Every spring is also a season for job-hopping for professionals, and the venture capital circle is no exception.
Editor’s note: This article from the micro-channel public number “first new sound” (ID: thefirstnewvoice), of: fish is not busy, Edit: Tianyan Hong, Planning: Mike,released with authorization.
The spring of each year is also a season for job hopping. Hopeless promotion, too much overtime, low salary, and poor co-worker relations are the main reasons for leaving.
After the 2020 epidemic, some people predict that there may be “retaliatory job hopping” this year.
This year’s “Talent Flow and Migration 2021” report of the Pulse Data Research Institute shows that compared with the same period last year, people in the workplace are even more tolerant of salary cuts and job-hopping. In the survey conducted in the same period last year, 25% of workplace workers made it clear that they would not accept pay cuts to change jobs. This year, only 15% of people chose not to accept it, and 60% said that as long as the rate of decrease is slightly smaller, it is still acceptable.
First Xinsheng interviewed 9 venture capitalists. Some of them resigned because of business adjustments to the new department, some resigned and started a business because they encountered a trend, and some quit because they were not consistent with the leadership concept….. .How did they make up their minds to resign step by step? In this process, what entanglements, helplessness, embarrassment and incomprehension have they experienced?
Let’s take a look at their job-hopping story and mentality.
01Business is stagnant and there is nothing to do
No project has been voted for in 2020
Li Ming Investor 4 Years
I resigned from an investment institution where I worked for 4 years.
The main reasons are two aspects. One is that this investment institution is partial to a state-owned enterprise. The overall investment rhythm, approval process, and decision-making system are not clear, the investment is relatively cautious, and the risk tolerance is not high. two is.
Currently, I am responsible for content operations on a well-known domestic Internet platform.
Before entering the new company, I communicated with the current leader and found that his working state and style are what I want to learn, and he can lead me to grow. So now, whether it is salary, leadership, or colleagues, I am very satisfied.
Although my new job does not have much connection with the contacts I have accumulated before, I will not make career planning very strict, and will make some simple adjustments under the big goal.
Most of the agricultural media are almost down, and there is no way to continue to develop
Xiao Liu started his own business for 2 years and invested in the industry for less than 1 month
In March, resigned from an agricultural and food technology media.
The main reason is that I think that as an agricultural media, there is no way for it to develop sustainably. Most of the agricultural media are almost collapsed, and their survival basically depends on the government’s business.
In 2017, I graduated with a postgraduate degree from a foreign agricultural university. I feel that there is a big difference in agricultural education at home and abroad. During my internship abroad, my income has reached the standard of ordinary people working for three or four years, but I think the job is too ordinary and not challenging, and the division of labor in the agricultural industry in that country has been very refined, and my development space is limited.
I am also a fresh graduate majoring in agriculture, 95% of whom enter the IT, finance, real estate and other industries. At the time I thought that starting a business might be a better thing.
In September 2017, I returned to China and partnered to start an agricultural education company. I was responsible for conducting training courses with a domestic agricultural university.
The ideal is beautiful, and the reality is very skinny. Business development has encountered challenges. First, the average salary of the agricultural industry is very low. It has been at the bottom of the average salary of all walks of life in the country for 20 years. Therefore, many young people trained choose to change careers or take civil servants in order to survive. Second, because we have too little information, we don’t know that there are many high value-added industries in agriculture. We only know that doing experiments in laboratories is very hard work.
The original intention of entrepreneurship and education was purely to train more agricultural practitioners, and in the end it turned into a purely sold educational product. Even so, the business model has not been established. One is that it is difficult for us to cooperate with universities, because start-up companies have no background. Second, if courses are offered, they can only start in the fall or spring, and enroll students six months or one year in advance, and the entire channel will be very long. The third is that they have limited abilities and traditional forms of communication, and there is no way to use the education system to develop on a large scale. The Internet cannot be realized, and it cannot be carried online (because the audience is small, and people’s willingness to pay for agricultural education is also small).
In 2019, I chose to work in the agri-food technology media, mainly to promote the concept of innovative technology in agri-food to the Chinese audience, but there is no reality here.Now my goal.
So I looked for a link that can really enter the decision-making process of the industry, thinking about investment and incubation, and joined the current investment organization.
At present, I have just joined the new investment institution for a week, and I firmly believe that the future path of agriculture must be internationalization and digitalization. The new institution can give me a platform to achieve internationalization.
In the future, I have a certain right to speak or industrial strength, and I will return to agricultural education. Because I think education is the awakening of a person’s life, and it can definitely affect a person’s decision-making for a long time. I haven’t done it so far because I haven’t seen a particularly good team, nor have I seen a particularly good model and technology.
02There is a better chance
Opportunities and outlets have arrived, so I came out to start a business
Zhang Minjin Investor 3 years
In January, I worked in the investment industry for more than 3 years and left my job to start a business. There are currently more than 20 people in the team, and I have received angel financing.
