This article is from WeChat official account:Mustard Duikan Education (ID: jiemoedu), author: Lee Yan, Li Zi Yi, son Airlines, the original title: “dialogue Chen Lin: people team blessing, why not out of the education business byte” accomplishments “? “, the head picture comes from: Bytedance Culture official account “Byte Faner”
Chen Lin announced his new title to educate the CEO.
This is the first time that Chen Lin has publicly explained the bytebeat education business to the media since he stepped down as CEO of Toutiao in 2019 and turned to be responsible for innovative business and education-related business. At the same time, Vigorous Education is also the first publicly released business independent brand of Bytedance, and Vigorous Education undertakes all educational products and businesses of Bytedance.
Chen Lin explained the reasons for establishing an independent brand in this way, “The education business is a thing that is completely different from Bytedance’s previous product field, but also has great value. In the long run, Bytedance’s education business needs its own Brand.”
From the earliest launch of GOGOKID, to now the business covers pre-k, K12, and adult education for multiple age groups. Its products include Qingbei Online School, Guagualong Enlightenment, Kaiyan English, Extreme Class Big Data, AI Learning, Educational Hardware Etc., ByteDance’s education business is always accompanied by various speculations, analyses and doubts from the outside world. But there is no doubt that Bytedance, the parent company of Douyin and Toutiao, is making education business its latest strategic focus.
On October 29th, Bytedance launched its education brand “Education Vigorously”, which may mean that they are ready to accept more upcoming inspections and tests. So for the newly established “Strong Education”, what is the future plan, and how will it break the doubts about the lack of educational genes in Internet companies?
Today, Dali Education CEO Chen Lin and Dali Education Intelligence Team Leader Yang Luyu further explainedExplained his understanding of education, his views on ByteDance’s education business, and the future development direction of vigorous education. The following is a question and answer session.
From ByteDance education business to the overall brand of “Dalian Education”
Q: Bytedance started its education quite early, and it took more than a year to formally do it, but there hasn’t been a particularly significant result yet. When the Bytedance reopened, was there any Sum up the reason?
Chen Lin: We were thinking about education-related issues in 2016, but we did not do it directly. The real attempt is in 2018, and we will do our best to at least start in 2019.
Why are there no grades yet and how should I look at this question? First of all, I think education needs to look at the long-term. There are a lot of work that can’t be done now that will immediately show the effect, including word of mouth and many services, including the desk lamp released today, which is not released after a few months. We started to make vigorously intelligent work lights in 2018, and we produced them in 2019. Later, we did a lot of polishing of users and product functions, which are very time-consuming.
Q: Does the release of Vigorous Education at this point in time mean that the Bytedance education business is entering or has entered a new stage of development? How would you rate Bytedance’s current awareness of education? Is it quite profound?
Chen Lin: Today we can already see that many products are doing well. We are still relatively low-key, and you may see a different trend next year. In the early days, the outside world was not very visible, but we know internally that there will definitely be some projects that can be launched next year. From this perspective, there will be many products in the future, which need to be undertaken by independent brands, which may be more unique among users.
As for cognition, I can’t actually say that my cognition is very strong, because education is really deep, and you need to keep going deeper to get new cognition. But I think we must have a deeper understanding now compared with last year and compared with 2016.
Q: How can Vigorous Education reorganize ByteDance’s existing educational products and brands? On the other hand, how to integrate the family scene with the school scene, and how to integrate it with the teaching aid organization scene, is to get through.
Yang Luyu: We will first pay attention to the family scene. I just said that its starting point is to solve the pain points of family counseling. When you have enough family penetration, we can’t rule out the future Connect to the school, but we will give priority to the family.
Q: Will the brand change after the education team becomes independent? There are so many products and services under vigorous education, how are these products coordinated?
Chen Lin: The adjustment of the brand and the team is not necessarily related. But our team is also under Zero. We have set an external brand called Vigorous Education, internally we call Zero, and Vigorous Education is an external action.
