Recently, Zhang Ye, the founder of Tsingshan Capital, has a high appearance rate, and he can be seen on the stage at many annual sharing sessions. Mr. Zhang Ye also gave face, and in line with the core of "looking back on the past and looking forward to the future" in the year-end review, he popularized a lot of "big words" suitable for enhancing confidence. For example, the "scarring effect" is used to refer to "consumer demand is only hidden, and it is completely possible to be activated". For example, "research consumption" is used to refer to the current "consumption entrepreneurship", which is mainly "R&D-driven", which is a technical job, which is different from the wave of "new consumption fever" that occurred between 2019 and 2021.
At one meeting, Mr. Zhang Ye also made a cameo appearance as the host, and the organizer invited him to sit with Li Jiaqi and talk about "new domestic products". Li Jiaqi may still be thinking about the "eyebrow pencil incident", and the whole romanticized speech theme "No one is an island, we are all part of the world". Mr. Zhang Ye was also very cooperative, and the first question of the conversation was very non-"commercial": emotions bring risks. In such a society, everyone is avoiding risks, what brings such an emotion (to domestic products) to consumers?
Of course, none of this comes as a surprise. In the past few years, Zhang Ye's social business card seems to be "not doing business", and the biographies of characters spontaneously written by various business ** have taken a lot of pages to describe him playing ** and doing DJ. His Weibo "Qingshan Zhang Ye", at the top is his collaboration with Zhou Shen "Heart of Peace", and the popular recommended content is "A Life" co-created by him and @pantaq Guoqu, and those who don't know think that "Qingshan" is a label.
Looking at the "slash youth" circle, the only one with the same name may be Da Bing.
There may be friends who are not familiar with the big ice, here I will popularize science a little. Mr. Da Bing is a professional writer who became famous, and he is also a host, a folk singer, an old backpacker, an unprofessional bar shopkeeper, a professional oil painter, a tambourine artist, an amateur leatherman, an amateur silversmith, an amateur poet, a senior **La Piao, a senior Lijiang gangster, **left face, and a Zen Linji**. In the era when social networks have not yet become infrastructure, Mr. Da Bing's book takes everyone to see the world. In the era of "withdrawal reaction" when you take off your mobile phone, Mr. Da Bing collapsed into a "new ** operation", and people saw in him the marketing tips of "adding countless entry tags to each piece of content to drain traffic". has been developing until the end of 2023, and a "ice science" was simply born on social networks, borrowing the name of Da Bing Teacher to refer to the subtle state of "insufficient dry goods, more than cards", a piece of "literary and artistic young people have read Da Bing is equivalent to a case record".
It is indeed inappropriate to say that Mr. Zhang Ye is the "big ice of the venture capital circle". But when you talk to practitioners in the primary market about Zhang Ye and Tsingshan Capital, the first word that comes to most people's minds is "style". It's hard for me to judge whether this evaluation is a good word or a bad word, which reminds me of Yang Di's experience of sharing a small experience of recording a "food show", he said that when he ate "I don't know how to describe the taste" in front of the camera, the most appropriate expression is "so special".
But recently, Tsingshan Capital has just completed a new phase of consumer fundraising, and the information that can be seen on the water surface of their internal name "China Consumption Seeds**" is that this phase will be launched in 2022 and the first level in 2023, with a scale of 60 million US dollars, equivalent to more than 400 million yuan, with a duration of more than 10 years, and there are dollar market-oriented mothers like Unicorn Partners and industrial mothers like Lee Kum Kee in the LP structure It also includes a number of domestic and foreign family offices, which plan to specifically target early-stage investment projects before the Series A round. Standard financial investment in USD**.
If you continue to search along this message, you can still find two easter eggs. One is the well-known veteran Fan Weifeng's **Gaozhang Capital officially announced the establishment of his own consumer angel**, and his LP is the local guide of Shanghai and Hangzhou**, plus some market-oriented mothers**, entrepreneurs, and family offices;The other is that Fosun Group has continuously invested in a number of catering business management companies since last month, with a registered capital of 45 million to 100 million, and its business scope is clearly positioned as "investment management, investment consulting, and asset management".
