Wu Shuang: Treasures may be hidden in places that no one pays attention to丨Character Interview

foreword

Wu Shuang is the head of the interactive application innovation department of Shengwang. Currently, he is mainly responsible for the related business of Shengwang interactive whiteboard. He founded the Netless interactive whiteboard company, which was merged into Shengwang at the end of 2020.

In the chat with Wu Shuang, he mentioned that products suitable for technology entrepreneurship have a common feature - "the entry point is small, and the scope of development is very large ", and the interactive whiteboard is in everyone's perception, it is a seemingly small And there seems to be no technical threshold in the field.

But why can Miro in the field achieve a valuation of tens of billions of dollars by relying on the interactive whiteboard? With industry understanding and a round of in-depth market research, Wu Shuang's "poor cognition" of interactive whiteboards allowed Wu Shuang to seize an opportunity and an "endless trouble" of accidental hits...

This article is an exclusive interview with the developers of Shengwang. The content is organized according to the content of the conversation with Wu Shuang. The opinions in the article only represent individuals .

Prospects :

• The products of technological entrepreneurship have a characteristic: "The entry point is small, and the expansion area is large."
• If it is believed that remote work and learning will become more common in the future, then the indispensable interactive whiteboard in this scene will surely have ample opportunities for development.
• We have cooperated for many years, and there is no chicken feather in one place. We can also trust each other and cooperate back-to-back, which I feel very proud of.
• The emergence of open source projects is equivalent to the fact that the ground is full of martial arts secrets, no need to rob, everyone has a share.

01 Please introduce yourself with a keyword

It is mentioned that entrepreneurs now have several fixed character labels and keywords, such as having dreams, ambitions, hard work, and persistence. These are of course very important factors and characteristics, but behind these characteristics, what are the specific reasons for the success of entrepreneurs, most people can't tell.

If I had to introduce myself with one key word, I would choose honesty. I think candor is the foundation of doing things, and you should be honest with others or with yourself .

Taking the collaboration within our team as an example, we will take comprehensive consideration of the good development of the project. Is it just because of luck? Are there any methodologies that can be generalized? If the project is not well developed, it will not forcefully explain or deliberately beautify the results. It is the goal of seeking truth from facts as the criterion to analyze problems and provide solutions.

It was the same when I started my own business. Whether it’s meeting clients or investors, I will talk about the extent of my project, and I won’t engage in “PPT entrepreneurship”.

02 Why did you choose to start a business at that time? What preparations did you do before starting a business?

There are two reasons for choosing to start a business. On the one hand, you find something you want to do, and you feel uncomfortable if you don’t try it. On the other hand, believing that what you want to do can bring benefits and provide value to society.

As for preparation, I didn't actually do a thorough analysis before starting a business, and most of it depended on courage and vision.

However, before starting the business, we calculated an account, and the money in hand was enough for our team and project to last for 10 months. Fortunately, when the money was running out, we found the source of living water, which allowed us to successfully pass the stage of only going out and no entry, and persisted all the way until the project improved.

Looking back now, the decision to start a business was a bit reckless, but we actually had a serious logical judgment in terms of decision-making.

Products suitable for technological entrepreneurship have a characteristic: "the entry point is small, and the expansion area is large" . In everyone's perception, the interactive whiteboard is a small track, and it seems to be very simple and has no technical threshold. But why can Miro achieve a valuation of tens of billions of dollars by relying on the interactive whiteboard? That said, there is still a lot going on here.

The reason why we choose this direction to start a business is because we have the industry and technical background in this area, and we understand more possibilities and market demands of interactive whiteboards. If we do it, there is a high probability of success; on the other hand, Seeing the "poor cognition" about interactive whiteboards, there may be treasures hidden in places that no one pays attention to.

03 Introduce what is an interactive whiteboard, and what do you think is the "poor cognition"?

The essence of the interactive whiteboard is a better auxiliary expression tool that we need when we work and study online. At the beginning, the interactive whiteboard is often just a panel that can interactively draw and write. As it continues to develop, it becomes more and more like an online operating system. With the blessing of different abilities, it begins to play a role in various subdivided fields. .

