When mature venture capital institutions invest in a project, their general business model includes "financing, research, investment, management, and withdrawal". Among them, the business process part of the connection between venture capital and target project enterprises often focuses on the two key links of "investment and management".

Generally speaking, institutional investors have their own clear set of investment management processes: establishing project channels, screening project BPs, gradually interacting with internal project approval, preliminary due diligence after the investment term list, signing a confidentiality agreement, entering the market for in-depth due diligence, writing investment reports, internal meetings, negotiations, meetings, signing investment agreements, changing articles of association and industrial and commercial registration, completing share delivery, and finally making payments, and then starting the subsequent management value-added and project supervision stages.

It's a very complex and rigorous process!

Under normal circumstances, many start-up companies take the initiative to seek financing from venture capital companies! Therefore, venture capital companies are passive and occupy an active position. However, there is also the case where the startup has already shown great potential, or where multiple VCs are interested in a startup at the same time.

At this point, the active-passive relationship is reversed. It has become a venture capital that has taken the initiative to come to the door and beg to invest in startups.

Facebook, apparently, is the case.

A year ago, Hu Jingjing didn't know how many times she had received calls and consultation letters from investment companies, asking if Facebook had any intention of accepting financing.

At that time, Yu Wenfei instructed him, but he refused all of them and did not consider them.

A website like Facebook, in the eyes of major VCs, is like "Tang monk meat"!

The most trendy Internet direction, classifying an almost forgotten Internet website - blog, has been reformed and done well.

Look at the momentum, it has even become the largest sharing social networking site in the country!

The potential of this kind of website is not an exaggeration to say that it is comparable to Tencent QQ, and even in terms of revenue generation, the website has a natural advantage over chat software.

In other words, Facebook will be easier to monetize traffic than QQ.

Therefore, there have long been many VCs "drooling" over Facebook, including SoftBank China, of course.

............

SoftBank China is naturally led by Xue Chunhe, and Director Wang is led by Jiaotong University Venture Capital Fund.

As soon as they met, Xue Chunhe held Yu Wenfei's hand tightly, and said with a smile on his face: "I have long heard from the old principal that we have produced a great junior brother at Jiaotong University! I have always wanted to meet you, but the two of us are too busy, and we didn't meet for the first time until today." In the future, we will move around more, we are all alumni, our own people!"

Director Wang next to him also smiled and said: "Both of you are the pride of Jiaotong University, and you are both successful in your careers. ”

That's the benefit of being from a prestigious school.

Among the alumni who graduated in previous years, some of them may have stood out and become bigwigs in various industries.

Of course, Yu Wenfei doesn't need anyone to help, what he has to consider is who he needs to support.

"Hello senior brother, I have admired the name for a long time, SoftBank China is a famous name in the venture capital circle under your leadership, and Alibaba's 20 million investment is indeed very visionary!" Yu Wenfei also shook Xue Chunhe's hand and responded.

Investing in Ali is Xue Chunhe's proudest thing, although Ali is far from the Ali empire in the future, but in the field of e-commerce, it has shown a momentum of unparalleled momentum.

Xue Chunhe laughed, shook Yu Wenfei's hand again, and said: "That was a few years ago, in the past two years, there is only one company I want to invest in the most, and that is Facebook!"

After a period of greetings, Yu Wenfei led everyone into the large conference room, and after taking their seats, they began to get to the point.

"Mr. Xue, Director Wang, I am very glad that you are optimistic about and trust in Facebook, the basic situation of Facebook does not need me to introduce it, I think you have already understood. Today, you are sitting here to come to a consensus that Facebook needs money to further develop, and you, by investing in Facebook, will reap huge returns......"

After finishing speaking, Yu Wenfei motioned to Hu Jingjing to distribute the sorted out Facebook-related data to everyone.

Although the venture capital company has done preliminary due diligence, a lot of internal data is not so easy to collect, and it needs to be provided by Facebook, and these materials are those data.

Xue Chunhe and Director Wang opened the information at hand one after another and looked at it carefully.

Facebook has more than 80 million registered users and more than 30 million daily active users, all of which can be found through third-party statistical websites.

However, such as the number of clicked pages per capita, the number of link redirects, the number of posts per capita, the number of comments and likes, the number of followers per capita, etc., these are not available to third-party statistical websites.

Looking at the information at hand, Xue Chunhe was even more determined to invest in Facebook.

