Reborn in 2000 as a scholar

After learning that Lin Jinqi intends to list YouTube, Satoshi Matsushima found Horizon Network Technology Group with a professional listing counseling team. -It was only after the meeting of the IPO counseling team that Lin Jinqi discovered that it is not that simple for a company to go public.Generally speaking, if YouTube, a subsidiary of Horizon Network Technology Group, wants to go public in the future, it will either choose the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq.However, according to the recommendations of Goldman Sachs Group, it is better for high-tech companies to list on Nasdaq.However, like the listing conditions of most stock exchanges in the world, Nasdaq has thresholds for YouTube's market value, turnover for the last three consecutive years, number of shareholders, and public share ratio.Other threshold conditions are relatively easy to meet, but the one of three consecutive years of turnover is not suitable for YouTube in any case.

"Actually, apart from the issue of three-year turnover, the company's market value and the number of shareholders are also big issues." Satoshi Matsushima did not expect that Lin Jinqi planned to spin off YouTube, so the entire counseling and listing process became a A very embarrassing joke.

"Mr. Lin, our suggestion is that your company adjusts its business model and seeks to go public after three to five years of operation with peace of mind. If Mr. Lin insists on going public, we have two suggestions. One is to acquire a "shell" Another way is to choose the over-the-counter market. If it is a backdoor listing, then Mr. Lin needs to invest a lot of money to acquire a suitable shell company before financing.

Now the resources of shell companies in Nasdaq are very precious. If Mr. Lin wants to buy them, the money spent will be very uneconomical.As for the over-the-counter trading market, it is also necessary to abide by the corresponding regulations of the US Securities Regulatory Commission, unless Mr. Lin intends to choose those markets with extremely high risks.This risk is not only for investors, but also for the companies being traded.Because if shares are issued in this high-risk over-the-counter market, there is a high possibility of hostile takeovers or reputational stains.Even if there is no hostile takeover, the reputation stain is enough to ruin any possibility of your company entering the NASDAQ or NYSE in the future.Mr. Lin, I also hope that you will carefully consider the company's listing plan. "

After listening to Satoshi Matsushima's analysis, Lin Jinqi also knew that it is impossible for YouTube to go public now, but he still asked a little unwillingly: "Then Mr. Matsushima, I want to know how we can raise funds?"

"Our suggestion is to issue corporate bonds, but with YouTube's current popularity, your bonds may be uninterested." Satoshi Matsushima said with some regret, "Mr. Lin, as far as I know, you have a horizon in China." Game company, this is a company that drives many Wall Street investors crazy. And although this company is still a little far from the listing standards, if bonds are issued using this company as collateral, I think there should be many market makers on Wall Street Interested. Besides Horizon Games, don’t you also have Horizon Software Technology under your name? This is also a very attractive company. Mr. Lin, although YouTube itself is very futuristic, it may not be so Attractive."

Cong Matsushima and others left after explaining, while Lin Jinqi and Chen Shijun stared in the conference room with great regret. "Just ask me for a loan in the name of the company, I just recently made a fortune." Lin Jinqi suggested.

Lin Jinqi did not propose the idea of ​​capital injection, because the current YouTube company is not his own privately owned company, Chen Shijun and others also have shares, and the management also reserved options.If Lin Jinqi wants to inject capital into the company, then Chen Shijun and others must register in proportion, otherwise they can only watch their shares be diluted.Lin Jinqi did not want Chen Shijun and others to choose to leave because the shareholding ratio was too low, so he decided not to inject capital but to borrow money.Borrowing between companies is not a problem, at most it is a "corporate debt" on the financial statements of the Horizon Network Technology Group.Lin Jinqi's proposal was naturally accepted by Chen Shijun, because the "Athena Project" and "Prometheus Project" really needed a lot of money.

"After the Prometheus 0.1 version is optimized on YouTube, the Twitter version will be launched, and then it will be used as the core algorithm for future Twitter content push."

Like YouTube, Twitter’s promotion standards are actually related to the success or failure of this product. Why Weibo is criticized in later generations is because Weibo often pushes content that users are not interested in or even disgusting, especially some advertisements or commercials. cooperative contents.Of course, advertisements are indispensable for a product to survive, but Weibo’s appearance is mainly because it is too ugly.

