Segmentfault founder Gao Yang: After dropping out with 500 yuan North Drift, 4 years to build the domestic largest developer question and answer community

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I black Horse Note: I once and Gao Yang chatted several days, in his body I saw the CEO of the special obvious success characteristics "dare to the world first". When others hesitate to dare to take the first shot, in the Internet era will often achieve the most critical "advantage of the opportunity."

July 19, "Tencent Product Home Salon: A special session of entrepreneurs" in Beijing, this article is Segmentfault CEO Gaoyang share content.

Gaoyang was born in 1990 Youth Festival, is a refusal to "cram" of the senior three and abandon higher education "lunatic" of the "." With the vision of the Internet, this young man with a 500 yuan North drift, with 4 years to become the country's largest developer question Community Segmentfault co-founder and CEO, organized China's largest hacker marathon.

The motivation of a person to move forward is a curiosity in nature, not a utilitarian factor in the real world. With this curiosity, the lucky, from the beginning of the internet has been on the top of the waves, to catch up with social games and the rise of the technology media two wave, to become China's largest organizer of the hacker Marathon, the creation of China's largest developer question community website. What is the difference between the way he walks and the world he perceives?

The following is the full text of Gaoyang's speech:

More and more people began to pay attention to the first, I want to think of myself as a "product" analysis. Standing on this stage, and speaking with four of the most wonderful people of my age, this experience is of great significance to me. What we have in common is that we've all gone a little way and walked up from scratch.

One, the body still less than 1000 yuan, buy tickets to enter Beijing alone

To tell the truth, the abandonment of higher education is not because the brain is not enough, on the contrary, the year, I began to contact the Internet. From junior high school often turned my brother bought a collection of computers, the computer is interested in abnormal. Read a lot of Hacker magazine, I am extremely worship hackers omnipotent, when my heart slowly buried a seed, I want to go through the Internet, to explore the new world outside.

Senior three that period of confusion, I turned the wall to go outside the wall to the Internet, through QQ and strangers chat, I like this and the outside world connection feeling. In my senior year, I saw the story of Wang in the "Computer newspaper" and immediately registered a school account, added a lot of college students, and even added a lot of staff. At that time, the school was going to push the high school market, asked me if I would like to help, I naturally wish to, posters, pull registration, sell T-shirt what live all dry, line online very active, many people even think I am a full-time staff. All of my original contacts started in the net. So now everyone knows about the internet company, there is definitely a good friend of mine working there. This kind of networking has a profound effect on my help.

College entrance Examination, I am probably the first person in SNS history to take the mobile phone in the school directly live college entrance examination live. So, my first college entrance examination failed.

No school can read me, in order to be able to face a computer every day, I went to a logistics company to work. This year's time, I in SNS to contact different people, also has been writing independent blog. I was one of the earliest people in contact with SNS, QQ space, school, home, Rice, and foreign Twitter, Facebook, every day to open the computer is a global mass of information.

In the logistics company after a year or so, I brainwave, want to go to university to see what the university is like. So I attended adult, test a school, where stayed for three months or so, found that college students are really not in the study.

Bitter force like me, in the school online posted a state, said I want to find a job.

Luckily, Guo Qirui, a well-known independent blogger, gave me the opportunity to start a social gaming business in Beijing and feel like I was active online, and he just lacked an operator. I was very excited to have the opportunity to really touch the Internet. That is the 2009 winter holiday, I have less than 1000 yuan, immediately buy a ticket to enter Beijing, as the 7th person to join his company.

Less than one months in Beijing, I was sure I would quit school and I would stay in Beijing.

Since then, I have been completely insulated from higher education in China.

Second, constantly try to choose their own position

Frankly speaking, when I first joined a friend's company, I didn't know what to do with my business, and there was only one concept of social games. So I study hard every day to learn about social games and all kinds of interesting things on the internet. Guo Qirui trusts me and often gives me a lot of guidance. Luckily, the start-up company just caught up with the social-game outbreak, with 7 people from the time I went to the 60 people who left, from tens of thousands of to the year, to the annual flow of 100 million yuan, to tens of millions of users worldwide.

That was the first time I felt the power of internet start-ups.

In the next 4 years, I went through four companies, two of which were startups. By June 2012, I think I should graduate from the "Entrepreneurial University", and the business has been brewing. I know myself, I am not an expert in a field, but an integrated talent, so I care about the team, must find a field of experts to do things. Just at that time I met my two partners.

