Scene Hui High-end Dialogue 丨Exabite with He Xin, Founding Partner of Silicon Harbor Capital: 20 years of investment veterans start again, aiming at the "golden age" of investment in the high-tech field

Per reporter: Li Lei Per editor: Xiao Ruidong

High-tech tracks, including emerging technologies and artificial intelligence technology applications, are becoming the focus of more and more institutions.

In November last year, Silicon Harbor Capital announced the completion of the first phase of fund raising, with a scale of nearly 1 billion yuan, achieving over-raising. Although it is a new fund, SiliconPort Capital is behind a team of "veterans" without compromise. Founder He Xin served as deputy director of Intel Capital, president of Carlyle Group China and president of Asia of Ruisheng Management Group, and the other two partners have been deeply involved in the technology industry for many years and have rich industry experience.

It is precisely because he has experienced a number of complete economic, industrial and investment cycles in his career and has a deep understanding of the industry, He Xin and the team judge that the next decade is a golden age of investment in the high-tech field, with huge opportunities, and Silicon Harbor Capital will also focus on this direction. According to public information, in the more than one year from the establishment of the company to the closure of the first phase of the fund, Silicon Harbor Capital has invested in nearly 20 projects in the field of hard technology and artificial intelligence.

Recently, the Daily Economic News interviewed He Xin, who shared with us his views on investment opportunities in the high-tech sector and the investment logic of Silicon Harbor Capital.

Investment in high-tech sectors will usher in the "golden decade"

In November last year, an institution called "Silicon Harbor Capital" turned out to be a fund, raising nearly 1 billion yuan in the first phase of the fund, and all the funds came from market-oriented funds, and LPs included market-oriented funds of funds, family offices, securities companies, entrepreneurs and other types, which triggered heated discussions in the industry for a time.

In fact, although Silicon Harbor Capital is a new VC, the team behind it is well-known in the industry. Founder He Xin is a first-generation venture capitalist in China, who has been serving top multinational asset management companies for the past decade, leading the private equity team in China to manage a number of US dollar and RMB funds, and investing in star projects such as Sohu.com, ATL and Ctrip. In 2019, he "self-reliant portal" founded Silicon Harbor Capital, which refers to technology investment.

The other two partners, Shi Lei, has served as an executive in nokia, Lucent and other well-known IT companies, and later became a continuous successful entrepreneur in the technology industry, and the company he founded was wholly acquired by listed companies for 860 million yuan. Jiang Baolin was a core R&D personnel of Autodesk, and later joined Huawei and HiSilicon, responsible for the early investment of the world's most advanced technology, and has a deep insight into the industry.

Overall, these three partners have a deep industrial background and have formed complementarity to a certain extent, which directly determines that Silicon Port Capital has been an institution with a global vision, rich investment experience and advantages in production and research resources from the beginning.

In He Xin's view, in the past 20 years, changes in technological infrastructure such as the Internet have brought about wave after wave of entrepreneurial and investment opportunities. In recent years, as emerging technologies have promoted the upgrading of Chinese manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing, the industrial smile curve has gradually improved, and a series of changes such as big data, artificial intelligence, and chips have changed the infrastructure of technology, giving China the opportunity to "overtake in curves".

"The biggest investment opportunity in the next 20 years is that with the power of emerging technologies, a large number of industrial enterprises in China have transformed into intelligent manufacturing enterprises." He Xin judged.

Unique play: industry research + platform driven

As a new institution, Silicon Harbor Capital has established its own unique play style in the field of technology investment where there are many masters.

Looking at the current domestic investment technology institutions, it can be mainly divided into several categories: one is the traditional white horse fund, with the track as the dimension, there are also very perfect pre-investment and post-investment teams and services; the second is to have a deep understanding and foresight of a certain industry and track, so it focuses on investing in A specific track of VC; there is also a type of industrial capital that is currently in the limelight, which can provide intuitive "strategic value" such as orders, resources and technology for the invested enterprises.

Compared with these institutions, He Xin and the team are very aware of where their advantages are, and they have also built an effective "industry research + platform-driven" investment system.

As he introduced, the most important task of the investment manager of Silicon Harbor Capital is industry research, through which to explore investment targets. "We want to study the originality of a certain technology, the future application scenarios, combined with a large number of enterprises, scientific research institutions, overseas technology trends, coupled with the contacts and experience accumulated by several partners in the industry for many years, joint industrial capital, LPs, industry experts and other important partners, together to build an industrial ecosystem, and combine these to make a platform." It seems easy to say, just like that, but it is very difficult to do, and I think it is much more important than any post-shot. ”

He Xin thought very clearly: "In the initial stage, Silicon Harbor can only take the boutique route and win by relying on the excess return of Bo. But I believe that the team has the ability to do large-scale funds. ”

On the other hand, Silicon Harbor Capital is not focusing on a single area, but around the core tools of intelligent manufacturing, grasping the relevance of technologies in the subdivision industry to expand, so as to create its own moat. In He Xin's view, the threshold for making technology investment itself is relatively high, and when judging whether to invest in a project, the most important point is to consider the company's ability in the process of value-added construction. "Technology companies have never been so simple, can not be seen in a single dimension, this is still quite testing."

Small funds, large platforms, pay attention to cyclical changes

In just over a year since its establishment, Silicon Harbor Capital has conducted a lot of research and layout in the fields of 5G + Internet of Things, integrated circuits, artificial intelligence, industrial software + cloud computing, etc., and has completed investment in nearly 20 projects such as Huatian Software, Seth Electronics, Yun migration technology, and Lordingsen, including many star startups and head enterprises.

An interesting phenomenon is that most of the projects invested by Silicon Harbor Capital are leading the investment. In many cases, even the amount of investment is not the largest, but it can also win the right to lead the investment, and truly practice the concept of "small fund, big platform".

Why this situation occurs is not unrelated to the investment platform that SiliconPort Capital is committed to building. In the concept of He Xin and the team, "openness" and "sharing" are two very important keywords. He gave an example: for industrial investors, Silicon Harbor Capital will hold open investment seminars regularly and make joint investments at the project end; form a positive interaction with LPs, have achieved joint investment many times, and LPs will in turn take the initiative to share the opportunities of investment projects; in addition, in terms of obtaining the latest progress in the industry and sharing industrial experience, Silicon Harbor Capital has also done a lot of practice. "We want to do things in a more transparent, shared way." He Xin said.

It turns out that these actions can indeed help Silicon Harbor Capital identify investment opportunities earlier. Whether it is The Core Wangwei and Huatian Software co-invested with LP, or the high-end optical communication instruments and meters that the team previously focused on researching the industry and investing in, they have now become hot spots for popular enterprises and industries.

When it comes to future development planning, according to He Xin, the first phase of the RMB fund plans to invest about 70% in the first half of this year. "We originally invested for 4 years, but now we expect to invest 70% to 75% in 2 and a half years." The next issue of the fund we are in contact with now and some potential investors. Taking advantage of this opportunity, we also summarized and optimized our own investment strategies and ideas. In the future, Silicon Harbor Capital will continue to focus on the intelligent core and pay attention to its cyclical changes in each industry. ”

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