The history of the world's richest man: how did Musk make his first bucket of gold?

News from Cailian (Shanghai Editor Liu Rui): After Donald Trump, elon musk has become the top trend of global Internet social platforms this year.

People always talk about Musk's success in space exploration technology company and Tesla, and there are many stories about his founding X.com (the predecessor X.com(PayPal). However, many people may not understand how Musk earned his first bucket of gold as an ordinary young man who grew up in South Africa-this story is more difficult than many people think.

(A) the inspiration ignited by the salesman

1995 Summer, Silicon Valley.

The 24-year-old Musk is internship in the game startup "Rocket Science Game". He just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania this year, and he is still a teenager with a South African accent. He came to the United States from South Africa to study, hoping to make a big impact in the field of space or new energy.

For the sake of his ideal, he planned to enter Stanford University in the autumn to study for a doctorate in materials science and physics after his summer internship.

But a salesman changed the course of his life.

At that time, he was writing the primary code of the game when a salesperson knocked at the door and came into the office, asking if their company was interested in registering the online yellow pages.

1995 the internet has just started in the world. There are less than 40 million netizens in the world, and most of them have never been exposed to the Internet. Like most people at that time, this door-to-door salesman didn't know much about the Internet. At that time, most company information was still registered in the paper yellow pages, and the salesman only understood the online yellow pages as a supplement to the paper yellow pages.

But Musk found inspiration: if you create an Internet yellow page for small businesses such as restaurants, clothing stores and beauty salons, and bind it to the map, people can quickly find the stores and addresses they want on the Internet-this idea is similar to the combination of public comments and Google Maps today, which is of course easy to understand today, but at that time, it was a "crazy idea that addicts couldn't think of".

Musk is excited about this idea. He found his brother Kimbarl: "This salesman doesn't understand what he is talking about, but maybe we can do it."

1995 is also a period of vigorous development of Internet start-ups. This year, the first-generation Internet giant Yahoo just got the first venture capital from Sequoia Capital, the JAVA language was just born, Netscape's Navigator browser dominated the browsing market at that time, and Microsoft just launched IE browser to compete with it. Many start-ups emerged this year, hoping to take advantage of the east wind of the Internet.

Musk has clearly smelled the potential of the Internet. For the crazy idea of Internet Yellow Pages, Musk chose to drop out of school two days after entering Stanford University, and rented a humble office of about 45 square meters with his brother at 430 Sherman Avenue, Palo Alto, San Francisco. The two brothers used the $23,000 sent by their father as the start-up capital to set up a company called "Global Link Information Network", which was later renamed Zip2.

(2) The hard years of starting a business

Because there was no extra money to pay the rent, the two chose to live in the company. Musk began to write source code day and night, while his more sociable brother Kimbarl went to the streets to sell from door to door. Musk's early entrepreneurial life was similar to that of many Internet entrepreneurs at the same time: he kept writing perfect code in front of the computer during the day, sleeping on bean bags on the ground at night and taking a bath in a nearby church.

After such a hard life lasted for several months, their venture capital was almost exhausted, and almost no decent order was signed at this time. Because not many people had access to the internet at that time, for most pizza shop owners, they didn't understand the significance of spending money to buy an internet link online.

After they hired some salesmen, the situation didn't get better. A few weeks passed, and the Musk brothers gradually got used to the disappointment of salespeople returning empty-handed. One day, when a salesman came back to the office with a contract and a check worth 900 dollars and asked what to do, the whole office was shocked. Musk stopped typing the code and poked his head out from behind the display: "Impossible? You actually made money? "

The only gratifying thing in these months is that with Musk constantly optimizing the code, the software of Zip2 has gradually evolved into an actual product that can be used and displayed. Musk realized the importance of getting venture capital to get cash flow, and his marketing talent began to show from this period: he made a super-large shell for an ordinary computer to make it look like a supercomputer, and then put it on a tray with wheels. Whenever a potential investor visits the company, he will drag out this huge machine to show their system-at least visually, it makes their system look big enough to impress investors.

