Author 丨 劢 calendar
Editor 丨 Zhang Shuo
Travel style original
After 5 years, Zhou Hang, the founder of Yitou, returned to online car-hailing again and served as the chairman of Cao Cao Travel.
It is worth noting that this is also the first time that Zhou Hang is responsible for a company as a professional manager.
Zhou Hang left Easy to these five years, the online car market is still lively.
Didi, which acquired Kuaidi and merged with Uber China, became the absolute hegemon of the mobility market; Uber was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2019, creating a myth of ride-hailing at a valuation of $82 billion;
After Didi was listed at the end of June last year, it was investigated by the regulator and removed from the App, and the online ride-hailing market set off a new scramble, including Cao Cao Travel, Meituan Taxi, T3 Travel, AutoNavi and other new and old players have increased the subsidy amount of passengers and drivers, waiting for the opportunity to expand market share;
Although the earlier players Shenzhou Chauffeur and Shouqi Ride-hailing car survived, they are no longer active; and Yi to yi has long been "dead in name" and is still facing more than 30,000 people "queuing" to withdraw cash.
With the entrepreneurial experience of success and failure and the blessing of 5 years of investor status, can zhou hang back to the online ride-hailing jianghu this time? Can Cao Cao's travel make up for the regret that Zhou Hang is easy to reach?
01
From "the originator of online car-hailing" to "entrepreneurship can not be too zhou hang"
From the perspective of the time of establishment, it is easy to count as the "originator of online car-hailing".
In May 2010, Yito was established. It was only five months later that Uber launched its first version of the app in San Francisco, which is known for its taxi difficulties (in fact, Uber was founded in 2009). In the words of Zhou Hang, "At that time, we didn't know each other's existence, and it was easy to be completely original." Didi, which has since grown into a mobility giant, began launching its ride-hailing business at the end of 2012, two years later.
Zhou Hang once proudly said: "Before 2014, the entire Chinese car-hailing field was ours, and everyone else followed us to do it." "For up to 18 months, it was easy to have no competitors, which was almost an unimaginable first-mover advantage. Until the end of 2013, Yito maintained a market share of 80%.
However, this first-mover advantage did not keep the pioneers ahead. In the subsidy war set off by Didi, Kuaidi and Uber China, the ease of refusing subsidies directly leads to the loss of the market. Not only that, but capital has also begun to turn to new players, and it is easy to start laying off employees because of insufficient financing reserves.
By September 2015, a month before LeEco entered the shares, the daily order volume of Yidao was only 20,000, while Didi had occupied more than 80% of the market share after the merger of Fast, with daily orders exceeding 7 million. This year was also Zhou Hang's "most painful year", and in the face of competition, he ran out of food and "already faintly smelled the breath of death".
Until October 2015, LeEco invested $700 million in shares, acquiring 70% of the shares.
It is understood that Yizhi talked about merger plans with Uber China and Shenzhou Chauffeur in 2015, but could not reach an agreement due to valuation differences. "The outside world always feels that I made a wrong choice in N multiple choices. In fact, at that time, I knew that it (LeTV) was not good enough, and LeEco was the last thing I wanted to choose, but other people didn't choose me, and I didn't have to choose. Zhou Hang regarded LeEco as the only straw that could be grasped at that time, "At the beginning, I must have made what I thought was probably the best choice." ”
This "best choice" at that time also became a turning point in easy destiny.
It is both a turning point from the brink of death to rebirth, and a turning point to the abyss of eternal doom.
Because of LeTV, it is easy to return to the highlight moment at one point. With a series of subsidy activities such as "100% recharge and cashback", the daily orders of Easy to Reach have exceeded 1 million in June 2016. It is precisely because of a series of capital crises in LeTV that it has become a "handled equity asset" and has to change hands again.
