Huaqing Jiayuan past

The West cannot do without Jerusalem, just as the history of the Chinese Internet cannot be without Huaqing Garden.

Huaqing Jiayuan is a 190-acre residential area in Haidian, Beijing, with 23 residential buildings, 97 units, 1776 parking spaces, 2475 houses - both 37 square meters of studios, 177 square meters of four-bedroom, surrounded by 19 hair salons, 8 cafes, 5 massages and 3 Baoding donkey meat fire.

The earliest owner of this land is the big brother of the Beijing circle housing enterprises - Liu Xiaoguang of the Capital Group. The first creation was in 1994 to get land, but in 1996 because of business difficulties to another Beijing circle building enterprise, the floor price of 4,000 yuan a flat, at that time can be described as a lion's opening level of the sky-high price, the circle of people are mocking: is the receiver a fool?

The first two phases of the project were called "Dongsheng Apartment" and the third phase was renamed "Huaqing Jiayuan" of foreign energy, which echoed with the Tsinghua Street diagonally opposite. The community opened in 2000, the first batch of price 5,000 yuan / flat, the masses scolded too expensive, but later showed: some things you think are the peak, in fact, just the beginning.

Huaqing Jiayuan is located near Wudaokou subway station

In the second year of opening, the unit price of Huaqing Jiayuan exceeded 7,000 yuan, in 2005 it exceeded 20,000, in 2006 it broke 20,000, in 2010 it broke 40,000, in 2012 it broke through 60,000, and in 2013, the unit price of small apartments once approached 100,000, which shocked the entire property market, briefly pulled back to about 70,000 in 14 years, and then soared all the way, and the unit price of 2020 has been quoted to exceed 160,000.

The reason why Huaqing Jiayuan is fierce is inseparable from its "upper wind and water" position: west of Zhongguancun, east of Wudaokou, south of Zhichun Road, north of Tsinghua Garden, soaking urine can splash three doctors, throwing bricks can hit five yard farmers, and there are cosmic famous schools such as Zhongguancun Second Primary School as a school district support, and its 20-year increase of 30 times is not outrageous.

But the country has risen dozens of times the real estate, why can Huaqing Jiayuan have a name in history?

The reason is naturally those Internet upstarts who have gone out here: Wang Xing's intranet was rented in Building 13 805, Wu Shichun's Kuxun was once rented in Building 11 1706, Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao were once rented in Building 7 305... Through the sea of plaid shirts in the community, you can also find the shadows of Zhang Yiming, Xu Yirong, Chen Annie and others.

Relying on the label of "the place where the big guys once fought", Huaqing Jiayuan has become an old revolutionary area for Internet people, and along the 13th line of the east gate of the community, through Tsinghuayuan is Shangdi, Houchang Village and Xi'erqi, which were once a farmland and cemetery are now crowded with Internet companies, one after another, densely packed.

In the days when house prices soared in Huaqing Jiayuan, students memorized the "Programmer Interview Treasure Book" and poured into the big factory, the US dollar fund held a stack of TS pepper noodle investment, the Xi'erqi subway station was crowded, and there were always people in the sardine canned car eating leek boxes while anxiously thinking about whether the future listing subjects would let go of Man or put the virgin.

That is the golden age, ringing the bell one after another, financing flocking to, the dollar rolling in, the future of the "Internet Dictionary" must have a sentence: Zhang Hua in the houchang village as a programmer, the amount of options is sufficient; Li Ping in the vc investment in the Internet, carry rich; I sell school district houses in Wudaokou chain home, monthly commission of 100,000: we all have a bright future.

Shakespeare said that these cruel pleasures will end in brutality.

01

Gatsby's world

During the short video war in 2019, the Beijing Internet circle circulated such a paragraph:

A junior algorithm engineer on Weibo was first pushed to Douyin, and his salary doubled; 3 months later, he was dug from Douyin to Baidu, and the package rose by 50%; half a year later, he jumped from Baidu to Kuaishou, rose by 30%, and gave a lot of options. It is equivalent to going around the back factory village in a year, doing nothing, but the salary is 3 times that of the previous one.

This absurd plot is an uncommon footnote to many "Internet wars" that have occurred in China in the past two decades, but there is no doubt that the Internet has become the golden channel for the transition of China's poor children and children - after the reform and opening up, the college entrance examination, going to the sea, speculating in houses, etc. have briefly led this channel, obviously, now it is the turn of the Internet.

