The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide

Being the CEO of X.com makes a lot of money. From the current point of view, it is much more profitable than working on electric cars with an uncertain future. As for SpaceX, which Musk founded the year before last, the future is even more uncertain.

Even Musk himself is not sure that SpaceX is going to succeed. He needs to invest his own money and continue to brainwash other investors that this thing can really make money.

Although X.com is in a field where electronic payments have great prospects, as NewPay's global influence gradually increases, the electronic payment industry is visibly prospering and has become the most popular industry in the Internet field.

The valuation of X.com has also risen accordingly, but Musk really doesn’t want to work in this field anymore. He doesn’t want to spend time thinking about what others are doing, what goals they want to achieve, and what measures we need to take to catch up with them. .

In the past five years of competition, Musk has felt deep frustration as a pursuer. The gap between X.com and NewPay has not only not narrowed, but has widened. He thinks that if he continues to work in this position, he will make money but lose his creativity and risk-taking spirit. This is terrible.

Therefore, even though the investors behind X.com persuaded him to stay and were even willing to give him higher option rewards, Musk left without looking back.

He knows Schulman, the new CEO hired by investors, and is even familiar with him. It is precisely because of his familiarity that Musk is not optimistic that Schulman can compete with Zhou Xin in the Internet field.

After Musk resigned, he sold almost all of his shares in X.com on the grounds that he no longer wanted to participate in the electronic payment field. The essence was because he was not optimistic about Schulman. To put it more bluntly, he was not optimistic about X.com.

According to Musk, how could anyone else do what I can’t do?

Therefore, when Musk saw NewPay's new big move, he felt happy in his heart. Fortunately, he made the choice quickly enough.

"Schulman, I don't have any other good suggestions. My idea is to burn money and tell shareholders to be prepared to burn money.

The interest rate of Yu'E Bao is less than 3%, and X.com launched a product with an interest rate 1% higher than that to attract consumers. "

This is the fate of the chaser. When the head launch strategy attracts users, you can only be forced to withdraw.

Musk also did this when facing various activities launched by NewPay before, using higher amounts to attract users.

"I understand we can offer products with higher interest rates to attract consumers," Schulman said.

The problem is that it is difficult to set the interest rate. The interest rate of Yu'e Bao fluctuates flexibly, and the cost is difficult to estimate. "

The interest rate of 2.00 points is not high at all, but it is much better than the interest rate of bank demand deposits. The current interest rate offered by the top ten banks in America is only 0.45%.

Compared with bank demand deposits, Yu'E Bao's interest rate of more than 2%, which has almost the same functionality and flexibility, is considered a super high interest rate.

Musk said: “We only need to pay 1% higher than Yu’E Bao, which is fixed at 1%, and then each account can purchase up to US$50,000 in this financial product.

At the same time, other financial products will be launched to balance expenses. "

Schulman nodded: “That’s all we can do for the time being.

If we want to be able to borrow and repay Yu'e Bao at any time, calculate interest at any time, and dynamically display interest rates in real time, this requires a lot of computing power, and our infrastructure must be optimized, which is also a cost. "

After finishing speaking, Schulman smiled bitterly: "I finally understand how much pressure there is in this position. Although X.com seems glamorous, it is the second largest company in the electronic payment field."

Musk added: “But compared with NewPay, other electronic payment companies are no different.

We need to be prepared to play catch-up for a long time until NewPay shows its flaws.

In fact, I think products like Yu'e Bao are an opportunity. The problem we have been facing before is that after attracting users through activities, whether users use X.com to get discounts or get cash rewards, the users attracted are time-sensitive. .

After the event, they will return to NewPay. For example, we first imitated NewPay’s activity of scanning QR codes to collect patterns and share prizes equally. At that time, we gained more than one million new users.

However, the proportion of these new users who will continue to use X.com after the event ends will not exceed one tenth. This is a dilemma that previous events have faced.

