The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide

"IDG Capital, they said that if we can get Newman's investment, then they are willing to continue to invest in the qq project." Before Zeng Liqing finished speaking, the call came again.

After the phone conversation, Zeng Liqing said helplessly: "Yingke also called. Yingke's meaning is the same as IDG. As long as our project is favored by Newman, they are willing to continue investing in QQ according to the original terms."

Chen Yidan said: "If Newman is interested in our project, why do we still seek investment from IDG and Yingke?

Whether it is financial strength or influence in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, IDG and Yingke are far inferior to Newman. "

Most Internet people in Huaguo like to call Zhou Xin Newman, because there is no mistake in calling him this way, and Zhou Xin became famous in Silicon Valley.

IDG's current influence is far inferior to that of later generations. In American, it can only be regarded as a small and medium-sized investment company, which is completely incomparable with Zhou Xin. Their only advantage is that they have entered the Huaguo market since 1991.

Pony Ma said: "Regardless of them, if we want to get investment, no matter who we get the investment from, we need to win Newman's favor.

Now it is equivalent to playing an RPG game. Obtaining investment is our ultimate task. No matter which side task we choose, we need Newman's approval.

So the most important thing for us now is to write the company introduction well, and everyone only needs to do this well now.

Yingke and IDG, I will talk to them after I finish talking with Newman and have the results. "

Zeng Liqing asked: "Who do we choose between Newman, IDG, and Yingke?"

Zhang Zhidong said: "It must be Newman. The resources, experience and vision that Newman can bring to us are what IDG and Yingke cannot bring to us."

The deeds of Zhou Xin's investment in Baidu have also been reported back to China, including handing over the quora search engine to Baidu.

Entrepreneurs like this type of investor most because they don't intervene too much in your company's internal operations, and can provide your company with help other than capital.

Similar conversations took place in many hotels in Yanjing, and Zhou Xin's behavior made the Internet Conference lose attention in the next few days.

From the industry to the general public, everyone is paying attention to who can get Zhou Xin's investment.

Compared with the direct money, the content at the Internet conference seems a bit lacklustre.

"Boss, I have read hundreds of company introductions, and the 20 companies I have selected are companies that I personally think are not bad.

In addition, three companies like Sohu, Sina and Netease are relatively mature in terms of business format, company size and scale.

They screwed it out alone, I guess Sohu is not short of money, simply Zhang Chaoyang wants to chat with you, and ask for a sum of money from you by the way.

He wants this money not for money, but for your endorsement. With your endorsement, it will be better to go public on NASDAQ. "

Sohu, Sina, and Netease are all companies that have survived for 20 years. Netease and Sina are doing very well. Sohu is almost, but not far behind.

Anyway, still alive.

After twenty years of vicissitudes, it is not easy for enterprises to survive.

Zhou Xin took a look and found that most of them were familiar names, such as Tencent, Alibaba, Tianya, CDC, eBay, Dangdang, Shanda and so on.

Even though Zhou Xin is strictly speaking a post-00s generation, he is no stranger to these companies.

The only one that was a bit unfamiliar was a company called Yitang, he really didn't know what this company was doing.

Zhou Xin said: "Okay, there are only 20 companies, so let's talk to them all. You can arrange them in order. After sorting, you can chat with about six companies every afternoon. This arrangement is quite reasonable.

In addition, prepare the standard contract we prepared, and if I am satisfied after the chat, I will sign it directly, and change the amount anyway. "

Yes, Zhou Xin has prepared all the investment contracts, and Yang Yimei, head of the Asia-Pacific region of Kaishou Law Firm, is personally in charge of the matter.

Yang Yimei was waiting outside, waiting for the investor to come out of the conference room, and explained the details of the investment contract to the other party in detail.

This is a billion-dollar business, and legal fees are secondary. It is of great benefit to help Kaishou expand its business in China.

When helping Zhou Xin in the lawsuit of reputation rights before, Kaishou's business in China opened up immediately, and what happened last time strengthened Yang Yimei's idea of ​​establishing a good relationship with Zhou Xin.

So after Zhou Xin emailed her about this, she made a special trip from Lion City to Yanjing.

The first one to meet was the pony horse. Zhou Xin was very interested in the pony horses of this era. With his later status, he hardly had the opportunity to chat with pony alone.

"Mr. Zhou, hello, my name is Ma Huateng, and my English name is pony. You can call me pony directly."

