Xu Xiaoping, one of China's most famous angel investors, was once known as the "first Internet celebrity" in the venture capital circle, and he and the Zhen Fund he founded are highly sought after by young entrepreneurs.
However, the popular enterprises in the past two years can be said to have nothing to do with Xu Xiaoping and his Zhen Fund. Whether it is today's headlines, Pinduoduo, Douyin, Kuaishou and other Internet giants, or bubble Mart, Naixue's tea, Xicha and other head enterprises that are highly sought after by the Z generation, there is no zhen fund figure.
Xu Xiaoping and Zhen Fund missed an era, a top angel investment institution, completely missed the huge outlet of China's Internet, which is regrettable.
At the same time, in recent years, Xu Xiaoping seems to have gradually faded from the public eye, and people rarely see the old naughty boy who jumps and jumps at every previous conference, has rich body movements, pretends to be hoarse, and shouts "entrepreneurship" in a slightly hoarse voice, except for the few appearances such as the online appearance at the IPO of Ucommune On November 24, 2020.
The highlight moment of the "net red" in the venture capital circle
Xu Xiaoping, the founder of Zhen Fund, was born in 1956 in Taixing, Jiangsu Province, and is a famous angel investor in China. He has won the titles of "2011 Angel Investor of the Year", "Best Angel Fund of 2012", "Best Angel Investor of 2013", "2013 Angel Investment Leader of Zhongguancun" and so on.
Before founding Zhen Fund, Xu Xiaoping was the co-founder of New Oriental Education Group, and together with Yu Minhong and Wang Qiang, he was known as the "troika" of New Oriental.
In 2011, five years after the listing of New Oriental Group, Xu Xiaoping, Wang Qiang and Sequoia Capital Joint Fund co-founded Zhen Fund, which aims to encourage young people to start a business, innovate, create wealth and create. Zhen Fund hopes to build a rainbow for overseas students to return to China to start a business, focusing on but not limited to international students to start a business. The Zhen Foundation is happy to help young people with international awareness and understanding to realize their entrepreneurial dreams.
"Zhen Fund has never invested in projects, but people, more young people with high education and overseas studies." In response to this, Xu Xiaoping once explained that investors should intervene when a company has nothing but a founder's idea, so there is nothing to examine except people.
Such an investment concept also makes Xu Xiaoping known as "the most popular angel among entrepreneurs in the circle". It is said that he never reads the report on investment, and if a project does not make his head hot within half an hour, it will not get his favor.
In 2016, Xu Xiaoping jokingly called the "first Internet celebrity" in the venture capital circle Kai-Fu Lee at a public event, and he was the "second Internet celebrity". However, many people in the outside world still think that Xu Xiaoping is the "first Internet celebrity" in the venture capital circle, and Xu Xiaoping also gladly accepts the impact of his "Internet celebrity" identity.
In a 2018 interview, he said, "I want to use my status as a 'startup influencer', an influential investor, to express my optimistic views on the future of entrepreneurship." For me personally, deep down, I have a reverence for fame. This reverence is actually the reverence of the masses and society that have given you fame. To meet the expectations of the public for celebrities, I think it is not too much to pay for a lifetime. ”
Xu Xiaoping is not only an "internet celebrity", he has also invested in "internet celebrity entrepreneurs" such as Chen Ou, Luo Zhenyu, and Papi Sauce. He has always encouraged and supported entrepreneurs to become Internet celebrities, "The purpose of the enterprise is to sell things, and to sell things must let people know about you." The web is the most powerful and cheapest medium, well done, even for free. ”
Zhen Fund was founded in 2011, but what really made Xu Xiaoping and Zhen Fund famous was the wave of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" after 2014. Because of this wave, Xu Xiaoping won the "2016 Forbes Global Best Venture Capitalist List" in 2016, which is also the first time he has been shortlisted for this list. In the past few years from 2014 to 2016, Zhen Fund has always invested more than 100 projects a year.
At the same time as a large investment, there are also large returns. In 2011, Xu Xiaoping's early investment in Century Jiayuan was listed on the NASDAQ, and as the leading century jiayuan in the online dating industry at that time, its listing brought rich returns to Xu Xiaoping.
In the same year, Xu Xiaoping invested $1.9 billion in Chen Ou, the founder of Jumei Premium, which was listed in the United States in 2014. The successful listing of Jumei Premium allowed Xu Xiaoping to invest 1,000 times the $180,000 that was gained, and according to the shares held at that time, Xu Xiaoping held a market value of $300 million.
Xu Xiaoping has invested in a number of start-up companies such as Lanting Jishi, papi sauce, xiaohuangche, etc. According to enterprise investigation data, as of now, there have been 917 investment incidents and 737 investment projects of Zhen Fund.
After the glory, a place of chicken feathers
However, it can also be found that these companies that have created a lot of wealth for Xu Xiaoping have long lost their luster.
In 2017, Xu Xiaoping said in a speech, "When I mention the past five years, I think of TMD (Toutiao, Meituan, Didi). I'd like to say 'TMD' because we didn't vote for TMD either. "Come to think of it, Xu Xiaoping is still grumpy about the giant companies that missed these future Internet companies."
