The death of crowdfunding: a "Gong Dou" sample of a crowdfunding startup cafe

Crowdfunding is a double-edged sword: it lowers the threshold for investment, but also increases the complexity of corporate governance.

Titanium media note: equity crowdfunding is considered to be an innovation in the entrepreneurial investment and financing mechanism, the company sells a certain proportion of shares to ordinary investors, investors invest in the company to obtain future income, which greatly improves the efficiency of financing. However, the seemingly beautiful equity crowdfunding is very difficult in practice. This model tests the trust between partners and puts forward higher requirements for corporate governance. This is the story of titanium media intern reporter and a partner of crowdfunding Cafe, which is no less than a "palace fight":

I first joined the crowdfunding project of CH Cafe (the following names and business names are aliases because of the sensitive information involved).

This motion first began with Feng Jingwei, an ordinary employee (engineer) who has worked in Hanwei Company for many years. Hanwei is a large IT company involved in communication networks, data communication networks and wireless terminal products. It has always adhered to its creed: resources will be exhausted and only culture can survive. Therefore, in years of hard struggle, self-transcendence and open enterprising, Hanwei has formed its own strong corporate culture, and there is also a strong relationship between employees.

Under the circumstances that there is a general lack of personal funds and it is difficult to build a grand blueprint, the crowdfunding model that Prime Minister Keqiang talked about many times at the meeting broke into Feng Jingwei's mind-- a crowdfunding project with low risk and great wisdom based on Hanwei culture. Why not?

Feng Jingwei's idea of Ch Coffee is like this-- like almost all crowdfunding cafes-- it will be an O2O social space with corporate culture as its theme & entrepreneurial incubator. Here, we can absorb the culture of the IT world, share and dock the resources and ideas of cross-border social groups, and expand the sales channels of Han Wei through product interactive experience. After the concept took shape, Feng Jingwei carefully considered and drew lessons from 3W Coffee and other crowdfunding coffee experience, initially decided to convene 200 shareholders, each shareholder raised 50, 000 yuan, raised a total of 10 million yuan.

Feelings and dreams

An excellent top-level design is essential for the operation and decision-making of the company, especially for crowdfunding companies with equal and decentralized ownership. At the same time, as a former junior employee of Hanwei, in order to be recognized by the team, Feng Jingwei plans to gather several people with more management experience and prestige to prop up half of Ch Coffee, so as to lay a solid foundation for the long-term development of the company and establish prestige for his own team.

The train of thought was formed, and then began to start. In the interpersonal network of Hanwei's former employees, Feng Jingwei chose several senior managers and told the whole story. Within a few days, three veteran employees who recognized Feng Jingwei's concept joined the sponsors.

The four sponsors have known each other for less than half a year, and the Ch Coffee project is just around the corner. How to make four people in the same boat without suspicion? Although a contract is good, it is a bit more cold and rigid. The righteous Feng Ching-Wei thought for a long time and felt that he had found an answer that he thought was good:

When the weather in Beijing returned to cold in March 2015, the four sponsors worshipped at Yonghegong Lamasery and made an oath never to betray each other in the sacred land of incense. Of the four, Park Jianyu is the oldest and has held the highest position and unusual status. The other three, including Feng Ching-Wei, call him Big Brother.

The four founders' consideration of shareholder selection is as follows: Hanwei's former employees and user fans, IT industry experts and heads of investment institutions, supplemented by media people and social activists; the former helps to promote the progress of all stages of crowdfunding, while the latter helps to broaden the influence of cafes.

My father is an expert in the IT industry and an upperclassman in his university. Feng Jingwei came all the way to him. After talking to his father about his grand dream of building Ch coffee, he was impressed by his meticulous and concrete plan.