I think that whatever you do, it comes down to people. Now I will often contact some freshman sophomore, from them, I only see two words, confused. This may be why so many students play games, because they have nothing to do, they want to find their own sense of existence. When you do not know what to do, if you want to change, you can look at me, my four years is constantly trying to choose their own position.

Programmers are the first productivity of the Internet, and if the creativity and dynamism of this group of people is released, the internet industry will develop well, and many of the most bull companies in Silicon Valley are entrepreneurs of the technical background. If programmers are bitter, 1-30-Year-old does not write code, who will make more valuable things? Internet domain programmers are an integral part of this community, and Segmentfault is valuable as long as it serves this group of people and brings them together. To be clear about this, in May, my founders and I all left, and in June everyone went to Hangzhou to start full-time as a community.

Third, inadvertently became the first person in China hackathon

A few of our team are the first to start a business, very excited at the beginning, but the first month encountered problems. Everyone has a job to do with their own, need to undergo a psychological change. The community has had an initial period of concern, and growth is not as fast as imagined. That time I feel nothing to do, the state is very bad. Other people can write code, and I can only do some basic operational work, it is difficult to see results. I read a lot of programming-related books after work: "Hacker and Painter", "rework", "Unix Programming Art", "Tide" and so on, also realized that the technical community can not grow so fast, need to pay time and patience to operate, so began to do micro-blog operation and offline Salon.

The offline salon has access to real users and understands their needs, but still hasn't found a way to really keep the company on track. In November 2012, we had a brainstorming session for lunch and said we had to do a special offline activity. Just in time to close the legendary end of the world, so the decision to do a hackathon (hacker marathon), the theme is the world before the end of the challenge. The next day I went to Beijing, because of the accumulation of social games, I in two weeks to the domestic most of the open platform to talk about the cooperation.

Event enrollment unexpectedly hot, initially estimated 120 places soon full, so the scale expanded to 150 people. Besides Hangzhou local programmers, there are also friends from Qingdao, Zhengzhou and Shanghai. On the day of the event, plus the heads of the major open platforms, and investors, the number of participants reached 200.

Everyone knows that there are programming activities like the hacking marathon, but nobody in the country really pushes it. Our small team of 3 people, is because like to do this thing, in just one months, accidentally made it into the country first. Successfully organized such a successful hacker marathon, suddenly launched his name, won the domestic some large open platform for the Segmentfault community recognition, we have confidence.

The success of the first hacking marathon has opened our mind and laid the foundation of trust in business cooperation. July 2013, we joined in the Infoq, in Beijing, Wuhan, Chengdu, Taipei, Singapore, to help Baidu hosted the largest programming marathon in Asia. Never made money, to a sudden hundreds of thousands of of the income, is really on the road.

The insistence is the place that we are really cool

The biggest difficulty in starting a business is two, the first is never venture to take the step of starting a business, how to survive the confusion period. The second is how to stick to your goals when you're running out of money but haven't found a business model.

Unlike the salon, the hacker marathon takes two days to get people involved. People who might not have known each other, together to develop a new thing, it is easy to inspire some new inspiration. A lot of people say we hackathon do special cows, but to be honest, hackathon is really our sideline, and our real kick is in our online community. Without the strong appeal of the online community, our Hackothon may not be able to do it.

I am very optimistic about UGC ability particularly strong vertical community, such as watercress, nutshell, know. The first is bullish on UGC, 20% of China's users are contributing content, other people look at it, but 20% of the user's contribution to the content is mostly valuable. Secondly, I am optimistic about the developer of this crowd, we have just started part-time to do segment fault this developer community, did four or five months, natural growth to 2000 users, the 2000 users were first from Baidu and Ali intranet pushed up.

Segmentfault to provide them with a problem-solving platform, such as programmers write code encountered problems, they can not solve, if the segmentfault to ask, we will give him a quick solution. So we were first in the form of questions and answers, followed by a senior user to share their experience. This is also my optimistic about the group of programmers, they are more willing to share, more open source spirit.

Do vertical community is actually a very hard thing, the beginning with us to do similar products may have 8 to 12, the longest one to do eight months, because it is like Tencent QQ, the beginning is not to make money. Some teams have a better background than we do, but I think we have a better place than we are. We persisted for two years before we could see another different scenery.

