An elite “deep second generation” failed entrepreneurial road

Deep second generation, and Beijing’s hutongs together string son, children in the yard, or Shanghai ‌ ‌ “310 ‌ ‌” etc are different. This is a labelled but unclear group.

Guo Yu is the second generation of Shen in his 20s, when his wealth retreated to Japan freely.

Beauty Zhihu Big V Wang Nuo is the second generation of deep;

The female high genius that joins US army is deep 2 generations;

Banyalen, who engages in political debate in three languages on the streets of Cologne, Germany, is also a second generation.

Lai Meiyun, also known as Xiao Qi in the 101 draft, is the second generation of Shen.

Zeng Shunxi, who plays the hero of the new edition, is from the second generation of Shen.

They are both the mysterious second generation, and if there is one thing in common, it is that their parents probably made the right choice to avoid living in eggshell apartments.

Recently, one of my friends parents working people to say: ‌ ‌ “my boss quickly went bankrupt and can’t write about him. ‌ ‌”

Parents often poking fun at his boss, summarizes the ridicule, the entrepreneurs can be summarized as: ‌ ‌ “sea turtles companies elite + deep ii + idealists ‌ ‌” defeated.

Later, we met the hero, Fan Chao, who had fallen into the mire at the International Students’ Entrepreneurship Building in Nanshan District, Shenzhen.

He was tall, clean teeth, upper body T-shirt t-shirts have ‌ ‌ “vigour ‌ ‌” 2 words, private parts is Holister beach pants…

The 200-square-meter office used to be an e-commerce company for pet supplies. The core product — electric cat litter box was once the top3 in the industry. The station is close to row by row, can imagine here once lively.

But now the office is packed with cardboard boxes and a handful of soon-to-be-laid off employees.

In the process of chatting, a neighbor company came to buy the office desks and chairs to be dealt with, and the largest conference table was sold off for 600 yuan.

Fan Chao did not look unusual, perhaps already accepted the reality, calm.

As a result of capital chain rupture, 3 years of entrepreneurship close to failure.

Among young people in the Greater Bay Area, smart people know it’s better to buy a house and rent than to start a business. Even if you have an entrepreneurial heart, you are closer to doing business, including but not limited to dealing in tea, disseminating Chinese culture, opening a shared office or renting an apartment…

In general, combine the resources in your home.

Hardware entrepreneurship, really so hard core?

A near-death experience for a startup right now is nothing to write home about. But What I’m interested in is, is Shenzhen, the second generation of entrepreneurial city, still suitable for entrepreneurship?

Not just Shenzhen, in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou… The enviable second generation of these first-tier cities, early can have people dream of real estate, have the town to do the topic of the lack of vision, has the enviable background of glamorous resume……

But are they suitable for starting a business?

one

Unlike our generation, which chose various basketball and soccer stars as their English names, Fan Chao’s English name, Byron, comes from his love for the British poet’s work when he was in junior high school.

His parents were the first generation of Shenzhen builders, as the second generation of Shenzhen, he enjoyed the rapid development of shenzhen brought huge dividends. From the property value of 100 times to quality education, to both Chinese and Western open vision.

And even as the second generation, greatly FanChao also has a remarkable record after 90, is a standard, parents mouth ‌ ‌ “other people’s children ‌ ‌”.

FanChao shenzhen school, referred to as “‌ ‌” pressure-pad-force ‌ ‌ “.

Shenzhen Middle School and Experiment, foreign languages and so on are at the top of the disdain chain in Shenzhen middle school circle. The latest news is that newly recruited teachers are all beiqing masters starting with an annual salary of 300,000 yuan.

On the official website of Shenzhen University, Fan Chao is a well-known alumnus as an employee of DJI. He was joined in a press release by Liu Ruopeng, the founder of Guangqi, and Pei Song, a partner at DJI.

