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Dictating by Xie Yang Editing by Zhang Ying
Steam Memory was founded in 2019, and its product “Authing Identity Cloud” focuses on helping enterprises solve the user identity problem of applications. Customers include petrochina, State Grid, Toyota, Ernst & Young, JcDECaux and other large global enterprises. The company’s three founders, Xie Yang, Xu Ziqiang and Li Yuhang, who were born in 1996, believe that the evolution of software is changing, and that it seeks real liberation rather than additional constraints. Therefore, from the first day of the team’s entrepreneurship, it no longer stays in the stage of reengineering software functions, but becomes a standardized service behind all software, so as to liberate the software itself, among which the liberation of software identity functions through Authing is just the beginning. The revolution in software’s “spatial architecture” was 15 years away; with steam memory, it could be five.
My first bucket of gold came from the entrepreneurship competition in college. In 2016, Poimoe, a multi-person collaborative painting platform I developed, won the prize of Tencent’s competition and was invested by Innoangel and Pre-Angel on the spot. This is my first business.
I was an ACG enthusiast when I was a teenager, and of course the first thing I wanted To do was design a to-C (consumer-oriented) product. Poimoe was inspired by my friends in the ACG community for many years. I often saw them sharing their paintings together. I judged that the market needed a collaborative tool and community for them to gather together.
However, when I really looked for entrepreneurial opportunities, I found that except for apps such as wechat, Alipay and Taobao, To C has fewer and fewer market opportunities, and To C products may lose their popularity after one or two years. In my opinion, I want To find a direction that has more value and a longer history, and then start To observe To B (enterprise-oriented), especially the huge market opportunity brought by the Internet and SaaS of enterprise software.
For our first venture, we launched a container cloud and Low Code platform called Gospel. The reason for this project is that in my previous To C engineering experience, I found that a lot of time was wasted in the development unrelated To the core business, and such waste is common in engineering development. I wanted to help developers free up their productivity by eliminating repetitive development, repetitive “wheel building”, and some of the o&M drudging. We wanted to be the “Gospel of being a developer”. However, due to the immaturity of product, technology and market cognition (product concept is too early than the general cognition in the market, and the cost of market education is very high), the project dies prematurely. At that time, I happened to know a mentor, Dr. Jie Bao, CEO of Wenyin Internet, which focuses on the development of artificial intelligence knowledge graph. He invited me to join an information platform in his product matrix, “Good Things Portal”.
It was very enlightening to have many conversations with Mr Bao, through whom I got to know his mentor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Turing Prize winner and father of the World Wide Web. Sir Tim went on to start his own business, setting up a Business in Europe that specialises in integrating Internet user data into multiple “containers”, giving users precise control and autonomy over where it belongs. Later, I also had a lot of in-depth communication with the developers of this company about the separation of identity and data of Internet users and the ownership of data. I also spread Sir Tim’s ideas and concepts in several domestic conferences, which had a subtle influence on my next venture.
Back to my “part-time” experience. On the Good Stuff Portal team, I was CTO, building architecture and writing code. Soon I wanted a bigger stage, so I joined Bytedance. There I led the design and development of the Serverless platform inside ByteDance. The platform is byteDance’s innovative business, and some of its product lines have migrated to the internal cloud platform. Working at Bytedance gave me an in-depth understanding of the enterprise’s cloud development tool chain.
During this period, I continued To study To B products at home and abroad. I mainly focused on looking for To B enterprise software that has both network effect, infrastructure capability and module reuse without mass customization development and can release productivity for developers.
I found that all organizations build software, all software needs identity, and identity has the opportunity to become a common platform and common standard. Repetitive identity wastes developer productivity and impedes enterprise operations and management.
This finally locked the direction of my startup product: Authing Identity Cloud, which focuses on helping enterprises solve the identity security authentication problems of internal employees and external customers, and is committed to becoming the identity infrastructure of cloud computing. By the time I left ByteDance, I had already been paid by a Chinese client who had seen a Demo version of Authing we had posted online. Even though the product was very imperfect at the time, the customer still had full confidence in Authing and said to me, “It doesn’t matter, you continue to develop, I will wait for you.”
In this way, we began the road To B entrepreneurship.
The realization of “service” is a growth
My generation of young entrepreneurs are more interested in B2B because they are interested in technology. For example, I started programming at the age of 13. The original intention of programming was to satisfy the desire for creativity, and then it became a business.
Of course, the market is also a consideration: first, see what China’s enterprise service ecosystem can develop into, determine the big trends are ok, then see what China’s ecosystem is missing most, and finally, see if there are companies coming out in these areas around the world.
The most startup friendly direction I can find in the cloud or basic software space and in line with the “productivity vision” is the “identity cloud”, and the overseas benchmark companies are mainly Okta. And we wanted to be a global business, so we didn’t use Chinese names when we chose our names; The identity issue also resonates with Sir Tim’s long-term ambition, which has the potential to create network effects, a business that is both grounded and stargazing.
Thanks to knowledge-based content marketing aimed at Internet developers, many corporate tech heads are aware of our presence. Although Authing has only released product introductions on a dozen channels, more and more customers are realizing that using a developer-friendly “identity cloud” is a better and more secure solution than building their own. At present, many customers in The Chinese market prefer cloud-native and cloud-neutral products, so they choose Authing.
Authing products, of course, another characteristic is “out of the box”, developers can use five lines of code generation login form, a cup of coffee time rapid adaptation, and because we are growing up on the Internet generation, for aesthetic, is very tall to the requirement of the user experience and the developer experience, so through the product itself to retain a lot of customers.
However, the most important conceptual shift we’ve made since we started our business has been our understanding of customer service.
