Hello, this is dialogue.
Today, I would like to share with you a story about a friend who started a business for six years and his company was acquired at last. This is a very good result.
It’s been three years since I wrote “The Three Years of Hardcore Entrepreneurship.” Now, every day, there are still a few sporadic people come to praise an article, and many entrepreneurial friends say that this article inspires them not to give up in the face of failure. I’m glad I’m able to make a small contribution to my friends’ lives. This new six-year summary is initiated because our Caper has experienced significant changes. In addition to summarizing what happened in the next three years on a three-year basis, I also draw a comma for the first stage of my entrepreneurial journey. Instead of a run-through narrative like the last one, in this one, I want to talk about my experiences in the past six years, especially in the last three. If the last three years were hardcore, the last three have been even better. I have experienced the ups and downs of life in these three years.
Let’s talk about the recent situation, friends familiar with me should have seen our big news, Caper joined Instacart, the third largest unicorn company in the United States, with a price of 350 million DOLLARS (39 billion dollars valuation). The latter is behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX and payments giant Stripe. Caper will continue to carry forward inside Instacart, continue to expand our products and market, as soon as possible to feed the hungry people, we can use Caper products at home.
Many of your friends may think, “This is such a glamorous thing. Wealth freedom, fame and fortune, I also want to start a business, I sour “. But whatever you think, please wait until you read my article today. Three years ago, we were in the throes of transition from QueueHop to Caper. We just got the seed round financing and faced the sea of stars. Everything was still unknown to us, full of expectation and unknown, so we had to give ourselves a pep talk. In the last three years, both I and our company have experienced many ups and downs. But it was all these experiences that gave me a deeper understanding of what it means to start a business, to do a good product, to do a good company.
What happened in three years
So let’s start with a quick rundown, because otherwise you probably don’t have a context. My last post was written on February 6, 2019, almost 2 years and 8 months ago. February 2019 what is the concept? It has been nearly a year since our seed round of $3 million. We have already launched some small customers, but struggle has been expanding on a larger scale. At that time, there was some accumulation of entrepreneurship, but we had not really contacted the core of our business, such as large enterprise customers, such as core computer vision technology, such as a larger and more comprehensive team, such as hardware mass production, supply and so on. Therefore, the experience summary at that time was more from the perspective of a small team of only 30 people. Such a team leader actually has many tricks to bypass the problems caused by the scale expansion of many companies and the expansion of customers. So the article from three years ago seems relatively early from the present point of view. Of course, we cannot deny all the experience of a small company, because if there is not a stage of 30 people, there will not be a stage of hundreds or thousands of people. If any reader wants to start a business from scratch, one piece of advice is never to start a business with the mindset of a large company or a small company, both of which have significant limitations.
From an outsider’s point of view, these three years actually we are quite prosperous. In the early stage, it came to another halo under First Round Capital with the halo of YC. After the First Round, we received Lux Capital’s $1,000W investment in October 2019, which was not a small amount. In November 2019, several of our partners appeared on Forbes 30 Under 30 North America (with NBA stars like Klay Thompson at the same time). In the same month, we landed our first Enterprise client, Sobeys, the second largest Canadian chain, on Canadian national television (which is similar to CCTV in Canada). It seems that we have taken off from 19 years ago as if there were no problems. But we’ve been having problems since the middle of 2019. In 2020, we began to face pressure from all sides, because at the beginning, we had been scanning cars, and the visual recognition system remained in a stage that could only be used as a demo. At the beginning of 2020, a customer of our Counter product should be launched in January, because we only reached 60% accuracy rate in the first test (95% in the original agreement), we were ordered to improve to 95% within 3 months, or we would directly turn us down. Around September of the same year, Amazon Dash Cart, a product we’ve always dreamed of, came out, relying on visual recognition, without the need for a scanner. We certainly feel tremendous pressure to let a latecomer steal our lead. At that time, the cars we actually ran in the store were all first-generation scanning cars. The accurate visual recognition system was still far away from us, and there was only a demo system all the time. By the end of 2020, due to the expansion of the team, we had to continue to raise money, and the financing situation was not optimistic, because two years had passed since the so-called unmanned retail year. During these two years, all parties focused on this project, but few of them did very well. The market response was so low that people thought the industry was going to die. At the time, we didn’t even have a working visual recognition system, so we didn’t have any capital to finance it.
