Chapter 153： Shock and Reddit

"Mi Mi, look, is Chen William in this report the one we saw at the Huayi Company's celebration party last time?"

At this time, Yang Mi was drinking afternoon tea with Tang Yan and Liu Shishi. When she saw Tang Yan playing with her phone, she suddenly shouted at them, which startled Yang Mi.

"What's the report?" Liu Shishi sat next to Tang Yan, put his head close, and read the report on her phone screen.

"There was news from the United States yesterday that Meta Investment Company acquired 40% of Ali's shares held by Yahoo for $4 billion in cash. In today's interview, Ali confirmed the authenticity of the news. According to the investigation, Meta The investment company is the sole proprietorship of William Chen, a well-known young billionaire in the United States. In addition, he also invested in the domestic Huayi Company, holding 10% of the shares..."

"$4 billion, my God, how much is that! Change it into Chinese currency... Hey, how much is it?"

Tang Yan murmured in shock.

"This should be the William Chen. Didn't you see that he also invested in Huayi Company?"

Liu Shishi also felt greatly shocked at this time. He had seen Chen William at the celebration banquet of Huayi Company. At that time, he just thought that the other party was outrageously handsome. He knew that he was a rich man, but how much money did he have for him? There is no concept. But now it is revealed from this report that she bought Ali's shares with 4 billion US dollars. This figure has completely exceeded her imagination.

At this time, Yang Mi's expression was quite normal. After all, she already knew the news before she came, and now seeing the appearance of the two girlfriends who have never seen the world, she couldn't help laughing: "Look at you guys, don't you think? I can't wait to bow down under his trousers immediately."

She completely forgot that when she knew about this before, she was so shocked that she was speechless, and finally said: "I rely on..."

At that time, she suddenly thought that when she met Chen William on the flight from Hangzhou to Yanjing that day, the other party said that it was a bit of a business matter. Now it seems that he should have just met Boss Ma at that time. ,What the hell.

"Well, it's not impossible." Tang Yan raised her chest and said to Yang Mi proudly: "William is so handsome, so rich, and single, oh, it just fits some of my fantasies."

"Whose William is, it's not sure if it's yours." Liu Shishi also said jokingly.

"Come on you two, watching your pair of A's is definitely not fun." They usually play like this, Yang Mi looked at the two people with disgust and said.

"Hmph, how can William be so superficial, besides, mine is not particularly small, and my legs are long..."

Hehe, Yang Mi sneered in his heart, I don't know what his taste is, after all, the old lady has personally confirmed it.

However, this scene also reminded her that now it seems that as soon as this report comes out, there are still many women who are eyeing Chen William, and she has to grasp this thigh.

At this time, the female star who has the same idea as her is not only herself. In the other two production crews, Chen Zihan and Zhang Yuqi were shocked when they saw the news, and they also secretly made a decision. .

...

After completing the acquisition of Ali shares held by Yahoo, Nielsen has a new task, which is to go to Condé Nast Publishing Group to acquire Reddit, a website that is currently under development in their hands.

Reddit has been criticized since its launch, and most importantly, their original team consisted of only four people, two founders and two employees.

This is a website similar to "Post Bar", which gives users a lot of freedom, can publish content, and let other people vote. Later, as the number of users increased and more and more content was published, the team at that time felt that managing such a website became more and more exhausting.

In addition, the three members of the team each encountered a lot of trouble. Alexis' girlfriend was seriously ill, and his mother was also admitted to the hospital because of the illness, and continued to pay for treatment; one employee was busy with school; the other The employees have psychological problems.

So in this case, they thought that if it went on like this, Reddit would eventually collapse, so on Halloween 2006, they sold Reddit, and Condé Nast Publishing Group bought the site for less than $20 million.

However, over the years, although the number of registered users of this website has increased, the development is not very good. After investigation, William Chen knew that the three-year contract with the company has now ended, and the two founders, Alexis and Steve, have left the company.

Valley

Therefore, Nielsen's other task is to contact the two, and William Chen wants to meet them after the acquisition. The reason for this decision is that William Chen knows that Reddit is not developing well. The main reason is that the parent company has restrictions on them, and the two founders have not yet found the right path.

In the previous life, they returned to Reddit a few years later, and found funds to buy back the company, and then brought it into the process of rapid development, so in the end, Reddit still depends on them to continue to lead , Chen William doesn't want to hand this company into the hands of others, but in the end it won't develop.

