Wen 丨 Li Tongwei
Source 丨Tou China Network
I heard that the existing projects in the Songshan Lake Robot Industry Base have been promoted to unicorns, and many projects are being rushed by investors, and there is a beautiful landscape - investors have come to Guo Xiaoping.
Guo Xiaoping, an ordinary investor in a domestic non-first-line institution, said, "Now invest in robots, not to come to Songshan Lake to see it seems incomplete, nor is it very professional." After the plane landed at Shenzhen Bao'an Airport, Guo Xiaoping took a taxi to the Songshan Lake Robot Base, and half an hour later, he saw that many buildings were located in the shade of lush trees, and the large area of Songshan Lake under his feet was calm and waveless.
Before coming, he consulted the information, Songshan Lake covers an area of about 8 square kilometers, surrounded by 14 square kilometers of ecological green space, in front of about 11 square kilometers of land boundary, hatched a lot of star enterprises.
Cloud whales are a good example. The investment network previously reported that the valuation of the sweeping and dragging robot company in early 2020 was 400 million yuan; a year later, in early 2021, it rose to 1 billion US dollars (6-7 billion yuan), up 15 times in 1 year. Valuation is one level, and investment speed and lineup are another level.
Cloud Whale completed a 100 million yuan C round of financing in June last year, but only 2 months ago it had just completed the B round; 3 months ago, it completed the A+ round. Sequoia, Hillhouse, etc. have rushed in, needless to say, the enthusiasm of ByteDance is also fully displayed in it, not only voting for the A+ round, but also entering the C round.
The same type of thing happened to another robot company in Songshan Lake, Hairou Innovation, a company that focuses on box-type warehouse robot systems.
At the end of September this year, Hairou Innovation completed more than 200 million US dollars of D round financing, led by Today Capital, Sequoia China, Wuyuan Capital, Source Code Capital, Lenovo Star, Zero One Venture Capital and investment; and just 4 months ago in May, it just completed the C round of financing, Led by Wuyuan Capital, Sequoia China and Source Code Capital. A similar story is that 6 months ago, Hairsoft Innovation closed the B+ round of financing.
That is to say, Hairou Innovation and Cloud Whale have completed 3 rounds of financing within half a year, and the amount of financing is not small, and they are all head institutions. The situation is staggering.
Sequoia China and Wuyuan Capital are not the only ones that are favored. Songling Robots is a company that mainly produces mobile robot chassis, and their team is also here. In July this year, it completed a series A financing of 100 million yuan, and Sequoia, Wuyuan and Vertex Investment China Fund and HKX entered the market.
Another company, called Benmo Technology, is also within the layout of Wuyuan Capital. In the Pre-A round of financing completed in May 2021, Wuyuan Capital was the lead investor, followed by Qi performance innovation and rice venture capital. What the technology of the end does is to serve household robots, industrial or commercial robots.
It seems that there is a robot industry cluster here, and Guo Xiaoping stepped on the outlet of this Songshan Lake robot enterprise being robbed and invested, and also came.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="219" > industrial base</h1>
The above four companies are just the tip of the iceberg, and many are not well known to the public. If you make a list, the above names also include: Li Qun Automation, GuGao, Homan Technology, Enhuo Technology, Yidong Technology, Walnut Intelligent Robot, etc. Since the establishment of Dongguan Robot Industry Base in 2014, more than 60 enterprises have been incubated here, with a survival rate of 80%.
Why this will become a robot industry cluster favored by investment institutions, if you want to talk about the core elements, you should first of all be people, core people, find people, and cultivate people.
Open the tweet related to the robot industry base and find that talent recruitment has always been their core content. A tweet read: "If you feel that your ideas are wild and difficult for everyone to understand, you may wish to come to Songshan Lake International Robot Industry Base to try it." Here, even the most crazy ideas have the potential to be realized. ”
Recruiting talents is the top priority of Li Zexiang, the founder of Songshan Lake Robot Industry Base, who has not only stressed many times that he has become a walking advertising machine, because in the process of establishing a base and incubating enterprises, his biggest feeling is the lack of talents.
"If the Chinese robot industry wants to catch up with Japan, it needs at least 4,000 Wang Tao," he said. Wang Tao is Li Zexiang's disciple when he taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and when Wang was working hard in a Shenzhen house in 2006 and waiting helplessly outside Li Zexiang's classroom for two hours, he should not have imagined that his future DJI would dominate the consumer drone industry. And Li Zexiang wants to make 4,000 DJI.