Light qi is an invisibility cloak, aircraft and metamaterials black technological civilization ‌ ‌ “magic ‌ ‌” enterprise. Fan has watched Videos of Liu ruopeng’s invisibility cloak in his high school class. At that time, very few people in China knew about Liu Ruopeng.

In 2009, he entered the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with a score of 684, majoring in global Business Management, the most popular and most difficult major to get into. As Hong Kong a few colleges and universities the ‌ ‌ “elite ‌ ‌” (elite), one of the major global business to be seen as the future business elites.

He also went to The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, as a top student.

After returning to China, Fan took an internship and a job at an investment bank in Hong Kong.

If the children of Beijing’s elite flock to ministries, the children of Shenzhen’s elite flock to investment banks, all in Hong Kong.

Fan chao was successful when he tried his first venture in Hong Kong. He and his friends developed a credit card application platform for financial institutions such as banks, and each successful drainage can bring hk $300 income, bringing the first bucket of gold in life.

But what really excited Mr Fan, and revived his excitement in Silicon Valley, was a lecture.

Speakers on the rostrum were Wang Tao, founder of DJI, and Professor Li Zexiang, godfather of technology entrepreneurs.

So Fan went to DJI.

Back in Shenzhen, fan chao, then 24, used his previous experience as an investor to lead a blockbuster financing round. Later, dJI’s rich business lines gave him the opportunity to transition from business to product, and to participate in the development and sales of industrial drones.

Fan chao realized his dream of science and technology, and the meeting with Wang Sicong is just a little anecdote. Dji’s 3-year experience in product research and development is also his biggest foundation for starting a business.

In 2017, Yams Pet Technology Co., Ltd. was established. It is registered in Yuehai Street, Nanshan District, Shenzhen — the richest street office in Nanshan District is also one of the most famous street offices in China, which contributes half of THE GDP of Nanshan District. Besides, zte, Huawei, DJI and other enterprises have also come out.

He loves cats, so as a science and technology enthusiast + shovel-master, he chose the track of intelligent pet products.

Huge pet blue ocean market, ‌ ‌ ‘MOE familiar economic air mouth ‌ ‌ “winds blowing is tight, in theory, the huge market size for a domestic intelligent cat sand basin.

In 2015, the market size of China’s pet industry reached about 97.8 billion yuan, and the number of pets reached 180 million. Per capita spending on a single pet reached 4,300 yuan in 2017, according to Data from Dog People.com.

From xinjiang, leaving his old propaganda ‌ ‌ “you make the failure to spend a year business, hurry back ‌ ‌”. Fan chao smiled, whose goal is not to succeed in business?

Then he told me he wouldn’t go back.

two

Everything looks good.

It took the team half a year to polish a cat litter pan demo product named footloose, which was crowdfunded on Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding website in the United States.

The original planned amount of crowd-funding was only 50,000 USD, but the product design concept and related documents unexpectedly made Footloose the top item in the pet supplies category on Kickstarter, which received support from more than 3,600 consumers around the world and raised 10 million RMB (1.35 million USD).

The day they saw that number, the team broke out the champagne.

The now-popular Moby Beluga ground hauling robot also had 1,905 backers and raised $1.14 million on Kickstarter in 2019.

In fact, Yunwhale founder Zhang Junbin is also fan Chao’s half Of the University of Hong Kong alumni (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Li Zexiang disciple).

The team immediately embarked on the road to expansion. As our migrant worker friend, Zhu Zi was the marketing director whom Fan Chao had personally recruited. On the day of the interview, she was dressed in shorts and a cap and told a story about how she never looked at the content of her peers in new media.

After the interview, FanChao thought past midnight or pigs, ‌ ‌ “she is very strange, but I’d like to try. ‌ ‌”

Pigs in the traditional garb of the screen through the us boss, FanChao intuitively use the ‌ ‌ “wizards ‌ ‌”.

