Investment Life

If you want to draw a time node for the Internet to take off, 1995 must be the key one.In this year, the success of Netscape and Yahoo officially launched a worldwide Internet boom. A thousand-fold return is no longer a dream, but has become the goal pursued by every venture capitalist on Shashan Road.

Before returning to this era, Chen Yuanming never thought that the Internet had such a time.There is a fee for logging into the website, a fee for retrieving information, and a fee for sending and receiving emails.America Online (AoL), currently the largest Internet provider in the United States, relies on this login model to earn profits.

In contrast to this charging model, there is a blank in the browser market.At this time, there was no Microsoft IE, and everyone still used the old and cumbersome Lib browsing mode. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP protocol) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) had just been widely adopted. Brand new topic.

It can be said that before Yahoo, the Internet did not have the concept of free.After Netscape's scape browser, the browser became one of the most indispensable components of the computer, opening the door for personal computers to the Internet.

Now, Chen Yuanming owns shares in both.Although he doesn't know much about the details of Internet development in this era, one thing is certain, these two companies will go public one after another this year and next two years, and continue to become a legend in the financial history. legend.

The millions invested in these two companies can easily earn hundreds of millions in return.But today, Chen Yuanming's mentality is somewhat different from when he founded Touchstone.Once upon a time, he only stayed at the financial level for these industries in Silicon Valley, just like any pure Wall Street investor, he didn't care about the development of the industry, he didn't care about the future of the company, and he only pursued one thing: arbitrage.How to grasp these companies that are bound to develop in the later stage as soon as possible and profit from them is his original intention.

But with the understanding of Silicon Valley and the establishment of a systematic business philosophy, Chen Yuanming's thoughts have changed unconsciously.Is the value of these companies only in listing?I'm afraid not necessarily.Any pioneer should have unparalleled advantages and occupy an amazing market.Leaving aside Yahoo, why did Netscape disappear from people's eyes in the end?

He has also used the scape browser released by Netscape today. In terms of operation, scape is no worse than the later IE.Even if IE won the market because of Microsoft's bundling, wouldn't there be browsers like Firefox, Aoyou, and Openg to carve up the market?Anyone who has used a computer should know that IE has many loopholes and how slow the speed is. scape should also be a very simple matter.As long as there is some resistance, Netscape should not be uncompetitive against Microsoft.

Excluding Netscape, Chen Yuanming still has a large number of similar venture capital seeds, such as ICQ, which already holds 85% of the shares.In the past two years, Chen Yuanming has successively invested nearly 200 million US dollars in ICQ, turning it from a studio into a well-known instant messaging company with independent servers.Since it still adopts the free model, ICQ has been downloaded more than 1000 million times and has several million registered users. Yahoo's home page link makes it even more powerful, and its popularity has increased linearly.But with such a huge communication software, Chen Yuanming has not been able to figure out a way to make a profit so far.

Do you want to rely on membership system and value-added games to make money like Tencent?But today's Internet speed limits this method. In an era of low-speed dial-up Internet access, it is impractical to play games online.At the same time, it is also necessary to guard against surprise attacks from other major software vendors, such as Microsoft's future mSN system.If it is just to promote its listing and wait for a big company to acquire it, maybe it will not take so much effort, but Tencent's success is in front of us, giving up such a potential company and marrying for others is really not worth the candle.

How to effectively integrate these companies and make them play a greater potential role has become the focus of Chen Yuanming's recent attention.At the same time, in order to solve this embarrassment as soon as possible, a new round of casting nets is slowly being rolled out.

The ones who cast the net this time are not the seed companies that are waiting to be fed, but the real talent recruitment.Today's Silicon Valley is far from the heyday of the Internet bubble, and a large number of talents are flowing from universities in the United States to Silicon Valley.Establishing its own talent reserve system has become the second most important task of Touchstone.

One of the deals they made was the recruitment of the research department of Anxin Company.

Entrusted by Xiao Yun, Golden Stone contacted several executives of Go Company and talked to them about Anxin's current plan. Such a visit really surprised and delighted those industry elites who had just suffered from Waterloo.

If it is said that Yahoo and Netscape jointly created the myth of the venture capital industry, then the experience of Go Company is undoubtedly an epic disaster movie in the field of venture capital.It took 7 years and more than 5 rounds of financing, costing nearly 8000 million US dollars in investment, and finally closed down by mergers and acquisitions, leaving nothing.All the investments were in vain, for a wonderful dream beyond the times.

