Those "pseudo-science and technology" unicorn companies whose stories are about to end

Latest update time：2021-08-30 20:31

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In recent days , riding on the popularity of the Wuzhen Conference, Hurun released a "2019 Hurun Global Unicorn List". As long as you meet four conditions, you can be listed as a "unicorn": 1. Valuation of more than US$1 billion; 2. Technology start-up; 3. History of less than 10 years; 4. Not listed.

According to his algorithm, there are 206 Chinese science and technology unicorn companies on the list.

I was also bored, so I read this list from beginning to end, and wanted to see what the next big possibility that might change our lives was quietly brewing. But after reading it, I was extremely disappointed. In 10 words, I can describe it: no science and no innovation, Liao Hua is the pioneer.

There is nothing much to comment on Ant Financial, ByteDance, and Didi, which are at the top. They are on the list purely because they have not yet gone public. Their valuations are all in the hundreds of billions of RMB, and they can no longer be considered startups. As for the companies with a valuation of 1 billion to 10 billion USD, I will categorize them into the following categories: sub-landlords, Internet finance, used cars, movies, online courses, pseudo-AI, electric cars, and e-commerce.

Yes. There are no flying cars, no robot girlfriends, no black mirrors, only various names you have heard of or not heard of - online English courses, online preschool courses, online certification courses, bookkeeping, online loans, vegetable sellers, wine sellers, and overseas shopping. And these have been the most sought-after "scientific and technological innovation" products in China in the past two years, and their valuations have been raised to astonishing figures.

Of course, I am not saying that these things are bad. After all, a society does need people to provide online courses, and these things are certainly valuable, otherwise no one would invest in them. But if you think about the fact that these things are the only things that private enterprises can offer in our era, it is hard not to worry about the prospects of China's so-called "scientific and technological innovation":

(To avoid trouble, the names of the companies mentioned below are hidden)

-01-

For example, the so-called "smart connected car" is still stuck in pseudo-concepts.

Smart cars, in my opinion, shouldn’t cars on the road automatically form a convoy and move forward at a constant speed to be worthy of the word smart? Or at least you have to work towards this direction.

As a result, what are the products that the unicorns in the industry that claim to be "intelligent connected cars" actually making? " Bind to the Taobao account system to complete the construction of a travel ecosystem that belongs only to you ." As for what a travel ecosystem is? Specifically, after you buy movie tickets on Tao Piao Piao, the ticket purchase information will be synchronized to the car, and you will receive a reminder to watch the movie after getting in the car.

My God, is this all that the "smart car" that is so popular now can do? Not to mention that if you order a movie ticket with your mobile phone, is there any particular need to synchronize it with the car? Isn't it a trivial matter that the so-called "exclusive network for listening to music while driving, online radio, and online idiom chain games for all people" that could have been solved with mobile phones six or seven years ago?

Remotely turning on the air conditioner is a technology that matured 20 years ago. Today, apart from adding a SIM card module to the car itself to enable Internet access and adding something like Xiao Ai for voice control, has there been any progress in the true intelligence of the car?

Projecting something that can be done on a mobile phone to an Android car and doing it again is like taking off your pants to fart, and it is not considered technology. It is a tragedy for the Chinese auto industry that a business model that can be defeated by a magnetic mobile phone holder can be blown up so much.

-02-

For example, the so-called "Internet medical care" is also a bubble that needs to be burst.

China has been hyping up 5G. The most talked-about vision of 5G is that in the future, doctors can perform surgery remotely and distribute medical resources to poor areas. This story has been told over and over again, but has anyone really done it now? No, because the difficulty is not the bandwidth of the Internet, but that someone needs to work hard to make the robotic finger more refined.

As a result, when it comes to the hardcore part, we have no one to do it, or we don’t have the ability to do it. Several well-known “Internet medical” companies on the market do similar things, either scalping numbers or selling numbers.

Doctor Plus can only be called a life service company at this level, so how can it be classified into the field of science and technology innovation? I am confused by this mysterious classification method. Is it because the word "medical" makes the moat sound higher?

Of course, not all of them are so low-level. There are still a few companies on the list that are truly engaged in medical research, such as high-throughput cloning screening and CAR-T cell therapy, or the production of nuclear magnetic resonance equipment, but these can only be classified as traditional commercial medical research units and have nothing to do with the Internet.

What kind of technological content does the only unicorn that can be related to the Internet have? After looking around, it is just a shared operating room, providing a place for doctors from top three hospitals who take private orders to practice outside the system. Its business model is more like a sub-landlord, and is far from new technology.

