In the entrepreneurship of a SaaS company, how will its philosophy and product views interweave?
Entering Li Dongshuo’s office, the wood-colored bookshelves are attached to the walls, leaving no gaps. Both walls of the room are full of books. Take a look at the bookshelf at will. There are two different versions of “The Elephant and the Elephant Riding Man” on it. He said that they were different translated versions bought during a business trip in order to put them together for a better understanding.
On the weekend of the interview, at the company’s internal CEO Talk sharing meeting, he said his new year goal: “One meter book every week.”
He is a good “Learner”.
A corner of Li Dongshuo’s office
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A night in San Francisco for the slash youth
Li Dongshuo is also a good “Trainer”.
Ten years before starting his business, he worked for LG, Hewlett-Packard and Google. Responsible for sales automation and operations at LG and HP, and once got a six sigma management black belt. Later, he joined Google and served as the director of Google’s Greater China Business Cooperation Department. He was responsible for a number of businesses in the Greater China, Asia Pacific and Global Business Cooperation Departments, and promoted the developer ecosystem to achieve commercial realization and sales growth.
Since 2004, Li Dongshuo has used his spare time to share internally and externally. He is the first Professor (Professor) of Google in China and the winner of the GMA, Google’s highest global award, “Outstanding Manager Award”. In Google’s famous G2G (employee-to-employee) project, he is Google’s internal trainer with the highest score in the world. Training at Google is very challenging. If the information density is not large enough and the content is not sharp enough, smart colleagues will not care about you.
For the past 15 years, he has also been a volunteer for the International Youth Achievement JA (Junior Achievement), which is the world’s largest educational charity organization. The topics he shared include: career planning for college students, corporate development, OKR, and so on. He has been awarded the title of Outstanding Volunteer of Junior Achievement, the world’s largest educational charity organization six times in three consecutive years.
One late night in late May 2013, Li Dongshuo, who was working on jet lag, got up and left the table. He is standing in a hotel in San FranciscoIn front of his window, looking at Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay in the distance.
At that time, while working at Google, he came to San Francisco to participate in the Google Developers Conference, also known as the famous Google IO Conference. He was also invited to participate in the annual meeting of 10,000 people organized by the ATD Talent Development Association in Dallas. Both conferences are global conferences.
“Some disappointment at the scene.” He strongly told “To B New Force”.
There are more than ten minutes’ walking distance between different venues. All entrances and exits always take a long time in line. But in this long and time-consuming process, people are very lonely. It is difficult for tens of thousands of people to make an appointment with them quickly, and the people around them can’t talk about it.
“All the links between the speakers and the participants are broken.”
This time on business trip, Li Dongshuo deeply felt that the long-standing contradiction between “teaching” and “learning” could not be resolved even by the top companies and top world conferences.
In the early morning of this working day, he stood in front of the window, staring at his lonely shadow on the window glass late at night.
“At that time, the night was beautiful. I suddenly realized that everyone actually has such a virtual image on the Internet. You can actually connect to each other on the Internet, either in real time or asynchronously. “
“After everyone is connected through the Internet, the work of teaching and learning has changed from face-to-face and real-time teaching and learning in the past to asynchronous, real-time, and hybrid teaching and learning.”
The estrangement makes you want to be close.
This night’s thinking is the original logic when UMU was founded, and it is also the logic that Li Dongshuo is proud of and hardly modified.
After his trip to San Francisco in 2014, he began to think and prepare for communication. Founded UMU in early 2015. And got financing from angel investor Wang Gang.
This entrepreneurship is entirely a combination of his own thoughts and feelings about Learner and Trainer.
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Education and the trillion-dollar market are also “variables” for human beings to realize their dreams
“I think one of the hardest things for human beings is education. When they were born, everyone looked the same and came to the world crying, but why is there such a big difference? Education is a very important variable. “
“Education makes people closer to one’s dreams. It can change a person’s future, a nation’s future, and the world’s future.”
According to the ATD Talent Development Association’s 2020 “Talent Development Benchmarks and Trends Industry State” report, the average direct learning expenditure per employee in 2019 is US$1,308 per year.
According to this data, the scale of the entire corporate training marketTogether, the French engineers formed UMU’s original AI team.
Through AI visual capabilities, it can be recognized in the presentation form that employees have six dimensions of sight communication, smile curve, body language, volume, and fluency in a specific scene during training. At the content level of the learner’s statement, through knowledge graphs, machine learning, and in-depth learning, confirm whether the content of the learner’s statement is accurate, whether the statement process is logical, whether the opening and closing remarks are vivid and effective, and the exercises related to the sales field can also be targeted for characteristic benefits Sales techniques such as conversion give accurate evaluations.