The earliest computer science majors were opened in Chinese universities in 1956, when students were required to learn boring programming languages and deal with cold hosts stuffed with circuit boards. In the 1990s, the Internet and PCs with graphical interfaces gradually became popular, and the popularity of computer professionals began to increase, and after the rise of domestic web1.0 companies after 2000, the treatment began to significantly open up the distance between other professions.

In 2010, the mobile Internet broke out, the salary of the big factory was even higher and higher, the Java training of Peking University Blue Bird surpassed Lanxiang's excavator and New Oriental's Hunan cuisine specialty, Tsinghua Yao class and Jiaotong University ACM were in Zhihu and Weibo, and even children of several years old wrote the first line of life "hello world" in various children's programming classes.

Xi'erqi subway station in the morning rush hour

Programmers have become one of the few professions that can enter the eyes of mother-in-law. In Shenzhen, girls in the blind date market prefer goose factory men and second choose Huawei men; in Hangzhou, the beautiful women of well-off families can post marriage posts on the Ali intranet; and in Shangrao, Jiangxi, some parents played a red banner of "Congratulations xxx monthly salary 18,000 to Jingdong", and the scene is comparable to the joy of improving the examination.

A folk song goes like this: marry a hero in the 50s, marry a poor peasant in the 60s, marry a military camp in the 70s, marry a diploma in the 80s, marry a rich man in the 90s, and marry a code farmer in the 2000s.

The HR of the Internet giant is obviously more anxious than the matchmakers and red brides, and in 2015, yahoo's Beijing global research and development center was closed, and its office location, Tsinghua Tongfang Building, staged a robbery "famous scene" at the entrance:

Hundreds of HR and headhunters got together to try to woo the 350 Yahoo employees who had just gotten their N+4s, and many beautiful women held up billboards, some with the words "Send iPhones on entry", some written "B-round unicorns are looking for the CTO", and some wrote "Yahoo's brother, we help you continue to be bullish".

People from all walks of life flock to the Internet, engaged in real estate, meeting houses, selling sex toys, and even Shanxi coal bosses have rented a house in Huaqing Jiayuan to start an app. They are full of ambition, with Zhang Yiming's ambition and 100 times of "Social Network" movie experience, often hanging on the lips of a sentence is: everything is ready, just TM is a programmer.

The boom also seems to be reflected in domestic film and television dramas: in the early years, the IT technology man was Xiao Bei in "Snail House" - a girlfriend who cheated with the leader because of the house. And now, although the image of programmers in domestic dramas has not yet been as cool as in "The Matrix", at least it can be cp with Tong Liya in "My Affordable Man".

Executives are even more financially charged. In 2005, Baidu listing created 8 billionaires, 9 years later Ali listing added this number to almost two zeros, even multi-millionaires have more than 1,000, and the listing of JD.com, Pinduoduo, Meituan, Xiaomi, Yingke, Huya, Shell, Kuaishou and other companies has allowed a large number of people to gain financial freedom.

Of course, these piping hot money will eventually find their hometown like a migratory salmon: the house.

A Haidian real estate agent who is proficient in current affairs recalled to the author: Byte, Kuaishou and Tencent people prefer large apartments of about 200 square meters, and there are more shots before the year-end award; Baidu and Netease employees buy two bedrooms and three bedrooms, but they are full at every turn; small apartments are mainly sina and millet people are buying; it seems that people who have not seen Sohu have seen much.

Haidian School District housing is only an option for internal volume workers, and Internet capitalists obviously have higher pursuits. In Shanghai, the successful founders of cash out like to collect a set of Cuihu Tiandi; in Shenzhen, the Shenzhen Bay No. 1 adjacent to the port has become the standard for the upstarts in Nanshan; in Beijing, Huaqing Jiayuan is just in need of entry money, and the Shunyi villa area where new money is gathered is the next stop after the Nasdaq rings the bell.

The style of the Internet plutocrats may be completely different from that of coal bosses: they usually dress modestly, take apple watches instead of Patek Philippe, take commercial flights instead of private planes, stay up late 996 overtime, do not engage in a 36 Hummer's marriage convoy, and do not buy two units in Wangjing before dinner, but their wealth accumulation speed and appeal in the field of public opinion are unprecedented in history.

