By Anqi Yang | Fortune (Chinese edition)

Surprises always come so suddenly. One day in last July, at about 1 A.M., Liangjing Song received a message on WeChat, which was clear and simple: some clients’ financing information had been leaked and circulated outside the firm.

He realized the seriousness of this message at once. Due to a botched operation, an employee sent an email that was supposed to be an internal briefing to someone outside the firm.  There was sensitive information contained in the email about the fundraising progress of several star startups.

The role of a financial adviser (FA) is crucial and vulnerable in large capital transactions. They hover between investors and startups, facing trust challenges even in quiet deals, not to mention leaks of this magnitude. It is no exaggeration to say that the email could’ve almost decided the fate of the six-year-old Taihecap which was positioned as a boutique investment bank.

During the 15 minutes in the middle of the night, what was going on in Liangjing Song's head was hard to describe: remorse, guilt, pain, as well as the subconscious self-protection in the bottom of his heart: to what extent the information has been circulated is still unknown, so should we take the initiative to come clean with the clients about our stupid mistake?

He didn't know how widely circulated the email was at that moment but only that the crisis was worsening.
He immediately convened Ruyi Guo and Wenqin Hu, the other two founders, to discuss about the issue on the phone. Eventually the choice they had to make stopped being a dilemma. Because if they took the initiative to confess their mistakes, it might lead to some severe reprimand and they might even lose these clients; however, if they didn’t come clean, all their clients would completely lose their trust in the firm once the whole thing became blown out of proportion.

The three founding partners decided to tell the clients. "Don't take any chances." These three decided that they must call the clients about this stupid mistake, because in their view, WeChat is the least intimate way to communicate. Fortunately, this incident did not affect clients' confidence in the firm. Instead, to a certain degree it helped accelerate the fundraising process of the clients on the mailing list since their investors wanted the email to be invalidated as quickly as possible.

It wasn't until later that Liangjing Song learned how many people the email had been sent to. "Within half a day, if someone in the investment community doesn't have this list, it means they're not in the main circle." He was reluctant to recall the incident.

In the wake of this heart-wrenching email incident, the entire firm started a big debate around reshaping its values. But that was another story.

It's about time to get to know this mysterious financial advisory firm. As the fastest growing investment bank in China, Taihecap has drawn a steep growth curve. Since its establishment in 2012, it has served more than 70 startups, helping them raise more than 70 billion yuan in total funding, and its top ten clients have a combined market cap of nearly 500 billion yuan. Among all the financial advisors in the primary market, this firm enjoys the fastest growth rate, the most concentrated portfolio of sector leaders, and the highest output per capita (1 billion +). In two weeks in July, they had three long-term clients that went public and they are Pinduoduo, 51 Credit Card and CANGO. On the list of the companies that they serve, there are also Zuoyebang, which just recently raised 350 million US dollars, as well as other star companies such as Guazi (a used car platform) and CHJ Automotive.

At the same time, the email crisis made the firm, which had not yet gotten over the scare then, look down at itself from a higher angle for the first time. This is where a case of atypical growth met a typical conundrum of corporate governance. When the speed of growth that the Internet industry enjoys happened in the traditional and conservative financial sector, and when the size of Taihecap exceeded that of a small workshop-style firm but is yet to equate with that of a large one, its shortcomings became quickly revealed. Do all operations within the firm, including information security, rely on the system or its people’s individual competence? How to guarantee service quality when its business and team expand rapidly? Most importantly, what does the firm rely on to make the right decisions in a quandary like this?

In Taihecap's growth story, you will see how a Chinese FA that started as a workshop-style firm developed the potential to become a top investment bank and a great company, with some even suggesting that this boutique bank could be the Chinese version of "3G Capital". 3G Capital, which was founded as an investment bank by three then obscure Brazilians, preaches its meritocracy governance model. In the past 50 years, the firm has educated more than 200 partners, taking different industries by storm. Juggernauts such as Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Kraft Heinz are now in the hands of these investors who have created a mega-empire worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

For example, Lei Zhang, founder of Hillhouse Capital, once said that these abilities Taihecap acquired can be replicated through a learning organization governance model, so as to grasp the key changes at the critical time and constantly find the pulse of the new economy.

