The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide.

Chapter 86 Payment Tokens
"NewPay has given me a lot of inspiration in terms of security. I have used NewPay. From the perspective of user experience and overall interface, NewPay is indeed doing better than Confiniti.

But what really caught my eye was NewPay's security measures. The combination of six-digit passwords and SMS verification codes can almost completely avoid security risks caused by improper software.

At the beginning, our attention was all focused on ensuring information security between hardware data transmissions, while completely ignoring security issues at the software level.

Users only need the account number and the amount of the other party to complete the transfer. Fortunately, Confinity has not yet promoted it on a large scale. land.

We still have time to remedy it, and at the same time we hope to obtain the patent authorization of the SMS verification code to further improve the user's account security. "

Peter Thiel sincerely admires the idea of ​​SMS verification code, which has too many application scenarios.

Part of the reason why Goldman Sachs and Morgan invested in NewPay is also because the patent right of SMS verification code is in the hands of NewPay. If the Federal Reserve and the Federal Ministry of Finance issue new regulations on banks, banks must be bound to mobile phone numbers when they open cards for customers.

The patent of the text message verification code alone is worth one billion U.S. dollars.

Zhou Xin didn't know much about Confinity, he knew more about PayPal later.

After chatting with Peter and Max, he found that Musk hadn't joined them yet.

Zhou Xin did not underestimate Confiniti because of this, but from the perspective of his future generations, he is absolutely confident that he can win the final victory in the field of electronic payment.

"I'm not in charge of NewPay's specific operations. I'll send you the email address of the person in charge of our patent licensing team. Then you can contact him directly."

The situation in foreign countries is different from that in China. The credit card system in foreign countries is very developed. Therefore, even in the era of mobile Internet, electronic payment is only a supplement to credit cards.

However, no credit card system has been formed in China. Even in 2020, the groups familiar with the credit card system are mainly white-collar workers in first- and second-tier cities.

That is to say, in Huaguo, the electronic payment system occupies the position of the credit card, and the credit card has become a supplement.

Electronic payments led by WeChat Pay and Alipay have actually eaten up the profits that originally belonged to the credit card system.

This has also led to extremely fierce competition in Huaguo's electronic payment, and there is no way to compare foreign countries with domestic ones.

Various methods emerge in an endless stream. In order to occupy enough payment scenarios, they are willing to spend high prices to invest in companies that do not make money at all and achieve breakeven in no time.

During the few years when the domestic electronic payment battle was turbulent, when Zhou Xin was studying for a Ph.D. abroad, PayPal seemed to occupy a monopoly position without dispute.

None of the giants of the time, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, wanted to compete with him.

Even if Amazon came up with Amazon payment, it was only as a supplement to its own e-shopping system, and it never thought of competing with PayPal.

Apple has thought about it, but the difference is that Apple's Apple Pay wants to replace the status of credit cards, not PayPal.

"Newman, Max and I started our business entirely in the electronic payment field, while your entrepreneurial field ranges from online communities to game distributors, to video game production companies and knowledge Q&A communities.

I'm curious how you come up with so many genius ideas.

Quora is really a very genius idea. I also registered an account on it. It may be because there are few competitors in the field of philosophy. In addition, when I was teaching at Stanford, students and friends in the department helped me solicit votes. I successfully became that The number of likes is the first, and the permission to ask questions has been obtained.

I think this kind of high threshold is right. The knowledge quiz community needs to ensure the purity of the community, and it is bound to make a trade-off between the number of users and the quality. "

Peter Thiel is not flattering Zhou Xin, this is his real thought, he was shocked after seeing Quora, especially after the user registration test came out.

In his view, Quora is by far the only community that has requirements for user quality.

"I have my own needs, and then I will consider whether my needs are universal or individualized.

If it is a universal demand, everyone will have a similar demand, then I will think about how to meet this demand through Internet services.

All my Internet products are based on this logic.

The only thing that is a little special is the game. Of course, the game is not made by me alone. I just make something that I find interesting and share it with everyone.

I was working on Angry Birds as an intern at Microsoft, and I didn't know if the game would be liked by players.

Looking at it now, my luck is good. "

Max said little.

After exchanging compliments, Zhou Xin asked, "Have you ever thought about selling Confiniti to me?

NewPay is currently focusing on the field of personal computers, while Confiniti's electronic payment products are mainly concentrated on the handheld computer side, and we can form a relatively good complementarity.

At the same time, Confiniti can further improve NewPay's security system in the security field. "

Before Zhou Xin came here, he asked someone about Confiniti's patents.

Purely from the patent level, Confinity’s most valuable patent is the security token, which you can understand as the USB-shield adopted by Huaguo Bank.

U-shield is a kind of security token. Currently, apart from Confiniti, only RSA and Vodafone have security token patents.

To acquire the technology, the acquisition of Confiniti is the fastest way.

Not to mention being able to harvest top talents like Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel and Max Levchin looked at each other. NewPay wanted to acquire Confiniti, which was in their consideration.

"We would love to be acquired by NewPay, but we don't want cash, we want to replace it with NewPay stock." Peter Thiel said.

Marks went on to say: "Yes, in our opinion NewPay is worth far more than money, including Nokia Investment Fund and Deutsche Bank, I think they all want to get shares of NewPay instead of cash."

If Peter Thiel could be persuaded to join, Zhou Xin would not mind giving them some shares.

"Do you know that in NewPay's angel round financing, do we adopt the structure of A/B shares? That is to say, the same shares have different rights. Each share of A shares has 1 voting right, while B shares have 10 voting rights.

I can't give you all B shares. I will give you most of A shares and a small part of B shares. Can you accept this approach? "

Peter Thiel was very shocked. He knew that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Sachs had participated in the A round of investment, and the valuation was as high as one billion US dollars, but he did not expect that these two top investment banks were willing to accept such conditions.

(End of this chapter)