No matter big or small customers, as long as they are Authing product users, we will care about everything about them. We are already aware that only when the customer’s enterprise get tangible benefits or performance improved significantly, will be more willing To pay for products To B, if customers To purchasing our products because of the introduction of better products for the company a profit, cost savings, or a promotion and pay increase, so they will be willing To invest.
All Authing team members have a “user-centric” performance indicator. This is not only a requirement for designing products, but also for customer service and collaboration within the team. Even as a developer, there is a need for customer response time. You can imagine how different you feel when you send a message to a vendor and they respond within a minute, 10 minutes, or 3 hours. We always adhere to the psychological grasp of customers’ needs, think of the unexpected things in advance and prepare solutions.
Why do we value service so much?
In the initial exploration, we built up a lot of features, and then ushered in a big customer. I thought it would save customers time, and then they told me, “I wanted a motorcycle, and you gave me a tank.” It turns out that customers only want to solve their own core needs, which leads us to find that customer service needs to solve the core problems of customers.
What’s more, in our early Service to key customers, we found that they generally wanted “Consulting as a Service” rather than “Software as a Sevice”. They needed a lot of Consulting work and a lot of human input from us to teach them how to use our products. To match their needs, the current position at Authing is called solution Architect. Authing now has a 50-50 customer base between large and medium sized enterprises. Although SaaS services for small and medium sized customers are growing rapidly, revenue is still dominated by services for large customers, such as private cloud or private cloud deployment. In other words, large clients are larger and more complex, so they need more of our peer-to-peer services.
I think the establishment of the concept of “customer success” marks the growth of our generation of entrepreneurs in business. In recent years, I have been in touch with some big sales, and found that the salesmen who can sell one billion a year can change the life of customers. Apart from business, the best relationship between customers and suppliers is consultant relationship.
Learn from working experience
The market for cloud services in China is still a fraction of the size in the United States. Entrepreneurs born in the 1960s and 1970s May not fully feel the benefits of SaaS for their companies, which of course include factors such as China’s economic development stage and human costs. With the rise of human cost, the change of managers and the change of thinking, The digital transformation of Chinese enterprises will be more and more thorough.
Productivity is the main artery of our company To B. Just as the registered name of our company is “Steam Memory”, which refers To the social change brought by steam engine, we also hope To promote the improvement of social productivity together.
My three co-founders, including an early engineer, met each other online. I wrote online blogs to record my life and think about life at an early age. I met Xu Ziqiang in Zhihu when I was in high school, and Li Yuhang searched my blog when I was a freshman. The three of us started our own business when we were at school. With years of experience in key accounts, commercial vision and enterprise management ability, Xu Ziqiang has signed many fortune 500 clients for Authing. Li was responsible for the design and growth strategies of products with hundreds of millions of users at IQiyi and Cheetah.
The “part-time” experience taught me the style of a mature entrepreneur. What Bytedance has taught me is, first, that enterprises need to have a perfect OKR system, and it is very important to synchronize goals from top to bottom and work together. Second, as Zhang Yiming likes to say, “Great efforts make miracles.”
My understanding of this sentence is: do anything to be persistent and continuous output. For example, why is Toutiao’s commercial record so good? Because it will deploy at least one salesman in every district, county, town and street in the country, these sales together can contribute several hundred million income every day, which shows that Today Toutiao will try its best to lay its own market, of course, the premise must be that the previous model has been verified. In addition, they dare to invest heavily in the promotion of APP. As long as the ROI is greater than or equal to one, they will continue to do it and gradually form scale effect.
Under the influence of this style, steam memory will be deeply cultivated To do anything. To B is a long-term business, and in many cases, it will not have a good effect in a short time. At this time, I will urge the team To be patient.
We also use backward thinking to decide what to do now, which gives us a long-term investor mindset, and the whole team follows a long-termism culture, and people who don’t fit into that culture are phased out.
Zhang yiming’s view of costs and benefits also had some influence on me. Many managers early on May think that research and development, manpower, etc., are costs, but he thinks these are benefits. He has a formula of his own that, once a certain point is reached, the contribution of talent far exceeds the cost.
I think that’s a good shift in thinking, and so our company, too, looks at talent, capital as leverage, not as a cost. We are willing to invest in talents with innovative ability. We are intentionally duplicating our early entrepreneurship, and we hope that there will be a small team of 2-3 people in the company who think deeply about a product or technology direction and then go to the ground to promote the success of commercialization.
What kind of person is appropriate? At present, my conclusion is that the first is to be diligent, and the second is to have autonomy. In the interview, I do not look at whether the other person is smart, I think the real talent is a person of great wisdom, just like Forrest Gump, do not accumulate a step to a thousand miles, do not accumulate a small flow into a river or sea, diligent people are no distractions, will not care about gains and losses, and have their own principles and beliefs. It may not show up on a regular basis, but when it comes to the crunch, such people don’t go with the flow.
To B is a slow business, and the team needs this kind of person especially. In addition, I think diligence can be seen, first look at a person’s eyes, second look at each other’s grasp of the basic knowledge of the firm degree, answer the question is not deep, not deep basic is not diligent performance. I find it hard to believe that a person who can’t even master his own food can do things 120 out of 100. If you want to add a quality requirement, I think it’s important to test whether the person is honest or not, mainly by asking questions about moral boundaries, and of course listening to what they say and what they do.
In terms of talent strategy, I think Jack Ma is the best entrepreneur. He planned his retirement more than a decade ago to ensure the company’s overall upward trajectory and executive succession, and he did it without affecting the company at all. So Steam Memory’s talent-management strategy is that the company can function no matter who leaves. R&d and commercialization should not be affected at all. We want to build a self-adaptive, self-operating, self-recycling organization.
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