The company valued at 2.5 billion went bankrupt?

Entrepreneurship has always been a narrow escape .

author ｜ Happy
source ｜ Hit the net (ID：China-Venture）

On the occasion of the Dragon Boat Festival , Some investors in my circle of friends coincidentally forwarded a link to an internal letter sent by the founder of a startup company ： Egret Technology , Go bankrupt and go into liquidation , The court auctioned off the sole residence of the founder Chen Shuyi .

Tell the truth , This year, both the primary market and the secondary market are changing , Are threatening our fragile emotions . But it's not egret bankruptcy that catches my attention , Instead, the forwarded investor expressed his love for egret CEO Chenshuyi has different views on the failure of entrepreneurship .

Chen Shuyi's internal letter is very long , The mood is very low , It describes in detail the reasons why he thought the egret would die , Let me briefly sort out the following two factors ：

The external environment is not friendly , Capital withdrawal , It is very difficult to start an undertaking ;

Too many investors , The interests of each other collide .

Egret technology used to be the darling of capital , owned 26 Potential investor , Almost all of them come from first-line venture capital funds . However, in Chen Shuyi's internal letter , this 26 Investors have also become the driving force pushing him to the cliff ：“10 After month , Our old shareholder suddenly attacked me , Frozen all the assets of the company, me and my family , Bank account 、 equity 、 Real estate, etc , And bring a lawsuit to the court for capital distribution . Egret has 26 Potential investor , Communication is very difficult , Their opinions and interests are also completely inconsistent , Put me in the middle , Until the end of the year , The court auctioned off my only residence .”

Entrepreneurship has always been a narrow escape , Egret's “ die ”, It really all comes from “ The environment ” Do you ？ For this matter , Some of my investor friends spoke from the bottom of their hearts ： It's not all because of the environment .

01 Start a business 13 year , The valuation 25 One hundred million yuan

The life span of egret technology is not short , Founded on 2008 year , There are also 13 year . Here 13 Mid year , As a family HTML5 One stop mobile technology and service providers , Independently developed egret engine 、 Egret Accelerator 、 Bone animation tools and other products , Overlay game solutions 、 Service games 、AR/VR And so on .

In that era of Internet blowout , Egrets are very popular with capital , A total of 5 Round of funding ,SIG、 Capitals 、 PwC capital 、 Shenzhen Venture Capital 、 Matrix Partners 、IDG First tier funds such as capital are their investors . Egret technology is also 2016 Landing on the new third board in , The valuation 25 One hundred million yuan .

The user group of egret technology is the game developer , Their profit model is to make profits from developers through engine solutions , This profit model is considered unsustainable by some people in the industry . According to official figures , By the end of 2020 year , There has been more than 4000 The game of egret engine is packaged and uploaded to AppStore and Taptap Channel distribution , Hundreds of projects have been targeted .

The last round of financing of egret technology is fixed at 2017 year , This is what chenshuyi said “ Industry change 2018 year ” The year before .

Egret once disclosed its financial data , since 2014 The egret engine was launched in , Products based on egret engine , Its accumulated operating revenue exceeded 200 Billion .2016 After listing on the new third board in, the company said that it continued to suffer losses 3 year ,2016 Years of losses 1684 Ten thousand yuan .

It's not hard to find out , Egret technology has been committed to H5 The development of the game , Even chenshuyi has expressed a point of view on various occasions , Egret engine should not be just a H5 Small game engine , They are transforming to a full platform game engine .

Transformation is certainly not easy , It corresponds to the information in Chen Shuyi's internal letter , Egrets do many things , Including new business , Transforming the meta universe , And Tencent 、 Byte beat talk about investment and merger .

The withdrawal and suppression of capital are regarded by Chen Shuyi as the last straw to crush the company and him , Even destroyed 2021 Egret new business ——OHHH Planet and VAR The engine may bring financing ,“L Capital and S Investors such as Asia , Have expressed a clear investment intention .”

Chen Shuyi once described the perfect ending of egret technology in an interview ,“ Expect to 2015 end of the year , We will become a company valued at 10 Billion dollar company .”

And now , As mentioned above , The grim environment 、 Cold capital attitude 、 The emotional exhaustion makes the egret go to another ending step by step ： Personal debt 4000 ten thousand , The company went bankrupt .

02 investors ： Make a mistake , Be upright when you are beaten

Chen Shuyi's internal letter was filled with tears , It's amazing , But all this is really just because “ Bad environment ” Do you ？ To understand the problem , It should be viewed in combination with its business itself .

According to its official website , The core competitiveness of egret technology lies in a series of products developed by the company HTML5 engine , The main application scenario is in H5 Small game development —— This is also recognized in the industry H5 One of the important application scenarios . Here we are. , It is necessary to have a chat first HTML5 The past and present life of this technology .

