Lin Feng didn't stay long in Los Angeles.

After a day of rest, he flew to San Francisco.

There, there's Uber, a start-up ride-hailing app company.

The idea for Uber originated at the LEEB Internet Summit in France in 2008.

At the time, Travis Kalanick and his friend Garrett Camp were in Europe with a large amount of cash to attend the annual Leeb Technology Conference in search of new business opportunities.

Kalanick had just sold his second startup, Red Soosh, for $20 million, and Kemp had sold his online content discovery engine, StumbleUpon, to eBay for $75 million the year before.

When they stood on the streets of Paris on a snowy night, they couldn't get a taxi. As a result, the idea of a taxi-hailing system based on the Internet as a platform was born spontaneously in the hearts of the two.

Their philosophy is simple: press a button and the car comes.

So, after returning to San Francisco, in 2009, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp founded "UberCab" in downtown San Francisco, the earliest prototype of Uber, and received $200,000 in seed funding in August 2009.

In the beginning, there was only one car on the Uber platform, which was an exclusive driver they paid for. When you call a taxi, the APP will send the passenger's GPS to the driver, and the driver will come to pick you up.

In the early days, they only used it for their own use, but later they showed it to their friends, and their friends were stunned and said they wanted an invitation code.

As the number of users gradually increased, the two co-founder's dedicated drivers were soon insufficient. Then everyone felt that this side project had a drama and was worth trying seriously, so they contacted some car rental companies as drivers, and slowly it got bigger and bigger.

In June 2010, Uber's ride-hailing service went live in San Francisco.

Although it was an innovative business, it was not very popular at the time, and shortly after they were founded, they received an injunction from the San Francisco Transportation Authority and the California Public Utilities Commission.

The two agencies have criticized many of UberCab's actions because UberCab uses the word "cab" in the company's name without applying for a taxi license.

Moreover, at this time, Kalanick has been in business for ten years, although he has just passed the age of establishment, but for Silicon Valley, he is already middle-aged.

To be honest, at this time, he and the Uber he founded, whether it is the founding team or the business model, actually do not conform to the aesthetics of Silicon Valley investors......

However, no one could have imagined that this company would grow at an almost subversive speed, unexpectedly fast, with frightening competitiveness and the power to disrupt and restructure the social fabric.

In fact, it is the slow popularization of mobile Internet and positioning technology that has led to the emergence of some disruptive new business models.

Uber just chose the right time and settled on the right runway.

Uber's biggest advantage is the surprising and even stunned ease of use, with many users finding it unbelievable how quickly drivers can take orders and get to the passenger's chosen location. It has created one of the most straightforward taxi service models that are so convenient in 21st-century urban life that they have become the norm for all services.

Lin Feng is very interested in Uber, not only Uber, but also Didi in China in the future.

The most valuable aspect of this kind of mobile Internet-based transportation application is, on the one hand, the invisible influence on the whole society, and at the same time, it can also promote the rapid popularization of mobile payment.

As for the fact that you can share the benefits of its rapid growth after investment, it is secondary.

Domestically, Alipay and WeChat Pay can be bundled with Uber China and Didi.

Overseas, Lin Feng plans to launch X Pay, a mobile payment function based on NFC (Near Field Communication Technology) on the Xphone, similar to Apple's Apple pay.

Therefore, investing in Uber is a multi-win thing, and Lin Feng will never miss it.

Interestingly, Uber's headquarters is not far from Titter's headquarters.

Lin Feng has invested in three rounds of Titter financing in a row, and is now about to conduct Series D, with a valuation of $1 billion.

Speaking of which, Lin Feng's previous investments have gradually begun to enter the harvest period.

Facebook is now valued at more than $10 billion, LinkedLN is about to go public, and Gopro is highly sought after, currently valued at nearly $1 billion.

If nothing else, next year, that is, starting in 2011, the Silicon Valley companies that Lin Feng previously invested in will be listed one after another, first Linkedln, then Facebook, then Titter, and then Gopro......

This is also a very rewarding thing, Lin Feng still likes the name of "God of Investment".

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With Lin Feng's current fame, he personally came to the small company of Uber, which surprised the founders Kalanick and Kemp, and then became excited!

Even Lin Feng is optimistic about their company's business, which undoubtedly gives them great confidence!

Truth be told, there's not much to describe the process of investing in Uber, and Kalanick and Kemp seem stunned by the surprise, gushing about their dreams and trying to show that Uber will be popular, and these Lin Feng even know better than they do.

Lin Feng only mentioned two points: first, rapid expansion in the form of subsidies, and second, pay attention to good communication with local traffic management departments.

As for the investment, it went very well.

With an investment of $10 million, Lin Feng accounted for 35% of the shares and enjoyed Pro-rata (the right to follow the investment).

Kalanick, who is over 30 years old and has already experienced two entrepreneurial failures, is not as vigorous as a young man like Xiao Za, who has just dropped out of college and started his own business, he is more compromising, and he is more cunning.

He attaches more importance to Lin Feng's identity and the resources behind him.

Lin Feng is now under the system of overseas assets, whether it is Xmobile, Facebook, or Titter, which has greatly helped the rapid development of Uber.

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Later, Lin Feng went to another sharing economy representative company also located in San Francisco, the American short-term rental website Airbnb.