The emergence of Taihecap reflects a turning point in China's FA industry: a shift from a workshop-style operation to an organization run in a systematic approach, and a transformation from an economy based on interpersonal relationships to a learning organization and meritocracy governance structure.

It all starts with…
Middlemen are an old business. In almost every society, we can find middlemen in various forms. This role has been around for thousands of years in Chinese, Indian and Jewish cultures, with brilliant middlemen occupying prominent positions in the business world at different times in history.

They are also often shrouded in mystery. These people are essentially "matchmaking" dealmakers, and at the same time, connections, emotions, and informational asymmetry have always been a fascinating part of the business.

According to Marina Krakovsky, an American author of the book “The Middleman Economy”, middlemen play at least six essential roles: Bridge, Certifier, Enforcer, Insulator, Concierge, and Safety Net.  "They add value through different combinations of these roles, and the most successful middlemen move easily between them." This means that in real economic activities, these different roles are bound to overlap, and often do not exist in isolation. A successful middleman usually plays different roles at the same time both elegantly and skillfully.

Investment bankers are undoubtedly the top "middlemen". They are always in suits, in a hurry, and at every turn they help close deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If they fail, they will become utterly discredited. The fortunes of some companies will change dramatically. The companies that get funding can go on and land the other shore of the rapids of hopes and dreams, while those who fail to do so will be drowned in the torrents of Chinese startups.

Early Years and Empowerment
The rise of Taihecap was accompanied by the financing dividend of China's mobile Internet. In 2017, mid-and-early-stage companies in the tech industry raised more than 500 billion yuan, and the fundraising has maintained rapid growth in the past few years. At the same time, FAs gradually began to penetrate the market on a large scale. Even so, the penetration of FAs today is only about 20%.

In short, this is an absolute blue ocean market, and the chaos happened early on.

Tall and well-built like most of the men from Shandong Province, the 34-year-old Ruyi Guo, another founding partner of Taihecap, still remembers the oddest thing he encountered when he first set foot in the business: some investor told him that he needed to get a membership card at Beijing's most famous nightclub and top up that card with about 300,000 yuan.

Ruyi Guo asked the investor: "is all like this?"

"All the same."

This dialogue reflects the reality of the initial stage in China’s FA industry. At the time, relationships and connections dominated the industry, and a service known as "over-service " was popular among investment banks. Investment Banks provide clients with the best interpreters at road shows, and offer a range of attentive concierge services, from opening the car doors for you to even remotely hosting birthday parties for the founders' grandchildren to gain their trust.

The good thing about suffering economic crisis and benefiting from technological advancements at the same time is that even the best investors and entrepreneurs need to think very rationally, and relationships and connections become useless in the face of the economic crisis. Jd.com is a prime example. During the economic crisis, even Mr. Richard Liu struggled to raise money, and Mr. Xing Xu 's 20 million US dollars saved him at a critical moment.

In such an environment, some FAs that used to rely on relationships and connections lost their edge. Or we shall say, given the ever-growing size of the venture capital market, it will take more than just solving the information asymmetry of financial transactions to achieve a perfect match between entrepreneurs and investors. In addition to capital, entrepreneurs need people who can provide constructive input beyond funding to help the company grow in its fundamentals. This requires FA not only to understand the capital needs of entrepreneurs, but also to analyze the market, business, operation and even strategic direction of entrepreneurs. Simply put, the traditional way of sifting through hundreds or thousands of potential investments to find the right deal and doing some referrals over a cup of coffee is no longer practical.

I met Wenqin Hu, the "conservative" of the three Taihecap founders, in the remote northwest area of Beijing. (He is called a conservative because he tends to veto sectors he does not understand or where he has made mistakes). He came out of a six-story grey building, slightly tired. He said he was helping a leading education company raise money, and allocation of shares had become the focus of this financing deal. It was not until a few weeks later when Zuoyebang.com announced the close of a $350 million round of funding from a group of all-star investors that I realized that Mr. Hu was the deal maker.

He has seen fierce competition among investors for leading companies, from slamming the door and leaving to begging really hard in the end for just a little bit more shares. He has also witnessed the entrepreneurs who went from being high-spirited to being broke because their investors abandoned them. "We never felt smarter than either side. But we have the advantage of being privy to more informed corporate decision-making and governance methods of great companies," Mr. Hu said. The opportunity for Taihecap comes at a time when some startups are left with a lot of uncertainty about everything from the allocation of options to the selection of deal plans and institutional investors. "Always believe that competition between peers is not about lowering prices, but providing better and professional service."