There are three reasons for starting a business. One is to wait and see for several years, and finally to wait for a suitable market opportunity; second, there is an excellent team to start a business together; third, the chip industry is ushering in a boom, and financing is much easier than before.
My team and I have been focusing on artificial intelligence algorithms and chips. We have done a lot of preparations since 2016, but we have not found a suitable landing opportunity.
Until 2020, Apple has applied ToF technology to its back camera, bringing unprecedented ecological opportunities for 3D imaging technology. In the context of the era of 5G and artificial intelligence, 3D imaging is expected to quickly gain market recognition, and market participants will also open up a new blue ocean.
The vision system is a qualitative change from 2D to 3D. In addition to the upgrade opportunity of the optoelectronic system, subsequent 3D image processing, 3D artificial intelligence puts forward higher demands on the chip. The amount of data and calculation required for 3D vision processing have doubled and must be completed locally. It is difficult for existing processors to complete these calculations with low power consumption and low cost, and cannot meet consumer-level applications, which gives 3D vision A huge market opportunity for artificial intelligence chips.
Actually, I have been engaged in chip design research since I was a graduate student, and it has been 18 years now. After graduating from his Ph.D., he worked in the Chinese Academy of Sciences for 10 years in processor design, during which he incubated a company in the research institute to make cloud artificial intelligence chips. However, due to the immature market environment at that time, it was difficult to implement artificial intelligence applications and financing was not easy, and the project was ultimately difficult to sustain.
In 2018, I received an invitation from an investor I talked about before, and after thinking about certification, I decided to work in an investment institution, mainly focusing on 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and chip racing. Over a three-year period, I invested more than ten dayAs a result of the Pre-IPO project, the current project development is pretty good.
At the end of 2020, we saw new opportunities in the chip industry, and at the same time received an invitation from the team, so everyone came out to start their own businesses together.
Compared with my first entrepreneurship, the biggest change I have now is to find big customers before starting a business, identify customers, understand market needs, develop products with customers, and ensure that products can be sold and promoted. This is because chips are a TO B business. If you don’t understand customer needs, product definitions are wrong, a lot of time will be wasted in redesigning products. Chip product development takes 6-9 months and the cycle is very long, and the company may die if it fails once. Drop. When we started our business for the first time, it was because we directly aimed at the international advanced technology and the major national needs, challenging the high difficulty, but due to the disconnect with the market, the application that has not been implemented for a long time, and ultimately failed.
Currently, newly established companies still have many difficulties, the most important of which comes from the project schedule and human resources. As a consumer electronics chip, the time to market is the lifeline, and it is necessary to desperately catch up with the development schedule every day. In addition, due to catching up with the trend and easy financing, there have been many start-up chip companies in the past two years. In addition, this year Internet giants such as Tencent, Ali, Baidu and ByteDance have begun to do chips for talents, and the market has more and more talent Scarce, talent has become the biggest difficulty for start-up chip companies.
Formerly in the fringe department, now a core executive
Wang Zhi 3 years in venture capital industry
At the end of January, I resigned from a well-known private domain marketing platform.
The main reason for leaving is that my department and job development are relatively restricted, and there is not much room for promotion, although the company itself is developing very well.
The division of this company is particularly detailed. The entire marketing department is divided into multiple departments. I am a subordinate department, and the department is divided into regions. I mainly do two things. One is to support regional agents to implement some activities and corresponding policies, and to provide support for sales materials. The other is to perform refined operations and continuous exposure in each industry according to the division of different industries. The effect is to get customers.
I feel that the work of the marketing department has not been paid special attention by the company and is not the core department of the company. This is also easy to understand, because To B is originally a sales-driven business model, the market position will not be too high, and most of the marketing functions are executed by the precision marketing department, we are marginalized.
I feel like doing the right and boring things every day.
Now, I am in charge of marketing in a startup company in the To B industry. The new job makes me very happy. On the one hand, I am more familiar with the company’s joint creation, and I have the same insights on many things. When I choose a job again, I am a person who values the team very much. You can see from him that an entrepreneur who has done something is veryMany characteristics, can learn a lot.
Secondly, the company is still growing at a high speed. It is a rare opportunity to accompany an early To B startup company from 0.5 to 1 by giving me space to play freely.
I also don’t have a clear career path. After graduating in 2018, my first job was as a market in a VC organization. Later, I also wanted to switch to an investment manager. However, I just graduated and had no entrepreneurial experience. I was an investment manager and told entrepreneurs what is right or wrong. It doesn’t feel good. Reasonable, so I hope to learn and exercise in frontline positions.
