Zhang Zhidong is a super elder who established Tencent Empire with Ma. He is the core figure of Tencent system. As a lifelong honorary consultant of Tencent, Zhang Zhidong ranked 29th on the Forbes China Rich List on 10/0.09 billion yuan.
With such dazzling achievements, Zhang Zhidong just wants to be "the man behind Ma Hua Teng". Apart from the affection of the same family, this may be related to Zhang Zhidong's own personality. For him, instead of going shopping, it is better to interact with technical data and polish every Tencent product with heart.
Zhang Zhidong, 1972, from Dongguan, Guangdong. His father is high flyers in Tsinghua University, and his mother is a primary school teacher. Living in such a family environment, Zhang Zhidong received a perfect education from an early age.
In a good educational atmosphere, Zhang Zhidong showed his excellent learning talent from an early age. He is extremely sensitive to numbers and often indulges in various games, such as exercising logical thinking. After attending primary school, Zhang Zhidong began to participate in various Olympic mathematics competitions and achieved excellent results.
In order to facilitate Zhang Zhidong's study, Zhang Zhidong's father bought him a computer. At that time, very few families could afford computers. It can be seen that Zhang Zhidong's family conditions are solid.
A square box can hold a lot of knowledge, which makes Zhang Zhidong feel very novel. Since then, Zhang Zhidong has developed a strong interest in computer principles.
From 65438 to 0989, Zhang Zhidong was successfully admitted to Shenzhen University. Out of love, Zhang Zhidong studied computer science without hesitation.
In the computer major of Shenzhen University, Zhang Zhidong met the person who changed his life-Ma.
If Ma is a top-notch talent in computer technology, then Zhang Zhidong is a deep computer genius. According to Zhang Zhidong's roommate, he typed in the dormitory all day and seldom socialized. His talent and hard work made Zhang Zhidong a leader in the whole Shenzhen computer enthusiast circle.
1993, Zhang Zhidong graduated from Shenzhen University with honors. At this time, all the students around Zhang Zhidong joined the employment army, and his good friend Ma also entered Shenzhen Runxun Communication Development Co., Ltd. and began to work as a programming engineer.
Zhang Zhidong did not go with the flow, but chose to continue his graduate studies. During his postgraduate study in South China University of Technology, Zhang Zhidong mastered more sophisticated application knowledge of software architecture, and his ability to organize codes was greatly improved.
Three years later, Zhang Zhidong graduated from South China University of Technology and became one of the few high flyers with a master's degree in that era.
Hit it off with the horse
After graduation, many Internet companies offered olive branches to Zhang Zhidong, including Dawn Network, a company with computer information system integration and national first-class qualification.
At that time, Dawn Network was the first in the industry. The computer automatic matching online trading system of Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange was designed and built by Shuguang Network, and China Stock Exchange became the first paperless, networked and fully automatic real-time trading in the world.
There is no doubt that Zhang Zhidong chose Dawn Network.
Different from ordinary employees, Zhang Zhidong is a person who is good at summing up and innovating. After a day's work, he is not in a hurry to get off work, but often thinks about some problems in his work.
He is not satisfied with completing simple tasks. At work, he often thinks: "What do users who use the Internet need?" "How to improve product design? Let users get a better experience "and" the future development trend of networking? " And some practical problems.
At this time, Zhang Zhidong had a lot of genius ideas in his mind, but as a new employee, it was difficult for him to apply the ideas in his mind to the platform of the company.
Zhang Zhidong has always had a dream of "technology changing life", but in practical work, no matter how hard he tried, he was always frustrated, so he came up with the idea of leaving Dawn Network.
At this time, in distant Israel, three Israeli youths jointly developed the world's first instant messaging software (chat software) and named it ICQ, where users can send messages, chat and transfer files.
Two years later, ICQ with more than 65.438 million users was acquired by Midea for 407 million yuan. ICQ can be said to be one of the fastest technical tools to create wealth in history.
The successful case of ICQ is concerned by a group of young entrepreneurs struggling in the deep sea of the Internet, including horses with great business acumen.