What's more subtle is the time, at the beginning of December, at the "17th China Investment Annual Conference Limited Partner Summit" held by China Investment, our colleagues from the research institute also released a data, saying that the financing interval of consumer projects before 2022 was about 14 months, and by 2023, this data will be expanded to 43 months. This set of data is combined with "the average life expectancy of small and medium-sized enterprises in China is 25 years", which is full of the atmosphere of "the primary market forcing the paradigm shift of entrepreneurial projects".
In fact, including Zhang Ye, he also said this very bluntly in his speech: "In the early stage of consumption, this species is not much on the market now......."It's said that 'the child who can scream has milk', but only if you have a mother." You see, the few days of the speech happened to be when he had just completed fundraising, and theoretically it was the time when confidence needed to be emphasized the most, but he couldn't help but emphasize the strong "counter-intuitive" color behind "optimistic about consumption and investment".
At this time, everyone suddenly realized: it turned out that Zhang Ye was not going to the hole, but sharing a set of consensus that had been paid for by real gold, across ** guidance, US dollar capital, industrial CVC, and high net worth. A GP who is not doing his job properly has completed the fundraising of the expected target with a recognized exit difficulty track at a recognized fundraising difficulty point. What a Rashomon.
What about the good ones who say they are not doing their jobs?So how should we make sense of this sudden, contrasting feeling?
The venture capital industry often talks about "looking at people, looking at people, looking at people", but in fact, which of the investment bigwigs is not a ghost?On the surface, this one rides a motorcycle outside every day, and that one pours chicken soup everywhere as a life coach. The bigwigs come to the stage either to share their observations of the world or to output their thoughts on the world, and they are also carrying each other's sedan chairs.
In the past few years, I have said more than once that the future ** is either a big white horse, or a vertical small and beautiful, you see that people are cunning and don't say through it, and they secretly practice it.
As early as 2012, in the famous capital market judgment "We have met the enemy, "he" is us" - this report to "dismantle those industry cognitions shaped by the millennial Internet bubble", Kaufman ** will make it clear that they have sorted out the data of nearly 100 venture capital ** invested in the primary market in the past 20 years, and found that only 20 ** can outperform the entire market by more than 3% to 5%, and even 62 ** have a yield that cannot exceed.
In fact, in the so-called more mature and fully developed European and American markets, "the * version needs to be updated" is a cyclical topic. For example, in 2017, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tomer Dean argued through a series of mathematical calculations that the current ** model seems to have some kind of "misfit" with the current entrepreneurial environment:
He hypothesized that a qualified ** needs to create 12% of the capital growth per year (the standard of 12% is 7-8% relative to the average return value of the ** market and real estate market at that time), and take a 10-year return cycle, then it can be roughly calculated that at the time of liquidation, a starting size of 100 million US dollars**, and the scale after 3 years theoretically needs to reach 3$100 million. In addition, Tomer Dean also sets a background condition, which is that he refers to the average performance of the industry, assuming that the venture capital has 80% of the returns, which is actually created by 20% of the projects.
So he extrapolated through a series of hypothetical scenarios – for example, investing $100 million in 10 startups, each of which performed mediocre, half of the investment projects exited more than expected (exiting with 10 times the return), one project became a unicorn while the others performed mediocre - and finally found that only the last case crossed the above $300 million threshold, and the final return was (9 * 12.5 million US dollars) + 1 * 2$500 million) = 3$62.5 billion. Tomer Dean looked at the long list of consensuses and asked himself a question: this situation may not exist.
The Harvard Business Week's "Six Misconceptions About Venture Capitalists" actually mentions "version updates". They cite an "industry and academic research report" that did not publish data, saying that the scale of the ** was more than 2At $500 million, the performance will inevitably decline. Specific to Kaufman's sample, venture capitalists with a scale of more than $400 million are almost unable to provide attractive expected returns, and 30 of the 62 outperformers are more than $400 million. In uncertain times, the big and the whole may not be able to beat the small and the beautiful.
