As We Gather for the Spring Festival Reunion Dinner, Gratitude to KangAi Commune's Three Sets of Providers

Tonight the KangAi Commune team will gather for a meal to welcome the Spring Festival. I consider the Spring Festival to be China's Thanksgiving: on this important holiday people visit and greet relatives and friends to express care and gratitude, and KangAi Commune too should use this day to give thanks to the three sets of providers who have sustained it throughout its history.

KangAi Commune's first providers were individuals from the earliest days, beginning with Professor Hu Jingbei and others. They provided the soil and water the Commune needed to sprout. Without Professor Hu Jingbei's encouragement and financial support, KangAi Commune would have remained nothing more than an idea.

KangAi Commune's second providers were venture capital. Mr. Feng Bo and Mr. Wang Pu of Ceyuan Ventures were the first to invest in KangAi Commune when we were hitting walls with VCs (and the first to believe the mutual aid model had a future); they showed us for the first time the possibility of support from capital. Later Mr. Sun Junjun of Jieshi Capital, the entrepreneur Ms. Ding Hong, and the entrepreneur Mr. Xu Dong provided a second round of venture capital at the moment we most needed recognition and help, carrying us smoothly through a difficult period into one where we could eat our fill.

Venture capital seeks returns and we have often disappointed them, but from my own experience there truly are investors in this world with sentiment and ideals who want to make society better—and we happened to meet some, such as Mr. Sun and Mr. Xu mentioned above. It is our bounden duty to repay that kindness by exploring, through reasonable and lawful means, ways to create wealth for them in the future.

KangAi Commune's third providers are our members! From 2019 onward, the members of KangAi Commune officially became our providers, supplying our bread and butter through service fees and the like. This gives KangAi Commune a more solid and sustainable foundation. It is a milestone.

In reality, though, from the moment KangAi Commune came into being they were already our invisible providers. The reason Professor Hu Jingbei gave us his earliest support was that he believed we might create value for them. On the flyleaf of the copy of Peasant Economics that he gave me, he wrote by hand: "We all come from the countryside; let us think more about the peasants." This shows that if not for the people we want to serve, perhaps even the earliest individual support would never have come. So members are the most fundamental reason KangAi Commune has been able to develop to this day; it is only recently that this has shown up in the accounts.

The process of building KangAi Commune is a process of earning trust. The harder the process, the more one appreciates how precious "trust" is. Trust may be the most expensive thing in the world. We must continue serving the members who trust us so as not to let them down, and also look for the reasons among those who do not trust us in order to do better. Whether the earliest individual supporters, the later venture capitalists, or the members who remain today, all support us out of trust. We need to think about why they trust us, and act to strengthen the grounds for that trust endlessly.

As the Spring Festival approaches and we bid farewell to the old and welcome the new, as we talk of the future and enjoy good food, once again we give thanks to our three sets of providers. However hard the road ahead, this team of ours will keep working tirelessly😀