The company’s foreign style makes the pig happy, calling the boss by his name and smoking in front of him. (Fan Chao himself does not smoke.) Piglets can make up for Fan Chao’s shortcomings at the executive level: turning around the company’s non-clock Buddhist culture, dismissing unqualified interns… And dealing with public relations crises like Zhihu — that is, fighting with people.

three

From the start of the company’s cash crunch to the brink of bankruptcy, the pair had three bitter fights.

The first time was when the company didn’t have enough money on its books to last three months.

The reason why Blue Ocean is blue ocean is not that no one has found the business opportunity of the intelligent cat litter basin, but the cost of opening a mold nearly one million yuan and the cost of long research and development time are in front of us.

The competition in the hardware market is unprecedentedly cruel. The crowdfunding money soon burned out. Half of the research and development was spent in exchange for two patents, ranking top three in the industry. However, under the pressure of low price competition from pirated products, Taobao’s sales performance was not as expected.

Kitten litter pan meets a 999 yuan copy, making it difficult for consumers to pay by sentiment. According to Tmall stores, monthly sales are twice as high.

‌ ‌ “we are afraid to do original, burning money bottomless. ‌ ‌ “turned from the phone hardware pet appliances elder said.

At that time, when He saw Fan chao in the office, he became frantic and urged him to go out to find money.

‌ ‌ “as CEO, your first priority isn’t out to sell (investment)? ‌ ‌”

The first quarrel between Pig and Fan revolved around financing.

It’s hard for a guy who’s done venture capital to pull millions?

The ease of crowdfunding paralyzed the team’s prediction of the difficulty of financing. It was too late for him to act. Since 2018, the financing environment has deteriorated in an avalanche, and the failures of OFO and others have taught entrepreneurs a heavy lesson.

In harsh environments and ‌ ‌ “sell ‌ ‌” to whom?

Fan chao suffered from severe insomnia in those days.

The subsequent compromise was to abandon the car. Following Pig’s advice, Fan took pains to streamline his research and development department, retaining only three employees who had been there since the start of the business.

Being a startup with a dozen or so r&d projects is wasteful in the industry, especially after going from zero to one.

The second argument is to return ‌ ‌ “clip ‌ cat ‌” online criticism.

Fan’s team decided to shoot a video to fight back, believing it was from a rival product.

The pig proposed to borrow a cat to be euthanized at a pet hospice in Dongguan. Emphasized the ‌ ‌ “absolute security ‌ ‌”, but FanChao anyway does not agree.

Finally, he responded by shooting an experimental video + Fan Chao chose to write a small composition of 1,000 words, which did not seem to reverse the decline.

The serious public relations crisis affected the sales volume, the cash flow further aggravated. At the party announcing the impending bankruptcy of the company, Piglet got drunk and cried and cursed the Virgin Mary of Fan Chao.

The third argument was over whether to post a crowdfunding litter box to overseas users.

This time Fan Chao was not tough.

The day I met FanChao packaging box over the ground will be sent abroad the last of the inventory, ‌ ‌ “can send a is a, the rest of the (people) I’m sorry. ‌ ‌”

According to the promise of the crowdfunding plan, 3,600 litter boxes need to be delivered to supporters by June 2019.

The time when the company was able to deliver goods was missed because the contracted OEM failed to deliver goods on time.

This is the most famous OEM factory in Shenzhen, several famous mobile phone brands all come from here. But small orders have no room for negotiation in front of the big manufacturers, and the break came as a surprise.

It may seem ironic that the so-called best OEM, which was also found by Fan Chao Tuo, is now helping the company to go bankrupt.

So far, two-thirds of crowdfunding users have not waited for a litter box.

After the outbreak, more than 1,000 litter POTS were sent out intermittently. But as more or more money is lost due to packaging and shipping damage and secondary repayments, already tight cash flows are squeezed to the ground.

Piggy’s proposal to declare the crowdfunding product a failure at a time when the company was already going through an internal bankruptcy process made sense.

