The ten-year summary of the internet "Queen"

There was no president on the Internet, but there was a queen, her name Mary Mik Mary Meeker, a 53-year-old woman who had just been transformed from an analyst into a venture capitalist. In 1995, Mick, a former Morgan Stanley analyst, foresaw that an unprecedented wave of innovation would change people's lives and create huge fortunes. And she summed up the point of view as a landmark report, so quickly established the "scientific and technological Nostra de Mas" status (Nostra de Mas, French astrologers).

And as a financial analyst, Mick helped Morgan Stanley capture major IPOs such as Netscape, Priceline and Google, and also recommended the AOL, Amazon, Intuit and Dell banknote printing machines. After the dotcom bust, many of her analysts who were in the same period were spurned by the market for their conscience, and even punished by regulators, but Mick was still out of mud. And the reason to be able to be alone, partly stems from Mick's belief in his own opinion. Even in the face of plunging, she still insists on her beliefs. And when investors lose confidence, she remains bullish on the value of some tech stocks-like Amazon. And the investors who follow her advice are also lucrative.

Now, everyone is listening to her advice. Since the middle of the 2000, her annual report on the status of the Internet has become an important event in the technology industry. Mick has always accurately grasped the pulse of the technology and investment industry, from the popularity of mobile computing to the rise of the Chinese market, without any omission. She released her latest report at the all Things Digital conference in May this year-19-minute speech with 99 slides. In her report, she highlighted a trend in which almost all human activity is changing-connecting (mobile), paying (Square), producing (3D printing), shopping (one Kings Lane), and even education (Codecademy). She summed up the trend as: "Everything, re-imagine."

In the 2011, Mick began to think about his life again. After 20 years on Wall Street, she moved to Kleiner, based in the Dunes Road, and became a venture capitalist who led the 1 billion-dollar "Digital Growth Fund" (Digital substituting Fund). She not only bets on famous startups like Square, Spotify and Twitter, but also invests in obscure businesses such as lending Club, DocuSign and Waze. She recently received a "wired" interview at Headquarters and used her portable ipad to summarize her reports for the past 10 years.

Q: You publish an internet Trend report every year. Do these trends stem from your research, or do you just collect a variety of data to support the trends you've seen?

Answer: both. For example, when I was lounging at Kleiner headquarters last year, I saw through the glass walls that there were some engineers in the conference room who were communicating with one of our venture capitalists, and I saw their speeches were pretty. I've never seen a male engineer in a flannel shirt make a nice ppt. I've never seen it. Then I took a round around the building and saw another beautiful set of slides. Same thing that happened on the same day. I found the situation a little unusual. So when the integration of design and technology is getting closer, it becomes clearer to me that this will be an important direction.

Q: These reports are not just for investors – these internet trends also reveal some technical or cultural information.

A: I agree that we have noticed a trend this year: people are willing to try the apps I mentioned in my speech.

Q: You push up the flow of Waze applications, and you seem to be the advertising spokesperson.

A: We are investors and we like this app. It has just broken through 20 million of users, whether in New York, Michigan, Colorado or Turkey, I've used it, and it feels like a video game in my hand.

Q: Have you ever invested in a product because of your personal preference?

A: In my most successful investment, I have used their products. such as apples. When I bought the fifth ipod, it suddenly occurred to me that my fourth part had not been unpacked and the package was fine.

Q: What is the greatest success that this strategy has brought you?

A: I personally, Amazon, Intuit, EBay.

Q: Are you obsessed with ebay?

A: Yes. The fascinating thing about it is that people don't say, "I just bought something on ebay." But it says, "I just won something on ebay." "So am I." The experience cheered me up. I also bought a car from ebay.

Q: What Car?

A: Nissan Xterra, second-hand.

Q: Have you brought this idea of hands-on practice to Kleiner?

A: Yes, I've set a rule for the Digital Growth Fund: Every company we invest in has to have someone who understands and uses their products closely. But it can't be the same person who is really in charge of the investment--not even the one who happens to have a crush on the product. For example, we invest in Zynga, but we don't want to be in charge of this investment by Bing Gordon, who is familiar with the gaming industry, and he is scheduled to learn about Codecademy. Every 6 months or so, he will tell us the latest codecademy. If there are any helpful information in the report, we will send the report to the company.

Q: During the dotcom boom of the late 1990, you were the biggest supporter of tech technology, and it helped. What do you think of that period now?

A: It's your opinion, I disagree. The investment cycle is pat: no one believed it at first, then began to believe it, then entered a turning point-a lot of people believed it. So the market began to prosper and eventually burst. If you look back at our report, we have repeatedly stressed that we believe that a few companies will be able to create huge sums of money. In a typical year, two companies usually go public and produce 10 times times the return on investment. Our job is to find these two companies. If you look at our combined rate of return, we will find this very impressive.

Q: Did you have a terrible time in the bubble?

A: @Home did poorly. Homestore is extremely disappointing, and it has made a mistake in its valuations and timing. There are also errors in the business model, and in the case of Homestore and @home, we have mistaken the business model.

Q: Is there another bubble now?

A: I don't think there is a bubble in the open market, but some companies in the private market are overvalued. The public market valuation is lower than the private market, but this should not be the case. Many companies will not be able to support their valuations.

Q: Why did you leave Morgan Stanley and Wall Street and switch careers into venture capital?

A: I've always wanted to invest. Kleiner has been talking to me about cooperation for ten years, and I feel that if I don't do it now, I may never be able to do it. I seem to have a lot of relevant experience to apply to the new cycle, new growth enterprises. We have seen similar situations in the 1980, 1990 and 2000.