Lin Jinqi decided to do a good job of pushing content on the one hand, and optimize advertising delivery on the other.In fact, the advertising push of WeChat Moments is much taller than that of Weibo.Because the advertisements in Moments are pushed based on the user's interests, even if the user may not need them, the degree of disgust is far lower than the inexplicable advertisements pushed by Weibo.And the most important thing is that although Moments also has advertisements, it has not modified the push rules of other content, so as to force users to advertise.Therefore, in terms of the degree of disgust of users, advertisements in the circle of friends are barely tolerated by users.

With the new capital infusion, YouTube quickly completed its first revamp.This revision is mainly aimed at logged-in users. After all, non-logged-in users can also use cookies to determine user preferences, but if it is a public computer, it is a bit embarrassing to push user A's preferences to user B, and this also involves A user's privacy issues.Therefore, when Chen Shijun launched the new version of the YouTube page, he limited the authority of the customized page to the logged-in users and informed all those who planned to use the authority of the customized page in advance.

According to the design of Lin Jinqi and Chen Shijun, the logged-in user can also refuse to use the personal customized page, if he values ​​his privacy very much.In fact, European and American users really value personal privacy very much, so there are not many users who are willing to enable personal customized pages after the revision.However, with the word-of-mouth communication of some users who are willing to enable users, more and more users have started to enable personal customized pages.Because as long as you log out, all personal pushes will stop and cookies will be automatically cleared once, which satisfies the user's privacy protection to the greatest extent.

With the increase of users who have turned on personal customization, YouTube's targeted content push and targeted advertising push have also been quietly turned on in the background.After two weeks of trial operation, users, video producers and advertisers have tasted the convenience of the new version of YouTube.Users can see more videos they are interested in, creators can get more like-minded clicks and comments, and advertisers' ad click-through rate and conversion rate far exceed other online platforms.

With the success of Prometheus 0.1, Lin Jinqi and Chen Shijun launched the "Advertising Win-Win Plan", saying that YouTube will share advertising profits with excellent video producers, so as to stimulate producers to produce better videos.After the announcement of this news, the entire video producer community immediately cheered.In the past, video producers have not accepted private invitations from advertisers, but this kind of rigid advertising placement not only ruins their popularity with the audience, but also violates the relevant regulations of the video platform and is punished.

Now YouTube's "Advertising Win-Win Program" obviously sets the standard for advertising videos for all video producers, and at the same time opens another door for those video producers who are unwilling to make advertising videos but are eager to earn income.For advertisers, more targeted advertising plans are naturally more attractive to them.Although YouTube has doubled the advertising price after the revision, and the targeted advertising has more than tripled, but this conversion rate still makes many advertisers willing to spend their advertising budget on YouTube.

In the Internet world, the competition between websites of the same nature is actually a "zero-sum game".If a website is successful, there must be other websites that cannot succeed or even must fail. The outbreak of YouTube is naturally the decline of GoogleVideo and MSNVideo. MSNVideo is not bad. After all, this product is only a supplement to the MSN portal plan. At the same time, the Microsoft father behind MSN is even more financially strong, and this loss can still be burned.And the most important thing is that after the boss shows his power, the second child is definitely the most uncomfortable, not MSNVideo who is the third child.

"Unexpectedly, we just integrated the Google AdWords business on Google Video, and YouTube launched a targeted push service." Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, looked at the other two entrepreneurial partners Larry Page and Xie Xie. Sergey Brin said.Among the three founders of Google, Schmidt is a pure manager and does not manage Google's core technology.

At the same time, the person who really developed and mastered Google's core technology PageRank was Larry Page, who was considered a technical geek and had little interest in company management.And the contribution of the remaining Google developer Sergey Brin, who is tied with Larry Page, is actually in the construction of the Google website prototype BackRub.

"How much impact has YouTube's 'targeted push' and 'win-win plan' had on us? Has MSN made any countermeasures?"