However, 2020 is also a year of great vitality for us. Under the pressure of losing customers and provocation from giants, our team made great technological breakthroughs in a very short period of time. We have developed all the core computer vision algorithms and are ready for mass production. There were several iterations on the hardware. In terms of software architecture, we have also made a lot of updates to serve our customers and can complete docking with us in a very short time. Every team worked hard. And finally, last week, we made Instacart’s biggest acquisition to date.
I’d like to share with you some of the most important factors that I think are behind this little success.
Persistence and Responsibility
2020 has been a tough year for me and the company. The words persistence and responsibility, in many business situations, are bullshit. No matter how many entrepreneurs in China or America, look at the problem from the perspective of a boss. There are also many entrepreneurs, the so-called adhere to and responsibility as a table to cut leek with the grand words, but never really practice these values. I don’t know why, but I have been very persistent and responsible since childhood. In the middle of 2019, my father became seriously ill. At that time, our team was expanding, and there were a lot of business in the company. I flew between China and the US for 4 times in 2019 to maintain the development of both teams. We are constantly bringing in a lot of new people, bringing a lot of conflict. Since August 2019, I have been suffering from depression since I could not bear the pressure of working with my bed in the hospital at night and going to work in the morning. Yes, many of my friends probably don’t know this, but I personally don’t shy away from talking about it. For a month, when my dad was in surgery, I was in the ward every day, working at night with the Americans. I would catch up until 12 o ‘clock, go to bed, and get kicked out of the hospital at 5 o ‘clock in the morning, because the hospital had to start cleaning and changing patients’ dressing and so on. But any individual, experience such a high pressure work and life pace, do not get sick that is abnormal. Therefore, I do not shy away from this topic. Although depression has caused great harm to my body, it has also made me understand myself more clearly and let me have a better perspective of what KIND of person I am under the surface. This disease has had a huge impact not only on my own life, but also on my company. All the key technologies stalled for a long time between 2019 and the first half of 2020. I also couldn’t manage the team well and often had conflicts with some members of the team. I myself have experienced the horrors of being in an ambulance, in a hospital, and in countless shrink’s. But I remember clearly that no matter what state I am in, I still feel that I need to continue to run this company, and I also need to get better and live on.
Persistence and responsibility were the two beliefs that supported me most at that time. The company has achieved a certain stage, and many capital first founder is different, we have been insisting on value first. What is value? He’s vain. He’s sentimental. For those who are only interested in profit, value is money, power, fame. But for me such a small person with the literature values, the value for me, is whether the man who can make me feel I depend, is if you can get yourself in this life, can is on the things I like, have a little different from ordinary people’s life, whether in a cynical world, to some extent to keep my own a pure, Don’t do small things. Some people will say, you are a little too lofty, come out to mix, especially start a business, who don’t like money. I love it. Of course I love it. Liking money is quite different from taking money as the sole meaning of life value. As the only meaning of the people, in the face of their own life and work double pressure, may choose to give up the company to protect themselves, let the company’s employees to drink northwest wind. Such people are also likely to give up when the product doesn’t bear fruit in the short term and move on to the more conservative business of making money. Perhaps influenced by my values, my other three partners began to have a lot of feelings, and even told me to think of the beautiful things in the world and the beautiful people in the company when I was in the worst depression. We are not fighting for ourselves, we are fighting for those who believed in us early and gave their heart to our cause. This sense of responsibility has kept me coming back to work when I wanted to leave many times. I remember the first time I went to see my doctor. After hearing my state, the doctor quickly and without hesitation gave me the verdict of severe depression and asked if I could be hospitalized. And I didn’t hesitate to say, no, I have a job. I have an office man to feed.
