Rebirth 2010: I taught Mr. Lei how to make a mobile phone

Chapter 147 Deep Binding & The Next Prey

Lei Jun felt that this sentence sounded familiar, "What does it mean?"

"Isn't our company raising Series A funding? What's going on now?"

Lei Jun thought about it and since Chen Mo was not an outsider, he told him about the progress of Xiaomi's A round of financing.

After his and the finance department's calculations, based on the current rate of capital consumption and Xiaomi's future development, at least $3000 million in funding would be needed in the A round to cover Xiaomi's subsequent development. The B round is expected to be after Xiaomi's mobile phones are launched and selling steadily, which is around mid-2011.

Therefore, we have been constantly looking for investment institutions during this period. Currently, there are two companies with clear investment intentions. One is Morningside Capital, which previously invested in the angel round and will follow up with an investment of US$500 million.

The other was Qiming Venture Partners, which was backed by Tong Shihao, with whom they had had a meal before. Seeing that Xiaomi was stumbling onto the right track and that its mobile phones had begun to be manufactured, they agreed to invest US$500 million with the help of Tong Shihao.

The last one is Shunwei Capital, founded by Lei Jun and Xu Dalai. After all, since it is their own business, they want to keep the money within the family, so they plan to invest 1000 million US dollars.

According to Lei Jun's original plan, he would go to IDG and Temasek to have a talk. Last time, when he was having dinner with China Guardian Auctions, he met IDG's Xiong Xiaoge and talked to him for a while. Although he was a little interested in Xiaomi, it would be very difficult to negotiate a capital of tens of billions of dollars, especially since Xiaomi had no achievements yet.

In fact, Lei Jun did think of Chen Mo at the beginning, but the funds involved increased several times with each round of financing. The angel round was 10 million, and the A round became 30 million. It is estimated that the B round will be over 100 million, and the units are all in US dollars.

He was afraid that this guy couldn't come up with so much money, so he put Chen Mo at the last priority. When the gap was two or three million, he would ask him to add icing on the cake and everyone would be happy.

As a result, last week, China Guardian Auctions gave him a "bombshell". During this period, Lei Jun was too embarrassed to look for Chen Mo, and he has been waiting until now.

But since Chen Mo has spoken, Lei Jun doesn't mind taking advantage of the situation.

Lei Jun introduced the various details of the current A round. "The A round is expected to raise 3000 million yuan in total, with Shunwei raising 1000 million yuan, Qiming raising 500 million yuan, and Morningside raising 500 million yuan. How much do you plan to invest this time?"

At first, Chen Mo wanted to just fill the full amount with 900 million, but he thought that if he did so, Lei Jun would definitely not be willing to do so. After all, his equity would be diluted, so how could he be ranked second?
So Chen Mo's eyes turned, "Mr. Lei, how much do you plan to invest personally?"

"500."

"I'll follow!"

In this case, the structure of Xiaomi's major shareholders will not change much, and the equity of other founders will be diluted to varying degrees, but the valuation will be higher, and the value of the equity will not change much.

Increasing Xiaomi holdings is just one of Chen Mo’s goals.

He had another request, but before he could raise it, Lei Jun spoke up first.

"You are already the vice president. Do you need an office for yourself? Or there is a single room between my house and the finance office. I can clean it up and use it as your office."

Chen Mo waved his hands repeatedly, "No, I'm not that delicate. It's better for me to come from the masses and be more down-to-earth. This way it will be convenient to communicate if there are any problems."

"Hey? Can you find a way to make me stand out from the crowd?"

"No way, it's just that my mentality hasn't completely changed yet, you have to give me some time to adapt."

"Is that so? It's up to you then. Just let me know if you need anything. After all, don't always think of yourself as a manager. An executive should act like an executive and don't mingle with the employees. I heard that you even went to play games with them a while ago?"

"That's called team building. We can't always study and research technology together, right? It's always a good thing to relax and work hard in both civil and military affairs."

"But I remind you that leaders must have the dignity of leaders, and must maintain a certain sense of mystery and distance. Employees must have awe of their leaders, otherwise they may take advantage of them."

Lei Jun began to impart his management philosophy.

Chen Mo did not comment on this. There were only thirty or forty people. There was no need. It was not like you were in charge of hundreds of people.

However, in response to Lei Jun's last sentence which seemed to have a hidden meaning, Chen Mo coughed and moved his butt off his desk.

Then Chen Mo brought up another important matter. "Well, I've checked Shunwei's official website. It seems that they are still raising funds. How about letting me join them? Maybe I can even give you two big brothers some advice?"

Lei Jun thought that if Shunwei had this lucky star joining, the subsequent development of Shunwei Fund might have unexpected gains.

With the mentality of an elder brother leading a younger brother, Lei Jun introduced the basic situation of Shunwei Capital.

In fact, Shunwei is more focused on looking for startups that currently need A and B rounds of investment. To put it bluntly, it is an expansion and extension of Lei Jun's personal investment strategy. Lei Jun has absolute control, and Xu Dalai only coordinates some relationships between the government and the investment field, and does not invest much money.

