Focusing On Zhou Kui: The Career Path Of A Sequoia Chinese Partner

Usually describe

In contrast, "getting better" is another career path.

Zhou Kui graduated from Wuhan Polytechnic University in 1989 with Bachelor of electrical automation.

Extension. In May 2000, Wuhan Polytechnic University had been merged into Wuhan University of Technology.

Then he got a job in Shaoguan. "My first job was to make smelting in a ravine."

At that time, the only joint venture in that mountain area was a decent one.

Smelting, by means of roasting, smelting, electrolysis and adding chemicals, can reduce the impurities contained in metals or increase some components.

He loved work, and initially worked as a technician, to an engineer, and later to manage a workshop.

At that time, he lived in a factory, had his first colleague, and had many friends.

The situation of enterprises is not satisfactory.

Zhou Kui also went to various places to run projects and talk about cooperation, but he thought he had nothing to gain.

By the end of three and a half years, work needs to be over.

"I watched the bank go to the warehouse to pull the goods, and I started to shed tears."

Colleagues and friends go on their own.

He went to Zhongshan, and some teachers who came out of the school set up a company that produced SPC exchanges.

In the early 90s of the last century, it was the beginning of this field.

At that time, the price of SPC switches was 300 to 500 dollars per line.

HUAWEI also began to set foot in the development of SPC exchanges during this period.

Although it is in a sunrise industry, the enterprise has not developed. Zhou Kui summed up the word "mechanism".

He thought his colleagues were brilliant, but they could not get together to do the same thing.

Next week, Zhou Kui went to the Pearl River Delta.

With the development of age and experience, he became the director of production in a foreign-funded enterprise.

The scale of the business is small, and it is a processing business.

Of course, Zhou Kui has more opportunities to understand small and medium-sized enterprises.

Business people's interest in business management is actually an emotion that arises spontaneously. When you see some problems, you have the desire to find solutions.

After seven years from the school gate, Zhou Kui decided to study again.

He went to Tsinghua to learn MBA.

Now Zhou Kui has many classmates from the enterprise. They can comb together.

In fact, a person's career is not designed, so when asked what advice he has for young people who aspire to enter venture capital.

Zhou Kui does not seem to have a corresponding answer, but he said, "the financial industry is ultimately not separated from the actual industry, for example, the stock market will eventually reflect the value of the enterprise."

The new starting point is Lenovo: in Lenovo, I have seen the operation mechanism, problems and solutions of China's excellent enterprises.

Zhou Kui has been in the business development department for two years, director of Business Development Department of Legend Holdings Limited.

It is mainly about the expansion of new businesses, investment management and internal business tracking.

The 2001 report of Zhongke Sanhuan hi tech Limited by Share Ltd showed that Zhou Kui, a 34 year old supervisor, held the position of investment manager in Lenovo holdings.

At that time Lenovo was brewing a new direction, that is, venture capital.

Lenovo has invested in Kingsoft, excellent network and other projects based on holding companies.

Ten years later, Liu Chuanzhi recalled: when Lenovo was founded in 01, I did not ask them to raise funds.

I'm afraid I can't make a good or bad brand.

It is Lenovo holding his own money accumulated over the years, and took out $35 million from the investment management company to manage it.

In April 26, 2001, legend Investment Limited was established, and Liu Chuanzhi was appointed chairman of Lenovo investment.

President Zhu Li Nan introduced to the media that he will invest in four fields in the big IT industry: telecom network equipment, enterprise application software, IT service and semiconductor chip design.

The target in 5 years is an annual average return of 30%.

So Zhou Kui entered Lenovo investment.

Lenovo investment

"I have been doing business before, and I deeply feel that money is very hard to earn, so I will shake hands when I invest."

There is no such thing as a venture capitalist, no matter what he thinks.

The story of this industry usually takes days, hours, or even minutes to decide to invest in a company. Oh, and this company is just like Facebook.

After a lot of efforts, Zhou Kui introduced a geographic information system company inside the company.

He ran all the companies that were related to the company.

So Liu Chuanzhi asked, do you think the company can score 85 points?