Of course, what also sustains me is the responsibility to my family. Although my father’s illness was the direct cause of my depression, my father’s optimism and toughness gave me great motivation. Although he could only get food through the nutrition tube for one and a half years, he still insisted on walking for physical exercise. Because he is a traditional Chinese medicine, has always insisted on their own to find their own prescription. Although facing the uncertain future ahead, my dad still kept on facing every day with optimism and didn’t give up on himself. This is also an important reason to support me. In life, of course, my mother and my wife help me. It is their tolerance to my gratuitous disease anytime and anywhere that makes me gradually get out of the haze and see the beauty of life again today. In the company, there were a group of colleagues who loved each other and were very understanding to me. They helped me solve many interpersonal problems that I couldn’t solve well at that stage and let me focus on the technology THAT I liked. This is also the effect of our family culture. I am very lucky that the company I built is a warm company.
Persistence and responsibility are one of the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation. These two values may not be promoted in western culture, but many Chinese people think these values are too illusory. We meet countless people who hope to make money by cutting corners. We’ve also seen countless public figures who talk about social responsibility but get locked up every now and then. I have also seen some so-called “elders”, in various CEO classes, telling you earnestly, “Young man, you are still young, you have to learn to smooth, you can really enter the upper society”. I’ve also met a lot of investors who tell me you’re too honest and we don’t want to invest in you because you don’t look smart and you don’t look like you can make money. I believe that sometimes you can accept the judgment of the world, but you can’t live with what the world thinks is right. Persistence and responsibility are the things that have sustained us throughout this small success.
Stick to your own judgment and don’t follow suit
Tell me about our company’s business options. Since Amazon Go burst onto the scene in 2018, numerous copycats have flocked to Amazon, from Both China and the US. I’m not evaluating what any of my friends are doing right or wrong in this area, I’m evaluating considerations based on my own judgment. In early 2019, Alibaba poached the Chinese R&D leader of Amazon Go to do this. That same year saw the emergence of a whole bunch of startups, ice cream boxes, convenience bees, and so on, all of which started out as unmanned stores to solve problems that technology was hard to solve. The same goes for Standard Cognition, AiFi, Grabngo, Zippin, a variety of unmanned retail companies in the US. Under that wind, our team is calm. After the QueueHop fiasco, we had a pretty good idea of what retailers were looking for. For retailers, technological advancements will always be secondary, especially in supermarkets and convenience stores. A technology that looks cool to a tech person means nothing to a retailer if it doesn’t help them make money or save money. If it takes a huge investment to implement such a technology, it makes no sense. Many retailers in Europe and the US are still using POS software made in the 1990s and 1920s, which has not been updated for decades. At the end of the day, this thing is good enough, and don’t give me crap. When we saw the Amazon Go solution for ourselves, we didn’t know how it worked, but it was too expensive. With such a low gross margin and so much cost, how long will their ROI cycle be? Can ROI be positive? These are question marks. Well, some people say, well, is this the future? Somebody has to do it. We absolutely agree with this, this is the trend, Caper does not rule out doing the whole store solution in the future. That is, of course, when all the technologies are mature enough for the cost to be manageable. Amazon or ali to do this, I feel very reasonable, they have their own shops, can regardless of the cost of investment, to provide technical field, and even some extent, we are very grateful to the big company to promote the progress of the industry and technology, but as a start-up, think first of all, it can within the scope of the sustainable cycle to, Make your own money. If not, who give confidence can always take financing to go on. To do a purely visual unmanned shop scheme, in fact, the technical difficulty is even higher than the UNMANNED car L5 level. Even if it is done, the transformation of existing retail stores will be a very complicated and headache problem, and it will be difficult to promote the market quickly. If we couldn’t get the market going then, how could we keep iterating on the product? I don’t want to disparage any of my peers, or any of my capital. In a sense, the industry was born out of this push. However, I always believe that a reliable company must be able to find solid product market fit, so as to achieve sustainable development. Although there are a lot of people who rely on story telling, financing, or even fooling themselves into going public, if we define success as not just from capital gains, I personally do not recognize the success of many such companies.
In the choice of product direction, no matter how the outside wind blows, we are firmly take the right road we think. Under the guidance of the direction, we make persistent efforts to really understand every need, do a good job in every experience, and really provide valuable things. Some entrepreneurs, when they go out to cheat money, they may not know what they are doing, and the products they do may not want to use, so there is no value. If your reader really wants to achieve success and the value of life, my advice is, stick to the truth, who passed the test of history, don’t be too much sway of the outside world, instead of constantly changes of direction for no reason, don’t take yourself look too flat that always believe in the judgment of others and do not believe my own judgment. I often tell many friends that entrepreneurs are not as good as consultants at dissecting industry data. A huge market in the early stage is often no direct historical data to do support. If there is, then the market probability has already been done.
