Is Chen Yizhou a loser?

"Just get half an economy class ticket first, and then slowly change to a full ticket." More than a year ago, Chen Yizhou said this to the media, and even compared himself to "a small local tyrant with a little savings at home." But even so, he, who rarely appears in the media's field of vision, is still frequently put in the spotlight and surrounded by all kinds of real and fake external evaluations.

It was not until the release of Renren's 2014 financial report that Chen Yizhou was once again pushed to the forefront of public opinion, and all dissatisfaction with Renren's performance or products was ultimately directed at Chen Yizhou himself.

People like to compare Renren with Facebook, which also started on campus, to lament Chen Yizhou's "loss of a good opportunity", and even ultimately attribute it to Chen Yizhou's own decision-making errors, while ignoring the various external objective conditions. We are always willing to review the experience of losers, because big and small failures can always show some kind of superiority in intelligence, which is not wrong, just as the ancients often sighed that Xiang Yu did not cross the Wujiang River. But some things may not be confusing to those in charge, but they understand the taste and reasons better.

This is even more true for Chen Yizhou. Although he is not a failure, countless commentators have already carved a tombstone on him. This is a bit too much. I have briefly summarized the evaluations of Chen Yizhou by various parties. There are probably three hats that various commentators like to add to Chen Yizhou. If you think about it carefully, it is quite interesting. It is not to whitewash Chen Yizhou, but it is indeed biased to simply conclude that a veteran of the Internet industry is a "loser".

The first hat: abandoning social interaction?

When talking about Chen Yizhou and Renren, people always think of Renren's former name "Xiaonei". This campus SNS community launched in 2005 can be said to have accompanied a generation of people in their ivory tower. In the eyes of many people, Chen Yizhou's biggest mistake seems to be changing "Xiaonei" to "Renren", and deviating from the general direction of social networking in subsequent development. Of course, when evaluating this, people prefer to say, "If Wang Xing continued to do Xiaonei", Wang Xing, who has lost nine times and won one time, always makes people feel a little tragic, and it is easier for people to defend him.

But the problem is that many people have chosen to forget the name change from "Xiaonei" to "Renren". The sensitivity of the word "Xiaonei" itself eventually prompted Chen Yizhou to change the name of "Xiaonei" and he has never told too many people about it. After the name change, Renren hopes to make social networking bigger and connect everyone. This is a big step, but talking about betrayal is obviously off topic.

Compared with the development environment of Facebook, it was not easy for Renren to become a social network covering all people at that time. This was determined by objective conditions. In July 2005, Accel Partners, a well-known investment institution, invested $12.7 million in Facebook shortly before investing $10 million in Oak Pacific Interactive founded by Chen Yizhou. In December of that year, Wang Xing's Xiaonei.com was just established.

To some extent, the betrayal everyone feels is simply that they have grown up, but others have not grown up with them. However, the age stratification of users seems to be an insurmountable gap for all social products.

Even in foreign countries, there are differences in age among users of Snapchat, Tumblr, and Facebook. Facebook is dominated by parents, and Snapchat has become the new favorite. What about China? QQ Space, Renren, and Weibo have almost become the inevitable social network migration of a generation for a long time. However, whether in China or abroad, this user age stratification is never absolute. It is not the case that if you use B, you will break away from A. It is just a matter of who uses it more. Just like some people say that no one uses Renren after college graduates, I just want to ask, "After college graduates, will teachers lose their jobs and schools close down?"

Back to Chen Yizhou, who founded ChinaRen in 1999, and seems to have had a close relationship with social networking since the beginning of his business. Later, Chen Yizhou's Oak Pacific Interactive acquired the famous Chinese community Mop in 2004, and then the story of the acquisition of Xiaonei.com, which is more familiar to everyone. It can be said that this Internet veteran has been engaged in social networking and has achieved some success. Even among the many projects invested by Renren, social networking is also a "central axis":

In July 2014, Renren invested in the anonymous social application Yik Yak.

In September 2014, Renren led the investment in the stock investment community Snowball.

In January 2015, Renren led the investment in Motif Investing, a US social stock selection and investment platform.

Even if we take a step back and look at the various startups that start with the Chinese character "Renren" (Renrenxiang, Renrendai, Renrenche...), the name change to "Renren" was quite prescient. Of course, speaking of prescient, this may have to mention another compliment that Chen Yizhou has received.

The second hat: investment expert?

Before this, this hat belonged only to the former world's richest man Buffett. However, as Renren successively withdrew from eLong and Vipshop at a good premium, many media and self-media also gave this title to Chen Yizhou, but with a bit of irony.

Objectively speaking, it is obviously not a bad thing for a company founder to have good judgment on the future development trend of a product. What's more, this investment brings good returns not for himself but for the company. This investment behavior should not be judged as "speculation", which is a term only in the evil old society.

Speaking of this, I think of another early Internet person who was also good at investment - Chen Tianqiao. However, compared with Chen Yizhou, Chen Tianqiao and his Shanda Capital seem to be inferior to Chen Yizhou and Renren in terms of hit rate and return rate. After all, being able to spot a monster stock like Vipshop requires both vision and luck.

Rather than saying that Chen Yizhou is a stock god, it is better to say that Chen Yizhou has a good grasp of some new directions and trends. Chen Yizhou invested in SoFi, a campus loan company three years ago. The subsequent popularity of the domestic campus finance field seems to have proved the success of this investment. Not long ago, SoFi just completed a US$200 million Series D financing.

Chen Yizhou himself has also said in public that Renren invests in American startups, in addition to financial returns, more to see how they are done abroad, and then transform them in China. This is evident from his years of persistence in campus and social networking.

Third hat: management?

This... after reading various comment articles, it seems to have become another major point of criticism.

China has never lacked CEOs with bad tempers, and many successful entrepreneurs have a bit of bad temper. The most famous one recently is Tang Yan, the founder of Momo, as described in the article "Ruffian Tang Yan". Jianghu and wildness have never been difficult to talk about in China since ancient times. It can even be regarded as a leadership philosophy. This kind of thing can be understood as bad temper in a bad way, and can be described as straightforward and generous in a good way. Just as my teacher told me at the beginning, the media is actually very simple. What they want you to see is what you see; what you want to see is what you see.

I have no intention of discussing whether a strong or soft character is better, and it is even more difficult to judge what kind of impact Chen Yizhou's character has on everyone, but at least as a veteran who has been fighting from almost the first wave of China's Internet entrepreneurship to the present, Chen Yizhou can be counted as one of the successful 1%.

Of course, sometimes it is precisely because of this that we always have high expectations for Chen Yizhou and his Renren, and sometimes even use some radical words to comment on him, but veterans never die, and we believe that under the current strategy, Renren will not wither. Financial and educational products such as Renren Fenqi and Renren Quxue, which are derived from Renren, seem to be more in line with Renren's campus DNA, so we might as well take a long-term view.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.