As the two poles of The Internet in China today, Tencent and Ali are naturally compared in terms of market value and profit, from main business to investment income, from employee income to the wealth of two horses. But beyond these visible data, is there a summary of the difference between the two giants?

At the just concluded 2018 Tencent Global Partner Conference, Tencent’s 20th anniversary video river provided us with a new perspective. Tencent in the film compared to the “river”, all things in line. If Tencent is like “water”, then whether ali of another pole is like “fire”? It has been said that Ma Huateng is a water, low-key diving, penetrating; Ma Yun is fire, high high fight, like a rainbow. Is the fire and water metaphor appropriate? Tencent and Ali difference is only the magnification of two personalities?

Business logic: trickle and fire

A friend of an advertising company once said, “Serving some of Tencent’s growing business lines is similar to serving a start-up company. Generally, there will be no big marketing investment in the early stage, so we have to decide whether we are willing to accompany them. Because it may be the wechat of tomorrow, or the sun of tomorrow.”

In Tencent, the logic of business development is bottom-up growth, just like a trickle. Successful businesses often converge into a river naturally regardless of their “origin”. Today, wechat, which has become necessary for people’s communication, and King of Glory, the first classic mobile game, were all made by the “edge” department that was not expected before. At Alibaba, by contrast, every business is a thunderous campaign. Whether Wang Jian do Ali cloud, or Zhang Yong do Tmall, all is not the first to predict the trend, strategic guidance, and then strong execution, desperate landing, the final success.

Of course, the flip side of success is failure. At Tencent, the vast majority of failed businesses will follow the market rules and return to dust. However, in Ali, no matter life or death, it is vigorous and vigorous. The development of a business often starts with a huge strategic release, and then it is doomed to failure. If it fails, it is toppling from top to bottom. Yu Yongfu, the former “future king”, lost his position as “crown prince” after losing the position of Ali Entertainment, and the whole entertainment was also changed from top to bottom.

But what is at work behind the top-down and bottom-up business logic of Tencent? Tencent’s ability is rooted in connection. In a narrow sense, social nature is very strong, and social forms are often difficult to plan. Just like the rise and fall of wechat and Weibo, no one can predict in advance, only let the product run in the market to find out. However, The transaction attribute of Ali is completely different, and it can make prediction and form planning. It can be seen from the operation of Taobao for more than ten years that every new strategy is clearly proposed and every implementation should be solid. Business logic is therefore an extension of the nature of business.

Form of investment: free flow and pay torch

At the heart of meituan’s decision to break with Alibaba and join Tencent, the much-publicized Internet storm, is that meituan does not want to cede control to Alibaba. Wang xing did not want to retire, and Meituan still wanted to be mei. To understand Mr Wang, look at the founders of alibaba’s acquisitions. Li Zhiguo of word of mouth, gao De of cheng congwu has left office, Gu Yongqiang of youku, Yu Yongfu of UC all turn post to do investment, fade out of people’s sight gradually, and he Xiaopeng of one of the founders of UCweb also left office directly to create a business.

In sum, Alibaba’s investment is like a fire, a gathering of absorbed forces to be put into flames. In this process, cohesion and assimilation must occur; Tencent’s investments are like water, not seeking to control the companies it invests in, but letting them flow freely. So JINGdong is still jingdong, Meituan is still Meituan and Vipshop is still Vipshop.

But no matter be like fire ali investment, or like water Tencent investment, its backside all have logic. Tencent started with social, whether QQ or wechat, is a natural aggregation of traffic. Social apps cannot charge for their services, and the traffic generated on them can only be valuable if it is channelled to other businesses. Therefore, Tencent will naturally send them to JINGdong, Meituan, Didi, Pinduoduo… So, in the final analysis, connection is not Tencent’s grand slogan, but his real business model, is a means to create business value.

Alibaba started as an e-commerce company, and its Tmall, Taobao and Ant Financial services can generate commercial value directly through transactions. The whole ecosystem needs to be in line with its own strategic planning and rhythm to carry out industrial coordination, absorb external flow for its own use, and finally generate transactions on its own platform to form a closed loop. Whether it is the acquisition of UCweb, Autonavi, or investment in Weibo, Momo, all have such internal logic. Therefore, Tencent natural need output, Ali natural need to input, this out and into, just like fire and water.

On the Tencent global partner conference, Tencent announced the key layout of industrial Internet, in fact, it is a congenital advantage. Regardless of AI, cloud and big data, no one knows users better than Tencent, and no one knows how to acquire users better than Tencent, which is the most important for governments and enterprises in need of Internet upgrading.

Corporate culture: warm water and wind and fire

If you take the elevator in Alibaba and Tencent respectively, you will have a completely different feeling.

An Ali employee described it as follows: “I work on the 21st floor of the Alipay building, and I can’t get down at noon every day unless I take the elevator in the reverse direction — everyone is going the wrong way, so those downstairs take the elevator up in advance and get down again.” Alibaba is used to such a situation, but Tencent has a special tradition called “Ruixue spirit”, which advocates not to take the elevator, but to wait in line civilly. “Tencent is like a big family,” Ma once said. “We treat every employee as part of the family. But that doesn’t mean we can dispense with basic courtesies, professional norms, and no off-limits areas of behavior.”

Of course, once someone from Tencent job-hopping to Ali, ma Huateng immediately found that “auspicious snow” in Ali is unable to survive. “Afternoon snack fruit, evening snack, if you don’t run to grab the words, you can only smell the delicious taste of others eating, silently swallow saliva alone.”

The elevator and fruit behind the story is Tencent’s modest gentleman and Ali’s Wolf. Tencent internal relatively few words, bow to work, just concentrate on carving products, code, design draft. And ali’s internal mantra is “life lies in the toss, not in the toss collapse, in the toss nirvana!” “It is better to fail badly than to be afraid of failure.” “It is not difficult. Why do I need you?”

To take another example, Alibaba and Tencent both run universities. Alibaba’s Hupan University is a high-flying school, inviting famous celebrities, while Tencent’s Qingteng University is low-key launch, low-key operation. Behind all of this, we still need to get back to business. To generate value from transactions, Ali must quickly conquer the city and fight for customers directly, which is a matter of life and death. Therefore, it must look like a Wolf, act like fire, and even fight with its life. Tencent’s business gene is to do social products related to users’ feelings, so it is natural to be calm, modest as water, and polished as polish.

Finally, although it is difficult to judge the merits of water-based Tencent and fire-driven Ali, we cannot deny that it is the growth and game of water and fire that largely shapes today’s Internet pattern. Without any pole, the story of China’s Internet would not be so wonderful.

Liu Kuang public number, ID: Liukuang110, this article first kuang Venture capital network