Online education is coming, capital is playing, and BAT (abbreviation of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) is inevitable.

According to incomplete statistics, Baidu owns its own products such as Quest, homework help and Du. Later, Chuanxue.com and Du Tangxue were acquired and merged into Baidu Chuanxue, investing in Wanxue Education and Zhixue.com; Alibaba owns Taobao Education and has invested in TutorGroup and Super Curriculum. Tencent owns Tencent Classroom and Tencent Excellent Class, invests in cross-examination network and easy question bank, establishes a joint venture with New Oriental "Micro-learning Tomorrow" and launches intelligent learning APP "Excellent Answer".

Recently, there are rumors in the industry that Alibaba will invest in Phoenix Media, a domestic listed company, and its shareholding ratio may reach 32%. At present, the transaction is coming to an end, and the official news is expected to be announced soon.

Obviously, Tencent's action is one step faster. On June 1 1, the crazy teacher of O2O platform, a tutor, announced in Beijing that she had obtained a series B financing of $20 million from Tencent.

This is Tencent's first shot in educating the O2O market, but why did it choose a crazy teacher?

Make products with temperature.

In fact, Tencent's figure has already appeared behind the crazy teacher. In June of this year, 5438+ 10, Mad Teacher completed a 10-million-level Pre-A round of financing, which was led by Wu Ling, vice president of Tencent. At that time, the crazy teacher APP was just launched in the app store and was being promoted in Hefei.

Five months later, crazy teachers covered more than ten cities including Shanghai, Fuzhou, Nanchang, Chengdu, Qingdao, Xiamen and Quanzhou, and officially entered the education center-Beijing.

Click on the Crazy Teacher APP to enter the main page of your city. There is a list of teachers with different levels of special certification. Click on each teacher, you can see the corresponding introduction, teaching time, parents' scores, clicks and so on. And you can also make an appointment for an experience class, and the time and place will be negotiated by both parties.

What crazy teachers are doing is to use the Internet instead of intermediaries, so that parents and teachers can directly connect, cutting off the black costs of traditional offline one-on-one institutions, such as venues, consultants and educational administration personnel, which greatly increases teachers' income. On the other hand, crazy teachers do not open teacher registration. Only teachers who have completed the survey of knowledge, teaching skills and values can enter the platform, ensuring that the teachers on the platform are good teachers to the greatest extent, "at least the top 30% of local teachers".

Zhang Hao emphasized that crazy teachers play the role of "agents" of teachers, and the whole business model is centered around teachers, and all designs are for excellent teachers. In every open city, crazy teachers have a team of 10 to 20 people, who are responsible for serving teachers and docking various tasks. In the future, crazy teachers will also provide teachers with a series of tools such as preparing lessons, giving questions, answering questions and answering questions online to enhance the user experience of teachers.

"The understanding of the teacher group is achieved through the product. When using the product, the teacher will perceive whether the team behind him understands him accurately." Zhang Hao said, "When a teacher uses a crazy teacher, I hope he thinks it is a product full of temperature."

If it is a trend, it is irreversible.

Since the beginning of this year, the O2O field of tutoring has continued to be favored by the capital market.

"Who to Learn from", founded by former New Oriental executive Chen Xiangdong, completed a $50 million Series A financing on March 30th. The "light tutor" founded by Hu Guozhi, co-founder of the former elite education, and Liu, founder of the former Only Education, won the B round investment of 65,438+0.5 million US dollars in April, and then won the future B+ round financing; "Ask him to teach", founded by former well-known grassroots stationmaster Chen Yuanhe, also received 69.5 million yuan in Series A financing in early April.

Zhang Hao bluntly said that the vigorous development of tutoring O2O actually coincides with the trend of "disintermediation" of the Internet. When you represent the trend, you will find that the user's acceptance is beyond your imagination.

He believes that crazy teachers have achieved at least three things: reconstructing the production relationship and turning the original linear relationship of "parents-institutions-teachers" into an institutional platform where teachers and parents can interact freely; Remodeling value distribution, parents pay teachers directly, which brings about the improvement of teachers' personal productivity; Focusing on serving teachers, improving teachers' spirit and living conditions will ultimately benefit parents and students.

In addition, Zhang Hao also said that on the platform of crazy teachers, teachers are more likely to form personal brands. It has established a set of front-end evaluation system, and through the selection of experts, it gives each teacher guidance, grading and preliminary pricing, thus solving the information asymmetry problem between teachers and parents. Parents can screen by subject, grade, teacher level and even gender, and users can also evaluate teachers after tutoring. This allows excellent teachers to rely on word of mouth to gain a large number of fans and form a personal brand.

"If a good teacher has enough fans, he can set up his own studio. Once the class starts, he can complete the registration in two or three days. This will greatly reduce the teacher's enrollment cost. " Zhang Hao exemplified the added value of the brand.

This is also where he thinks that crazy teachers are different from other tutoring O2O platforms. "The cooperation between similar products and institutions still binds teachers to the traditional value system, while crazy teachers release them from institutions, creating a channel with borderless value; Similar products open up the registration of teachers, which leads to uneven quality of teachers and aggravates the pain of parents' choice. Crazy teachers have no teachers, and each teacher is strictly selected to bring good reputation through good teachers, so as to realize the positive operation of teachers' work quality and parents' word-of-mouth stalls. "

He said that it was this unique book that made Crazy Teacher get Tencent's attention.

40 million students, 1 10,000 teachers.

Tencent entered the B round of financing negotiations of Crazy Teacher halfway.

Previously, Zhang Hao's team had contacted several well-known investment institutions. After learning that Tencent was interested in investing, Zhang Hao asked to complete the financing in the shortest time, which led to the classic closure of completing the $ Termsheet in 36 hours, completing the due diligence in 20 days, signing the agreement and closing it.

During this period, I visited Peng Zhijian, investment director of Tencent, Liu Chi, president, and "Big Penguin" Ma. Liu Chiping's words strengthened Zhang Hao's idea of accepting Tencent's investment.

"What can Tencent bring to crazy teachers? The first is brand endorsement. No teacher doesn't know who Tencent is. The second is technical support. If tutor O2O welcomes the explosion of user growth like taxi software, Tencent's powerful technical team can handle the problem of high concurrency; The third is user sharing. QQ and crazy teacher's user groups are highly coincident. It is not ruled out that Tencent will open the port of 200 million user groups to crazy teachers in the future. "

In the end, Crazy Teacher and Tencent finalized the $20 million Series B financing. At this point, the valuation of crazy teacher has reached 1 billion dollars.

Zhang Hao revealed that this round of financing will be mainly used to expand the city, improve the platform and invest in the first batch of teachers who have settled in the platform. He said that he will enter first-tier and quasi-first-tier cities including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Tianjin and Xi 'an before the end of this year.

With the addition of Yao Xin, founder of PPTV, Zhang Hao is more confident to achieve this goal. "Yao Xin and I are the same age. He has ten years of experience in internet entrepreneurship. I have ten years of experience in education and entrepreneurship. Our combination is a typical O2O. He built a team of crazy teachers' technology and products, and on this basis, he superimposed ten years of educational experience to form a real' Internet+education' product.

Facing the spotlight, Zhang Hao said frankly that the most difficult thing is not to complete the financing, but to always know where his starting point is, where his goal is and what he insists on. A picture comes to his mind from time to time: 40 million students choose crazy teachers, and 1 10,000 teachers live by their own brands on the platform. ...

This is Zhang Hao's vision. (transferred from: Qipa)