如何成就一家优秀的企业？又该如何定义这个“优秀”？对于创业企业来说，这个问题被赋予了过多的神圣感。今年11月在上海举办的Slush国际创投大会上，许多优秀的创业企业、投资人和媒体都做了精彩的分享。也许这个问题由这些成功的创业者做回答时，才能为初创企业清晰的指出一个坚定不移的方向，打消创业的恐惧失败心理。

Slush大会上，舜飞科技的CEO兼创始人张小白在分享创业经历的同时，向全球与会者传递了舜飞的“小白”创业精神，提出了科技创业不可或缺的三个要素——学习、实践、联系。下文对此做了详细记录。

Good afternoon everyone! It’s my pleasure to be invited by Slush to share some of my experiences in my startup with you.

I’m 张小白. [小白] In Chinese it means too young too simple. This is my first time to have a speech in English. So forgive me, but I think it would be a good opportunity to practice.

Sunteng is one of the fastest growing internet marketing technology companies in China. We have a young team built from the best global and internet companies. What we all have in common is a passion for learning and practice.

As you can see, our team grew from 15 people to over 180 people over the last 3 years with significant and profitable revenue growth over the past 3 years.

We are running our business in an industry overheated with capital. Most of our competitors raised more than 100m funding with some even over 500m funding. Yet we have achieved better performance without fund raising.

Even back to the beginning of this year, we still did not have any sales team, marketing team nor PR. There is even no strict regulations for our team and the company has a completely flat management structure.

However, this does not mean these things are not important, or you should follow this approach.

So if we can build the business to this scale without having these things (capital、regulation、layers of organization), what really are the key things to become successful for a startup?

How should we measure whether an internet company is good or not?

To answer these questions we should think about the fundamentals: what does a company essentially do?

For a traditional company, materials are sent into the company for processing and further production.

However, for an internet company, the input is information and the output is still information.

Therefore，we think the essential of an internet company are: capability of catching information and capability of processing information.

From a founder’s perspective, a clear objectives should be setup to measure your teams performance of catching and processing information. If you are an investor, you should carefully assess a company‘s capability of capturing and processing the information as well.

As we are now approaching to the digital singularity towards Artificial Intelligence era, in the future the entire internet would become an intelligent cloud with each company acting as a node or a point on this cloud. Looking into the future from a global perspective, the capability of catching and processing information will remain to be the most essential.

To build links across the industry is one way to catch information. The links here are not the links between computers, but among people.

A good lesson I have learnt recently is the definition of B2B. B2B is no longer simply business-to-business moreimportantly it has become “business people to business people”.As a founder of a B2B startup, you should never stay in office focusing on your product and technology, get out of the office and knock doors, build relationships and meaningful links with your clients, prospects, and partners, face to face.

The most important capability of human being is the ability to learn, and to keep learning.

For young entrepreneurs, don’t be afraid if you are lack of experience. No one is born with experience. Take me as an example, I started Sunteng with zero experience in this industry.

For established companies, the key to keep your advantage is not your experience but the aspiration and ability to keep learning.

While the business is growing, you might think the company really has distinct advantages in the industry when looking at the revenue and profit increasing. This is when you may begin to fall into the comfort zone and become complacent.

This is dangerous. It always is a mistake to believe we are already good enough and let’s make things stable. The world of internet is innovating everyday, if you choose to become “stable”, you will soon find yourself out of the date.

Change is the only constant. Stay connected, keep updating.

Training is important.

No one could become a champion without training. The well-known AlphaGo algorithm is also well-trained before it became so powerful. For myself, I have trained myself for 10 years till today ever since my first startup. For our team, we train ourselves every day to become more professional and to keep ahead in our industry.

The best way of training is practice.

One’s life is about practicing to become a better person. A company’s ultimate goal is about practicing to become a great company. While a company is more or less of an extension of the founder’s mindset.

If you look at your startup as part of the practice of your life, there will be no fear of failure.

When I decided tobuild my first startup, only one question was asked to myself: will I starve to death if I have no job?

Then, I left Netease 10 years ago with no money, no management experience, and no team to build my first startup.

I have failed twice along the way and life was once hard at that time. But I have never regretted. It‘s been the best practice and the foundation of our success today.

I am 小白, my belief is to keep young and simple.

Thank you.