Glacier on one side, volcano on the other. You in the capital of the winter prosperous fall, and I in the market tide under the torrent forever. Not long ago, articles titled “The startup company that won the A round last year is now going bankrupt” flooded wechat moments. On the other hand, mobike’s round after round of financing recently made people sigh: “Is it still the winter of capital?”

The news of getting funding is still there, but there are far fewer people who say, “I’m going to start a business” with a desire to change the world. At this time also resolutely choose to devote to entrepreneurship, is really determined to entrepreneurship. You know I’m talking about Mr. Feng?

Not everyone is cut out for starting a business right now

I interviewed several former entrepreneurs recently. They were all young, mostly born in the 1990s. They’ve been CEO, CTO, then come back and look for a new job. In its heyday of 15 years, when almost all media and even the state were advocating entrepreneurship, a large number of recent graduates were swept up in the wave.

There is a boy who came back to Start his own business after finishing his master’s degree in Oxford. He wants to find a basic programming job again. He thinks he is still young and does not want to lose his skills. I am interested in data visualization, so I want to start from the front end. I am willing to work for half of my salary and re-evaluate at the end of the probation period. He’s talented, smart, has solid fundamentals and can get back to doing things on the ground. We are willing to give this opportunity.

When I meet someone with a big contrast, I always ask him how he feels at the moment. Experiences sharpen your mind and give you a more complete view of things. The gap between people is more marked when they experience failure. I’ve been through phases of failure where I still don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know what I want. I do not agree with the saying “entrepreneurship makes people grow”, because entrepreneurship itself has a lot of luck, and different people face different challenges when starting a business. If Wang Sicong succeeds in starting a business, I will not think he is particularly great. I prefer to believe that “setbacks make people grow”. Starting a business is fascinating because there are so many setbacks to go through, but can you really solve them all?

Making others’ way more beautiful is also a choice

There is another young man born in the 1990s in the circle. He worked as an intern in Ali in college and became a full-time employee after graduation. He grew up in Ali all the way. It seems to be a normal routine. There is no doubt that Ali, including many first-line Internet companies, is full of such people, but few people can grow into influential people in the industry in two to three years. Born in the 1990s, it’s all about talent, hard work and choice.

What would this guy look like now if he graduated and joined a fast-growing company instead of becoming a CEO?

Choice is an interesting thing. If you knew that every choice you made would change the course of your life for the rest of your life, would you make it so easily? Are we rational or try to be rational or even capable of making rational decisions? These two problems are paradoxical, because we need to choose, try, and calibrate before we can make the right choice. In the end, it will be easier to make rational and correct choices.

Most of the time, we do things that we don’t stick to because we don’t know enough about ourselves and our circumstances, and most of the time because we don’t know enough about ourselves.

How do ordinary people walk out of the “extraordinary” life track

Most of us are ordinary people with similar IQ, perseverance and approach to things. It may be that the methods used and the guidance received are different. In my opinion, if you want to achieve anything in any industry, you must go through the following four stages, including entrepreneurship itself.

A novice

“All things are difficult at the beginning.” If you want to do something well, it will be more complicated than you think. It takes a lot of practice and learning to be able to cope. Having a mentor who is very experienced in the industry is very important at this stage. There’s nothing wrong with listening to people who’ve been there.

For a master

Did anyone give up at the first stage? People who choose to do something else because it is too hard, too tired, or too difficult. Entrepreneurship is typical, many people do not have any accumulation of their first business, everything depends on feeling the stones across the river. And do the most bitter, the most difficult, the most tired thing, give up the people are especially many.

If you step over a novice and become an expert in your field, you have learned how to deal with and solve most problems and rules. Even if you have never encountered a problem, you can find a way with experience.

If there are no new challenges, it’s easy to get into your comfort zone.

experts

Crossing from one stage to another will be a hurdle. For example, some people stop moving up after they become experienced masters. At most, if you do the same thing in a better environment and a higher salary, you will put yourself into a hotbed, and it will be very easy to be eliminated by the industry. It’s easy to get into your comfort zone once you’ve become an expert, but moving up is a bottleneck. At this time, we need to combine our own characteristics and advantages to find our own direction.

The difference between expert and expert: Lead the team, cultivate new people, start to build their own influence and become the leader of the team, find the most difficult and challenging things to do, and rush to the front. Summarize their knowledge in the field, and the industry leading level of comparison and close to the overall optimization of their own way of doing things, skills, improve efficiency……

The master

Experts are people who excel in their field and eventually become executives and key people in the organization. My idea of a master is someone who contributes to the industry and drives it forward.