Excellent entrepreneurs are actually good at thinking about the rationality of a product from the basic human nature, whether it is really reasonable, whether it is in use scenarios or business models. This is not to say that entrepreneurs’ judgment should be based solely on head-snapping, but sensitivity to business data is also a must. Entrepreneurs also need to have a very strong ability to cut through the clutter of data to find the strong data that supports your product. I don’t believe Steve jobs decided to do the MAC and iPod and iPhone after doing a bunch of surveys. Of course, many people will say, that this is troublesome, this feeling is a metaphysics, how to train ah. I think the key to this is empathy. I believe that good entrepreneurs are sensitive. Only continuous active observation and thinking, it is possible to make good products. Otherwise, you will always make what works for you, not what works for others. It is not easy to empathize with the diverse psychology and needs of different people. The hardest thing about empathy is that when you’re not in that person’s shoes or circumstances, you can understand why they’re doing what they’re doing in that moment. Empathy is also the basis of what we often call business acumen, and if you don’t have empathy, it’s hard to keep your eye on the ball and stick to your ideas. As our business, we will always stand in the Angle of the retailers up thinking, if I were a retailer company employees, whether IT, or the clerk, or the manager, each different roles, they do, every day in what process, by using our product is broken, where because of our products, I will ascend. Too many AI companies do what they want to do, not what the industry needs.
Someone who can actually do something
You can’t do a good company without having enough people who can actually do things, and I’m glad we have them.
So what is a real working person here?
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The hardest thing about a startup is how to define a problem. Because the problem is too fast, too new, and there is not much previous experience to draw on. It’s important to turn a boss tip into an actual spec that can be discussed.
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Having the ability to simplify complex problems, problems are clearly defined. In execution, it is very important to straighten out the relationship between complex problems and break them one by one, and to handle dependency between various problems well.
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Pure heart only love, can be outstanding. It’s hard to do great work if you come to us just for the money.
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Focus on things, don’t focus on politics, just do things
In addition to the above four points, we should be able to see their ability during the interview and give absolute support to the company’s management system. How to make people pay more attention to the product itself, rather than all kinds of competition and exclusion within the company, requires a very large system and cultural innovation to ensure.
Our company is a zero-politics company. We, the four founders, never quarreled about the distribution of profits and all kinds of crazy things. Many people think that we are stupid. From the perspective of being a boss, some people think that you are really too young. When you can squeeze the poor people to live a happy life, why should you suffer yourself? If that’s what your values are, I’m sorry, but you’re the kind of person I despise the most (although my disdain doesn’t affect you at all), and you don’t have to read my article. At the management level, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that even if you don’t want to do politics, there are always people who do politics. Indeed, if the culture is not well structured, you will get politics. After all, working in A company like ours in China is one in a million. We have survived the bitter corporate politics and are used to this mode of work. But the problem with this kind of struggle is obvious. Teamwork is fragmented, everyone only cares about their KPI, and everyone only cares about whether they can get promoted or not. The common progress of the team is also limited. In this mode, vicious competition is more common, resources cannot be maximized, and various resources are repeatedly made. Except for the boss, there is no one to stand up and systematically point out the problems of the team and systematically improve the overall strength. In the end, it’s a vicious circle, people don’t do things, people fuck people. So how do we keep politics to a minimum? First of all, politics is not allowed at the highest level of the company, and if one executive and another start fighting over resources or something, both of them will receive a stern education from our four founders. Our value is that if you both want what’s best for the company, then discuss what’s better. If it’s better for another team to do it, another team will do it. We try to treat all our work equally. In a company, of course, some departments are important and some are not so important. If you always reward people who do well in those few important departments, you will start to grab resources, and the less important departments will also try to grab important projects. But if we can do it relatively evenly, and support departments can add value and be recognized, the project can be guaranteed to stay with the right team. As for individuals, we encourage everyone to raise other people’s opinions. If you see other people’s work is inappropriate and need to be corrected, you can do so, and all the management will not understand this as tattling. All management is also required to get to the bottom of it, and if it’s true, talk to the person who did the wrong thing and sort it out. If it’s not true, we’re not going to punish anyone, either the person who brought it up or the person who was brought it up. To put it bluntly, we treat everyone in the company as a normal person, telling the truth without any messy things. Over time, there is less politics in the company. People are just people trying to get things done. A hundred years of life, what a shame to waste on such nonsense as politics.
