Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship: Flipboard Change reading won praise from jobs

Flipboard founder Mcmachue Zheng from Silicon Valley jobs's eyes lit up, took the ipad and began carefully experimenting with every feature of Flipboard. More than 20 minutes later, he put down the ipad and smiled and said what the developer wanted to do was a good thing. Before the mood disturbed Mcmachue feel, that moment oneself as if in the dream. It is probably the biggest affirmation of the way to start a business by being praised for being a renowned idol. Many years after Steve Jobs's smile, Mcmachue (Mike mccue), looking back at the best of his life, would think of the remote summer afternoon when jobs came to his office. In 2010, his third start-up, Flipboard, was founded only a few months ago and developed a social-magazine application based on the Apple tablet ipad, which was listed in April. Before applying to the shelves, Mcmachue up the courage to invite his idol, the Apple CEO Steve Jobs to try this product first. Flipboard's office is a small, 100-square-metre bungalow on a narrow street in Palo Alto, Calif., with a small f sign outside, and a 20-square-meter reception across the street. When Mr. Jobs drove from his home in Palo Alto to Flipboard, Mcmachue was in a bad mood; he did not expect busy jobs to come in person, not to know how the legendary man with the perfect reputation would look at his products. Because it was clear that jobs hated talking nonsense, Mcmachue introduced the main features and functions of Flipboard in the simplest language. Just as he opened the application and opened the first page of the social magazine in his own innovative flip turn, Mcmachue a glimpse of the skinny jobs. And then there's the moment that he will always remember: Jobs took the ipad directly from Mcmachue, like flipping through a magazine page to read content from Facebook, Twitter and a variety of collaborative media. He looked very slowly and carefully, and seemed to be completely involved in his own world, experimenting with every detail of Flipboard's features. The room was quiet, time was slipping away, and Mcmachue almost held his breath. More than 20 minutes later, Jobs put down the ipad, smiling on his face and, well, doing very well (well,its pretty good). At that moment, Mcmachue felt that he had put the Buddha in a dream. People familiar with jobs know that the Silicon Valley Idol is an extreme perfectionist, in his eyes only genius and dog excrement, Apple product developers desperately working to get the affirmation of jobs, but countless times he was scolded by the worthless. When Steve Jobs, who resented the polite compliment, said it was a good time, it was the coveted reward of research and development designers. Mcmachue, a young admirer of jobs, knew that his Flipboard had taken the first step of success. The humble Mcmachue of character seldom boast, though theHe has been successful in starting two influential companies, but he is always willing to share the story with his friends. When it comes to jobs smiling and approving, Mcmachue bursts into a child-like laugh. What could be happier than to be praised by Steve Jobs, a pioneering mentor? Life has changed. Mcmachue was born in 1968 in the New York State of the town of Woodstock, when the U.S. technology industry took off, the Apollo landing inspired the American technology boom, Silicon Valley in HP, Intel and other companies to become the world's IT Industry center. Under the influence of this kind of growing environment, Mcmachue in infancy showed great interest in science and technology, and dreamed of becoming an astronaut. In 1982, the 14-year-old High school student, Mcmachue, first came into contact with computers at the school's computer lab, and later recalled that his life had changed. Like many it elites in the United States, his interest has been fully supported by his parents. When he was a sophomore, his parents finally bought him a very expensive personal computer, and he started his own software programming career. He developed several video games in college and sold them to game publishers. Steve Jobs is Mcmachue's lifelong idol, and changing the world has a huge impact on his life; Mcmachue has been obsessed with browsers and human-computer interaction technology, hoping to change the way people get information and experience, and his three startups are all about that. Mr. Jobs's pursuit of perfection and his never-ending character has been etched in his mind by Mike Machuzo, guiding him to start his own life. As a fan of jobs, almost every product Mcmachue from Apple II to Mackintosh to next to Mac has been used and studied. But in 1986, he chose to start his own it career with Big Brother, IBM's mouth. Originally Mcmachue just wanted to experience a few months, but he found himself in IBM learned a lot of technology, and decided to stay and work hard. While doing very well at IBM, according to Mcmachue's vision, only life like jobs, Gates and Mitch Cabours (Mitch Kapor) is wonderful. In 1989, Mcmachue, 21, left IBM for the first time to start a business. (Note: Kabul is the co-founder of Lotus Software, the most famous software company in the United States, and the 1995 Lotus software was bought by IBM for 3.5 billion dollars.) The first half of the venture's employees resigned his first company called Monitors Software, mainly engaged in 3D browser technology development, Mcmachue hope consumers can write on paper as easy to use the computer. For novice entrepreneurs, the initial situation is not easy, product research and development progress slowly, the funds quickly depleted. In order to earn money to continue his business, Mcmachue had to do other work to support the venture: He did software design consulting for Merck's contractors, and even went to the site for a while. Every time I look back on my first venture, Mcmachue is always feeling。 