Zhang Zhaoyang'S Story: How Did The First Venture Start?

1996, whether for Zhang Zhaoyang or later Sohu, or today's Internet, it is an unusual start.

In spite of this year, the bandwidth of China's CERNET to the US international line is only 2M.

In this year, most Chinese do not yet know what the Internet is.

In fact, according to the statistics of China Internet Information Center CNNIC, even in October 31, 1997, there were only 299 thousand computers in China, 620 thousand Internet users and 1500 poor Internet sites. At that time, the international export bandwidth was only 25.408M.. In the same year, Zhang Zhaoyang, who returned from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and set up her own company in China, is anxiously waiting for the first venture capital that she has worked hard to reach. A total of $220 thousand.

Despite the fact that only $170 thousand has finally entered Zhang Zhaoyang's account as venture capital, it has made a difficult first step for the first venture entrepreneur to take overseas venture capital to return home.

What Zhang Zhaoyang encountered before and after 1996 is constantly repeating itself among almost all Internet start-ups today.

The only difference is that Zhang Zhaoyang is in an extremely difficult but very promising era. Venture capital is far from the United States and lacks interest in China's Internet companies. Ten years later, the situation seems to be the opposite. Venture capitalists are willing to travel far and wide and take every potential Chinese business plan seriously, but the chances are less and less.

On the other hand, few people know that Zhang Zhaoyang chose to return to China in October 31, 1995 because he hoped his birthday would bring a "new life".

In 1981, Zhang Zhaoyang, who graduated from the Department of physics of Tsinghua University from Xi'an, won the "Li Zhengdao scholarship" on 1986 before graduating from university. He obtained the qualification to study abroad in the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He lived in the United States for seven years.

In the past seven years, he has received his doctorate in physics and has been engaged in postdoctoral research for two years.

In 1994, Zhang Zhaoyang was shocked by the wonders of the Internet at MIT's laboratory.

In fact, it was the interconnection between some campus intranets and the Internet. It was called the "information superhighway". Zhang Zhaoyang recalled, "we have been able to conduct online conversations through UNIX code and e-mail. Although not like the graphical user interface now, even this simple application, the unique charm of the Internet has made me determined not to go the normal way, but to set up a network company and go back to business."

At that time, I felt that there are two major trends in the modern era - Ridingthewavesofourtimes, oneisthecomingofageoftheinformationsuperhighway, anotheristhemergenceofChinaasaglobalpower, which conform to the two great trends of our age. One is the arrival of the era of information high speed road, and the other is the rise of China as a global power.

These two sentences were written by Zhang Zhaoyang on the cover of his first business plan, "China online".

But at that time, he did not know what he could do in his own business, nor did he have any resources in China.

During this period, Zhang Zhaoyang had many opportunities to travel between the United States and China. During his short working experience in an American Internet Co, ISI strengthened his determination to start his own business.

ISI is engaged in some Internet based closed services, that is, to collect some information, such as financial information and various data, and sell them on the Internet.

Zhang Zhaoyang was the chief representative of this company in China. At the beginning of joining ISI, he had had a gentleman's agreement with ISI - "only one year and then started his own business". So a year later, Zhang Zhaoyang returned home on his 31 th birthday and started his own business.

In July 1996, Zhang Zhaoyang officially started his financing trip.

"In those two or three months, I often traveled between China, New York and Boston."

Zhang Zhaoyang said with great regret that at that time, venture capitalists in the US did not believe in entrepreneurs far from China.

In order to call investors, he queued up in public telephone booths on American street. He even tasted the embarrassing feeling of being expelled from the office by investors.

Zhang Zhaoyang, at this time, had to endure a lot of American investors' playing in order to get financing.

"They played me around," Zhang said.

After continuous efforts, Zhang Zhaoyang met with the director of the MIT Media Lab and the author of "digital survival", after being interviewed with Zhang Zhaoyang, he promised to invest in his company.

"After a long time of contact, we identified three more interested investors.

And I've been tortured.

Maybe it was because I was very young, energetic and concentrated, and the three of them might be attracted by the desire for success revealed in my eyes, which gave me the chance.

In fact, it was also under the recommendation of the professor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology that I got the first angel investment.

In August 1996, ITC electronic technology company (Beijing) Limited was officially registered.

In October 13th, Zhang Zhaoyang finally saw 150 thousand dollars in his account. This is the first venture capital invested by the company. Investors include professor Edward from Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ni Glot Ponti and Sloan School of management.

Robert, nigero Ponty's other $twenty thousand was put in place in 1997.

This is a very important investment for Zhang Zhaoyang. It has a total investment of 225 thousand US dollars, although eventually only 170 thousand dollars will be set up for him to start a business, but at last he can start to do what he wants to do.

Wanquan manor is the place where Zhang Zhaoyang started his business. Almost all of 1996, he ate there, lived there, worked there, worked overtime and stayed up late.

At that time, there were few Internet Co in China, only Reed online, East Netscape and the biggest service provider, Ying Hai Wei.