-03-

The so-called “big data” is all talk and no action.

Click on 10 companies that claim to be big data companies, and 8 of them have products that focus on pre-loan review and credit assessment. The other big names? No. Some of them can get government orders and do some business that is not convenient to discuss here, and the rest are small businesses. The web pages are full of various high-sounding "industry solutions", but I don't know how many customers they can attract in a year.

The truly valuable data in China is in the hands of the old Internet giants. The giants dominate all major portals and receive huge amounts of data every day. They use them to develop consumer products or exchange them with each other. It is not the turn of the outside "big data" companies to intervene. Only lenders have some demand for them. If this continues, I think it would be better to sell these "big data" companies to banks and online lending institutions as a pre-loan compliance department.

These so-called big data startups have never figured out one thing: big data, big data, you have to have data first, then you can do the rest. As for computing power, in the long run, it is always in excess.

But it seems that few big data companies can creatively develop a new dimension of data collection to explore the value of new data. They are all foolishly getting a lot of computing power and waiting for others to come to you for computing. Of course, this cannot be entirely blamed on entrepreneurs. Collecting information on social and economic activities is an extremely sensitive thing here today. The times have destined China's (private) big data companies to only be able to do processing with supplied materials, and there is no further room for imagination.

-04-

The final form of the “sharing economy”: sub-landlord

I think this trend was started by WeWork. In the past few years, a large number of shared offices that cannot be rented out have emerged both at home and abroad.

Don't you think that even offices are "shared" and "mobile", then the meaning of the office itself is gone. It's better to work from home (WFH), the boss saves a lot of rent, and the employees get the experience of skipping work, everyone is happy, why should we take off our pants to fart, and crawl from Yanjiao to your place in the traffic of the Third Ring Road to enjoy another group renting experience with others?

When Chinese people do business, they always want to go around to the house. The middle class who have a little money can't help but want to go in and ask questions when they see the shops outside the community. This is determined by the national character. However, the imagination space of the sub-landlord business combined with the Internet is really small now. Airbnb can't get the soul of others in this soil. Trying to manage the apartment business among white-collar workers and students has aroused public criticism of vampires. Finally, it seems that WeWork is the safest, so capital rushes in again.

WeWork's IPO failed and its valuation has collapsed. It has now been revealed that the total amount of the lease with a landlord is nearly twice the size of the company. Unlike other Internet scams, real estate can be clearly calculated. How much difference the sub-landlord can make can be modeled out for you after 10 years. I don't know how this story was blown up in the beginning, but people actually believed it. Now that the bubble has suddenly burst, Masayoshi Son is slapping himself in the face.

Those who run apartments probably don't have an easy time either. On one side, there's the public opinion of playing landlords and the strict supervision. On the other side, there's the old and dilapidated neighbors and the increasingly dramatic hipsters. No matter how you look at it, it doesn't seem like a good business.

-05-

"Artificial intelligence" is not worthy of its name and is far off the topic.

In fact, the people are already very tolerant. Even an elementary school student knows that it is still a long way to go for strong artificial intelligence. As for inserting a tube behind the brain, it is even more like science fiction. Everyone's expectations are already very low, but these entrepreneurial unicorns have not even been able to come up with a stupid artificial intelligence at the level of a fool. At present, it is at the level of reptiles - able to see things clearly (image recognition) and hear sounds (voice recognition), and that's all.

There are a lot of people reinventing the wheel when it comes to face recognition, so let's put that aside for now and talk about voice recognition. What I want is very simple, just like YouTube, I can open a video and convert subtitles in real time. Which video website in China can do that? If you can't even do this, don't brag about semantic recognition.

Speaking of semantic recognition, there is no need to say much. Even if semantic recognition can be achieved at 30%, today's lonely otakus and housegirls would have already chatted with their robot partners all day and night and loved them to death. The scene depicted in the movie "Her" is the norm.

But what is the level of human-computer dialogue now? It can only add an alarm clock and turn off the desk lamp. Apart from that, it can't even last more than 3 rounds of basic chatting, and it can no longer understand human language. To be honest, even if we make a pseudo-intelligent dialogue, we can simulate it better than them by manually brushing a massive material library (I don't know why no one in those big data companies does this).

A "semantic recognition" company currently valued at $1 billion, note, $1 billion, what is the selling point of their product on the official website? You say a sentence to the device, and the device can reply to you - relatives, idioms, horoscopes, guessing animals, poetry, unit conversion, medical guide robot (I guess it's probably just you say a disease name and it replies to you what department it is in). . . .

