Wen 丨 Cao Weiyu
Source 丨Tou China Network
In just a few days, 18-year-old Gu Ailing has become the world's top.
Her excellence is incredible, setting off a wave of super idols in China and achieving an explosion of commercial value. Someone has calculated an account, 2021 so far Gu Ailing signed 20 brands, according to a single endorsement of 2 million US dollars estimated, in the past year Gu Ailing Light endorsement income has exceeded 40 million US dollars, equivalent to more than 200 million yuan.
This is just before the Winter Olympics. It is not difficult to foresee that this number will increase steeply after the end of the game, which is difficult to estimate.
The great and comprehensive success also attracted everyone's eager attention to her family. At this time, everyone was shocked to realize that Gu Ailing's mother, Gu Yan, was not an ordinary character. Related reports point to a point, Gu Yan is probably the earliest batch of venture capitalists in China, according to the time, basically and the "VC queen" Xu Xin, IDG Xiong Xiaoge in the same period into the industry, really can be regarded as the first generation of VC in China.
According to LinkedIn, Gu Yan is still working as a private investor and expert in Fusion Investment in China, but after about 2000, Gu Yan seems to have begun to fade out of the investment market, and there are almost no publicly available relevant cases in the VC/PE market.
Some people began to use Gu Ma's profession to look at Gu Ailing, saying that Gu Yan's most successful investment was actually Gu Ailing.
How to say it? Yes and no.
Gu Ailing and her mother Gu Yan took a group photo, Tuyuan Gu Ailing Weibo
Champion rank,"China's first VC"
If you look at it according to the current professional standards of investors, Ms. Gu at that time was also a proper "king of the duan position", and the career starting point was very high.
Let's start with the educational background. Ms. Gu studied at Peking University, then studied in the United States, studied biochemistry and molecular biology at Auburn University, molecular genetics at Rockefeller University, and then MBA at Stanford University Business School.
Domestic Top2 undergraduate + American veteran famous school master + Vine MBA, basically belong to the venture capitalist "top match" education background, it is no wonder that the MBA graduation took the offer of 12 financial institutions. To add that, if you put it in the current biomedical outbreak, the biological professional background is also a big plus, which belongs to the kind of compound talent that VC/PE will pay a lot of money to grab.
Again, Ms. Gu Ai entered the venture capital industry very early, about 1993, which is equivalent to the "queen of venture capital" Xu Xin. If you look at it from the perspective of time, it is not too much to say that the first generation of Chinese VCs is not excessive.
In 1993, Ms. Gu Yan worked for Lehman Brothers on Wall Street, where she worked on the IPO, merger and reception of the company. As a role at Lehman, Ms. Gu had successfully run a $200 million loan for China, setting a precedent for a successful commercial loan on Wall Street in the United States; at The Bankers Investment Company, she successfully conducted a $1.3 billion deal, which the Wall Street Journal had reported on, calling her "one of the financial experts who can shake the earth."
In 1994, Gu Yan began to venture capital in the Chinese market. First, he cooperated with American venture capital expert Evans Ferrrick to establish the American Technology Investment Company, and began to invest in high-tech industry projects in China. In 1997, Beijing Oriental Weibo International Information Technology Co., Ltd., with a total investment of 8 million US dollars, was established, with Gu Yan as the chairman, which was also the first information technology enterprise in China to introduce the US venture capital mechanism.
Looking at Gu Yan's few reports, you can still observe the characteristics of some excellent investors and cutting-edge ideas.
The first is the "ability to save the game", which is almost one of the core competitiveness of contemporary investors. For example, the establishment of an American technology investment company to invest in the Chinese market, where venture capital is still blank, was proposed by Gu Yan to American venture capitalists. After that, Gu Yan mobilized a group of talents who stayed in the United States to return to China, and the team included former Microsoft technical experts and international information technology experts.
Behind the advanced actions, there must be more advanced ideas to support, and some of Gu Yan's ideas in those years are still common today.
For example, the reliance on "people". Gu Yan's answer was that that the most difficult thing to do in China was people, she said that venture capital has high requirements for the quality of people, and it is necessary to have scientific and technological knowledge, management ability and financial operation experience.
At that time, China's venture capital market did not have a clear and civilized career and concept, and it was almost doomed to recruit people. Nowadays, the industry is open, the threshold is lowered, and talking about "people" seems old-fashioned, but the standard of people is still a key element of the investment industry.