Therefore, when Shunyi mothers get together to discuss their husbands' investment projects, when the wuzhen dinner bureau talks about the next trillion outlet, when The Porsche sales in Hangzhou wish ants a smooth listing in the circle of friends, and the newly registered Family Office in Cayman and Singapore mushrooms, the atmosphere suddenly becomes Gatsby.

How many years from now, how will people remember this glitz and restlessness?

02

The story of mobility

The vast majority of the world's wealth comes from the illusion of money jetting and liquidity.

John Doerr, the godfather of the Internet VC circle, commented on the new money in "Silicon Valley Fire": the only and largest amount of legally accumulated wealth of this century. Obviously, before the monopoly label is labeled, the rolling wealth of china's Internet is also considered to be the "cleanest generation".

But the rise of the internet has been too fast, and the speed is jaw-dropping. It took Walmart 50 years to hire 2.2 million people, while it took less than 10 years for the number of Meituan riders to exceed 5 million; It took Huawei 23 years to build a global high-tech talent team of 100,000 people, and ByteDance did the same number in 8 years. Why are they?

The technology dividend and model innovation are the answers in the textbook, but where does the money that underpins these technologies and innovations come from?

Is it a local venture capital institution? Turning over the portfolio of RMB funds such as Shenzhen Venture Capital, there are very few star Internet companies. Is it supported by financial subsidies from the government? Over the years, I have heard of subsidizing photovoltaics, wind power, and chips, but I have never heard of subsidizing the Internet; is it by the money of real estate tycoons? It seems that only Jia Yueting has done this.

Is it to make blood on your own? Turning over the financial report, Ali has made about 630 billion yuan since its establishment, Tencent has earned 550 billion yuan in the same period, Baidu has earned 170 billion yuan, NetEase has earned 100 billion yuan, in addition to other Internet companies, they are still pursuing positive cash flow and breakeven, and the total profit is not as good as the fraction of the above four companies.

Direct financing is the biggest faucet, and there are no more than two forms, one is primary market financing, and the other is secondary market IPO. In these two scenarios, Internet companies can not care about profits, directly PV, UV, DAU, MAU, GMV, ARPU and other letters and numbers, magically transformed into a steady stream of Dollar.

What is Dollar? "Let the Bullets Fly" master gave a definition: dollar, US knife music.

Transporting the green paper from this end to that end, the direct financing of Internet companies is essentially a crude pipeline that has been running for 20 years, one is the world's largest money reservoir, and the other is the heavily fortified Chinese mainland financial market, which has moved 300 billion US dollars in the past 20 years. That's really big money.

The valve of the pipeline is a dollar fund standing on the outlet of the times, and the plumber next to the valve is a group of VC/PE investors. Slightly different from secondary market fund managers, VC/PE investors are a profession that naturally needs exposure, one is to raise funds, and the other is to create momentum on the track they invest. Therefore, under the media and their own shaping, a considerable number of investors have become "heroes of the times" star.

In the communication field, Xiong Xiaoge is the godfather with glasses, Shen Nanpeng is a shark in a suit, Zhang Ying is the coolest capitalist, Lin Xinhe is a sniper with an 8x mirror, and Xu Xiaoping is the Elite Bole of the Fujian Academy, like a machine gun placed in the T3 terminal of the capital airport, every famous school youth who returns to China by flight will be shot by him.

Investors cross the sea with eight immortals, and various genres bloom, such as the contestant faction, the whaling faction, the track faction, the vertical faction, the research faction, the trend faction, the pepper noodle faction, the clubhouse shaker faction, the bureau fishing faction, the bone-faced faction... There are more hills than the Kuomintang reactionaries. However, in addition to grabbing the case, everyone will be squabbling with each other, and usually the basic well water does not violate the river water.

Even the intermediary agencies have become giants themselves, typical of Huaxing's Bao Fan, a bald middle-aged Shanghainese, like fitness, extraordinary clothes, media photos with a strong "GQ" or "fashion" flavor, but his real energy far exceeds the appearance of his packaging - in the early days of the dollar fund, as long as you know Bao Fan, you know half of the Internet circle.