First ,HTML5 It's not a new technology , It's just famous HTML A new standard of language .HTML The full name of the language is Hypertext Markup Language, Born in 1990 year , The Chinese translation name is hypertext markup language . As Web 1.0 The cornerstone of the times , It is the bricks and tiles that make up the Internet world . and HTML5 It is in 2008 A new generation of standards issued in , The previous standards have been innovated , To cater to the development of technology .

stay HTML5 Standard innovation , The most important feature is to adapt to the needs of mobile devices . The era when smart phones are not yet popular , The main tool for people to surf the Internet is the personal computer , therefore HTML In the past, the architecture of language was mainly for convenience PC End user . But the popularity of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets , Make the way that the user browses the webpage more diversified , Cross platform compatibility has become a must , That is why HTML5 The birth of . meanwhile ,HTML5 Standards also improve the designability and performance of web pages , It makes possible many functions that could not be realized in the past .

The concept may be a little abstract to explain , Then give me a few chestnuts .

It is very popular among many middle-aged users 、 A web game with strong gold absorption ability , Basically based on H5; Almost all online application websites , Such as online video websites or online document editing tools , Is based on H5 The standard ; There are also common promotion pages in the circle of friends 、 Electronic photo album 、 Electronic invitations, etc , All are H5.

so to speak ,HTML5 It is the product of the times , And egret technology does H5 Technology companies , To a large extent, it is eating Web2.0 And mobile Internet dividends , And egret technology itself , It is All in 了 H5 Play this track .

Open the official website of egret , You can see a long list of names in its commercialization case ：《 Dream journey to the West web version 》、《 Open up the fantasy 》、《 Gunfire factory 》、《 The whole people snipe at God 》、《 Create a mini city 》、《 Legend of the world H5》、《 Legend of Yutian 》、《 Fengshen single machine 》、《 Her Majesty 》 etc. , These games are developed with the development tools provided by egret .

I wonder if anyone has ever played any of them , But just look at the name , Two words came to mind ： Restoring ancient ways .

About web games , There are a lot of critical articles in the market , The point is basically to change the skin （ The old game play is redone with a different theme ）、 crudely made （HTML5 The development capability and performance of is limited , There is a bottleneck in the rendering effect ）、 Ask Hong Kong stars to shoot some advertisements that look very outrageous and so on .

In a word , Page game developers seldom care about the quality of the game , Many companies are involved with the mentality of "getting a ticket and leaving" . as far as I am concerned , Some page games have extremely low operating and development costs , One or two large families can feed you , The company can even hire people to play with big families , Make him happy but not too happy , Stimulate large households to continuously recharge .

therefore , When the performance of the mobile phone continues to improve , The quality of mobile games is improving day by day , Other forms of entertainment are also taking up users' time , Page games have naturally declined . According to the data of the game Working Committee of the China audio and digital Association , from 2015 Year to 2021 year , The actual sales revenue of Chinese Web Games has decreased year by year , from 219 100 million to 60.3 Billion , The market has shrunk 7 become .

Back to the egret itself , Its product concept also makes people a little confused .

Egret's own slogan yes “ Egret engine , The mainstream engine in the field of heavy mini games ”, This sentence itself is thought-provoking . severe , It means that users need to invest a lot of time 、 Money and energy ; And small games , The content of the game is relatively light 、 More casual . In such a seemingly contradictory sunset track , Even if it is done “ Mainstream engines ”, It may not make any sense .

Chen Shuyi has always stressed in his open letter that the general environment of the game industry is not good , This is the truth . But according to 《2021 China's Game Industry Report 》, The actual sales revenue of Chinese game market 2965 One hundred million yuan , Year-on-year growth 6.4%. in other words , Although the growth rate of the industry has been slowing down due to various factors , However, China's game industry as a whole is still in an upward trend . Don't you see that the mobile game with the highest income in the world eats chicken 、 The king's glory and the original God are all made in China , MIHA you is also here “ Cold winter in the industry ” A hundred billion level giant growing up in the . Users' demand for games has not decreased , But in this era , More and more players who do not lack entertainment methods need high-quality game experience , instead of “ Come and cut me down if it's a brother ” Of XX legend .

The fall of egrets , Of course, it cannot be separated from the process of history , But it cannot ignore its own problems . As one of my investor friends said ,“ Make a mistake , Be upright when you are beaten .”

03 The relationship between investors and entrepreneurs

Chen Shuyi actually highlighted the relationship between investors and entrepreneurs in his internal letter . It's just in his opinion , The two are not equal , Investors are more like “ Barbarian at the door ” role , In particular, the opposition of the old shareholders made the entrepreneurship even worse , Even bankruptcy liquidation .

Investors and Entrepreneurs , Is it a reciprocal relationship ？ How to get along with each other is appropriate ？ In the face of difficulties , Should investors choose to stop losses in time or should they try to run with them ？ These are questions that are worth exploring but never have the right answers .

Some investors believe that , Investors and entrepreneurs should be partners ; There are also investors who believe that investors should never abandon Entrepreneurs . Today, post investment management is becoming more and more complex and meticulous , Investors can influence the fate of a company to some extent .

But a company is difficult to sustain from operating , How much is related to investors ？