Since graduation in 2009, I have already passed nearly 12 years in his career, has experienced several companies, has for several industries, from the earliest PC Internet, mobile Internet, and then to the Internet finance, eventually to be known as the industry value chain of the Internet blocks, has rich experience, also with gains. Today, I will talk about these experiences and gains and losses, as a summary of my own more than ten years.
The fledgling
I graduated from South China Normal University in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree, which is a 211 university. It is not even 985. No famous school background, in the school is not what high achiever. And the family is poor, no father, everything can only rely on their own. After graduation, I just entered an ordinary company and worked as an ordinary programmer. It’s not that I haven’t tried BAT level factories, but I didn’t even get an interview because I didn’t have an elite school background, no project experience and no bright spot. The main screening conditions for fresh graduates are as follows:
- Graduates from prestigious universities are preferred, followed by those from 211 universities, and then those from ordinary universities are considered. However, most of the slots are taken up by 985 applicants, and if there are no other eye-catching advantages, the resume will be directly rejected.
- It is also desirable to have project experience that is a good match for the job you are applying for. Of course, this is not a hands-on project, but a commercial or academic project.
- Other bonus points, such as more than half a year of internship experience in a large company, or ACM with an award, or CSP certification of CCF with a high score (above 300 points).
However, I now say this is an afterthought, in fact, I did not know these in college. Many college students are locked in the ivory tower, with very little understanding of the outside world. If they lack guidance, they do not know which direction to work in. This is also the reason why many college students are confused. In college, it is not enough to learn well enough to get credits. If you are satisfied with this, you are likely to be unemployed after graduation.
Last year, a reader told me that he had consulted me when he was in college a few years ago. I suggested he work on data structures and algorithms to get a solid foundation, which he did, and he landed at Google after graduation. So, to break through the cognitive bottleneck, you can get to know and consult people who have these cognitive skills. Now that the Internet is so developed, it’s not hard to do that. Through the public account, zhihu and so on can get to know a lot of different fields of the big guy.
In the first few years after graduation, I was mainly engaged in Java development, during which I also did other language development for a period of time. RPG language of AS/400 system is a very niche language, and now there are almost no recruitment for this language. At that time to do Java development, there is no popular before and after the separation of the architecture, the basic framework is Structs + Spring + Hibernate, referred to as SSH framework, three sets to handle the front and back end. So, Java programmers back then, they were all full stack. Although the technology stack has been completely different from what is now called the full stack, the essence of the idea has not changed much, and the core is still to have global thinking.
In a word, the starting point of my career road is very ordinary, there is no bright background, there is no wonderful story, to put it bluntly, I am an ordinary grassroots.
First shift
That should be in early 2011, see colleagues once bought a few books, “rich dad, poor dad” series, there are 4 books, “rich dad, poor dad”, “rich dad financial freedom”, “rich dad investment guide”, “rich dad successful entrepreneurship ten class”, feel quite interesting, and I can borrow to see later. After reading it, it completely changed my outlook on money management and wealth, and it directly affected the rest of my career.
Rich dad divided them into four quadrants, called E-S-B-I, based on how people earned their income.
- E = Employee E = Employee E = Employee E = Employee E = Employee
- S = self-employed, self-employed and small business people who typically work for themselves
- B: Let the system work for you
- Let’s make money work for you
People in the E and S quadrants are basically trading time for money. As you get higher in your career or larger in your business, you often have less and less free time. So, the price of success in these two quadrants is busy and tired. Therefore, it is difficult for people in these two quadrants to achieve time freedom. And because wealth grows slowly, financial freedom is hard to achieve.
The rich are people in the B and I quadrants. They are good at building money making tools, and eventually they can always achieve financial freedom and time freedom, so that they can have money to do what they really want to do. What’s more, while enjoying life, moneymaking tools continue to earn wealth for them.
Rich dad’s advice was this: To be rich, you must start a business, whether you are full-time or part-time.
I read it and I took it in my heart, and that’s how my entrepreneurial dream began to sprout and I started to take action.
