"Wait a minute, I have another meeting." In the past two months, the investors of Shanghai homestead have reached a tacit understanding with each other. The project brush + telephone conversation has become a daily must-have project for homestead. Without the commuting time spent on the road in the past, the early communication efficiency is even increasing day by day** But even so, they are often stuck in the last step of the upcoming payment.
Author / sunyuan
As an investor in the consumption track, gujunhua, director of angel Bay venture capital investment, has been a little dissatisfied recently. The abortion of the close project originally planned in April has always disappointed him. In his opinion, the investment failure of this project is related to the indirectness of remote communication and the loss of information.
Gujunhua's "unable to shoot the last shot" has become a headache for the VC Circle in Shanghai. Qian Qian, CEO of Pegasus, frankly said that "it is useless to invest, and it is useless to brush projects". In her opinion, investment is essentially a service industry, and the vitality of the economy determines the vitality of investment.
"All technical matters and the logic of investment will not change. When the big waves hit, those speculators will be washed away. After the closure of Shanghai, the cost of entrepreneurship will also rise faster, and investors will be more tight handed in the future and will not easily invest in projects."
The unsealing in June, which is within reach, is an important matter that investors are looking forward to. However, after two months of closure and control, Shanghai's economic recovery still needs a certain cycle. For the venture capital circle, the impact of this outbreak has not yet ended.
Whether to invest or not and what to invest will undoubtedly become a difficult problem faced by Shanghai VC companies after tightening their belts.
Investment slowdown is inevitable, and spring will come through the epidemic
Guokejia and lujiaqing, senior partner
As far as I am concerned, from the results, the closure and control of the epidemic at home has mainly had three impacts.
First, the pace has slowed down, and few institutions can make money without going to the scene; Second, the overall industry environment is facing greater challenges, the market macro-economy is not good, and the market recovery under the epidemic also needs a certain period; Third, the investment industry has been under greater pressure than before from all aspects of raising, investment, management and withdrawal. Investors and enterprises are like "main driver" and "co driver". Now the main driver is facing the pressure of survival, and the co driver is naturally having a hard time, so there are great challenges and pressures.
At home, there is more time for screening projects at home, but only screening projects based on industry research are meaningful.
At least as far as our institution is concerned, business research is a perennial existence. In fact, the epidemic situation is closed, and the task of the team to write industry reports is aggravated. Because I can't travel, I can spend all my time on the high-speed rail to study the industry, that is, screening projects.
However, I don't know when to unseal the project. As an investor, I talked a lot with the project. However, because I couldn't go to the site, it was difficult to conduct in-depth research on the project. The rest can only be said that the information will be sent back to us in the company.
Therefore, for the investors in the sealed control, there is a limit to the screening project. Aside from the work you can accomplish online, a large number of things need to be completed offline. If a large amount of preliminary work is not completed before the closure, it will be difficult to promote the final investment of the project, especially the projects just contacted. Take the recent PE project with a valuation of about 3billion yuan. We have been following this project for one year before it can be completed online.
Even if Shanghai is fully unsealed on June 1, I personally believe that it will take more than three months to ease up. It will take time for the economy to change from cold to hot, and the impact of the epidemic on enterprises has already taken place.
Source: pictures provided by interviewees
The recovery of the investment industry mainly depends on its upstream and downstream recovery. VC is a completely open profession, and its recovery is mainly accompanied by economic activities. For example, many of the funds invested in the upstream RMB market are state-owned assets, but now local governments are still busy with epidemic prevention, and the performance of downstream enterprises may be negative this year. At this time, whether to invest or not is a problem.
At the same time, the life of the dollar fund is also difficult. It is difficult for the upstream to raise funds. The downstream is faced with some track projects that were previously overvalued. Last year, when the market was hot, it obtained a round of large-scale financing. Now it is faced with discounted financing, or even unable to raise funds. Investment institutions are still in a dilemma.
So now investment has become a cautious state. First, both upstream and downstream markets are in the process of gradual recovery. A startup in Shanghai has been closed for more than two months. The first thing must be to resume production, not financing.
Second, objectively speaking, during the period of Shanghai's closure, a shares fell by a large margin in March and April, and the secondary market fell to a low level. The transfer from the secondary market to the primary market has an impact. I think this year, most institutions will slow down their investment. It is good to be able to invest in several projects.
From the perspective of investors, the slowdown is due to objective factors, so VC must be optimistic and explore positive factors to see more opportunities.
In fact, many investment logics are very clear this year. I am working on a double carbon project, which focuses on the national strategy. From the Russian Ukrainian war, it can be seen that a large amount represents real resources. At present, China is short of energy, so it will be more determined to promote the new energy strategy and the direction of carbon peaking and carbon neutralization. The same is true of the military projects I am looking at.
