Another Battle: How Can Big Data Be Realized?

Cheng Weiceng, founder of dripping trip

After eight years of work, I am well versed in the success of Alibaba. It is because the Internet buyers and sellers have solved the problem of asymmetric information.

Under the background that mobile Internet constantly subverts and changes vertical industries one after another, Cheng Wei is keenly aware of the pain point of travel, that is, the dilemma of passengers taking a taxi and the driver's difficulty in finding passengers.

In 2012, Cheng Weicong

The position of deputy general manager resigned and started business, created a drop taxi and later renamed dripping.

In August 18, 2016, Fortune magazine released the list of 50 companies that changed the world in 2016.

Dripping travel is the only Chinese mainland company to list in the thirtieth place this year.

In just four years, Didi has become the largest Internet travel platform in China. Cheng Wei has also grown rapidly to become the youngest Unicorn enterprise in China, CEO.

Although he left Tencent and right-hand Ali, he had nearly $4 billion in cash in his pocket. However, the uncertainty of the profit model, the competitive environment of his opponents, the new rules and policies of the Internet, and so on still puzzled him, and the first war was far from over.

Capital Road

Every drop is a lifetime.

Since 2013, the popularity of smart phones, the rise of mobile payments and the full laying of 4G networks have provided the earth with the right time and place for rapid growth.

Capital is coming.

In the beginning of June 2012, Cheng Wei started his business with 700 thousand of angel investor Wang Gang and 100 thousand of his own. In September 9th, he took a taxi.

Two months later, only ten thousand yuan was left on the company's books.

Subsequently, Cheng Wei saw 20 VC agencies, but they were all rejected.

Until December 2012, Zhu Xiaohu met with Cheng Wei on micro-blog. After half an hour's meeting, he negotiated the A round of financing. Cheng Wei got $3 million from Jinsha River venture capital.

Zhu Xiaohu said in an interview with the media that as early as 2010, local travel was very good.

Before dropping, Zhu Xiaohu contacted with Yi and shook the car and had investment intentions. But after due diligence, Zhu Xiaohu gave up.

It was because the driver's smartphone penetration rate was very low at that time, and the lack of Internet thinking by rocking and driving team also led Zhu Xiaohu to retreat.

At that time, in the southern city of Hangzhou, Chen Weixing was also hatching a project, which was a quick taxi later.

In the dripping development process, Zhu Xiaohu has been standing on one side for the applause of the people, and not too much involved in specific matters.

The only thing that strongly demands Cheng Wei to do is to force him to get the money from Tencent.

At that time, Cheng Weihe and Wang Gang were hesitant.

One reason is that Cheng Weihe and Wang Gang are both employees of the original Alibaba. The investment in Tencent will definitely have psychological barriers. What's more, they are still in the stage of B financing. They do not want to accept strategic investment too early and queue too early.

However, the situation at that time has not been hesitated. BAT, the three Internet giants, wants to get involved in the travel market.

Tencent said it must invest in a company in the field of travel.

On the one hand, the entry power of Tencent WeChat has been fully manifested. On the other hand, Ali has supported fast taxi in Hangzhou.

If the Tencent is forced to support the rolling car, this means that the dripping train in the Beijing market must be dripping and driving in Shanghai and Hangzhou will be a very hard two line operation.

On balance, introducing Tencent's strategic investment to stabilize the Beijing market is the only choice for Cheng Wei at that time.

In April 2013, the taxi driver accepted Tencent's B round investment and won the Tencent group's $15 million investment.

However, things are not going smoothly.

The C round of financing is extremely difficult. Ali personally blocked the drip financing, and even promised to share the shares listed by Ali to prevent them from investing.

Because of this period of experience, Cheng Wei repeatedly mentioned that "many drops almost died."

By the end of 2013, CITIC fund had invested in the C round of financing.

At the same time, with the help of Ali, he soon got the C round of financing.

In February 2014, the two sides started a three month subsidy war.

Until July 2014, Liu Qing's accession completely changed the financing environment.

As Liu Chuanzhi's daughter and former Goldman Sachs executive, "Liu Qing can pull all investment funds that are interested in the industry," he said in a drip.