In order to cultivate my almost negative financial quotient, my father bought shares in my name. After his father became a shareholder, Feng Jingwei exchanged cups with our family on the wine table, revealing his beautiful blueprint for Ch coffee: "I plan to build a flagship store within a year, build more than a dozen or more chains across the country within a few years, and then promote the brand of Ch coffee to the world. One day, he will not only be the cultural distribution center of the Han and Wei people, but also an iconic business card of Chinese industrial culture in the world!"

Giving adequate, fair and reasonable returns to shareholders is the foundation of crowdfunding. The shareholder return mechanism established by the four founders: in terms of intangible value, shareholders can look for business opportunities in the interactive communication of this O2O platform. "I'm still looking for my partner, and maybe one day he'll sit across from me with coffee." People who drink coffee at 3W once said so.

In Feng Jingwei's plan, it will also be the common wealth of individual shareholders and cafes of Ch Coffee: investment cooperation, exchange of ideas, technological collision, creative burst. Cafes have created a top-notch and efficient culture in this slow life, which has an inestimable aggregate effect on Ch Coffee to further expand its IT corporate culture and integrate more diverse resources, and has become an indispensable human, financial and technical resource for Ch Coffee to open a chain of funds.

In terms of tangible returns, the returns of each shareholder include:

 can get a 50, 000 yuan equal return card.

has the same shares and rights, and each shareholder has a share of 1max 200 and a dividend of 1max 200

 continues to pay dividends: 10% of the profits of all subsequent chain stores, with an average dividend to all shareholders of the first store.

The equal return card of 50,000 yuan can not only benefit shareholders, but also play the effect of maintaining offline platform communication between shareholders for a long time, so that the elites in the industry who are not easy to meet may gather in the coffee shop more because of the link of rebate coupons after the establishment of the coffee shop, so as to enhance the cohesion of the Ch coffee think tank.

As a gathering place for Hanwei veteran employees, Ch Coffee will strengthen its interaction with Hanwei clubs and other organizations, integrate Hanwei's cultural resources, and hold regular theme activities such as management salons.

In terms of marketing, Ch Coffee will use the Internet as a means of transmission, driving TV media and print media reports to quickly magnify the advertising effect, so that people who pay attention to Hanwei will quickly expand their horizons to Ch Coffee.

In terms of profit model, in addition to the profits of ordinary coffee shops in alcoholic beverages, Ch coffee will also have terminal sales of Hanwei products, incubation of start-up projects and investment, and so on, which will make profit channels fully three-dimensional.

The four founders of the Ch project initially shared a feeling that the team of Ch Coffee would gradually grow. However, in early May, when the first batch of crowdfunding shareholders were fully invested and the second batch gradually joined the team, divisions among the founders quietly emerged.

Crowdfunding is characterized by a large number of people, and each person's contribution proportion is exactly the same. In this relatively equal shareholder social environment, there is still a need for decision-makers, managers, operators, and division of labor. It is impossible for everyone to stand in the middle of the stage and control such a large platform. However, even so, the core management team should be composed of several people and need a strong supervision mechanism to check and balance managers. The idea of autocracy is difficult to gain a foothold in the 21st century, especially in societies and organizations with few people and everyone has a voice in small countries such as "Greek city-states".

However, the personal will of some co-founders still runs counter to crowdfunding's reasonable top-level planning-they put others, including the founders, as weaker participants, creating a gap between them.

The mystery of where the money is going

At the beginning of the establishment of Ch Coffee, it was agreed in the motion that all shareholders' funds were collected into joint public accounts. The person in charge of the account, that is, Park Jianyu, the "eldest brother" of the four sponsors, needed to make the funds transparent, publish the details of bank funds in a timely manner, and timely feedback the screenshots of each shareholder's money to the shareholders themselves. However, one day in March, a shareholder exposed that Park Jianyu had a payment platform discrepancy during the prior capital reconciliation: in a screenshot of their chat, the payment platform used by a shareholder who had just paid was not consistent with the picture captured by Park Jianyu.