For example, for online education, remote conferences, interactive games and other scenarios, the interactive functions provided by the interactive whiteboard are required, but the specific capabilities required are different. In this way, the interactive plug-in ecosystem will develop more vigorously.

After understanding this, we can understand why Miro has achieved a valuation of tens of billions of dollars, and understand what we just said about "poor cognition".

Regarding the cognitive difference, in fact, it corresponds to the entry point and the expansion surface:

• small entry point

When I was just working on an interactive whiteboard product, people around me would comment on "small whiteboards with low ceilings" when they saw them. All the big manufacturers didn't bother to make this kind of product at first, which also gave us a good opportunity to develop vulgarity. Looking at it now, the big RTC-related manufacturers already have an interactive whiteboard product.

• wide open area

The interactive whiteboard is just a natural carrier of the interactive engine. With the development of the industry, more and more market demands will gradually emerge. Whiteboards are a very integral part. If we believe that remote work and learning will become more common in the future, the interactive whiteboard that is indispensable in this scene must have ample opportunity to develop.

04 Introduce your project, I feel that the names of several products are very interesting

The project I started at the time was called Netless, and the name was inspired by Serveless. Serveless means that everyone does not need to care about the operation and maintenance service, and the service is all handled by the designer; Netless's vision is to make a service for interactive applications, and we, as a service designer, will handle all the network layers.

Since the concept of Netless is relatively abstract and created by ourselves, it is difficult for developers to use this setting in the initial stage, so we chose the interactive whiteboard scene as the first official interactive application. The application of the interactive whiteboard scene can not only show the power of our interactive engine, but also meet the needs of the teaching field.

Later, due to the accumulation of many customers in the teaching field, the interactive whiteboard was taken as the main direction. Looking back, this startup was indeed a part of thinking ahead for me, as well as a part of making mistakes.

Later, with the development of the business, in order to simplify the steps for customers to access the whiteboard, we made a quick access SDK Fastboard, whose name was inspired by Tianjin Rap - Allegro. As the name suggests, Fastboard emphasizes simple and fast access, which can basically be accessed by filling in the configuration file declaration.

Last year, in order to make it easier to use our own products to eat our own dog food, we tossed out an open source online classroom Flat. After the release, the effect was not bad. So far, we have harvested nearly 4,000 Stars.

05 Do you consider yourself an excellent entrepreneur?

In terms of objective results, I am not even one star away from being an excellent entrepreneur. But from my own point of view, I think I can do it well. I can explain this "fairly okay" in two levels:

From the point of view of what we do: our project has produced a certain social value, and is effectively solving the problems of online education and remote collaboration for many colleges and universities, educational institutions and enterprises, and from the feedback of users, our products are in the industry. is more prominent.

In terms of internal cooperation and management: I have lived up to my trust in partners and investors, and I have been frank and solid to realize the project step by step according to the vision.

We have cooperated for many years, and there is no chicken feather in one place. We can also trust each other and cooperate back-to-back, which I feel very proud of.

06 Looking back on the entire entrepreneurial experience, which moment is the most impressive?

With the outbreak of the epidemic in early 2020, our interactive whiteboard products suddenly flooded into a large number of usage scenarios and users. Before we had time to enjoy the sense of accomplishment that our dosage brought us, we were overwhelmed by business pressure. Mainly, students, teachers, and schools rely on our products to be used in class. Even if our products are unstable for a short period of time, users will feel anxious, and our team members will feel anxious.

There was a time when I was envious of all jobs except my own, and it was better to work hard to deliver food or drive an online car hailing than to fidget 24 hours a day . But when we survived this darkest moment, we also experienced a huge improvement in the team's engineering capabilities. The business is recognized by users, which also fills the heart with a sense of accomplishment.

Of course, this also taught me a lesson - when faced with an engineering challenge, you must have the courage to face and solve the problem. Whoever digests these coping experiences will be the future technical master.