The second is self-control and domestic substitution. There are many directions to look at. For example, the military industry I invested in, and of course, the hottest semiconductor and industrial software projects in the early stage. When the valuation returns to a more rational point, we will actively layout because the valuation of industrial software was too high last year, which has a certain foam.
In general, the impact of the epidemic on the hard technology track we are concerned about may not be as great as consumption. However, from the perspective of upstream and downstream supply chains, the absolute impact on semiconductor supply chains, for example, is still great, and the epidemic will lead to production suspension.
But does the enterprise need to lay out more factories? In fact, my answer may be different from others, and I don't think it's necessary. Because the epidemic situation will always pass, probably soon.
Objectively speaking, as an entrepreneur, there are only three things to do right now.
The first is to adapt to the environment and survive. We must believe in the resilience of China's economy. There will be spring in the past winter.
Second, after surviving, we should reflect on our own development model. With the increase of macroeconomic pressure, the past era has gone forever. Some projects that rely solely on blood transfusion (financing) will become narrower and narrower. The vast majority of enterprises should have their own organizational resilience and hematopoietic capacity and manage their cash flow well.
In my opinion, the most difficult enterprise now is the enterprise that has expanded the number of employees after the last round of financing, but now the financing is slowing down and waiting for layoffs.
Finally, enterprises should form their irreplaceable and differentiated core competitiveness. I have always looked at technology and science and technology. Generally speaking, from the perspective of R & D Investment Guarantee and product differentiation, although many technologies are growing slowly, as long as you do this well, even the M & A will survive.
Source: pictures provided by interviewees
In addition to sitting in front of the computer and working late into the night every day, the treadmill has become lujiaqing's daily necessary punch in item
Consumer projects should be "rigid" and "fancy" should be avoided, and the 36 month cash flow should be guaranteed
Gujunhua, director of angel Bay venture capital
Most of the office buildings in Shanghai became inaccessible around the middle of March. At that time, I was in Pudong, Shanghai. I was not at home yet. Until the end of March, the community was closed.
In fact, the work of investment institutions requires a lot of business trips. They go to the site to see projects, talk to each other, and make adjustments. Now they can only become every day Tencent Meetings.
As an investor, the first part of my job is to find prey.
In the past, if I wanted to see 10 projects a week, I still made initial contact through telephone or online conference tools. From this point of view, I actually became more efficient, because there was no waste of commuting time, and I could complete a large number of prey searches online.
The second part of the work is to "hit the door and shoot", which is equivalent to watching 100 projects, focusing on 10 of them, and finally shooting 3 of them.
The efficiency of this part is obviously slower, because the collaboration efficiency is lower, and the capture efficiency is also significantly reduced.
The most obvious part is reflected in the internal communication link, communicating with the boss and partners to promote the project to pass the investment committee. On site communication, I can observe everyone's performance and pay attention to what everyone cares about. However, the visual information I have captured across the screen is incomplete, and I don't know how effective I will be. There are obvious differences in collaboration.
However, investment itself is not a work of intensive exchange. Usually, everyone is in the state of free range nursing. Everyone does his own work, and there is not much communication in the early stage. However, once the investment promotion of the project is to be started, intensive communication and coordination between all parties are required. Through communication with colleagues, bosses and members of the investment committee with different functions of the company, the final investment, signing agreements and making payments can be completed.
As a result, I had a project that should have been closed at the beginning of April. As a result, due to the epidemic situation, the on-site due diligence became a remote meeting, including internal communication, the development and Investment Committee, and so on. In the end, the project was not put into operation.
In my opinion, part of the reason why the project didn't succeed in the end is related to the whole process of online communication, the complete absence of on-site communication and due diligence, and the second is that it is really difficult to promote project investment from online.
Through observation during this period, I have also paid more attention to the relevance between the epidemic and entrepreneurial projects: for example, the impact of the epidemic on his future revenue and business model, and how entrepreneurs view the relationship between enterprise development and the epidemic.
After the outbreak, we should first look at the impact of the epidemic on the project. The weight of the impact of the epidemic has increased significantly.
We may never have thought that Shanghai would be closed for 60 days. In the past, we thought that 14+7 had been a long time, but now the epidemic has not ended. The current policy is to reset dynamically, which means that cross regional flow may slow down and more possibilities of closure and control may be brought in the future.
From the closure of Shanghai, it can be observed that the physical industry, especially the catering industry, has been greatly impacted. I learned that some Michelin restaurants in Shanghai have a good reputation and location, but it may be difficult for anyone to accept the offer. From the performance of the catering industry, we can see the huge impact encountered by offline industries, which also means that investors will become more cautious.
First, do not invest in offline industries; The second is to invest in offline industries. It is necessary to tell entrepreneurs that cash flow should be maintained for more than 36 months. In the past, 18 months was enough, and 24 months was enough, but now I won't do it in 36 months.