Gou once asked Li Zexiang how to find out that young people will be able to do well in the future. He replied, "I have two experiences: first, to see if his eyes glow; second, to let him do one thing so that a good man will act immediately, and the next day to get your ideas right away, and even to propose his different explorations." ”
The eyes will shine, that is, enthusiasm and creativity. Li Zexiang hopes that high school students and junior high school students can also come to the base to share and practice, "The creativity of middle and high school students is not bad at all, after such a dream factory environment, their ideas and ideas can also become a good product or a company." ”
Finding young people with ideas is the first step, and the second step is to take the time to understand the interests and focus points of young people, for example, Wang Tao's liking of aircraft models is the driving force behind his DJI drone.
But what you are interested in and want to do is not necessarily combined with the market, and the next essential thing is market research, industry research, and supply chain research.
Li Zexiang mentioned in an interview, "After doing this, you can enter the next stage, that is, the exploration stage." We'll give him a small amount of money to do a year or so of exploration, and he'll usually make a prototype, iterate two or three times, and then attend the show and visit potential customers. After this stage has passed, it is almost possible to register a company, and we will encourage him to register a company and give another financial support. ”
Li Zexiang has always been committed to talent training, which is also what he calls "academic entrepreneurship". In March 2016, the base jointly established the Guangdong-Hong Kong Robotics College with Guangdong University of Technology and Dongguan Institute of Technology. He has made many reforms in the curriculum system and practical activities; he also likes to choose students from interdisciplinary disciplines and cultivate them. Two years after college, all the students of the Robot College came to the Songshan Lake Robot Industry Base, and the base asked engineers from the company to give them lessons.
Where does financial support come from? Both Yun Whale and DJI were supported by Li Zexiang and several other teachers. In September 2014, the shareholders of Songshan Lake Industrial Base officially established the "Clearwater Bay Entrepreneurship Angel Fund", and also provided the venture fund together with Sequoia Capital and Hillhouse Capital.
During the interview, the person in charge of the administration of the base told the investment network that this is a complete set of systems that have not been completely summarized, including the understanding of hard technology, industry, and business, as well as the culture, ability, and vision of engineers, and one of the most important links is practice transformation.
Li Zexiang admired the idea of Eric Starup (Lean Entrepreneurship), a famous entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, that is, to complete multiple iterations from creativity to prototype to market at the fastest cost, which is also his experience along the way.
"There is no shortcut to science and technology entrepreneurship, especially hard technology entrepreneurship, each iteration contains multiple stages of prototype trial production, and a successful technology product must go through thousands of hammers to kill it," Li Zexiang shared in a speech.
The setting of the Songshan Lake robot industry base is based on this, and the administrative leader said, "Here, Idea will not just stay as a concept, you can quickly turn it into a prototype or a physical object, take it to the target group for testing, get feedback, and then come back to iterate." ”
The base has 15,000 square meters of shared incubation and research and development space, research and development, code writing, discussion and testing are carried out here; there are 24,000 square meters of shared pilot workshop and laboratory, Idea and the prototype made in the laboratory should be strictly tested in the pilot workshop, and survivors can be mass-produced.
In 2014, Li Zexiang, together with Gao Bingqiang, former Dean of the School of Engineering of HKUST, and Gan Jie, Vice Dean of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, established the Songshan Lake Robot Industry Base, which was supported by the Dongguan Municipal Government and the Songshan Lake Management Committee.
Li Zexiang's definition is that Songshan Lake is a practice base, with science and technology entrepreneurship and robot entrepreneurship, to test what kind of quality and ability students need, how to learn, can go further on the road of scientific and technological innovation. However, technology can only go up to the first step, and the second and third steps depend on a series of superpositions such as the resilience and financing ability of the market.
Regarding why it is located in Songshan Lake, Li Zexiang admitted in an interview, "After the projects represented by DJI have risen, the cost of land and rent in Shenzhen has become higher and higher, and we hope to find some wider space, so we can go to Guangming, Pingshan, and even Zhuhai around Shenzhen to investigate, a relatively fortuitous opportunity to come here." ”
In an interview with Intellectuals, Songling Robot mentioned that supply chain resources are a major advantage in Dongguan. "Songshan Lake adjacent to several towns, through the highway can be easily reached; several towns have their own characteristics, such as Liaobu has the largest second-hand car city, next to Dalang is the largest wool weaving city, Fenggang is the hardware city, Zhangmutou is the electronic city, etc., such suppliers have agglomeration, procurement is very convenient; like electronics, from Shenzhen's Huaqiang North to send things, a day to arrive, especially suitable for hardware entrepreneurship."