The success of the US dollar fund, on the one hand, has the luck of stepping on the historical process, on the other hand, it also benefits from the acquiescence of the regulatory on both sides of the ocean to the gray area, such as its "two ends outside" model - fundraising outside, LPs are all US dollars; exits are also overseas, most companies have taken the VIE structure to list overseas and cash out us dollars. This model avoids a large number of taxes.

Direct financing in the US dollar is a perfect match with the asset-light, new model, and high-risk Internet industry, which can make the latter independent of the local financial market where mortgage culture prevails, so that they are not afraid of monetary tensions, not afraid of macro-control, and can save those programmer-turned founders from clumsily dealing with local bank presidents at the wine table and golf course.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, QE has been released one after another, the DOLLAR interest rate has risen all the way, and the flood of liquidity has directly made the global primary market rise. Clearly, in a rotten world, the high-tech industries in China and the United States are promised land in ruins. The Chinese Internet at this end of the pipeline can naturally get the gushing water flow for the first time.

The result of the sheer dollar is a two-decade,tumultuous war of separation unprecedented in China's business history.

03

Proxy wars

An entrepreneur who has swum out of the bloody sea of corpses on the Internet is likely to quote Zeng Guoquan's sentence when reviewing his own experience: spending money is like earth, killing people is like hemp.

Zeng Guoquan is good at tough villages and fighting stupid battles, but Internet entrepreneurs believe in the blitzkrieg of the Third Reich. Reid Hoffman writes in His book Lightning Expansion: "Speed is the key, efficiency" later — if you win, efficiency doesn't matter, and if you lose, efficiency is even less important.

Since the "Battle of a Thousand Regiments" in 2010, the smoke of blitzkrieg has never been extinguished. E-commerce war, takeaway war, live broadcast war, online car war, short video war, shared bicycle war, community group buying war, online education war... It is said that the United States has only been at war for 18 years in the 244 years of its founding, and the proportion of the Internet will only be lower.

Some of this is the giants attacking each other, but the results are usually not very friendly. For example, Tencent went down to do e-commerce and won Liu Qiangdong's famous evaluation - "You can't beat the next bunch of brothers"; for example, Ali did social networking, urging all employees to promote "contacts", and there were even posts on Douban that downloaded exchanges to save Ali employees, and the results were still plummeted.

In fact, after Tencent changed its concept, Ali folded its contacts, and Baidu sold takeaways, the older generation of Internet companies sitting on Jinshan were difficult to mobilize directors with annual salaries of several millions to fight hand-to-hand, and they preferred to use investment (to give money) and ecology (to traffic) to fight proxy war, that is, "agent war".

The so-called proxy war refers to the Internet giants abandoning the old way of doing their own "family barrels" in the past and turning to the use of traffic and investment to form various "unbreakable alliances".

Giants take sides with traffic support requirements, and dollar funds are in the middle of it, the former has seemingly inexhaustible cash flow, the latter has a thick checkbook, the two cooperate with each other to jointly deliver arms to the battlefield, as for entrepreneurs, ten years ago they worried about "dog day BAT will not copy me", ten years later they care about "whether the honorable BAT will vote for me".

Due to the existence of "competition restrictions" in investment agreements, US dollar funds often have to take the initiative to take sides. Typical examples such as online education, the new giant ape tutoring and homework gang in the K12 field short-term contact, the two shareholder lists basically include more than half of the first-line dollar funds, the former behind the Hillhouse, IDG and Jingwei, the latter behind sequoia and SoftBank.

A vertically subdivided Internet field, originally the intensity of competition is relatively average, eating hot pot and singing, suddenly hit by the dollar. Players who touch the two-color ball have to rely on rapid growth to prove themselves, and grab people and grab traffic and resources at the first time after getting money, which is why some people will jump around the factory village for a week and then the salary will increase by 2 times.

Some investors have explicitly pointed out that history will punish those who dare not burn money. Typical examples include the first to do the easy to do online car and its boss Zhou Hang. In 2014, Zhou Hang had at least 6 Termsheets in his hands, with an intended fund of $300 million, but he only took the $100 million C round out of caution, but within a few months, he realized that something was wrong.