Holding the youngest and most valuable developer is the future of the Internet

Learn programming people know, Segment fault in the programming is "paragraph error" meaning, C language if with code write wrong will this error. The reason why this domain name is chosen is because, first of all, we locate the crowd more accurate, is China's youngest developer geeks; Secondly, we are also paying tribute to a very hot foreign site, the stock overflow, which registered a user may only 3 million, but it has more than 90 million visits, is the most popular technology FAQ website in the global IT industry.

Some communities say they have 10 million of developers or users, some say millions, but we are positioning more segments and concentrations of people, we want to hold young valuable developers, is to grasp the future of the Internet. So you can see that we are now the largest young developer in China in the geek community.

This young represents two meaning, one is our user is very young. From June 2012 onwards, to the two anniversary of June 2014, we have accumulated more than 200,000 users. We have a statistical and division of the population, found that the most concentrated people are 1994-1995 years or so, is now reading a freshman sophomore. Followed by the 1985 to 1988 of the population, the smallest even the first grade five to learn to write code.

What are the characteristics of these two people? 1985-1988-born people, most of them have some work experience, have a certain income base, have experience and dream. They are not code laborers, and we want to call them code artists. They want to make some new stuff out of their code, not from a training school.

It is for this group of people, we have to do the Chinese largest hacker marathon organizers. As anyone who has done the internet knows, many internet companies, including Facebook, make a hack day every month, and several groups of people are free to team up and create something new within 24 hours.

This is another meaning of youth, we do things very young. Hacker Marathon, from 2012 to now, we have done more than 30. The first time I was in the hacking Marathon was 2011, and I didn't venture out, and I felt it with a couple of partners. It was the first time a foreign company had an event in China, and the CEO said that Chinese developers surprised him. He found that we had two hundred or three hundred people together to develop thirty or forty pieces, which was actually interesting. Since 2011, many mobile internet things in China are actually better than foreign ones in some aspects, such as micro-letters, face sprouting and so on. Canada has a similar face-sprouting application, but it hasn't been fired.

Six, finally for the third to say a fair word

Compared to the 70, the new entrepreneurial advantage is reflected in a better understanding of their own, is not with large companies to compete with users, sponsored resources, on the contrary, let other people more recognize us, automatically close and accept our culture. Do not take into account the eyes of others, do not need to get the world's understanding, just as writing code when the annotation is a waste of life. Clear goals and ideals, I will always be on the road.

People say luck is important, but I think good luck is attracted by good mentality. My character has brought me many good opportunities and gathered a lot of interesting people. I am a big connection point, put countless points together, we do some valuable things together. I like to help others, I hope one day to do Angel investment, to the early start of the People guide and help, this is my little dream.

The following is "Tencent product Home" and Gaoyang's Q&a:

How to find a partner when you start a business?

Gao Yang: I had a very early idea of what I was doing, so I kept observing others. A couple of my partners have been on social networking for about 2008 years, and then worked together to make a project and become friends. My technical partner is my colleague, I often go to his home to rub rice, chat more to find that everyone has the same idea, we go together.

Recruit new words I think or two points, one is to see the founding team itself, the second is to see what you do. Our team is young, and the things we do are new and easy to attract similar people.

What is more important when choosing a venture capital institution?

Gao Yang: I am looking for investors and partners is a concept, first look at the value is not the same, if not together, there is no need to talk about.

2nd, respect and tolerance. We are a few Li Feng cast, he had a special analysis of our group of people, although still not very understandable, but his way of doing things show respect and tolerance.

What do you give investors?

Gao Yang: A few years ago, it was generally assumed that investors were condescending. But our generation believes that entrepreneurs and investors are equal dialogues and respect each other, so we will respect them. and may be because of a relatively small number of new ventures, many people rushing to vote, investors sometimes instead some weak.

How to find the motivation to do it?

Gao Yang: Constantly upgrade themselves and improve themselves. I now have a clear feeling that I am not the same as the entrepreneur I started two years ago. I will reconstruct myself in about a few months, beating and killing myself, and building a new self.

How do you pay for yourself?

Gao Yang: I am more open to this look, my own words, the first because it is my own investment in the project, so it is not paid for the year. Later, after earning money, the symbolic thousands of yuan. Now that we've got the investment, our founders are going to take care of the basics and focus on what we do.

Do you have any short boards?

Gao Yang: I am trying to sum up a new methodology that is more suitable for myself, because the previous way may have made me pay more. The thing to do now is to let yourself be free and give yourself time to think.