Because although it is very interesting and its future operating conditions are very good, tagged's service group is destined to make it unable to make a lot of money - how much do you expect children and middle-aged people to spend on the Internet?
Just as a benign asset investment, tagged is also a good choice. At least its return is not bad. In addition, if you want to sell it and make a profit, it will be very convenient and easy.
What really made Xiao Qi start to think about were several Internet technology companies that would rapidly develop and expand in the United States in the future.
If you count it in terms of time, the first thing you should buy is the social networking site Yammer.
The biggest feature of yammer is that it tailors a social platform for each enterprise. This social platform includes partitioned projects such as chat, activities, topics, voting, ideas, etc., so that employees of the enterprise can freely participate in it.
comminicate.
However, this kind of communication is relatively closed. Each user must register with a corporate email that has been certified by his or her company. Then people from any company can participate in the internal activities of that company and cannot go to other companies' social platforms, thus ensuring that
The company's inside information will not be leaked.
At first glance, this kind of restriction violates the purpose of the unlimited and barrier-free network, but this relatively closed environment is liked by many companies and their employees, just like LinkedIn, because they can still use it during working hours.
There is a relatively free platform for chatting and consulting.
In fact, this is also the case. Yammer is favored by 85% of the employees of the Fortune 500 companies in the world. Although the scale of users is not huge, not hundreds of millions, but because they are all high-level and high-income user groups, it
On the contrary, it looks very distinctive and has investment value.
So in June 2012, Microsoft took the lead and acquired Yammer for US$1.2 billion in cash.
In Xiao Qi's view, Yammer is also not smart. If they persist for another year or two and expand their service scope to medium-sized enterprises around the world, then Yammer's market value will directly increase several times, and it can reach
More than 5 billion US dollars. - This is not an exaggeration at all. When your tens of millions of users are high-income groups, then your business value will be greatly increased, far more than those websites with hundreds of millions of dormant accounts.
much higher.
Yammer started operating online in September last year, and its current development can only be said to be reluctant. After all, large companies have encountered financial crises, and all employees inside are worried about their own futures, and they have no interest in Yammer's website.
.
Xiao Qi never thought about starting Yammer by himself. Although it was only launched in September 2008, others had this idea several years ago. The company had already been established and had applied for a patent long ago. Others had no idea.
There's no way to compete with them.
But on the other hand, there is a big advantage of not starting one yourself, that is, when it is just started, if you take care of Yammer, you can get a good company and a group of excellent entrepreneurial teams. Then you can just
Just invest money, Xiao Qi doesn't have to worry about anything else.
As for whether to continue to hold or sell after doing so, Xiao Qi's own preference is in his hands.
Because Yammer's future users will include more than 80% of the world's large and medium-sized companies, with strong appeal and influence. Not to mention such companies making money, even if they don't make money, they should still be in their hands.
, exerting various subtle influences on those corporate elites.
The reason why Xiao Qi did not acquire Yammer immediately was actually very simple. That is, the people of Yammer must be made aware of the cruelty of entrepreneurship, and then Xiao Qi rescued them in distress, and only then could Yammer be completely destroyed.
Take control.
Otherwise, they will develop smoothly. Even if Xiao Qi invests a large amount of money, they will not be grateful and will just think it is a very ordinary business investment.
What crisis did yammer encounter?
Of course we hit the financial crisis head-on!
The financial crisis officially broke out in September 2008, and Yammer's long-planned launch could not be changed temporarily, so they faced the financial crisis directly, resulting in very uneven and slow development in the six months since the launch.
It cannot be said that they are a handful, but they are definitely just a handful of kittens, and they have not achieved even one-tenth of the expected achievements.
The results are not good, but the various operating expenses are very huge, such as labor, bandwidth server rental, various publicity and maintenance, etc. They spend money like water and have already exhausted the funds they raised before.
According to the memory of the previous life, Yammer should have struggled until the second half of this year, and then ushered in two rounds of angel investment. Only then was it able to sustain itself, and as the impact of the financial crisis in the United States subsided, it slowly developed and expanded.
stand up.