However, our internal organizational structure will not be adjusted. It was originally done in a more reasonable way, including the collaboration between various internal projects. We have always emphasized the openness of each business. Just now Louis (Yang Luyu) Many of the technology and hardware things talked about are also linked to other businesses. They are already linked, but more of the work we did before. No different changes will occur because of this brand.
I think the big difference between making educational products and making user products is that you really have to treat your products and your users very seriously. Because you do not do well, it will delay your children’s time and delay. This is his responsibility. So we don’t want to be very aggressive. If the product is not done well, we will promote it in a large amount. I think this is not good. We should pay more attention to the needs of users. It will help children’s performance growth. I think this is a better way. .
Will the education business be split and listed? The present and future of “vigorous education”
Q: What is the focus of capital investment in the education business? Is there an internal profitable timetable? The relationship between Vigorous Education released today and ByteDance, will independent financing in the future and listing considerations?
Chen Lin: Dali Education is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bytedance. Three years of non-profitability is a determination we have expressed. I think it may be a longer period of non-profitability in the future, because you will find that it is difficult to make a profit in the short term when doing education products.Yes, whether it is product polishing or cognition, it will take longer.
Why do we say three years? Because we have done BP internally for three years. From the perspective of three years of BP, it is not profitable, but we find that it is likely to be unprofitable for a longer time.
Q: Will Byte split the education business and launch an independent listing?
Chen Lin: We have not considered this issue in particular for the time being to raise funds separately, but in the long run, we do not rule out the possibility of listing, because education may be a very big thing .
Q:How to understand Vigorous Education to do education will not do a single point of business, but will do diversified businesses to contribute to the education ecology can? Will these businesses be done in parallel, or are they playing different roles and functions?
Chen Lin: We now have a project called “Xuelang”, which empowers independent content innovators on Douyin, Toutiao, and Watermelon. Now many teachers have settled in, through Publish short videos to attract fans, and can also provide fans with paid services, such as paid columns, and can also give users live lessons and monetize. These are to empower the entire industry. These teachers have no employment relationship with us. Including offline organizations, we are thinking of how to empower them and make their lives better. The school also helps teachers to correct papers and so on.
Q: Before ByteDance had self-developed products here, there were also many external investments. I would like to ask what is the strategy for investment in education products, or what are their boundaries?
Chen Lin: There are two types of investment, one is acquisition and the other is investment. I have talked about investment before, for what others do well, we may invest in it. But what others may not do well, we can do it.
There are two ways to do it yourself, one is to get a group of people from your team to do it, and the otherThe way is to find the acquisition team to do it, which can be understood as a talent acquisition. Many of our acquisitions are talent acquisitions, because this can accelerate and form a team to do this business faster.
Q: Some of these businesses are self-operated, and some are investments. How to link the two?
Chen Lin: In fact, the business we invest in has a lot of synergy, whether it is an investment or we do it ourselves, to meet the needs of users. There are some things that we feel that the invested enterprise may not be able to do well, we will choose to do it ourselves. But there are companies that have done well, and we may be more willing to choose the way of investment. Because we ultimately want to achieve users, whether it is a company we invest in, or do our own business, or achieve users through empowerment, these three methods are optional. However, the specific choice requires specific analysis. The general principle is that if this thing is difficult and important, we may have to do it ourselves. We are more inclined to do it ourselves.
Q: The outside world’s impression of Bytedance’s education is that marketing is playing fiercely. Is this a strategy of Internet companies? ? Companies like Bytedance that started on the Internet have relatively weak accumulation in teaching and research. How can we build a brand image for parents and the public to educate?
Chen Lin: First of all, I don’t think our teaching and research is very weak. The teaching and research team has more than 1,000 people. This is a very large team. We are relatively low-key and did not say this to the outside world. We have used a very strong and high standard on the teaching and research team to recruit various talents. And we really believe that education and research are very important to education products, and we will continue to recruit better and higher-level talents.