This is also a "unicorn" company that will be on par with Uber in the future.

Unlike Uber, Airbnb has been around for two years.

The two founders, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, both graduated from the prestigious Rhode Island College of Art and Design (RISD).

The inspiration for Airbnb is also interesting:

At the end of 2007, Brian got tired of life as an industrial designer in Los Angeles and quit his job to drive north to San Francisco with his $1,000 savings to join his friend Joe Gibia.

Joe told him the rent was $1,150...... , Brian regretted a little and moved to San Francisco without asking.

Under pressure to survive, they want to solve the rent shortage. That year's design conference was held in San Francisco, and there weren't enough houses, so Joe and Brian took out the air bed at home and inflated it.

3 people stayed on their hoverbeds that weekend, one from Utah, one from India, and one from Boston.

So, Airbnb started out to solve a real existential problem: the founders of many great companies are solving their own problems, maybe not as great as saving wildlife, but some pain points found in their own lives.

Entrepreneurs have deeper insights and observations than ordinary people when solving their own pain points.

A few months later, they were joined by their mutual engineer friend, Nathan Blecharczyk. Brian is the big leader, Joe is mainly responsible for website design, and the BNB Three Musketeers are officially formed.

In the summer of '08, (), I started to meet investors. However, the investors were not very cold, 15 angel investors, 8 rejected them, and 7 ignored them at all......

Debt-indebted and on the verge of bankruptcy, they decided to try it out at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in '08. From my first experience in San Francisco, people will need to find other ways to stay when the supply of hotels exceeds the supply.

No one invested and the website didn't make any money, so they designed two cereals packaged as presidential election-themed — *** and McCain.

Because they didn't have the budget, they approached a student at the Rhode Island School of Design to print 1,000 cardboard box covers, fold them at home, and paste them with hot glue.

At that time, Brian often pondered: Why did Zuckerberg's Facebook go viral on American campuses in a matter of months, while no one used his product, and now it was reduced to pasting cardboard boxes in the kitchen?

Because they couldn't afford to buy big-name wheat rings, they drove to a cheap supermarket far away every night to buy a $1 box of cereal (wheat rings) to reduce costs and assemble wheat rings.

They sold at the conference for $40 per box and eventually sold more than 500 boxes, raising nearly $30,000 for the company.

Although it survived on the income from selling crop circles, in 2009, Airbnb almost went out of business.

Like many startups, they launched a product, but with few followers, the company made a profit of about $200 per week. There was also a rift between the three young founders, which was nothing less than a matter of adding insult to injury.

It's no secret that VC firms are looking for companies that are looking for something that moves like a hockey stick (a company with high growth potential), but that's not the case with Airbnb, where the three founders are being forced to max out their credit cards.

Fortunately, at this time, an investor finally noticed them.

An investor named Paul Graham invited them to join a startup incubator called Y Combinator, and Paul gave them a small amount of funding and training. However, it was this little help from the "godfather of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley" that planted the seeds for the trio's success.

The advent of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States has also provided opportunities for Airbnb to grow, with a large number of vacant houses and many people willing to rent cheaper and more practical homes instead of staying in high-end hotels.

At the same time, they found that the tenants didn't know how to put the best side of the room in the way they could.

The poor photo-taking techniques and poor copywriting of the homeowners obscure the strengths of the house itself. So they spent $5,000 to borrow a high-end camera and go door-to-door to take free photos of many New York homeowners. Soon, bookings in New York doubled or tripled, and the company's revenue in the city doubled that month.

They began to realize that rooms were the core of Airbnb's product and therefore needed to be packaged, and this shift in mindset drove Airbnb from a ticket-like Couchsurfing company to an online travel accommodation company.

According to the trajectory of the previous life, Airbnb will receive 7.8 million Series A investment from Sequoia Capital and other institutions in the second half of this year, and rapidly expand globally, and its valuation will exceed $1 billion next year......

And Lin Feng's stake at this time can be said to be on the eve of the imminent outbreak of Airbnb.

Similarly, for $10 million, Lin Feng successfully won a 40% stake in Airbnb and Pro-rata.

I have to say that with Lin Feng's current status, he also deigned to go to negotiate investment in person, whether it was the founder of Uber or Airbnb, he was flattered.

likes to collect "unicorn" companies, which can be regarded as Lin Feng's little bit of bad taste now.

For the two investments this time, Lin Feng invested in the name of the "Lin Family Trust Fund".

In fact, he is also planning to transfer all the shares of overseas companies, including Facebook, Titter, Linkedln, etc., to the family trust.

The shares of Fengxing Group, Cool Wind Group, and Hefeng Financial Services will also slowly transfer from his private company to the Maple Leaf Foundation and family trust.

This can be regarded as a guarantee for Lin Dandan and the soon-to-be-born Lin Huahua in the future......

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After finishing his stay in San Francisco, Lin Feng flew to New York again.

There, he met with the bosses and bankers of several of Wall Street's largest fund institutions to discuss whether they could provide financing support when Cool Wind Group acquired Nortel Networks.

After all, the opponent is a giant like Apple and Microsoft...... A multi-billion dollar acquisition is too risky to rely solely on Coolwind's own cash reserves.

Lin Feng still hopes to be prepared.