Compared with Page who is studying YouTube's targeted push function, Brin is more concerned about the impact on Google Video.Google is a company with a very sensitive sense of technology, and their products can basically seize the forefront of Internet development; even if they occasionally fall behind, they can produce products that are not inferior to their competitors in the shortest possible time.Google attaches great importance to GoogleVideo, because everyone can see that video sites are the key products for the Internet to truly challenge traditional media.It is precisely because of this that Internet giants such as Google and Microsoft have set foot in video websites one after another.

“Before we integrated Google AdWords, YouTube’s market share in North America was stable at around 40%, while in Europe it was 35%. But after we integrated Google AdWords, YouTube’s market share in both North America and Europe dropped by 5% %, and these users basically flow to our GoogleVideo side.” Schmidt showed the report to his partners, “But since YouTube announced the revision two weeks ago, our upward trend has been interrupted. , while YouTube’s market share is rapidly recovering. So far, YouTube’s market share in North America and Europe has exceeded 50%, almost forming a de facto natural monopoly. MSNVideo does not seem to have much action, they It just launched an online news channel by taking advantage of the relationship between the parent company MSN and MSNBC. As far as the current user feedback is concerned, this MSNVideo news channel, dubbed 'MSNBCONLINE', has not been accepted by users."

"It's the Internet age, who would be willing to watch news programs on cable TV on the Internet?" Larry said sarcastically. "The content of video websites in the Internet age must be created by Internet users. We can increase the advertising share and let those excellent video producers on YouTube come to our website to make videos. As long as we have excellent video content, we are willing to come to our website. The number of users watching videos on the website will also increase. In addition, we can link GoogleVideo to the search results of GoogleSearch, so that we can also guide traffic to our video site through search engines.”

If Lin Jinqi was here to observe the meeting, he would definitely applaud Larry Page's suggestion.For the PC era, the biggest entrance to the Internet is the search engine.Therefore, if Google directs GoogleVideo on GoogleSearch, let alone MSNVideo, even YouTube will be beaten down.

Fortunately, GoogleSearch at this time has not yet reached the monopoly position of later generations. After all, Yahoo has not completely fallen at this time, and YahooSearch can still compete with GoogleSearch.What's more, at this time, the search engines of companies such as Microsoft, America Online, and Netscape are still struggling to support, and their number of diehard users is also considerable.But even so, as long as GoogleSearch is determined to divert traffic for GoogleVideo, life will definitely not be easy for YouTube.

It's a pity that Lin Jinqi didn't participate in Google's internal meeting at this time, so he didn't know that GoogleSearch was already preparing to divert GoogleVideo.Lin Jinqi is now focusing on YouTube's own search function, because in addition to passively accepting YouTube push content, users still prefer to actively find content they are interested in through the search function.After Lin Jinqi acquired YouTube, he asked Chen Shijun and others to develop the "tagging" function for YouTube. The "tab" function is standard on any web2.0 product in the future, but it is the first of YouTube's at this time.

Because of the emergence of the "tag" function, video creators and viewers can mark their works with the most suitable search keywords, which basically improves the accuracy of YouTube's search function.In addition, Lin Jinqi also purchased its search engine from the domestic Qiandu Company.Although Qiandu Company has been scolded to the brim, but in terms of technology alone, Qiandu Company's search engine is indeed not inferior to GoogleSearch.Even GoogleSearch technically has part of the source code suspected of plagiarizing Qiandu Company, so if you really think that Qiandu Company has no technology, you are really sorry for them.It's just that although Qiandu Company has the technology in hand, it succumbs to the will of capital in operation, which leads to the belief that there are too many things that interfere with the search results, and it is quite embarrassing to become the object of ridicule by many people in the end.

However, after Lin Jinqi bought the search engine of Qiandu Company, he would naturally not intervene in the search results. At the same time, he also implanted the function of Prometheus 0.1 in it. After YouTube's search engine introduced Qiandu Search and Prometheus 0.1, the interactive function has obviously been greatly improved.The first thing to show the user is the automatic association function in the search box, especially after the user logs in, the association function will be closer to the user's idea; secondly, the search results can be artificially sorted according to the user's needs, although the search engine should not interfere with the search As a result, users can choose according to their own needs, so the search engine will be closer to the user's search needs according to the user's choice. The result of YouTube's small upgrade in the search function is that it has attracted a further increase in YouTube users, and the matching is that YouTube's advertisers have also experienced a wave of growth.