Taihecap has fought its way out of many FAs in the "capital winter" between 2015 and 2016. In the written responses from top investors to Fortune (Chinese edition), at least one view was shared: this is a financial advisory firm focused on research and thinking, which is different from most FAs. Or in other words, it is an institution that, through research and learning, "empowers" (a term that has been misused by the Chinese tech industry) startups.

Mr. Song concludes that Taihecap can empower startups with three capabilities: capital, business and management. These three capabilities present a progressive course and also represent the three stages of FAs in China, namely, seeking capital, exploring new business models, intervening in management and even decision-making.

Several examples may support his claim. After several brainstorming sessions, Haitao Sun, the founder of U51.com, and Taihecap decided that the greatest value of his company lies in the closed-loop path of online financial transactions based on big data. In the case of Meili Finance, the founder Yannan Liu was able to quickly raise enough money after following the advice of Taihecap and separating the second-hand car financial products from the original business. Today, Meili Auto Finance has become the largest financial company in China for used cars. This year, Taihecap also suggested one client to develop an incentive system through a WeChat mini program on top of their original APP based on Taihecap’s research about the internal competition mechanism (nick-named “horse racing”) of another client, and this client quickly obtained millions of DAUs (daily active users) soon after following the suggestion.

This ability to study and make a good call about an industry has also earned the trust of top investors. Lei Zhang, founder of Hillhouse Capital, one of Asia's largest asset managers, made this comment about Taihecap: "in the fickle capital market, Taihecap can always stick to its independent value judgment system, long-term research and deep thinking, and provide with empathy the right services that empower companies." David Zhang, founder of Matrix Partners China, has known Taihecap for many years. He also thinks that today's founders in China are increasingly versatile and smart. It is not easy to persuade them to go with an FA for a long time. It’s even harder to win their heart-felt approval. But Taihecap has been doing a splendid job in this regard.

The success of Taihecap has become a turning point for the FA industry, where there are now more and more financial advisers who emphasize "research" and " the focus on service".

But there has been more than one big leader in the FA business that dismissed this approach: boutique services cannot scale, let alone compete with them. With 20 billion yuan raised last year, this boutique investment bank has proved its competitiveness. The next question is, how do you maintain a sustained, systematic success? Taihecap's answer is to create the kind of meritocracy governance system it wants. It wants to breed “a pack of wolves”.

Identify Talents
If you talk to everyone in Taihecap you can see the commonality in these people: they are extremely smart, and they have a strong appeal. Although they don't have Jack Ma’s penchant for public speaking, if you can listen to them for 10 minutes, you don't want to miss out on what they have to say for the following couple of hours. Some investors told me that they only went to Taihecap to "hang out a bit", but then they often ended up talking with the people there for an entire afternoon, during which investors obtained valuable ideas from Taihecap. There was even a meeting between Xing Wang, founder of Meituan, and Ruyi Guo, which went on for so long that the two guys were kicked out by cafe staff after announcing closing of the store.

To build a great company, you have to hire the best people from day one, maintain the operation system, and share the success with the meritocrats. This is the starting point of Taihecap's “pack of wolves”. This recruitment principle is reminiscent of Lemann’s initial talent strategy in the book " DREAM BIG: How the Brazilian Trio behind 3G Capital - Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira - acquired Anheuser-Busch, Burger King and Heinz " - find the PSD (Poor, Smart, and Desire to get rich). That means to find those who had humble beginnings but are brilliant and have a strong desire to get rich. After they get onboard, their performance is completely determined by their competence and contribution, regardless of how long they have been with the firm, their educational background, personal history or any other factors. Moreover, these people can ultimately become the firm's shareholders. But the “Poor” element is not in Taihecap's hiring strategy, because there are not many people that are literally that poor today. They're looking for people that are HIS (Hungry, Influential, Smart).

