Compared with the title of "physics teacher", which is more familiar to young people nowadays, Zhang Chaoyang put back his badge of "Sohu Founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO" in Wuzhen.

On November 9, the "first generation Internet entrepreneur", Qu Fang, the founder of Xiaohongshu, and Tao Lin, the global vice president of Tesla, held a round table exchange around the theme of "innovative development and standardization of the digital economy" at the "Internet Entrepreneurs Forum" of the 2022 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit.

Twenty six years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, an American scholar, published the book "Digital Survival", in which he said that computers are no longer only related to computing, they determine our lives.

At that time, Zhang Chaoyang founded China's first Internet company with venture capital funds under the support of Negroponte's venture capital, and officially launched Sohu products two years later.

Today, the Internet not only determines life, but also penetrates into many corners of the economic society, leading the digital economy to high-quality development.

Recalling the process of founding and managing Internet enterprises, Zhang Chaoyang said "lucky". He said that the first agricultural revolution was about 10000 years ago, and the industrial revolution was about 200 years ago. In the time scale of 10000 years and 100 years, he was lucky to catch up with the information revolution.

Qu Fang, the founder of Little Red Book, thinks of the company's "traditional program". At the beginning of each year, the company's core managers will put aside the operating data, pretend to be researchers, go to the place where young people gather, and ask "Do you know Little Red Book?". In her view, this is the driving force for Internet enterprises to understand user needs and promote enterprise development.

In the discussion of the Internet, there are not always positive and optimistic voices. Some voices believe that the era of global Internet demographic dividend may be coming to an end, and the perception and prediction of entrepreneurs on this "network" has also become the focus of public attention.

Tao Lin, global vice president of Tesla, believes that the development and evolution of technology is first to make people's lives better and efficiency further improved, and second is to constantly apply human time to more effective things.

"Many people worry that technological evolution will replace some people's work. In fact, all technological evolution has proved that every technological progress will only lead to a higher stage of human beings, and there will be jobs more suitable for human intelligence, and those replaced are jobs that consume a lot of energy," said Tao Lin.

Qu Fang said that every time when catching up with technological innovation, Internet start-ups are willing to try at the forefront. Zhang Chaoyang suggested that we should look at it with a questioning attitude, "Some new concepts on a 10-year scale do bring about changes. In a short time, sometimes we should be a little reserved, always grasp users and see what they are doing."

Despite being at the forefront of Internet challenges, Zhang Chaoyang still feels that there is no bottleneck in the development of the Internet. "We are still in the midst of the third great wave of information revolution, and we are developing very well."

Tao Lin also said that for entrepreneurs, the most important thing they can do is to find out where the boundary of solving problems lies.

"In the process of rapid development, there must be challenges." Qu Fang said that the current Internet space, especially the community platform, is facing the challenge of ecological governance, which requires multi-party cooperation to build a good network ecological environment and provide better development soil for entrepreneurial enterprises.

Yin Xining, reporter of China Youth Daily, China Youth Network Source: China Youth Daily