Q: What have you learned so far?

A: Venture capital experts work harder than I thought.

Q: How do you decide whether to invest in a company?

A: You need to see something very basic. Big chance? is the management team outstanding? is the product or service excellent? From this point of view, there is not much difference between my work at Morgan Stanley. We might be looking at 1000 IPOs, and it's not just numbers that really make a difference, but the ability of entrepreneurs. We're kind of like bole.

Q: How do you determine if a person is good?

A: John Dole says you have to differentiate the missionaries from the mercenaries. Doerr Good people have an uncanny passion for the product, as is the case with Daniel Ek of Spotify. If you ask him a question, he already has the answer, he has already thought deeply about this question. If he doesn't know, he will try to find the answer.

Q: You released last year a copy of "American Company" (USA Inc). The United States as a company to analyze the report. Your conclusion is that the US is losing its edge, and the financial outlook will be miserable unless it changes direction. How did this conclusion come out?

A: In October 2007, I lived in New York, and the mortgage problem was more serious than I expected. In that year's report on Internet trends, we added a slide that read: "Be careful, the mortgage is out of the question." "The next year, when we were at the darkest hour of the financial crisis, I felt obligated to talk about it." Internet entrepreneurs may think there is no need to care about unemployment or GDP growth, but it is not, because it will affect your business. The theme of the speech was: "Wait for a bear market for a year, and make a five-year plan." ”

After that, I asked Liang Wu, a colleague of our digital team, how to merge the 10-year financial report of the United States, just like Google's financial statements. He said it would take about three or four hours. So he started to do it, and I looked and said, "Oh my God, people should think about this." ”

Q: You have repeatedly pointed out social security, endowment insurance, Medicaid, etc., which accounts for 57% of federal government spending in 2010.

A: Yes, it was embarrassing. We pay a lot of taxes, but we only have to study the government's financial reports to see where these taxes are used. If I can decide, I will distribute my taxes in a different way. I will continue to allocate this money to insurance, which is the most important. I hope we can have a vibrant ecosystem that will promote future growth and increase employment and education. We should help Americans to take care of themselves, to maximize the use of funds, and spare no effort to help them achieve self-help.

Q: Is Silicon Valley disconnected from the rest of the United States?

A: It depends on how you understand it. There are many immigrants in Silicon Valley-some from other countries and some from other parts of the United States. The children of Syracuse, who work for an internet start-up in San Francisco, can learn about the status quo in the United States, and the children of those who were cut off by financial services companies in 2008 can also appreciate the status quo.

Q: You are also an immigrant.

A: I grew up in a small town in northeastern Indiana. I spent my childhood in the United States, I was optimistic, my father was more than 50 years old. He volunteered to join the World War II when he was more than 40 years old. He went abroad for the first time by boat from San Francisco to Japan-he saw the world and brought back many optimistic personalities. He is a successful lawyer and a successful steel merchant. So I was fortunate to have grown up in the steel industry during the rapid growth period in the United States. My growing experience has made me believe that a person can have an impact. In Indiana, you can see this phenomenon in basketball: small towns can beat big towns, as they did in the film "Ambition" (Hoosiers). This is one reason why entrepreneurs attract me.

Q: Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are doing well, but what has Silicon Valley contributed to the rest of the United States?

A: I feel that people live better because they can get all kinds of information at a very low cost. Entertainment is getting cheaper, help is getting easier, and it's easy to avoid trouble. I think technology is making things worse than it really is.

Second, Silicon Valley has been different. Comparing the Oracle of the 1980 and the current Facebook management team, we can see that the former value sales and the latter pay more attention to changing the world. Their mentality and ideas have changed. Many of the young people who have just graduated are humble, and they have seen their parents suffer in times of economic hardship. They don't think everything is taken for granted, they feel they should go their own way. These children are creating incredible things.

Q: Do you see these characteristics from people who come to finance?

A: Yes. Think of the remark that Mark Zuckerberg quoted in the open letter of the prospectus Zuckerberg. (She takes out the ipad and starts looking.) "We want to reconstruct the way people communicate and consume information." "That's the most arrogant thing I've heard so far. But he has more than 900 million users, and he may be right. 5 years from now, if we look back, we may think that his ambitions are not big enough.

But for me, Google's mission is the most powerful--"organize global information so that everyone can access and use it." "We were involved in their IPO, and I had to ask myself," Do we agree? " I could have said no. But I remember thinking: "God, they might be able to do it." ”

Q: The IPO was very different, with two unusual founders adopting an unusual way of listing.

A: Yes, they're weird. They are stubborn, good entrepreneurs are very stubborn, but they are good at listening. I thought Microsoft would embarrass them, thinking their margins would fall in a few years, but that's not the case.

Q: In your industry, women are in the minority. Some people complain that the technology industry women's voice is too small, what do you think?

A: No one forced me to do science and technology. I do it because I have passion. I think if women are passionate and genuinely willing to succeed, they can succeed. In terms of relative numbers, men are clearly dominant. But in absolute terms, there are many successful women in the technology industry.

Q: Kleiner is now involved in a high-profile sex discrimination case, are you worried that it will affect the company's reputation?

A: This is a legal issue and I cannot comment.

Q: Several times in your interview, you used the ipad for information. When do you not use the ipad?

A: Very few. You don't have to play golf.

Q: Last question, what do you think of people calling you "the Internet Queen"?

A: The Queen is always better than grandma! I always put on a shelf sometimes. For example, three people in the company's dining area waiting for the coffee machine, I would say, "Sorry, I am the Internet queen, can jump the queue?" There are a lot of bad names.