Entrepreneurship Means Choosing, Focusing, and Differentiating: Lessons from Zhou Hongyi and Qihoo

You could take a look at Zhou Hongyi’s entrepreneurship book, now reissued; its previous title was Dianfuzhe (“Disruptor”). --- Robin: “The most important things in entrepreneurship are choosing, focusing once you have chosen, and differentiating. Even if you are building a platform, you need one memorable point for users: LINE means messaging, Google search, Meta social networking, and momo e-commerce.” Finding the right investor also matters. An investor told Zhou Hongyi: “I don’t understand your business either. But we invested hoping you would do something distinctive. Instead, you seem to have built a Sina, a Baidu, and an Alibaba. Are you planning to compete with everyone? Can you do that many things at once?” ---- After leaving Yahoo China and founding Qihoo, Zhou Hongyi thought hard about the internet’s next big trend. He was determined to work on search, while blogging was flourishing. He decided on community search, letting people find content across forums. After a while, however, it produced disappointing results. He then entered text messaging, multimedia messaging, podcasts, and other businesses, getting involved in many fields without any one business generating substantial revenue. Zhou and Qihoo lost direction, and the company’s business model became completely blurred. An investor told Zhou Hongyi: “I don’t understand your business either. But we invested hoping you would do something distinctive. Instead, you seem to have built a Sina, a Baidu, and an Alibaba. Are you planning to compete with everyone? Can you do that many things at once?” Those words were a revelation. Even a platform must begin with one entry point that wins users over. Focus is the most important entrepreneurial principle. Zhou therefore planned to cut all the miscellaneous businesses and keep just one: security.