Hu Maohua, CEO of Duojiang: Entrepreneurship makes me feel more secure

According to Gartner (NYSE: IT and ITB), the global generalized cloud service market reached more than $130 billion in 2013, with an annual growth rate of 18%, and is expected to reach $244.2 billion in 2017, and will continue to maintain a growth rate of more than 15% in the next few years. From the perspective of the regional distribution of the global cloud service market, the United States accounts for more than 50%, the share of Western Europe and Japan is slowly declining, and the share of China and other emerging economies is rising rapidly.

In China, due to policy support and rising demand for related services by enterprises, the cloud industry has shown strong vitality. Dokang, an emerging cloud service provider in China, has just received a 10 million angel round of investment led by IDG and followed by Geek Gang (this is the first official official disclosure of financing news).South Seven Roads interviewed Hu Maohua, co-founder & CEO of Multi-Backup, how did he enter the cloud service field to start a business after serving as an executive in many large companies? What is the most difficult problem in starting a business? How can multiple backups survive and thrive in the space of Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud giants?

I was first at Tencent, the employee number was 116, and I was the director until I left, and I was one of the earliest employees to leave Tencent. In a large company like Tencent, from No. 116 to 10,000 people, I found that the work I was doing was getting more and more detailed, narrower, and slower and slower, and then after reaching the middle management, I found that you were just an executor and a microphone.

When I came out of Tencent, I was both excited and scared, Tencent's working environment was still relatively simple, and after I came out, I found that the competition was fierce, and everything had to be done from scratch. Later, he went to Shanda and worked as CTO in an independent subsidiary of Shanda Investment. Later, he went to store No. 1 as vice president, responsible for technology. I have always worked for a large domestic Internet company with more than 10,000 people.

After changing several companies, I found that the larger the company, the more detailed the division of labor, and the sense of personal existence and achievement was blurred and reduced; The larger the enterprise, the heavier the system, the longer the process, the efficiency is reduced, the effective working time of individuals is getting shorter and shorter, and the growth is getting slower and slower, especially managers, who meet all day long to discuss ungrounded strategies, communication, reporting, performance, budgets, etc., and there are also entrepreneurial ideas in the middle, but they have not been put into action. After working in a large company for a long time, it is easy to find that your experience has touched the ceiling. Although ability and experience can already solve some things, find yourself unable to make decisions because there are bigger bosses above. At the same time, in the whole company, due to the huge system, there are many interests that need to be balanced, and it will gradually be found that it is difficult to do something.

When I first arrived at the first store, I entered a completely new field, and since it was unfamiliar to me at the time, there was a lot of room to learn, so I was full of energy at that stage. However, it soon became discovered that when a person has done something well and done it smoothly, it is difficult to make a new breakthrough. I find myself working more than a dozen hours a day, but less than an hour of effective work. In large Internet companies, once the work is done and there are traces to follow, time will become more free. When you are idle and unable to exert your strength, you are extremely insecure and will become very confused.

At present, in addition to me, there are also founder & CTO Chen Yuanqiang, co-founder & CMO Li Shuo, Chen Yuanqiang and my colleagues from 5 companies, he is more technical and I am more management, which is a good combination in itself, when he left Tencent, under my encouragement, he went to Shanghai to work, moved the whole family over, and later he returned to Shenzhen to start a business, and made more backups. In the meantime, he kept in touch with me, hoping to start a business with him.

Several times he called me the first night to tell me about the project and the company, and the next day, he bought a plane ticket and flew to Shanghai, saying that he was downstairs in my house and we would come out to talk again. At my age, my family is stable, my children are studying, and I have settled in Shanghai. In the end, I was moved by his enthusiasm, passion and sincerity in starting a business, and did this ideological work for my family and myself. In this way, we wrote a business plan and went to find investment, and our whole process of finding investment was still very smooth.

