Influence Empire: Inside the Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“Tencent’s entire philosophy is to be a connector. It strives to link content, information and people, helping a billion users build their identities.”

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“Tencent has been one the world’s most powerful companies that few people outside its home turf are aware of.”

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“Thus began the story of Tencent’s controversial origins – being a copycat. Just as many of China’s largest internet companies started out by imitating Western peers – Sohu from Yahoo, Baidu from Google, Weibo from Twitter, Alibaba from eBay – Tencent’s first hit came from emulating ICQ.”

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“Indeed, things started out slowly. ‘When users first came, nobody was in the chat room. I had to keep them company and talk with them,’ Pony recalled years later. ‘Sometimes I had to change my profile picture and pretend to be a girl.”

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“Tencent divided the engineers into four categories: associates, engineers, seniors and experts. Those who wanted to apply to become a senior needed to have come up with products that generated more than 10 million users; for experts, they would need 100 million.”

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“More broadly, with the emergence of companies like Tencent, China’s tightly controlled internet model has risen as an alternative that many emerging countries in Southeast Asia and Africa are closely observing and even aspiring to.”

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“‘You either wait for someone else to kill you, or you kill yourself first,’ is one of Pony’s most often-quoted mantras. That value, which has been instilled into every employee, explains Tencent’s paranoid leadership.”

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“A popular saying in China is that all private companies have original sin – whether it be in the form of evading taxes, polluting the environment or bribery.”

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“And so the billionaire might not be bowing out anytime soon. Perhaps it’s not even up to him. For the Party, it would be much easier to have one mighty all-knowing yet obedient company to rule all than play whack-a-mole with potentially disruptive forces.”

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“If Pony’s generation of entrepreneurs spent the first half of their lives swimming upstream like carps to leap over the gates of the Yellow River hoping to become dragons, then, following ancient wisdom, the second part of their fate lies in knowing when to bow out – or perhaps becoming part of the system they once wished to change.”

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