Rebirth 2010: I taught Mr. Lei how to make a mobile phone

Chapter 241 Xiaomi raises funds, valued at billion US dollars
Jobs was a universally recognized genius, but after making achievements he was kicked out by Apple's board of directors.

The reason why a genius is called a genius is that he can achieve success in different industries. By chance, Jobs acquired Pixar, which was still a computer graphics studio, and this led to the world's first computer animation movie "Toy Story".

Later, Apple fell into crisis, and Jobs' return as the king led to everything that happened later.

In fact, Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer as early as 03. There are many types of cancer. Fortunately, the one Jobs suffered from was a relatively "mild" type. He was one of the people in the world who had access to the highest medical resources, and after surgery, his cure rate was very high.

Unfortunately, geniuses are always aloof and selfish. Jobs hated operations and repeatedly rejected the advice of his exclusive doctor, preferring to believe in so-called vegetarian therapies and folk remedies.

In 04, Jobs missed the best time for treatment due to his stubbornness, and his eight-year fight against cancer ended in failure.

The biggest difference between rich people and ordinary people when facing illness is that money can prolong life but cannot buy life.

If it were an ordinary person, it might take only one year to spend all the family wealth, and it would not take even 1 years.

Chen Mo felt sad again when he saw the news. After all, he didn't have the chance to meet and chat with his lover. He couldn't help but feel a sense of regret that he was gone before he was alive.

At the same time, he also posted a screenshot of Apple's official website and a candle emoji on his personal Weibo.

On October 10, Xiaomi Technology announced that it had completed a US$9 million Series B financing round, with the company's valuation reaching US$5.27 billion. The funds will be used for the subsequent research and development of new Xiaomi products, expansion of production lines, and expansion of overseas markets.

In addition to Morningside Venture Capital, Qiming Investments and individual investors who led the previous round, Singapore sovereign funds GIC and DST also participated in this round.

Singapore's sovereign fund GIC was led by Xu Dalai, while the latter DST took the initiative to invest.

Speaking of DST, it appeared in the investment world as a mysterious dark horse in the early 2000s.

Xiaomi is currently rising strongly in the mobile phone market, with orders and sales of tens of millions of units and annual revenue of hundreds of billions of RMB. Investment banks and law firms in the market currently value Xiaomi in the price range of US$50 billion to US$70 billion.

The fact that Xiaomi has such a high valuation today is largely due to the contribution of Yuri Milner from Russia, the head of DST Investment Group. He valued Xiaomi at 100 billion US dollars, which even Lei Jun himself found unbelievable.

Chen Mo was even more surprised than Lei Jun. He was impressed by the courage, decisiveness and vision of this Russian man. He actually fell in love with Xiaomi at first sight, just like measuring it with a ruler.

In the evening, at Xiaomi’s financing celebration dinner, Chen Mo met this legendary Russian investor.

After a conversation, Chen Mo learned some more specific things.

During the financial crisis in 08, DST offered $2 million in exchange for 2% of Facebook’s shares, but did not want a board position or decision-making power. Such an attractive offer was an example of a person with a lot of money and no one could refuse it. When Facebook went public, Milner sold his shares and cashed in $24.45 billion.

The characteristic of successful people is to replicate past successful cases, that is, to make success replicable.

After investing in Facebook, DST moved on without stopping, paying high prices and without any decision-making power, and acquired Zynga, Groupon, Twitter and Airbnb one after another.

Last year, DST invested all over Silicon Valley. This year, it set its sights on China, a land full of magical power. DST not only invested in Xiaomi, but also invested US$15 billion in JD.com and US$5 million in Alibaba.

After a chat, the other party showed his true intentions and actually wanted to invest in Bian'an Technology. He gave a valuation of 20 billion US dollars and said that under his leadership, at least 3 million US dollars could be raised. Chen Mo politely declined.

Yuri Milner felt very sorry and said that they hope to have a chance to work together in the future.

After chatting for a while, both parties had a good impression of each other, especially their investment philosophies and some concepts about the Internet, and they had a very pleasant conversation.

Finally, they left each other their contact information before parting.

Before leaving, Yuri Milner said something meaningful, "MO, you are a very promising investor. I smell a kindred spirit in you!"

"What are you talking about?" At this time, Lei Jun finally got around to chatting with Chen Mo.

"Talking about investment ~ I am the reincarnation of Buffett"

"This is nonsense again. It was Steve Jobs who was killed a few days ago, not Buffett. This time you invested another 5000 million US dollars in Xiaomi. The revenue from the other side should be able to cover it. Why did you bring another 10 billion to the bank?" Lei Jun was a little confused about Chen Mo's operation.

"Loan to buy a house~"

"Get a loan to buy a house?" Lei Jun recalled what he had said to the district leaders at the dinner, and he felt a little enlightened.

"I hate the life of drifting in Beijing. Zhongguancun Software Park Phase II has just started construction. I plan to build a home there, which will cost more than 10 billion yuan.

How about being neighbors together? Are you interested? "Chen Mo encouraged Lei Jun to buy land and build houses for Xiaomi nearby.

Lei Jun actually thought about the feasibility, then shook his head, "Money should be spent wisely. If I don't invest the newly raised money in the mobile phone business but use it directly to buy land, the group of investors not far away will kill me."