At that time monitors software had 6 engineers of the research and development team, but the company has not seen the improvement also makes people difficult to get together. One day, three engineers asked Mcmachue to resign. Speaking of this detail, he sat on the couch, in a bland tone to Sina technology: "I told the other engineers, we have bad news and good news, the bad news is we lost half of the engineers, the good news is that we keep the best half." Memories are always easy, but Mcmachue at the time of the pressure imaginable. He and three other employees worked almost day and night to develop a new product, but also by Steve Jobs's influence, Mcmachue would never be anxious to get the job done in a hurry, and they would always have to take time to refine the product before it was officially released. Monitors software's first product was sidebar, an icon technology designed to make computers more intuitive. But after having access to the Web browser mosaic, Mcmachue decided to start moving research and development goals and have the Web browser display 3D graphics. After months of research and development, the launch of their 3D Internet software quickly gained market popularity, and once overwhelmed Microsoft for nearly 80% of its market share in similar software markets. Mcmachue succeeded. For entrepreneurs, success is not easy, and success is more difficult. Mcmachue Frankly, monitors software later encountered growth bottlenecks, technology research and development also into difficulties, he will call this glass ceiling. Although once rejected AOL's bid, but after repeated weighing, in order to better development of the company, he finally in 1996 accepted Netscape's offer, to 20 million U.S. dollars to sell his first start-up company. After being acquired, Mcmachue as Netscape's VP of Technology, and was able to continue to engage in the browser research and development he was interested in. Under his chairmanship, Netscape's Cross-platform browser, Netscape Navigation, once posed a huge threat to Microsoft, prompting Microsoft to fully promote bundled IE browsers in its Windows operating system, which sparked a later high-profile antitrust lawsuit. Siri's pioneer in Microsoft's crackdown, Netscape gradually began to decline. AOL spent 4.2 billion dollars to buy Netscape in 1998, and Mcmachue decided to resign again early next year after a brief consideration. He found his subordinate and friend Angues Davis (Angus Davis), who decided to engage in research and development of voice input browser technology. July 2000, McMachue Li Tellme nx, began his second pioneering journey. Thanks to the success of his first venture, Mcmachue, a little-known in Silicon Valley, soon pulled 238 million of billions of dollars in venture capital, including the Kleiner of well-known VC funds. Their idea is to create a voice browser that allows users to use speech recognition softwareSearch for network information by telephone. As we all know, speech recognition combined with web search is a huge research and development problem, Apple's iphone 4S on The voice assistant Siri, although stunning debut, but also unspeakable technology mature. Tellme was undoubtedly an industry pioneer. According to Mcmachue's introduction, Tellme software can convert the user's voice command to VoiceXML technology, and then enter the data into the network for the user's desired search. Under their impetus, VoiceXML became the industry standard. In the second half of 2004, Tellme realized the profit; In 2005, 35 million people in the United States used their products to call for information every month, and Tellme's income also exceeded 100 million dollars. Tellme is the world's first voice-recognition Internet platform, and their technology was quickly spotted by industry giant Microsoft. Microsoft bought Tellme in 2007, although it did not disclose the amount of the deal, but the Wall Street Journal said the deal price could be 800 million dollars. Sadly, the promising Tellme, who appeared to have vanished after being merged by Microsoft, is another Apple-bought voice-recognition company, Siri, that has received a lot of attention this year. When it comes to selling Tellme, Mcmachue is unwilling to say more, perhaps he is still annoyed by the deal. After being amnesty by Microsoft, Mcmachue as general manager of Tellme Project. This experience for Mcmachue, in his philosophy, the designer's position is always higher than the engineer. This may not be compatible with Microsoft's engineering culture, Mcmachue said, and if it were to be graded, the Microsoft experience would have to be c+ or B. Entrepreneurship is a science and technology culture, is a spirit of endeavor, but also a way of life. To borrow a movie line, some birds feathers are too shiny to be caged. Perhaps to Mcmachue such person, the resident Microsoft's big tree is not the normal, he longs for own space to pursue the entrepreneurial dream. But Tellme is already a Microsoft asset, and the only thing he can do is to leave the business again. Open a new page in June 2009, Mcmachue resigned from Microsoft to look for the next entrepreneurial goal in Silicon Valley, the first thing he thought of was the browser. As he pondered the direction, Mcmachue met the former Apple iphone engineer Ivan Doll (Evan Doll). In the summer of that year, two of people had a brainstorm: if all the browsers were to be redesigned, how would people read the information on the internet and what would be a more beautiful and elegant user experience? Do not think it men do not understand literature and art, Mcmachue is a deep cultural background of people, hobby is quite extensive. In addition to software programming, he played a good piano, Chopin's piano is the best way for him to decompress; he liked Chinese kung Fu, carried out professional training, and even went to the Wu Hall as a coach, Bruce Lee is his mind Kung fu superstar; he likes sailing, personally design and participate in creating a sailing constellation. CultureSelf-cultivation is not