The establishment of Shunwei Fund predicted that the trend of mobile Internet was imminent, and it seized the companies with the potential to grow into entry-level companies in various hot spots as investment targets in advance, and provided capital, strategy and other aspects of support to the projects.

In this way, these start-ups, backed by Lei Jun and Xiaomi, have huge strategic resources and will assist Xiaomi in building its ecological chain in the future.

Shunwei Capital focuses on Xiaomi mobile phones and invests in companies that have strategic value to Xiaomi in niche areas as a supplement to Xiaomi's ecosystem. The investment projects mainly include hardware, software, content, etc.

Simply put, Shunwei and Xiaomi are highly complementary. Xiaomi is the heart, and Shunwei is the blood, responsible for the operation and circulation of the Xiaomi ecosystem.

After hearing this, Chen Mo was secretly amazed and couldn't help but want to applaud. Xiao Lei was indeed worthy of his reputation, his vision and vision were amazing.

At first, he just wanted to invest in Shunwei to deepen his ties with Lei Jun, and just be a hands-off boss and collect dividends every year.

Now that I think about it, I increased my positions a lot and calculated the funds I had.

"5000 million US dollars, is that enough?"

"You are so bold, aren't you afraid of losing money?"

Lei Jun widened his eyes, not believing where this guy got such courage. 5000 million US dollars, nearly 3 million RMB, according to the previous auction price on the website, at least more than half of it had been thrown away.

He was now half shocked by this guy's audacity, and half moved by the trust this little brother had in him, which made him feel that he was shouldering a lot of responsibilities invisibly.

"I'm so young, there's nothing to be afraid of. At worst, I can start over again!"

"Okay, I'll call Xu Dalai now."

A few minutes later, Lei Jun finished the conversation, took out two cans of Coke from the refrigerator, opened them and handed them over, "Xiao Mo, welcome to Shunwei."

The two of them bumped into each other, tut tut, burp~~~
The next moment, two people's hearty laughter was heard in the room!

The big things are done, and here are some of the daily little things in Chen Mo's eyes.

Near the end of November, according to his previous deployment, WeChat will be connected with MIOS. WeChat V11 and MIOS will be released simultaneously on December 1.1. By then, WeChat will be pre-installed after users update their MIOS system.

In fact, ever since MIOS has been firmly at the top of the list of Android customized systems, many software manufacturers have called to seek cooperation, but Chen Mo rejected them all. After all, too many pre-installed software on MIOS would cause great disgust among users.

But WeChat is its own product after all, so that’s a different matter. Users can uninstall it themselves if they are not satisfied.

However, he expects that when the next version is launched, based on the current installation volume of MIOS of nearly 300 million, it will not be a problem for the number of WeChat users to increase by at least 100 million.

Then breaking through the 10 million mark is a foregone conclusion.

Currently, the three MIOS teams led by Chen Mo have 32 permanent members, and WeChat has also expanded to 12 people.

During this period, Shuangbiao·Mo has begun to experience the features of the latest version of WeChat, such as drifting messages and group chats. These are functional iterations.

The first technical update is the stability of the application, which is something Chen Mo has emphasized again and again since the beginning of WeChat product development. For this purpose, the technical team has made a lot of optimizations and preventive measures to ensure the high availability of the service and the pre-processing of unexpected situations (such as preventing the loss of information in slow and weak network environments, etc.).

The second is that the traffic loss should be optimized and compressed as much as possible. Text does not actually take up much capacity. 1MB can send 52 Chinese characters, and the current 3G packages start at at least a few hundred MB.

The text is completely sufficient, but the picture is different, which can easily take up 1 or 2 MB.

Therefore, the compression ratio is very important during the transmission of this kind of instant messaging software. Quality cannot be sacrificed for the sake of capacity, nor can the message transmission be too slow for the sake of quality. Therefore, such optimization is a long-term and extreme task.

After all, reducing traffic loss as much as possible at present will bring a better experience to users.

Now WeChat’s counterpart is the SMS and MMS services used by traditional mobile phones. If data charges exceed SMS charges, why do people still use WeChat?

Regardless of the track, be it games, e-commerce, or mobile communications, free or focusing on the ultimate cost-effectiveness are the best entry points.

Just when Chen Mo was checking the project code for the last time.

He received a call from Chen Tong and found that the other party was very excited.

"Haha, Chen Mo, it's just as you said. I don't know why, Tencent Weibo is acting crazy now. It either never updates, or it updated two versions in the past half month. The functions inside contradict each other. It's like the left hand is fighting the right hand."

Chen Mo walked to the small conference room, closed the door, and said casually, "I guess Tencent is also a makeshift team. There must be many teams under the Weibo department. Many teams and many products will inevitably bring about the cost of horizontal communication. It is not uncommon for such a big flood to flush the Dragon King Temple."

"However, since the 3Q war, I have observed the performance of Tencent Weibo over the past month and feel that they are a bit leaderless. They are no longer following us relentlessly like before.

It's like no one is watching over him. Hey, do you think it's possible that after the 3Q war, Xiao Ma is looking for his next prey?" Chen Tong expressed his guess on the phone.

"Who knows, maybe they'll be aiming at me."

Chen Mo's words were just nonsense, but he didn't expect that they would become the law.
(End of this chapter)