"Since everyone else can do it, why can't we?" With this in mind, Ma found his old classmate Zhang Zhidong.
"Do you think we can also build a network chat tool that belongs to China people? It is better to have the function of sending emails and viewing news. Such a multi-functional social software will inevitably attract many young people. "
Coincidentally, Ma's idea coincides with Zhang Zhidong's. After a long talk, the two hit it off and started their own entrepreneurial roads.
Both of them are people with very strong executive ability, and soon they organized their own Internet entrepreneurial team, including Ma, Zhang Zhidong, Chen Yidan, Xu, and these five people became the five tigers of Tencent.
Five people have their own specialties, some specialize in technology, some are good at public relations, and some are good at management. The five of them have their own duties, and they are a perfect entrepreneurial team.
From 65438 to 0998, Shenzhen Tencent Computer System Co., Ltd. came into being.
Five young people contributed a total of 500,000 yuan, of which Ma personally contributed the most, accounting for 47.5% of the shares. Xu Yechen and Chen Yidan each contributed 50,000 yuan, each accounting for 10% of the shares, Zhang Zhidong accounting for 20% and Zeng Liqing accounting for 12.5%, which is also the reason for the different prices of the former Tencent 5 Tigers in the later period.
Among these people, Zhang Zhidong has the strongest computer skills, and Zhang Zhidong is the chief technology officer of Tencent.
Under the leadership of Zhang Zhidong, in less than a year, an instant messaging software-"OICQ" was born, which copied almost all the functions of ICQ.
In fact, Tencent's original intention was to make a network paging system and sell it to paging stations. OICQ is only a by-product of network paging system, which can increase the call volume of paging stations, and the two can be bundled to sell at a good price.
Tencent hangs OICQ on the Internet for users to download for free, increasing the user base for the network paging system it is developing.
Unexpectedly, as soon as OICQ was released, the number of users reached one million. After that, OICQ users grew wildly. In less than two years, the number of users exceeded 30 million.
Even so, Tencent still doesn't intend to operate on its own, because the amount of funds consumed by the operation is too large, and they are just a small company established soon, and they simply can't afford the funds.
At this time, the paging industry suddenly began to decline, domestic paging stations continued to close or merge, and the general trend of mobile phones replacing pagers was highlighted. Tencent had to suspend the network paging system under development.
At this time, OICQ, as a subsidiary industry of network paging system, has become a "hot potato". For the future development of the company, Tencent intends to sell OICQ to companies that have the ability to acquire it.
Ceng Liqing used to work in Shenzhen Telecommunications Bureau, and Ceng Liqing arranged it for him. Tencent plans to sell OICQ to Shenzhen Telecom Bureau for 700,000 yuan, but the person in charge of Shenzhen Telecom Bureau is only willing to contribute 500,000 yuan. In the end, the two sides failed to negotiate the price range and the cooperation failed.
Two years of research and development efforts fell short, and the team's anger was a little depressed for a while.
"We can't let the hard work of our team's research and development go down the drain. Since we can't sell it, we will run it ourselves. "
Ma's plan was unanimously recognized by everyone. After all, OICQ is the only product that their team can hold for two years.
Ma decided to run his own business, and Zhang Zhidong has been silently accompanying him. In the following days, in order to maintain the normal operation of the company, Tencent began to outsource some work. As a "big boss" in the computer field, Zhang Zhidong took the initiative to undertake outsourcing work such as program development and web design.
During this period, Zhang Zhidong is constantly adjusting the structure of OICQ. From the perspective of real user experience, he designed OICQ's user interface very succinctly and added new functions. More and more people enjoy the social convenience and novelty of OICQ, and OICQ has become the trend of instant messaging.
Zhang Zhidong is steady and practical, and works hard. With him, the company seems to stick to it no matter what difficulties it encounters. Therefore, Zhang Zhidong is also known as the "anchor of the sea" within the company.
At this time, the horse is not idle. He invests everywhere. With unremitting efforts, Tencent finally made an investment. PCCW and IDG in Hong Kong are very optimistic about the future development of OICQ, and they have injected100000 USD into Tencent.
