Today, Wang Junyu, CEO of Pea Pod, formally announced that its application distribution business will be merged into Alibaba. Outside rumor, Alibaba spent 200 million dollars to buy the pea pod. Neither side disclosed the exact amount of the acquisition.
Many media articles expressed regret, because the last round of financing wandoujia 120 million DOLLARS, the valuation of nearly 1 billion dollars, and wandoujia founded today, from the outside can be queried, it seems that the amount of financing more than 200 million dollars. Another app distribution market, 91, was acquired by Baidu for $1.9 billion two years ago. By contrast, Wandoujia’s $200 million acquisition by Alibaba was not a “successful” venture by any reckoning.
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(Photo from Jun Yu’s Instagram)
The success of a startup is the result of doing everything right, while failure can be simply the result of doing one thing wrong at the wrong time.
This article does not discuss the success or failure of Wandoujia or the application distribution market. Instead, I want to talk about Wang Junyu, the most idealistic geek among Chinese entrepreneurs. I would like to believe and wish that he will definitely make greater products in the future.
1
Like the palm of his hand
I got to know Jun Yu in 2008, when he was still working at Google China. We were not familiar with each other at that time. Looking through our previous chat records, I found that we had been discussing various technical issues and policies of Google on Gtalk from 2008 to 2010. A man of broad mind.
Although he was in the user experience team at the time, no matter which branch of products I asked him about, he always gave me an answer. He once took the time to analyze to me why Chinese writers’ protest against Google scanning books (2009) was actually a misunderstanding of its principle. He even told me, Why he thinks It’s not a good idea for Google to pull out of China. Of course, he adds, “If you write, don’t say it from me.” In this way, hidden merit and fame.
An ordinary employee knows all the business of the company very well. I think there may be two reasons. One is that he likes the company very much, and the other is that he is very good at learning and researching. I believe he has both.
He is the most knowledgeable non-senior executive I have ever seen in a large company about all its products.
2
To be humble
Years ago, the media often reported that Google lunch was the best lunch in the world, and I always wanted to try it. And have a meal in Google for the first time, be jun Yu gets go in, that is 09 June.
That was the first time I met Ji Junyu. The sweaty little fat man in black was the Top scorer in guangdong College entrance examination two years older than me. At that time, Jun Yu was well-known in the blogosphere, while I was just a small editor of a portal. After dinner, he took me and my ex-girlfriend around Google’s Beijing headquarters and introduced Google’s various devices and company atmosphere to us without any arrogance.
Review images more than a year later, he founded the peas, during his act as their CEO of peas, due to work or other reasons, we meet at about 1 years, every talk, though not long, but you will find that every conversation, this is no longer a small fat people, remain a few years ago that humility the stereotype would have us believe; agreeable, no matter who you are, He’s willing to talk to you as an equal. I think perhaps the more knowledgeable a person is, the more he thinks he doesn’t know enough and believes that there is always something he can learn from others.
He’s one of the most humble founders I’ve ever seen at a startup.
3
The efficiency of
Several years ago, when Wandoujia was at Deshengmen, I used to visit their offices and see the wandoujia team using various productivity tools.
Including but not limited to Google Enterprise Email, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Dropbox, Asana, Basecamp, Trello, Geckoboard, Google Analytics, Jira, Zapier, IFTTT, RescueTime…
You’d be hard pressed to find people using so many productivity tools on any other team in China.
They even developed an in-house dinner system. When their office was in Deshengmen, the company provided a uniform lunch for each employee, while the auntie ordered takeout for dinner. At that time, There were about 100 people in Wandoujia, and everyone had different tastes. So the aunt who was in charge of ordering food began to count who wanted what to eat with a pen and paper from 4pm, and then ordered five meals.
In the eyes of Jun Yu and Wandoujia’s engineers, this approach is extremely inefficient. So they developed an internal ordering system. Every day before 5 o ‘clock, all employees ordered takeout in the system and sent it to the aunt.
Perhaps as a result of his time at Google, he is a big believer in “tools for efficiency” and has written several internal systems himself. In November 2011, Jun Yu and I, along with several friends, tried to organize a “productivity forum”, where everyone would gather weekly to discuss how their teams could use tools to improve productivity.
Three years ago, when I was still in geek Park, I invited Jun Yu to share about team efficiency, and he immediately agreed. There was so much to say about this topic for him. The tools mentioned above cost about 2000 yuan per employee per year on average. The cost of these tools is not a heavy burden for a company. On the contrary, with the help of tools, the focus of Junyu is to improve work efficiency and make the team “more comfortable” at work.
We hope to use the world’s simplest tools to help us make the simplest and most useful products, only we use the best products, can make the best products.