Now the YouTube company is not only the object of attention of "Red Herring" (a magazine dedicated to high-tech startups), but mainstream financial publications such as "Wall Street Journal" and "Forbes" have also set their sights on YouTube.More and more investment institutions agree with the statement that "YouTube will be the next Yahoo miracle", so major mainstream investment institutions have begun to inquire about YouTube's financing plan.

Satoshi Matsushima did not expect that he would visit YouTube again less than two months after the last counseling listing.If YouTube was still a newborn baby when I came here last time, now YouTube has grown into a unicorn company that no one dares to underestimate in Silicon Valley and even the global Internet.This may be the miracle of Internet companies, as long as they seize the opportunity, they can grow instantly.If it is a traditional enterprise without five to ten years of development, how can there be such capital attention?

However, Satoshi Matsushima knows that YouTube itself is not short of money, because the advertising revenue in just two months has almost caught up with Yahoo’s half-year advertising revenue last year, so many analysts say that YouTube is already a "cash cow". YouTube's interest in financing is not that great.Fortunately, Satoshi Matsushima knew that YouTube had a plan to go public, and whether it was the NYSE or NASDAQ, the exchange had regulations on the number of shareholders and equity ratio of listed companies, so YouTube must introduce venture capital institutions Yes, it's just that the shares YouTube is willing to give up may be relatively small.

"Mr. Lin, I didn't expect us to meet again so soon." Satoshi Matsushima was not embarrassed.

If you care too much about your own face in business, you will only lose green dollar bills.What's more, Matsushima Satoshi did not offend YouTube, otherwise Lin Jinqi and Chen Shijun would not have found Goldman Sachs in the first place and asked Matsushima Satoshi to directly contact them.Cong Matsushima is also very grateful for Lin Jinqi and Chen Shijun's love, because after this battle, Goldman Sachs already knew that Lin Jinqi, a major client, belonged to Matsushima Cong.Basically, unless Satoshi Matsushima's head was caught by the door, no one in the Goldman Sachs Group could replace him to directly contact Lin Jinqi.

"Based on the popularity of YouTube in the current capital market and your company's revenue in the last two months, there is basically no problem going public after three years. Many companies usually only consider approaching us in the last year of listing. Come to do IPO counseling. In fact, at that time, we don’t have much good solution other than optimizing the report. But if your company invites us to counsel from the beginning of the planned IPO, we can help the company’s financing plans, equity distribution and the company's internal structure, which will also help the company to develop healthily and steadily after listing in the future. By the way, in order to express the sincerity of our Goldman Sachs Group, we have a small piece of information here to share with you The company shared. Of course, this news will be made public tomorrow, and we only shared it with you a dozen hours in advance. Mr. Lin, I wonder if you are interested?"

"Mr. Matsushima, why don't you tell me what you know."

Lin Jinqi knows that a large group like Goldman Sachs generally needs to be responsible for the IPO guidance or other affairs of many companies, so the confidentiality measures among employees are very strict.But no matter how strict the measures are, as long as the final executor is a human being, there will always be some omissions.Therefore, there will be some employees who are willing to share with their customers some news that is about to expire or the nature of confidentiality is not so strict, so as to attract customers.

Satoshi Matsushima told Lin Jinqi that Google decided to divert Google Video from Google Search. Although there were no specific measures, Lin Jinqi was shocked into a cold sweat.After Lin Jinqi sent Satoshi Matsushima away, he asked Chen Shijun and others to hold a YouTube high-level meeting immediately.When Lin Jinqi broke the news, the entire YouTube executives were blown away.Although YouTube and GoogleVideo are competitors, this does not prevent people from YouTube from favoring GoogleSearch.

In fact, Google Search is indeed a very good search engine, and later became the overlord of the search market.But now GoogleSearch decided to divert GoogleVideo, which angered YouTube.After all, most of YouTube's external traffic also comes from GoogleSearch.

