Top of the big era

In the final analysis, if New York's technology industry wants to develop, it must be driven by people. Ziweixing wants to come over and take the lead in deploying, and the most important thing is to deploy talents.

This is not Zhou Buqi’s personal invention, it is the entire American technological culture.

Large companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle may acquire a dozen or even dozens of small companies every year. Many times, it’s not that the product of a small company is good, but that the team behind developing and operating the product is great.

After the acquisition is completed, their products are often abandoned and the team is integrated into their own business.

Rather than buying a company, it is better to say it is buying talents.

Ziweixing International entered Silicon Valley too late, and it is difficult to compete with those entrenched Silicon Valley giants. In addition to being very attractive to the Chinese ethnic group, it does not have much competitiveness in front of other ethnic groups.

The East Coast is different.

Silicon Valley giants have not yet paid attention to this market. Big companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have only arranged offices here to provide some sales services.

This is the opportunity of "Ziwei Galaxy"!

Ziweixing International, Changyou and Spotify, which are the first to enter this market, can take the lead in attracting senior talents in this area.

Then, extend your tentacles into the university campus to lay out the layout, carry out more practical projects with students in the computer department, and even imitate the campus network to build a "university campus incubation base."

This is not enough.

Still have to buy, buy, buy.

Lu Qidao: "Next, when selecting investment projects, we must focus on the New York market. It is best to capture all the excellent IT startup projects in New York."

Zhou Buqi strongly supports this view, "If you can buy, buy it; if you can't, buy shares. First, define this sphere of influence!"

Lu Qi and Jones were very happy after receiving the support of the big boss.

Then, Jones took out a piece of material, "These are 20 outstanding entrepreneurial projects that I have screened in New York."

Zhou Buqi rarely reads this kind of material.

Fortunately, domestic ones can be picked out with foresight. He really didn't know much about any outstanding entrepreneurial projects abroad. However, if he knows about a certain project, it is like finding a treasure. It will be a technology giant with a market value of tens of billions of dollars in the future, such as LinkedIn, Spotify, Pinterest, and Netflix.

After taking the materials, Zhou Buqi looked through them quickly.

You don’t need to look at it in too much detail.

Just look at the names and the main businesses, Etsy, Kickstarter, Foursquare, SecondMarket, Stickybits...

Zhou Buqi had never heard of any of these names.

But looking at the main business, it’s really shocking.

The scientific and technological innovation in the United States is really great. Of course, Jones, the chief investment officer, has a good vision. The projects selected have great potential to meet the next industry development trend.

Etsy is a trading platform for handicrafts and art;

Kickstarter is a platform that helps artists or artworks finance;

Foursquare is a social platform for sharing real-time locations developed based on the most popular LBS function of smartphones (mobile phone positioning);

SecondMarket is even more powerful. It is a trading platform for non-cash assets, such as collateralized debt obligations and bankruptcy claims, as well as stocks of unlisted companies. It is really ambitious.

The function of Stickybits is very familiar. Based on the barcode of a smartphone, for example, by scanning the barcode on a product, you can find detailed information about the product on the Internet.

There are many more to come, including AppNexus, Hunch, Boxee, Fluidinfo, Square...

Huh?

etc!

Zhou Buqi immediately noticed something was wrong, "Square? Which Square is this?"

Jones coughed slightly and said, "It's the company started by Jack Dorsey."

"It's really this!"

Zhou Buqi was quite helpless.

Jack Dorsey is one of the founders of Twitter and is the current CEO of Twitter. He and Musk are best friends and have a close relationship. Seeing that Musk could run several startups at the same time, he was not convinced. While managing Twitter, he also went outside to start a business. The project he created was Square, which is about mobile payment.

In fact, from Zhou Buqi's perspective, Square is a very bad product. But even so, the company will gain market recognition in the future, and its market value once exceeded US$100 billion.

Zhou Buqi had long wanted to finance this product, but he was unwilling.

On the Twitter matter, the two sides were not happy.

"Yes, this product has entered the markets of Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia last year." Jones is obviously very interested in this. "It is gaining momentum and all parties are optimistic about it."

Zhou Buqi felt helpless, "Isn't this a Silicon Valley company? Why is it listed in New York?"

Jones said: "Because Jack Dorsey has to manage both Twitter and Square, he can only work in Silicon Valley. In fact, this is a financial company with its core business in New York, and it has to rely on Wall Street to do it."