"The network is not built by the Internet. They have built many servers in the room, so that people can access these servers through dial-up Internet access." Zhang Zhaoyang said, "what they used at that time was not a common communication protocol on the Internet, so it should be said to be an isolated island of information."

Zhang Zhaoyang, who has got the money, finally can start to do the company he wants to do, but what a specific business and how to do it becomes a major problem before him.

He spent two months exploring whether to be a technology provider or an information provider?

The firewall software is the first thing he thought of, and he also had contact with Israeli companies.

He also thought about doing some web design for local enterprises, but eventually he decided to make a website first.

"The concept of the website was not very clear at that time."

In Zhang Zhaoyang's impression, the most important thing in 1996 is that at the end of the year, it spent twenty thousand yuan to "save" a server and put the server on the backbone network that Beijing Telecom (now Beijing Netcom) has just built. This is China's first commercial server hosting, and is also China's first commercial website.

As for the content of the website after its opening, Zhang Zhaoyang said, "it takes a year to explore".

Zhang Zhaoyang, one of the shareholders of the company, also invested in another Internet site in the United States.

It is the "hot line" that first invented the business model of online advertising.

This is also a great inspiration for Zhang Zhaoyang. He visited the "hot line" in the United States.

At that time, "hot line" employed a large number of reporters to write news, they wrote a lot of high-quality short articles, new pictures, and the way of reporting is different from the newspapers and magazines at that time, especially suitable for people's reading habits in the digital age. Traffic is very large.

But after a short period of cooperation, Zhang Zhaoyang found that the cost of this mode of operation is also very huge. In Zhang Zhaoyang's words, "it is simply killing people and wasting money".

In Zhang's view, such a cost is not something that a new company such as ITC can afford.

Zhang Zhaoyang began to think about whether he was content on the website, or did he create some links so that visitors could see more information?

At this time, the Chinese Internet community, such as Oriental Netscape, Reed online and some other small websites, has already introduced some service descriptions. Zhang Zhaoyang tried to link these contents with hyperlinks in a column of his website, and even received unexpected good results.

"A lot of people go to see it, so I don't have to do the content."

Zhang Zhaoyang is very excited. This fully exerts the essence of the Internet -- hyperlinks. "In fact, the Internet can expand rapidly, which is based on hyperlinks."

This attempt was just the beginning. It made Zhang Zhaoyang taste the sweetness of content.

Soon, the web site began to give up its content and turn to hyperlinks as a whole.

At that time, Zhang Zhaoyang's company had developed to 12 people. Every news on the front page every day must be decided by the editor's office.

These links also had their own name "cyberspace" at that time, and later renamed the compass. The flow of links became bigger and bigger, and the links began to have various contents, including Xinhua news. Zhang Zhaoyang began to replan the name for this crucial link column.

"At that time, the Internet users saw the hyperlink directly."

Zhang Zhaoyang said, they then found the "sohoo.cn.net" domain name, and at that time there was no ".Com" domain name.

At the same time, Yang Zhiyuan's YAHOO began to be popular in the United States. Zhang Zhaoyang began to learn from YAHOO's classification and navigation mode. The name of her was changed from "search for" to "Sohu".

From the server hosting to the establishment of the website concept, Zhang Zhaoyang has been exploring all the way from the original mode of "hot line" to the establishment of hyperlinks and navigation modes.

But these are not the most difficult moments for Zhang Zhaoyang to start his own business. What really impressed him is his second round of financing.

This financing made him finally feel the impact of capital strength and financing on the development of an enterprise.

The Wall Street's face is very thick. If the shareholders of the first financing are based on Zhang Zhaoyang's personal trust and personal friendship, then the second financing will no longer have such emotional factors.

For Zhang Zhaoyang, this financing process has been ups and downs.

"The second financing is more difficult than the first time, it takes me a lot of time, and no one in the company can help me, no one knows what I am doing."

Zhang recalled that the first investment in 1996 was US $225 thousand (actually $170 thousand), which has consumed more than half of it in September 1997. Zhang Zhaoyang has started a six month long financing journey.

At that time, the Internet has not become a particularly attractive concept.

In the US, only Netscape Co is listed, and YAHOO has not yet been listed. Investors do not even believe what success a Chinese Internet company can achieve.

In the impression of Zhang Zhaoyang, the Americans were very strange to China at that time, and few investors were willing to listen to his plan.

In fact, it was difficult to find an investor willing to meet the Chinese entrepreneur at that time.

In the introduction of Robert and nigero Ponty, Zhang Zhaoyang went to California to see the billionaires at his own expense.

He stayed in a small hotel in California, rented a car with a green card, and then spent two days on the phone making appointments with those who might change the fate of his company.

In September 11th of 1997, Zhang Zhaoyang was unforgettable, and he was proud of his ability to show on this day. He saw four venture capitalists on the same day, and two agreed to invest in him.

According to the appointed time, he should go to see Intel investment company at nine in the morning, and then talk about the twelve point with the head of investment in the century. At three in the afternoon, Softbank, at five in the afternoon, is a billionaire Robinson Steven who later invested in Wang Zhidong.

The top three investors are near Silicon Valley, while the last one is in San Francisco.

In order to make full profits