It's about a two-hour flight from Seattle to Silicon Valley, and after chatting with Jennifer for a while, Du Qiu opened his laptop and demonstrated the unfinished iDesign software, which he was busy developing at Microsoft these days, storing a lot of test materials on his computer's hard drive, and soon designed a web page that was very humble in 2016 but looked beautiful in 1995. Pen % fun % Pavilion www.biquge.info

"OK, that's almost the end of a web page. ”

The seats in the private jet can be adjusted, and there is a detachable desk, which is very convenient to communicate, Jennifer and Du Qiu sat side by side, just like appreciating the painter's painting, watching his smooth operation, dazzling typing, and after a while, the web page was ready, faster and more chic than everyone I had seen before, and I couldn't help but exclaim: "It's amazing!" Autumn, it's a very useful piece of software, it's much more efficient than Vermeer's Frontpage, and it's easy to use. ”

Vermeer is a blank, from scratch to develop web production software, Du Qiu is once in the sea, after seeing the prosperity of the upside down research and development, one is from the bottom of the mountain to climb up, the other is from the top of the mountain down, of course, it is not the same, he pushed the laptop to Jennifer's side, asked: "Do you have a trial version of Frontpage?"

"Yes, but in the office, I can make a copy to you if you need it. Jennifer took the mouse, looked at the web page she had just designed, and said confidently: "Tim will love your product." ”

"Where is Vermeer, how many employees does it have?"

Jennifer was perceptive, glanced sideways at him, and asked, "You want to buy them?"

"The software is a half-in-product, with a lot of flaws, and I need to work on it manually. ”

The requirements for free and open source software are relatively low, as long as the basic functions are okay, they can be released, because they can be modified and improved at any time according to feedback, but closed-source charging software is not good, it is impossible to just sell version 1.0 today, and version 1.1 will come out next week, in this way, users will wait and see, unwilling to buy, so in the traditional software industry, most of them only update a version in one or two years, the cycle is relatively long, and the requirements for quality are relatively high.

Besides, if Vermeer is not annexed, it won't be long before they are acquired by Microsoft, leaving one more competitor for nothing......

In the style that Microsoft likes to bundle, once Vermeer is acquired, the web pages designed with Frontpage can only be browsed on Internet Explorer......

"Vermeer has only a few people, and we're looking for investment everywhere, and it doesn't take much money to acquire them. Jennifer was impressed by Du Qiu's demonstration just now, and was very optimistic about the idesign project, regarded it as a bag, and took the initiative to propose: "We can act as a middleman to help you operate." ”

"Wait until you've met your boss. ”

"Autumn, I retract what I just said, you are not a confident person, you are a victim paranoia. Jennifer put down the mouse, spread her hands and asked, "Why are you so resistant to VC? We are not man-eating monsters, we are boosters to help you grow." ”

"Jennifer, startups are like girls, most of the boyfriends you find at the age of sixteen or seventeen are not good boyfriends, and Snapdragon is still just a twelve or thirteen-year-old girl. Du Qiu looked at her delicate facial features, trying to remember this beautiful face, and asked Zhengse: "There are many, many startups in Silicon Valley, why did you choose to ask me for the first investment?" I am a Chinese, you don't know my character, you don't understand our country's culture, and even you don't know what products my company is making. ”

"I was impressed by your interview in Wired. Jennifer put up three fingers and explained: "You have a good story, a good product, and a good concept, and the risk of investing in you is very small, and the return is great, because the media likes your story, and when they report on you, they will also increase the exposure of the product, for example, after Wired published your story in May, iView's market share rose from less than 8% to 15.7% in one month." ”

"It seems that your year as a reporter for "Red Herring" was not in vain. ”

"Of course. Jennifer smiled politely and said: "When Jim Clark invested in Mark Anderson to start Netscape in April last year, that's what he did, a 22-year-old genius boy who was suppressed by the bureaucracy and forced to resign and wander to Silicon Valley, where a frustrated billionaire started his own business again, old and young, working together to chase the American dream with high technology, and so on, and the fame of Netscape was stirred up in a few months, when they didn't even have a beta version of the product." ”

"Bureaucratic crackdown on Mark Anderson?"

When he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA management forced him to leave the Masic browser development team, taking away the software rights, and Mark Anderson had to work for a small company in Silicon Valley. Jennifer is worthy of being a reporter, and there is a lot of gossip news, introducing: "Jim Clark is the founder of SGI, with a fortune of more than $300 million, and he failed in the company's internal struggle a few years ago and was kicked out of the company, so he invested in Netscape." ”

"I see. ”

"For ordinary users, the high-tech industry is very mysterious and boring, and they are not interested in understanding professional terms such as code, algorithms, mathematics, rendering, etc., and it is very difficult to publicize, so if the founder of a company has a good story, it is a great advantage. You see, Netscape had a good story and then it worked, and other browser companies failed because the exposure wasn't on the same level. ”

This girl is really a woman who inherits her mother's business, and she is very talented in public relations and marketing......

Her mom spent a whopping $3 million a few months ago to buy a song from the Rolling Stones to promote Windows 95, presumably a similar tactic, because Bill Gates has no legend to tell other than wealth......

DFJ Ventures is located in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, which is a very small city, with a population of only 20,000 or 30,000, which is not as large as the local towns in China, but the environment is very good, right next to Stanford University, where Google was originally founded and Facebook is headquartered.

There is a street called Dune Road in Menlo Park, which is the headquarters of famous venture capital companies such as Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Huaying, Enyi Investment, and Mayfield, and is known as the core engine of Silicon Valley, and Wall Street in New York, which is said to be one of the most expensive places for commercial real estate rents in the United States.

When Du Qiu came to Menlo Park, it was already past 8 o'clock in the evening, and Chen Dayou, who had come from San Jose, asked as soon as they met: "Didn't you say a few days ago that it was a little too early to split up? )