Why did this happen? Each of our shareholders is anxiously waiting for a statement in the WeChat group, and there are only a few guesses:

1. What mistake did Park Jianyu make inadvertently in the course of operation?

two。 Park falsified payment records after misappropriating shareholders' money for his use.

Prestige is like Boss Park in the past, for a mere 50,000 yuan, why bet on your own intangible assets-credibility? Therefore, most people are willing to believe the first hypothesis before the truth is revealed.

However, the truth is more strange. In the next two months, Park Jianyu disappeared, Wechat did not return, phone calls did not answer, shareholders asked repeatedly: wake up every morning, more than a thousand Wechat bombardment. Many shareholders lined up in the group to ask Park Jianyu for an explanation, but there was still no sign of him. Later, when I also received Feng Jingwei's suggestion that I should wait in line to open my accounts to Park Jianyu, I began to feel a little undercurrent.

No matter why Park Jianyu did not reply to Feng Jingwei, Feng Jingwei did not choose the board team to solve the problem, but chose to disclose the situation in real time in the group, and did not try to restore the overall credibility of the founder team.

At the beginning of the founding team of Ch Coffee, Feng Jingwei hoped that his sworn brothers would help him and rely on their prestige and network resources to enable them to gain a foothold on the Ch stage. However, maybe Brother Park's entrepreneurial ambition is no weaker than that of Feng Xiaodi, and in the days that followed, he became more and more willing to run for the post of general manager. That kind of Park Jianyu is not compatible with Feng Jingwei, who wants to be general manager and runs the company himself.

As a result, Feng Jingwei changed his strategy and used some tricks to expose Park Jianyu's deeds that did not follow the rules to shareholders, thus shaking Park Jianyu's previously unshakable position. At this moment, perhaps Feng Jingwei is waiting for an opportunity to push himself to the front desk of the company.

In this autumn of life and death, the three younger brothers found the highly respected Gong Lixin as chairman of the board of directors to implement the resolution of the board of directors.

Ginger is still old and spicy. Gong Lixin solved Park Jianyu's "disappearance case" in just a few days, recovered the people, returned the funds, and then forced Park Jianyu to leave.

A few days later, when Park Jianyu left the Ch Coffee team, many shareholders who were going through the withdrawal procedures said they had received a refund from Park Jianyu. Park Jianyu's departure, the board of directors gave us a "Park Jianyu violated the transparency of Ch coffee funds" reason. However, Park Jianyu also said that some of the founders have "changed the rules of the game of Ch Coffee" over and over again. It is difficult to judge which is right and which is wrong.

After the storm, everything seemed to be calm. However, how can the fragile wall of trust built by shareholders because of the same dream withstand such a fierce storm? Feng Jingwei did not properly handle the departure of Park Jianyu, who began to persuade shareholders of some companies to leave because he was aggrieved or not optimistic about Ch coffee.

The two periods of shareholder financing gathered more than 130 people, and almost in an instant, 40 to 50 people left. This is undoubtedly a considerable loss and blow to Ch Coffee, which was originally based on the advantage of the number of people and the disadvantage of each person's investment. However, Feng Jingwei sends weekly progress information on Ch Coffee in the group, announces recent major corporate events in the announcement group, and so on, those meticulous planning and steady efforts make the remaining shareholders think that the road can still go on.

The battle of the general manager

However, wave after wave flattened and rose again and again.

After Park Jianyu left, the competition for the general manager came one after another. For Feng Jingwei, who originally conceived the Ch coffee crowdfunding plan, becoming a manager is his long-awaited wish. However, even if the source is him, he is the most time-consuming and laborious. As a young man with fresh blood and relatively inexperienced management experience in the past, he does not have an advantage in the competition for general manager.

Feng Jingwei originally thought that the first sworn brothers would always stand beside him and support him. Unfortunately, contrary to his wishes, Mr. Park left, and the prestige of the founder team with him as the core was questioned. Even if the other two founders support his election, the competitive advantage over other shareholders is gone.