Therefore, the models we adopted later were to attract new customers with high bonuses, full discounts on payment or random instant discounts to retain customers. However, NewPay can also provide these activities. Since their volume is much larger than ours, they have a large market share in electronics. There is higher bargaining power in the payments sector.

We have to spend our own money to provide customers with full discounts, and NewPay’s full discounts in many offline consumption scenarios are voluntarily provided by merchants. For example, Walmart’s payment activity of 10% off for purchases over 100, the cost of this 10 US dollars is borne by Walmart.

This also means that we have to spend several times the price of NewPay to achieve similar or even worse results than NewPay. This is why the gap between us has not narrowed over the years, but has widened.

The biggest advantage of products such as Yu'e Bao is that it allows users' funds to be deposited in X.com. Even if they download X.com just to earn interest, for us, it also gives users a reason to choose X.com. "Musk is optimistic on the surface.

In fact, he is not so optimistic in his heart. How many users can be attracted by only 1% more interest rate? He wasn't sure.

Because the siphon effect of NewPay is so obvious, an extra 1% will not attract attention at all.

But he needed to say this to give Schulman confidence. This was his understanding of strategic advisors. Someone had to be optimistic.

In fact, it is not Internet companies that are most affected, but financial companies.

A week after the launch of Yu’e Bao, the Wall Street Journal used a front-page headline to discuss:

"Yue Bao has turned more than 10 million electronic payment users into financial investors"

In this article, I highly praise NewPay’s financial innovation capabilities and believe that NewPay represents the boundary of electronic payment capabilities. As far as it can go, the electronic payment industry can go further.

At the same time, the past methods of business development in the financial industry were discussed, and whether it was time for the traditional branch model of the financial industry to change. NewPay made the advantages of Internet business development clear at a glance, and whether traditional financial institutions need to follow up.

Wall Street giants have said that we must follow up. First, Citibank announced that it will invest more than 1 billion US dollars in the construction of Internet application systems in the next three years, then Wells Fargo announced the acquisition of an electronic payment company, and then Amerikan ranked top Banks walked out one after another, a clear indication of how irritated they were by the incident.

In the traditional business development model, if you want to achieve 10 million users, 1,000 offline outlets can't do it together. However, NewPay can sell a product to 10 million users in just one day, and it is global Exhibition business.

Compared with Internet finance, traditional finance has too many disadvantages.

“We need to move aggressively toward the Internet industry,” the president of Raymond James Bank told a forum on Wall Street.

Financial people should not hold the previous attitude that electronic payment is just a payment method and the Internet is just a means of information exchange.

Judging from the success of NewPay and Yu'E Bao, the Internet can fundamentally subvert the front-end of the traditional financial industry. Judging from the content of the strategic cooperation between NewPay and Citigroup, NewPay wants to change the risk identification model in the middle office. It is obvious that the future of the Internet will Companies will comprehensively transform the financial industry from front-end to back-end.

I think this is a good thing. It is time for the financial industry to change. For traditional financial companies, we need to have Internet thinking. We cannot regard Internetization as simply setting up a homepage and putting some company information on the homepage.

We need to further increase integration efforts. The combination of finance and the Internet will become the most important direction of Raymond James Bank in the future. "

Raymond Bank is one of the businesses of the huge Raymond James Financial Company. Raymond James is involved in retail banking, commercial banking, insurance, investment banking, private equity and other fields. Banking is one of their most important sectors.

Traditional financial institutions have been involved in the Internet. Americen's reporters really wanted to interview Zhou Xin about his views on Internet finance. At this time, Zhou Xin had returned to China. Only large media with offices in Shenhai had the opportunity to interview Zhou Xin.

The problem was that Zhou Xin didn't want to be in the public eye, so the media settled for an interview with Peter Thiel.

"Mr. Thiel, in the past month, Yu'ebao has become the hottest topic in the financial field in the United States. Some people say that it only took one day for Yu'ebao to become the wealth management product with the largest number of holders in the United States. Some people say that after NewPay entered the financial management business, it only It will take one day to surpass most financial institutions in the United States.