Liu Chuanzhi is a member of the investment decision Committee.

In the final decision conference, all aspects of factors were integrated, Zhou Kui asked himself that the project did not have 85 points, so the project ended.

After that, he recalled that of course he wanted to take the first step, "but you have to be disciplined and honest."

For a long time, Zhou Kui did not make a case.

Although this period of time, IT investment is a cyclical trough, but this is not much convincing.

However, since the end of 2001, he began to investigate the software outsourcing industry.

There are two words. In 1995, Zhong Xing computer system (Beijing) Co., Ltd. was established.

In 1997, the company established its main business as overseas software development business.

In 1998, the Japanese news corporation was established.

The company's website points out that compared with the large number of European and American enterprises issuing contracts to India, Japanese enterprises choose Chinese enterprises as their main software outsourcing areas.

China News software group Limited by Share Ltd was founded in 2002.

It also signed LSP contract with Sun Microsystems in the year to start IT technology service business.

Zhou Kui has been researching from 2001 to 2003. It is not limited to China News software. In fact, the top 50 of the industry have seen enough homework.

Project approval also has some setbacks, and finally repeated meetings to pass.

Zhou Kui is under tremendous pressure, but this project is no more than, "I may not be able to get mixed up in this industry."

In March 2003, Lenovo invested in HK $24 million for investment.

In April 30, 2004, China News software listed on the main board of Hongkong, raising HK $more than 100 million, oversubscribed 9.8 times, and the issue price to earnings ratio was 13.9 times.

"Before China News software, Hongkong capital market is more concerned about real estate and other industrial markets, and the knowledge of software outsourcing is still blank.

We must spend a lot of energy and more time to introduce our business to our investors and the prospects of outsourcing market and enhance their confidence. "

Wang Zhiqiang, head of China News software group, said in the face of China computer news.

After that, I invested in a company called "Xun Tian" in 03 or 04 years.

In May 2004, President Liu Yi told the media that the company had reached an agreement with Lenovo and Acer, which invested 6 million dollars a day.

Liu Yi said in an interview with the website: "we are concentrating on the market segmentation of WAP. We have provided many mobile phone users with ringtones and pictures through the WAP platform.

A year later, in 2005, Index, Japan's largest SP company, acquired Shenzhen Xun Tian Communication Technology Co., Ltd.

Indeed, the person in charge of Index is Ogawa Yoshimi, a famous entrepreneur.

On the return, Zhu Linan said in an interview with the twenty-first Century economic report at the end of the year: a project currently exiting is called Shenzhen Xun Tian, which is a SP company based on WAP application. The return on investment of a single project is about 3.5 times.

Zhou Kui is senior vice president of legend Investment Limited.

Zhang Fan's comment, "when we found Zhou Kui in 2005, we felt that he had made a lot of progress in the next 3 years for every industry, as well as whether he was cheap or expensive for specific projects, and did a lot of homework that other people had not done."

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Sequoia

Since October 2005, Zhou Kui has been a director of Sequoia Capital China Fund.

At 16:39 on February 2, 2011, a little publicity was made to an organization before the new year. A low-key silent social enterprise "Zhongxin Nong", http://url.cn/1WsIxx, has the reputation of "the people's Bank of the mountains and waters". Since 1986, the group loan mode based on five joint insurance has been mainly implemented in the poverty-stricken areas of the country, and it has provided a single credit loan of an average of 3000 yuan, without any mortgage or guarantee, and 800 thousand people have benefited more.

At the same time, Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is also looking for ways to enter China. After the two sides contacted, they found many similarities, but of course, the talent was rare, and the two sides quickly reached a tacit understanding.

In December 2006, the Chinese version of Forbes launched the list of best entrepreneurs in China.

At that time, the list leader was Wang Shuang.

Zhang Fan Ling, fourth, who is 35 years old, is the representative of the young Chinese risk investor.

Zeng de Feng Jie, President of global venture capital fund Greater China, has invested in the air network and Focus Media, and once served as Baidu's director.

Shen Napeng, 38, listed twentieth: introduction to the list: as a founder of Ctrip, he also became an angel investor in a hurry. He was an investor of Focus Media and an independent director. He also sold the magma digital to the Hua You century.