Now entrepreneurs need to make good plans, that is, they may experience city closure for three months a year. If they can survive for three to six months, I think your business model is good.
On the other hand, it is necessary to accelerate the integration of online and offline businesses. However, moving offline businesses to online will inevitably lead to changes in the business model.
For example, an offline training institution for music education actually attaches great importance to the offline musical instrument experience. The unit price of offline paying customers is also relatively high, which may be 10000-20000 yuan / year. However, if you move this model to online, consumers' willingness to pay may decline.
As consumer investors, we are now looking at whether the project pays more attention to rigid demand and whether it has enough universality rather than "fancy".
For example, enterprises with "rigid demand" for vegetables and meat can apply with the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce to become insurance suppliers, so that the crisis can be further alleviated; However, catering enterprises with non rigid demand cannot do so. It can be seen that Qingmei, Jixiang wonton, Wanchai wharf and other brands have met people's basic survival needs and become the main products in community group buying in the current epidemic in Shanghai; However, new brands such as Hutou Bureau, which had been popular before, could not welcome such sales explosion.
In this way, there will certainly be fewer high-quality targets, and the investment environment for the whole consumer project may be worse in the future. All brands should be prepared to live a hard life. On the other hand, they will pay more attention to the online business of enterprises, because the offline brands will also have a certain overall advantage.
The characteristic of offline brands is that they mainly focus on a region and are generally concentrated in one city, such as Hangzhou, Shanghai and Wuhan. Their eggs are all put in the same basket, so they cannot be highly dispersed.
At this time, the advantage of online brands lies in the fact that there are several warehouses in the country. One city, one warehouse is closed, and other warehouses can deliver goods. In this way, businesses in other regions can still follow suit and reduce the impact of the epidemic.
So now I will certainly ask entrepreneurs how they can supplement online businesses in a timely manner and make certain adjustments to their revenue businesses once their offline businesses are affected. It is very important to "never break offline". A round a enterprise with 20 stores in Shanghai is likely to be "dead" after being closed for three months. The rent and employee wages are enough to overwhelm him. Now, more offline projects are required to combine online and offline, and the distribution of delivery warehouses across the country should be as many as possible.
Under the epidemic situation, the daily operation and supply chain of enterprises should do a good job in plan B
Zhang Yan, director of daotong capital pharmaceutical investment
For investors, all preliminary exchanges can be completed online. In the past two years, under the COVID-19, we are also used to using Tencent conferences and other tools to communicate in the early stage and form investment intentions. For a more self disciplined investor, the project and industry adjustment will not be affected by the workplace.
However, if we really want to make investment decisions, we can't go to the scene to communicate with the founding team face to face and make adjustments, and then complete the cloud payment. It's not realistic for institutions, and we are a little empty in our hearts.
For example, some medical device projects, such as surgical equipment and consumables, need on-site demonstration. Enterprises also hope that investors can understand them face to face. If Shanghai sealed control, Shanghai projects will certainly not be able to see, which has a great impact; However, other investors from other places are relatively unaffected when looking at the project, so on the whole, it has not affected our progress in looking at the project.
Under the unexpected situation of Shanghai, our company, including myself, realized that the enterprise really needs a plan B design in its daily operation and supply chain.
Japan has a sense of danger in the face of fire, earthquake and other situations. "How to operate in a crisis" is integrated into everyone's education and life. In fact, the sealing and control in Shanghai can be understood as a war with the virus. Under such circumstances, in fact, our enterprise side operations are not well prepared.
For example, under the epidemic situation, the company may face the situation that there is no official seal for signing the agreement, it is unable to send mail, and it is unable to sign the agreement, make payment and prepare materials in time. It can also be seen from a video that "because of the closure and control of the epidemic in Shanghai, Dr. Zhang, a vascular surgery expert in Shanghai, rode more than 40 kilometers and went to the office to get a U shield, just to pay the employees of the group company." it can also be seen that the enterprise lacks an emergency plan under daily operation.
In addition, the supply chain also needs to have plans. For example, reagent R & D may require the purchase of reagents, antibodies, cells, etc. if it is imported raw materials, there may be problems in transportation and customs entry. At this time, it is required to prepare a delivery period of 1-2 months, or prepare consumables for biological experiments at this stage for a certain period of time, so as to help avoid the impact caused by shortage in the R & D stage.
At the same time, the lack of foreign products also means that there will be more demand space for localization, and the filing of domestic substitution is also very important.
The second is the company in the clinical stage. For the management and return visit of patients, plan B is also required in the clinical stage, so that they can make some arrangements in other places in case of emergencies.
In a word, in case of an outbreak of an epidemic, the core lies in coping with such crisis situations through plans.