"It is not sure how Google will divert Google Video from Google Search, but there are only two methods. The first method is to directly change the search algorithm and force Google Video to be displayed as the top priority. If this is the case , Colleagues from the technical department and the legal department will pay attention to the changes in the results of certain keywords in GoogleSearch from today. If we find out that they have forcibly changed the search results, then we will directly sue Google for 'unfair competition'. I think Microsoft will also get involved at that time, after all, apart from their video business, their more important business is search.” Lin Jinqi said.

To be honest, if the head of Google is still an idealist Larry Page or a liberal Sergey Brin, Lin Jinqi would dare to stand in court and swear by the Bible to ensure that GoogleSearch will not be in the search engine. Arithmetic tricks.But as Google expands, Wall Street capital increasingly controls Google.As a representative of Wall Street capital, Eric Schmidt, who is currently the head of Google, Lin Jinqi really dare not overestimate his character.

You know, the first thing he did after taking over Google was to expel Page and Brin from the management rights of the company.But who would have thought that PageRank, Google's most valuable technology, was in the hands of Page, and that Page and Brin were inseparable from each other, which forced Schmidt to dare not make matters worse, and finally the company entered the era of troika .Although Schmidt is still the main person in charge of the company, some key or important matters still require the consent of Page and Brin.That's why Lin Jinqi was worried that Google would play tricks on the GoogleSearch algorithm, so he left a foreshadowing to see if Google would jump in.

"Another way is for Google to display associated video results in a 'panel' in the empty space on the search results page."

Google is much more conscientious in displaying search advertisements than Qiandu. Generally, their advertisements only display a maximum of three in the panel, and the ranking of the advertisements is also automatically calculated by the user's clicks.In fact, in the future, GoogleSearch will also display three video playback boxes on the search results in a panel.In this way, there is a clear distinction between search results and Google display results, and users have no way to sue Google.

"But since they want to launch a separate panel to display videos, then they have only two options. One of the options is to recommend excellent related videos to be displayed on the panel according to the search algorithm, and we have an advantage in this regard, and even I will I wonder if Google intends to use this to guide us to YouTube. But the second option is to make a paid advertisement and charge based on the number of times it is displayed. If it is the first option, we will not take any action, just let the technical department Over there, pay attention to the frequency of their panel display in time to reverse their algorithm and optimize our page. But if it is the second option, then they have to refuse the purchase of external personnel, otherwise it is 'unfair competition'. In short, Keep in touch with Microsoft, and if Google gets upset, we will jointly sue. At the same time, we will place an advertisement on search engines such as Microsoft and Yahoo, and we cannot rely solely on Google to attract traffic.”

Just when Lin Jinqi was formulating countermeasures against Google, his third paper in the Annals of Mathematics was also published.Compared with the first two papers aimed at solving certain problems, Lin Jinqi's third paper is about his own problem-solving methodology.Although Lin Jinqi's first two papers also attracted a lot of attention in the mathematics circle, the attention of this methodology paper far exceeds the attention of the first two papers, and the citation rate is also quite high.

Originally, the international mathematics community’s view of Lin Jinqi was “a young scholar trained by Princeton University”, but now after the publication of this methodology paper, the international mathematics community’s view has changed to “a scholar who is very likely to grow into a master in the future” .No one cared about Lin Jinqi's age anymore, but paid more attention to Lin Jinqi's academic achievements.However, as everyone knew more about Lin Jinqi, they also began to feel dissatisfied with Lin Jinqi's involvement in so many disciplines, and even being good at business. They always felt that Lin Jinqi was wasting his talent.

In addition to the international mathematics community paying attention to Lin Jinqi's achievements, Wall Street is also paying attention to Lin Jinqi's growth.Horizon Interactive Entertainment Group, registered and established by Lin Jinqi in Hong Kong, has long been positioned by Wall Street as "the most potential and valuable unicorn company from the East". Not to mention the near-monopoly position of Horizon Games in the domestic game market, Horizon Interactive Entertainment still holds There are resources such as Haowan.com, Kankan.com, Hi123 and "Elf Series Software", as well as the investment shares of Penguin Group and Sanshi Group.

It's a pity that Horizon Interactive Entertainment has no plan to go public, and as Horizon Interactive Entertainment's brother company in the United States-Horizon Network is also a very growing company, and its YouTube company has already started the pre-IPO financing plan. It has received the attention and participation of large mainstream investment institutions such as IDG, Sequoia Capital, and Carlyle Capital.