Pony Ma was very nervous, he was not even sure whether he could be selected, because the product QQ has a clear benchmark product overseas, that is ICQ.

icq has never found a profit model, let alone qq, the reason why they are struggling to support qq and want to continue to operate it is precisely because this thing has many users, and the users are growing at a high speed.

Qq's user growth is several times or even ten times that of ordinary websites.

Although I don't know how to make a profit, it is always a good thing to have so many users, the founder team of Goose Factory thinks so.

The result is that the more users there are, the higher the requirements for servers and bandwidth, and they will soon be unable to support it.

It was not until after the 3Q war that the media and the Internet community realized the power of QQ, and did not know what user stickiness and social attributes are.

Before the 3q war, even though Goose Factory was listed on the Hong Kong stock market and achieved substantial profits through QQ shows and games, they were still not so popular.

Compared with portal websites, instant messaging software like qq seems to be heresy.

To use Wu Xiaobo's original words in "Tencent Biography": The capital market has always looked at Tencent after its listing with a very cold eye.

Why? Because foreign benchmarking companies have not achieved profitability. Why Baidu ranked first in the early BAT, because the foreign benchmark company Google has achieved great commercial success.

The same is true for Alibaba. Overseas benchmarks Amazon and eBay have achieved great commercial success. Only Tencent's benchmark ICQ has not found a direction to make profits after being acquired.

Not to mention that in 1999, most investors were not optimistic about qq. IDG had the idea of ​​investing in qq because of Wang Shu's repeated insistence.

Wang Shu is the investment manager of IDG in China. He has invested in Kingdee, Zhongkejian and other companies. Zhongkejian will establish a joint venture with Samsung later.

With Wang Shu's insistence, IDG decided to invest in the goose factory.

Now with the new storm effect of the week, the entire Federal Reserve raised interest rates earlier, and the collapse of Nasdaq came faster than expected.

IDG's Asia-Pacific regional headquarters in Xiangjiang refused to invest in the project.

"pony, just call me Newman. Please briefly introduce what Tencent is doing now, what it will do in the future, and your founding team." Zhou Xin has never seen such a young pony horse.

The appearance is not much different from the pony horse twenty years later, the only difference is probably the temperament.

Later, Zhou Xin saw it from a distance at a certain conference. At that time, the pony horse was full of bossy aura, but now it looks like a pure IT nerd.

Pony Ma was not so smooth in the introduction process. He originally wanted to bring Zeng Liqing here, because Zeng Liqing played a bridge role in finding investment.

He is far inferior to Zeng Liqing in expression.

But Zhou Xin saw only one person, so Pony Ma had to come by himself.

"Tencent's current situation is roughly like this. We are now facing a very real problem. If we can't get investment, then we will die immediately. If we find investment, the direction of profit is not clear." Pony Ma said.

Zhou Xin said after listening, "Have you met investors before?"

Pony replied: "Yes, I have seen Wang Shu and Wang Gongquan from IDG, and the investors from Yingke Capital."

Zhou Xin said: "You are too frank. Don't you worry that investors will take the opportunity to lower the price if you are so frank?"

What Zhou Xin is talking about is a practical issue. The more difficult you are, the more eager you are for money when talking with investors. Once you express this desire, it means losing the initiative.

Pony Ma said: "I am seeking truth from facts. It is really difficult to find a profitable direction for the business form of qq.

You asked me to find a profit model in just one or two days, which is unrealistic.

Everyone knows that you have a sharp vision in the Internet field. I don't need to cover up anything. Instead of being questioned and exposed by you after covering up, it is better to be honest from the beginning.

And I'm not only honest with you, I was also honest when I chatted with IDG's Wang Shu. He asked me how I see the future of our company.

I said it directly, I don't know. "

Zhou Xin said: "Qq is a very popular app now, and you just said that in just nine months, there are more than one million registered users.

This is an amazing number. Since users like it, there must be a way to realize it.

It’s just that you haven’t found this path yet. I’m willing to invest in Tencent. Please make an offer. "

Zhou Xin also wanted to have a deeper conversation with the other party, because after he returned to China this time, he was going to go shopping in Silicon Valley soon.

In China, I invested in some Internet companies, but when I returned to Silicon Valley, I could buy some semiconductor companies.

When the Nasdaq bubble completely bursts, semiconductor companies will not be able to survive alone.