William Chen stayed in Silicon Valley and went to several of his companies to meet with management and learn about the latest situation. Including Twitter Inc., Siri Inc., and technology.

In particular, development is going well. The characteristic of Internet projects is that it is very important to seize the opportunity. Once users have formed a habit of using this software, the latecomers will have to make extra efforts to catch up.

Especially this kind of chat software, when the user's network has been fixed in it, it has a very strong moat.

After such a long period of observation, William Chen is still very satisfied with the performance of David Jones, so this time, he decided to accept him as the CEO of technology, and injected another 20 million US dollars into the company to continue R&D and development.

Nielsen's team negotiated very smoothly with Condé Nast Publishing Group. In the years since the acquisition of Reddit, the development of the site has not been satisfactory. Therefore, in the view of Condé Nast Publishing Group, this is an unsuccessful acquisition.

And this group had a hard time in the subprime mortgage crisis, so now some people want to buy Reddit, they are still very happy, and after Nielsen made a $50 million bid according to William Chen's opinion, the other party is very happy Happy to agree to the deal.

It's not surprising, otherwise Alexis wouldn't have successfully repurchased the site from them. The reason is that they don't have much hope for the current development of Reddit. After all, there is a more successful similar website Digg standing in front of them at this time, so they have no confidence to surpass each other in this field.

Nielsen also reached out to two Reddit founders, Alexis and Steve, who came to Silicon Valley to meet with William Chen.

After William Chen told the two that he had bought Reddit and hoped that the two would return to the company and continue to lead Reddit forward, Alexis agreed after thinking for a long time; and Steve agreed. Still decided to leave.

Since this is the case, Chen William is not forcing the other party. After telling him that the company will always welcome him back, he sent Steve away.

In the face of Alexis who stayed behind, William Chen talked to him about the future development of Reddit, and put forward his own suggestions:

The first is the need to strengthen the management of website content, because he found that in some sections of Reddit, there are inappropriate content and pictures, which will cause trouble for the website.

Because the purpose of Reddit is to give users a lot of freedom, but this is not the reason for them to relax supervision, especially when William Chen found shocking pictures in some underage sections, these contents, no matter what country they are in , will be banned, so William Chen hopes that Reddit can cooperate with his other company, Twitter, to improve the content moderation algorithm and strengthen the supervision of inappropriate content.

The second is to fully optimize the advertising system. William Chen does not require Reddit to make profits immediately, but this is a problem that needs to be faced sooner or later. Here, he suggested that Alexis organize a special team to study the most suitable recommendation algorithm, combine the advertising content with the algorithm, and make the advertising more accurate to attract advertisers.

In addition, this personalized recommendation algorithm is also conducive to improving the user experience, allowing them to feel that Reddit understands themselves better and can easily find the content they are interested in.

To put it bluntly, it is similar to the personalized recommendation algorithm of Toutiao in the previous Shihuaguo, but in fact, this algorithm has been used earlier in Netflix, and Netflix has held algorithm competitions for three consecutive years. , to recruit outstanding talents in this field.

The third is to start developing the iOS and Android versions of Reddit now. Now Reddit is just a website. In the future, the mobile Internet will become more and more popular. Reddit needs to keep up with the pace of the times.

Finally, William Chen will continue to inject 100 million US dollars into the company to support Alexis' improvement and development of the above points.

After the conversation, Alexis finally breathed a sigh of relief He felt that he had found the right direction of Reddit development, and could not wait to immediately invest in improving the site.

"Alexis, there's something I've always wanted to say, I heard that you and Steve have been good friends since college, but I just felt that the two of you seemed to have a deep estrangement, I know, people Everything will change, but some friendships are precious, and some of them may not be as difficult as imagined."

At the end, William Chen thought about it for a while, and still said so to Alexis.

"Have you seen it too, Mr. William, I actually don't know why we have become what we are now, maybe we started to accumulate contradictions when we sold Reddit in the first place, but there are really contradictions that cannot be solved, It doesn't seem like there really is. I remember when Reddit was on sale the day after, Steve packed his bags silently and went back to San Francisco to continue working; The two seemed to drift apart, stopped talking, and even the discussion on Reddit disappeared."

"Now that I think about it, maybe there is no hatred between us, but we just ignore each other. In fact, I still care about Steve's friend very much, and I will find an opportunity to have a good talk with him and untie our knots. I also hope that the two of us Individuals can continue to work together and struggle together.”