What are the most failed projects of 10 Internet giants including Lei Jun, Zhang Xiaolong, and Zhou Hongyi?

Who hasn’t fallen on the road to entrepreneurship? Even Lei Jun, Zhou Hongyi, Liu Qiangdong... these Internet giants have experienced bloody lessons, but they did not fall into despair because of a fall. Instead, they summed up and learned a lot of entrepreneurial experience and lessons from the failure and picked themselves up again. This article lists the most failed entrepreneurial projects of 10 Internet giants and what they learned from them. Perhaps it is precisely these experiences that have enabled these Internet giants to achieve their current success, and these lessons learned are even more valuable to today's entrepreneurs.

Lei Jun

Founder of Xiaomi, currently valued at $45 billion.

Before his success, he founded the Tricolor Company, which went bankrupt due to lack of profitability.

When he was in college, Lei Jun read a book called "Fire of Silicon Valley" about the early entrepreneurial legends of Gates and Jobs. It had a great impact on him. "I was deeply attracted by Jobs' story. After working hard in Wuhan Electronic Street for a while, I felt good about myself and started to dream: I dreamed of writing a set of software that runs on every computer in the world and I dreamed of founding the best software company in the world."

So, in his senior year, he and three friends founded the Tricolor Company. Unfortunately, the company was forced to disband within half a year. In this regard, Lei Jun has three reflections:

1. There must be a clear profit model.

In terms of business, Sanse Company did not have a fixed model. They would do anything that could make money. "At the most, we had 14 people, and our business scope was quite broad. We sold computers, made counterfeit Chinese cards (a type of computer hardware), and even took on typing and printing jobs." Therefore, their funds were always tight. When he was really short of money, he even had to rely on playing mahjong with the canteen chef to win meal tickets to survive.

Second, we must have a forward-looking market awareness.

In fact, they came close. At that time, Lenovo Hanka created a glorious profit of hundreds of millions, so Lei Jun and his partners decided to copy this product. But after the product was launched on the market, they encountered an even more powerful copycat king, who copied their product again. Moreover, this company was large in scale and sold at low prices, which eventually overwhelmed the Tricolor Company.

3. Must have certain team management capabilities.

When the company was founded, "there were four people, each holding 25% of the shares, and everyone was very happy. But after a few days, problems arose, and everything needed to be discussed repeatedly. Later, the general manager was even re-elected twice." Such a management structure makes it impossible to make effective decisions.

Chen Ou

Founder of Jumei.com, with a market value of US$2.4 billion.

Founded the GG gaming platform.

While studying at Nanyang Technological University, Chen Ou built an online gaming platform called GG with just a computer. Relying on his identity as a professional player, Chen Ou invited two top Warcraft players who had never met each other: WCG champion Moon and ESWC champion for a peak showdown, and the platform for the showdown was GG. This won him his first batch of users.

However, as the number of users increased, Chen Ou, who had no financial reserves, became increasingly embarrassed. The sponsorship he could get was a drop in the bucket, and investors were dismissive of this fledgling entrepreneur. This makes GG's development difficult.

At this time, Chen Ou was going to Stanford to study for an MBA, so he brought in a professional manager to manage the company and sold part of his equity. Subsequently, the professional manager introduced other angel investors and, through their operations, reduced Chen Ou's shares to just over 30%. He lost control of the company and was eventually squeezed out of the company.

For his second venture, Chen Ou founded a gaming company in China. His business model imitated that of the United States, with built-in advertisements in social games. However, due to the significant differences between the domestic market and the United States, the company soon declared bankruptcy.

These two failed entrepreneurial ventures gave Chen Ou two gains:

1. The company needs to have a reasonable equity structure.

Second, simply copying foreign models will not work.

Yan Ronghui

Founder of 51job.com, market value of 2 billion US dollars.

Invested in voice mail and magnetic materials.

Before starting his own business, Zhen Ronghui worked as a consulting consultant and was a professional manager with an annual salary of one million. But in the tide of rapid economic development in the mainland, he developed the ideal of becoming a "billionaire", so he worked part-time on a voice mail transmission system and also invested in magnetic materials. But both of these ventures ended in failure.

He learned a lot from these two experiences. In summary, he said:

1. Starting a business requires a lot of energy and you have to do it full-time; at the same time, the team is also very important.