The introduction of the core variable of AI technology can provide learners with real-time and personalized feedback in practice sessions such as video homework to improve learning effects. Let the students go from just “knowing” after the class to being able to “do it” through repeated practice.
“This requires us to converge to a very basic law, to return to the essence of learning and education for product design, thinking, practice and innovation.”
Then what is the essence of Learning?
“For UMU, we hope to make some contributions to the effect of learning and the experience of efficiency. If we are more ambitious, we hope to change the way humans teach and learn.” Li Dongshuo believes.
Before and after 2010, functional imaging magnetic resonance (fmri) technology promoted the development of brain science, which in turn brought the evolution of cognitive psychology, which led to breakthroughs and changes in learning science. UMU is based on learning science, and product design returns to the evidence based of regular science.
Another point that UMU has changed the industry is that the ToB software on the market is facing a dilemma. Those who are in the education industry cannot be a company, and those who are a company cannot enter the education industry. The old explanation was that it was impossible to get through because of differences in age groups, industries, and the nature of the organization. However, product design based on scientific empirical research has enabled UMU to reach the world and all age groups.
Currently, UMU has proven in more than 200 countries, education industry and enterprise fields that online learning can bridge differences and simultaneously flood a large number of users. The key behind this is to infiltrate the “teaching and practice” science of learning and learning technologies such as AI.
Looking at the disassembly, first of all, product design must make the extraction and delivery of knowledge scientific. For example, how to disassemble a four-hour big class into multiple short videos. After the employees learned a short video, how to practice, express and verbalize, transformed into proficient behavior for customers. Avoid the past when you finish your knowledge in class, but leave the get out of class before you have time to practice. This has changed the status quo of “excessive teaching but insufficient training”.
Inconspicuous small product design can play a disruptive value instead.
Compared with industry friends, UMU has another difference-the authority of course creation and knowledge sharing is not limited to the HR department and administratorsaccount number. In real corporate training, employees at all levels only attend classes and cannot find the underlying driving force. However, if employees at every level can design courses and learning projects, it will stimulate the learning ability of all employees. Let “everyone can teach and everyone can learn” can be realized in UMU products.
Li Dongshuo believes that this is something the company needs very much. “The leaders of each department hope to deposit their own department’s business capabilities into the organization, so that the business can be operated and grown on a stable scale. If business capabilities are not available, Once it settles down, it is easy to lose the ability to take a leave or transfer.”
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The product philosophy behind “stakeholders”
When choosing a product entry point, Li Dongshuo thought about the connection between the Internet and education and training.
“Everyone is a living person with their own ideas. Support them to become better, and give employees, companies and students more positive and sharing.”
“In this process, people, products, and profits. People must be good to people first, then organization will be good, profit will be good, and the order cannot be reversed.”
This kind of thinking about people also extends to industries and products.
How to grasp the connection between the Internet and education and training in entrepreneurial positioning?
Li Dongshuo shared his thoughts on “Stakeholders (stakeholders)” to the new forces of TO B.
Li Dongshuo believes that many industries today are still in the process of searching from top to bottom, and the prospects are not yet clear. “Each vertical traditional field has many major opportunities that can bring about changes in productivity and efficiency.”
“When you connect multiple stakeholders, if the stakeholders benefit from this and improve the satisfaction of the stakeholders, then such a value network can be continuously expanded.”< /p>
He gave an example, such as how to define two user types, B and C. If a product itself is a strong collaboration, then there will be a stronger network effect between B and B, B and C, big B and small B, and big B and big B. The entire industry will be purely To B than in the past, exponentially erupting and bringing interest rate growth opportunities.
When implemented on UMU, he would think that the essence of UMU is actually to build an application that can contact all “stakeholders”. These people can be B or C, they can be individual trainers, counselors, different companies, and suppliers. Business and so on. Among these stakeholders, the supplier may lead the implementer to use the software, and the small B or C-side customers can influence the big B.
Li Dongshuo gave an example of the development path of Zoom, because the application of Zoom involves individual C-end individuals. Department leaders and employees in the company can buy Zoom products directly. This allows Zoom to bypass the traditional miningThe path of purchase depends on. The traditional procurement path is to buy a product that is friendly to the purchasing department or manager, but the end-users of the C-end are not necessarily friendly. When Zoom gives C-end users who hold video conferences a good experience, basic users will buy after using it, and C-end users in the enterprise will promote B-end purchases.
Similar to Zoom, UMU’s business path is similar.
“I will summarize the process into three steps, the first step is called seed, the second step is tree, and the third step is forest.” This is Li Dongshuo’s thought.
“In the first year, purchases of several hundred to several thousand U.S. dollars, purchases of tens of thousands of U.S. dollars in the second year, purchases of more than one million yuan in the third year, and even purchases of more than tens of millions Seed to trees to forest.”