From then on, Tencent got rid of the trouble of insufficient funds and began to embark on a normal development track, but Tencent also paid the price of 40% shares.
40% of the shares may be the pain of growth, but it is this kind of pain that makes Tencent successfully stand on the cusp of Internet business, grow up rapidly, and complete the revolutionary changes within Tencent enterprises in a tortuous and timely manner.
With sufficient financial support, Zhang Zhidong and Ma began to expand the scale of the company, from a small workshop with only five people to a medium-sized company with more than 1 1,000 people. Tencent only took less than six years.
In 2004, Tencent was listed on the main board of Hong Kong, becoming one of the many successful IT entrepreneurs.
Of course, Tencent's first venture was not smooth sailing, and they also encountered legal disputes.
The so-called OICQ caters to the vast majority of young people in China from the beginning of design and development. In 2000, OICQ occupied 90% of the instant messaging market in China, and no one could shake its position.
Just as OICQ was about to take off further, a lawyer's letter from the other side of the ocean caught everyone off guard. In a lawyer's letter to Tencent, AOL said that ICQ is a registered trademark of AOL, and Tencent's OICQ has infringed AOL's trademark use right.
Therefore, Tencent's OICQ must be renamed, otherwise it will inevitably face legal disputes with AOL. OICQ is originally an imitator of ICQ, so it is inevitable that OICQ will be renamed.
What's more, OICQ used famous cartoon characters such as Donald Duck and Smurfs as avatars.
If only the trademark names are similar, they will be prosecuted, then using other people's anime characters as avatars will definitely be prosecuted. In order to stop the loss in time, Tencent decided to remove all foreign animation avatars.
After several months of repeated design and revision, Zhang Zhidong finally decided to change the name of OICQ to QQ, and changed the original cartoon head to his own cartoon image, which is the familiar image of a little penguin wearing a red scarf today.
Zhang Zhidong's idea was unanimously recognized by everyone, so OICQ was officially renamed QQ in 2000.
With the development of the times, users' needs and experiences are constantly changing. In 2004, although QQ developed very well and had more and more functions, QQ also encountered problems similar to the development of ICQ, that is, its functions were bloated and its user experience declined.
In order to solve this problem, Zhang Zhidong plunged into the work team to improve the QQ framework. In Zhang Zhidong's view, only products with good user experience can last forever.
So in recent years, although Zhang Zhidong is worth hundreds of millions, he still focuses on the improvement of new QQ functions.
Finally, at 20 1 1, Tencent launched the mobile simplified version of QQ "WeChat", which Tencent can reach at the next level.
From a small entrepreneurial workshop to today's huge "Tencent Empire", Zhang Zhidong has made great contributions. Zhang Zhidong's contribution to Tencent is beyond doubt. The QQ infrastructure he built more than ten years ago is still in use today.
For the development of Tencent, he often stays up late and works overtime to solve various technical problems and upgrade Tencent's technology. It is because of Zhang Zhidong's childlike innocence that Tencent's technology department can develop into the strongest in the industry.
Zhang Zhidong is a purely technical talent, and cars, beautiful women and luxury houses are not attractive to him. He has always maintained his initial intention along the way, and "technology changes life" is his long-term pursuit.
As the second largest shareholder of Tencent, in 2020, Zhang Zhidong was listed on the 2020 Forbes China Rich List with a price of13010 million.
But these seem to have no effect on Zhang Zhidong. His life is still the same. He drives his own Bora car of more than 200,000 to and from work every day. Zhang Zhidong has a simple personality and no leadership shelf. He looks no different from ordinary employees.
In 20 14, Zhang Zhidong resigned as the chief technology officer of Tencent, giving the opportunity to more young people, but this does not mean that Zhang Zhidong left Tencent.
Today, Zhang Zhidong, as a lifelong honorary consultant of Tencent and honorary dean of Tencent College, is still "the man behind Ma Hua Teng".
With the increasingly fierce competition in the domestic Internet industry, Tencent may face more opportunities and challenges in the future. As a technical veteran of the company, Zhang Zhidong still plays an important role in Tencent.