Kickstarter allows crowd-funding products to fail. The original intention of overseas crowd-funding websites is to encourage the sponsor users to create better products. Users who choose to support products are informed of the risk of bankruptcy and failure in advance.

But open the Kickstarter to raise website, cat sand basin, a the bad review English comment in a spectacular Chinese ‌ ‌ “I want a refund ‌ ‌”.

A similar public relations crisis also exists on Zhihu.

Fan Chao’s self-esteem was wounded. Business failure is acceptable; But with a dark history of entrepreneurial failure, he cried.

Can this kind of background, it is difficult to accept ‌ ‌ “scam vendor ‌ ‌” stigma.

four

Fan chao’s career continued, after a large number of people, the capital situation was greatly improved, for him, how do not want to give up.

He also considered mortgaging his home (his parents’ name) to save his company and the opportunity to send out the remaining 2,000 crowdfunded litter pans.

Nanshan city center nearly 10 in case of a flat house, the bank gave nearly 10 million mortgage loans.

Zhihu has a list of top ten losers, the top is selling houses to start a business.

The news that a listed company loses a year’s profit to a set of Housing prices in Shenzhen floats on the front page of Weibo every year like a hot joke.

According to the Price index of 100 Cities by The Middle School, the average price of residential buildings in Shenzhen will be 54,200 square meters in October 2020, ranking first in China.

Ten million will probably keep the company burning for another year, but after that? The entrepreneurial track is very difficult, who do not know tomorrow and accident which comes first.

‘My parents agreed and my wife understood,’ Mr. Fan said. But he couldn’t do it.

‌ ‌ “if it is my own house, perhaps really a cruel is sold, ha, ha, ha. ‌ ‌ “FanChao seriously discussed with me ok no property, his name or really will make a silly thing.

It is not surprising that a home can be worth the annual profits of a listed company after several rounds of house-price inflation. Not selling a house is probably the bottom line for all young people in China’s first-tier cities to start a business.

Shen Gen 2 does not want to sell a house, perhaps without exception.

five

In general, Fan chao’s venture feels like an anticleastcompletion.

But he has experienced many things that would have been impossible for him in his original career and education. It includes fighting with interns, doing customer service in person, writing a 1000-word essay in response to buyers, sending lawyers’ letters to the Internet blackspots he thinks of, and even paying money to smooth out black PR…

In the era of entrepreneurship, there are two extremes. On the one hand, the original favored children of heaven are fighting on the track with high threshold of assets. For example, Huang Zheng of Podongduo graduated from Fudan University, Zhang Yiming is a top student of Nankai University, and Dai Wei of OFO is an official second generation. The other is the rise of a variety of grass mang, such as various anchors we Media, quick hand Simba Taobao Weiya.

Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou… Although there are all the high-quality enterprises in China, it is much more difficult for children growing up in these cities to build Tencent, Huawei and Ali from scratch than in the 1980s and 1990s.

Big-city kids may have a thousand things to admire, but they may not have an edge when it comes to starting a business. Everything they have can be an Achilles’ heel.

Once, Fan Chaomen spoke fluent English, wore tailored suits and traveled around the world. These days, Fans are all over Uniqlo, chatting with no fans, surrounded only by baiding, and ridiculed by their employees for speaking too much English.

Starting a business dragged Fan down a path of respectability and down a rough, muddy path.

In the exchange, he admitted that he had chosen the hardest road to take, rather than the easy one.

The knowledge they possess may not play a role in the reckless entrepreneurial environment, and the construction of their life values may only restrict their brutal growth.

But on the other hand, were the experiences of the fathers so that the children could grow up savagely again?

Perhaps no one can answer this question.

It is not easy for these big city children, who have been envied since childhood, to live with more courage and sense of value.

‌ ‌ “if I do not choose the path of the difficult, who will go? ‌ ‌ “FanChao replied.

It’s a decent idea.

He also told me before the press that the situation had improved and that he was confident in his business fundamentals and that he was able to lead the team back to the ground.

Good luck to him.