Of course, because Riot Games will also enter Huaguo in the future, with Riot Games, QQ obviously cannot achieve the scale of later generations.

"For 2.2 million US dollars, we are willing to sell 40% of the shares, which means the valuation is 5.5 million US dollars." Pony Ma said.

"How did this price come about?" Zhou Xin asked.

"Because we don't want to lose control over Tencent, and at the same time, we need at least 10 million RMB for our operations in the next year.

Considering that the Internet winter is coming, I estimated this amount upwards. "After the pony horse finished speaking, he was very disturbed.

Because before knowing about angel investment, the founder team of Tencent had the idea of ​​selling the company.

They sold the company at that time, and the psychological expectation of the sale was only 3 million RMB.

Calculated according to the exchange rate of 8.27, the price he is now negotiating with Zhou Xin, the valuation of Tencent has come to 45.485 million RMB.

It was as much as 15 times what he expected half a year ago.

Zhou Xin never thought about taking the Goose Factory over, because the Goose Factory lost its founder team, so could they still be in the form of later generations?

this is a problem.

At the same time, Zhou Xin himself has the energy to make the goose factory bigger? This is more of a problem.

Therefore, only investing and not operating is the best model.

There are too many good things to vote for.

Looking back in 2010, Baidu is obviously stronger than Alibaba and Tencent.

But looking back in another ten years, Baidu has fallen far behind.

If we go back another ten years, maybe Baidu will rise again.

Zhou Xin nodded: "Okay, Manager Wu is waiting for you outside, the contract is ready, we will sign it right away, after signing, let's talk about how Tencent can achieve profitability.

I will tell you some of my thoughts.

If you are not at ease about the contract, you can call your founder members or lawyers to read it together. I will meet the next entrepreneur first, and we will talk after you sign. "

After Tencent decided to seek angel investment, Pony Ma met many investment institutions, including Zeng Liqing, who had a good understanding of the styles of different investment institutions during internal meetings and discussions.

From the first meeting to the final investment, there must be at least three rounds of negotiations, from the investment manager to the supervisor to the final decision.

Pony Ma suddenly realized that today is a day blessed by the Buddha, Tencent should not die, and he still has a feeling of ecstasy.

Is this what it feels like to chat directly with the boss?

"Shiqiang, prepare the contract. The valuation is US$5.5 million. We will acquire 40% of Tencent's shares at US$2.2 million." Zhou Xin pressed the button on the table, and then Wu Shiqiang walked in.

After he glanced at the pony horse, he didn't expect that the first person would be favored by Zhou Xin.

He nodded and said, "Okay."

With the pony horse were Chen Yidan and Zeng Liqing. They greeted the pony immediately after they saw him come out.

"How is it?" Zeng Liqing asked.

Pony Ma said: "US$2.2 million, according to the price we negotiated with IDG before, sign now.

Yidan, the people from the emerging investors will show the contract later, you can take a look at it, and sign it directly if there is no problem with the contract. "

Zeng Liqing shook his fist violently: "After the meeting is over, we have to celebrate. Fortunately, I brought Yidan here today, otherwise I really don't know what to do."

Chen Yidan is a master of economic law from Nantah University School of Law. Zhang Zhidong and Xu Chenye were not brought with him because they guessed that they might sign the contract on the spot.

"Mr. Ma, please wait a moment, our external lawyer is preparing the contract, you can sit here for a while."

Xinxing invested in the Marriott Hotel next to the city hall and directly rented an entire floor.

The projects that Zhou Xin likes will be taken to another hall alone to wait.

The contract is a standard contract, but the amount, shareholding ratio, and company name all need temporary adjustments.

"Should we just sign up with emerging investors?

Don't consider IDG and Yingke Capital anymore? " Zeng Liqing asked.

Chen Yidan was puzzled: "What else is there to ask? Didn't we still say yesterday that Newman can bring us far more than other investment institutions?"

Zeng Liqing explained: "It's not that we don't want Newman's investment, but that we accept multiple investments separately to spread the risk.

Newman got a 40% stake in Tencent, which means that once he gets the support of two more people from our five founders, he can control Tencent. "

During the illness, there was only one chapter, and I felt something was wrong after finishing writing last night, but I took my body temperature after finishing writing, it was 38.5 degrees, and something was really wrong. . .

I still have a low-grade fever when I come back tonight. So today there is only one chapter.