2. Entrepreneurship cannot start from the product alone. Good products do not mean there will be customers. Customers need complete services. Therefore, entrepreneurship needs to shift from product orientation to customer orientation.

Wang Xing

Founder of Meituan.com, valued at US$7 billion.

He founded the campus network, but was later forced to sell it.

In the winter of 2003, Wang Xing, who was studying for a doctorate in the United States, asked his supervisor for a long vacation and returned to China to start a business. After experiencing several failed projects, Wang Xing discovered that social networking among students was a viable entry point, so he set about building the campus network.

In terms of website interface, they copied Facebook and were criticized by everyone, but because Facebook's design is very user-friendly, compared with competitors who have independently designed their interfaces, Xiaonei's user experience is the best. This has retained a lot of users for them.

At that time, the Beijing subway was not convenient and it was very troublesome to go to the train station to take a train. So during the winter vacation, Wang Xing launched an activity at Tsinghua University, Peking University and Renmin University, where people could register on the campus network and take a free bus to the train station. At the same time and at the same place, the bus will depart when there are 50 people.

In order to get enough numbers, students advertised everywhere and asked their fellow villagers to register. Some boys would even take the bus to the train station instead of the train in order to meet a girl. With this move, Xiaonei.com attracted 8,000 seed users, and everyone started to become active on this website.

However, since it was his first time starting a business, Wang Xing did not have his own theory, did not have a deep understanding of the Internet and lacked a clear profit model, so investors were not optimistic about the Xiaonei project. In the end, the capital chain broke and disputes arose among the internal team, so Wang Xing was forced to sell it.

The failure of this project gave Wang Xing the following inspiration:

First, the entrepreneurial team must have a clear division of labor, and the CEO must be liberated to pay attention to the development trends of the entire industry, era, and society.

Second, rapid promotion is important.

Third, there is no need to blindly innovate yourself, just quickly learn from others' strengths.

Fourth, you should get in touch with capital as early as possible, lower your posture, and make some compromises.

Fifth, you must start a business with people you trust. Only trust can keep the team stable when encountering lows.

Wu Xinhong

Founder of Meitu, valued at US$3 billion.

He founded the 520 social platform, but later ceased operations.

In 1999, when he was in high school, Wu Xinhong saw a piece of news: a domain name called "business.com" was sold for 7.5 million US dollars in the United States. So he borrowed 10,000 yuan from his family and started investing in domain names. With this investment, he made some money and met the later investor Cai Wensheng.

In 2002, Wu Xinhong, who had dropped out of school and was at home, discovered a good domain name: 520.com. So he planned to copy Tencent and collect money through membership fees. That is, only if you are a paying member can you obtain the other party's online contact information.

After two years, 520 had accumulated hundreds of thousands of paying members, but because its products and operations were not up to par, most members stopped using the app after only one month of payment. Therefore, Wu Xinhong was forced to shut down 520 and sell the domain name.

Looking back on this experience, Wu Xinhong said there are two lessons:

1. Reverse entrepreneurship, that is, setting up a company through a good domain name, is completely unreliable.

Second, more importantly, I was a homebody and not good at socializing. I had no idea what the users’ real needs were, so how could I start a dating website?

Liu Qiangdong

Founder of JD.com, market value of 40.3 billion US dollars.

He once opened a restaurant in Zhongguancun, but closed it after being defrauded of his money.

After graduating from university, Liu Qiangdong bought a restaurant near Zhongguancun. In the past, the restaurant's clerks had very low salaries, lived in the basement, and usually only ate leftovers, and the boss personally controlled the funds. After Liu Qiangdong took over, he increased the salary, improved the accommodation, provided the clerks with delicious food and drinks, and let them do the purchasing and cashiering. This young man who started a business with idealism confused trust and management and suffered the first setback in his career. Due to lax management, employees were always finding ways to embezzle the store's money, so within a year, the originally profitable restaurant lost all his investment.

The lesson Liu Qiangdong learned from this is:

You must trust your employees, but trust does not mean there is no management.

Chen Yizhou

Founder of Oak Pacific Interactive, later renamed Renren, with a market value of US$1.1 billion.

Founded the ChinaRen community.

At that time, Chen Yizhou and others, who were still studying at Stanford, designed a combination of the characteristics of several popular community websites in the United States at the time and named it ChinaRen, which means a combination of Chinese and Western cultures. But no one in Silicon Valley was willing to invest in their project. In the end, he only raised $200,000 from his classmates at Stanford.