Not only missed the investment of these giant enterprises, xu Xiaoping invested in the star companies also fell into a dilemma, in 2017, Jumei Premium market value shrank by 90%, Chen Ouren collapsed; after the "red, yellow and blue kindergarten" incident, Xu Xiaoping as an angel investor came out to respond: "You can blame me, for the sake of Chinese children can blame me." ”
Before this, Xu Xiaoping also realized the common characteristics of the founders of the Internet factory. The founders of those big Internet companies are serial entrepreneurs or executives of large companies before, in addition, they take the money of acquaintances, and both entrepreneurs and investors come from the Internet industry.
These are inconsistent with the investment philosophy that Xu Xiaoping insisted on before, and in order to make up for it, he began to pay attention to the executives who came out of the big factories, changed their social circles, and gradually shifted the part of the focus on college students to the bias towards executives. Under the leadership of Xu Xiaoping, the Ucommune Workshop invested by Zhen Fund in 2015 and the perfect diary of investment in 2016 ushered in the first wave of listing boom in 2020.
In 2020, it has become the "online education" of the outlet, xu Xiaoping is also involved, but the results are not so satisfactory. In 2011, he and Wang Qiang personally invested in angel investments in the startup company. Together Work Network is the predecessor of Together Education, the founder is Liu Chang, who was the assistant vice president of New Oriental Group, and Together Education was listed on the NASDAQ in December 2020.
As of the listing, Together Education has been established for 9 years, but the loss rate in the past three years is still more than 160%. As of April 29, less than half a year after the listing of the same transaction, the stock price has plummeted from a peak of $23.93 to $7.20, a discount of nearly 30% from the ADS issue price of $10.5, which has been called "the worst new stock in the education industry" by the market.
When it comes to blockchain, it is difficult not to think of Xu Xiaoping.
In January 2018, a screenshot of a WeChat group chat went viral on the Internet, and Xu Xiaoping mentioned in the WeChat group of 500 people of zhen fund, "A blockchain revolution has arrived!" Please fasten your seatbelts, refuel, and take your own enterprises to enter the blockchain era steadily, accurately, fiercely and quickly! He called blockchain "a great technological revolution that goes along with the flow and dies against the odds," calling on the other 499 individuals to "embrace blockchain."
But only 10 months after Xu Xiaoping said this, he urgently stepped on the brakes, and on November 28, 2018, some media found that Xu Xiaoping deleted all the relevant microblogs related to the blockchain. In addition to IOST, the blockchain projects invested by Xu Xiaoping and his Zhen Fund have a maximum decline of 99% in tokens such as DATA, EDU, YEE, MDT, etc., and the coin price is almost zero.
On the official website of the Zhen Fund, the blockchain projects previously invested by the Zhen Fund have been offline. In the financial technology investment sector, the blockchain projects such as Huobi, FINBOOK, Gongxinbao, MaiCoin, Coinify, and BLOCKSEER that Zhen Fund has invested in are no longer in the list.
It seems that with the decline of the blockchain heat, Xu Xiaoping has gradually faded out of the outside world's vision.
There are about 26,000 pieces of information related to Xu Xiaoping on Baidu, about 3,900 related to 2016, which have dropped sharply to about 1,100 in 2020, and there are only a few repetitive press releases so far in 2021. Xu Xiaoping's latest Weibo post was updated on December 21, 2019. The only thing that can be found about Xu Xiaoping's latest developments recently is the article on the perfect diary written by Xu Xiaoping released by the Zhen Fund public account at the end of 2020.
This has also caused widespread speculation from the outside world, where did Xu Xiaoping go?
Angel investment encounters "freezing point"
Xu Xiaoping's scenery from the scenery of previous years to the silence of the past two years also reflects the ups and downs of China's angel investment field to a certain extent.
Earlier, when asked about the current status of angels and early investments in the venture capital market, Mi Lei, the founding partner of Zhongke Chuangxing, said that it was "extremely shrinking".
Another angel investor, who also had a unique scenery 5 or 6 years ago, once said privately that of the 3 or 400 angel projects he invested in, there is only one case that can live well.
Source: CVSource hit the data
According to CVSource investment data, in 2020, the number of angel investment events was 1238, a decrease of 83% compared with 2016. On the other hand, in the past 5 years, the number of new institutions established by angel investment institutions has also continued to decline significantly, and even no new institutional players have joined in 2020. In 2020, the number of investment cases of early-stage investment institutions was 180, compared with 727 in 2016, a decrease of 75%.
Although their external caliber continues to be based on the "early stage", the investment tentacles of most of the active angel institutions in the market have begun to extend to the later stage, and there are basically very few institutions in the market that simply invest in the angel stage.
With the gradual end of China's entrepreneurial tide, angel investment has begun to become more rational, and the fanaticism of the past has been difficult to appear. It is only bitter that those institutions that provide incubation and services for entrepreneurship, when they deal with the epidemic and the big test of the global economic downturn, they must actively transform and carry the weight forward, and the scenery of the past has long become a memory!