One last word on the big news
Finally, there’s the acquisition. Six years, kind of a way to explain myself. Actually, it’s been a tough six years for the four of us founders. There were countless times when we wondered what we would be like if our CEO was still doing finance, I was still working in Silicon Valley, we CBO was still working as a coder in Canada, and our VP of Hardware was still studying for a PhD at USC. Looking back today, of course, that sounds a bit Versailles. But the funny thing about life is, even for a second, you can’t compare with what if. The past is the past. As far as I am concerned, I look at my friends, senior’s senior and manager’s manager. Although I hold a CTO title, sometimes my daily activities do not sound like those of CTO. Linkedin is getting better and better. Mine is a CTO for a small, little-known company. Everyone started to get hundreds of thousands of dollars for package a year, but I only had the basic salary of about 10W at the beginning. Everyone’s buying a car, buying a house, settling down, and I can’t even put a down payment on it. The pressure to compare was huge, because when we started, each of us was ambitious and thought I wanted to prove to people that we could be successful if we didn’t go the other way. But after a year, two years, three years, you find that they start to take a different path, start to climb the peak of life, while we get deeper and deeper into the mire of entrepreneurship. Also because of this, a few of us began to seem to care less and less about money, because care is useless, you earn more, go out a ratio, will be all kinds of ratio down. Since MY money than everyone, I compare the sense of existence of the general good, all day circle of friends to earn a shout, feel like doing a big thing. However, before the acquisition, no one would really think that York’s company was awesome. Even many people have been the impression of us still stay in the rental of a small house, a few people eat and live together without wages garage start-up stage. It’s hard to stay in this state. People are always social animals, and when you have your own goals and peer pressure, you’re always a little out of balance.
And entrepreneurship is a very magic thing, is that you sometimes think, gee, other people’s life is so easy, so comfortable. But when you think about going back to a routine job, you immediately say no. And that’s why most entrepreneurs, most of them are serial entrepreneurs, because if you’ve started a business, whether you’ve succeeded or failed, unless your family needs a steady income, you don’t want to go back to an environment where you can’t control your own work. When we failed in QueueHop, we didn’t even think about going back. The first thing we thought about was what the next project would be.
At a party with my friends yesterday, I was asked why I chose to start my own business at that time, now THAT I have made some achievements, and what is my plan for the future. This is actually the question everyone asks me. To me, entrepreneurship itself is not a rational decision, it is more of a belief. When I was an undergraduate, I played band. Why? It was also a religion. I liked the critical and anti-secular things in music. But as I played around, I suddenly realized that starting a business was something that could change the world just a little bit. At that time, after being brainwashed by ITP (Zhejiang University Innovation and Entrepreneurship Management Intensive Program), I became crazy about entrepreneurship. I started to make some gadgets when I was an undergraduate, and then I made an APP with some friends when I was a graduate student. Then I quit my job and started my own business in less than 4 months after graduation. Every startup decision I made at that time, I didn’t really think about it, I was thinking about this thing, whether I was interested in this product, whether it had a future. Starting my own business felt like something that had to happen in my life, no different from getting married, having children, retiring. It has been branded in my heart since I was an undergraduate. Life is a toss, in fact, a good interpretation of my original intention to start a business. But the business of entrepreneurship, is not to do before the yearning, after doing desperately persuade others. As you have seen above, it is very difficult for ordinary people to bear the uncertainty brought by starting a business.