To prevent anyone from arguing, I know that this is certainly not the most cutting-edge level of semantic recognition in academia. I just feel sad that even a company like this can be valued at 1 billion, which is quite sad. It shows how scarce investment targets are in China.

Of course, having no “technology” is not something that cannot be tolerated.

After all, the inherent deficiencies of private start-ups mean that they cannot master the truly black technologies like quantum entanglement like the state, nor do they have the resources to take on the heavy equipment of the country such as ultra-high voltage power grid and new nuclear power reactor. But start-ups are at least filled with well-educated young people. Science and technology innovation, science and technology innovation, no science, some creativity is fine.

It turns out that this generation of young people lacks even creativity and originality. After looking at more than 200 so-called unicorns, none of them are doing something I have never thought of before. They are all extremely dull and boring. It is 2019, and the so-called "dream-selling companies" are only doing things like connecting home cameras and mobile phones. Shouldn't this have been achieved 10 years ago?

There are also several companies in the film industry on the list. Apart from those that build cinema screens in fourth- and fifth-tier cities (which is a variation of the sub-landlord business), I estimate that the remaining companies that invest in content will have a hard time in the next two years due to unknown regulations.

But you who work in the cultural industry, there are some talented people, but not all talented people, can you be a little creative? For example, you can make a movie with multiple endings? For example, you can make a TV series where the audience can participate in the plot selection? These things should have been available long ago with today's technology, why doesn't anyone have the courage and inspiration to make them?

For example, can home appliance companies that always talk about the Internet of Things but never deliver on their promises have some ambition and stop waiting for others to develop a refrigerator that can predict the shelf life of Lao Gan Ma by scanning a code? Waiting for others to do it first and then copying has become a path dependence of China's manufacturing industry. No wonder no one is innovating. Whoever innovates first is a fool.

It is said that Li Ka-shing has a keen eye and can see the future that you cannot see. How many people have verified and studied where he invested the 4 billion yuan he got from selling the land in Xigang, Dalian this year?

Let me tell you, Li Chaoren invested this money in four Australian companies:

The first is Q-Ctrl, a quantum computing startup. The software control technology they invented makes quantum computing more stable and prevents hardware errors in a short period of time. Q-Ctrl is currently the only company in the quantum field that is doing this for stable quantum computing. Its clients are other quantum computer companies in the same industry, a true high-end B2B.

The second is Fleet, which has launched satellites as big as shoeboxes into space. It uses sensing technology to transmit data to collectors in network blind spots such as farmland or mines, and then launches them onto satellites. The related technology provides breakthroughs in Internet of Things (IOT) technology for network blind spots. While everyone is chasing 5G, this company believes that even if 5G becomes popular in the future, it will only increase the speed of existing networks and will not enhance coverage. There is still a need for IoT in remote areas.

How much does it cost to launch a satellite the size of a shoebox? Anyway, it costs less than a house in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is fully capable of carrying out such a small space project, but it lacks the courage. It has been speculating and selling houses for ten years and has been having a great time.

The third company is called SoilCQuest: It studies a specific fungus and applies it to seeds. When sowing, the fungus will spread to the soil. When the fungus grows, it will produce a melanin substance called Melanin, which helps to fix carbon emissions into the soil and recycle carbon emissions through agricultural planting. There are 731 million acres of land planted with cereals in the world. If all of the above technologies are applied, 8 tons of carbon can be locked up every year, and the produced Melanin is helpful for soil nutrition.

The fourth is a company called Harrison.AI that uses artificial intelligence to detect active embryos. It uses artificial intelligence to reduce the error rate of embryo screening and increase the success rate of in vitro fertilization (IVF). It will also launch AI pneumonia detection technology within 12 to 18 months. I don’t understand medicine, but at least in my opinion, what this company is doing is more worthy of the “artificial intelligence medical” category than the app called Doctor Plus.

Of course, these examples do not mean that these companies are reliable. But at least it shows that they have a bigger vision, tell more exciting stories than us, and have much more room for imagination than the so-called "unicorns" in China. In the past, people said that the venture capital circle is just crazy people telling stories to cheat money, but now the Chinese Internet is even less able to make up stories, which is also lamentable.

Chinese people, especially young Chinese, can take a look at what young people in other countries are doing in this era. In this era, young people all over the world are very outstanding and smart. The future cannot be won by lying on old stories such as mobile payment.