Zhou Kui introduced Sequoia to the Vince innovation that he had invested before.

This is another software service outsourcing company.

In 2005, Lenovo invested $10 million in capital investment with DCM.

Vince was founded in 1995, and established long-term cooperation with IBM in the same year. He also established long-term cooperative relationship with Microsoft in 1997.

It signed an outsourcing service contract with HP, Oracle and SGI in 1998.

In 2005, he was elected the best supplier of Microsoft, and set up an offshore research and development center in Beijing and Shanghai.

CEO Chen Shuning talked about the importance of scale. In an interview with investment and cooperation in 2006, he pointed out that a company with a turnover of 1 hundred million US dollars has only stood in the industry. The second parameter is the number of people who must reach 3000 or 5000 people.

"They have known them for three years, when they did need money to jump up and develop, and it became very natural."

In 2006, Sequoia, DCM and Lenovo invested another $30 million into Vince.

Zhou Kui points out that Vince has a very good team and good customers. He thinks excellent customers can cultivate excellent enterprises.

On December 2007, 12 days, Wen Si information landed on the NYSE, issuing a price of $8.5 and financing $65 million 25 thousand.

The first day newspaper closed at $9.96, up 17.18%.

As a result, Windows 7, which is now used by people, has its contributions, including multilingual version of OS compatibility testing.

In 2007, there were many investments in this year. There was a passage saying that Lin Yu, founder of netqin, sent dozens of e-mails to Sequoia regularly to inform the progress of the project, while Zhou Kui probably welcomed enough information.

Netqin's first round won 3 million 300 thousand dollars in Jinsha River and Sequoia.

"Mobile phone is a product of personal application, and security is very important.

So we are optimistic about this industry.

Moreover, the team is very serious in doing things, no matter in terms of technology or cooperation with operators and mobile phone manufacturers.

Zhou Kui accepted the interview with "Global Entrepreneur".

In July 2007, Sequoia invested $3 million 500 thousand in the Skye network.

The Hangzhou based company has been very low-key for a long time.

The company website pointed out: the launch of the Skye bubble platform has enabled the mass consumers of low-end price function phones to fully enjoy the application of high priced "intelligent machines", and can smoothly use all kinds of games, downloads, friends and other Internet applications.

The company practices a middleware platform combined with B2B2C's thinking, that is, CP does not need to consider how the game developed by itself is embedded in different cell phone models: Skye will include mobile phone chip manufacturers, mobile design and manufacturers, mobile value-added service providers (SP), mobile application and game developers (CP), mobile operators and mobile terminal consumers in the mobile phone industry chain upstream and downstream.

In September 2007, Zhou Kui talked about his understanding of business models at the "business summit -2007 China Summit".

When it comes to a problem of scale characteristics, he pointed out that similar to Google: there is little change in the cost of developing a user, and very little change. When the company is doing bigger, it will find that the bigger the more, the more profitable it is.

There are also many negative examples around us, so that we can not see that the value growth is very fast.

Zhou Kui is not only facing TMT, but at the end of 2007, Zhang Fan revealed that Sequoia invested in Igs.

Igs (Beijing) Medical Technology Co., Ltd. is one of the earliest clinical research contract research organizations (CRO) in China.

The company provides clinical development related services, involving product registration, phase I to phase four clinical trials, bioequivalence tests and international multi center clinical trials.

(in November 2009, the US PPD company acquired David Grange, chief executive officer of Gus, PPD), pointing out that for clinical research, China is a new and huge potential region, which can be derived from its compound annual growth rate of 21% over the past 5 years.

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Since June 2007, Zhou Kui has been a partner of Sequoia Capital China Fund.

This year, Zhou Kui was selected as "Global Entrepreneur" in 2007 under the age of 40 business elite.

Shen Napeng quoted the article as saying, "on the surface, you may feel that Zhou Kui is not the kind of quick.

But he has two qualities as a risk investor. First of all, he is considerate and detail oriented. He can remain rational when many investors are excited by appearances.

At the same time, he is very open.