“I think the value of UMU in the process is not only within the enterprise, but also connects between enterprises and enterprises, between enterprises and institutions, between enterprises and individuals, through stakeholders, and has made value upgrades.”< /p>
In terms of relationship, Li Dongshuo believes that the relationship between the Internet and traditional education and training cannot be a “substitute” relationship. Instead, the Internet should be infiltrated into traditional teaching. In fact, this essentially solves the problems encountered by people. He also mentioned that, facing the Learning modules on Oracle, SAP, and IBM, they are connected through API interfaces to achieve intersection. In addition to the perspective of OA and automated office, it provides the possibility of innovation, rather than a direct replacement.
“We are not in a hurry to bring about earth-shaking changes, but after companies are plugged in, they can expand the scope of application. One day companies may use UMU as a major product.”
On the other hand, in caring for individuals, such as in class, how to make people who dare not raise their hands to speak can scan the QR code through the mobile Internet to express their voice online. Let a shy person be praised for his thoughts and admired to express himself. The subtle function of the tool. Not only is there a great tolerance for individuals, it also makes the long-term serialization of the group in learning become parallel.
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Legacy is the bottom support to avoid fluctuations
“Any To B product has two levels of thinking. The first level is management thinking, and the deeper level is philosophical thinking. Otherwise, it will follow the trend.”
“Financing is a result, but not a goal.”
When To B’s new forces asked Li Dongshuo: UMU has received four rounds of financing in the past year and injected capital into China’s top VCs and CVCs, what was his mood? He answered like this.
Unexpectedly, Li Dongshuo did not show some kind of joy at a glance. It seems that the company’s valuation changes will not affect his emotions.
Continue to question the underlying motivation of this entrepreneurshipWhat time is it? Li Dongshuo’s answer is full of philosophical meaning-Legacy. This is almost an answer that makes you hear it for the first time, and it is difficult to understand it all at once.
If you cannot find long-term value, you are likely to pay the cost of anxiety about short-term value. In the “Fire of Silicon Valley” and “The Biography of Steve Jobs” that have burned the hearts of many entrepreneurs, such stories have been written:
When the young Jobs ran out of parts during an electronics project, he picked up the phone and called Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, to find parts for his frequency counter.
Hewlett not only provided the parts, but also gave Jobs the opportunity to work in the Hewlett-Packard instrument department during the summer vacation. It further established the cooperation between Jobs and Wozniak, and was also an important reason for the birth of Apple I and Apple II computers.
Jobs in his youth
Behind this story is the important spirit of Silicon Valley-inheritance. The meaning of inheritance is that younger generations complete their own careers based on the achievements of their predecessors, and this also contains a certain style.
Jobs, who got the inheritance, found the founder of Google, Larry Page, when he was dying. Even though the competition between Android and iOS has continued for many years and is fierce. Jobs sincerely told Page the most important revelation: focus.
Google has gradually withdrawn from businesses with uncertain positioning and advantages, such as Google Talk and Google Buzz. After acquiring Motorola’s patented technology, Google quickly divested its mobile phone hardware business. Page believed in and passed on the inspiration of Jobs.
The turbulence of business is short-lived, but “inheritance” may be able to travel through time.
“The inheritance of Legacy is a deep imprint to me.” Li Dongshuo told To B the new forces.
“As a trainer, a teacher, your students become more powerful, will you be happy for him or jealous of him?” Li Dongshuo once asked himself this question. His answer is:
“Trainer wants his students to become better. Founder, wants every colleague in the company to be better than himself. This is also a heritage.”
In the past few years of operation, UMU has had a bright moment of financing more than four times a year, but there are also moments when customers are facing a cash flow crisis due to the delay in remittance of customers. LeeDongshuo increasingly feels that it is an important thing to achieve sustainable development of the enterprise. “Maybe because I set a very high goal called legacy, so I am relatively indifferent when facing many things, and I don’t feel that exciting.”
When you design a high enough vision and goal, there is a distance from the goal; you are not easily moved by the joy and sorrow or pain and joy in front of you, or dragged away by emotions.
During the interview, Li Dongshuo told me that “My Heart is Home is Dunhuang” is really a good book. At the time of writing, I read this book. This is a personal account of the work and thoughts of Fan Jinshi, the honorary dean of the Dunhuang Research Institute and a research librarian, who have been in the Dunhuang Research Institute for more than 40 years.
Fan Jinshi, Honorary Dean and Research Librarian of Dunhuang Academy
One morning, I asked Li Dongshuo, what does he think is so good about this book?
“Everyone has his own life path, mission, or destiny arrangement.”
“The most important thing is my choice and response to fate and the present.”
“Constantly revise your thoughts, and live in the present while walking.” He replied.