So how will Feng Jingwei make the next move?

He chose to play by the rules. Park Jianyu's departure has been a very serious lesson, as the founder himself, all he can do is to do everything around him as well as he can, and rely on his strength to be recognized by shareholders.

The cabinet system proposal of the general manager of Ch Coffee mentions:

The board of directors organizes competitive recruitment activities to produce the candidate for the general manager, and the selection of the general manager sets up a 15-member "selection committee", which is composed of 5 directors and 10 people elected by shareholders. If one of the top 10 shareholders wants to participate in the competition for the general manager, he shall not be elected as a member of the committee and fill the vacancy starting from the 11th shareholder.

As a former Hanwei executive, Zhang Pengcheng was highly respected. During the election of the 15-member selection committee, he lived up to expectations and was elected by a high vote, and then set up a "15-member committee WeChat group." In the (Wechat) group, members of the selection committee worked out the rules of the game for selecting general managers with the participation of member Zhang Pengcheng. After all the rules were laid down, Zhang Pengcheng, who originally stated in the selection committee group that he would not participate in the competition for general manager, went back on his word and said on the eve of the competition that he would participate in the competition for general manager, which was not in line with the competitive proposal at all. Moreover, for the rest of our shareholders, Zhang Pengcheng's behavior is an act of killing first and playing later. The original announcement is as follows:

Dear Ch family, candidates add Zhang Pengcheng.

Without procedure or even consultation, candidates can be replaced easily, reflecting the non-openness and opacity of the competitive recruitment process. Not only that, on the eve of the competition, the two old shareholders who had withdrawn their shares were also quietly pulled back into the group of shareholders and joined the competition committee, replacing the other two members who had been elected before, exposing the grey areas in the competition.

The motion makes it clear that the members of the competition committee must be shareholders, so how did the two former shareholders fish in troubled waters to join the committee? We don't know. However, most of Zhang Pengcheng hopes to win over his cronies, so that he can take the position of general manager, which is self-evident.

It is not difficult to expect that this incident caused another disturbance. Opacity and injustice are difficult to tolerate in the so-called "fair competition" of election. Zhang Pengcheng's approach reveals his ambition for the position of general manager, at the same time, his means are not clever, which once again triggered a local earthquake among general manager candidates.

If I don't accept your rules, I won't play the game any more. Therefore, the competition has not yet begun, Feng Jingwei abstained from the competition. As Feng Jingwei, who has always longed for the position of general manager, the opacity of the competition rules and the out of control of the competition process are tantamount to a blow to him. A number of members of the selection committee who supported Feng Jingwei were asked to stay without success. Perhaps the reason is that Feng Jingwei confronted Zhang Pengcheng with retreat as his advance and defense as his desire to attack when the situation was unfavorable to him.

The results of the competition day showed that Zhang Pengcheng was elected by a unanimous vote, which may have been the outcome he had expected.

At the end of May, when General Manager Zhang Pengcheng took office, he said that Park Jianyu had a heart-to-heart talk with him and expressed his idea of being an adviser to General Manager Zhang Pengcheng. Under the support of Park Jianyu's prestige, Zhang Pengcheng built up confidence.

However, good things always wear too much. A few days later, Zhang Pengcheng found that the number of shareholders was still declining, and the trend was the same as before he took office. Park Jianyu did not really support his inauguration, which was undoubtedly a great blow to General Manager Zhang Pengcheng-without the backstage cover of his eldest brother, Zhang Pengcheng could not stand in front of the stage calmly. Alas, the rules of the bill promised by more than 70 shareholders have come to naught, and the authority of the founder is in jeopardy. Zhang Pengcheng continued to act anxiously as his general manager.

