After seeing off Hua Shiyuan, Gu Yun returned to the company to work overtime.
The product has been online for some time, and Doule is in a critical period of development, and he needs to make many decisions.
Even at night, he would hold video conferences with the Suhua team in Beijing.
The starting point for the Doule team to lead the global journey is the AVIC low-rise building located at No. 48 Zhichun Road, Haidian, BJ.
In 2013, Gu Yun received an application from Suhua to relocate Doule's office. With a stroke of his pen, he decided to inject a new amount of funds.
After receiving the funds, Su Hua arranged for Doule employees to move with the senior management to this squat, square, off-white building with only two floors.
This was originally the location of the aviation museum, and helicopters could take off and land on the roof.
Su Hua, the always humble deputy of Doule, sent an internal letter to remind all employees: "We are one of the few companies that knows Chun Road in the center of the imperial capital."
At that time, Su Hua was keen on handling administrative affairs and was particularly satisfied with this low building with a height of 14 meters and a sense of space indoors.
This big shot has a lot of experience in office space: “Many companies languished after moving to good headquarters.”
He cited SUN, Yahoo, and Evernote as examples. The environment changes the mood. Luxurious and comfortable headquarters not only stifles innovation, but also breeds comparison.
For example, some company executives actually want to install independent elevators.
"Very tacky," he said.
Just after moving in, the only big bosses in the company, Gu Yun and Su Hua, have independent offices, located due east on the second floor of the top floor.
Employees often see him entering and exiting the elevator, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, walking with his head down while scrolling through his mobile phone.
When it's meal time, he will take the public elevator to the cafeteria on the first floor, endure the hunger, and wait in line for delicious meals with the employees carrying the rice tray.
Many people regard him as a spokesperson for data-oriented and machine rationality. This statement reflects the pure line of technicalism, but ignores his human side.
During the entire development process of Doule, through constant communication with Gu Yun, he gradually understood the ambitions of the top leader.
The year Doule was born, Gu Yun formulated a strategy for the next five years. There are only two highest priority strategies: interactive entertainment and internationalization.
As front-line employees, people were amazed at the rise of the mutual entertainment line DouLe, but they overlooked another thing: DouLe has never taken a step towards globalization.
Determining "which market is big" is a science.
Every time he reported on work, he found that Gu Yun not only looked at DAU (daily active users), he would also ask Su Hua to come up with another data and calculate the value (average revenue per user).
That is, multiply the total number of daily active users by how much money can be earned by one daily active user, and then derive the maximum commercial benefits that can be extracted from a market.
Gu Yun seems to never set any mental constraints for himself.
"The big boss thinks that challenging le is something that should be accomplished."
Su Hua told all employees at an internal meeting, "For the big boss, his wish is very simple, that is, to stand firm and then knock down the giant."
Regardless of whether others believed it or not, Su Hua's heart was equally fervent. He believed that Dou Le would have this day.
Every evening during the video conference, Su Hua would walk out of the east office on the second floor, come to the conference room, and find a seat.
Senior executives from various departments will attend the biweekly meetings in Jingcheng and Jiangcheng on time. The number of people in the meetings is maintained at 20 people, and only middle-level and above participants participate.
Most of the time, the big boss Gu Yun on the screen would only touch his laptop, listen to the meeting, and type while not speaking.
A mid-level person present recalled that among the few words left by Gu Yun, only one sentence still lingers in his mind.
Gu Yun said: "Running fast is the most important thing."
However, they soon discovered that going to sea was not easy, and troubles ensued.
The first generation person in charge of Doule Overseas was named Zhou Jingjin, who was the science champion in a county-level city in Zhejiang Province and an alumnus of Su Hua at university.
Su Hua roped him in early.
In Paradise Group, no matter what business line it is, we always believe in the concept of "new people doing old business" and "old people doing new business".
Zhou Jingjin took the initiative to ask for international business.
When Gu Yun set his goals, he realized that going overseas requires mature managers with international trading experience.
In early 2013, he asked Su Hua to recruit Liu Xinhua as the person in charge, and Zhou Jingjin reported to him.
Liu Xinhua was originally the CMO of Cheetah Mobile and had already gained fame and freedom of wealth.
Gu Yun gave this second-generation manager high authority, and treated him with courtesy from the business department from the first day he arrived.
The International Business Department is the first business department established by Dole. It enjoys independent autonomy, which is unique in the history of the Paradise Group and has not appeared in the following years.
But what is unexpected is that in Doule, a company that still used a middle office as its operating mechanism at that time, the business department became a huge constraint.
After Liu Xinhua took office, he quickly promoted four things - building an overseas structure, setting up local operations, and resolving copyright disputes. In addition, he took the lead in renaming the overseas version of Doule.
An operations director of an overseas business unit believes that in developed countries, what ultimately puts products in trouble is growth.
There are worlds of differences between Chinese and foreign mobile Internet growth and monetization channels.
In China, the mobile phone pre-installation market is large, the exposure channels are scattered all over the place, and the overall price is fair.
In the overseas ecosystem, user growth and monetization are monopolized by two giants: le.
"The project is competing with them. Users come from these two lines, and monetization channels also come from these two lines. The growth model is an endless loop."
For example, in the United States, a user costs 3 US dollars, but within a 30-day life cycle, he can only earn nearly 1 US dollar in revenue.
"You can't make money back, so you end up paying taxes on it,"
The above-mentioned operator concluded, “Overseas, if you want to develop content or social products, the ceiling is Facebook. It is a giant.”
In the first quarter, due to the lack of new entry points, Doule's plan to go overseas was spent in anxiety.
In April, the Strategy Department wrote a report and submitted it to Gu Yun.
The report shows that there is little hope for product internationalization and that transformation is urgently needed.
But Gu Yun couldn't accept retreating.
"The big boss firmly believes that great efforts can produce miracles. No one knows where he gets his confidence from."
An employee of the International Business Department said that in his mind, since this model has been proven domestically, it should be able to go global.
However, the shortcomings of an independent kingdom like a business department have become increasingly prominent. It is difficult to allocate resources from Doule's central platform, and it is impossible for two voices to exist on a mountaintop.
Liu Xinhua wanted to give up midway, which was not in line with Gu Yun's expectations for him. Therefore, under the multiple incentives of cultural integration and product direction, Liu Xinhua left after less than a year in office and joined Kuaishou.
