A Letter to Entrepreneurs from Tencent Pony Ma
Tencent Partner Conference was convened in Beijing today which marks that now it’s been two years since Tencent open platform was launched. Pony Ma, co-founder and CEO of the company, wrote a letter to all the entrepreneurs posted on Tencent Weibo last night. Below are some points in his article worth our attention.
The individual developers now accounts for 70% of the third-party partners on the Tencent open platform and the amount of small and medium sized enterprises (SME) has exceeded 96%. Those entrepreneurial teams of “small is beautiful” (put forward by Jack Ma on APEC in 2009) provide service for 300 million users.
Last year, Tencent underwent structural readjustment including cannibalizing into small teams and fully embracing the mobile Internet. Meanwhile, in order to meet users’ needs, we kept developing the high quality product and encouraging more diverse applications to enrich the platforms. We are making every effort to enhance the user experience with more valuable integrated services and help SMEs to regain entrepreneurships and startup mojo.
Tencent QQ blazed a new trail to a trinity of instant messenger, social media and communication platform on PC Internet which also was a breakthrough based upon Asian Internet enterprises into the global Internet industry. On Mobile Internet, Tencent WeChat allows users to create a closed “circle of friends”, setting up a new model of all-in-one mobile messaging app in the world. And we believed that in the future people could get all the service they need on the Internet merely through a QR code scanning or user ID.
Some media workers and entrepreneurial peers once thought it is the existing of large enterprises such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba that hindered the development of small enterprises by increasing the risks and costs of startup business. Admittedly, it is not easy to start a new business in this realm for those who have very limited resources on various aspects such as products distribution, funds, talent, managements, branding and marketing. Therefore, for those small enterprises, competing with large firms in such sticky situations could be harder than ever. But fortunately, we’re meeting with the open platforms which offer us zero-risk and no-cost opportunities for startup businesses by reducing the threshold. Thus, with more advantages and resources, the open platform could help entrepreneurs achieve success easier.
Mobile Internet with its utter openness has evolved into a new business model and wins the most attention in the world of 2013. Offline business owners, individuals, and grass roots are becoming the content publishers and service providers through WeChat Public Platform and QQ Life Service Platform. A booming era for startups is coming forth.
We have always valued the user experience since we have our first product manager. Moreover, we have been not only improving the work performance of platform for startups and developers, but also maintaining a safe and healthy environment of applications. Meanwhile, we are continuously paying attention to the whole industry chain and Internet ecology of startup enterprises. For example, we have been improving the value-added service of our platform and building up a social media advertizing model on the social networking platforms. The open platform could accordingly lead to equilibrium of interests between users, startups and platform owners by full access management and coordination.