And among so many followers, a company named "Literary Review Technology Company" seems not so conspicuous.Renaissance Technology Company sounds like a technology company, but in fact it is an investment institution.Different from other investment companies, Renaissance Technologies especially advocates the use of mathematical models to guide investment.And their Medallion Fund has indeed obtained extremely high investment returns under the guidance of mathematical models, so the private equity funds peddled by Renaissance Technology are very popular in the circle.

"Peter, do you think this little guy's investment vision is very close to ours, and even better than ours?" In an office building in East Setauket, New York City, an old man asked the middle-aged man in front of him.The old man's name is James Simmons, who is the co-founder and current chairman of the board of directors of Literary Review Technology; the middle-aged man in front of him is Peter Brown, the company's CEO. In 2018, Renaissance Technologies managed a fortune of $840 billion.Although it cannot be compared with Goldman Sachs Group's $1.5 trillion in assets, Renaissance's company size is much smaller than Goldman Sachs Group's. "You mean he probably invests using mathematical models like we do?"

"Not 'maybe', but 'certainly'." Brown took out a private detective's investigation report to the old man. "He opened accounts in the three trading markets of Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange and CME Group through UBS Group. Except for the foreign exchange market, all other tradable securities are his investment scope. However His investment scale is very small. If we hadn’t discovered the anomaly, perhaps no one would have cared about his small capital movements. According to our understanding, all his hype was judged by a computer. We are Princeton University learned that he had indeed designed a mathematical model of financial investment, but no one knew the details. At the same time, he used Goldman Sachs to find strategic investors for him, and one of the investment projects was artificial intelligence. Therefore, I doubted He uses mathematical models combined with artificial intelligence to carry out investment speculation. Judging from his operating income during the recent period, his rate of return is much higher than ours, which can be described as quite generous. According to our analysts’ calculations, his three-year The return on investment should be above 75%; short-term return on investment may be even more exaggerated!"

"Although we can achieve a similar rate of return on investment, we need to invest a lot more manpower than him." The old man muttered.

The labor costs of investment banks are quite high. In addition to fixed salaries, fund managers still receive dividends and company options. In addition, the additional benefits of fund managers are also very exaggerated.Therefore, although the old man thinks that he can achieve a 75% return on investment, how much of these returns will he actually get after deducting labor costs?You must know that this young man's investment is for himself, and the only expenditure may be electricity, right?Moreover, this young man does not pay attention to the securities market 24 hours a day. According to the survey report, this young man may read investment statements once a week.In addition, it is to optimize the investment model every once in a while, and then put his energy on other aspects.If the investment manager under him worked like this, he would have been fired a long time ago, right?

"Peter, how attractive do you think our company is to him? How much do we need to pay to recruit him?"

Hearing the old man's question, Peter immediately smiled wryly.

"Mr. Simmons, what we are facing is a rising star in the mathematics world and an investment genius at the same time. Fortunately, UBS and Goldman Sachs did not notice this kind of person when they contacted him, otherwise he would Perhaps he is already the senior vice president of one of these two groups? Of course, as a company that believes in mathematical investment theory, we have a natural sense of identity and intimacy with him. However, this does not mean that we can easily Recruit him. However, there is a very interesting thing that you can talk to Mr. Simmons, that is, our young man seems to be short of funds. According to our understanding, he has a supercomputing project and an artificial intelligence research project in his hand .If it is a big company like IBM and Microsoft, it would be a bit surprising to start two projects at the same time, and it will not have such strong support. But he has been using his income to support these two projects. Maybe we can Cut in from here."

"I understand what you mean, but I still need to discuss it with Howard." Of course, the old man understood what Brown meant. It was nothing more than recruiting this young man with a high salary, and at the same time giving him very high dividends and stock options, and finally let him control a fortune. A large number of private equity funds.Then this young man will choose his own company for the sake of money, but this needs to be considered.At least the old man can't make decisions privately, he has to chat with his partner Howard Morgan.

Lin Jinqi hadn't expected that he would attract the attention of a big fish that he was very interested in.