers. High quality and low price, plus social bonus, it doesn't hurt to strive for good goods.

A large number of users gathered at once, and the increase in single volume was amazing. In less than 20 days, 5000 orders were placed on the day of goods assembly. In 10 days, the daily order will reach 10000.

In just a few months, the number of active users has reached 10 million, and the daily order has exceeded one million.

But the rapid development has also brought many problems.

From June 2065438 to June 2005, we bought litchi. On the first day, the order reached 200,000, which exceeded the delivery capacity of good goods. However, sales hoped that orders would hit a new high and did not stop promoting sales. They just told the customer that there were too many orders and the delivery would be delayed. The promotion lasted for three consecutive days, with a total of more than 400,000 orders.

Although the order volume is better than expected, it also means that a latent disaster is coming.

At that time, there was only one warehouse, and the maximum order processing capacity per day was 70,000 orders. Huang Zheng sent all the technicians who assembled the goods to the warehouse to solve the problem on the spot. It took Huang Zheng a week to deliver the goods, and all the lychees received by the customers behind were rotten. Refund applications filled the backstage, and some customers couldn't get a refund for a while, so they jumped up and called Huang Zheng a liar.

The accident reduced the daily order volume of good goods from several hundred thousand to 20 thousand. Seeing the explosive power of commodities, Huang Zheng invested all the 100 people operated by e-commerce, and opened positions once every 1 month on average.

The storage problem was quickly solved, and the orders for assembled goods soared back.

At this time, Huang Zhengqi's dream-chasing game team was very excited after seeing the feasibility of this model, and felt that the spell-single model could be made into a platform, introduced into brand merchants and delivered to third-party logistics.

So in 2065438+September 2005, Huang Zhengqi's dream-chasing game team was formally established with many products.

If a good product is equivalent to a fruit+social version of JD.COM, then Pinduoduo is equivalent to a social version of Tmall.

Surprisingly, the development speed of Pinduoduo far exceeds that of good goods.

After two weeks on the line, the number of fans has almost reached one million. Tencent's investment has made the development of Pinduoduo more rapid, and Pinduoduo and WeChat are perfectly combined. While Taobao, JD.COM and Vipshop are still worried about traffic, Pinduoduo has entered the expressway of development.

Pinduoduo is growing rapidly. By 2065438+March 2006, the daily order volume reached 300,000-400,000, which was comparable to good goods. By September of 20 16, the monthly flowing water in Pinduoduo will reach 10 billion yuan.

However, due to the rapid development of Pinduoduo, some serious problems have emerged.

At that time, because of the rapid expansion, uneven suppliers, some products were not up to standard, and even fake products, the delivery speed was slow and the user experience was not good.

Huang Zheng's attitude towards counterfeiting is very firm. He believes that honesty is one of the principles of enterprises.

On the one hand, Huang Zheng is not afraid of the other side sending underworld to track threats and resolutely deal with illegal suppliers; On the one hand, Huang Zheng sent the most corrupt employees to prison and reduced 1/3' s commodity operation team.

In view of the slow delivery, Huang Zheng sent someone to the supplier's warehouse for supervision, but the goods were not in the Pinduoduo warehouse, so it was useless to worry again.

In addition, from 2065438 to September 2006, Huang Zheng merged Pinduoduo and patched it up. With Pinduoduo as the core, Pinduoduo has become a self-operated channel in Pinduoduo, and Pinduoduo's commodity and warehousing team has shared it with Pinduoduo, which has comprehensively improved the user experience in Pinduoduo.

In 20 17 years, Pinduoduo's GMV has exceeded 10 billion, Taobao has spent five years, and JD.COM has spent10 years to achieve the same performance.

2065438+On July 26th, 2008, Pinduoduo was listed on NASDAQ, with an opening price of $26.5 per share.

Following the initial public offering, Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, holds 46.8% of the shares and is the largest shareholder in Pinduoduo. At the opening price, the value of its Pinduoduo shares is about 65.438+0.374 billion US dollars, or about 93.43 billion yuan.

