With his right-hand men and left one after another, will Zhou Hang, who has never forgotten his original intention, continue to protect Yidao?

On the 18th floor of Zhongguancun Technology Exchange Building, when Yidao employees leave the company after 7pm every night, the work of the senior management team has just begun. CXOs and general managers of various business units gather in Zhou Hang's office for discussions, and it is not uncommon to hear arguments in the office at one or two in the morning. After 9pm, a large group of Yidao car owners wander around under the China Technology Exchange Building.

"Every time at this time, we receive a lot of orders near the China Technology Exchange Building. The people who take taxis are all Yidao employees who have finished overtime. It is difficult to get orders in other places," said the car owners.

Behind these two scenes are the troubles that Yidao encountered at the time: shortage of funds and user loss.

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Crisis is coming

After receiving a US$100 million investment in its Series C round led by GIC in September 2014, Yidao launched a large-scale discount promotion and established an innovative business department. The department's job is to try to create different new businesses and products. Yidao hopes to expand its business lines in this way.

Spending money too early and expanding business too quickly

In order to attract more users and speed up the development of new businesses, Yidao invested heavily in marketing and launched large-scale recruitment, resulting in a sharp increase of hundreds of employees in a short period of time.

100 million US dollars is nothing in the taxi industry. Just when Yidao was almost out of money, Didi and Uber, which had just absorbed Kuaidi, officially entered the private car market and launched a fierce counterattack. In the dilemma of insufficient subsidies, the users that Yidao had worked so hard to attract began to flow into the pockets of Didi and Uber.

The persistent Zhou Hang did not initiate the D round of financing. He hoped to win by service rather than price.

All the combination punches missed

However, the game in the online car-hailing industry was not as good as Zhou Hang imagined. In the face of subsidies, users will never have feelings or brand loyalty. When Zhou Hang realized the problem, he solved it in two ways:

1. Reverse the flow of private cars through other businesses

Zhou Hang tried to import users for the private car business from other new businesses. To this end, Yidao launched a designated driver business, launched a ride-sharing service, established a bus business department, and set up an overseas business department, with business distributed in 30 cities overseas.

2. Focus on exploring corporate customers

Zhou Hang believes that the core users of private car services should be the middle and upper middle classes, and subsidies mostly benefit non-target users, so he never compromises on pricing strategy. At the same time, he built a brand private car division and purchased 30 Teslas and several high-end sedans to serve high-end corporate people. He also expanded the key customer sales team to capture corporate customers.

Unfortunately, these two sets of combined punches seemed to be of no use in the environment at that time.

In terms of innovative business, the designated driver market is dominated by two fierce rivals, eDaijia and DidiDaijia; the number of game players in the carpooling market has reached double digits; the online bus market has competitors such as Hello Pass, Jiewo, and Didi Bus in Beijing alone. It is extremely difficult to break through in this environment.

Although there were some successes in expanding the business of corporate clients, the efficiency did not meet Zhou Hang's expectations. Didi, on the other hand, used simpler and more crude methods. According to sources, Didi gave four-digit free taxi fares every month to startups in the sixth phase of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator. The negotiations were conducted that night, and the taxi fares were deposited into the account the next morning. The execution was very strong.

Yidao’s previously highly publicized car-making plan (Haiyi Travel) was also forced to shelve.

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Yidao crisis: a wave of resignations and the dissolution of several business units

In mid-May 2015, Yidao's business was not doing well and employees were demoralized. Banners with red background and white characters were hung all over the Yidao office. The originally refined office environment and leisure atmosphere seemed to have entered the Anti-Japanese War period overnight. Various slogans were posted in the rest area, and the content of the banners was full of sales targets and radical and exciting texts.

After Zhang Wei, general manager of the government and enterprise vehicle division (the bus division and the enterprise key account division merged), resigned, the snowball of resignations in the entire company continued to grow. Yidao co-founder and CMO Zhu Yueyi took over the management of the government and enterprise vehicle division and planned to open 100 routes in four cities within a month, but the reality was far from the plan. Subsequently, most employees of the department changed jobs, and within less than a month, the bus business of the government and enterprise vehicle division was completely shut down. "If sales do not reach × times last year, it will be either ×× or ××", and the enterprise key account division is also under very high KPI pressure. Under this, Xiao Peng, general manager of the enterprise key account division, resigned...

