Entrepreneurial "Fraternity"

What does a tech company do for a startup?

By husband and wife, Cisco started from pop;

By their parents, Bill Gates ' first big deal came from the mother of IBM's director, the first investor of Ma, who had a deep relationship with his father, the Yantian port group;

With alumni, at least 5,000 of the founders of the company are from Stanford, including HP, Yahoo, Cisco, SUN, EBay, Netflix, Electronicarts,intuit, and LinkedIn.

Entering the mobile internet age may depend on investment, not just money, but the "entrepreneurial fraternity" behind investment agencies.

In the venture capital organization Frontline Ventures, one of the most important investment principles is "VC Community". This high-force word is used to refer to the "entrepreneur cluster", that is, "all the projects and their cluster effect", of course, in the celestial we have more grounding of the argument, such as "XX department", "xx Gang", "xx school."

In addition to frontline ventures, basically all the investment institutions are hoping to invest in the company can form their own ecology, domestic also appeared to "Tencent department", "Ali department", "Baidu Department", "Redwood", "Jingwei department" and so on. This trend is now becoming apparent. Kim Pham from Frontline Ventures will explain in detail the origins, status and future of this "VC Community".

VC 2.0

Now, start-up companies are getting more and more easy, money is becoming less attractive, and startups need guidance and help. This guidance used to come from investment managers, but as investment managers have invested more projects, the attention and guidance that can be given to each start-up will be reduced.

On the contrary, now the start-up companies are facing increasingly fierce competition, shorten the "learning curve", as soon as possible on the right track, need more guidance. In the internet age, startups are faced with global competition, they need to understand other areas, regions and cultures, and this often goes beyond the team's own knowledge, and not one of the investment managers can provide.

Of course, in order to develop well, resources are indispensable. If we can integrate more resources as soon as possible, startups can get more "power" and accelerate development. And depending on the strength of the entrepreneurial individual, talk about quality resources or cooperation time consuming, consumption, and money. Most of the time, there are often no.

When capital is no longer the most important thing that VC offers (which is debatable), entrepreneurs are increasingly valuing how much VC can help build the company. At this time if you can put the investment of the start-up companies or founders into a network, the personal knowledge, the company's successful experience, the project failed to condensed into a "collective wisdom", there will be greater competitiveness.

Venture Brothers

This is well understood, so why is it the Brotherhood of the core of investment institutions?

As we all know, people tend to be categorized to gain group status or membership, forming identity and cultural identity. This classification of standards, both congenital, such as gender, age, color, ethnicity and even household registration, also have the day after tomorrow, such as education factors, personal occupation, consumption grade. This is the inevitable law of the development of human society. VC behavior can not be divorced from such a law.

Compared to the husband and wife, parents, friends, alumni, entrepreneurs have played the "entrepreneurial" label, forming a "entrepreneurial community", this is not only a kind of identity, have a common experience, more easily formed cultural identity. Considering that no one wants to have a heart-to-heart with the competing entrepreneurs in the field, in addition to the entrepreneurial itself, the most obvious common "symbol" among entrepreneurs is investment.

In fact, investment institutions can also provide entrepreneurs with resources other than "identity". The more projects you invest, the more areas you cover, the more industry experience and lessons you will have, and these are the things that entrepreneurs need.

Kleiner first proposed the Marvell Keiretsu concept, referring to the formation of corporate alliances like Japanese companies. The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of communication between companies. Now ambitious VC also uses this concept.

In the United States, a classic case is the venture capital institution, Round. In the past few years, they have quietly set up a service platform for their investment in the company, through investment tools, products to help achieve the sharing of resources among companies, thereby adding value to the investment companies. They opened all the founders of their partners, investment managers, financial staff and even investors, releasing HACKPR in 2012 to help start-ups introduce media resources. So far, Round Capital has invested nearly 200 companies, including Uber, path and so on.

NextView Ventures established a blog called the View from Seed, which provides guidance and other resources for seed-wheel companies. Sequoia Capital, the Union Square Ventures, will collate the data of the invested projects and share them with the invested companies.

More radical to Count a16z. In the investment community, I am afraid that no one knows the "Andreessen Horowitz effect". Andreessen Horowitz, in addition to providing investment for start-ups, has formed a structure that can support entrepreneurs, providing a full range of services that have upended the entire venture in just three years. The companies they have invested include Skype, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare, Pinterest, Airbnb, Fab, Groupon and Zynga.

In fact, the domestic entrepreneurs, investors are not unfamiliar. For example, Lenovo Star has entrepreneurial CEO special training classes, in addition to entrepreneurial guidance, will also lead to the cooperation between entrepreneurial projects; for example, seven of cattle partners have Camera360, both of them have been through Jingwei investment.