It can be said that Tsingshan and a series of consumer investment institutions have obvious gains in the irrefutable contrarian trend, which is very suitable for making the domestic primary market aware of the necessity of "version iteration". According to the information I heard from many sources, an important detail is that three of the five RMB** before Tsingshan's fundraising exceeded 1, and the highest one reached 13. As a result of this performance, a slightly "restrained" scale of $60 million was chosen, while a "conservative" duration of 12 years was set for a major investment range of $505 million. It is difficult to say whether LPs' choice of Tsingshan is based on their confidence in the recovery of consumption itself, or the consideration of "the need for specialization of capital products".
And what is a bit of a fantasy linkage is that almost a month ago (November 2023), the famous solo VC investor Elad Gil just completed his third cosmic-aleph 3 fundraising. The so-called SOLO VC can probably be simply understood as "registering themselves as the company's super angel investors", most of them only have an assistant team, do not set up a complex organizational structure, look at the project, do due diligence, and post-investment management are all completed by themselves, and register the company like an orthodox VC, record themselves from natural persons to GPs in the regulatory authorities, formulate investment rhythms in accordance with the standards of financial products, raise funds from LPs, and accept the assessment of IRR and DPI.
Elad Gil's Cosmic-Aleph 3 has an initial fundraising target of $8200 million, the actual amount of funds raised is 109.5 billion US dollars (nearly 8 billion yuan), the degree of over-raising is quite exciting, and the number of LPs has reached 54. In addition to Elad Gil, Solo VCs who have been active in recent years include well-known Silicon Valley investor Oren Zeev and former CEO of game developer Mino Games Josh Buckley, both of whom have a record of raising more than $300 million for their single ** between 2021 and 2023.
In contrast, according to Pitchbook's statistics, it may be difficult for the total amount of venture capital raised in the United States to exceed $100 billion in the whole of 2023, and in the bleakest Q1 quarter, when 99** companies in the United States announced their closing of the books, the total amount of funds raised was $11.7 billion, and only 2** raised more than $1 billion. So much so that Forbes magazine columnist Ozi Amana wrote an article lamenting that Solo VC is about to become an emerging class in the venture capital industry, and their professional, minimalist, agile and entrepreneur-like characteristics are more suitable to dominate the current venture capital market. This once again shows that the version iterations in today's market have been voted by GP to the maximum.
China has a "huge single market" that is unimaginable to European and American practitioners, and the existence of two sides of the same coin, copying the solo VC model is somewhat unrealistic, but the pursuit of venture capital atmosphere is always the same. In this case, in the domestic primary market, the rise of a number of "small but fine" investment institutions with complete functional departments, clear ideas and obvious style characteristics is also a foreseeable general trend.
Judging from past investment cases, Tsingshan Capital is one of the first institutions in China to let LPs eat the sweetness of "small but fine". For example, in 2020, when looking for beautiful opportunities and mergers and acquisitions, Tsingshan Capital, as a shareholder who participated in the angel round and A round, directly cashed out 2400 million yuan, supporting the DPI to 1200%. Coupled with the value of the shares, Tsingshan Capital's external packaging words in those years were, "a total of 500 million yuan was earned in two years of investment". In such a sluggish consumer market this year, Tsingshan Capital has also taken some time to achieve a complete exit from this company.
Of course, it is too early to regard this series of news as a sign of the recovery of the consumption track. Zhang Ye feels that the last wave of so-called "new consumption", new mainly refers to new marketing tools, many start-ups focus on new packaging, and in the end will only bring a change of tricks of "drumming and passing flowers" (this sentence is my simple summary), and the real new consumption is "research consumption", and the application of interdisciplinary technology to consumer goods is promising. Lao Fan has a bit of a S** idea, and he thinks that part of the reason for LP investment is that "consumption and 2C tracks are in the trough of the cycle" - this is actually a good window for "angel investment".
In any case, for China's venture capital industry, which is emerging from adolescence, the idea of solving the problem seems to be becoming more and more obvious. Or like the famous recipe of the well-known programmer Ellen Ullman**: you have to scribble and make a mess first, as a way to remind yourself that all perfect work is done through trial and error.