"Oh, buying land now is a waste of money." "Forget it, Xiaomi's various businesses are still booming and this is where the money should be spent. Xiaomi is now like a perpetual motion machine with a continuous cycle. The output of this cycle becomes the fuel for the next cycle, and so on. If I use the funds to buy a house now, it will affect the development of Xiaomi.

Xiaomi is not like Bi'an, with less investment, so it can play this way."

"The server room alone is an investment of hundreds of millions of real money. Anyway, your younger brother has advised you not to do so, so Xiaomi should just continue to float."

"Once you move out of Wucai City, there will be enough space for Xiaomi. When are you moving?"

"You want to kick me out so soon? We haven't even started yet. I haven't signed the contract yet. It's just an intention."

"Well, you can rent 10 or 11 floors, but they won't work. Just rent one floor and we can negotiate the rent."

"We are close friends. When I asked for two floors, I wanted to leave one for you."

"Thanks in advance. This will save me a lot of worries. What do you think of Wang Chuan? I plan to recruit him into the core founding team to develop the Xiaomi TV and Xiaomi Box I mentioned earlier."

Wang Chuan, the founder of Leishi Technology, previously developed an e-reader called Duokan. This product is similar to Amazon's Kindle, but is more in line with Chinese people's reading habits, and its appearance is also very simple and beautiful. However, the emergence of iPad made him see the crisis, so he took the initiative to transform and enter the field of smart TV hardware and established Duokan Technology.

He then planned to get involved in the television industry starting with TV set-top boxes. He hoped that this box would have a Chinese operating system and rich Chinese online resources, and become a gateway for people to find film sources when watching TV in the future.

This development trajectory just fits in with the layout of Xiaomi and Shunwei Investment, and Lei Jun and Wang Chuan have been friends for many years, so he was invited to the celebration party and persuaded him to join again, and it was a good opportunity to hear Chen Mo's opinion.

"Dr. Zhou Guangping has already encountered some difficulties in coordinating with his peers in hardware. The company is growing faster and faster, and Xiaomi urgently needs to strengthen its hardware personnel. If Wang Chuan comes here, he will be a great general!"

"I think there's no problem. Once the Xiaomi Box and Xiaomi TV are ready, Wang Chuan can be in charge of the mobile phone supply chain. Dr. Zhou's ability is not available in the early stage, so it's really difficult. Being a deputy is his comfort zone!"

“By the way, when will Shunwei’s second batch of investment list be announced?”

"In two days."

Two days later, on October 10, Xiaomi officially announced that Wang Chuan became the company's eighth co-founder.

On the same day, Shunwei Fund announced its second batch of investment lists after a lapse of 5 months.

There are not many companies on this list, only three:
Meituan (3000 million), iQiyi (2000 million), Duokan Technology (2000 million), Zhihu (500 million)
Also not disclosed are dozens of mobile phone manufacturing, digital technology and home appliance manufacturing companies, with a total cumulative investment of 3500 million.

In addition to investing in the mobile phone field, Xiaomi has also, at the suggestion of Chen Mo, hit it off with Lei Jun and started to make early arrangements in the small home appliance industry.

Since we are going to make home appliances, how can we not have televisions? Since we are going to make televisions, after Wang Chuan and his team joined, the next content is a very critical link.

Currently, the video websites Youku and Tudou are already powerful, but have been losing money for years, while iQiyi has just emerged. Therefore, after Chen Mo made the proposal, the three of them discussed and added iQiyi to the list.

Now Shunwei has become the second largest shareholder of iQiyi after Baidu and has a certain say.

In fact, Chen Mo has some tricks up his sleeve. The subsequent video websites are getting more and more greedy. VIP is not enough, so they have VVIP and SVIP. What's even more outrageous is that they have gold, platinum and diamond members just like rank. Why haven't we seen the strongest king members? It is estimated that they will be available in a few years.

After paying for membership, you can't even skip the commercials before the movies, and the projection screen to TV is only at the lowest 480P. If you want HD, it's because your membership level is not high enough. You have to upgrade your membership to the supreme level.

They really want to make money and don't care about their reputation at all.

But Chen Mo also knows that capital is profit-seeking. If it doesn't work, he can wait for LeTV to go bankrupt in a few years and acquire a lot of film and television copyrights. See if he can become Xiaomi in the video field this time and build his own website to crush these money-conscious competitors.
The above investment amounts are all in U.S. dollars. So far, Shunwei Fund’s first batch of investment totaling 2.1 million U.S. dollars has been used up, and it is preparing to recruit the second round of funds.

However, Chen Mo did not continue to invest later because he now has Bia'an Venture Capital.

He only adheres to one principle when investing: investing in people rather than companies.

That is, I don’t care whether the business of a company has prospects or not. I just think this person is awesome, so I’ll just invest in him.

Chen Mo's investment theory is somewhat similar to the investment theory of other investment schools.

Now the information and public opinion department will send him personnel tracking reports regularly, and the movements of some personnel are under Chen Mo's control.

Don't be in a hurry and wait a little longer. After all, icing on the cake is never as precious as helping someone in need.

It's not a good deal if you try too hard.

Just like Lei Jun said, money should be spent where it counts!

(End of this chapter)