In March 1999, they returned to China to register a company. After receiving investment from Goldman Sachs, they quickly launched the ChinaRen community and obtained tens of millions of dollars in new financing. After obtaining financing, ChinaRen began to spend money like crazy on advertising.

At the beginning, Chen Yizhou and his colleagues felt scared, but the investors said it didn’t matter, there would be more investment after the money was burned out, and there would be no way to go public if the money was not burned out. But soon, the US stock market crash of 2000 came and capital entered a cold winter.

As a result, the investors who supported the money-burning plan changed their attitude and told Chen Yizhou clearly that there would be no new investment and he should sell the company as soon as possible. So Chen Yizhou had no choice but to sell the ChinaRen community to Sohu.

In fact, this case is similar to the campus network:

To start a business, you need to make rational use of existing capital and it is best to have your own blood-making ability so that you can safely survive the crisis during the capital winter.

Zhang Xiaolong

The father of WeChat, valued at 64 billion US dollars.

He created Foxmail, but it was not profitable.

Foxmail developed by Zhang Xiaolong once had 2 million users, making it the sharing software with the largest number of users in China. Zhou Hongyi said that Foxmail did not have a business model back then, so he often criticized Zhang Xiaolong, saying that he wanted to add advertisements and make a profit! But Zhang Xiaolong said, why does it have to be like this? As long as there are users and feelings, it’s fine!

Therefore, Foxmail became a huge burden for Zhang Xiaolong at this time, because countless people urged him to move forward every day, but the huge popularity and number of users did not bring him any benefits in terms of economic or social status.

A year later, Zhang Xiaolong chose to sell Foxmail to Broadcom, a little-known Internet company.

Although many founders of Internet companies now say: We don’t need a clear profit model. Once we have users, we will naturally find the right profit point. But Zhang Xiaolong’s experience tells us:

Before starting a business, a clear profit model is extremely important.

Huang Yimeng

Founder of X.D. Games.

He created VeryCD and introduced eDonkey to China.

In 2003, computer enthusiast Huang Yimeng was dissatisfied with the low-quality and paid movie resources on the Internet, so he registered his personal website verycd.com and brought eDonkey to China. He posted some of his resources stored on CDs and hard drives on Verycd.com for everyone to download. As a result, VeryCD quickly gathered a group of users similar to Huang Yimeng, who uploaded their own resources while downloading.

Soon the website was paralyzed because it could not bear the load, so VeryCD users began to pool money to buy a new server for Huang Yimeng. This made Huang Yimeng realize that this website could generate value, so in 2004, Huang Yimeng left university and founded a studio.

However, with the development of Internet technology, video websites represented by Tudou and Youku have emerged one after another, and downloading, a very popular online activity, has gradually become outdated. Moreover, as a large amount of capital poured into this industry, copyright issues gradually emerged, and relevant departments began to issue "audio-visual licenses" to operators. This made Huang Yimeng realize the necessity of transformation.

However, after considering related businesses such as video playback, community, and even TV set-top boxes, and making some simple attempts, Huang Yimeng realized that these "directions that may be suitable for transformation" in his opinion either required a large amount of resource investment or could not guarantee sustained and stable income. Therefore, he decided to abandon this project and instead invest in a new project, web games, which has a low threshold but makes money quickly.

Zhou Hongyi

Founder of 360, market value of 6.4 billion US dollars.

He once created 3721, one of the earliest search engines in China.

Before founding 360, Zhou Hongyi had created a search engine called 3721, and Baidu also launched a similar service. The two sides were competing fiercely for territory, so Zhou Hongyi added a module to the 3721 client specifically for deleting Baidu's client. This module cannot be deleted. This also earned Zhou Hongyi the title of "Father of Rogue Software".

This false start was followed by another false decision. Zhou Hongyi said that he felt that Baidu's search model was better than his own, and China's Internet was also very sluggish at the time, so he chose to sell 3721 to Yahoo when its market share was high. As a result, the $1 billion search market was eventually occupied by Baidu.

Regarding these past experiences, Zhou Hongyi said:

When doing things, don't just focus on your competitors, you must focus on user needs, and you must stick to your own career and don't give up easily.