On June 5, Xiaomi invested 200 million yuan to establish a venture capital company. After 15 years, Lei Jun’s status as an investor may become active again.
In 2004, Lei Jun reluctantly sold Joyo.com to Amazon. With the $7.5 million in exchange for Joyo.com in hand, he was a little confused. After thinking for a long time, he decided to use the money to do something meaningful. Since your entrepreneurial dream has been frustrated, it is better to try to help others realize their dreams. Therefore, Lei Jun started angel investment. At that time, angel investment was still a new term in China, and there was no perfect legal and institutional guarantee, and the success rate was less than 10%. What should I invest in? Lei Jun has a famous saying, if you start a business, you have to stand on the forefront, and even pigs can fly.
He believed that the next 10 years would be dominated by mobile Internet, so he took a sack of cash to see who was doing mobile Internet. If the first place didn’t work, he would look for the second place, and if the second place didn’t work, he would look for the third place. name. One characteristic of Lei Jun’s investment is that he doesn’t care about the size of the company. More than 10 companies he invested in were started from scratch, and some of the companies were even named by him. In 2006, UCweb had only a dozen people and could not even pay the rent. It was about to go bankrupt. Lei Jun stepped in and invested 2 million yuan, occupying 10% of the shares. He said: "The future valuation of this company will definitely exceed your imagination!"
Facts have proved that he was right. In 2012, UC Browser was valued at US$300 million. In 2014, Alibaba acquired UC Browser for US$4.3 billion. Lei Jun’s investment that year directly increased in value thousands of times. Famous investor Xu Xiaoping once said that the angel investor he admires most is Lei Jun: "He likes to invest in an entrepreneurial way. Sometimes when he has an idea in his head, he starts discussing it with his friends, and then he looks for investment and builds the company step by step. Established." Lei Jun also became a "professional chairman." Many start-up companies are little known, and people don’t discover Lei Jun until their second or third round of financing.
The return on investment is as high as 100 times. On April 25 this year, electronic payment operator Lakala was successfully listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. With a market value of more than 20 billion, it was known as the "first third-party payment stock" of A-shares. Later, Sun Taoran, the founder of Lakala, posted a piece of gold brick on Weibo - a gift from Lei Jun. Sun Taoran said that Lei Jun and his brothers made an agreement that he would give a one-kilogram gold brick to whoever built a $1 billion listed company.
Yu Yongfu, chairman of UC Browser, has a piece, and Li Xueling, founder of Huanju Times (formerly known as Duowan.com), also has a piece. Lei Jun is so heroic precisely because he is not short of money. He once said that the amount of realizable assets he invested was astronomical. Lakala is Lei Jun’s first angel investment project, and he invested US$500,000. 14 years later, Lei Jun received an investment return of more than 200 million yuan, with investment income as high as 900 times. Similarly, Lei Jun invested US$1 million in YYY in 2005. Seven years later, Joyful Times was listed in the United States. Based on the opening price, Lei Jun received a book return of 112 times, and the shares he held were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
According to Pencil Road statistics, Lei Jun personally has 32 angel investment projects since 2004, of which 2 companies have gone public, 3 have landed on the New Third Board, 2 have been acquired by Xiaomi, and 1 were acquired by Alibaba, and 9 projects reached the C round and beyond. From this point of view, Lei Jun is undoubtedly a successful angel investor.
After the establishment of Xiaomi, the huge investment kingdom behind him, Lei Jun began to focus on his entrepreneurial dream, and the label of angel investor gradually faded. In 2011, Lei Jun established Shunwei Capital, holding 51 shares. Although investment behavior has shifted from individuals to organizations, in fact, Lei Jun is still making decisions. Xu Dalai, founding partner of Shunwei Capital, once told the media that Lei Jun will attend every meeting of Shunwei Investment Committee and all projects must be viewed and decided in person. Shunwei Capital also follows Lei Jun’s entrepreneurial investment style. Xu Dalai said that Shunwei is the VC closest to the incubator system in China, “We can create projects, come up with business ideas together, and then find people to work on them.
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According to incomplete statistics, Shunwei Capital has completed more than 300 investments, of which 9 companies were successfully listed last year, including star companies such as 51talk, Qutoutiao, NIO, and iQiyi .