Needless to say, Director Wang, before he came, he received a notice from President Li that Jiaotong University Venture Capital is a co-investment and must be invested. But they can't come up with too much money, and how many shares they can get in the end depends on the results of the talks between SoftBank and Facebook.

Therefore, in this negotiation, he is ready to just listen and not talk, and let SoftBank charge forward.

After reading it, Xue Chunhe closed the information at hand and exclaimed: "Very beautiful data! Being able to do Facebook to such an extent in half a year is really the first time I have seen it for so many years!"

Yu Wenfei smiled faintly: "Mr. Xue has won the award." ”

"So, how much money does Mr. Fei plan to raise and how many shares to transfer in this financing?" Xue Chunhe asked with a blazing gaze at Yu Wenfei.

started to talk about business, then it was necessary to put aside the alumni friendship for the time being, and in terms of title, the two people also coincidentally became "Mr. Xue and Mr. Fei".

"Let's talk about Facebook's valuation first, which is the foundation. Yu Wenfei said calmly.

Xue Chunhe nodded in agreement.

"Facebook now has 85 million registered users, and with reference to the recent user growth rate, the number of users will officially exceed 100 million in half a month, or at most a month, and the number of daily active users will exceed 40 million. On the basis of these two key figures, by comparison. We believe that Facebook should be worth more than Sina and Sohu. Yu Wenfei said solemnly.

The three major domestic portals, Sina, Sohu and NetEase have all been listed on the NASDAQ, and their market capitalization is also very clear. So it is normal for Yu Wenfei to compare them to get the valuation of his company.

Xue Chunhe nodded, then shook his head again, and he said: "Compared to Sina Sohu NetEase, I have no opinion. But if you want to say that Facebook surpasses them in terms of market capitalization, I have reservations. ”

At the beginning of 2003, Sina had a market capitalization of $3.2 billion, the highest of the three portals.

This is followed by Sohu's $2.8 billion market capitalization, followed by Sohu.

The weakest is NetEase, with a market value of only $1.8 billion.

According to Yu Wenfei, more than the three major portals, that means that the market value of Facebook will exceed 3.2 billion US dollars!

This made Xue Chunhe a little unacceptable.

Although Facebook's data is very rebellious, but this is your A round of financing, is the asking price so high......

"Oh, does Mr. Xue have any different opinions?" asked Yu Wenfei unhurriedly.

"All three of these companies have been listed, and although their market capitalization is relatively objective, they are ...... Everyone understands that there is a certain amount of moisture in this. The market value of a listed company does not represent their actual value, which contains investors' expectations for the company's future prospects. In addition, the portal is currently the most mainstream in the Internet industry and has the strongest traffic monetization ability, in this regard, I think the blog website can not be compared with the portal. Therefore, I agree that Facebook is qualified to be on a par with NetEase, but it will not surpass Sohu, let alone Sina. Xue Chunhe said slowly.

Xue Chunhe believes that the prospect of the portal is better, and the monetization ability of the blog website is weaker than that of the portal.

At that time, for Internet companies, investors still valued the ability to liquidate in the future, they could accept short-term losses, and even long-term losses could endure them, but your business should be profitable after all.

At that time, the Internet industry was very simple in terms of the means of monetizing traffic, and the only way to do it was through advertising......

Therefore, through advertising, Yahoo has been able to dominate the world in terms of market value for several years in a row.

Also through advertising, Google quickly rose to become a new generation of Internet overlords.

Sina, Sohu, and NetEase also became the three major Internet giants in China around 2000 through advertising.

This is also the reason why when people open a portal like Sina, they find that there are so many advertisements on the homepage that they can blind your eyes.

The homepage of Facebook is so simple and pleasing to the eye, it was definitely a clear stream in the Internet at that time, and other websites just went online thinking about how much advertising space to set aside, as long as there is a chance to pull ads, you will be given any position.

Yu Wenfei also shook his head, although Xue Chunhe has the ability and vision, but the vision is still not long-term enough, and the pattern is not big enough.

Obviously, Xue Chunhe was still limited to the Internet environment at that time and could not see the future development direction of the industry.

Traffic monetization does not have to go through the traffic entrance!

He opened his mouth and said: "Mr. Xue, I have considered how Facebook will monetize in the future. It's not easy to disclose the exact means at this point, but one thing I can guarantee is that in the near future, within three to five years, Facebook's profitability will exceed that of these three major portals, or rather, more than their combined!"

These words made Xue Chunhe dumbfounded, his own junior ......

It's too good to blow!