America's Road to Fame

Chapter 154 Shock and Reddit
"Mimi, look quickly, is William Chen in this report the one we saw at the Huayi Company's celebration banquet last time?"

At this time, Yang Mi was drinking afternoon tea with Tang Yan and Liu Shishi, only to see Tang Yan was playing with her mobile phone, and she suddenly yelled at them, which startled Yang Mi.

"What report?" Sitting next to Tang Yan, Liu Shishi leaned his head over and read the report on her mobile phone screen.

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

"40 billion U.S. dollars, my God, how much is it! Convert it into Chinese currency... hey, how much is it?"

Tang Yan murmured in shock.

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

Liu Shishi also felt greatly shocked at this time. She met William Chen at the celebration banquet of Huayi Company before. At that time, she just thought that the other party was too handsome. There is no concept.But now it is revealed from this report that Ali's shares were purchased for 40 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 coming here. Now seeing the appearance of the two girlfriends who have never seen the world, she couldn't help teasing: "Look at you, don't you?" I wish I could immediately bow down under his trousers."

She completely forgot that when she knew about this before, she was so shocked that she was speechless, and in the end she only said: "Damn..."

At that time, she suddenly thought that when she met William Chen on the flight from Hangzhou to Yanjing that day, the other party said that it was 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 puffed her chest out, and said to Yang Mi arrogantly: "William is so handsome, so rich, and single, alas, it just fits some of my fantasies."

"Whose William, I don't know if it's yours." Liu Shishi also said jokingly.

"Come on, you two, looking at your pair of A's, it must be useless." They usually play around like this, Yang Mi looked at the two of them with disgust and said.

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

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

But this scene also reminded her, now it seems that once this report comes out, there are not many women who are staring at William Chen, and she has to hold on to this thigh.

And at this time, she is not the only female star who has the same idea as her. In the other two crews, Chen Zihan and Zhang Yuqi were shocked by the news and secretly made a decision .

……

After completing the acquisition of Ali shares held by Yahoo, Nelson has a new task, which is to go to Condé Nast Publishing Group to acquire a website in their hands that is not very good at present-Reddit.

After Reddit went live, it has been criticized, and most importantly, their initial team has only four people, two founders and two employees.

This is a website similar to "Tieba", which gives users great freedom to post content and allow others to 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, each of the three members of the team encountered a lot of trouble. Alexis' girlfriend was seriously ill, and his mother was also admitted to the hospital due to illness, and continued to pay for treatment; one employee had to be busy with school; Employees have psychological problems.

So in this case, they think that if this continues, Reddit will eventually collapse, so on Halloween in 2006, they sold Reddit, and Condé Nast Publishing Group bought the site for less than $2000 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.

Therefore, Nelson's other task is to contact the two people. William Chen wants to meet with them after the acquisition.The reason for making this decision is that William Chen knows that the main reason for the poor development of Reddit is that the parent company has imposed 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, found funds, bought back the company, and brought it into the process of rapid development. Therefore, in the end, Reddit still depends on them to continue to lead Well, William Chen didn't want to hand over this company to others, and it would fail to develop in the end.

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

Especially HOLA, the development situation is very good.The characteristic of Internet projects is that it is very important to seize the opportunity. Once users form a habit of using this software, the latecomers will have to redouble their efforts if they want to catch up.

Especially chat software such as HOLA, when the user's relationship network has been fixed in it, it has a very strong moat.

After such a long period of observation, Chen William is still very satisfied with David Jones' performance, so this time, he decided to appoint him as the CEO of HOLA Technology, and injected another 2000 million US dollars into the company to continue research and development.

Nielsen's team negotiated very well with Condé Nast Publishing Group. In the past few years after the acquisition of Reddit, the development of this website has not been satisfactory. Therefore, from the perspective of Condé Nast Publishing Group, this is an unsuccessful acquisition.

And this group is not having a good time in the subprime mortgage crisis, so now someone wants to acquire Reddit, they are still very happy, and after Nelson made a bid of 5000 million US dollars according to William Chen's opinion, the other party is very happy. He happily agreed to the deal.

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

Nelson also contacted the two founders of Reddit, Alexis and Steve, who came to Silicon Valley and met with William Chen.

After Chen William 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; Still decided to leave.

Since this was the case, William Chen was no longer forcing the other party. After telling him that the company would always welcome him back, he sent Steve away.

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

The first one 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 a reason for them to relax their supervision, especially William Chen found shocking pictures in some underage sections, these contents, no matter which country they are in , will be banned, so William Chen hopes that Reddit can cooperate with his other company, Twitter, to improve the content review 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 a profit immediately, but this aspect 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, so as to attract advertisers.

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

To put it bluntly, it is similar to the personalized recommendation algorithm of Jinri Toutiao in the former Huaguo, but in fact, this algorithm has been used earlier in Netflix. For this reason, Netflix has held an algorithm competition 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, and the mobile Internet will become more and more popular in the future. Reddit needs to keep up with the pace of the times.

In the end, William Chen will continue to inject 1 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 for the development of Reddit, and he could not wait to invest in the improvement of the website immediately.

"Alexis, there is something I've been meaning to say for a long time. I heard that you and Steve have been good friends since college, but I just felt that there seems to be a deep gap between the two of you. I know, people Everything will change, but some friendships are precious, and some of the knots in them may not be as difficult to solve as imagined."

In the end, William Chen thought for a while, and said so to Alexis.

"Have you seen it too, Mr. William, actually I don't know why we have become like this, it may be that we have already started to accumulate conflicts when Reddit was sold, but it is true that there are some conflicts that cannot be resolved. It doesn’t seem to be true. I remember that on the second day of Reddit’s sale, Steve packed his luggage quietly and returned to San Francisco to continue working; while I went back to my hometown to rest for a while. Since then, we The two seem to drift away, gradually stop talking, and even discussions on Reddit have disappeared."

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

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(End of this chapter)