For venture capitalists, another attraction is the enthusiasm and determination shown by the Musk brothers. Musk once said to venture capitalists: "My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit suicide by caesarean section than fail. "

(C) The turnaround brought by the first venture capital

In the second year of the company's establishment, they succeeded in attracting the first large-scale venture capital: from Moore? $3 million from David Multi-Venture Capital. This venture capital has brought a turn for the better for the company.

After the capital injection, the two brothers cheered up their confidence and began to expand their business, expanding their business coverage from the San Francisco Bay Area to the whole country, and at the same time began to recruit employees on a large scale.

Musk's strong management style also began to appear during this period. As the technical director, he always made a very radical project schedule and forced employees to work with him around the clock-a style that continued to the enterprise he later founded, and until now, Tesla employees always complained about it.

Jim Ambras, deputy director of Zip2 technology department, once complained: "If you ask Elon how long it will take to do something, he will definitely not have more than an hour in his mind. If Elon says it will take an hour, we will understand that it will actually take a day or two. If Elon said it would take a day, we would think it would actually take a week or two. "

Doris Downes, creative director of Zip2, had a similar experience: I remember once at a meeting, everyone was discussing a new product-a new car website. Some people complain that this idea is impossible to realize. Elon turned and said, I don't care what you think, and left the meeting. For Elon, the word "impossible" does not exist, and he hopes that everyone around him will have such an attitude.

(4) The development direction of the company is divided.

This venture capital also laid the groundwork for the company's subsequent failure: while the venture capital company provided funds, they pushed Musk to the position of CTO and hired Rich Sorkin with more management experience as CEO-from the outside. Although Musk agreed to this decision, he was obviously very dissatisfied and privately complained to his colleagues that this was a "devil deal".

After losing control of the company, Musk watched sorkin shift his business development direction from 2C to 2B, and the company began to transform to some traditional media, providing software packages so that traditional media could provide online classified advertisements for automobile and real estate dealers.

This change can't be said to be a wrong choice, because it did attract many big contracts from media companies at that time, including the famous The New York Times. But this is obviously not in line with Musk's idea. He wants to build a more innovative company, directly facing consumers-but for Ricky sorkin and venture capitalists, they need to ensure stable returns in the short to medium term. 2C means a lot of capital cost and high risk, and 2B is obviously a safer way.

After the divergence of business direction, the company fell into the power struggle of executives to a certain extent, and the merger and acquisition plan originally finalized by the company and competitor CitySearch was indirectly cancelled. After the merger failed, the negative news about the company was reported by the media, and the company's financial situation gradually declined. At the same time, Internet giants such as Microsoft began to set foot in this field, and competitors from start-ups in the fields of automobiles, real estate and maps also emerged, and Musk gradually felt discouraged.

(5) Wave goodbye to the first Internet dream.

1In February, 1999, Compaq Computer, a PC manufacturer, suddenly offered to buy Zip2 for $307 million in cash. For the company executives who fell short at that time: "This is like money falling from the sky." The board of directors of the company decided to accept the deal without hesitation. In return, Musk and his brother Kimbarl received $22 million and $65.438+05 million respectively.

After getting the money, Musk started his next PROJECT-X.com (the predecessor of PayPal) without hesitation, leaving no nostalgia for this Zip2, which is completely different from his original Internet ideal.

After Musk left, Zip2 quickly fell silent. A year later, Zip2 became a sub-brand of online portal MyWay.com, while MyWay.com closed in 2005.

Despite the disillusionment of the first Internet entrepreneurial dream, Musk also earned the first bucket of gold and business management experience from Zip2.

Looking back 20 years later, if Zip2 can follow Musk's idea of 2C, it may go bankrupt ahead of time because of the exhaustion of capital flow, or it may become another inter-generational Internet enterprise, or it may become another Google map and American public comment on the world line. But in any case, today, Zip2 is just a distant name that people will mention when talking about Musk's entrepreneurial history.