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="182" > Li Zexiang broke the wall</h1>
In 1999, Li Zexiang tried to combine some scientific research results of the laboratory with the industry in the Pearl River Delta, and he also proposed the Silicon Valley model of "high technology, globalization, employee shareholding, and venture capital". After all, at that time, the term Internet was still unfamiliar to Chinese people, and most people had only seen the concept in newspapers.
Li Zexiang's idea also sounds simple and simple — to commercialize research results through companies.
His first project was to use a control of the robot to the equipment manufacturing industry, the equipment manufacturing industry was a new topic at that time, before the procurement of standard equipment from outside, but with the localization of many manufacturing processes, equipment manufacturing must also begin to be localized.
He and the team used some standard motion control parts, spent more than 5 years to do motion control technology training, to the company to do the concept of promotion, in 2005 the product development, this is the birth of solid high-tech. In this way, Li Zexiang, who has always been deep in it, has witnessed the development of the equipment industry in Shenzhen and even the Pearl River Delta.
As one of the first lucky ones when the door opened to the outside world, Alcoa will train 2 undergraduates as a thank you for China's hospitality during its visit to China. In 1979, at the age of 18, Li Zexiang had just been admitted to Central South Minzhi University (the predecessor of Central South University of Technology) and was selected to study at Carnegie Mellon University, thus starting his american study trip.
In the 1980s, the young, knowledge-hungry rural guy was fascinated by efficient critical thinking in the United States, he liked to do seminars, debates, and he gradually learned to think independently. At that time, he found that the source of innovative talent should not be to look at the university employment rate or international rankings. At the same time, the engineer's culture and innovative thinking began to run through his thinking and practice.
Li Zexiang returned from the United States in 1992 to teach at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prior to that, he studied at Carnegie Mellon University, graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, and then worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year and NYU for three years.
In 1998, HKUST was invited by the mainland to send many professors to Shenzhen to participate in corporate cooperation, and not long after, professors who lacked practical experience withdrew. Li Zexiang is keen on practice and feels that this is a good opportunity. In 1999, he and his colleagues co-founded the well-known enterprise in the field of motion control in China, GuGao-Tech, and served as the chairman of the board.
From then to now, what he has been doing unremittingly is to break through the industry-university-research model in the field of intelligent hardware and reform engineering education. In his speech in 2017, Li Zexiang repeatedly proposed to build "China's Silicon Valley", which is also a feeling that the innovation of Silicon Valley has benefited the world.
On this road, he has taken many detours. A semiconductor packaging equipment company incubated at the same time as DJI failed after five or six years; as far as the education reform is concerned, in 2010, at the invitation of Zhu Qingshi, the president of the University of Science and Technology of China, Li Zexiang and two other professors from the University of Science and Technology of Hong Kong participated in the preparation of Shenzhen Southern University of Science and Technology, but due to the incompatibility of the concept of running the school, three professors publicly announced their collective resignation a year later, which became the biggest storm in the education industry at that time.
In addition to SUSTech, Li Zexiang has also done curriculum reform and the introduction of new teaching materials in the National Defense Science and Technology University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and Harbin Institute of Technology, but he has not been able to show his fists due to rules and regulations.
Until 2010, he found a suitable experimental field in Dongguan, where education and industry can go hand in hand. He strives to explore how to systematically cultivate "Jobs", and Li Zexiang believes that the highest achievement of innovative education is successful entrepreneurship.
This person with multiple identities, dressed plainly, always likes to carry a torn school bag with worn shoulder straps when climbing, and when the students who come to the base do not see him, they are always a little afraid that he is too serious and severe, and after seeing real people, they feel simple and amiable.
An entrepreneur in the Songshan Lake Robot Industry Base is very proud and thinks that Guo Xiaoping will come to Songshan Lake to talk to them.
Resources:
China's Silicon Valley: The Dream of Robots by Songshan Lake. Di Li Hui. intelligentsia
Wall diggers from Berkeley to Dongguan. WU Yunfei. Tiger sniffing
Li Zexiang: Academic entrepreneurship and manufacturing broke the situation. LI Zexiang. intelligentsia