Such a tragic experience is also rare in today's Silicon Valley.Therefore, these former dark horses in the industry were blacklisted by venture capital companies without exception. In the end, they failed to start a business again, but chose to enter other companies and merged into the turbid current of Silicon Valley.

Therefore, the appearance of the touchstone brought out a bit of strange color.You must know that the name of the Golden Stone is completely different from a year ago.Although there is no actual harvest yet, the publicity of the Golden Stone on the Internet is unrivaled.As one of the main investors of Yahoo, its Logo is now hung at the bottom of the page of the world's first web portal, and with the help of Blizzard and Eagle's Nest, its reputation is far greater in the Internet and game circles More than any other angel investment company.

This kind of promotion effect has attracted the attention of many people, and has also been ridiculed by many people.Just like Yahoo, ICQ, which has no means of profit, Amazon, which sells books online whimsically, and all kinds of small studios.In some people's mouths, Philosopher's Stone has become an out-and-out "waste acquisition station", which specializes in finding seed companies that lack practical value.Therefore, being approached by such an angel investment company, these Go veterans inevitably feel a little unclear.

What's more important is what it brings, an invitation letter from far away China.

At this time, the relationship between China and the United States was still in an ambiguous period, and it was not until 1990 that it entered a real "bilateral relationship". There are very few.Now a Chinese company -- and a mobile phone company -- is coming to your door, so how can you not be surprised.

At that time, his invitation was really exciting.Quite reasonable salary, very superior treatment, and what they are engaged in is the pen input method research that they have spent several years of hard work on.It’s just that the pen input method is quite different from their design. What this company needs is not a real personal computer that is complex and capable of multiple functions, but a medium, a tool that replaces the keyboard and communicates between human hands and the computer system. .

For Westerners who use alphabetic languages, such a tool is really hard to imagine.But after seeing those square Chinese characters and the headache-inducing Chinese Wubi keyboard, this confusion turned into understanding.China's huge population has become the last piece of weight.In the end, Jonathan used his superb negotiation skills to settle the technical invitation.Five ex-Go engineers and a director signed the agreement and embarked on a journey to China.

The gold mine in Silicon Valley is still being dug, but what really impacted Chen Yuanming was another matter.

At the beginning of February, Blizzard sent a message. Mike recommended a new studio called Condor to Chen Yuanming. Since the income of "Warcraft 2" is very considerable, Blizzard has started a new round of game development. This Condor The studio is the peers they met at the Chicago International Consumer Electronics Show. Because they share similar interests and have a high degree of resonance in game concepts, they are based on the noble concept of heroes cherishing heroes. Now Blizzard, which is already rich and powerful, promises to provide Condor Studios with Gundam $2 in financial assistance to help it develop new products.

Such a large investment should naturally be reported to their main investor, and Chen Yuanming got the news soon.He is not familiar with the name of this studio, but he is very familiar with the game that this new studio will develop.

Diablo.

This famous work of Northern Blizzard has finally surfaced.For Mike's anxious request, Chen Yuanming didn't say a word, and took a day to go to the Blizzard headquarters to meet with the founders of several Condor studios.

Like Mike and Allen, the three founders of this studio are also passionate game lunatics, so what should have been a serious business meeting eventually became an internal carnival mode.Today's Blizzard headquarters is no longer what it used to be, and the atmosphere of a university dormitory has been replaced by a serious studio, but this environment has not affected everyone's enthusiasm.After briefly talking about the business, several people excitedly pulled Chen Yuanming to start the game journey.

It's just that this time they didn't choose a computer game made by themselves, but moved out of the TV, and took out a boxy box from the corner, and plugged it into the TV.

Seeing Chen Yuanming's dazed expression, Mike shook the game controller in his hand and smiled.

"How about it, haven't you seen this? The latest game console released in Japan has not yet been launched in the United States. I asked a Japanese friend to get it. This thing is called PlayStation. It is a new generation of TV game console produced by Sony. It uses CD -Rom format. I think some of the games we develop can be ported to this in the future. In terms of picture effect, it is no worse than a personal computer.”

Looking at the small square and white box, Chen Yuanming was speechless for a long time, he really forgot the existence of this thing.An existence that is likely to break Feiyan's dominance in the CD field.