The ability to seize opportunities is not lost. "

2008

No matter how many chapters of the Sequoia Capital China fund will be introduced in the future, it will be highlighted in 2008.

In March 2008, the Sequoia China fund invested 10 million 220 thousand dollars in Qian Zhao.

Xiamen dry photograph Au Optronics Co was founded in February 2006, is specialized in red, yellow, orange four yuan LED epitaxy chips, chips for enterprises.

The four yuan epitaxial film produced by the company is applied in the fields of digital, dot matrix, display screen, traffic signal lamp and so on.

Another business is high performance GaAs solar cell research and development, which is the main power source of spacecraft.

(in August 12, 2010, Qian Zhao entered the Shenzhen Stock Exchange's gem.

The issue price was 45 yuan, and the first day newspaper closed at 79.68 yuan, up 77.07%.

Zhou Kui is vice chairman of the company.

One record is that four years after the establishment of the company, the listing was realized.

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Regarding the RMB fund, this stage has changed from a discussion to a business need.

In 2007, Zhou Kui said that he was considering it.

In June 2008, Sequoia China's first phase RMB fund was completed by 1 billion yuan, and the third party financial institution Noah wealth was appointed as its exclusive financial adviser in the process of raising.

In an interview with "financing China", Zhou Kui said, "there are many arrangements in the financing process, such as liaison and so on. The operation efficiency of intermediaries is much higher. Moreover, there is no special fund raising team for RMB within the Sequoia Capital."

In September 20, 2008, Asian interactive media was delisted from the Tokyo stock exchange.

Prior to June 3rd, the Asia interactive media announced that Cui Jianping, chairman of the company, appropriated the assets of the company privately and set up a guarantee for the debts of the third party enterprises.

The impact of this incident on redwood is very negative. This is the first project to lead investment after the foundation of the company, and Zhang Fan is the director of the company.

The company has a TVPG mode, namely the Television Program Guide (TVPG).

Fewer people subscribe to the TV weekly, but with more TV stations, the professional channel TV guide becomes an option.

The competition for ratings is becoming more intense. In the process, companies running TVPG will get business opportunities from TV stations, such as advertising agencies.

Two years later, in an interview with the twenty-first Century economic report, Shen Napeng said: "the investment of the media in Asia is certainly worth reflecting, but what is more important is that we should be more cautious about the whole investment rhythm, process and other aspects in the future investment, which is more important.

This matter has not yet been settled, and the whole venture capital field is feeling the Wall Street financial storm.

At that time, an e-mail was circulated on the Internet, which was written by the head of the investment company of Sequoia Capital, and stressed that "cash is more important than your mother!"

Finally, the letter stressed: let's reiterate: before your funds are used up, we will not ask for money again.

Later Zhou Kui would like to clarify that this is a misrepresentation, but he also pointed out that the whole environment is not so crazy, so entrepreneurs should not expect it.

In 2008, Zhou Kui entered the list of "China's best venture investor" in Forbes's forty-third edition.

The scope of the list has been extended to IPO/ acquisitions by venture capitalists in the past 5 years, 3 years before.

Zhou Kui's IPO/ merger and acquisition project: Zhong Xun software, Wen Si innovation, Shenzhen Xun Tian; other star projects: skyline, Jie Xun Technology, netqin technology, Skye technology, house lizard software.

House lizard invested $10 million in Sequoia in the first half of 2008.

The company's business is in-game advertising.

In the premise of not affecting the player's game experience, put in advertising and implementation.

Zhou Kui entered house lizard's board of directors.

Sequoia confirmed Zhang Fan's departure in January 25, 2009.

In an interview with the media, he said, "in the past year, I have started to focus on venture capital.

On the other hand, I returned to China in 2001, and founded the Sequoia Capital China Fund in 2005. The pace of work and life is very fast, and now I hope to adjust it as a consultant to help guide the establishment of a venture capital fund.

In fact, it is not easy to engage in Venture Capital Manager's work. Zhou Kui once talked about investment excitement in his interview with people's website. He said: after throwing it out, the mood will become heavier and heavier.

He said that although the company would be excited when it came to the market, it would be even more serious when it first started.