Now that the company has been acquired and our founder is out of the picture financially, what’s next? In fact, a lot of people would probably think that the four of us are so successful that we need to find something else to do. Not really. We had a very interesting process in deciding on the acquisition. In fact, we did not consider the acquisition option, at the beginning of this year, we initially launched our Series B financing. In fact, financing is quite good. Various funds offered us an offer of interest, especially Masayoshi Son of Soft and Hard Vision, who personally chatted with us on Call and said he wanted to invest after about 20 minutes of call, leaving a line of “You guys figure out a right valuation”. Therefore, in fact, it is not impossible for us to take the path of financing and finally go public independently. So when I first received the offer of Instacart acquisition, I told my partner that Instacart was so annoying. Because we got all the term sheets of financing at that time, we still had to worry about the option of financing which was so happy originally.
For entrepreneurs who really want to build something, no matter how rational you are, the words “sell the company” are always negative. Those four words emotionally betrayed us and our employees, and in value, gave the impression that the founders were in a hurry to cash out and get out. But when we really sat down and calmly reviewed the acquisition offer, rationality told us that joining Instacart would be of great help to our own business and products. Instacart’s vision and mission are basically exactly the same as ours. Instacart’s customers are our customers. Instacart’s future business layout is also very consistent with our development direction, which is to integrate online and offline retail data and become a unified digital retail platform. At the moment, only the giants are doing this themselves. In the US, Amazon is only doing this with its whole Foods and Amazon Fresh stores. But because Amazon itself is a retailer, it competes with other retailers, walmart, Kroger and so on, so no one is willing to pay for Amazon’s technology. However, it is difficult for these traditional retail companies to have the technological strength of a technology company like Amazon. What we’re doing with Instacart is enabling them to compete with Amazon even as Amazon continues to grow. In fact, there has always been a joke slogan in our company, that is, our goal in the future is acquire Amazon. It’s a goal we know is hard to achieve, and it’s unlikely to happen in our lifetime, but joining Instacart has at least made it a little more realistic. Therefore, from a rational point of view, joining Instacart is of great help to us. We are no longer in a hurry to prove any short-term profitability to the capital market, we can focus on our products, we do not have to worry about our current competitors who unexpectedly grab a big customer, we can also quickly bring the convenience of our products to more people. So when we joined Instacart, we didn’t think much about personal finance. We thought more about whether Instacart could help our products continue to grow.
Therefore, for future planning, the answer is very simple, we will let Caper enter every corner of the world, if possible, we still hope to follow Instacart to acquire Amazon
Another interesting feeling was that none of the four of us were ready to accept a huge sum of money, and then suddenly he came. This reminds me of one thing: entrepreneurs who think about making money all day may make money, but not necessarily a lot of money. Entrepreneurs who don’t think about making money all day can really have enough energy to pay attention to long-term products and direction, and really seize a long-term valuable thing. Many people scoffed at my idea. But I know entrepreneurs, people who want to make money in the short term, they’re still doing it. Of course, I am not against the pursuit of profit, the essence of business is to pursue profit, no matter how packaging, or finally make money. But making money from products is not the same as making money from speculation. What’s more, by making money from products, you are really providing social value, creating resources and realizing a richer value of life. A simple pursuit of profit would not have such a nice by-product.
conclusion
In fact, the tone of the whole article today, I know some people will not be happy. I’ve been waiting a long time for this, too. I’m one of the few people I know who has tried to live up to some of the lofty values that we see in movies and books. I pursued my dreams, did what I thought was right, always had the world in my heart, always wanted to change the world in my mouth. When we were young, we had such rhetoric, but as the society, by all kinds of secular hanging, how many people, but also really with dreams and feelings to fight in the end. Although I firmly believe that, I do not like to say this on many occasions, because I feel that I am just a rump who is going to change the world. I do not know what I am doing now. Can I make money? Now there is a day when I can express my opinion, and I want to show those who have laughed at me, you see, THIS is how I do it, I don’t change, I can achieve something. Insist on the meaning and value of dreams, though he will be late, he will never be absent.
Finally, I would like to thank my family and colleagues who have been with me for the past six years, all the investors and partners who have supported and believed in us, and all those who have helped us in various ways. Even I thank those who despised us and looked down upon us for giving us the motivation to carry on till now. As I said at the beginning of this article, acquisitions are a comma for us, and in Instacart’s day, the future is still there!
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