Again, Gu Yan has a cutting-edge international perspective and recognizes the value of knowledge and technology, which makes her see further. For example, as early as the report in 1997, Gu Yan mentioned an investment case of a new cancer drug, there was no profit for 7 years, but the stock was still rising, because once the drug entered the market, it would have more than one billion profits every year.
Such an asset-holding mentality is still a process of market education at present.
She also delved into Silicon Valley, from market insights to opportunities and value in different regions. From the beginning, she has noticed that the United States has abundant capital but lacks good projects, the Chinese market is at a time of rapid economic growth, but lack of capital and technology, the original intention of leading the establishment of the American technology investment company is to combine Eastern culture and Western culture, try to create China's "Silicon Valley".
Public information came to an abrupt end. Bold speculation, if Ms. Gu Yan insists on going down this road, the roster of Chinese VC investors will most likely have an important seat for her.
The "ceiling" of elite education
Some people believe that Gu Yan's most successful investment is actually Gu Ailing, after all, Gu Ailing's commercial value is exploding amazingly.
But to be honest, I don't quite agree with this statement, business is business, family affection is affection. However, we can draw some desirable points from Gu Yan's cultivation of Gu Ailing.
For example, the optimal allocation of resources. Thanks to the dual pedigree of China and the United States, Gu Ailing received training in the more advanced United States in skiing, brushed up on the problems in the country with more complete education and training (more accurately, Beijing Haidian Huangzhuang), and resolutely returned to China when the national reserve of ice and snow talents was introduced and the Chinese sports idol fault was broken.
Perhaps out of the mentality of not being able to eat grapes, some people criticize this as "speculative". But Gu Ailing did get advanced ski training as a result, achieving unprecedented attention and applause and commercial value, which is understandable.
Not only that, Gu Ailing also completed his studies solidly and received high scores from Stanford. No wonder netizens commented that Gu Yan is the "ceiling of Haidian mother". Although we can hardly see the sign of "chicken baby" in the interview, Mother Gu's sentence "Ten days of chinese lessons, the top in the United States for one year" has long been a reality.
Then there's the balance of a winning mindset and emotional stability, a trait that applies equally well in the business world and everyday life.
Gu Yan's winning mentality has long been sharp. She got 12 offers after her MBA from Stanford, and in an interview she told the president, "Don't hire me because China is in a good state of the economy, because I'm a Chinese, first of all, I'm a good banker, I'm going to work in the best New York office."
Gu Ailing, who is engaged in competitive sports, is even more so, and from time to time stages "queen behavior". Not long ago, a winter sports analysis blogger released a video of "Gu Ailing Winter Olympic Prediction", the original intention is to hope that everyone will reduce the expectation of Gu Ailing, do not use "three gold" to ask Gu Ailing. This "protective" prediction was seen by Gu Ailing herself, who commented, "Why don't you have confidence in me?", accompanied by a smiley and crying expression.
Excessively winning can easily throw people out of balance, especially in an inward-volume environment. In Gu Ailing's documentary, Gu Yan is always an emotionally stable mother. Gu Ailing had a fever, was injured, and when the situation occurred frequently, she was very calm and calm.
Finally, why I don't agree to look at Gu Ailing's cultivation from an investment perspective, because a small episode reveals the affection, weakness and humanity of this "superhuman" mother.
On February 8, the beijing Winter Olympics freestyle skiing women's big jumping competition came to the third round, and Gu Ailing wanted to try a difficult move that had never been tried before. Before the game, she called her mother, who advised her not to take risks and make a safe move, but Gu Ailing did not listen to her mother's words and decided to challenge herself, and finally won the gold perfectly.
Suppose that from an investment perspective, the most decisive jump can supposedly go to the top return, which is the highest ceiling choice. But in the choice of the last one, the advice given by Gu Ailing's mother is conservative, and this "conservatism" is the result of multiple complex factors such as family affection, experience, and strategy. But Gu Ailing chose a more difficult technical action, "more difficult" is also the result of her choice, the driving factor behind it is "courage", but behind the courage?
We can think of the support of factors such as responsibility and technical self-confidence, but in my opinion, what is more important is freedom, the free will given by mothers, coaches, and teams in the process of cultivation, which is the most indispensable and irreplaceable element for a top talent to achieve the next top success.