Wen | Yu Yan
Editor | Wu Ge
Produced by | Yuguan Finance
The Winter Olympics held at the doorstep of the country have made the Attention of the Chinese people unprecedentedly high. If you talk about the hottest national-level Internet celebrities in this Winter Olympics, in addition to the ice pier, it is Gu Ailing.
On February 8, 18-year-old mixed-race girl Gu Ailing became the first champion of the event in the final of the freestyle ski jump, which was also the first snow sports gold medal won by the Chinese team at the Winter Olympics.
Gu Ailing's success is inseparable from the support of her family, especially her mother Gu Yan. She once said in an interview that her mother is the best mother.
As a result, her mother also quickly entered the public eye, and a report about her 20 years ago was also brushed off for a while. Top-level Chinese and foreign famous school education and professional resume, let many mothers sigh, the original "chicken baby must first chicken themselves".
Gu Yan's profile on the LinkedIn shows that her career is mainly involved in the financial industry and investment circles. From the interview with her in 1998 by China Science and Technology Information, it can be seen that she is a witness and participant in the opening up of the domestic investment community, even earlier than the current "venture capital queen" and xu Xin, the founder of Today Capital.
From the 1990s to the present, 30 years have passed, and the domestic financial industry, investment community and Internet industry have already undergone earth-shaking changes. If Gu Yan can cultivate here at that time, she may become a well-known investment coffee in China like Xu Xin, and share the domestic Internet feast as a Bauer of BATJs.
Now that she is the mother of an Olympic champion, it is not a reward.
We might as well take Gu Yan's experience as an excuse to look back at those past years.
From researchers to Wall Street white-collar workers
Like her daughter Gu Ailing, Gu Yan was also a genius girl when she was young: she was admitted to the Department of Chemistry of Peking University in 1981, and after graduating from undergraduate, she continued to study for a master's degree in biochemistry at the university, becoming a famous biologist and one of the experts in synthetic bovine insulin, a closed disciple of Professor Shen Tong.
In addition to studying, Gu Yan, who was born in Shuxiangmendi, loves sports and is a versatile member of the school's short track speed skating team and ski instructor.
In the 1980s, Gu Yan, who graduated from Peking University, also became a member of the international students, took a full scholarship, entered Auburn University in the United States to study biochemistry and molecular biology, obtained a master's degree in biology, and entered the Hughes School of Medicine at Rockefeller University in the United States in 1989 to study molecular genetics.
However, Gu Yan, who originally took the scientific research route, chose another path in 1992, and was admitted to the Stanford University Business School in the United States, in this place close to Silicon Valley, to pursue an MBA degree at her own expense.
This was a major turning point in Gu Yan's life, and this determined the trajectory of her life for the rest of her life. As for why the transformation, she said in that interview, "Engaging in politics, finance, and law is more direct to the country than basic science." ”。
Venture capitalist Bill Draper has said many times, "Without Stanford, there would be no Silicon Valley." On another level, there are no venture capital institutions and angel networks, and there is no Silicon Valley.
In the 1990s, Gu Yan's Stanford brothers and sisters, as well as venture capitalists, were obsessed with finding those "tech buds" in Silicon Valley.
John Dole, a venture capitalist and one of Google's directors at the time, repeatedly claimed in his speeches that "the Internet is the greatest and most legitimate wealth-creating activity in the history of the planet." Much of his personal wealth comes from investments in Web 1.0 companies such as Amazon, Netscape, SunMicrosystems and Google.
In such an environment, Gu Yan, as a student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, should have had an initial impression of the venture capital industry.
However, Gu Yan's initial involvement in the field of investment was not in Silicon Valley, but on Wall Street.
According to her LinkedIn, she was a summer associate at Lehman Brothers for four months while studying at Stanford from May to August 1993.
Yes, the one that fell in the 2008 international financial crisis.
This is Gu Yan's initial contact with the financial industry in public information.
In 1993, it was the time lehman brothers entered China. In that year, Lehman's Beijing office opened and did two major things, one was to underwrite bonds for China Construction Bank, creating a precedent for the private placement of overseas bonds of Chinese companies. The other was underwriting the first overseas dollar dragon bond for MOF.
In June of this year, the "Sixteen Articles" of macroeconomic regulation and control were just issued in China. Mr. Zhu began to serve as the president of the PBC, proposing to "block the evil door and open the main door." In December, the Company Law was passed, and in the same month, the Decision on the Reform of the Financial System was issued. The financial industry is entering a normative period from a chaotic period.
At that time, Lehman Brothers was one of the earliest foreign financial institutions to enter China, and Goldman Sachs did not enter the Chinese market until the following year.
In that interview in the early years, Gu Yan introduced her experience at Lehman Brothers as a successful $200 million loan for China by carrying out ipo, merger and reception here, setting a precedent for China's financial community to successfully conduct commercial loans on Wall Street in the United States.
There is no public information on what role Ms. Gu played in Lehman Brothers' initial engagement with China, or which project she was involved in.
When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008, according to ccB's announcement on September 19, 2008, it held a total of US$191.4 million in Lehman Brothers bonds, making it the largest Chinese bank at that time.