I thought the matter was over for the time being, but this is not always the case. The secret contest between General Manager Zhang Pengcheng and Feng Jingwei continues:

According to the prior agreement, Zhang Pengcheng will receive no less than 75 cents a month in the industry. However, Zhang Pengcheng's demand for personal interests does not stop there, and the demand for millions of virtual shares comes one after another: he wants the 1 million shares to have a similar consumption voucher interest. In order to get a "reciprocal return" for his more efforts, or perhaps to better dispatch resources and manipulate Ch coffee, Mr. Zhang hopes to get more economic benefits and rights, and this idea of paying too much attention to self-interest runs counter to the feelings of Ch coffee and is different from Feng Jingwei's. When General Manager Zhang's request was partially rejected by senior experts, suggesting that he link virtual equity to the general manager's performance, his opposition revealed his worries about the future of Ch Coffee and his lack of confidence in his abilities.

If a crowdfunding cafe wants to go long-term and even well-known at home and abroad, the return ratio between shareholders must be relatively reasonable. The "human" factor is the core of the company's entrepreneurship, the voice of each shareholder can not be underestimated, especially the relatively high status of shareholders. Regardless of the previous reputation, the excessive demands made by management before taking office will still be questioned by all parties. After all, if shareholders get more equity, and the equity belongs to personal interests, then the use of equity, the board of directors, the founder and so on have no right to interfere. Such a plan is obviously beneficial to individuals, but it is not easy to hold up if it is previously stated that "consumer coupons can be used for discount sales and business promotion is attractive."

The first thing the managers of crowdfunding companies should do is to convince the public. only by establishing prestige with their own virtue and ability among a hundred people, all the work can be carried out, and the cohesion of the company will not disperse in the event of setbacks.

If the friction between Park Jianyu and Feng Jingwei may also come from differences over the control of funds, then the episode between Zhang Pengcheng and Feng Jingwei is more of a pure struggle of power. the tricks used by the two of them to compete with each other may not often play on the margins of the company's rules, but fortunately they did not let the smoke spread to the shareholders.

For me and other shareholders, we watch their struggle, but it is difficult to know the specific process; therefore, we are more concerned about who can take the responsibility and who can support a huge coffee brand that will have dozens or hundreds of chains. The supremacy of ability leads to success and defeat. Only the general manager with both ability and political integrity can find his position, set up a team with sufficient management ability, and better control the relatively flat management structure of the company.

When Zhang Pengcheng put the individual and the company in such a relatively unbalanced position, the hearts of our shareholders gradually alienated him. He was shut out for the first time, or because the work between them was carefully arranged, and the board and the founder weakened the power battle in front of our shareholders. However, the conflict will break out at some point, and the issue of millions of virtual equity is just a fuse, and shareholders finally stop making concessions when it comes to matters related to their own interests.

Now that the differences are on the table, General Manager Zhang is aware of the change in the situation: the benefits he wants directly cannot be obtained, and he does not have enough confidence in the future development of the company. I don't think the performance-linked mechanism will enable me to get the same amount of equity. Under such pressure, Zhang Pengcheng had to resign as general manager.

At this time of turmoil, Feng Jingwei was pushed into the chair of the general manager, vowing to "do only one thing in life, making Ch coffee is enough." Feng Jingwei fought a beautiful battle at this time, from the initial retreat into progress, to the final opportunity to take advantage of the east wind, and finally fulfilled his wish to become general manager.

Feng Jingwei watched the team gradually formed over the past few months. in the past, with the influence of Park Jianyu and Zhang Pengcheng, many prestigious people were able to join the Ch team. however, their prestige was too high and their desire for power was not small, which hindered Feng Jingwei's self-development. Now, Feng Jingwei has taken the position of general manager, but the "buddy" who once gave Feng Jingwei a hand has left CH in twos and threes. Perhaps this is also Feng Jingwei's expected ending. (this article exclusively launches titanium media)

Author: Tao Tao link: http://www.tmtpost.com/1437133.html

This article is published by author Tao Tao   authorized by titanium media, and edited by titanium media. Please indicate the source and link to this article when reproduced.