When you decide to start a business, the next question to think about is: which industry to start a business in? In terms of the industry, I chose the direction of mobile Internet. At that time, I did not have a deep understanding of this industry. After doing some understanding of the graduation project, I was always optimistic about the development of this industry. How to start a business after choosing a direction? No money, no team, no ability yet, it’s impossible to go it alone. So, I decided to look for a suitable start-up company and participate in entrepreneurship first. In addition, mobile Internet needs to start from App, so I learned Android in my spare time. After learning for more than a month, I began to look for Android development positions, and aimed at some start-up companies.
Later, I found a startup company suitable for me through weibo and successfully joined the company. The company is called Guangzhou Wonton Information Technology Co., LTD., the English name is XoneTeam. The company was also founded at the beginning of the year, and the team members were only a few when he entered the company. In this company, we successively made three products, two mobile apps and one cloud platform. However, we worked together for two years, but the financing failed due to the rupture of the capital chain, and the team was dissolved in 2013.
Although our startup failed, I learned a lot from it. The biggest lessons are as follows:
- A new insight into entrepreneurship
- I started to have product awareness
- Start building your personal brand
In general, thinking before was limited to how to make the business technically, but now thinking how to make the product? Think about how to market the product? Thinking about business models? Thinking about how to start a business? The level of thinking is completely different.
The road to personal branding
I started blogging in September 2012 with the idea of building my own personal brand and operating it as a personal startup product.
From September 2012 to the end of 2012, I exported a total of 7 articles. However, in 2013, I wrote only two articles — one on the first day of the New Year, one in the year — and then stopped writing altogether. It was mainly because of the failure of XoneTeam financing and dissolution at that time, which led to the change of my personal status. The change was subtle. The passion for entrepreneurship was still there, but the passion for running my personal brand was no longer there.
It wasn’t until mid-2015 that the decision was made to restart the personal brand operation. I don’t remember what triggered the decision. This only then returned to writing, also registered their own personal domain name, and then opened the public account, and has been operating until now. After that, I began to produce dry articles. In 2015 and 2016, I exported more articles. In these two years, I exported nearly 40 articles. However, maybe because I don’t know how to operate, the growth rate of the public number of fans is relatively slow, from 0 to 1000, fully used half a year. By the end of 2016, it had only 4,000 + followers. Over the next few years, it was unable to maintain that output frequency, and so far, the total number of users is only 7K+.
Although I have been on the road of personal brand for so many years, I have also exported some good quality articles and been recognized by many readers, but I think I have really failed in this road. I summed it up for the following reasons.
First of all, the output is seriously insufficient. I have been writing articles for so many years, and the total amount of original articles exported is less than two hundred. Some awesome bosses have reached this number in less than two years.
The second is a lack of focus, writing a bit too many types of articles, rather than focusing on a specific niche vertical. I always advocate single point breakthrough when making a product. After the reboot in 2015, I still focused on one field, but after 2017, I gradually deviated from it.
Then is not understand the operation, although has written a lot of high-quality articles, was reproduced by many channels, but has not been able to break out. It is also possible that I overestimate their own, although belong to dry articles, but not dry enough to become a point of explosion.
Finally, I failed to stick to it. If I can consistently output and accumulate high-quality articles, I can achieve a breakthrough from quantitative change to qualitative change in a high probability.
In short, if you want to make a breakthrough on the road of personal brand, you may need to push yourself and learn from Luo Fat. But no matter what, I definitely need to make some changes.
Of course, these years of continuous output, but also harvest, the most core value is to make some contacts. These connections have also helped me in my career, by introducing me to new career opportunities, broadening my cognitive horizon, or solving my hiring problems.
Entrepreneurial road
For so many years, I’ve been on the road to entrepreneurship. During this period, I participated in entrepreneurship more, and also had several attempts of partnership entrepreneurship, each of which had different insights and gains and losses. I’ll just pick a few of them.
