Qian Kun, Partner of N5Capital: Entrepreneurs either love their own business or success 丨N5·Thinking

Recently, Lieyun.com released a list of honors in the venture capital industry at the “Growing against the trend-NFS2020 CEO Summit and Lieyun.com Venture Capital Awards Ceremony”. N5Capital won the 2020 “Top 10 Best Consumer Investment Institutions of the Year”. Founding partner Mr. Jiang Yiwei won the “Top 20 Most Popular Investors for Entrepreneurs of the Year” in 2020.

 

 

Qian Kun, Partner of N5Capital

 

Dr. Qian Kun, partner of N5Capital, was invited to represent N5Capital to attend the discussion on the theme of the forum “Investment Logic in the New Consumption Era”. 

Entrepreneurs, either love their own business or love success

 

This guest forum started on the four major issues of the consumer industry, namely: the “changes and the unchanging” of the consumer industry, the reasons for the rise of phenomenon-level brands, the relationship between consumer brands and channels, and investors’ messages to entrepreneurs.

 

Talking about the topic of “change and change”, Qian Kun, partner of N5Capital of Wuyue Capital, said, “There are two things in the consumer goods industry that will never change: one is cheap, and the other is good quality. The three constantly changing are channel , traffic and technology. To cater to these three changes, and to take into account the two needs of consumers for cheap and high-quality industries, it is worthwhile for entrepreneurs to try.” At the same time, Qian Kun mentioned that the track that attracts N5Capital to invest in is first of all a “big market”, such as the company’s sales, market value, scale, volume, investment return and other aspects.

 

In recent years, phenomenon-level consumer brands have risen rapidly. Qian Kun believes that the main sources are three dividends: product dividends, demographic dividends, and traffic dividends. To expand, for example, the emergence of food technology in product dividends, the birth of healthy drinks such as “0” sugar content, are popular with people who like to drink cola but are worried about fat; and the aging of the population and the decrease of newborns make intergenerational age groups happen. Changes, the corresponding elderly care industry will usher in a new development, which is a demographic dividend; and the rapid development of makeup is mainly due to the emergence of traffic dividends. In the early years, girls learned makeup through pictures and texts, which required a lot of patience and great difficulty, the video appeared later, making makeup a simple matter, and thanks to China’s strong supply chain, the cost of a single product was reduced from hundreds of RMB to tens of RMB, so the colour makeup crowd won the universality, instead of confined in an office worker, young to middle school students. In fact, starting a business is worth a try as long as it accounts for one of the three dividends, Qian said.

 

What is the relationship between consumer brands and channels? Qian Kun, a partner of N5Capital, pointed out: “who has the user, who is the king.” The reason is that in the current consumer industry, the channel is the most efficient and can satisfy users for one-stop shopping. In fact, many consumer brands do not have brand value, because a consumer is a consumer of multiple brands, and a collection of brand stores can meet the shopping needs of consumers. Correspondingly, if the brand wants users to become the brand itself, the cost will be higher. On the other hand, the current market situation is that the choice of channels is relatively narrow, so it is easier for channels to produce large companies. Brands may become large companies, but it is tortuous and difficult.

 

According to Qian, it is easy to make consumer products into small and beautiful companies. It is a bigger and more difficult business, and how to persist in a bigger and more difficult industry is to “keep learning”. He said, “In my nine-year investment in the consumer goods industry, I found that people from big companies and senior executives who make consumer goods are not likely to succeed, which is different from the Internet industry start-ups — senior executives from big Internet companies are more likely to succeed. The consumer goods industry needs entrepreneurs to have more practical experience and patience. Finally, Qian Kun emphasized, “A word for entrepreneurs is to either love what you do or love success. “