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March 2002 1 71day is a milestone in the history of e-commerce development in China. On this day, Pinduoduo officially surpassed the giant Ali to become the largest e-commerce platform in China, only five years after the establishment of Pinduoduo.

Also on this day, Huang Zheng announced that he would resign as the chairman of Pinduoduo, hand over the position to the current CEO Chen Lei, and completely "let go" the company he founded.

Looking back now, when Huang Zheng announced his retirement as CEO on July 1 last year, it seemed to be a preview of his "retirement" plan. Since then, he began to consciously "take a back seat" in foreign activities, so that he focused more on "Pinduoduo CEO Chen Lei".

The media described Huang Zheng's choice as "rushing back", but the motivation behind it is worth pondering. Perhaps, as Huang Zheng himself said, he wants to jump out of the present and "touch the stone in 10 years", or perhaps, it is just that Pinduoduo in Huang Zheng has reached an insurmountable bottleneck.

Huang Zheng graduated from Zhejiang University in 2002, obtained a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin in 2004, and then joined Microsoft and Google. In 2007, he left Google to start a business, and successively founded an e-commerce agency company and a game company, and founded Pinduoduo on 20 15.

Huang Zheng's impression to the outside world has always been low-key. When Pinduoduo was in the US IPO, Huang Zheng was absent, and even found a user in Pinduoduo to ring the bell. Huang Zheng will write some thoughts on his official WeChat account before. In one of his articles, he talked about his understanding of "duty":

In an interview with Caijing, Huang Zheng called himself an "atypical CEO". He only does what he is good at, such as exporting cultural values and formulating strategic directions. He never knows how to delegate what he is not good at.

He admits that he is far less clever than most people, and to keep smart people, in addition to the same goal, there are also corresponding incentives. In the end, Huang Zheng chose to establish a partner mechanism similar to Alibaba.

Last year, when Huang Zheng resigned as CEO, 7.74% of his shares, about $8 billion, were transferred to Pinduoduo's partner collective. As a result, Huang Zheng's net worth decreased by $65.438+04.289 billion (about RMB 65.438+00.095 billion), giving up his position as the second richest man in China.

As far as Huang Zheng's personality is concerned, this may be the reason why he is willing to compromise. In recent years, Huang Zheng rarely appears in public, and the shareholder letter is the most commonly used medium for him to communicate with the outside world. Almost every shareholder letter is full of myths about grand philosophical themes such as time.

Like many founders, after great success in their careers, they often enter a more "retired" field. In an interview, someone asked me what I want to do if I don't want to be Pinduoduo. He replied that he wanted to be a scientific researcher: "I think non-profit and wholehearted scientific research will make more contributions to mankind."

This time, he talked about his personal plan in the shareholder letter. Huang Zheng said that he wanted to do some research in the fields of food science and life science in order to "improve the added value of agricultural products in quality" and "greatly improve the health level in quality".

Huang Zheng doesn't seem interested in success in the popular sense. His ambition is to enhance the value of Pinduoduo and build a more influential company. He mentioned an advertisement many times:

This is Think Different from Apple, which was an advertisement that Jobs made when Apple came back. Obviously, Huang Zheng also wants to make something different. He stressed: "We will invest more firmly in the future and strive to build a new world in front of us. In this new world, our beautiful journey has just begun. "

The latest financial report shows that all the data of Pinduoduo in 2020 are improving. The annual revenue increased by 97% to 59,495,438+0.9 billion yuan, and the annual turnover (GMV)1667.6 billion yuan, up by 66% year-on-year.

In addition, the loss data narrowed sharply, and the annual net loss was 2.965 billion yuan, compared with 4.257 billion yuan in the same period of 20 19. But beyond the data, there is still no reliable antidote to Pinduoduo's "chronic diseases".

Marketing and customer acquisition are two major obstacles in Pinduoduo's profitability.

At present, Pinduoduo's core strategy is still huge subsidies, trying to seize the territory that has not been eroded by the giants. Although we have long been aware of the "double-edged sword" effect of subsidies, Pinduoduo is still afraid to give up the subsidy model under the mode of pursuing growth.

But the problem is that the quality and loyalty of new users brought by this subsidy are not reliable. After acquiring customers, we still have to invest a lot of money to maintain the activity of existing users. Not only the marketing cost is high, but also the user retention cost is high.

On the other hand, successive negative events also exposed the management dilemma of Pinduoduo in the process of rapid expansion. Big data killing, forcing "two choices", infringing on user privacy, monopolizing price increases, and unfair price competition in community group buying have been severely punished ... In the past year, many products have been frequently recruited in supervision. In the subsequent public opinion fermentation of sudden death of employees, all kinds of management disorder became the target of public criticism.

The rapid expansion of Pinduoduo, constant pressure from competitors, and changes in the overall environment are also prompting Pinduoduo to cope with this change with a better organizational structure. For "conscientious" Huang Zheng, it may be time to break the bottleneck.

Dr. Chen Lei, a newly recruited computer undergraduate from Tsinghua and a doctor from Madison, Wisconsin, is also the co-founder of Pinduoduo. Chen Lei does not reject propaganda. Often attend various industry conferences and activities, and give speeches on stage. But after more than half a year as CEO of Pinduoduo, he still lacks a clear image.

In the hands of Chen Lei, there are still many problems to be solved in Pinduoduo, such as how to keep the "duty" in the high-speed growth, how to keep the users after the "10 billion subsidy", how to keep the growth at the end of the demographic dividend, and how to find a new growth path for Pinduoduo.