Zhou Hang, after losing the controlling stake, gradually faded out of the management, until it was exposed that the driver was difficult to withdraw cash and the passenger had no car to play. On April 17, 2017, Zhou Hang said in an open letter that LeEco had embezzled 1.3 billion yuan of funds and called on Jia Yueting to properly handle it, completely intensifying the contradictions between the two sides. LeEco denied misappropriating the funds, accusing Zhou Hang of "malicious slander" and saying it was a "realistic version of the farmer and the snake."
The "war of words" between the two sides is more like shirking responsibility for each other. Subsequently, Zhou Hang and the two co-founders of Yito, Yang Yun and Tang Peng, issued a joint statement announcing the resignation of all relevant positions of Yitou.
Zhou Hang's entrepreneurship ended in failure. In the entrepreneurial circle at that time, there was even a popular saying: "Entrepreneurship can not be too zhou hang" .
More than two months later, in July 2017, a new receiver appeared, and Yi to make a debt of more than 4 billion yuan to Taoyun Capital. Since then, it has been easy to fall into a long-term dilemma of driver withdrawal difficulties, and gradually faded from the mainstream online ride-hailing market.
02
Easy to do something wrong
Before the founding of Yi to, Zhou Hang and his brother had a successful entrepreneurial experience, the two founded Tianchuang Digital is said to be the largest professional audio company in China at that time, as a startup company won the competition with two strong rivals of Dazhong Electric Appliances and Vanke. He always considered himself a born entrepreneur.
But Yi to this entrepreneurial experience made Zhou Hang seriously frustrated, resulting in serious self-doubt, "I feel that I did nothing right, nothing is done well", and even "my strategic ability is not the worst", "that kind of failure and excessive denial of self-emotions always hang over me".
The failure of Easy to Reach is caused by many factors, and the outside world will always be attributed to LeTV first, including Zhou Hang himself, who also said that Yi To "The final result is actually dragged into the water by LeTV".
As for what LeEco has brought to Yidao as a shareholder, Zhou Hang said in a public forum in August 2017: It is all negative, and LeEco is synonymous with "no credibility".
Zhou Hang also mentioned that "if there is no LeEco injection, it will be easy to have a different fate." He also added, "Nowadays, the online ride-hailing industry has also changed, and Shenzhou Chauffeur, Shouqi Ride-hailing, etc. have returned to the track of easy to the early days, and they have also achieved good development."
Will fate be fundamentally different? If there is no LeTV and a series of operations after that, if there are other capital parties willing to lend a helping hand at that time, can it be easy to go along the "small and beautiful" route?
The answer doesn't seem to be yes either.
Before LeEco took a stake, Yi to has seriously fallen behind. For Yidao at the time, certain factors of failure were already engraved in the DNA of the founders and teams. Thinking about it from another angle, how did it get to the point where you wanted to choose to be taken over by LeEco?
Under the advice of Xu Xiaoping, an early investor of Yizhi and founder of Zhen Fund, Zhou Hang deeply analyzed the failed entrepreneurial experience and published a book in October 2018, "Re-understanding Entrepreneurship: Thinking on the Way of an Entrepreneur", "Unveiling Each of His Scars to Others".
Discussion of failure is often more valuable than successful preaching. In this book, we see how easy to go from being a forerunner to being eliminated by the market step by step. Compared with the reluctance when he first left Yidao a year ago, Zhou Hang, who had become an investment partner of Shunwei Capital, was more rational and in-depth about the review of Yidao after seeing more and more entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial projects.
One of the most important points that cannot be ignored, Zhou Hang mentioned in the book, "When it was easy to go to the A round of financing, an investor talked to us, and signed an investment intention letter at that time, but still did not invest." Later, he commented that what Yi da did did not match my personality. I was not convinced at the time, and now I have to admit that he was right."
Idealists who pay attention to detail, pursue perfection, have feelings and are very literary, these qualities are concentrated in Zhou Hang. As the head of a startup, in the barbaric growth of the mobility industry at that time, this also directly led to the inability to make the right choice in strategic positioning, financing, and competition. An early executive also mentioned that "Zhou Hang is the kind of person who would rather lose gracefully than win in a bad way."
