Tsinghua University student, failed to start a business 33 times, founded Kuaishou 8 years ago with a market value exceeding one trillion, and a net worth of over 100 billion

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Su Hua, the chairman of Kuaishou, has too many dazzling labels. Although he resigned as CEO last year and was replaced by another founder Cheng Yixiao, he is still the core decision-maker of Kuaishou.

Su Hua is the legendary child of someone else. He was talented and a super academic since he was a child. He graduated from Tsinghua University and failed to get a Ph.D.

He started his business at the age of 26. He is an absolute technology “big guy”. He has experienced 33 entrepreneurial failures. In his 34th venture, he went from GIF Kuaishou, a curiosity-seeking Kuaishou, to a Kuaishou with a market capitalization of trillions. , this time he finally succeeded.

As a Taozi from Hunan, Su Hua has a typical Hunan character, but he found his niche in the short video community on the Internet.

Everything seems to be taken for granted, but behind every success story, there are always thousands of hardships, persistence and determination that are beyond ordinary people.

The "Tsinghua Academic Master" who emerged from remote Xiangxi

In 1982, Su Hua was born in Yongshun County, Zhangjiajie, Hunan, which is a remote Xiangxi area in Hunan, with high mountains and long roads. The economy is not developed, and writer Shen Congwen, painter Huang Yongyu, and singer Song Zuying all came from here.

Su Hua’s entrepreneurial spirit must have come from his father’s genes. His father was originally a civil servant, but in order to provide a better life for his family, he quit his job and started a business in agricultural machinery.

Su Hua has been extremely smart since he was a child and has always been the top student in his class. However, he is not a good boy in the traditional sense.

He has always been obsessed with games. Starting from the sixth grade of elementary school, "Little Overlord" was his enlightenment. Later, when he came to the stand-alone version of "Legend of Sword and Fairy", just playing games was not enough for him.

Su Hua began to try to write code and buy equipment from deciphering games. When he was boarding in Yongshun No. 1 Middle School, he even went to the Internet cafe to play games all night long.

But even though he has been addicted to games, he did not delay his studies at all, and was easily admitted to Tsinghua University, becoming a well-known person in "Yongshun County" at that time.

It was from his liking for games that Su Hua had great interest and enthusiasm for the Internet and programming, which also laid a solid foundation for his future entrepreneurship.

Su Hua studied all the way from his undergraduate degree to his Ph.D., but when he saw the skyrocketing housing prices in Beijing, he couldn't help it and actually dropped out of school to find a job.

Su Hua’s personality can be seen from these experiences. He is bold and decisive in doing things.

After 33 entrepreneurial failures, he never gave up

With the aura of Tsinghua University, Su Hua successfully entered a job at Google, "responsible for search and system architecture." At Google, Su Hua felt the charm of technology for the first time.

The comfortable working environment, high salary and advanced technology in a large factory made Su Hua feel like a fish in water and grew rapidly.

But the restlessness in his bones made him start his first business, doing website video advertising, after working in Silicon Valley for two and a half years. In 2008, the video website had just started, and no one was optimistic about it. Unfortunately, the financial tsunami happened again, and Su Hua naturally failed.

Later, he tried various projects one after another, but they all failed for various reasons. "I have done at least 33 projects and accumulated a lot of failure experience." During this period, Su Hua also went to work at Baidu In two years, I helped Baidu develop the Fengchao system that will be the core of making money from advertising in the future, and also learned about team management.

Su Hua has never been willing to write code for a big company. Although he has accumulated a net worth of millions, he has always been eager to realize his own value through technology. He believes that entrepreneurship must be the only way.

So he took his six brothers and embarked on the road of entrepreneurship again, preparing to build a search engine.

They co-founded Kuaishou

While Su Hua was exploring, with the help of investor Zhang Fei, he met Cheng Yixiao, who was also starting a business in the Internet field.

In 2013, Cheng Yixiao and his team were operating an animation tool "GIF Kuaishou". At that time, mobile network social networking was on the rise. Young people were no longer satisfied with text communication, but were using the emerging In the chat software WeChat, he happily sends funny emoticons in GIF format.

