A large number of entrepreneurs are approaching in the era of entrepreneurial coffee 2.0

In this wave of thorns and flowers coexisting, a variety of entrepreneurial coffee also came into being. Like the rapid iteration of Internet products, entrepreneurial coffee is also escalating: under the banner of "not just selling coffee", a batch of entrepreneurial coffee has fallen, while those who survive are exploring new ways to play.

In any case, the era of Startup Coffee 2.0 has arrived.

The power of a cup of coffee

Leather sofa, long wooden table, bar full of glasses, only from the appearance of more than 400 square meters, IC coffee in Zhangjiang Legend Square is very different from other coffee shops around; at most, it is private rooms such as "Peach Blossom Island", "Guangding" and "ethereal peak", as well as the name IC, which reveals some fine-tuning.

The difference lies in the cultural soft environment: in entrepreneurial coffee, a cup of coffee worth more than 20 yuan a day, instead of renting and starting a business, chatting with similar "creatures" and working next to each other; if you are lucky, you can also find partners and investors on the way to start a business in the moment you pass by.

More than two years ago, 100 professionals from the upper and lower reaches of the IC and IT industrial chains, each with 20, 000 yuan, partnered to open this entrepreneurial cafe. Hu Yunwang, the founder and one of the founders, has decades of experience in headhunting and interviewed thousands of KT talents when managing IC talent.

So far, there are nearly 130shareholders in the upper and lower reaches of the IC industrial chain, all of them are big winners, such as: Hong Tianfeng, vice chairman of Yuanhua and founder of Fang Guang Capital, Chen Datong, CTO of Spreadtrum, Kong Huawei, director of Shanghai Branch of Computing Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Zhao Xiaoguang, gold medal analyst of electronics industry.

In fact, most start-up coffee sponsors have been in related industries for many years, and almost every one has a number of "heavyweight" supporters, such as Su Di, founder of Beijing Garage Coffee and former investment director of NASDAQ listed company Lan Xin. Another 3W Coffee company has nearly 200 shareholders, including Qunar CEO Zhuang Chenchao, Tencent co-founder Zeng Liqing, New Oriental co-founder Xu Xiaoping, and famous hosts Li Jing and Xie Na.

In the view of a number of entrepreneurial cafe partners, as well as entrepreneurial coffee regulars, the rise of entrepreneurial coffee has simply benefited from the wave of mobile Internet.

Compared with the Internet craze in the PC era, there are more opportunities for mobile Internet segmentation, from games and APP applications to large-screen smartphones and small tablet hardware, while continuing to generate the next wave of smart wearable devices. On the other hand, the capital that has tasted the benefits in the PC era is also very "hot". As long as you have an idea, you dare to bet.

Almost without exception, every start-up coffee is trying to lower the threshold of starting a business, providing "grassroots" entrepreneurship with one-stop services such as shared office space, talent exchange, technology sharing, market expansion, project docking and so on.

Like other start-up coffee, Hu Yunwang also stressed that "we don't just sell coffee, coffee is just a carrier." he also wants to emphasize the operation of the whole ITC entrepreneurial chain running through the upstream and downstream, which is known as "a cup of coffee leverages tens of billions of capital."

How powerful is a cup of coffee? In a recent internal email from Huawei, Ren Zhengfei proposed that "a cup of coffee absorbs the energy of the universe," hoping that future "seeds" such as research experts and doctors and would-be doctors would drink coffee and input energy into the "seed" stage. to form a huge group of ideas.

From this corner, the power of a cup of coffee should not be underestimated. So far, entrepreneurial stories such as ink weather and rapid traffic born in garage coffee are still being talked about, while IC Coffee has also stepped out of the Forbes list of 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 in China and Wu Zhuhua, founder of Shanghai Yunren Information Technology Co., Ltd.

The branch opens to Silicon Valley.

"We are different from others!" This is the most frequently heard sentence in the process of coming into contact with many start-up coffee.

Every start-up coffee operator seems to want to be different from others; of course, it is the phrase "how to be different from others" that is most often asked by the outside world.

Specifically, according to our reporter's rough statistics, 3W coffee located in Beijing, including leading entrepreneurs and investors, is committed to creating a middle-and high-level social circle of the Internet; Fuyun Coffee, located in Hangzhou West Lake Fudi Entrepreneurship Park, is inevitably marked with the brand of "Alibaba", with Ali background as the majority of more than 30 shareholders, while another Beta Coffee is regarded as C2C "the best gathering place for online businessmen".

In addition, Xiamen's Aite Coffee focuses on "Internet Entrepreneurship + Digital Features", while Shenzhen's starting Coffee draws lessons from the garage coffee model, but pays more attention to the support for entrepreneurs, receiving the most entrepreneurial teams in the Internet and mobile Internet.

"there is still too much regional agglomeration." In Hu Yunwang's view, unlike other start-up coffee, IC Coffee has broken through regional boundaries. Not only the online circle has been connected to the world since its inception, but the offline IC Coffee stations have also spread to Taiwan, Singapore and even Silicon Valley.