At the end of 2014, Didi, which was behind Tencent, received $700 million in financing; in January 2015, SoftBank and Ali quickly got $600 million. The two sides were full of ammunition and began to pour ammunition into the center of the battlefield: "hot war" was fought for 5 months, and 2 billion yuan was invested in subsidies alone, and Didi got 78 million new users with this.

With the entry of Uber China, "Rush" has risen to a new dimension. In 2016, the Saudi Public Investment Fund brought Uber $3.5 billion, making it clear that it would be used for the Chinese market. Before that, Uber CEO Kalanick announced in front of global investors that he would send at least $1 billion in taxi subsidies in China.

As for easy to reach with $100 million in hand, you can only shiver - you are about to lose Didi, Didi loses quickly, loses fast Uber, and then no one loses.

From 2014 to 2016, the fiercest online ride-hailing war, Didi publicly disclosed a total of 13 financings, with a total amount of more than $10 billion, and the counterparty also held at least $5 billion. In this context, the weak and easy to be forced to commit to LeTV, but the honeymoon period was hollowed out by LeTV not long after, and eventually withdrew from the table.

The story of the ride-hailing car finally ended with the merger of Didi and Kuaidi, which was a happy ending for all parties, and the management of Kuaidi cashed out $600 million, leaving the market quite decently (especially compared to the current Didi, it is not easy to sigh). Similarly, the founding teams such as Dianping, Mobike, and Ele.me have all achieved mergers and acquisitions and exited, and fled this shuluo field.

When "billion" becomes a common and accessible number, the agent will inevitably have the illusion of being a chess player. In fact, the risk of being abandoned by the Internet giants has always been the same: even if you take the right 99 steps, 1 bad move will be abandoned, the far example is Feifan e-commerce, the near example is the Ten HuiTuan, and the not far away has ofo.

In the 10 years from 2010 to 2020, funds from Internet giants and overseas VCs poured into various battlefields with "100 million" as the basic unit, creating an unprecedented prosperity in the era of mobile Internet. These wars usually end in two ways:

One is the did-and-do ending. After the merger, Didi maintained a near-monopoly market share for a long time, and thus changed from a chess piece to a chess player. The second is ofo-style ending. Meituan, Didi and Ali launched their own "agents", each unable to destroy the other and hopelessly merged, they could only strike the army and changed from pawns to abandoned.

On the surface, ofo makes the classic mistake of "lightning expansion" – neglecting internal management in pursuit of growth. But in fact, the negative externality of the ofo defeat is very high, and the impact of the shared bicycle war on the level of social opinion is far more than the rise and fall of a company.

In 2018, when the bike-sharing war was feverish, 55-year-old photographer Wu Guoyong traveled to more than 20 provinces, visited 45 shared bicycle abandonment sites, and filmed a set of photographic works called "Nowhere to Put": Abandoned bicycles are like colorful ants in every corner of the open space, like a cemetery. This group of photos has dropped a shocking bomb in the hearts of Chinese, who have always advocated thrift and thrift.

One of "Nowhere to Put", the "Shared Bicycle Cemetery" in Pudong, Shanghai

When the huge waste is displayed in front of the Chinese people, the siphon effect of the Internet's high salary is carried out in a hidden corner. In the chip company, HR found that microelectronics graduates have switched to computers; in the aerospace mouth, the big sister of the personnel office watched the young people resign to be the community operation at the first time after getting the hukou; in the old media, the backbone reporters privately discussed whether to go to the big factory to do PR, and suddenly looked back to find that their leaders had jumped first.

In fact, the siphon effect of the Internet on social resources, along with photos of bicycle cemeteries, speeches at the Bund Financial Conference, Didi's break-through IPO, online education company's Spring Festival Gala advertisements, riders trapped in the system, and community group buying "like small traders grabbing profits", have become the landmark events of the turn of the times - no one can figure out what the specific impact of each thing is, but the lollapalooza effect they superimpose, everyone can see.

During the "proxy wars" of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway wrote For Whom the Death Knell Tolls. It ends with this sentence: Don't ask who the death knell is ringing for, the death knell will ring for you.

04

End

In 2000, the Internet bubble burst, the Nasdaq cold wind whistled, and domestic Internet companies were also in a slump. On December 12 of that year, a conference entitled "The Tenth Anniversary of the Development of the Capital Market" was held in Shanghai, and a deputy director of the State Information Center surnamed Liu delivered a speech entitled "New Economy and Capital Markets and Venture Capital".