Obviously, he did not know the relationship between Boss Zhou and Jack Dorsey. He only thought that Ziweixing International was the major shareholder of Twitter and the two parties should cooperate sincerely.

For this reason, Jones also said with a smile: "I guess you should be Dorsey's idol. He imitates you in everything. He manages two companies by himself and does a pretty good job. It's really great."

Zhou Buqi sighed, "On the contrary, he is competing with me! The disagreement on Twitter led him to have a business plan outside. He is looking for a way out."

Lu Qi pondered for a moment and said slowly: "If necessary, it is best to cooperate with Square. Ziweixing International's core business is the mobile market and cannot do without mobile payment."

“We’ll talk about this later!”

Zhou Buqi waved his hand and avoided this problem.

Now he has a plan to sell Twitter to Google. You can get rid of your baggage and make friends with Google.

As the founder and CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey is definitely not willing to work for Google. Once this matter is pushed forward, the relationship between the two parties may continue to become rigid.

If you want to cooperate on the Square project, it's basically impossible.

Then, continue reading, BuzzFeed, Stackoverflow, OMGPOP, AdSafe, SpeakerText, MakerBot, etc.

Zhou Buqi looked around and felt that everything was okay.

It would be difficult to achieve a market value of tens of billions of dollars. He had never heard of any of these projects. However, looking at the development direction of these products, the selection is not bad, and small successes are valuable.

All can form business complementarities.

For example, the product BuzzFeed is a news aggregation platform that subscribes and collects all the current important content on the Internet here. Users can see all the most popular news here.

If Ziweixing International invests, it can allow BuzzFeed to collect more content on YikYak, thereby bringing users and attention to YikYak.

"Are there any recommended entrepreneurial projects?"

"Yes, AppNexus."

"Oh." Zhou Buqi looked at the materials in his hand and found related products, "Advertising business?"

Jones said: "Yes, we are focusing on the current situation of data fraud that is very common in the Internet industry. Including Google, there will be a large number of false clicks and false data, causing advertisers to pay a lot of additional money for these false data. A fee. This is a crisis of trust between advertisers and platforms.”

Zhou Buqi understood immediately, "Is this a third-party advertising monitoring product?"

Jones smiled and said: "Yes, through this product, advertisers can monitor and adjust advertising campaigns at any time. It creates a new layer between advertisers and content publishers, bringing greater flexibility and also It solves a certain crisis of trust.”

Zhou Buqi nodded, "There is room for application, but it won't be too big. When the business is small, it will develop well, but the ambition cannot be too big."

"Yeah?"

"It is impossible for a large platform to hand over its lifeblood to a third party."

Zhou Buqi gave his judgment very clearly and keenly.

Although he didn't know much, he basically guessed how AppNexus works.

An advertiser who wants to advertise on Google but does not trust Google's data can hand over the advertising to AppNexus, and let AppNexus act as an agent to advertise on Google, and then AppNexus will supervise and adjust it.

At first glance, this model seems good and fair.

But the same cannot be said for Google.

It’s not that Google wants to defraud advertising fees through data fraud, but that it cannot keep advertising sources in the hands of a third party. This is a structural danger for Google.

Once an advertiser wants to advertise on Google, but the intermediary AppNexus believes that Google's advertising is not effective and recommends the advertiser to advertise on Facebook, something will happen.

By then, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and other technology giants will all come to AppNexus to grab advertising orders...

is it possible?

How can a small broken company be so virtuous?

At that time, the only outcome is that the big platforms will no longer provide interfaces for AppNexus or cooperate with AppNexus, and the company will die.

This is the same as Alibaba’s “Taobao”.

When Taobao's business was small, Alibaba was very happy; once Taobao became big, it would be blocked by Ali.

"But it doesn't matter, it's a good idea after all." Zhou Buqi waved his hand, "If the price is not too high, you can invest in them all. Next, we need to focus on New York at the strategic level. The purpose of investment is to find excellent entrepreneurial projects. But there is also a higher strategic goal, which is to create a spark industry atmosphere in New York."

Lu Qi said: "Yes, gather those small and medium-sized enterprises and start-up companies around Ziweixing..."

Zhou Buqi said: "We must pay special attention to mobile Internet entrepreneurial projects and technology and financial products like Square. We must seize the opportunities of the times and make good use of our geographical advantages."

Lu Qi knew what he was referring to, "Will we have more cooperation with financial institutions on Wall Street next?"

Zhou Buqi nodded, "The combination of technology and finance will be an important industry direction in the future."