In a few words to describe: all aspects of the pursuit of perfection with works to impress people, influence people process transformation, upgrade (for the industry to bring new methodology, and tools) industry influence of the above several stages, each person can experience which stage, respectively in each stage how long? Is a difficult question to decide, and not necessarily in order to experience all. It is not difficult for most people to achieve the above three steps, as long as serious, focused, persistent, open-minded it will come.

It’s easy to say, but not many people can do it. Why is that?

Start your own business or join a startup

The difficulties encountered on the way to start a business are unprecedented. If you fail to make it to the end, you have to bear the loss of time and economy, including opportunity cost. If you really have your own entrepreneurial dream to realize, but before you are ready, you can enter a startup company and try within a certain margin of safety.

If product managers are pre-ceos, getting a job at a startup is like getting paid to practice entrepreneurship.

When do you join a startup

I am one of the ordinary people. In 2008, I joined an independent B2C e-commerce website owned by “Good News” and started almost at the same time as “Vancl”. However, when “Vancl” was in its heyday, we closed down due to the group’s no longer investment, and later led the Team in China to take charge of Microsoft’s global online mall. It was also there that my technical and management skills were greatly improved, and I wrote about it at that time. NET technical articles have formed a certain influence in the circle. I had never thought of joining a startup before.

Later, in 2014 to 2015, I did some contact with “Entrepreneurship” and participated in some entrepreneurship week and some offline activities. I see so much that shines in these teams: passion, energy and innovation. These are exactly what many big foreign companies lack. The fast pace of startup growth gives everyone the opportunity to grow quickly.

At that point in 2008, most startups were innovative with a traditional corporate flavor. Today, openness, transparency and freedom are embedded in some corporate cultures from the start.

Keep an open mind and try out whatever is available to you without prejudice, even if it’s something you didn’t think was possible for you.

What kind of startup do you join?

I’ve been at three startups so far, and I’ve tried to start my own. The first one was invited by a friend to be the technical director of an intelligent home furnishing start-up company in Hangzhou. Because of different cultures, I left three weeks later. The second was a former “star” startup who worked as a development manager in the architecture department until the company went out of business. The third is the company I work for now.

I’m still cautious about joining a startup, but if you do go to a startup, do a lot of research.

Look at risk

Angel round startups are still easy to die, and the early stage of entrepreneurship is the most risky and difficult type of company. A – B between wheel in an adjustment period, by the high speed development of the business will slowly turned to process, standardization, and C after the wheel company basically overall culture, each big boss, have been identified, went after the possibility of A move brick is very big still, but rise space is better than the slow development of foreign companies, traditional companies better.

Look at the background

This background is very microsecond, too many background between the direction of the high level easily confused. If your background comes from a traditional company, look specifically at the company culture. If the background is too strong, we need to see whether the company’s team can maintain the spirit of hard work. If not, see if the CEO and startup team are really competent and diligent.

The culture

A big part of the appeal of startups is that they mostly have a fair, transparent system that at least doesn’t bury the incompetent and the truly striving. If that’s not guaranteed, it’s basically hard to retain people.

Go to the front lines, where there are the most difficulties

Before joining the current company, I also offered to be the technical director of the second-level division of a domestic tourism OTA quasi-listed company. The team started as an incubator program of the Innovation Center. As the business grew, the development, testing, and front and back end staff approached 30. It has obvious advantages in terms of salary, stability, probability of success with expected returns, and even the resources available. Then why did I choose my present company?

The most practical place

It’s fair to say that startups are severely short of talent, and even if you’re not mature in some way, if you have an idea, it’s possible to get the opportunity to practice it. I saw girls who graduated only two years ago. They are designers, but they are responsible for user research, planning, project promotion and launching, collection and summary of online feedback and so on. I saw my brand colleagues in charge of the mall’s revenue, and I saw my classmates who were interested in data marketing studying growth and doing experiments. You want to surprise people? Then go to customer service rotation, happy users in your happy time, to the user casually send some coupons or free products.

However, I am practicing how to gradually upgrade the technical architecture and technical team with insufficient resources and rapid business development. The reason why we don’t consider quasi-public companies is because their technical structure and organizational structure, culture and so on are already established. Rather than trying to build on an established, stable architecture, I’m more interested in finding connections in the mess and reconstructing a platform.