Liangjing Song, with a bit of whiskers and a pair of steady eyes, always cuts to the chase. Over one lunch, someone spotted TH Captial’s name at the top of the rankings of institutional investors. His first reaction was: "why are you ranking us? We don't even want to be on the list." "You haven't done your best yet," Mr. Song said at a monthly meeting when someone mentioned that he hadn’t been able to reach out to the founder of a potential client.
Born in Renshou County, southeast of Meishan City, Sichuan Province, Liangjing Song grew up in a family that wasn’t well-off and worked as a young sailor and then the secretary to a leader in state-owned enterprise. These experiences helped him learn to combine adventure with steadiness. He has a saying: "one needs to break through one's cognitive limitations."

The limitations can be multifaceted. For example, some investors have "exclusivity period" agreements with startups, which the investment community takes for granted, but Mr. Song doesn't. "Why do you give exclusivity to specific investors? Can they give you a deposit? For example, if you want to raise 100 million US dollars, will they give you 50 million upfront? They don't, right? Then why should you give them exclusivity? They said it's a convention? There’s no such thing! Didn’t they come up with the whole convention talk? I don't think it's a convention." So, Taihecap has innovatively devised an “priority investor” deal structure that allows you to invest first, but breaks free from an exclusivity agreement.

Liangjing Song envies 3G Capital for hiring people from poor backgrounds at an early stage. He told me that if you give employees who come from poor families and may enter the big cities and live in basements a bright room, making them feel dignified, they will repay the firm with hard work and kindness.

Typically, a new recruit who wants to get into Taihecap goes through four rounds of interviews. One of the basic parts is called Case Study. In this part, people who want to join Taihecap need to complete the analysis of a made-up case and sort out their own views. Partners don't like people who find ideas and views online and paraphrase them - they want to see completely independent judgment, even if biased. Next comes tests on professional competences around financial models, such as doing financial analysis and valuation for a company.

If you meet Taihecap’s criteria on all of these levels, there will be a vague assessment without the right or wrong answers - talk with a partner. This is a seemingly easy session, but in fact it is a judgment of one's values.
Some interviewees let partners down. During an interview, Mr. Song asked a winner who had done well in the proficiency tests what to do when running afoul of a client. The interviewer replies, "try to convince him, but there's nothing you can do if he doesn't listen."

Speaking of which, Liangjing Song got a little worked up. "That’s not how we do it at our firm." He told the interviewee that if he thinks he’s right, he has to stick to his guns. "To put it bluntly, if the man insists on dying, we will still give him something as a last resort."

This embodies an almost rebellious spirit. Few financial advisers dare to challenge their clients' authority. Entrepreneurs as the Party A always think that they know their companies and industry like the back of their hand so they don’t need an outsider to tell them what to do. Investors, on the other hand, have a lot of money, often determining the fate and direction of a startup. As a result, FA is often referred to as "Party B to the Party B". As a result, they are rarely able to hold their ground. But that is clearly not the case with Taihecap. Qin Liu, managing director of Morningside Venture Capital, has been friends with Liangjing Song for many years. He believes that the style of Taihecap is closely related to Liangjing Song's personal philosophy and thinking, which will always drive Taihecap to be an excellent organization.

Ruyi Guo thinks his ability to identify talents is getting more and more accurate. He can find out from simple questions whether this person is upbeat and resilient or not. He once asked an interviewee, what if the client doesn't respect you that much and the investor thinks you're a kid and doesn't want to talk to you as an equal? The interviewee told Ruyi Guo a story: when he was in his second year of junior high school, he watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. His folks bought him a wall calendar featuring Beijing and the city is ablaze with lights in the pictures. He told himself that he must go to the big city, at least to see what it looks like. "You could see his hunger. He said he was from a small town, and the client's complaints were nothing compared to the fear of poverty and the desire to succeed." That's exactly what Taihecap looks for in the people it hires.

There is another group of people who want to prove themselves even though they have a good life. They are also the people Taihecap wants. Ke Jiang, with his short hair and the maturity that is rare for someone at his age when he speaks, worked in the secondary financial market before joining Taihecap. He is now a managing director at Taihecap, next to the managing partners. After graduating from a university, he was once advised to work as a researcher in a school, but Ke Jiang always felt that he should be trained in actual combat so he joined Taihecap under the influence of Liangjing Song. " It's exciting to work for a research-oriented FA and feel that you are approaching the essence and truth of the new economy."

Rules and Channels
Having found a group of driven, smart, hungry and aspirational people, Taihecap’s executives face the next question: how do you retain them?

