On May 15, 2018, the press conference held by Hammer Technology at the Bird's Nest became the company's last brilliant moment in the Era of Luo Yonghao.
Accompanied by a sound of "Long live Sister Li" during the live demonstration, the TNT workstation that Luo Yonghao held high hopes for became the object of ridicule in the mouths of netizens, followed by the extremely dismal sales of TNT, which once led to the lack of orders for the foundry to be unwilling to take orders for it.
The nut R1 mobile phone, which should have been valued, was hastily brought over at the press conference, and the final sales performance was also very tragic, and the hammer technology that had just improved was completely dragged into the abyss.
Just a few months after the launch, the crisis of Hammer Technology began to erupt in concentration, the company owed about 600 million yuan in debt to banks, partners and suppliers, and Luo Yonghao signed a personal non-liability guarantee of more than 100 million.
At the beginning of 2019, ByteDance began to gradually take over the dying hammer, and Luo Yonghao had to leave the company he founded himself. In November of that year, Luo Yonghao was issued a consumption restriction order by the Danyang Municipal People's Court because of debt problems, and the person who once boasted of "buying Apple" is now in a deep quagmire.
After leaving hammer, Luo Yonghao began to look for ways to make quick money to pay off debts, and he first participated in ono e-cigarettes founded by Peng Jinzhou and became its partner.
But soon after, bad luck came again, Lao Luo forwarded his company's products to warm up Weibo only twenty minutes later, the electronic cigarette online ban was officially promulgated, Lao Luo's microblog, became the last e-cigarette advertisement on the Chinese Internet, the release of the ban also made Ono shocked.
Seeing that e-cigarettes were not successful, Luo Yonghao started to "shark skin" again, and served as a global partner and "chief fooling officer" of Sharklet Technologies, and the result was also thunder and rain.
After all kinds of ups and downs, Lao Luo finally found the right direction. In April 2020, Luo Yonghao switched to the live streaming industry, and his first live broadcast set a sales record of 110 million yuan in 3 hours, becoming a brother of Douyin.
Since then, Luo Yonghao has played his talent as a "cross-talk actor", and at the end of 2020, Luo Yonghao made his talk show debut in the third season of the variety show "Talk Show Conference", in which he said that his 600 million debts have been paid off 400 million, and the rest is expected to be repaid within a year.
In the following year, Lao Luo worked very hard, making a friend and broadcasting live 365 days a year, almost non-stop. From the end of August, the live broadcast time of the live broadcast room was extended to more than 20 hours. In the 2021 annual Douyin Talent Goods List TOP50, Luo Yonghao's annual sales ranked first, exceeding 5 billion yuan.
On January 5, 2022, the investigation showed that Luo Yonghao's execution information was zero, and Luo Yonghao had no information related to the executor. Lao Luo also responded in the official Weibo: "All repaid, we will definitely announce it ourselves at the first time, after all, we ourselves are more anxious than anyone to complete this matter." ”
The debt is about to be settled, and Luo Yonghao now seems to be not satisfied with e-commerce live broadcasting. Now, in his 50s, he is ready to step out of his comfort zone again and return to the Internet industry, and according to himself, the first entrepreneurial project he returned to was the "meta-universe".
01, the meta-universe Big Bang, the future is bright or short-lived?
The concept of metaverse first appeared in the 1992 science fiction novel Avalanche by American writer Neil Stephenson. The novel depicts a virtual digital world parallel to reality, the Metaverse.
People in the real world have a virtual doppelganger in the metaverse, and people put on headphones and eyepieces, find a connected terminal, and can enter the virtual space simulated by the computer and parallel to the real world in the form of a virtual doppelganger.
The VR headset, which was born many years ago, seems to have turned this scene into reality very well, and after several years of development, technologies such as AI, blockchain, 5G and wearable devices related to the metaverse have matured day by day.
On the other hand, due to the epidemic in the past two years, online office and online teaching have been vigorously developed, and people have spent more and more time learning, working and playing in the virtual world, which provides a good opportunity for the development of the meta-universe.
Under the surging epidemic, technology giants including Microsoft, Google and Apple are actively laying out the meta-universe, and Meta has achieved stage success, the company's VR headset device sold hot in this year's Christmas shopping season, and its supporting app once dominated the Apple App Store in the United States.
At the end of the year, the metaverse was selected as one of the top ten hot words of the year in the Collins Dictionary, and the past 2021 became a veritable "metaverse first year".
Let's go back to Lao Luo, not long ago, OPPO and Huawei have released their own smart glasses, which was once an AR product that Google had high hopes for but ultimately failed. It's reminiscent of Hammer Technology's former TNT workstation, and the similar Microsoft Surface Hub.
So, the same new product encountered Waterloo, why only the hammer will be imprisoned for this?
The answer is still in their own conditions, the Internet giants in their brilliant process, the formation of their own mature research and development system and strong technical strength.
Therefore, we can see that even the concept products released by these large enterprises have a very high degree of completion, and the new products of each company can be integrated into their existing software and hardware ecology, which is very helpful for the development of the initial meta-universe field, but Luo Yonghao, a "brother with goods", does not have such conditions.
Even at the level of product establishment, positioning and layout, the hammer once seemed immature and clumsy, and was too swayed by Luo Yonghao's personal opinions.
Microsoft, Apple, Meta and other big manufacturers dare to boldly open up new positions, inseparable from the fault tolerance given by their huge volume. For them, even if several new products are not recognized by the market, the company's own operations will not be greatly affected, which gives decision makers and R& D teams a lot of trial and error opportunities.