In the future, if I have accumulated enough experience in a startup company, I will return to investment institutions, about 35 to 40 years old, and use my own money to invest in my own cognition. We once did a survey of the fund industry and found that investors with good investment projects are probably between the ages of 32 and 36.
I may enter as an LP. Since it is a project that I am optimistic about, why don’t I invest money myself? Many investors around me started to go to work in the companies they invested in, including Lianchuang in my current company as their investors. There are more and more cases of this kind. I don’t rule out that I feel ok at a certain stage, and I have a certain amount of accumulation in my hands. Then I will do the corresponding things. This road has not been blocked.
The career direction is still in the investment circle, so I resigned from the previous startup
Yangliu Venture Capital Industry for 3 Years
At the end of February, I officially resigned from a startup company.
The main reason is that work is inconsistent with long-term career planning.
I studied business and worked as an FA in an institution after graduating from graduate school in 2018. The one that gave me the most sense of accomplishment was the successful financing of 10 million yuan for the small project I was responsible for, and the process went very smoothly.
At that time, I knew a little about finance, but I was not very familiar with the operation and industry of startup companies, so I went to a startup company to study for a year and a half in 2019.
During this period, I was mainly responsible for the two parts of marketing and branding. The job of the market was to bring clues to the sales department through online live broadcasts and offline activities, and convert them into company customers. Here, I have a deep understanding of the entire To B marketing system and style of play, and I have gained a lot.
Before I went to a startup company, I might be evaluating startup projects as a third party. I found many things to be particularly easy, but in fact, things that are very difficult to do may face problems such as talents and funding. The awareness of the entire market is not high, and the suggestions to the founders are superficial. My word, a suggestion, entrepreneurs have to spend a lot of energy behind the scenes.
Recalling that when I was doing FA, the advice to others was silly. After all, they have been in the industry for many years, and I just saw other companies’ gameplay, so I gave them a suggestion.It’s not practical.
For example, I once talked to the founder of a SAAS company. At that time, I said that it should be easy to acquire customers. It is recommended to go to various platforms and use various methods to do more marketing, which will definitely bring a lot of leads and customers. When I worked in a startup company, I discovered that To B’s marketing ROI is not high and expensive. Generally, early startups cannot afford to have no money on their accounts. In addition, it is a very long process for a clue to enter, cultivate, transform and finally pay for it.
Because my career is still in the investment circle, I resigned from my previous company. At the end of February 2021, I will do IR in a five or six-person organization.
In addition, I have accumulated a lot of investor resources before, and now my new job is going well. Mainly responsible for two aspects, one is to promote the existing contracted projects to investors. The second is the daily need to establish a close relationship with investment institutions, including offline visits, etc., to timely update the industries and sub-tracks that investment institutions pay attention to, as well as the institution’s own investment style and fundraising situation.
The reason why I did not become an investor is because I think it is better to become an investor after having a successful entrepreneurial experience. The current investors are actually uneven. Some have just graduated or have a short time in the industry, and many of their ideas are not well implemented.
I have the idea of starting a business, but I haven’t figured out the specific direction yet. In the next 2 to 3 years, I hope to do more good projects in the FA industry.
03Does not recognize leaders
I don’t agree that partners want a major transformation
Zhang Mei has been in business for 4 years
In March, I quit the startup company.
There are two reasons for leaving. One is that the company has been on the track for 4 years, without a breakthrough in business, and not making too much money. This situation sometimes makes me feel powerless. The second is that the company is undergoing transformation, and the partners have to change to a completely unfamiliar industry. I disagree.
In March 2017, I graduated for three years and started a business with my original leader. The company chose the field of artificial intelligence. It is a technology-based company, and its positioning is to make artificial intelligence voice solutions. I own part of the company’s shares, and I am mainly responsible for the company’s overall external business and market control.
Starting from 0 at that time, there were only two of us. We did all the procedures and team building bit by bit. I still remember that in 2018, in order to win a well-known customer in the industry, my team and I squatted under the customer’s office building for a month.
So far, the company’s business has not broken through and is facing a turning point. In 2017-2018, the artificial intelligence voice track was very popular, but now it is very crowded, and the business is also experiencing bottlenecks. The partner is now going to transform into a field that I am completely unfamiliar with. He is very optimistic and thinks it will be a big wind in the future, but his colleagues are not familiar with it, and the team is also in a period of reorganization.
In fact, there are many players on that track. This conversion has caused me some doubts. It has no relevance to the current business and has little chance of success. .
The company has also had a bright moment. In 2018, we took a project from a well-known domestic smart phone company. At that time, the team had more than 40 people and received two rounds of financing (currently A round). Originally, there was a B round of financing in 2019. As a result, the business was stuck and the financing failed. In 2020, coupled with the epidemic, the financing failed again, and the company missed two opportunities.
In the short term, I don’t think about starting a business. Although a former partner invited me over, I still need to think about it for a while.