The best test of your problem-solving skills

There is no shortage of people to find problems in startups, product problems, team problems, market problems, even business model problems and CEO problems. Therefore, we put “ways always more than problems” as the enterprise slogan. If you stand in the perspective of a company is to survive to think about it, you will find there are now problems such as products, operating, and problems in the development of (such as the technical framework of robustness and scalability issues) for the team or even a long-term problem (we how to build the core competitiveness, let opponents can never catch up with us?)

So how do we solve it? No one can give you the answer, we have to walk to find out. That’s why the experience becomes exponentially more valuable.

Where you need to keep switching gears

It doesn’t work the way we used it elsewhere, and it probably doesn’t work the way we used it here a few months ago. For example, what is the first problem that can be solved quickly and that will bring the biggest payoff? Recently I saw a very interesting concept of “double loop learning”.



Double loop learning

When a method fails to solve the problem or the solution is not so good, we need to reflect on the root of the problem and find a more appropriate and effective way.

Can’t stop learning

I’m afraid of greenhouses, yes. Everyone has their own margin of safety, and when you reach your margin of safety, it’s easy to move into your comfort zone. And this time of rapid development, you can be obsolete in a year. The things that force us to grow the most are the problems and challenges we encounter.

Being happy is more important than being comfortable

It’s a very young, free, open team. With as few rules and procedures as possible, you can communicate openly with anyone in the company with suggestions and questions, including the CEO.

Who are we? What did you do? And what are you going to do in the future?

Business expert, provide one-stop shop products for brick-and-mortar merchants. Through a single account, it manages tedious cashier bookkeeping, customer relationship and commodity profit, and integrates various innovative e-commerce tools to help merchants reduce operating costs, improve customer shopping experience and increase sales revenue.

We try to keep the software simple and easy to use. Integration at the same time some of the latest Internet tools, such as sweep WeChat code micro payment, mobile phone shop, etc.), and can satisfy all retail stores and most of the service class store daily management, such as clothing stores, boutiques, cosmetics shops, shoe shops, flower shop, cake shop, stationery shops, pet shop, restaurant, cafe, beauty center, fitness club, and so on.

In the future, we will also be involved in supply chain management of brick-and-mortar stores, connecting the B and C ends, as well as open platforms for third parties and more developers to share revenue.

Build engineer culture

Nowadays, Internet companies even talk about geek spirit and engineer culture as long as they are related to technology. Although capital markets have cooled, the fickle mood in the technology environment seems to remain. Just look at all the tech conferences that are going on all over the place. In addition to some of the public account to promote, many people read a few articles about Taobao, JINGdong and other large website evolution plan, feel that they should also be an architect, to deal with those high concurrency problems. Or to those emerging technology has inexplicable fanaticism, according to the example of the net official wrote a small Demo said he was familiar with.

The standards that we have pursued internally are:

  • Like to study technology, but do not blindly worship new technology, good at using the most appropriate technology to solve problems
  • Excelsior, no matter the size of the problem, even a simple data import and export can also be used in a very elegant solution
  • Write nice code before you dive into some fancy architecture
  • In addition to technology, be familiar with the business first
  • Take the initiative to analyze and solve problems, and be good at summarizing and sharing habits

We are a SaaS company and technology will always be one of our core competencies. We will strive to build a team that is open, transparent, fair, free and capable of doing something for the technology community.

I wanted to do something for my fellow entrepreneurs

I believe that there are many entrepreneurial partners like us, facing the problem of resource shortage and rapid business development. But at the same time the stability of the system and the infrastructure construction of the platform is urgent. Is there any chance we could do something together? Such as automatic deployment, unified day platform, unified task debugging, monitoring center and so on? We’ve already tried some of these, but it still takes time to make them more robust. If your team also needs these things, we can spend some time to communicate (you can leave your information and contact information in the background of the official account).

Building a technical team

Our back end is implemented in ASP.NET and we are using Web API to separate the back end and SOA. There are also some basic services implemented with Node, mobile terminal is using ReactNative for reconstruction, and we are also actively trying Vue at the front end.

Here is a small advertisement ~ business experts are conducting B round of financing, we need more like-minded partners to join us. NET backend engineer, business architect, basic platform architect, DevOps, front-end architect /Leader, iOS and Android engineer, interested or recommended friends background contact. The salary is Open, the team is young, and the office is located in SOHO on the Bund.

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