40 Years Of Age, Entrepreneurial Impulse 5 Years To Build 3 Billion 200 Million Wealth

As a 36 year old entrepreneur who has entered the United States and is only 40 years old to start an entrepreneurial impulse, Zhu Min's challenge is not only from entrepreneurship and business itself, but also from a Chinese person. Is it possible for a Chinese to lead an enterprise from scratch and from small to large into the mainstream of American business?

Will he incorporate any Asian characteristics and Chinese elements into the process?

20 years ago, people did not think of the world as a single piece of thinking. They were easy to think of their time and space -- "this is the world we live in".

In 1986, the Chinese society was ignorant and puzzled about the concept of "entrepreneur". What is "entrepreneur"?

People only know "director of the factory manager". In 1986, Lenovo was founded two years ago, and now Liu Chuanzhi, regarded as a "Godfather" in the Chinese business community, leads a small group of scientific research intellectuals to start talking and touching with the business.

But there is another 1986 and twenty years for Chinese business and entrepreneurship.

When a handful of Chinese start building their own business world when a small number of Chinese start their own businesses, the first Chinese students who have gone overseas after the reform and opening to the outside world have been plunged into a relatively mature and mature society from a country that has abandoned and suppressed business for many years. After Culture shock in the first few years, some people have found and grasped the entry point and path of creating business in the foreign countries.

The cover story of Zhu Min and his Netcom is a notable example.

1986 was the year when Zhu Minmeng was born in Silicon Valley.

Needless to say, these best educated Chinese have created a qualitative leap and difference with the overseas Chinese businessmen in the early years, and needless to say, the Chinese people and the enterprises they founded are concentrated in the American Silicon Valley.

In 80s and 90s, it was a completely different business world from China, from language to the way of thinking behind the language, from the path of growing up to the social system supporting this path.

Zhu Min and Liu Chuanzhi, who were born in 1940s, belong to a generation, but are facing different business topics in different business environments.

When designing the "big bend" route, Zhu Min is most worried about how close a small company can survive in the IBM and Microsoft giants. When Lenovo brand becomes the pursuit and life line of Lenovo, Zhu Min knows clearly that the purpose of his company is to sell it well and sell it at the very beginning of the business. This is the roadmap of the vast majority of Silicon Valley companies. When Liu Chuanzhi and Ni Guangnan carry out the Chinese style "so-called entrepreneur and technologist" game, Zhu Minhe, like other Chinese founders, is directly confronted with the "ceiling" of foreign and immigrant entrepreneurs. In that era, VC would not invest money in a Chinese entrepreneur? When Liu Chuanzhi tried his best to change Lenovo

Is the board confident and willing to remain a Chinese chairman or CEO when the company is listed?

As a 36 year old entrepreneur who has stepped into the United States and is only 40 years old to start entrepreneurial impulse, Zhu Min's challenge is not only from entrepreneurship and business itself, but also from he is an outsider who is influenced by Chinese culture and education. Is it possible for a Chinese to lead a business from scratch to small business to mainstream business in the US?

Will he incorporate any Asian characteristics and Chinese elements into the process?

For a long time, the domestic commercial media have ignored the concern and narration of Zhu Min, because the story of Zhu Min and Netcom is lost in thousands of similar entrepreneurial stories in Silicon Valley because their growth and prominence takes time, because the world and our world do not really have relations.

Now, it's time to push them to the horizon of local readers.

We can see that in recent years, Chinese entrepreneurs born in the background of the mainland have successively made great achievements in Silicon Valley, and they have been making a lot of achievements in the past few years. They have been sold to more than a billion or even billions of dollars in the market value (such as the Gric of Chen Hong), or sold them to world-class firms for billions of dollars. (Deng Feng founded NetScreen sold 4 billion dollars in 2004, and Zhu Min founded Netcom in 2007 to sell for 3 billion 200 million dollars). For example, the magnitude of these acquisitions easily exceeds that of Lenovo's acquisition of IBM PC Department (1 billion 750 million US dollars) only in terms of numerical value.

What is more important is that after the enterprises are finished or sold, they begin to go back to China and start their second round of entrepreneurship in different ways and pointcuts.

Unlike Zhang Zhaoyang, a returnee overseas student who represented a few years ago, Zhu Min and Chen Hong returned to business as entrepreneurs who had successfully started their business overseas.

The resources behind them and their influence on local businesses are at least higher than those of overseas returnees in previous years.

It has been a long time since China has gone to China for a long time, and China has changed greatly. This time, they are bound to go through another culture shock.

The difference between the world and the world is that it has not been cut apart 20 years ago. The two world's mutual expectations, exchanges and understanding are more frequent and deeper.

Whether it is working language or ideology, whether it is a technological starting point or a capital platform, the "world" and the "world" are becoming increasingly close together.

The capital, technology and business models of Silicon Valley, such as mercury, are spreading to Israel, Taiwan, Hsinchu, Shanghai and Beijing. The twenty or thirty year old Chinese enterprises are generally trapped in the bottleneck of growth. The encounter and connection of these two worlds will reveal a more brilliant chapter than the previous twenty years.

Zhu Min's story is no longer remote.

Zhu Min, 59, a Ningbo native in Zhejiang, has worked in China before the age of 36, including farmer, construction worker, director of township enterprise, refrigerator factory worker. He was an apartment manager, gardener, computer engineer in the United States after he was 36 years old.

In 1991, Future Labs was founded in Silicon Valley. After 5 years, it was sold for 13 million dollars, and then WebEx was created. In 2007, it was bought by CISCO at a premium of 3 billion 200 million dollars.