We might see the firm’s attitude towards this question through one anecdote. At a recent monthly meeting, Liangjing Song, Ruyi Guo and Wenqin Hu changed their titles from “founding partners” to “managing partners”. In their view, being the founders is an established fact, and the emphasis on this identity can be an obstacle to the ultimate partnership system. The trio wants to send a strong message to all their people that the path to founders is not impassable, and that if you are competent enough, you can become a managing partner on a par with the original founders.

In the management system designed by Taihecap, everyone will be assigned to a large industry and market, and the rest is handed to you to find prospective clients in this market and serve them well.

"So how do you avoid vicious competition between equally good people in the firm?" I threw the question to Liangjing Song.

"It's about the underlying architectural design." Liangjing Song made a big circle in the air with his hand. "You have to give everyone a market big enough. Remember this, only when the market is sufficiently big, the fish in there will be big.”

Then he said: "our talent selection and promotion principles are that there’s no glass ceiling to which you can get promoted and there’s no bailout for you if you are bottom performers."  After each quarterly review, those who qualify are immediately promoted up to the point of becoming managing partners of the firm and there is no limit of how many people can be promoted at all levels.  People whose review results are bad will first be given a warning and buffer period, and they will need to identify the problems and ways to improve. But if it doesn't work out, they will have to leave and there is no limit of how many people the firm may let go of. One employee told me privately that the firm has a 50 percent elimination rate for new hires.

He returns to the mantra: push the cognitive envelope. "My previous management limitation was that I thought it was difficult to determine promotion criteria, and it was especially tough to assess someone’s values and competence. But later I found it was easier than I thought." So Liangjing Song gave me an example: if two employees are competing for the same promotion opportunity and the first person is lucky enough to easily raise 1 billion US dollars for a client, while the other has another client that is not as good as the first person’s but he or she plays a significant role and creates great values in the financing process, the latter will be promoted. "We're looking at procedural outcome indicators."
Procedural outcome indicators mean that you need to evaluate the employees’ values, level of effort, and the depth of their business thinking.

But that is not enough to explain the full capabilities of a "meritocratic learning organization". Locking five smart people in a room and letting them talk to each other is often more creative than thinking alone. Almost all Taihecap employees told me that cross-industry discussions have become the norm in this kind of learning organization. Ke Jiang said that since industries always integrate with one another, communicating with people in other industries that have different perspectives and views as well as with investors brings him some new ideas. On the one hand, it is a validation or modification of your existing opinions. On the other hand, it brings about new interactions. Therefore, it becomes a positive cycle. "The more good stuff you have, the more good stuff will come out of your communication with others. When people think that they are having a dialogue with someone who is of the same caliber, they will be willing to tell you more. Besides, where you are right now in terms of competence also determines how much of the content you can absorb. “

Rachel Mei is attentive and professional. The Oxford-educated former head of sales in the private banking division of a Swiss bank faced a "sense of fragmentation" every day. This "sense of fragmentation" came from the fact that she did not need to know what products were sold to the clients, and only needed the clients to entrust their money with her bank. After having a conversation with Ruyi Guo at Costa Coffee, she joined Taihecap.

At Taihecap, Ruyi Guo taught Rachel how to handle the delicate relationship between founders and investors. Sometimes investors call her after negotiations go nowhere, but often Rachel chooses not to answer. "I will think about the new conditions that investors are going to come up with so I can get prepared " she said, “negotiating a deal isn't like buying a coke, you need to be street smart. The key is whenever I feel torn, the first call I will make is to Ruyi Guo, and the second call will be to Wenqin Hu. They always answer their phone immediately. You always feel that there is someone who’s got your back."

If you attend one of the firm's back-to-back seminars held every two months in a different city, you'll get a good sense of what a learning organization looks like. Starting with partners, they ruthlessly review past mistakes and explore best practices in every aspect of research and deal making. Of course, everyone also lists prospective clients in their research industry, and they have already figured out the business model and potential of these companies. They just need to find the right person to meet to have “touchdown”.