Of course, Xiao Qi would not let anyone else get the title of savior, so after discussing tagged's investment with Tang Mingxiang, he was going to entrust Citibank to negotiate with Yammer, trying to buy all of Yammer in one fell swoop.
When doing business in the United States... no, I should say doing business around the world, a middleman, or a broker, is very important.
For example, in the previous life of the Zappos shoe-selling website, Amazon had long wanted to acquire it, but the two parties negotiated for two years without success. Finally, Goldman Sachs stepped in to coordinate the deal, and the deal was concluded within a few months.
This shows how important a suitable middleman is.
It can be responsible for coordinating the interests of both parties, finding a suitable balance point among the requirements of both parties, and then allowing both parties to accept it, thereby reaching transaction negotiations.
Especially for a Chinese like Xiao Qi, unless he founded his own company, such as the several Internet companies he and Hoffman were working on, he would have no advantage at all if he were to acquire American companies. It could even be said that
I don't know the way inside at all.
But with a middleman, it's different. Xiao Qi doesn't have to worry about what's going on inside. He just needs to pay and it will be done without any trouble. All the traps and other traps have been removed by the middleman. This is also their professional ethics.
That's why Xiao Qi was able to acquire LinkedIn, acquire IMAX, acquire Skype, acquire Yahoo, acquire Marvel... and so on.
As a very traditional Chinese, Xiao Qi never thinks that money is important. The most important thing is the wealth that can be seen in a down-to-earth manner.
For example, a company that can develop for hundreds of years, a huge land resource, or a bank with strong cohesion capabilities.
Therefore, even though the cost of acquiring these companies was very high, even the intermediary fees paid were very high, Xiao Qi never frowned.
What's more, the young man now has more than 160 billion US dollars in cash flow in his hands, which is enough for Xiao Qi to buy many valuable companies.
The cost of acquiring Yammer is around US$200 million at most, which is not a big deal at all.
Of course, as a reincarnated person, Xiao Qi spends a lot of money to buy stocks of high market value companies, which is obviously not his advantage.
The biggest advantage of young people is that they can find companies that have just been established or have not yet been established, but have great development prospects, and then get the benefits of their development.
Only in this way can you be called a real winner in life, and it is also very fun to cultivate.
Watching a company grow from small to large in your own hands, and finally becoming a famous company in the world, this sense of accomplishment cannot be given by money.
After Yammer, a creative concept that Xiao Qi wanted to implement was the famous Square.
When you talk about Square Company, you may be a little unfamiliar with it, but if you say it is Lakala in the United States, you may be very familiar with it.
The earliest prototype of the mobile phone card swipe released by Lakala that plugs into the headphone jack of a mobile phone is square - the name of its product and company are both named after this.
Square company has directly become a star company with a valuation of more than 5 billion US dollars by virtue of Square, a mobile card reader product.
Some financial analysis companies even predict that if it goes public, it will quickly reach a market value of more than 10 billion US dollars.
The initial company of Square was established in 2008, but at this time they were not called Square. The company would not officially change its name to Square until the Square product was formed.
As for what they were called before, Xiao Qi didn't know, and there was no need to know.
Xiao Qi only needs to know that in February 2009, Square had not yet been developed. They would not officially develop and finalize it until 2011, and Square would only begin to be sold in the Apple store at that time. This was enough.
Xiao Qi has no intention of acquiring this company.
Since Square has not yet been developed, Xiao Qi will present the mature Square concept himself and ask Hoffman to find a group of suitable experts in Silicon Valley to develop this product intensively and quickly. Then Square will become Xiao Qi's asset.
.
In the market of creativity, whoever takes the lead will gain the upper hand.
What's more, the original Square company didn't have a preliminary model until the second half of this year after it poached people from Apple.
Xiao Qi invented it a few months in advance, so it can’t be considered stealing, right? (To be continued, please search Piao Tian Literature, the novel is better and updated faster!
ps: Some brothers said that Qi Shao and his wives have acquired too many companies, but look at these big companies, Apple, Google, Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent. Which one is not acquiring companies every year?
Didn't Rebus also say that he is planning to invest in 100 companies? Are they just stupid? This is a big plan for the future!