Soon after, due to the high operating costs of the overseas business unit, the general manager Zeng Fanbo resigned and the overseas business unit was disbanded. In addition, there was a large-scale turnover of personnel in multiple departments, and Yidao co-founder and CMO Zhu Yueyi also left to start her own business. From June to October 2015, Yidao, which originally had less than 700 employees, had more than 100 people leave.

At this time, Shenzhou, whose market share was behind Yidao, launched an advertisement in June to block Uber. Although the advertisement was criticized by the industry, Shenzhou used it to consume its reputation and quickly increased its popularity. It also launched a large-scale discount campaign, and its market share increased dramatically. As mentioned above, in the face of subsidies, users do not seem to care about brand reputation. Yidao fell from the original leader in the private car market to the fourth.

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LeTV enters the market

Yidao watched helplessly as its cake in hand was carved up by others, but it had no power to fight back. In October, a piece of heavy news came, shocking the entire online car-hailing industry.

On the day before the National Day in 2015, Zhou Hang lay in bed with his eyes closed, waiting for the phone call that might decide the life or death of Yidao: a call telling him that all agreements between Yidao and LeTV had been signed.

Hu Xulei, senior brand director of Yidao, recalled that Zhou Hang pulled him into a WeChat group with LeTV's capital consultants and public relations personnel. After several days of preparation, on October 20, the two parties announced that LeTV had acquired 70% of Yidao's equity and became Yidao's controlling shareholder.

Jia Yueting proposed a goal: Can he surpass Uber and return to second place in the private car industry?

At that time, Zhou Hang thought, "Just pay money. Yidao is not lacking in strategies and capabilities." So in mid-November, Yidao started marketing activities such as "recharge 1 cent and get 50 yuan back" and "recharge 100 yuan and get 100 yuan back." This lasted for 224 days, and a total of 6.53 million people recharged, with a cumulative amount of more than 6 billion yuan. The market share once surpassed Uber and ranked second.

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Senior management reorganization

Although Yidao has been making rapid progress since receiving investment from LeTV, the problem of factional disputes within the company has become increasingly prominent.

In March 2016, Peng Gang, the former CMO of LeEco Holdings, was parachuted into Yidao Car Rental as president, and Sun Ke, the former deputy director of investment of LeEco Holdings, was appointed vice president of investment, responsible for marketing, sales, operations, users, ecological collaboration, achievement of business targets, personnel and organizational construction, investment and financing, etc. There was also a saying in the industry that "Peng Gang is the behind-the-scenes leader of Yidao".

At the same time, Yidao’s COO Lu Han resigned. Two months later, Feng Quanlin, general manager of Alibaba Rural Taobao’s Central and Western Region, joined Yidao as COO, and brought with him a team of Alibaba managers who had worked with Feng Quanlin for many years. These people have now become the core members of Yidao’s operations management team. Generally speaking, Yidao has entered an era where LeTV, Alibaba, and Yidao are all in power.

Looking around Zhou Hang, he no longer has the same people around him. His assistant Yin Shouhua, who had worked with him for many years, has also left. Although Zhou Hang holds the title of CEO of Yidao, his authority is limited to "implementing overall strategic planning, achieving business targets, and managing personnel and organizations," and he has gradually faded out of daily operations.

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Zhou Hang's original intention

Just recently, there were rumors that Zhou Hang had resigned. Although Zhou Hang himself denied the rumor, as those who had worked with Zhou Hang to conquer the world have left for other places, and LeTV's control over Yidao has been unprecedentedly strengthened, I wonder if Zhou Hang's original intention has changed compared to when he founded Yidao 6 years ago.

"Let everyone share their private cars", "I want to launch a car that is born to be shared, is only used and not sold, and has no keys" This is Zhou Hang's original intention. His original intention is not just to succeed in business. Wang Jiang, the founder of Flight Butler, once commented on Zhou Hang:

Zhou Hang has his ideals, not only in terms of business structure, but also in terms of sentiment, which he can make more influence through the design of business structure. He hopes to have a higher influence on all things and to make his ideas and concepts benefit more people.

And now, when the dream that Zhou Hang created with his own hands has gradually become a chess piece in the hands of others, will Zhou Hang, who has not forgotten his original intention, continue to wait where he is?