Wall street news: the entrepreneurial story of toilet financing

Wall street news: the entrepreneurial story of toilet financing

He is a new financial media? What did you see on Wall Street? Wu CEO. I call him a Wall Street financial detective. He used to be a financial reporter in the United States for 2 1 Century Business Report.

This is an entrepreneurial story of financing in the toilet. This is a story of self-salvation of financial journalists.

Wu Shuo: They are all busy looking short, but we insist on doing more. News still creates value. ?

Let's look at a VCR self-report of Xiao Peng first.

After we first met with the three bosses of Ping An Venture Capital, they went to the toilet for a while and came back and said, we will make an offer today, but on one condition, either you accept the offer on the spot or we don't vote. ?

Next, two other partners and I also went to the bathroom to discuss, but we felt that neither option was acceptable, because another good company would make an offer in two days, and we should at least compare it. Finally, we stayed in the toilet for half an hour, and investors came to urge us to come up with a third plan. Today, we went straight home and didn't listen to Ping An's proposal. ?

Later, another company offered 60 million yuan, but they wanted 100% acquisition. In the next two days in trouble sleeping, I finally decided to do my own thing. If acquired, most of the players who have fought with me for more than two years will not benefit. In addition, I am also a high-risk preference, and it will be much more difficult to develop independently, but this life is more interesting.

At that time, there were also top domestic financial media interested in taking shares, but at that time, we had not set up a company, and the other party was from a state-owned enterprise background. We may encounter some problems in registering companies and employee incentive system.

In the end, we chose Ping An Venture Capital as our institutional angel. I made a proposal and agreed safely. To this day, we still don't know what price they negotiated in the toilet.

Original intention of starting a business

Wall Street Insight was originally a personal blog, which was founded on 20 10 1 1. At that time, I was a reporter in new york for 2 1 Century Business Herald (hereinafter referred to as 2 1), who was responsible for reporting the American economy and financial market.

2 1 is the first domestic market-oriented media with international expansion. I have a double major background in journalism and English, so I was lucky enough to be the first overseas reporter stationed on Wall Street in April 2008. I was 24 years old that year.

What the newspaper wants most overseas is high-end interviews, so it interviewed Bernanke, Geithner, Buffett, Gross and other financial people on Wall Street in the past five years.

But I gradually found that there is something more valuable than high-end interviews, that is, the most important financial news in the world is little known in China!

In the past few years, the quantitative easing (QE) monetary policies of major western central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, have dominated the financial markets, and any change in policies may cause violent fluctuations in all markets. But in the first few years, these policies were not reported in the domestic mainstream financial media, or were almost ignored. In the public finance public opinion space, few people discuss these most important issues.

Limited by the timeliness of newspapers, 2 1 is also difficult to operate on these important news topics. For example, the US government will publish the employment data of last month on the first Friday of each month, which is the most exciting and nervous day for global investors every month, because the employment data will determine the next direction of QE policy, which is likely to become a major turning point in all markets around the world. However, when this data was released, the newspaper had passed the deadline of Friday, and it would not be published until next Tuesday at the earliest.

Any trend of these policies should alert China investors at the first time, so I set up a Wall Street information website, hoping to help investors better understand the world we live in.

A month later, we received good user feedback. A management of CICC, the best investment bank in China, wrote to encourage him and claimed to be? E-mail has been sent to 500 colleagues in the global sales and trading department of CICC, advising them to read the website every day? .

Fu Peng, chief macroeconomic adviser of galaxy futures, later said that many middle and high-level financial institutions in China are loyal users of what Wall Street has learned.

Financing story

The initial cost of the website is the article manuscript fee and the server fee. Among them, the manuscript fee accounts for the bulk, and the first year's manuscript fee is several hundred thousand. At first, the number of visits was small, and the server cost was several thousand yuan a year.

I think this thing is valuable, and I didn't hesitate too much when I first invested. However, in the second year, the website traffic increased rapidly, and the total monthly cost has increased to 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. I have also invested hundreds of thousands in this project, which can no longer be supported by personal financial resources.