At present, IC Coffee Beijing Station, located at Quantum Core Block in Haidian District, has officially entered trial operation, and more than 10 sub-stations, including Shenzhen Station, Silicon Valley Station, Chengdu Station, Singapore Station and Hsinchu Station, are under planning or have entered the stage of preparatory construction.

"unlike the mobile Internet, ICT has higher technical barriers; and all links are not connected to each other." Hu Yunwang believes that when experts from all aspects of the industrial chain are gathered, human resources themselves are a barrier. For example, Kong Huawei, one of the founders, moved his "ITalk Salon" to IC Coffee to become a major brand in Zhangjiang's innovative soft environment.

On May 24th, at the IC Coffee event on the same day, Shanghai Station talked about the road to the revival of intelligent hardware, Beijing Station talked about FPGA, Singapore House talked about big data, Suzhou House promoted what IC Coffee is; and after all these events are over, in the early morning of US time, the friends of Silicon Valley will begin their Nth gathering-- planning how to decorate the post-cafe at the selected location.

"each IC coffee sub-site is led by local ITC veterans." Hu Yunwang told China Business Daily: for example, Li Hongyu, head of IC Coffee Silicon Valley Station, is a ZigBee chip provider and one of the founders of Taiwan's Dasheng Electronics, and currently works in Silicon Valley; Dong Yemin, head of Singapore Station, GLOBALFOUNDRIES (Singapore) Research and Development Manager.

In the process of preparing for the construction of IC Coffee Silicon Valley Station, some Internet companies took the initiative to provide two pieces of idle space of nearly 500square meters for the daily operation of their cafes and office space for incubators.

According to Hu Yunwang, future overseas sites will incubate entrepreneurial teams dominated by overseas Chinese. "for example, IC Coffee Silicon Valley Station can be used as an overseas home for domestic venture capital institutions, making it more convenient for them to have close contact with overseas entrepreneurial teams."

Version 2.0

Service entrepreneurship at the same time, entrepreneurial coffee itself is also a form of entrepreneurship. Starting a business means survival or death; from foreign experience, entrepreneurial coffee can make money, but there are also a lot of failures.

Last year, Dong Jianqiang, founder of Shenzhen Qiqi Coffee, broke the news that "100 start-up cafes made less than 10% profit", which once caused an uproar in the industry. According to Dong Jianqiang's preliminary statistics of more than 50 start-up cafes, about 30% of those who break even are in a state of cash flow loss.

According to our reporter from the industry, in the past three years, about 10 start-up cafes have transformed or closed down. Not long ago, Dongguan crowdfunding "a lot of people coffee" was transferred to take over. In fact, only from the point of view of catering license and coffee management, most start-up coffee is unprofitable, flat or only small profit.

According to Hu Yunwang told our reporter that after two years of operation, the overall income of IC coffee is basically flat and slightly profitable. In Venture Coffee 1.0, IC Coffee Sea is only a simple primary ICT industry chain resource aggregation platform, but in version 2.0, it will be given more functional positioning, such as: technology media, management consulting, incubator, venture capital consulting, venture capital funds and so on.

Among them, different from the traditional incubator, the incubator of entrepreneurial coffee pays more attention to virtual incubation. In China, garage coffee was the first to put forward the concept of "virtual incubation" and was officially recognized by the Zhongguancun Management Committee. The entrepreneurial team stationed in the garage can enjoy the same preferential policies of Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park. At present, there are dozens of resident teams.

Not long ago, Hu Yunwang used years of networking experience to persuade Hu Xin, a professional with decades of incubator experience, to join full-time, mainly in charge of IC coffee virtual incubator business. Hu Xin said with a smile to the reporter that the job, which used to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, is now unpaid for the time being, but she thinks entrepreneurial coffee is meaningful and has great potential for development.

In June, IC Coffee Virtual Incubator will be officially launched, while in July, IC Coffee will raise its own first venture capital fund, which is the first time that Venture Coffee has set up its own venture capital fund.

According to Hu Yunwang, the first phase of Angel Fund plans to raise 50 million yuan, which is mainly raised by internal investors, and plans to carry out professional investment and financing services in areas such as integrated circuits, wearable devices and smart homes.

In the next five years, IC Coffee can gradually achieve the positive development of the business model through the above-mentioned projects.

Just like the classic line in the movie Casablanca, "there are so many cities in the world, and there are so many pubs in the city, she walks into mine." the attraction of the startup cafe is that you never know whether the next person to walk into the cafe is an entrepreneur, an investor, or someone special.

At present, there are more than 50 entrepreneurial teams out of IC Coffee, while IC Coffee has established strategic partnerships with nearly 20 investment and financing institutions. Hu Yunwang said with a smile, "Please choose a primary school with strong teachers for your children (entrepreneurial team)."