In his speech, he made it clear that despite some recent fluctuations in the NASDAQ market, "the new Internet-based economy continues to penetrate and expand, becoming a core factor affecting economic growth, income distribution, international division of labor, and national competitiveness." ”

He analyzed the digital economic policies of the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and other countries, and then summarized the framework of the Chinese government's "Tenth Five-Year" information planning, and finally gave a clear conclusion[5]: "The general trend is very clear, I do not think that cyclical factors will interfere with structural changes, so there should be no confusion about the general direction." "

After re-reading this speech 20 years later, I still feel that the inner and Middle views are extremely forward-looking and inspiring.

A year later, he published a paper titled "Unifying the Development of the New Economy with the Goal of Reform." The paper points out that the conditions for the rise of the Internet in the United States are lacking in China, but China also has potential that the United States does not have: such as a huge potential market, small and medium-sized enterprises playing an increasing role, thousands of years of educational tradition and strong talent reserves, and under the impetus of the government and grassroots enterprises, the system conducive to the development of the Internet economy is gradually taking shape.

The paper points out that China is likely to embark on a new path different from that of the United States[8]: "With the huge domestic market size to drive the formation of industrial scale, and then through the expansion of industrial scale and extensive international cooperation, to promote the formation of standards, China's ability to customize the development of the new economy may be driven by domestic demand." "

20 years on, almost as predicted in the paper.

The Internet economy led the first 20 years of this century, creating countless wealth myths while bringing tangible efficiency improvements to China - more than 10 million direct employees, tens of millions of indirect employees, the global front row of digital capabilities... In every moment of the epidemic, who can deny the huge positive effect of the Internet on society?

But after 20 years of soaring, the industry is also getting heavier and heavier, one of the evidence is the Internet penetration rate that is close to the peak, as of June 2021, the mainland has 71.6% of the Internet penetration rate and 1.011 billion netizens, users inside and outside the fifth ring have achieved "vibrato freedom", and almost all the places that should sink have sunk.

The second piece of evidence is that innovation models are drying up. Most of the Internet innovation in the past 20 years has been based on downstream model innovation, but today, in almost all fields, including food, clothing, housing, eating, drinking, and Lhasa, giants have turned over countless times with swords and ploughshares, and at the moment when upstream technological innovation stagnates, only a few battlefields are left for the imagination of big factories.

When it comes time to say goodbye, it will not simply say goodbye to you, but will pour out 100 sweet words to you with a sense of ceremony, desperately suggesting that "I don't want to leave, in fact, I want to stay". And those who are still clinging to the old paradigm will only finally wake up to their dreams after countless injuries.

Will the baton of Huaqing Jiayuan be the SMIC Garden Community in Zhangjiang, Pudong? The question is like "Will hard technology take over the Baton of the Internet", no one can guess for sure. But to characterize an industry with a real estate project actually implies a metaphor: the Internet and real estate have been the two major paradigms of the economy in the past 20 years, and they have encountered the end of the curtain almost at the same time.

In the past forty years, we have witnessed and personally experienced the end of countless golden ages: the end of the golden age of township enterprises, the end of the golden age of three-to-one supplements, the end of the golden age of coal bosses, the end of the golden age of infrastructure construction, the end of the golden age of real estate... Many times a decent goodbye is the best goodbye.

The times have come all the way, the times have gone all the way, and people who are immersed in the shadow of the old time have reached the time when they need to turn to the next page.

End of the full article, thank you for your patience to read.

[1] Huaqing Jiayuan Entrepreneurship Gang: A large number of Web2.0 enterprises were born in the community, chuangyebang

[2] If you can't see through the wolf dog time of Huaqing Jiayuan, you can't be the next Wang Xing, Chuangbang

[3] The Boiling New Decade: Brave Crossers in the Jungle of the Mobile Internet

[4] Didi raised 23 times, how did the founder control the decentralized equity?

[5] New Economy and Capital Markets and Venture Capital, China Economic 50 Forum

[6] Through the Ruins: The Bike-Sharing Drama Is Not Over, Tencent Technology

[7] Ofo's final battle, GQ reports

[8] Unifying the development of the new economy with the goal of reform: The path dependence and practical challenges of China's development of the new economy