At this time we did two things. Let's first introduce the advertisements that Google automatically distributes on the website, which can cover about half of the expenses. Then we took an angel investment from a part-time author. This angel is a trader of a hedge fund in Philadelphia, USA.

Speaking of which, there are quite a few teams, right? Gao Shuai Ritchie? And then what? What about white? . When we were recruiting part-time writers, the top ten investment banks in the world all submitted resumes. For example, JPMorgan Chase's offices in new york, London and Hongkong contacted us. Many people regard this place as a volunteer work purely for hobbies.

Several part-time authors said that they were willing to invest if they needed funds at any time, and their valuation at that time was twice as high as that of VC who contacted us in China. With the support of such reserve forces, I will quit my job with confidence and return to China to devote myself to this cause.

20 12, 165438+ 10 After returning to China in October, I rented two villas in Songjiang, Shanghai, hoping to find the feeling of starting a business in the movie Social Network.

At that time, the website had 20,000 unique visitors every day, and I felt that if the traffic tripled, Google advertising would be able to make ends meet and grow. But my main partner said, I can't go to your house to work every day. I can't resign if you don't raise money. ?

This post-80 s partner is a financial professional background, one year younger than me, and also changed from a part-time author to our partner. Shall we call him? Textual research expert? Because he has CFA, CPA and advanced interpretation certificate; There are still many people calling him? Lujiazui golden collar? Before he resigned as a journalist, it was said that his annual salary had reached one million, which he never denied.

When I started to contact institutional investors, five or six institutions took the initiative to find them, the most interesting of which was Ping An Innovation Investment Fund.

(The specific financing details are the financing story in the toilet mentioned at the beginning of the article. It is omitted here. )

Journalist transformation product manager

In the eyes of Ping An's investment manager, the Wall Street story is the best social promotion of new financial media.

Our initial growth was mainly due to Sina Weibo. Although there are only 470,000 fans, our Weibo influence index ranks among the best in all financial media. In the second half of last year, we turned our focus to Tencent WeChat. Now more than 220,000 WeChat users follow us. At present, it is difficult to find more financial micro signals than this number of users.

It has been nine months since we set up a company to run Wall Street, during which the number of website users has increased by three or four times. However, the lack of technical strength has always been our shortcoming, which has restricted our product capabilities. At the end of last year, we made up our minds to recruit 10 development engineers, and also hired a former technical director of Shanda Games as a consultant to help us lead the team.

Investment in technology is very worthwhile. On June 5438+ 10 this year, the real-time market of global stock indexes, foreign exchange, commodities and bonds was launched. Two weeks later, this product has been used by more than 60 thousand people every day, and soon a top portal website will ask if it can be authorized for them. Two days before the Spring Festival, we launched the Wall Street Experience App in the Apple Store. Two days later, we ranked 1 1 in the free financial ranking of the app store.

From financial reporters to product managers, this road has just begun, which requires a lot of investment and learning. At the same time, in order to study the needs of users, I also do a lot of macro transactions every day, involving assets such as the US Standard & Poor's 500, Japan's Nikkei 225, gold, oil, euro against the US dollar, US dollar against the Japanese yen, and German government bonds.

But in terms of media, we still need the highest quality content. After the Spring Festival, we invited an excellent reporter who had worked in the top financial media in China and the United States and won the full prize in financial news at Columbia University to join us and lead our editorial team.

However, we still hope that more outstanding international financial journalists will join us, to borrow a sentence from our old club, 2 1. Everyone is busy bearish, and we insist on doing more. News still creates value. ?

They all do overseas financial information. Many people will ask, what is the difference between what I learned from Wall Street and what I learned from American stocks? I think American users mainly pay attention to corporate fundamentals, while Wall Street users pay attention to national fundamentals.

Learn from Buffett and study the company thoroughly, but if you want to be Soros, how can you miss what you have seen on Wall Street?

Overseas economic and financial markets, every major turning point in the world in the past few years, and what Wall Street has seen and heard are always the first to warn China investors.

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