In the situation with absolutely adequate preparation, there is a fairly high success rate of “touchdown”. Last May, Ke Jiang visited a client who was one of the founders of China's auto finance industry. Some institutional investor cautiously introduced Ke Jiang to the gentleman, and the two talked for half an hour at first, then an hour. After getting a "you really get it", Ke Jiang turned the gentleman 30 years his senior into his client. After Taihecap helped the founder close two rounds of financing, CANGO, the fintech company, recently went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

In Ray Dalio's famous book " Principles", there is an important principle: radical truthfulness and transparency.

Compared with a typical corporate climate, results of this vision did seem radical. To maintain his ultra-realistic image, Dalio insists on full transparency. For example, every meeting is recorded and archived. Often, employees are required to give blunt feedback, including 'probing' meetings to discuss why they didn't get the job done. Managers are not allowed to evaluate an employee's performance if he or she is not present. According to Dalio, mistakes are a powerful tool for learning, so every time something goes wrong, employees must write a memo in a so-called "issue log." Dalio was keen on the idea of meritocracy, and he encouraged subordinates to argue with their superiors and required superiors to encourage subordinates to do so. "We hate self-righteousness."

Liangjing Song has suffered from not having “extreme transparency". He once noticed a colleague who was too busy and tired, so he assigned the client opportunities that should belong to that colleague to someone else. This led the colleague to wonder if he wasn't good enough. Or does the firm want to train others? The speculation was disheartening.

It was not until Liangjing Song and his colleague had a heart-to-heart that Song learned that this colleague was not as exhausted as the others imagined, and he even had the energy and impulse to do more cases. "No one should make decisions for other people. They all mean well at the beginning but end up doing the others a disservice. The best solution is extreme transparency. It all comes down to values."

Values, everything goes back to values
When Liangjing Song was a sailor, he found that everything at sea was out of his control, especially on the high seas, where the law no longer exists. He was desperate for rules and order on land. The unnerving “email incident" on that night seemed to throw him back on the high seas, and when he was back on land again, new rules needed to be made immediately.

After the email incident, Taihecap had its monthly meeting at the Brickyard Hotel outside Beijing. On the sidelines of the meeting, members of the management team engaged in an unprecedented discussion that lasted into the wee hours of the night.

Each member of the management team shared their own growth stories and career goals as they tried to build a new, structured set of values that would serve as an action guide for everyone. This discussion inspired every member: Ke Jiang brought up the whole "righteousness, faith, wisdom, and integrity " that his university advisor instilled in him and Ruyi Guo also shared his previous story with a client. This client really couldn’t get any financing in the end, but was still grateful to Taihecap for its help, because the firm really left no stone unturned.

A few days later, the discussion was reenacted across the firm. A few days later, the discussion was reenacted across the firm, resulting in a piece of A4-sized paper with 30 values under 6 guiding principles. These principles may seem common enough to apply to any company (e.g., client first), but for Liangjing Song they are the best beliefs generated in practice. "The concept of client first is really for the good of the clients, and if the clients make a wrong decision, challenge it." Liangjing Song said. For example, one of the descriptions of "integrity and accountability" is: we are against insinuations or gossips, we call for keeping things professional and impersonal, and we advocate transparent communication. In the end, all the 30 values were included in the assessment indicators, with a weight of 50% in the quarterly assessment, which is equal to that of competence.

Later, several partners at Taihecap found that a growing proportion of fast-growing clients spoke to them about "values" - a guiding cultural system that can be used in the absence of hard rules which serves as the ammunition when every great company grows bigger. The book “Principles”, which is all the rage in China's venture capital world this year, is actually the records of Ray Dalio's values. Taihecap's values are a bit similar to Amazon's: client first, sense of ownership, innovation and keeping it simple, recruiting and developing the best people... and so on.

Many people have predicted that another capital winter will arrive. In this winter, no one will doubt that the only way to truly win clients is through a service-focused, high-value-added approach. The firm's new challenge is whether 3G Capital's meritocracy model can be fully replicated and successful in China.

Liangjing Song didn't give an answer. He only said that he is among the earliest owners of Tesla. At the beginning, he felt like a hillbilly who wasn’t unaccustomed to the sense of acceleration in an electric car. But then he started to realize that as long as his foot moved slightly, the car would pick up speed, and he would sense the acceleration until he felt that the car and himself became one. "You know what, this is just like the relationship between an organization and its people, and if they integrate well, they can accelerate together, and that's what happened with Taihecap."