Leaders are unwilling to touch new things, which made me miss a good investment opportunity
Zhang Nuo Investor 4 years
In March, I left my previous investment institution.
There are two reasons for the job-hopping. One is that the leadership does not pay attention to the corporate service track, is unwilling to contact many new things, and is not clear about the projects I push, which makes me miss some good investment opportunities.
For example, at the end of 2019, there is a project that has already passed the meeting, but the valuation has not been negotiated. There is a valuation difference of 20 million between us and the old investment institution and the project party. The actual shareholding ratio for us after the investment is only a fraction of a percentage point, and there is no essential difference.
Originally, we were the lead investors. My leader said to wait a while, but later I wanted to follow up with the investors. However, after the lead investment of the project party is confirmed, there will be no shortage of money, and we will not be allowed to follow the investment. This project did not have much income before, and it will have good revenue in 2021. It is no problem to double the valuation. The project is more in line with the current direction encouraged by the state.
Secondly, there are obstacles in team communication and discussion. Leaders may be very busy. Many times they do not discuss and communicate with us in depth. The people below are like flies without a head. The goals of the entire company are not very unified. This makes me feel that there is no motivation to do things. Even if the work is done well, there is no positive feedback, and it is not necessarily material.The reward is not even the encouragement of the leader.
After working in the organization for nearly two years, only successfully invested in one project. Because many projects are always destroyed for strange reasons. For example, for a project I once promoted, it may be because there were several co-investors. The founder may not have very close contact with us. My leader eliminated the project, which surprised me.
In 2015, I graduated from postgraduate and worked in sales. One and a half years later, I went to a state-owned enterprise to make mid- to late-stage investment. Investing in a state-owned enterprise is mainly to look at the boss’s eyes. He is interested in a certain project. If I write about this project, it will be changed to very good.
In 2019, I was more interested in early-stage investment, so I entered the institution where I just left. Because the early projects themselves accounted for a larger proportion, unlike the previous projects, which basically followed the boss, I was purely executing and did not have my own judgment. Early investment has a higher subjective initiative and can make more use of one’s own judgment and research.
In March 2021, I worked in a new investment institution for two weeks, and I am still adapting to the new environment, mainly in the field of corporate services.
The CEO is too young and there are many management problems
Liu Meng is dissatisfied with starting a business for 1 year
At the end of January, I decisively resigned from my last company.
The reasons for quitting are very complicated. First of all, I think there are many problems with the management. The CEO is only 20 years old and too young. He started his own business before graduating from college and has no career experience. His mother often intervenes in company affairs. I think that managing a company requires a certain amount of experience, or the ability to make unique judgments. Second, the company’s products have not made any progress in the past half a year, which makes me desperate.
In other words, leaders have neither strong technical capabilities nor strong financial and resource support.
In September 2020, I joined this startup company. At that time, there was another CTO. He left after more than a month. His view was “This company is just superficial.”
During the period, I was mainly in charge of the market. When I first joined the company, the team was 0. After a month and a half, the team was set up, with a total of 6 employees. The target of the whole department is to increase users, and also to improve some products. When I joined the company, the product had not yet been launched, and the number of users was equal to 0. Afterwards, I did product operations and activities in some channels. When I left, there were already tens of thousands of users. But no money was spent, basically relying on automatic fission.
The leader did something that chilled my heart and made me decide to leave.
In December 2020, IMy father passed away. Because the incident happened suddenly, I sent him WeChat to ask for leave and go home, and I told other colleagues about the matter. The boss is two-faced, and he replied on WeChat that he agreed to ask for leave to return to his hometown and would support me.
However, as soon as I got home, my boss madly forwarded emails to me, and many colleagues also came to me to ask about work.
At the time, I felt that there was a big problem with this company’s culture, and there should not be a personal life. I went home for a total of 5 days, two of which were weekends, and under normal circumstances, it was not too much work. When I returned to work the next day, my boss asked me to transfer part of the work to another department head.
I was cried by my boss that day at the company because what he said was very strong and unpleasant. A few days after my father passed away, I rushed back to Beijing in the middle of the night on Monday, and went to work the next morning without much rest. However, when my boss gave the job to others and cried me, he pretended nothing happened.
At the end of January 2021, I had a better chat with the CEO of the current company, and I came to the new company. The CEO of the company is a serial entrepreneur. He has worked for more than 15 years and has rich experience in the workplace. He has also served as an executive in many large companies. His management or communication with employees is completely different.
At present, I am also in charge of marketing and belong to the core founding employees in the early days. In addition to a CEO, there are two directors, one of which is me. In addition, the new boss gave me great authority to form a team, as well as options and other benefits. For this job, I left Beijing where I lived for more than 10 years and came to Shanghai, but I don’t regret it.
Note: Except for Zhang Minjin, the rest are pseudonyms.