But for Luo Yonghao and Hammer, the failures of TNT and R1 alone were enough to take them into the abyss.
Startups can't afford to make key decision-making mistakes, and if they can't recover R&D costs in time, an irreparable crisis will break out soon after, and Microsoft, which has previously released a similar TNT product Surface Hub, does not need to worry about this problem at all.
In the meta-universe entrepreneurship, Luo Yonghao now encountered a similar situation. The giants began to spend a lot of money on research and development, afraid of falling behind competitors, but Luo himself did not have much capital.
To some extent, the metaverse itself is still uncertain, and the views of both bullish and debauched views seem to be sufficiently convincing.
Metaverse can play a major role in gaming, entertainment, office and even autonomous driving, there are already some companies trying to use VR equipment to assist the office, Meta is pushing VR virtual meetings, Microsoft is also promoting virtual office, Accenture has purchased 60,000 Oculus Quest 2 headsets to train new employees.
Proponents argue that when AR/VR devices become more widespread in the future, the use of headsets by employees to work virtually will become the new normal. At the same time, with the hot sale of AR/VR devices in the consumer market last year, its terminals have tens of millions of users, which is enough to carry more use scenarios.
But there are also many celebrities who are not optimistic about the future of the metaverse, including philip Rosedale, the designer of the online game "Second Life". He didn't expect much from his invention, as he put it: "It's not for everyone, and probably never will be for everyone".
Elon Musk also said, "I don't believe people will abandon the physical world and replace it with a virtual world, especially if they have a screen in their face, which will ruin your vision", and VR headsets will cause users to have a hard injury of 3D vertigo, and there is still no good solution.
Liu Cixin, a major science fiction master in China, has a more negative view of the "metacosm" and even believes that it will lead mankind astray.
In a recent public speech, he said that "the metacosm will lead humanity to a dead end" because "the future of mankind is either to go to interstellar civilizations or to indulge in the virtual world of VR for many years", "if humanity achieves a highly realistic VR world before moving to space civilization, it will be a disaster." ”
02, Meta universe and Luo Yonghao, can they succeed this time?
People's evaluation of Luo Yonghao is always polarized, and people who like him will admire him for daring to say and do, his straightforward personality, and his humor and humor.
At the same time, this personality has also attracted a lot of criticism for him, and the expression of the spirit of Japanese craftsmen without scruples has made him gain nicknames such as "Luo Taijun" and "Jingri", and the saying that "I am not proud and inferior to myself is Chinese" has also made it difficult for many people to accept.
In particular, such remarks erupted before the Bird's Nest conference, destroying the desire of many consumers to buy hammer products.
He and Wang Ziru's famous live broadcast on Youku were on the line, although he exposed Wang Ziru's old bottom, leaving Wang dumbfounded. But in the end, it did not win much praise for itself and Hammer Technology, and its sharp performance made it fall out of the powder.
Luo Yonghao is a very confident person, but often excessive self-confidence will blind his eyes, lose the rational analysis and assessment of risk, and the momentum of adventurism will rise.
Murphy's Law tells us that if something is likely to go bad, no matter how small the probability, it will always happen.
Although Luo Yonghao can reap the success of the stage, it is difficult to bear the consequences of things going bad. Nuts and M1 once gave the dying hammer a sigh of relief, but Luo Yonghao did not choose a conservative strategy to recuperate, but tried to "change the world" with a product like TNT that was full of flaws and lacked actual needs.
The arrogance brought about by overconfidence dug a big hole for himself, and he didn't climb out of it until today.
From the failure of e-cigarette entrepreneurship and Niu Bo Network, it can also be seen that Luo Yonghao lacks sufficient sensitivity to the direction of policy winds, and there are still relatively few policy norms related to the meta-universe, and Luo Yonghao is bound to encounter compliance risks in the future.
It is true that it is biased to call Luo Yonghao an "industry lamp", the smartphone industry has remained strong for ten years, and the failure of the hammer is only due to its own reasons and market competition.
And the live broadcast with goods let Lao Luo harvest a successful joy, while paying off the debt, you can also get a lot of income, the well-known anchor's tax evasion storm did not affect him.
Luo Yonghao in the live broadcast is still funny and talkative, but he seems to be more humble and stable than ever, and although the memory of failure will be deeply imprinted in his mind, Luo Yonghao still loves the Internet industry and dares to take risks.
This is also the reason why he chose to step into the metaverse. But the circumstances before him remained uncertain.
Metaverse is a new world that encompasses many fields, application scenarios, and hardware and software products. Today's practitioners are like explorers of the Great Discoveries of Geography, embarking on a journey of obscurity and the unknown.
Finding the right direction for you is not easy, a lucky captain may open up new routes, may discover a new continent, and more people will simply disappear into obscurity or even sink into the sea.
For cautious individual investors, entering the market now may not be a good option.
In a way, this is another gamble on Luo Yonghao, and past experiences may have made him more cautious and do what he can when betting, but it may not.
It is worth noting that in the case of Internet giants fighting hand-to-hand, Luo Yonghao, who is already an "Internet celebrity", does not have enough ability to stir up the situation.
Unlike smart machines and PCs, the current technological maturity of the meta-universe is still far from catching up with its popularity, and for a long time to come, the strength of technology research and development will be the most critical factor in determining who can occupy the highlands, which is what Luo Yonghao lacks.
How far Lao Luo can go in the metaverse, whether he can save himself and take a small piece of territory, may be insignificant for the entire industry, but for him and a group of fans who are already 50 years old, it is very important.