At this point, drops of travel as an industry giant figure began to show.

Cruel battlefield under burning money mode

Behind the capital support, the way to kill the siege is simple and crude, but it is still a war of four wars.

Moreover, this war is undoubtedly the cruelest in the history of Internet.

If we kill the Beijing market and kill the bumblebee in Shanghai, it's all about fighting.

In January 2014, the launching of the subsidy war was behind WeChat and Alipay's "decisive battle".

In the two weeks, the order volume increased 50 times, and 40 servers could not sustain.

Dripping CTO Zhang Bo asked Cheng Wei for help. Cheng Wei called Ma Huateng on the same night. Ma picked up an elite technical force in the Tencent and prepared 1000 servers overnight.

In Suzhou Street's silverware building, Zhang Bo fought with the technical team and Tencent for seven days and seven nights to rewrite the server side architecture.

Fierce competition has created a taxi market in China.

The number of passenger drops increased from 20 million to 100 million, with a total market share of 98% at the peak of subsidies, which accounted for 6 of the total.

This battle also dominated the subsequent merger.

With the help of Liu Qing, at the end of 2014, 700 million dollars was trickled out.

It soon announced $800 million in financing.

No one knows how long the north and South war will last in the field of travel, and billions of yuan in the war and the market share is close. No one can destroy each other.

At this time, Baidu's joint venture is on the side.

In the drip D round of financing, Russian investment giant DST invested $60 million.

Yuri Milner, the founder of DST, said to Cheng Wei in the process of dropping drops, "if you want to live, you can only merge quickly."

Cheng Wei decided to listen to the advice of investors and set up a code named "Valentine's day project" with Liu Qing.

The negotiations lasted for 22 days.

In February 14, 2015, the announcement was quickly announced.

The market share of the dripping team dominates the merged new company, and the fast high level gradually withdraws from the team.

At the same time, the unexpected gains were that after the quick subsidy war was finished, the other more than 30 rivals also disappeared.

Fast, backed by Alibaba and

The two giants occupy most of the market share and have the ability to face the best battle.

At that time, the estimated value of the new product was $6 billion, while the new competitor was valued at $50 billion.

Behind the excellent step is Cheng Wei Travis, the equally aggressive founder.

The price cut policy in China is very decisive, with 30% of the price cut and the number of users increasing rapidly.

In the important juncture of integration and integration, the first step is to make a big move.

Drops quickly set up "Wolf Totem" group on-line express business response.

After more than a year in China, the company has lost more than 2 billion US dollars in China.

With the help of common investors, didi and gifted step by step with China to stop burning money, and announced the merger. The combined valuation reached up to US $35 billion.

They have common investors: BlackRock, high alpine capital, Tiger Fund and China Life Insurance.

Cheng Wei, the founder of drip, will join the global board of directors, and TK, the founder of the company, will join the drip board.

Follow the big trend -- share the economy

Although the drop in profit model and talent reserves have been criticized by other countries, the drop in market dominance is hard to shake.

Before the advent of the net car, the taxi industry is a monopoly industry where oil and salt do not enter.

How can a barrel like industry be easily rebuilt?

At the beginning of the drip, there is one thing that makes Cheng Wei very puzzling. If only professional drivers, no matter how to adjust, they will not be able to get a car in the rush hour. Until one time, Cheng Wei visited professor Zhou Qiren of Peking University.

Zhou Qiren said that this is a typical economic problem, called "the economics of tidal demand".

Similar problems include Spring Festival travel and golden week tourism. Like tides, there is a wave of user demand, and there will be bottlenecks in the rush hour supply.

Zhou Qiren offered advice: the only solution is to "share the economy", integrate the idle resources of the whole society, and adjust the supply naturally with the tide of the market.

Then a lot of part-time drivers began to be introduced.

Now, from the United States to China, the world is exploring the boom of shared economy.

The shared economy has brought tremendous changes to individuals and businesses. The concept of sharing is put forward to solve the biggest crisis of mankind.

In traditional business logic, the solution to the relationship between supply and demand depends mainly on the continuous improvement of productivity.