After the dissolution of XoneTeam, I, the then CEO and CTO were recruited by Lixin Group. In fact, at that time, our CEO went to the boss of Lixin Group to talk about financing, but the financing was not concluded. Instead, he incorporated several of our core technologies and set up a research and development center directly under the group to become a private cloud platform. In fact, this is equal to the internal entrepreneurship in large enterprises, the biggest advantage is not lack of money and resources, but our private cloud platform product was aborted halfway, was arranged to do a smart home product. This experience has made me understand that although there is no shortage of resources for starting a business in a large enterprise, there are also many limitations, such as the lack of independent decision-making power in terms of many products and business models.
In 2016, I was recruited to Guangzhou (Guangdong Precious Metals Trading Center) by two CXOs of XoneTeam. However, I have not been in two months, our entire team all transferred to the Hundredfold technology (Guangzhou Hundredfold Network Technology Co., LTD.). During that period, there is a trading model called “micro disk”, very popular, even Tencent, netease, thunder and other have participated in it, and this trading model is the hundredfold of the first technology. At that time, guanggui, Hagui (Harbin Precious Metals Trading Center), Guangdong International (Guangdong International Commodity Trading Center) and many other trading centers were the partners of Hundredfold Technology. Before we turn over the hundredfold technology has developed for two years, the number of users of the microdisk system has been millions, but the system architecture is a little backward, has been unable to fast iteration, it is difficult to support a larger number of users and higher concurrent QPS. We moved over to solve this problem and lead the new product line.
That year, is also a hundred times the development of science and technology business reached the peak of a year, impression, at that time the number of users reached more than 7 million, there are more than 2 million daily live, daily water is also at least ten million level. And, in a month, he doubled the size of his team to nearly 200 people.
Not for long, however, in 2017, the CSRC to overhaul of precious metals trading, many exchanges was halted at the provincial level, including broad is expensive, and so on, has had a huge impact, one hundred times the natural also alone, the decline of the business, tried several times to transformation is not better, the company behind the fall, part of the team are independent and went out.
At one hundred times the experience let me learned a lot, in addition to the ability to improve technology, management and products, in addition, let me understand the importance of risk control management, in addition to manage the risk of product level control system, also want to consider the external risks, especially the policy risk, once happened, could be a fatal blow, should plan well in advance. But this is easier said than done.
Last year, I witnessed the rapid expansion of the team and rapid Game Over again. And, this time, I built the whole team from zero to one. It was in June last year, when I was in my previous company, because I introduced a large group company to become our largest shareholder, accordingly, we needed to set up a team to research and develop a set of projects in the group, and it was a very large ecological project, which needed to develop more than a dozen product lines. I was entrusted with the responsibility of this project. From zero to one, I gradually expanded the team to nearly 100 people. All the core product lines were completed and put online, and some of them were developed by outsourcing companies. However, due to external reasons, the market operation has not been very good to open the market, so it has not been profitable, that is, the whole project has been burning money. At the beginning of this year, the group finally decided to stop r&d and focus only on marketing. As a result, our entire R&D team was laid off.
I also learned a lot from this experience. As the r&d leader of the whole project, I had a deeper feeling and could see many things more clearly, but at the same time, I felt a little helpless.
I also want to share with you a little experience. I can’t remember the specific time when this experience happened, except that I was introduced to build a team to build a product of indoor fine navigation with several other people. However, we did not devote ourselves to it full-time, but started a part-time business. At the beginning, everyone’s share allocation ratio is set, also registered a good company, also began to enter the product research and development, but finally did not make it. It failed because people started their businesses part-time, not full-time. In this case, our main energy is still on the main business, for this entrepreneurial project is just to try the mentality, resulting in the progress of product development is very slow, and the technology at that time, do indoor fine navigation is also difficult, finally we gave up. After that, I turned down all other offers to start a part-time business.
In fact, most of my work experience was in these startups, which gave me a lot of zero-to-one experience in terms of teams and products. These experiences taught me how to build effective teams and how to develop products quickly and iterate quickly. They also gave me a high sensitivity to products. However, the downside is also obvious. In many people’s eyes, I will be unstable, because they do not have a deep understanding of my every experience, but only see my frequent job-hopping. In addition, the lack of experience in big factories also made my resume less impressive. Moreover, I have not experienced the experience of a large factory, and MY accumulation of technical depth is also insufficient, which has become a weakness for me.