Q: ByteDance now has a lot of educational products distributedIn different circuits, such as K12, pre-school, school-age circuits, etc., where are the key circuits currently invested, and how to balance the investment and competition between these products?
Chen Lin: Actually, I just talked about big education, I think some important scenes should be paid attention to and cultivated deeply. Our current businesses are all businesses that we are optimistic about, and we also think they can be successful. And I think for these businesses, the resources are sufficient, and there is no saying that because of resource problems, many things cannot be done. But if you look at the current business, I think K12 and family scenes are very important, including entering school scenes. And our teams are not small, they are all growing rapidly.
Q: Please describe the relationship between the three aspects of business: extracurricular tutoring, campus scene and family scene?
Chen Lin: Our current team is not small in the family and school business. Like the Dali Smart Team, it should be a relatively large team within us, including the school team. We did not say how much the headcount is restricted. Both of these businesses are carried out and the degree of attention is very high.
Also, let me talk about the synergy between these three areas. I think it is more from the needs of users and the needs of students. Students study in school, at home, including in extracurricular tutoring institutions, should they learn repetitive things? Not necessarily, wasting a lot of students’ time.
Nowadays, in the family scene, many parents ignore it, thinking that education is not a matter of the parents themselves, it is a matter of the school or an after-school tutoring agency, we only do this. I think there is great value in doing everything, as we do our homework today to solve the pain points of parents. In the future, we want to make more user experience better and the growth of students more systematic.
ToB or ToC? Byte Beat and BAT
Q: Both Tencent and Alibaba have focused their education business on the 2B side. Byte has been 2C from the beginning, and will continue to increase this aspect. Are you considering doing 2B business?
Chen Lin: I just said that in addition to customer counseling, there are also families and schools in big education. We now have school business, our AI learning, extremely large classes Data is all our AI products, and we also have many good talents in it to make some innovations.
Q: Alibaba and Tencent are both working on smart campuses. Has Byte considered?
Chen Lin: This is the product we are making now.
Is there a traffic platform such as Toutiao and Douyin today, will I use the platform advantages to attract traffic for education business
Q: First of all, I would like to ask the byte has always been known for its technology and algorithm. I would like to ask how our teaching and research team is built in other content education products Yes, is it also built in the form of a middle station?
Chen Lin: Many people in the industry think that our products and technologies are very powerful, and they must be doing education from a technical point of view, but I think that in the education business, we still have to follow the essence of education, not Technology must replace teachers. Technology will not replace teachers. It is more about empowering teachers. Teachers are very important. We have issued 2 million annual salary to recruit famous teachers who graduated from Qingbei. We found that the role of teacher is very important for students, so we have increased our efforts to recruit very good teachers, including the teaching and research team, which is the same as our education product. The core soul, products and technology are just some empowerment.
Q: Now Toutiao and Douyin under Bytedance are very important platforms for educational institutions. How will BYTE use this platform? Drain your own business?
Chen Lin: In fact, we are all thinking about the platform. Whether it’s Toutiao, Douyin, or the education business, we have the same launch in Toutiao and Douyin. The delivery is done by our own internal delivery team, and the price is adjusted on the delivery platform. In fact, there is no difference, but there is a small discount because we don’t need media internally, which saves part of the cost. In fact, we have no structural advantage in terms of traffic acquisition with the outside world, and internal settlement is also done.
Q: What role does technology play in online education, and what kind of effectiveness can it produce?
Chen Lin: I think there are some things that technology is very good at. It can replace some repetitive tasks, such as checking homework and correcting pronunciation. But it certainly has limitations, emotional connection, which is difficult to achieve with technology, and difficult to achieve in the future.