However, with the rise of short videos, he has been strongly impacted, and the struggling Cheng Yixiao also urgently needs to transform.

The two hit it off, and their concepts and ideas were very similar, so they hit it off and decided to start cooperation. In fact, as the founder of Kuaishou, Cheng Yixiao should have a larger share of the shares. Why was Su Huawei the leader? This was what they discussed at the time. , determined by Cheng Yixiao’s overall situation.

Before the merger, Cheng Yixiao accounted for 80% of Kuaishou’s shares and investor Morningside Capital accounted for 20%. After Su Hua joined, Cheng Yixiao gave up 40% of the shares and asked the investors to give up half of the shares, resulting in In the newly formed Kuaishou, Su Hua’s shares surpassed Cheng Yixiao’s and became the actual controlling shareholder.

Su Hua has solid background knowledge, working experience in a large factory, and entrepreneurial experience in 33 projects, so of course he is not allowed to become the CEO of Kuaishou. Cheng Yixiao is responsible for polishing the products.

In the Internet world at that time, whether it was Tencent Video, Youku Tudou, or iQiyi, which brought a lot of capital to the market, players had disrupted the entire market. Su Hua felt that if he wanted to be a fast player, he would have to do it. To be different from others, the angle he chose was video social networking.

So he launched a drastic reform, cutting off all the original complex applications of Kuaishou, leaving only three columns on the homepage: "Follow", "Discover", "City", and another. Recording function represented by icon camera.

However, the result was not completed as planned. Instead, the number of users dropped sharply, and 90% of the active users disappeared one after another. This confused Su Hua.

There are 700 million users but they can’t get rid of the rural style.

After calming down, Su Hua did not get confused by the small setback in front of him.

Short video operations always follow the route of celebrities, anchors, and big Vs. In this way, through the cultivation of top anchors, they can attract a large number of fans and increase user activity and traffic.

But Su Hua does not want to repeat this old path. He believes that the PC era may be the knowledge center of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. In the mobile Internet era, the whole world may become a big market, so he focuses on the perspective of ordinary people. video.

Kuaishou did not attract celebrities and gave up the big V certification label. Instead, it started to specialize in algorithm recommendation technology.

The best way to get high recommendations is to use high-quality content.

Soon, the number of fans lost by Kuaishou came back. In June 2014, Kuaishou’s daily active users rose to 200,000. In 2017, Kuaishou’s total registered user data exceeded 700 million!

This is rocket speed.

As the number of Kuaishou users increases, the amount of content generated continues to surge. The platform has 700 million users, which means that at least 10 million pieces of video content information may be generated every day.

It has made famous a group of grassroots people like "Xiaowei", female crane drivers, rural youths who drive excavators and other ordinary people.

However, an article titled "Cruel Bottom Story: A Video Software in Rural China" quickly brought the beauty of Kuaishou to the forefront. The article pointed out the vulgar content of some of Kuaishou's videos.

“Some people put firecrackers into their trouser pockets, some eat glass and milkworms, some abuse cats and dogs for fun, and there are even underage girls appearing on the platform to make money with early pregnancy as a gimmick. Attracting a large number of young girls to follow the trend and imitate..." In order to be curious, video bloggers do everything they can.

The article uses pictures and texts to analyze the chaos of Kuaishou from various aspects such as Errenzhuan, dirty jokes, and cruel juggling.

They think Kuaishou is vulgar, crude, and rough, and label Kuaishou as a "cow ghost, a snake spirit," and a cruel story in the countryside. As soon as the article came out, it triggered labels all over the Internet. Kuaishou was labeled "LOW", and CCTV News also criticized Kuaishou.

Kuaishou encountered a large-scale crisis. Su Hua issued an open letter to apologize and immediately stated that he would improve the algorithm, enrich the content, and improve the quality of the content.

Su Hua’s wealth story is yet to be completed. In the next article, we will focus on analyzing the secret of Su Hua’s entrepreneurial success, especially the reference and inspiration for entrepreneurs.

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Kuaishou helmsman Su Hua 2: Teaching entrepreneurs with a net worth of hundreds of billions that entrepreneurs must have the courage to fight despite repeated failures