In the past few days, a sad piece of news suddenly came across.
Mu Yan, the co-founder of Baihe.com, posted his WeChat payment code in his circle of friends, saying that his property had been frozen and his life was tight, so he simply “begged” to survive.
At the end of the day, I received 12 transfers, ranging from a penny to a thousand yuan, totaling 5826.61 yuan. In the remarks column, some people wrote “Old classmate, hold on”, others wrote “I don’t know, I saw the post”, and the most embarrassing sentence was: “Thank you Baihe.com for allowing me and my husband to have a happy home.”
A payment code and a few minor transfers ruthlessly destroyed the dignity of a first-generation Internet entrepreneur.
1. 婚戀教父
Regarding Mu Yan, many young people today may have never heard of it. But ten years ago, he was a well-known figure in the marriage and love circuit.
The first half of Mu Yan’s life can be called the script of a proud man. Dual major in Computer Science and Business Management from Tsinghua University, PhD student at the University of Massachusetts (undergraduate), worked at Microsoft China Research Institute, and has a resume that is too polished to fault.
In 2005, he founded Baihe.com with two Tsinghua alumni. They took a look at the anxiety of singles under the wave of urbanization. For the first time, they put psychological tests into marriage and love matching. With the slogan “Spiritual matching, happy marriages”, it suddenly became famous among the dating websites.
It was the golden age of Chinese dating websites. PC Internet had just become popular. For the first time, young people did not need to rely on relatives to find a partner. Online blind dates became fashionable.
Then came the popularity of TV variety shows. With the exposure of the variety show cooperation of “If You Are the One” and “Let’s Date”, and Mu Yan’s regular appearance in “It Must Be You”, Mu Yan and Baihe.com became a national symbol.
In 2015, Baihe.com was listed on the New OTC Market and became “China’s No. 1 Marriage and Love Stock” with nearly 90 million registered users. In the same year, it spent US$250 million to acquire its old rival Jiayuan, which finalized the industry structure.
The merger was completed in 2017, making Baihe Jiayuan a well-deserved industry giant. But that same year, Mu Yan submitted his resignation report, resigned from the board of directors, and no longer held any position in the company.
He passed away in a dignified manner, telling the public that he had retired after a successful career and wanted to do something new. But few people noticed that he no longer held shares in Baihe.com at that time.
If he stops here, relying on the wealth he saved in his early years, he will not be able to worry about food and clothing for the rest of his life. But entrepreneurs probably have a hard time staying idle, and Mu Yan wants to create another game that is entirely his own.
2. 新局折戟
Mu Yan, who left Baihe.com, did not leave the marriage and love track, but turned around and started a new project called “Matchmaker No. 1”.
The model of this project is a crowdsourcing route based on acquaintances, allowing ordinary people to act as matchmakers, match up single friends around them, and successfully earn commissions.
The logic sounds beautiful, using social fission to reduce the cost of customer acquisition, and it also comes with the endorsement of acquaintances. After all, he has been working in the marriage and love industry for more than ten years, and he has all the resources, experience, and connections at hand.
Financing also went very smoothly. The angel round received 7 million from Xu Xiaoping, Ni Zhengdong and others, and the Pre-A round received 25 million.
Capital can be used for success, and capital can be used for failure.
In 2018, Matchmaker No. 1 completed Series A financing, but the project growth was less than expected. Mu Yan said that out of consideration for his personal reputation, he later signed a supplementary equity repurchase agreement with Capital, promising that he would personally repurchase the investor’s shares for a target amount of 10.183 million yuan.
Unfortunately, this time, luck was not on his side, and Mu Yan lost the “bet”.
This result is not unexpected. In the wave of mobile Internet, the logic of marriage and love has changed.
In the PC era, people go to Baihe.com and Jiayuan with the clear purpose of getting married, and are willing to pay for the information difference. But in the mobile era, Soul, Momo, and Tantan have robbed young people with interest-based social networking and matching looks. Douyin and Kuaishou’s live broadcast room blind dates are even more dimensionality-reducing blows. The traffic pool of traditional marriage and love platforms has been shrinking.
Mu Yan’s No. 1 matchmaker is essentially a micro-innovation based on the old idea. She does not break out of the framework of matchmaking and charging, so she naturally cannot beat new players.
3. 困局輾轉
The project was difficult to maintain, and the 10.18 million repurchase became the straw that broke the camel’s back.
In 2021, Mu Yan was restricted by the court from high consumption due to a dispute over the equity repurchase of Matchmaker No. 1, and the relevant equity in his name was successively frozen. It’s not like he hasn’t tried to make a comeback, and then he did the “university to get out of singles”, trying to turn blind dates into payment for knowledge, but he still failed to make a splash.
In 2023, when the AI trend emerged, he jumped in again and launched the CheapAI large model, which focuses on low cost and decentralization. It claims that the computing power cost is only one thousandth to one tenth of OpenAI.
The direction is not accurate, but the AI track is a game of capital. How can an entrepreneur with exhausted cash flow compete with large companies that often invest tens of billions?
What really made Mu Yan come out of the circle again was the “calling out to Zhang Yiming” in 2023.
He posted multiple long posts in Moments, complaining about Douyin’s account bans, private messages related to pornography, and feedback to Byte executives about problems that he could no longer read back. He even advised Zhang Yiming to “retire quickly” in a big brother’s tone.
In the article, he also recalled his early years in Huaqing Jiayuan – “We lived in Building 1, Wang Xing lived in Building 7, and we met Zhang Yiming at that time.” There is a sense of loss between the lines: “You were my little brother back then, why are you ignoring me now?”
At that time, many people just felt embarrassed after watching it, thinking that it was an Internet relic trying to gain a sense of presence. Looking back now, it may be that he was a desperate person who was using his remaining connections and fame to make a last ditch effort.
4. 化緣度日
On October 15 this year, the Beijing Chaoyang District Court added a new record of more than 650,000 yuan to him as a person subject to execution. Immediately afterwards, there was the scene of “begging” in the circle of friends.
Mu Yan’s own statement is that the asset freeze was caused by a company in which he had a 2% stake 12 years ago. The original actual controller resold the company, and the new boss owed tens of millions of dollars in debt. A court in a county in Hubei also froze the bank card of his small shareholder, so he could only withdraw money but could not withdraw money.
Some people say that he is selling out for speculation, but according to his own words in an interview with Jiemian News, “borrowing money is taboo, and you can’t gnaw on old age.”
There is pride and embarrassment here. Even if you fall into this situation, you must leave a fig leaf for yourself.
We have seen many such stories over the years. The founder who had great success back then fell from the clouds into the mud because of a bet. Some people are saddled with lifelong debts, some become people subject to execution for breach of trust, and some even go to more extreme levels.
Now that things have happened, I don’t know if Mu Yan will regret why he didn’t cash out after leaving Baihe.com.
But this is the fate of entrepreneurs. They are born to struggle and will not be willing to spend their old age with money. They always feel that they can still build the next billion or tens of billions of companies.
This ambition made them successful, but also trapped them.
Mu Yan is over 50 years old this year. For a serial entrepreneur, this age is not the end. At that time, Shi Yuzhu owed more than 200 million and was still able to turn over, and Chu Shijian was still able to grow Chu oranges in his seventies. The accounts of life cannot be settled in one period.
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