MyLife As a Serial Entrepreneur (Part 2)
Three Chinese Lessons
Gilles Raymond is currently working on his new startup, DONE. In this occasional series, he has chosen to tell us the unedited version of his journey, from the first idea to the final product, the best and worst moments (past and future). No bullshit. Promise.
(Part 1 is here)
Sometimes strings are attached. In my case, they were consented to and comfortable. In June 2016, I had just sold my company, News Republic, to the Chinese giant Cheetah Mobile for a nice $57 million. Cheetah wanted me to remain on board for a couple of years. This was ordinary for this kind of exit. It delayed the cashing-out of a minor part of my founder’s stake by a bit, but I got a position as international VP for business development and the salary that goes with that. Not a bad deal.
Especially since even after selling I want to make the best of it for the company. I know the potential of News Republic that can be unleashed with Cheetah’s backing.
Our business is based on content aggregated from publishers around the world — content that is licensed, not stolen — and distributed in our app, monetized through advertising. At the time of the transaction, we have 2500 deals with publishers in 11 countries. But I know we can do much better.
My idea is to propel the business as far as possible. It would also be a way to reach the top five execs position at Cheetah Mobile. This is a $600 million-revenue company (of which 80 percent is made out of China), listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: CMCM). It has global ambitions, first as a provider of smartphone utilities for 600 million monthly active users, and now as a potential worldwide news provider on mobile. I could help them with their global ambitions for news distribution. But they would need to accept having a non-Chinese exec in their C-Suite.
How naïve I was.
On my first week at the job, the main change is the way we communicate. It boils down to one word: WeChat. My daily flow of emails suddenly drops from 200 to 10 while my WeChat exchange spikes to reach a cruising speed of 700 a day. No other form of meeting even seems to be considered.
That’s fine with me. After all, I split my time between my home in Marin County, on the north side of the Bay, sometimes commuting to Cheetah’s office in Menlo Park, and News Republic’s home base in Bordeaux, France.
The first conversation I have is with Cheetah’s president, Xu Ming, in a rapid-fire exchange via WeChat. I tell him about my desire to switch gear for News Rep’s business. We agree on 42,000 news articles per day published from signed publishers in 14 countries as a target for the first year. That is a 100 percent increase. “How long do you need to build the team to achieve that?” he asks. I reply: “Well, given the time to find the right people, pull them out of their jobs, and sign them, we will need about 6 months to assemble a team of 30 people …”. Even via a cold medium like WeChat, I can feel the incredulity of my interlocutor: “… We can’t give you 6 months … You should be able to do that in two weeks … Contact the head of HR, I will ask him to help you …”
A couple of hours later, I’m poring over Cheetah’s org chart for business development. With the blessing of the company’s second in command, I’m entitled to poach whoever I want. I contact heads of divisions to request this guy in India or this woman in Taiwan. I expect to make a few mortal enemies in record time as I’m snatching the best people I can find. In a matter of days, several dozen employees are kindly invited to a training seminar near Bordeaux were News Republic is headquartered.
Johnny Li, head of a division at Cheetah whose staff has been severely depleted by my blitzkrieg asks me to join the session in France. Not a good idea I think. Diplomacy ensues. I balk. Ten days later, we are in a chateau on the outskirts of Bordeaux. The manager asks me to deliver the welcome pitch to his former team. I refuse. He’ll speak after me and I’m ready to kick him out off the stage if he dares to undermine my position in any way. But to my surprise, he delivers an incredibly cheerful and uplifting speech, extolling the importance of the work ahead for the future of Cheetah Mobile and wishing everyone success. That will be the first of my Chinese lessons: nothing is more important than the common interest and once the course is set, everyone follows.
Thanks to an incredible push by the entire biz dev team, both the newcomers and those from the remaining crew of News Republic, we far exceed the commercial objectives.
Politics & values
My next move in Cheetah’s politics will turn to be more arduous. Within a few months, I make two proposals to grow the company internationally by redeploying some assets and dealing with cell phone manufacturers.
I’m turned down twice.
Then there is the episode of a seminar in Beijing, allegedly an international gathering. Except that all the presentations are in Chinese. It occurred to no one that a translator could be needed. I owe thanks to a nice colleague who helps me get a glimpse of what’s going on. This the moment where I discover the existence of a duly appointed representative of the Chinese Communist Party among the top twenty execs of Cheetah Mobile, reporting directly to the President of the company.
That’s my Chinese lesson #2: in a tightly politically controlled Chinese corporation, there is no room for a Gweilo at the top. Got it.