In the "LEXUS Hurun Rich List" released by Hurun Research Institute in 20 18, it will rank in 13 with a value of 95 billion yuan, which is equal to Suning Zhang and Tencent Zhang Zhidong, and once surpassed Ding Lei and Liu to become a new Internet tycoon.

After Huang Zheng became a famous young rich man, everyone imagined that he could finally race with the bulls. But this is not the case.

Before and after listing in Pinduoduo, Huang Zheng's life didn't change much.

In life, he still keeps a low-key style, takes the subway to work on time, and usually only wears an ordinary T-shirt, which is not much different from ordinary people. People who don't know him will never think that he is a billionaire.

For Huang Zheng, money is just a tool, not an end.

What should be done every day should be done, and what should be done in the future should be considered in advance. Even if you finish it at this moment, you still have to run hard, or you will be trampled down by others.

Life has been running and struggling.

03

Ceo leaves office at the age of 40: the re-practice of life

On July 1 2020, Pinduoduo has just been listed for two years, and its development speed is amazing.

Huang Zheng made an unexpected decision at this time.

He announced through an open letter entitled "One Small Step for Pinduoduo" that he was about to step down as CEO of the company, and Chen Lei, the former CTO of the company, took over as CEO, and Huang Zheng continued to serve as chairman.

In addition, Huang Zheng and the founding team donated 2.37% of the shares to set up the Star Charity Fund, and Huang Zheng also donated 7.74% of his shares to Pinduoduo Partner Collective to improve the partner system.

Huang Zheng said that in the future, he will spend more time with the board of directors to formulate the company's medium-and long-term strategy, study and improve the corporate governance structure including the partner mechanism, and strive to promote by going up one flight of stairs, Pinduoduo from the institutional level and gradually become a public institution with international competitiveness. "I hope that through this adjustment, the management can gradually hand over more management work and responsibilities to younger colleagues," he said.

Five years after its establishment, Pinduoduo has risen at an alarming rate.

A week before the announcement of the decision, Huang Zheng, who was only 40 years old, was worth US$ 45.4 billion (about RMB 32/kloc-0.0 billion), surpassing Ma Yun for the first time and becoming the second richest man in China. Today, Huang Zheng's stock market value is about $30.2 billion.

According to the latest disclosure of SEC documents, the proportion of Pinduoduo shares controlled by Huang Zheng dropped from 43.3% in April 2020 to the latest 29.4%. In other words, Huang Zheng's shareholding ratio decreased by 13.9%. According to Pinduoduo's latest market value102.8 billion, his net worth has disappeared1428.9 billion (about RMB109.5 billion).

100 billion RMB is not a small sum. It is not easy to give up so much wealth.

In the golden age of 40, it is even more difficult to give up the position of CEO of the company he founded.

Surprisingly, Duan Yongping also stepped down as chairman of BBK at the age of 40 and chose to retire and immigrate to the United States.

Before, Huang Zheng always claimed that Duan Yongping was his life mentor, saying that he had taught himself a lot about life and business from Duan Yongping, such as Pinduoduo's corporate values-duty, which is the way of doing business.

Huang Zheng's decision seems to be following the path of Duan Yongping, but whether it is like this or not, what we can see now is that Duan Yongping has become an excellent investor after leaving office, and Huang Zheng's future is unknown, so we can only wait for time to verify it.

But what we can be sure of is that Huang Zheng still can't slack off and must continue to work hard. The new exercise has started, so let's wait and see if Huang Zheng can break through himself again after this exercise.

* References:

1, Warren? Bennis/Robert? Thomas Geek and Gringotts Machinery Industry Press

2. robert frank's Success and Luck: Luck and the Myth of Elite Society, Beijing United Publishing Company.

3.Socket College "By studying Huang Zheng's family history, we found an indispensable' noble' on his road to success."

4. Sina Finance "History of Huang Zheng's Struggle"

5. Tencent News "Huang Wei, Founder of Pinduoduo: His Three Nobles and Three Turning Points in Life"

6. Interface news "Pragmatist Huang Zheng's Road to the Richest Man"