For example, financing, as a pioneer, Yizhi has been the object of investor pursuit until 2015. In the first half of 2014, the easy-to-reach C round of financing could have received 300 million US dollars, which was also the largest amount of financing for non-listed companies at that time. But Zhou Hang eventually only needed $100 million, and the largest financing in the history of global private equity fell to the limelight.
In September 2014, didi, which was in the limelight, received $700 million in Series D financing from investors including GGV Capital, Tencent Investment, DST Global, etc. Since then, the entire market pattern has undergone earth-shaking changes. Zhou Hang recalled, "At that time, it was actually game over. ”
Zhou Hang reflected that yidu did not take advantage of the good opportunity to raise enough capital, and the most fundamental reason was, "I did not think clearly about what the money used for financing." Although I knew I was going to use the money to subsidize users, grow my business, and advertise, I didn't carefully calculate how much money I would spend, and I didn't foresee the worst possible scenario in the competitive environment."
From this point of view, Easy to be not completely dragged down by competitors, in essence, Easy to not deal with competition head-on at all. From swaggering and bumblebee to the establishment of Fast and Didi, competition in the field of travel began as early as 2012. Yi to has always claimed that "what you do is a special car", and what others do is a taxi taxi, which seems to be differentiated competition, but in fact, it is to avoid competition with an "ostrich mentality".
With the accumulation of taxi business, when Didi started from scratch to make special cars, it took only three months to surpass Yidao.
For the taxi business, easy to "three up and three down", in the early days of its establishment, Easy to launch a one-click call taxi product - "taxi secret", which was stopped after half a year, because Zhou Hang was not optimistic about the taxi business model. In 2013, Yizhi once again launched the "Taxi Secret", which was specially responsible for by a new independent team, but it was unable to resist the subsidy war between Kuaidi and Didi. Zhou Hang decided to concentrate on doing a good job, and the "taxi secret" was once again taken off the line.
As Lei Jun responded to Zhou Hang's failure: "In essence, you did not see through it, did not see through the essence of this matter (mobile travel). ”
This may be the core of Zhou Hang's regretful ending.
03
How Cao Cao traveled to write a new story
Zhou Hang mentioned at the end of the book "Re-understanding Entrepreneurship", "Creation makes me happy, and I still want to start a business again." If I start a business again, I should be able to learn something from the previous period of entrepreneurship, and my cognition and mentality will also change."
What the outside world did not expect was that Zhou Hang did not choose to start a business again, but chose Cao Cao travel as chairman.
After ending his career as a capital investor in June last year, Zhou Hang must have many choices, and he must have returned to the battlefield of online ride-hailing that he had failed, and he was still unwilling after all. Even at that time, online car-hailing was not the entrepreneurial project that Zhou Hang most wanted to do, and before the establishment of Yi to, he also considered mobile payment, electronic reading, social networking based on address book, etc., "but through rational judgment, between wanting to do, capable and capable, I found a meeting point."
Compared with the ease of the entrepreneurial period, or a new entrepreneurial project, today's Cao Cao travel may be more suitable for the characteristics of Zhou Hang.
Cao Cao Chuxing is a mobility company under Geely Automobile, founded in 2016 (then named "Cao Cao Special Car"), led by Liu Jinliang, then head of Geely's new energy sector, and incubated internally. In 2019, "Cao Cao Chauffeur" was upgraded to "Cao Cao Travel", and the business line was also expanded from chauffeur to taxi, hitchhiking, same-city delivery and other businesses. By the end of 2021, Cao Cao Travel has covered more than 60 cities across the country and has more than 600,000 registered drivers.