The concept of "starting a business" began to enter Zhu Min's mind in his third year after he arrived in the United States - in 1986, he was 38 years old.

Is Zhu Min being delayed by the Cultural Revolution?

That generation.

After the national college entrance examination resumed in 1[FS:PAGE]977, he was admitted to the Zhejiang University to study tractor manufacturing at the age of 29. After graduation, he was admitted to Zhejiang University for a master's degree after a short period of work. He soon became the first batch of overseas students studying abroad after the cultural revolution.

Zhu chose Stanford University because "this is a university that talks about engineering from the perspective of economic management, which is very good for the spleen and stomach."

In 1984, Zhu Min, a middle-aged man, plunged into the arms of the United States.

In 1986, Zhu Min was still studying at Standford.

I heard Zhu Min wrote a program for IBM. A company that made ERP products found Zhu Min through friends, hoping that he could help to deal with a technical problem.

Zhu Min, who has never heard of "ERP", has become a technical authority in this company after a lot of research.

But the process of getting involved in the company gave Zhu Min the biggest prize, not to get him to know ERP technically. Rather, he soon saw the way in which he had never seen business life in China in the past more than 30 years - the small company called AFK was bought by a big company.

The latter is a role of the near monopolist in the US ERP market, and employees are constantly jumping out of it to launch products with similar functions and cheaper prices.

Zhu Min made a move in his heart and thought, "I am also selling it to a company, isn't it very good?"

He observed that printing the ERP report at that time was a time-consuming and arduous task. So he consulted more than 20 heads of IT company. If he could work out the software to improve the efficiency of this link, the answer would be 5000 dollars per set.

But when Zhu Min was determined to start his own business, he found that Silicon Valley, especially the door of VC, was closed to a 40 year old middle-aged man from mainland China.

The concept of China is valued and even sought after in Silicon Valley, which is 20 years later.

A friend of mine introduced him to a Taiwan businessman, chatting about his disrespect for the mainland's rural areas and Zhu Min's self-esteem. He failed in financing his first venture.

Zhu Min joined in the establishment of an industrial system control software company.

Here, Zhu Min became acquainted with his first "close" partner in his later career as a Singaporean, a former executive of HP in the Far East. He was very famous in the Asian business circle, who was then a partner in the software company.

After leaving the company, Zhu Min began to think about the network interaction at the enterprise level, which he called "the line of white collar workers", aiming to improve real-time sharing and collaboration in the commercial community.

He mobilized his son and daughter to make a small local area network at home, trying to produce a sample: two computers can modify a circle together, which he called "multi-point data collaborative processing software".

After the sample was formed, the next road did not know how to go. He did not have the right entrepreneurial partner in the circle he knew well, so he pulled the Singaporean into partnership.

They went to Singapore to find two friends, pulled 70 thousand dollars, partners invested 60 thousand, and Zhu Min invested a small amount of money.

The two financing needs to go back to Singapore, which shows that partners do not have rich resources in the US, but this did not attract Zhu's attention at the beginning.

In 1991, Future labs was founded. This is the first company that is really connected to Zhu Min. He has a 30% stake in it.

A few days after the establishment of the company, Zhu Min went to Las Vegas to attend a trade fair in an industry, and unexpectedly discovered that IBM was promoting the same product on a large scale.

Zhu Min said in his heart, "such a monster will hit us."

On the other hand, he also decided that he had chosen the right direction, so he pushed his head forward, feeling that the company might die every day.

The first "angel" in his career appeared at this time. An investor took the initiative to find Future labs. "I like your products very much. Do you want to invest?"

Zhu Min repeatedly said, "yes, yes, yes."

How much did the other person ask for it? Zhu Min was bold enough to report 1 million.

Investors hesitate, "well, how much do you own?"

Zhu Min thought for a long time. "How about 25%?"

"Signing this evening!"

The other side left a sentence and left, leaving Zhu Min standing in a daze: how could it be so easy?

In the second day of the fund, second opportunities will follow. A large company also looks at Future labs, and proposes to buy it for 4 million dollars. Zhu Min can stay with 1 million of the reward. After the first generation of the new generation of products, he can reward 1 million. Zhu Minyi thinks this is not bad. Selling the company can become a millionaire.

He and his partner found investors, and I'm sorry. Now I'll give you 1 million and give you another 500 thousand.

The other side scolded them. "Why are you guys so hopeless that you want to run away with a little bit of money? Do you know the real value of the company?"

Zhu Min was embarrassed to return the shares. He asked the partner market.

The Singaporeans said, "he is so rich that he is behind us. No problem. I am sure I can sell the product."

The real disaster has come.

Soon after, Intel announced that similar products will be their future direction, and plans to invest $100 million, "we 1 million dollars, they are 100 million dollars, how do we play?"

Not only is Zhu Min panicking, but also the investors are worried. This time, you are dead.

Singaporean partners have come up with a way to advertise all the 1 million dollars and believe that Future labs can become a 1 billion tier company as soon as advertising is launched and sales can rise immediately.

Zhu Minxin said it was so easy, but he didn't know how to do it well.

For a while, the advertisement of Future labs flew all over the sky, and 1 million dollars burned up quickly. At first, the telephone rang in the market department, but it was quiet after three days.

6 months later, the investor came to the board and looked at the situation. He said impolitely, "you are useless," and he withdrew 1 yuan in nominal terms and no shares.

Zhu Min gradually felt that he had chosen the wrong partner. Although the two sides had no obstacles in communication and culture, the partners in Singapore were too convinced of the experience accumulated in HP.