So in terms of technology, we may give full play to its advantages. For things that technology is good at, we invest a lot of manpower in doing things. For things that require people, we may build a large team of teachers and head teachers. Our current class teacher team has thousands of people, and people and machines are combined.
Q: Previously, Chen Lin talked about the two advantages of Bytedance in education-strategic determination and organizational culture. How to understand These two advantages?
Chen Lin: First of all, the strategic determination is to invest in the long-term instead of looking at short-term returns. Because whether it is education or Douyin, we firmly believed in this direction in the early days, and then invested heavily. It is not something to be done just by scratching the head, but we see it very clearly, we think there is a lot of room for innovation. So not only do we feel that we must persist in doing it, but it is something we can definitely accomplish in the long run.
Regarding organizational culture, I think Bytedance is actually relatively well-known in the industry.When doing vigorous education, you can actually feel it. When we recruit high-level talents, we are still very attractive in all aspects. For example, the culture of innovation, because internally, we don’t mean to bring experience and act according to experience. I more hope that innovation can occur between different functional lines.
Including an open culture, our different teams are all open, like Louis (Yang Luyu) team thanked AI today The Lap team, in fact, there are a lot of things that are done by teams other than the desk lamp. AI Lap provides a lot of technology, including hardware mid-stage and supply chain, and provides a lot of support and help, so we have a strong I think these are the cultures of our organization.
How to break the hardware profit problem?
Q: In terms of internal integration, how do hardware products drive content products?
Yang Lu Yu: It is not called drainage, it is more about service integration for everyone. We hope to use hardware to solve some very daily tutoring tasks that need to be repeated. And some difficult services that need to be specially provided by someone, give it to our teacher. So it can be understood that this is a combination of two different scenarios. We believe that the final education must be hardware plus algorithms, plus human services, to cover a combination of all scenarios.
Q: The smart hardware operation lamp is very similar to the smart speakers of Tmall Genie or similar products. What kind of smart hardware products do you want to make in the end?
Yang Luyu: Smart homework lights have many more functions than smart speakers. Voice dialogue is only one of the functions. Smart speakers can’t do homework guidance and recognition. From the perspective of the product concept, recognition is one of the main technical forms, and voice recognition is one of them. In fact, our main focus is visual recognition, so it is fundamentally different from smart speakers. You can think of it as a product that includes smart speaker functions.
We do smart hardware in order to follow the idea of building infrastructure. Why do we need to build infrastructure? Because we found that in an environment like a family, there is no good service today. Let’s not say okay, in fact there is noServices. During the three hours of study and homework at home every day, the child did not actually get any help.
Why didn’t you get help in the past? Because there is no such an infrastructure to reach children’s products, mobile phones are not a suitable device. In the future, we hope to be able to cover the home scene thoroughly, and be able to do well in the functions and services that are still needed in this scene. At the same time, we hope to be able to make the connection between children and parents well, including the connection between children and children in the future, we hope to build a huge online classroom, this classroom, its desks are distributed in everyone’s home of.
Q:How to break through the hardware profit problem in the home scene in the future? Or is the role of hardware not aiming at profit, but aiming at family entrance or strengthening entrance?
Yang Luyu: We are in the hardware business, but we don’t think it is a pure hardware business, so the unprofitable hardware is within our expectations.
You are right. Hardware is not profitable. We are selling at a loss. I think hardware is a service carrier. In the future, this hardware will really solve the problem of parents, which means that this hardware has a long life cycle. During this life cycle, we can solve the problem and provide more services.
I believe that we will be profitable in the follow-up services in the future. I think the core problem is that you have to solve the parents’ problems. I also answered in the front that I think the best model in the future. Maybe ordinary and simple problems are realized by free functions. Where there are difficulties in the future and need to provide special services, we provide fee-based services, and we do not exclude us from talking to others. Combine products.
This article is from WeChat official account:Mustard Duikan Education (ID: jiemoedu)a> , Author: Lee Yan, Yi Li Zi, Zihang