After graduating from Stanford Business School in 1994, Ms. Gu joined Bankers Trust, the eighth-largest bank in the United States, as a derivatives trader, where she worked for two years.
Two years after she left Sinofor Bank (December 1998), Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest commercial bank, invested $10.1 billion to merge Sinofor Bank, thus forming the world's largest commercial bank. The acquisition also became the acquisition of the largest U.S. bank by a foreign bank at that time, and received widespread attention from the international financial community.
It can be said that Gu Yan's initial financial career witnessed these important events in financial history. His experience at two well-known financial institutions also laid the foundation for his later venture capital.
The first generation of venture capitalists
After leaving Xinfu Bank in 1996, Gu Yan also left Wall Street and returned to the Bay Area to start her career in venture capital.
In 1996, Gu Yan joined ITIM Asia and stayed for four years.
Publicly available information shows that it is a software technology company founded in 1993 and has gradually grown since 2004 through a series of acquisitions of small traditional retail software businesses.
At the same time, Gu Yan also had a career in China.
According to the 1998 interview with China Science and Technology Information, she was the general manager of American Technology Investment Co., Ltd. and the chairman of Beijing Oriental Weibo International Information Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Oriental Weibo").
According to industrial and commercial information, Oriental Weibo was established on August 8, 1997, with a registered capital of 4 million US dollars and a total investment of 8 million US dollars, which is the first information technology enterprise in China to introduce the US venture capital mechanism. Gu Yan is the legal representative.
In another article in the same year, China Science and Technology Information mentioned that Oriental Weibo is a Sino-US joint venture, established by American Science and Technology Investment Co., Ltd. and Beijing Baifu International Group. The company was "founded under the circumstance that international and domestic informatization is becoming increasingly hot, and China's venture capital industry can be said to be about to come out."
According to public information, American Technology Investment Co., Ltd. was founded in 1994 by Gu Yan and Stephen Evans-Freke, a well-known venture capital expert in the United States and a former member of the three-person leading group of the U.S.-China Science and Technology Committee, to invest in high-tech industry projects in China and Southeast Asia.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, the Internet was on the fast track. In August 1995, Netscape went public, setting off an Internet wave. At that time, a number of foreign venture capital institutions flocked to China to look for business opportunities.
At that time, Xiong Xiaoge, who was also studying in the United States, had taken his old owner, Patrick McGonagall, the founder of the American International Data Group (IDG) in 1992. J. McGovern) returned to China with $20 million, established IDG Capital in Beijing, and set up the first dollar fund the following year, becoming the first person to carry out venture capital business in China, and was also known as the "godfather of venture capital".
In 1998, Intel investors introduced their venture capital business to China, becoming the first foreign company to do venture capital in China.
It can be said that Gu Yan returned to China to carry out venture capital business, and it was just in time.
In an interview that year, Gu Yan told reporters that venture capital is particularly popular in the United States, and venture capitalists call themselves angels because they "bring wings to people with ideals that dreams may be realized."
It is understood that venture capital first appeared in the United States in the 1940s. In the 1980s, the concept of venture capital was introduced to the mainland. But it wasn't until the end of the 1990s, when the development of high-tech enterprises entered a climax stage, that venture capital began to receive attention.
However, for Chinese entrepreneurs, the new thing of venture capital has not yet been accepted, and it is not easy to get started.
Xiong Xiaoge later complained to the media, and when he mentioned VC to people, people thought it referred to vitamin C. It was not until 2000 that IDG Capital began to slowly return, which was previously supported by its old owner IDG.
It's harder to find the right talent. Gu Yan also admitted in the interview that the most difficult thing to do in China is people, who must have scientific and technological knowledge, management ability and financial operation experience, and only one can be picked out from a thousand people in Beijing that year.
Moreover, soon, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 struck.
In addition to the interview, no information about Oriental Weibo and its investment projects was found in public information. Industrial and commercial information shows that the company was revoked in 2002.
This may seem to indicate that Gu Yan's Dream of Chinese Venture Capital has awakened.
On the other side of the ocean, the dream of a group of silicon valley technology companies has also awakened. In 2000, the "internet bubble" in the United States began to burst, the NASDAQ stock price index slid all the way from the highest 5,000 points, and the dream of a number of high-tech companies to go public was shattered.
Gu Yan's LinkedIn information shows that in this year, she left ITIM Asia and joined California Technology Investment inc as a managing director (MD), serving for 11 years, which is the company she has stayed for the longest time LinkedIn information.
Since 2006, Gu Yan, who loves skiing, has also worked part-time at northstar At Tahoe ski resort for two years. It was also here that Gu Ailing, who was just three years old, began her first contact with skiing.
In 2012, 9-year-old Gu Ailing began competing in ski competitions in the United States. Perhaps in order to cooperate with her daughter's ski career, Gu Yan also changed jobs this year and spent more than a year at K2 Advisors. Since 2013, he has worked as a private investor and expert in FusionInvestment Inc China.
Since then, Gu Yan has lived a passionate life of cultivating future Olympic champion Gu Ailing on the one hand and continuing her own investment career on the other hand.
Gu Yan, the first-generation venture capitalist, although she did not become a venture capitalist on the famous zhen side like her domestic counterparts, but she has an excellent daughter, and her life is full of taste, how can it not be a success?
Image: Network