In 2018, when Ma Yun said "I'm hungry," Alibaba used $9.5 billion to acquire Hungry, completing the largest cash acquisition in the history of China's Internet at the time. As the biggest winner of this acquisition, Zhang Xuhao, the founder of Ele.me and in his early 30s, jumped into the ranks of "billionaires", and according to the 2021 Hurun Rich List, Zhang Xuhao ranked 1297th in the rich list with a value of 5.5 billion.
However, at the same time as being acquired, Zhang Xuhao was also forced to quit the hungry mo he had founded for 10 years.
First, are you hungry when you come out of school?
In 2008, in the boys' dormitory of Shanghai Jiaotong University, four young people planned to start a partnership, and one of them, a 23-year-old, said: "30 billion is not enough to earn!" This high-caliber student of Jiaotong University is the founder of "Hungry", Zhang Xuhao.
Today, in the lobby of Ele.me's headquarters, a scrapped electric car has been placed. This electric car is called "Hungry Mo No. 1", carrying Zhang Xuhao's original intention, he is riding this electric car, sent out the first takeaway of Hungry Mo.
Zhang Xuhao once recalled that when he was a graduate student at Shanghai Jiaotong University, he and his roommates were prone to hunger at night and wanted to order food, but the merchants were unwilling to send it because it was too late. Zhang Xuhao summed up: Since the merchant does not send, let us send. A few roommates, tens of thousands of dollars, a few electric cars, the prototype of Hungry Was Born.
At the beginning, Zhang Xuhao's founders personally delivered takeaways, developed restaurants, and did ground pushing. In the past 3 months alone, the takeaway team has placed nearly 1,000 orders. Zhang Xuhao noticed that it is easy to make mistakes in receiving orders by telephone and text messages, and several high-achieving students have played their advantages and made a web page for restaurants to take orders, and convenient and fast orders make all restaurants near Jiaotong University quickly settle in.
Three years after starting its business, Zhang Xuhao's team received its first financing, US$1 million from GSR Ventures. At the same time, Ele.me's nemesis, Meituan.com, was established and quickly entered the takeaway market, launching the Meituan takeaway APP in 2013. In 2014, after receiving an investment of $80 million from Dianping, Ele.me officially opened a head-on confrontation with Meituan.
However, the defection of a company almost made Ele.me "history".
Second, the defection of important partners
The war of attrition with the US group, for Zhang Xuhao, a young man after the 80s, never expected it to be so long. Until he left Hungry in 2018, and now in 2022, the "war" between the two is still scorching.
In 2014, in order to seize the major cities, Ele.me began to implement the "sinking plan" and rapidly expanded to 200 cities across the country. I didn't expect that the city that Zhang Xuhao thought had no demand for takeaway had already been taken down by the METUAN, which had a keen sense of smell.
In 2015, Meituan merged with Dianping, an important investor of Ele.me, to give birth to a local life service giant, Xinmeida, and received $3.3 billion in financing from Tencent.
The defection of public comments made Hungry Mo suddenly lose strong reinforcements, and in the face of the "money burning war" launched by the us group with strong capital, Hungry Mo gradually lost its strength. In 2016, Meituan announced that it was profitable. When the reporter asked Zhang Xuhao, "Are you hungry enough to make money?", Zhang Xuhao replied helplessly: "We are on the road to making money." ”
In fact, hungry is walking on one less leg from the beginning. Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan, started with group buying and social entrepreneurship, so in the layout of Meituan's business field, it is also equipped with business travel, travel, movies, group purchase and other services, walking on multiple legs, and has stronger anti-risk ability. After getting the traffic and merchants of public comments, Meituan is even more powerful.
So, how did Hungry survive to this day?
Third, the "white knight" - Ali
In 2017, after the acquisition of Baidu takeaway for $200 million, although Ele.me has the volume to confront me head-on, it still does not have the capital to fight with it. At this time, there are only two paths in front of Zhang Xuhao: either continue to fight or be acquired. The rational Zhang Xuhao chose the latter, and in 2018, Ali officially took over Ele.me, which also ended the "Zhang Xuhao Era" of Ele.me.
In fact, for the departure of Zhang Xuhao and the founding team of Hungry Mo, Ali did not care. In 2018, Ali only cared about one thing, that is, under the development momentum of Meituan, a company under the sniper "Tencent system", and consolidated its territory in the field of local life services in China.
Now, with the "national team" cloud flash payment strongly entering the payment market, China's online and offline consumption field will usher in a three-legged situation in the future - Ali, Tencent and the national team. In the traffic entrance market, the "Tencent system" represented by Meituan, Dianping, and Didi Taxi still shows a strong expansion trend.
Since the acquisition of Ele.me, Ali has linked Ele.me with platforms such as Hema Xiansheng, Gaode, and Fliggy, which can be said to be Ali's intervention, allowing Ele.me to achieve multi-legged walking and the possibility of continuing to survive.
The joining of Hungry Mo has also provided Ali with nearly 3 million hummingbird distribution troops, completely solving the distribution problem of Hema and Ali supermarkets. "Hungry 30 minutes convenient life circle" and "hema half an hour" and "Tmall supermarket one hour" together to jointly build the logistics infrastructure of Ali's new retail scene.
IV. Conclusion
Looking back at Zhang Xuhao, ten years of entrepreneurship from scratch, to the peak, and opponents, capital, oligarchs have fought, and finally when the industry dividend will end, sprinkled out of the field.
Today's Zhang Xuhao is still active in the venture capital circle, with the implementation of the "double reduction" policy, subject training is prohibited, boosted by the dividends of industrial policies, the demand for sports training has risen sharply, as a national second-level athlete Zhang Xuhao founded Gerk Sports in Shanghai, the initial investment is 150 million US dollars, and high-profile publicity "to use 268 yuan, let everyone learn to play golf."
Making golf a high-end sport civilian is Zhang Xuhao's goal of this venture, but whether it can open up a trillion-level market like Hungry's takeaway in the past, we can only leave time to answer. However, as a typical representative of post-80s entrepreneurs, Zhang Xuhao's tenacity in the entrepreneurial process and the freedom to withdraw from the startup company for 10 years have been enough to become a model and role model for young entrepreneurs.