However, after the third industrial revolution, especially in the past twenty or thirty years, the traditional way of relying on production to solve the contradiction between supply and demand has gradually failed, because the main problem facing people is not the lack of capacity, but the uneven distribution of resources.

But through everyone's share, the surplus capacity can be maximally balanced so as to achieve new value.

The reason why Dixie was chosen as the 50 company to change the world in 2016, the core comment of Fortune magazine is: China's industry competition Unicorn helps resist the pollution crisis.

Motor vehicle emissions account for 1/3 of China's dangerous smog.

According to the drop estimation, because of their business of carpool and wind cars, they reduced their domestic vehicle trips 1 million times a day, saving 500 million liters of gasoline and reducing 13 million 550 thousand tons of carbon emissions last year, which is equivalent to the ecological compensation amount of 1 billion 130 million kinds of trees.

The historical origin of the birth of the shared economy is bound to have an extraordinary future.

This is a new economic mode to adapt to the development of the times, and will also be one of the most important economic models in the future.

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The second war against big data

It is shameful to talk only in business.

No one denies the advent of the data revolution, especially in the Internet industry.

Ma Yun regards big data as a strategic direction, and Robin Li uses "box computing" to plan for the future. In the past two years, a lot of capital is keen to invest in some new data tools companies.

The essence of dripping is an intelligent system for precise matching of travel data, an intelligent big data engine for pportation, which is driven by big data and deep learning.

Dripping has become the fastest growing Internet Co in China and even the world. It occupies more than 88% of China's net car market and more than 99% of the net share of taxi market share.

More than 300 million users, more than 14 million drivers, orders more than 13 million per day.

The drop platform generates more than 50TB data per day (equivalent to 50 thousand movies) and more than 9 billion times of path planning.

On the one hand, the huge amount of orders reflects the ability to compute big data in a big way. For example, how to push information to drivers who are more suitable for the region and who get priority orders need to rely on big data support. On the other hand, based on such a large amount of data, the maximum amount of data mining can be carried out.

Here, I want to give an example, the American video website Netflix is familiar with the domestic audience because of its investment in making the popular TV series "card house". Its hot element is based on the analysis of the big data of 29 million users' viewing habits, and is also sought after by the Internet practitioners.

No matter whether this is speculation or not, Netflix launched the million dollar award in 2006. Whoever is best able to optimize its recommendation algorithm will receive a reward of $1 million.

In 2009, the prize was won by a team of 7 people.

According to this algorithm, many members of the popular movie have entered the list of waiting lists after completing the personal list and recommending the system.

Considering the cost of movie resources, the cost of popular movies is generally higher. If Netflix company can increase the proportion of films in the movie rental, it will naturally enhance its profitability.

Subsequently, Netflix immediately launched second million dollar reward "algorithm".

So did Didi.

In May this year, a drop Di-Tech algorithm competition was held. A reward of $100 thousand was awarded. Artificial intelligence and machine learning were used to solve the most challenging supply and demand forecast problems in the travel field.

In a report from National School of Administration in Beijing, Cheng Wei predicted that the second half of the Internet competition must be artificial intelligence.

The core of AI is algorithm, large-scale cloud computing and precipitation of massive data.

The data that occupy most of the share of the travel market has already constituted a huge data gold mine, and drops in the layout of AI.

In May 2015, "machine learning academy" was set up, including machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence, data mining, optimization theory, distributed computing and so on.

Although big data has not yet dug up its direct liquidity, in the future, data will become the most valuable asset and will be swagger into the balance sheet.

Of course, the significance of travel big data is not only for companies and users, but also significant in improving traffic congestion, promoting green environmental protection, and even formulating traffic strategies.

Starting from the line, we gradually solve the problem of eating and housing. The scale of these consumer markets is huge and the space for optimization is huge.

And the larger space is to open these data to enable people with ideas to dig out these data, creating greater value.

Based on this data platform, it is possible to form an entrepreneurial platform.

For the drop trip, the subsidy war in the Internet travel field is just the first war it encountered. After harvesting a large number of users, how to dig out the travel data and achieve commercial realisation is the second more important war.

The first war is not over yet, and the second wars have begun.