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This is what he said in that speech.
He is the most productivity-oriented and tool-driven CEO I’ve ever seen.
4
feelings
Internet companies like to export feelings. To export feelings once is PR, to export feelings twice is planned PR, and to export feelings for years and years is true feelings.
My understanding of feelings is that what we are doing may not be directly profitable, but it is something that promotes some kind of progress or change, so we keep doing it.
Pea pod is a continuous output of feelings of the company.
As anyone who has developed an Android app in China knows, wandoujia is the cleanest of the dozens of Android markets in China. Whether it is from the interface of the software, or whether it is “hands-on” to your phone after installation, whether it brings you “family bucket”, Pea pod is a strange flower in the Android market, a relatively clean strange flower.
Insist not to play rascal, is a rare feelings, is China this piece of land rare fresh.
Another thing, can also see the pea pod and Jun Yu’s feelings – pea pod design award. Wandoujia has been helping users discover the highest quality apps through the Wandoujia Design Awards since 2011.
Back in 2011, there were a lot of well-designed apps on iOS, but on Android, most of them were just plain old. At this time, Wandoujia planned the “Wandoujia Design Award”, hoping to recommend beautifully designed applications to users and better standards for Android application design through manual selection, so as to jointly improve the quality of Android applications.
Pea Pod Design Awards only select good enough design, never consider downloads. That’s why you often see little-known apps that have been nominated for pea-pod design awards.
At the time I was a product lead for a mobile client and I assumed that, like most of the domestic awards I’d seen, design awards could be “bought”. So I approached Jun Yu and the other pea pod people and tried to figure out how to get split Pod to give our client a design award. But they turned me down. They told me that the Pea Pod design Award was fair and just. Every week, they would discuss and vote to select the winner of the design award of the week.
So I had to honestly talk with their BD about the cooperation of advertising space, and determined to the next big version, our client design more beautiful.
I think that in this land of pollution, there are young people, young people who simply like what they are doing, young people who think they are doing the right thing, and they can do it well and make it big, even in China.
After six years, many things I believe have not changed. Yes, I have encountered a lot of obstacles and learned that hard work may not be rewarded, and kindness may not be understood and recognized by everyone… But I don’t want to learn any lessons about not doing things this way or that in China. Even if it is harder, I will continue to do what I think is right, so that MY conscience is clear.
Jun Yu wrote on his blog.
He is one of the most idealistic Chinese entrepreneurs I have ever met.
5
geek
The commercialization of pea pods is really not good enough, and because it is not good enough, all of us can think of a reason why it is not good enough. That’s unfair to entrepreneurs, because a successful startup is about doing everything right, and a bad startup is about doing one thing wrong at the right time.
There are a lot of people joke about Pea pod, saying that 2 years ago, it could have been sold at a high price of 1 billion, but now it can only be sold at a low price of 200 million so that investors “exit”. In my opinion, pea pods were not sold 2 years ago because of “disbelief”.
They didn’t believe that pea-pod had no place as an app market under the giants; They didn’t believe pea Pod could only do app distribution marketing, they thought they could do more, and in fact they did more, like “view”, like “open eyes”.
I think entrepreneurship itself is a form of disbelief. Entrepreneurs do not believe that the world is perfect, they try to change the world with their own hands. I see this “disbelief” in Jun Yu, this entrepreneurial spirit, or rather, this geeky spirit.
I once gave an external definition of geek:
By this definition, Jun Yu is one of the most geeky founders I have ever met.
6
blessing
About Jun Yu, he is:
Someone who works for a big company but knows everything there is to know.
A man of great intelligence but humility.
Someone who believes in technology and is willing to use it to increase productivity.
A man who has ideals, who wants to do the right thing.
A person who is not willing to give in easily and is full of “disbelief”.
Such people, if the business is not successful, there are only two reasons, bad luck, or not good enough in commercialization. He is only 31 years old, and he has plenty of time on his hands to build a product that is idealistic, passionate and commercially successful.
As he said on his blog:
Life is short, I still hope to create more influential works, continue to focus on the things I really passionate, to help more people who remain interested in the world to discover a bigger and better world. Maybe from the outside, these things look more… You know, but I feel like if I hadn’t done these things, if I’d made orders of magnitude more money, I’d be “regretting my mediocrity” when I got older. That’s the true definition of failure.
The only difference is that after years of accumulation, I believe I have the ability to make these businesses achieve greater and commercial success.
I strongly believe that, having experienced the startup of Pea Pod, he already knows and has the ability to make a successful commercial product.
And as for luck, idealistic geeks, I believe, are no worse off.
Best wishes to Jun Yu.