Li Shuo is my classmate, he has been working at Microsoft for more than ten years, so he was very interested in my entrepreneurship at that time, but his family is in Changsha, I think he can just complement our team at that time, two are doing the Internet, one is doing traditional IT, which is a natural combination of doing B2B, so I invited him to join the team. But he was in the same situation as I was at the time, and it was difficult to make this decision, because the whole family was in Changsha.

Since I also had this mental journey, I could understand it very well, so I went to Changsha to communicate with him, and kept calling him in the middle, just like Chen Yuanqiang was looking for me, I needed to impress him with sincerity. Finally, after more than two months, he agreed. Later, when he had dinner with me, he told me that what really moved me was not what conditions you gave me, but your words that moved me at that time. I told him on the phone that we were all almost forty years old and classmates and friends. If we don't work together, we may never have the opportunity to work together again in this life, just for this one, you have to try it for a while.

Because he has been dealing with enterprises before, especially in the B2B market, especially in the business expansion, I suddenly feel that I have reduced a lot of pressure. Our team also has some core personnel from Shanda, Xunlei, and Sohu, who are basically acquaintances. On the whole, our team, except for our three core founders, is basically reliable. Therefore, finding a partner in entrepreneurship is comparable to finding a life partner, and to some extent it may be more difficult than finding a suitable wife.

Many people have asked us how to compete and develop with more backups in the cloud service sector. First of all, the ecological chain of the cloud platform is long enough, in a short period of time, they have not yet had time and will not spend the main energy on doing this edge business, it is not the most core, such as Tencent has not been on the storage object, its entire billing and so on have not been perfected, and the entire improvement is estimated to take two or three years. For large companies, they need some startups that are more specialized in niche fields to supplement the thickness of their service system and strengthen their service capabilities, because they focus on doing ecological chains.

At present, all IDCs are also turning to the direction of cloud platforms, the total number of cloud platforms in China and abroad is no less than 100, and there are nearly 70,000 or 80,000 IDC developers in China. At the same time, we are making a neutral platform, for the user he can choose freely, if Alibaba Cloud does this service, then the user can only use Alibaba Cloud. But for the Internet, users should be given more choices, such as users who want to make backups on another cloud platform to make their data more secure. At this time, a third-party company that is not a cloud platform or IDC does this to do this, so that it can be more valuable.

Just like doing e-commerce, a merchant settled in Tmall, settled in JD.com, and settled in Store 1, and it is impossible for Tmall to take the initiative to open up with other platforms such as JD.com, and users only need to upload goods once, and all platforms will be solved. At the same time, users can also easily move their products from platform A to platform B, which is basically impossible. Similarly, Alibaba Cloud cannot take the initiative to open up with other cloud platforms such as Tencent Cloud, which are inherently competitive, so there must be a third-party company to help them do this connection and solve the pain points of users. We have always been open, and we are currently the first to do this business in China. Our business has grown rapidly, and we currently have nearly 70,000 enterprise users.

Now there are quite a lot of overseas companies doing this, but the division of labor is very fine, such as there are special storage and cloud gateways, the so-called cloud gateway, is to connect all cloud platforms, to the upper and lower cloud platforms and access this piece, to provide a special cloud gateway, users to store this channel. At present, foreign countries are very subdivided, such as doing many kinds of backups, backing up gateways, backing up enterprise application systems, backing up virtual machines, backing up mobile office equipment and even computer desktops. Some of these companies have developed independently, and some have been acquired by giants to make up for the shortcomings of their business, because they play the Internet and develop to cloud platforms, but they have always lagged behind.

We don't have to worry about BAT to make a cloud platform at all, in the future, we may become the world's largest virtual cloud platform, for example, now we have more than 40 nodes in the world, Alibaba Cloud only has 5 nodes in the world, it always has some places that cannot be covered, we will choose the best quality nodes of the global cloud platform to better cover users, and we can do a lot of things on this in the later stage. If a company is looking for a CDN (Content Delivery Network), it will naturally want to cover a wider area, bring the service closer to users, do it faster, and have a better experience. So in general, this direction and this market are big enough, and next year our goal must become an inseparable part of the cloud platform ecological chain.