Before you launched Yu'e Bao, did you realize that it would be a huge success? "

Peter Thiel said: “Actually, Newman and I had discussed this product a long time ago, and we were both very confident at the time because there was a lack of similar products on the market.

The threshold for financial products of financial institutions is too high and the rules are complex, making them unfriendly to most ordinary people. And the interest rate on bank deposits is too low. If your deposit amount is not large enough, the interest rate is not as high as the handling fee.

You can borrow and return at any time, you can buy for one cent, real-time display of profits, etc. These product advantages were gradually reflected in the product design process. We were very confident at that time that it would be successful.

It’s just that Yu’e Bao’s final results were even better than we expected.

But I don’t think this is a victory for NewPay, or how powerful NewPay is, but because financial institutions did not do a good job before. They did not realize that there was such a widespread and urgent need for Amerikan. NewPay was just the first to discover this. organizations with similar needs. "

It's enough to be in the limelight. Whether it's communication in private, or communication in public forums or meetings, Peter Thiel can fully appreciate that a big tree attracts attention, and the shock brought by Yu'e Bao is too strong.

NewPay has a de facto monopoly on the electronic payment industry, and the voice of splitting NewPay has become louder recently. Peter Thiel knows that it is because NewPay’s launch of Yu’e Bao and their plan to enter the financial business have caused too many people’s uneasiness.

So when being interviewed, Peter Thiel tried to be as humble as possible and attributed his success to objective reasons.

This is an exclusive interview conducted by the New York Times. The Salzberg family, the actual controllers behind the New York Times, have a deep personal relationship with Peter Thiel, so he accepted an exclusive interview with the New York Times.

The biggest competitor of the New York Times, the controller behind the Wall Street Journal is Murdoch. Murdoch has never dealt with companies affiliated to Zhou Xin. The source can be traced back to the sale of Quora. At that time, Murdoch wanted to get involved, but Zhou Xinli did not. Ignore him.

In the early days, the Wall Street Journal liked to insinuate Zhou Xin's companies, but as Zhou Xin's achievements grew, the Wall Street Journal switched to praising them.

Peter Thiel continued: “But we never imagined it would be such a success.

We never thought that so many users would support and trust NewPay. Our original expectation was to accumulate 10 million users in one year. "

Reporter: "There is a voice in the market that NewPay's entry into the financial product field will completely change the current financial market structure. What do you think?"

This is a threat theory, often seen in Wall Street media.

Peter Thiel said: “I think NewPay is just a channel that gives users more choices that are more transparent and intuitive.

To put it bluntly, we are about to cooperate with several financial institutions to put their financial products for sale on NewPay. These institutions include Wells Fargo, Citibank, etc.

Users can see the specifics of these financial products, whether the associated underlying assets are bonds, stocks, or something else.

We are too far away from changing the pattern of the financial market for the time being. I have always believed that NewPay is just a channel, a channel with more than 50 million users. The biggest difference from other financial institutions is that we are directly connected to users through the Internet, and we can provide more real-time information to users. "

What kind of example does Peter Thiel want to give: "Before the advent of NewPay, users could log in to the bank's homepage, but after logging in, they could only see how much money was in their account.

NewPay was the first to launch the accounting function. Users can see the expenditure and income of their NewPay account, as well as details, categories, etc. Later other banks began to offer similar features.

From this example, I want to illustrate that we are industry promoters, not industry changers. "

The impact of Yu'ebao is greater than imagined, so the resistance faced by NewPay is also greater than imagined. Less than a month after the launch of Yu'ebao, it launched a financial management module and put the products of financial institutions on it. This is to reduce way of resistance.

With Zhou Xin returning to China, he has stopped interfering in the specific operations of NewPay. Peter Thiel will not ask Zhou Xin's opinion on anything except particularly important matters.

If it were Zhou Xin, he would definitely launch Huabei immediately, with one hand financial management and the other hand loans, leaving the bank with nowhere to go.

Peter Thiel will not be so radical. His idea is to cut the sausage, step by step, and wait until everyone has launched products similar to Yu'e Bao before doing other tricks.