In addition, engineering design should also be prepared for a rainy day. The mistake we make is to think about optimizing in the future when designing, and refactoring is a "happy trouble" even if the usage is too much. In fact, when the challenge comes, there are only endless troubles, and there is no happiness.

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Aside from being an entrepreneur, Wu Shuang is also a developer who is keen on open source and technology culture. He thinks he is "one of the worst" in the team, but to evaluate himself from another perspective, he feels "not bad". Regarding open source, he said that there are actually "thresholds", but don't be too "cautious"...

01 What do you think is the threshold for developers? What makes a good developer?

I think a person who can solve problems in work or life by programming is a qualified developer. Whether it is excellent or not, I have summed up the judgment criteria in two aspects:

First: objectively have a relatively high technical level and contribute to the development of technology;

Second: subjectively can continue to learn, it is best to continue to output to help the latecomers improve their level.

The technical culture and open source spirit of developers are similar in some aspects, and the bottom layer should be extremely open.

02 Do you think you are an excellent developer?

In terms of technical level, it is definitely not, and it can even be said that the developer with the most technical level in the team is not one of them. If I can find an objective reason, it is that after starting a business, I need my product planning ability and communication ability more than the technical ability team, hahahahaha.

Still, I keep myself in the habit of coding regularly and keeping up with technological developments to keep myself tech-savvy. I'm also "not bad" in terms of continuous learning. And I will also lead the team to do some open source things and make some community contributions to make everyone feel more fulfilled.

03 As a developer who is keen on open source, what is open source in your eyes? What are the characteristics?

After thinking about it, let’s talk about three points haha:

First, open source is the least expensive but most valuable repository for developers to acquire . There are excellent open source projects in various fields and directions on various open source code platforms. The most important thing is that there is basically no threshold for obtaining these precious materials, which is great. By reading the code of these high-quality projects, you can understand the way of thinking and technology use of top developers.

Second, open source can lower the threshold for developers to participate in projects . The natural threshold for becoming a core developer of an open source project is very high. But for those who want to participate in open source, the threshold for participation is very low. As long as you want to contribute to the project, even if you change the readme, doing document translation is one of the ways, and then doing plug-ins, mentioning bugfixes in some code, etc., step by step to the core area.

Third, open source projects will focus more on long-term development and the elegance of their internal structures . After all, no one wants to be accused of poor or problematic coding by the community or other developers. In traditional projects, it is inevitable to write some shit mountain in order to catch up with the launch, but all the codes of open source projects are public. Even if you want to release the follow-up iteration first, you will keep the version before the iteration in the historical record. If you don't want to leave a dark history, then you must avoid code that you can't even see.

All in all, the open source world is full of martial arts cheats, and there is no need to rob them, everyone has a share. And most importantly, as long as you have the will, you can also contribute your own martial arts secrets to the world one day through the improvement of your personal abilities.

Interview Notes

Before the official interview, I took a peek at Shuangge's public listening records on Xiao Universe, and found that two of the three episodes he listened to were related to " wealth and freedom ". Although he explained that it was because he was more concerned about the anchors of the two episodes rather than the topic, I don't believe it anyway (ahhhh)

So at the end of the interview, I also discussed with him my understanding of this issue. Wu Shuang said that if you want to be free, you really need to reach a basic amount of wealth to eliminate survival anxiety. The wealth that can bring freedom to people may be the real wealth, and it will be more confident to do things that you recognize.

This view is, in his words, " correct nonsense ." But whether it is nonsense or not, in fact, many times it depends on the listener, not the speaker. When someone throws out a point of view, we first analyze the background of his statement, and then choose how to understand and absorb it according to our own actual situation. This may be a more appropriate way of communication, and it is also the message we hope to convey when doing character interviews.
- Asui

About Shengwang Developer x Character Interview

"Soundnet Developers" series of interviews with characters is a text-based interview program launched by Shengwang. Different from pure technology sharing, we believe that the thoughts and experiences of developers themselves have more abundant value. I hope to link outstanding developers through this column, and tap the power of each individual developer behind the golden age of technology.