necessary for programming, but if jobs does not have a high aesthetic taste, there will be no Apple's heyday. Mcmachue is very fond of reading, in the busy work, he always take time every day to read newspapers and magazines, the traditional paper media have a fascination. It suddenly occurred to him that it might be a great idea to use the flip page of reading a book magazine for Web browsing. Despite the idea, technology needs a platform to implement. Perhaps it was a coincidence that, as they pondered how to break through, Mcmachue learned that Apple was developing a revolutionary tablet computer. With his knowledge of jobs, the tablet could be disruptive to the current Internet experience and Man-machine interface. Mcmachue decided to temporarily shelve the platform for Research and development, first explore the page experience and content integration forms, waiting for Apple to release the product after the development. In San Francisco in the January 2010, when a huge ipad appeared between the iphone and the MacBook on the big screen, jobs smiled again to pick up a device that was it. Mcmachue is also extremely excited: it is it! That's the best way he could read the browser's ideas, and his entrepreneurial trajectory was with jobs ' Apple. Perhaps this gave Mcmachue great encouragement, inspired him to develop the perfect product to win the affirmation of the idol. Also in that month, Mcmachue and Dole formally founded the Flipboard. Investment is probably the biggest headache for startups, but if you have a good reputation, investors can confidently support the voyage of entrepreneurs. Mcmachue soon gained 10.5 million dollars in wind investment, and his supporters not only had previous Kleiner, but also Twitter founder Dorsey (Jack Dorsey), Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscow (Dustin Moskovitz), There are even Hollywood young man Kutcher Beecher (Ashton Kutcher). Best application of the year last April, Mcmachue was as anxious as any fruit powder for the ipad to go public. After grabbing several ipads in the first time, Flipboard immediately began the actual development and commissioning process. Dole, a social network heavy user, introduced Facebook and Twitter content into the Flipboard, while Mcmachue began to reach a content distribution agreement with the mainstream press and blog sites such as Time Magazine, New Yorker, Engadget. After making sure Flipboard was mature enough, Mcmachue contacted Apple in the hope of having a chance to show the social magazine to Mr. Jobs himself. To his surprise, jobs not only promised to take the time to see the show in his busy schedule, but also to visit the Flipboard office in person. So there was the beginning of this article. Flipboard was officially launched in Apple's App Store last July, offering free downloads. This new operation, rich in contentSocial magazines are entirely tailored to the ipad platform, and the ipad's revolutionary operating experience has made Flipboard quickly popular with ipad users. At present, Flipboard download has reached 4 million, equivalent to every 10 ipad has a download using Flipboard. Last year Apple selected Flipboard as the best ipad app of the year. After being successful, another giant, Google, extended an olive branch to Flipboard. At the end of last year, Google submitted a 200 million-dollar takeover offer to Flipboard, but Mcmachue rebuffed it. Speaking of this matter, Mcmachue not to disclose details, but he firmly said: "I have for various reasons sold two start-up companies, this time I will not sell, will strive to make Flipboard a great product." And we have only been established for more than a year, the future has a long way to go. Flipboard is still in the initial stage of income generation, Mcmachue has not been anxious, he still focus on improving products. However, he revealed that advertising is the main source of revenue for Flipboard, and Flipboard also wants to make the social magazine platform a content distribution channel to distribute publishers ' content products in a more innovative way to more users, earning a royalty. After a great success on the ipad, Flipboard began to expand its tentacles gradually. December 6 this year, Flipboard with Sina, launched the integration of Sina Weibo and Sina portal site, such as more localized content of the Chinese version of the application, began to enter the international market. The next day, Flipboard a new design for the iphone and added a cover story (vinyl Story). The best of Times Mcmachue was a successful entrepreneur, and the three companies he founded were successful. But when it comes to entrepreneurial experience, Mcmachue a smile and, in a very serious way, says: "The road to entrepreneurship is very difficult, may encounter difficulties of all sizes, must have a clear goal to achieve the goal of the determination and the ability to tide over the difficulties." You didn't fail until you chose to give up. If you encounter difficulties in the road, hold on and don't give up, it means everything. Stepping into Flipboard's office, the screen in front of the door is a copy of "Jobs biography." Some of Mr Jobs's obvious effects are seen in Mcmachue: Focus on simplicity, detail above all, design over engineering, profit-seeking, rather than a delay, rather than shoddy production. While not changing the world as Jobs did, Mcmachue's three startups are dedicated to changing one aspect of people's lives and changing the way consumers interact with the online world. Mcmachue hopes to change the reading habits of the internet age by Flipboard, and hopes that its products will bring a new distribution channel to the traditional paper media, to help the newspapers and magazines that he once loved to move towards the mobile internet age. He said excitedly:This is not only a huge opportunity for the media industry, but also a great opportunity for Flipboard, we are in the best of times. He paused, waved farewell, yes, the best of times.