You will feel stressed yourself. That's true.

You spend more time on projects you invest in, because your money is in your pocket, and now it is thrown out.

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wireless

Wireless Internet is probably a direction. Zhou Kui has set foot in many projects.

In November 2009, at the 2009 China entrepreneur forum and gem interpretation conference, Zhou Kui concluded:

Development is a marketing company that uses short messages on wireless Internet, and WAN Po is an online marketing company.

Netqin wireless Internet helps you reduce the harassment of the company. This is the two sides have business needs and personal needs, the same is that you want to allow customers to serve.

The Internet is the bottleneck of the wireless Internet. We see whether there is any solution to the payment.

To open up the sky is a project in association, and the business is residential SMS.

In 2006, Sequoia invested in the WAN Pu century, and the company provided wireless internet marketing platform.

In 2006, it also invested in Gaoyang Jie Xun. The company has many recharge businesses.

In December 9, 2010, Skye network landed on NASDAQ.

The issue price is US $8 and financing is US $58 million.

However, the market reaction was not ideal, and the first day it closed down 6 US dollars, down 25%.

The reason is that Skye is facing a problem: the popularity of Android, and the price of smart phones has become less expensive.

Zhou Kui's view is quite positive. "In the 07 years we invested in Skye, we only had 200 thousand income in one month, only 20 people, and now it has become a more than 300 million dollar market capitalization company. I think its growth rate has been very fast."

In another way, Zhou Kui has IPO records in the stock exchange, the domestic gem, the NYSE and Nasdaq, and of course there are also mergers and acquisitions.

Now some people are very optimistic about the prospect of wireless, and think that not only can they copy the Internet, but also the industry will be much larger than the Internet.

Since everyone owns a cell phone, it can be used anytime, anywhere.

"In the wireless field is the most active, speed, change, opportunity, very broad field, China is also the largest wireless application market, so we have a very good position here, the company here is very light and fast."

At the end of 2 2001, in the press release of "innovation China 2011", Zhou Kui revealed that the Sequoia wireless layout:

Up to now, there are nearly 20 enterprises. There are two chip enterprises in the wireless operation and wireless Internet. About seven or eight companies in the application platform are such enterprises.

For example, games, associated companies are probably six enterprises, some of the more life oriented applications, we have four or five enterprises.

"Nearly 90% of the wireless industry is the first round of investment."

It seems that entrepreneurs have more opportunities to invest, Zhou Kui talks about the characteristics of the industry: if there is a chance, it should be earlier to sit with the entrepreneur, or if he gets up, if he presses the button, the subsequent financing will be very difficult and often do not need more financing.

In May 5, 2011, netqin was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the United States, with a price of $11.50, $89 million, and a 19.13% drop on the first trading day.

In an interview with the media, Lin Yu, Lin Yu, said that the market environment was depressed and the stock price was poor.

According to the company's website, as of the end of March 2011, netqin has nearly 86 million of the world's total (over 27 million overseas users).

In addition to security, the web page also displays services such as communication housekeepers, schedule housekeepers, etc.

Three months later, in August, netqin released its second quarter earnings report as of June 30th: the second quarter revenue was $8 million 900 thousand, a 147.4% increase over the same period of the same period, and net profit of 1 million 100 thousand US dollars, up 977.8% from the 100 thousand US dollars in the same period last year.

Of course, the direction of investment is not the only problem. In the June "2011 China Equity Investment Fund Development Forum", Zhou Kui introduced that Sequoia manages five US dollar funds and two RMB funds in China. The US dollar fund adds up to 2 billion dollars, and the RMB fund adds up to 4 billion yuan.

A question about organizational structure, Zhou Kui said, "a few years ago, we thought about whether the renminbi and US dollar were combined, we first made the company system, then we could meet the demand of rapid investment, but then we gave up.

"Because the feeling is from the process, from the source to the last exit, everyone's tempo is different. The procedures we are going through are different. They may form mutual restraint."

epilogue

A good investment should not only catch up with the trend, but also systematically understand, understand and seize the opportunity from the perspective of industrial development.

Investment is the same, or occupation is the same.