My recent situation
I just 35 years old this year, also just is my year. Last year I didn’t think I was going to have a 35-year crisis, but this year I did have one that made me doubt myself for a while.
As I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of this year, the group decided to stop the development of the entire ecological project I was in charge of, and the r&d team of the whole project was laid off. There was no reason for me to stay, so I chose to leave.
I thought it would be easy for me to find a new job, but it was.
Because has not been in the Internet factory experience, always feel some regret, want to make up for it. In addition, because of my age and family, I want to find a job with long-term and stable development, Dafang is undoubtedly a good choice. So I just threw a lot of tencent, ali, bytes, such as giant position, mainly concentrated in the Leader post or P8 level of research and development work, also have to find some push channel, however, only a few about the interview, asked the cause of your resume didn’t pass, only a few will reply, some said I frequent job-hopping is not stable, some said I experience and job matching degree is not high, Some say experience at other big factories is a must for this position. And those who did end up feeling that I didn’t have the technical depth required for the level. This caused me great frustration, and made me doubt myself, lose myself, and even become impetuous. I started to throw myself at the BOSS and the hook, whether they were suitable or not.
However, in the end, I did get several offers, but finally after thinking about it, I chose an offer to leave my hometown and come to Beijing.
Originally, I was more resistant to leaving Shenzhen and leaving my family. The offer in Beijing was also because the project I was working on was just the direction I liked to participate in and was recommended by someone, so I conducted several rounds of interviews with the mentality of chatting and watching. Perhaps because of this peace of mind, I did well in several interviews, passed all of them, and was paid a satisfactory salary. Later, my wife and I discussed and considered this offer for a week, and finally accepted it. We started our job at the end of last month.
Before I came to Beijing, I was actually a little worried about whether the company was reliable, how the team looked, whether it was suitable for me to develop, whether I could adapt to the life in Beijing, and so on. Up to now, except for a little miss my wife and children at home, I think everything is fine. The company’s values and talent view coincide with mine. The team atmosphere is also very good, and the projects I do are correct. I also start to adapt to the environment in Beijing.
Briefly speaking, I participated in a DeFi project. Although I entered the position of technical development director, I am currently engaged in front-line RESEARCH and development. Although MY advantages and values cannot be maximized, these need to be gradually reflected through continuous output of high-quality results in the process of work.
The future planning
First of all, in terms of personal brand, my goal is to achieve a breakthrough, with the number of fans exceeding 10,000, 50,000 and 100,000 respectively. In terms of specific practices, according to several problems mentioned above, targeted solutions should be carried out:
- Output is severely inadequate: speed up the output. The first goal is one article per week, and the second goal is two articles per week
- Lack of focus: Then I plan to focus on the blockchain technology field, centralized continuous output, try to single point breakthrough
- Do not understand the operation: do not understand the study, read, consult the boss, to improve the ability in this area
- Failed to insist: only death knock oneself, have no other way
In addition to writing articles, it will also try other aspects, including live streaming and open source.
The live broadcast mainly starts from the blockchain technology. The early plan is to explain the written articles together again in the way of live broadcast. Therefore, a series of articles need to be output first and then broadcast again, so the frequency of this live broadcast is not too high. Also, I’ve never done live streaming before, so I’m sure it’ll take some learning.
The open source part is to run an open source project of its own for a long time, starting with a matchmaking engine I wrote about earlier. Many people have asked me whether the matchmaking engine is open source. When to open source? Then I’ll do it this year and give you what you want
However, live and open source are also time and effort consuming and may not start as quickly, so I plan to focus on the continuous output of articles for the first few months. After a certain amount of accumulated before the start of live and open source.
Above, is my future planning on the road of personal brand. In my career, I will deeply participate in the current company with an entrepreneurial mentality and strive to make successful products. My short-term goal is to maximize my value in the company; my medium-term goal is to get an opportunity to conduct internal entrepreneurship; and my long-term goal is to succeed in the startup.
The above plan, THE time period I set for myself is five years, can also be called a five-year plan.
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