Since the second half of last year, there have been many changes in the senior management of Cao Cao Travel, and it is reported that the original team has basically left all of them. Enterprise investigation and industrial and commercial information shows that Hangzhou Youxing Technology Co., Ltd., the main company of Cao Cao Travel, has recently undergone industrial and commercial changes, adding Zhou Hang as chairman and Zhang Quan as a director, the former chairman Liu Jinliang's position as a director, and the original director Li Donghui withdrew from the director position.
"Travel Fan" learned that at the end of December last year, Liu Jinliang had left Cao Cao Travel to serve as the chairman of Chongqing Happiness Ten Million Family Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Happiness Ten Million Family"),a subsidiary of Geely. "Happy Tens of Millions" positioning aggregation platform, to create a travel capacity service ecology, for the driver group to provide training, examination certificates, vehicle sales, vehicle leasing, vehicle maintenance, financial solutions, order empowerment, energy supply, catering and life and other one-stop services.
In addition, Gong Xin, who was in charge of Didi's ride-hailing, chauffeur-hailing and regional ride-hailing business, joined Cao Cao Chuxing as CEO in May 2021.
Whether it is Zhou Hang or Gong Xin, they have accumulated rich practical experience in the field of online ride-hailing. The former participated in the budding and development of the ride-hailing market, and the latter witnessed how Didi, which grew up in the subsidy melee, was a monopoly. This is undoubtedly an extremely valuable resource for Cao Cao's travel in the post-Didi era, which is eager to seize the market.
Since the removal of the Didi App in July last year, Cao Cao's order volume has increased significantly. In September last year, Gong Xin revealed that cao cao travel orders doubled in just three time periods, and in some larger cities, cao cao travel's market share has approached 20%.
However, Cao Cao Travel's mission is not just to occupy more markets. Especially in the context of strengthening the compliance process of online ride-hailing in various places and rectifying industry issues such as the proportion of online ride-hailing platforms by the Ministry of Transport, barbaric and disorderly expansion is no longer a key word.
For Geely, Cao Cao Travel is one of its important strategies of "new energy vehicle sharing ecology", Geely has announced that it will use the world's leading vehicle networking, automatic driving technology and new energy technology to innovate and apply it to the field of shared travel, and empower Cao Cao travel in an all-round way.
While steadily expanding, the improvement of services and experiences, as well as the innovation of business models and technologies, are the next focus of Cao Cao Travel.
This is Zhou Hang's strength.
In fact, Yito has done a lot of innovations, such as test drives, such as exploring automotive e-commerce through online ride-hailing platforms. Another example is the cooperation and exploration with the automotive industry chain, including the establishment of Haier Travel with Haier Finance, and the joint venture with Chery to establish Yiqi Automobile to produce and develop electric intelligent shared cars. There are also creative marketing such as reading books in the car and cooperating with the beaver family to engage in nail art cars. These ideas and initiatives are also very valuable today, of course, most of which have been realized by Didi.
However, for the easy arrival at that time, these were the icing on the cake, not urgent and unnecessary. Zhou Hang once reflected that if (a new idea) just changed things from 9 points to 9.5 points, it would be a lot of effort to do things after the decimal point, which was not much use.
And now Cao Cao's travel is to the period after the need to constantly enrich the decimal point.
On April 13, Cao Cao Chuxing held the "Cao Cao Travel N³ Strategy Landing and Product Upgrade Conference" in Chongqing, and "N³" (N cube) refers to New Car (customized car), New Power (new energy), and New Ecosystem (ecosystem).
From this new strategy and the establishment of "Happy Ten Million Homes", it is not difficult to see that the next Cao Cao Travel will focus on the driver's end and lay out the industrial ecology around vehicles and transportation capacity.
Zhou Hang regretted the failure of the second venture; whether the investor Zhou Hang achieved "excellence" as expected is no longer important. Zhou Hang, who re-emerged from the mountain, unlocked the identity of a "professional manager", and it was in the field of his own fiasco.
"Those who can't kill you make you stronger."
The story that belongs to Zhou Hang and Cao Cao will open a new chapter. Looking forward to a different case of ride-hailing.