Kai-fu Lee: a letter to a graduate who wants to start a business

20 years later, China's greatest enterprises, and the success of the world stage of the enterprise is likely to be created in the next five years. Therefore, many college students are now eager to start a business after graduation. In addition, the launch of the Gem, the success of many startups, there are many successful entrepreneurs are inspiring Chinese students, so they also want to follow Ma, horse, Li's pace, toward http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/17316.html "> Entrepreneurial road." On the one hand, I appreciate college students have entrepreneurial ideals, but on the other hand, I suggest college students: first to participate in entrepreneurship, and then lead the business.

Many college students mistakenly believe that if you have a good idea, you can get the investment, and with persistence, passion, luck, you can be the next MA. So they all thought: After graduation, they will start their own entrepreneurial path. But they are overly optimistic. The real key to entrepreneurial success lies in: teamwork, experience, and executive power. Most startups fail not because of bad ideas, but because of lack of experience, team, and executive power--and ultimately, accumulation is more important than ideas.

After a year at the Innovation Workshop, I contacted and reasearchers hundreds of entrepreneurs and invested in some of them. In the process, I deeply feel that China's future belongs to them, but at the same time I also feel that the best entrepreneurs need deep accumulation to succeed. Technical training in the school is one-sided, and entrepreneurs can not only be professionals, must have a wide range of experience, not only need to understand technology, products, but also to understand the management, operation, market. There is a very talented and creative young entrepreneur, in the initial expansion too fast, finally the company can not load, closed. In addition, the entrepreneurial team is very important. Mr. Jobs said the success of entrepreneurship lies in the ability of the team, especially the entrepreneur, to find 5-10 smart, diligent, invincible, complementary teams. An inexperienced entrepreneur often fails to attract such a team. There is a young entrepreneur who has a good idea but can't attract a team and get bogged down in recruiting. Later a person than he has the experience to quickly find a team, to make products, to seize the opportunity, and finally he only faced the fate of bankruptcy. Finally, in the entrepreneurial period, execution is more important than the idea, and the executive force can only be involved in learning, so the smart graduates can not skyrocketing as soon as they graduate.

Of course, someone will ask: Why are Microsoft's gates and Facebook's Zuckerberg successful when they graduate or even finish college? In fact, they have a team in the start-up, have experience, have executive power. Not only was he a programming genius, he invented the world's fastest sorting algorithm, but also a business genius, creating profitable traf-o-data companies in high school. Moreover, he is not a person to start a business, but with Allen. And Zuckerberg, starting at age 11, has been studying how to program in C + +, and in high school has developed a music player that Microsoft and AOL are willing to buy for millions of dollars, creating too many social-related networking products at college, which is crucial to its future building of Facebook. His entrepreneurial team is four outstanding Harvard students. So the success of Gates and Zuckerberg is an exception and is not replicable. Unless you have a team, executive, and experience like Gates or Zuckerberg, it's best not to start a business as soon as you graduate.

Of course, the vast majority of people can not be compared with gates, then college graduates want to start the students should do? Some people say: first employment, then start a business. This statement is worthy of reference. If you join a "future you want to create" company, learn how it operates, how it works, how its corporate system and culture are built, and how many years it can improve. If the company can provide a good training program, you can learn more. However, I also see many large companies for 3-5 years of excellent staff, enter the time is holding a charge after the start of the plan, but slowly, got a generous treatment and promotion, but also accustomed to nine to five of the stable life; learned the knowledge of the subdivision of the post, but also became a huge machine in the screws Optimize the ability to survive and promote in large companies, but lose the passion and motivation to start a business. So, if you are really sure you want to start a business, but also understand that you need the most appropriate, timely and most appropriate training, perhaps you should find a better training place.

Such a training site is a start-up company, my advice is: first to participate in entrepreneurship, and then leading entrepreneurship. You can consult which companies have a vibrant entrepreneurial environment and corporate culture, experienced and worthy of your role model leader, industry recognized products and direction, quality investors. In the start-up company, the pace is particularly fast, learning has targeted, and everyone needs to participate in all aspects of the company, so learning is particularly fast. In a short year, you may learn something that will take years to learn in a big company. To make sure you learn the initial entrepreneurial atmosphere, try to participate in smaller companies (less than 100 people) and not be a screw. In the innovation workshop, in order to provide such "participation in entrepreneurship" opportunities, we also opened the goal of 150 people's campus recruitment plan, we want to find is to first participate in entrepreneurship, first to do engineers, learning entrepreneurship, and then leading the business.

"After" how long? In a good startup, your growth may surprise you. In a large company, it may be several decades before the CEO can climb. However, in a small company to learn, two or three years later, you may be in the experience, team, the implementation of training enough, can come out to start their own business. For example, MI Jinhua was a graduate student from Zhejiang University in March this year. She was a green but passionate assistant product manager when she entered the "Magic Chart elf" team of creative workshops. But six months later, she learned what she could not learn in school and had the potential to successfully push the product to more than 100,000 users in four countries worldwide. Not only did she learn a lot in product design, but also learned the overseas promotion, user experience, and successfully made several business negotiations. Today, she has become the head of the project. Ye Jie is one of the founding engineers of the team who joined the larger pastry team at the end of last year. In just eight months, under the training of Zhang Lei, the mobile leader from Baidu, and Minthi, the product director of Tencent, he has become the head of the application software for the dim sum operating system, now leading a group that carries the company's core application software. It is believed that in a few years, Jinhua and Zhe 韡 may become the leading entrepreneurs. Our other entrepreneur once lamented: "Good engineers don't have the opportunity to go to big companies, and they really have to worry about how to get a big potential startup." ”

In the best of myself, I suggest that all graduates: "The future is more important than today, the positive is more important than the stability, and learning is more important than money." This is more targeted at students who want to start a business, because myopia and stability are the biggest enemies of entrepreneurship. When you graduate, think more about who you are working with, can you learn to grow? After graduation, participate in a good start-up company, this is the best first step on the road to entrepreneurship.

Source: Kai-fu Lee's Blog

Links: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_475b3d560100lgwt.html