The third lesson epitomizes the profound incompatibility between Cheetah’s values and mine. One day, as the Dalai-Lama is visiting Paris, I realize there is not a single story on the event in News Republic stream. Nothing. I quickly discover that Cheetah has decided to impose the list of forbidden topics on the entire network. A blacklisted subject in China suffers the same fate in Europe and everywhere! After a tense exchange, even tending a non-quiet resignation, I obtain the right to oversee the blacklisted terms (most of them involving the usual racial insults, etc.) for everything that is published outside China.
But I know that after this clash, I have hit a ceiling at Cheetah.
In due fairness, the company’s top management always treated me extremely well. With the biz dev operations roaring, and my ambitions stopped in their tracks, I’m quickly offered a “gardening” position. I’m only supposed to be remotely involved in the business, with a part-time job soon becoming sparse-time. No office, no team. At this point, it has only been a year since the sale of News Republic.
With a surprising lack of emotion, I feel like it is time to consider my next move. I start to look at how we live and work and try to foresee opportunities.
Need for speed
Like a fading photograph, the remaining memory of my short journey as a Cheetah Mobile exec, is the speed and the agility of the company, the pace of the decision-making process. It looked like everything was moving, not only faster than anywhere else but in a kind of simultaneous and uninterrupted flow of decentralized exchanges.
At some point, we were trying to close a deal with a major global media corporation that we had been pursuing for two years. In the dedicated WeChat channel, five or six key stakeholders were working on the issue. The country manager, legal, marketing, finance, editorial, and partnerships teams were all engaged in an uninterrupted virtual meeting that spanned over three continents and four different time zones. One day, as I was recovering from the flu and had missed a day of work, I found out that a decision had been made a few hours earlier. First I was frustrated for not being involved in the final ruling, then I quickly realized that: (a), it was the best call, and (b), everyone had had a chance to weigh in, to voice their opinion, and express their arguments. The collective intellect had come up with the right choice. In any tech or media company, this issue would have required a meeting, most likely scheduled for the following week, and the painstaking coordination that goes with it.
It occurred to me that Instant Messaging — in our case WeChat — was the fast track that enabled this agility. The media deal was just an example. Everything at Cheetah seemed to run smoothly thanks to about 40 dedicated channels, all of them free of time zone constraints or participants’ availability.
IM is by no means new. But in the case of Cheetah, its preeminence over any other means of communication (including video conference) allowed the company to compress time by a factor of 10 and to completely decentralize the decision-making process.
All of the above was accomplished despite the intrinsic mediocrity of the tool.
WeChat is certainly not designed to work in a professional environment. Nor is WhatsApp, by the way. Even Slack, despite its penetration in the corporate world, was not designed as a pro tool from its inception. At first, it was a clever internal messaging system used in Stewart Butterfield’s gaming company. It’s a hack that has been blown up into a product, lifted by a few clever marketing moves and a strong push from developers to impose their nerdy tool. But research shows that Slack is still mostly used as a substitute for email and leaves scores of potential needs unfulfilled. Slack’s glory days also seem to be over as the stock’s value has been nearly halved since its IPO six months ago.
The ten same dumb applications
Today, each and every one of us relies on the same batch of ten applications that don’t talk to each other. Over the last fifteen years, we have been doing the same thing: looking at our emails, dealing with documents and folders, establish a to-do list, and organizing meetings. Take the folders. Most of us rely on a combination of Google Drive, Dropbox, maybe iCloud, or Box, to manage documents, depending on whom we are working with, not to mention the finder of our PC. The worst is arranging a meeting. It involves all sorts of maneuvers, email threads, the copying and pasting of addresses, etc.
What if we had a tool that was able to deal intelligently with an IM message and able to understand a phrase like, “Hey, Frederic, I’m in Paris next week, would you have a moment?” The application would be able to match our respective calendars, and then suggest a time and a place based on our past encounters. A couple of swipes, clicks or taps and things could be arranged seamlessly. Instead, we deal with the same suite of ten or fifteen dumb applications and services that create endless micro-frictions. I know what I’m talking about. With the Done team, we have been testing all of the tools available on the market. None of them are remotely satisfying in the way they need to be.
None of them are cool to use either. It is as if any notion of pleasure has been deliberately removed from these applications. They are meant for work, therefore the user must suffer. She must learn the syntax for retrieving a file in Box or setting up a reminder in Slack (I’m not kidding, the line of command is actually: /remind [@someone or #channel] to [What] [When]**).
My other area of fascination in the software business is how unfriendly these brands are. I wouldn’t want to compare the attributes associated with Microsoft Office, or Google Hangouts, to those for Audi, Apple, Under Armor, or W Hotels. Software is the only industry where the brand is not a massive key differentiator factor. Why is that?
There is no real mystery here: software is the brainchild of engineers, therefore, pleasure, emotional connection between users and the product, have always been secondary to the list of features. These are my next venture’s challenges.
Next: The Brand, the missing feature of the software industry, and how to blend it into our product.
