Single food is difficult to fat
When the mobile Internet tide has gone, the “industry Internet” era is still mixed, where are the big opportunities for investors? Tan Bingzhong’s answer is: the city Internet.
Ban Bingzhong, chairman and founding partner of Yiqi Capital. About the Hong Kong people with nearly 30 years of investment experience, the most important label is two: Fidelity Asia Venture Capital (FAV) partner, the first batch of Alibaba investors. It was recently learned that a strange capital headed by Tan Bingzhong recently announced a merger with real estate and venture capital consultancy Lioncrest Global. The restructured new fund will aim at high-tech and new-type real estate, and is determined to build 10 smart towns in China.
The dramatic story of “6 minutes to decide to invest in Ma Yun” makes Sun Zhengyi one of the most prominent investors in the world today, and Tan Bingzhong’s investment in Ali is actually three months earlier than Sun Zhengyi. In October 1999, Fidelity Asia, Goldman Sachs and the Singapore Government Science and Technology Development Fund jointly invested $5 million in Ali (this is the first institutional investor attracted by Ali), when Tan Bingzhong participated in Fidelity in his own name. This investment in Asia.
To a large extent, it was from this investment that Tan Bingzhong, who originally worked for a US dollar PE, decided to join Fidelity Asia in 2002 as a founding team member to form the Beijing office. Since joining Fidelity, Tan Bingzhong has moved his family from Hong Kong to Beijing because he is convinced that “the big opportunity for the future must happen in China.”
Tan Bingzhong is a believer in the concept of “investment is a long-term relationship.” This has been undoubtedly revealed in Fidelity’s previous investments: investment in Ali has been going on for 20 years and is still holding stocks; investment in AsiaInfo has been 22 years, and more than a round of investment has been added; Fidelity is the longest in the United States. Invested for more than 40 years. This makes the most unimaginable holding time of VCs, but it is sparse in the eyes of Tan Bingzhong and Fidelity. On the one hand, Fidelity “invests with its own money and does not care about short-term returns”, and Tan Bingzhong believes that it is more important. “Persistence of ideas”: “Our philosophy is to invest in a company from the first day of support to the end, not to fight for a short time. The best investment may be ‘never exit’.”
In the more than ten years led by Tan Bingzhong, Fidelity Asia has invested in star companies such as AsiaInfo, iSoftStone and WuXi PharmaTech. However, by 2012, a large number of Chinese VCPEs had risen, and the venture capital market was in a mixed battle. Tan Bingzhong realized that “in a red sea market, traditional investment styles will inevitably fail”, so he decided to leave Fidelity and start thinking. From 0, I will invest in it.” In the next three or four years, he used his own money to make a lot of investment to “find feelings”. Until 2016, he was convinced that “investment is not a game of money, and It is a human game.”
This “Epiphany” promoted Tan Bingzhong to start a new investment career: he built a”Communities” that gather dozens of investors, “have money to make money together” – specifically, these investors and friends not only become Tan Bingzhong’s funders (also known as LP), but also become His external consultants and think tanks provide the right investment targets, and he himself becomes the “architect” of this ecology.
There is money, where is the asset? Tan Bingzhong told that the city Internet is his most promising future field, and the specific landing form is the “smart town.”
How do you understand the “smart town” that Tan Bingzhong said? To put it simply, it can be considered as a “magnified version of the Science Park”, “but the Science Park is a CBD during the day and a ghost town at night”, while the Smart Town has a multi-functional nature of work, business and life. Prior to this, Yunqi Town and Xuelang Town were already representative examples, but the future smart town in Tan Bingzhong’s plan will take advantage of advanced technologies such as edge computing, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things.
Sounds, this seems to be an “overly ambitious” concept, not even a game that an investment fund can participate in. Tan Bingzhong also confessed that relying on their own efforts can of course not complete the construction of a smart town. He hopes to create a smart town by uniting various capitals and influential technology companies, and the role of Yiqi Capital in it. It is the “defective” and “planner”.
Further dismantling, the smart town mainly includes high-tech and real estate. In fact, according to Tan Bingzhong’s plan, half of the funds raised in the future will be used in 5G, technology, Internet of Things and other fields. The company’s investment to achieve the necessary digital foundation, the rest is used for real estate development. For the former, Yiqi Capital will realize cooperation through investment or invitation to settle in; for real estate, Tan Bingzhong said that a considerable number of strange investors are real estate families, which is quite experienced, but they I hope that the real estate in the future town is more like a product than a real estate in the simple sense, thus forming a new asset class. “Like a smart phone, the future real estate is also a smart real estate.”
At present, Yiqi Capital has participated in the construction of several smart towns and plans to build 10 smart towns in the next ten years. In addition, they are also raising a “hero fund” with a total of $1 billion.
“Single food is difficult to faten” is an old saying in Cantonese that means that everyone can participate in order to make the cake bigger. In the interview, Tan Bingzhong repeatedly mentioned these four words. He said that this is the biggest truth he has gained in investing for nearly 30 years: “Not only must grow with the CEOs, but also make money with a group of like-minded colleagues.” Perhaps at this level, we can better understand the strange capital of Tan Bingzhong’s vision: “It should not be a traditional investment institution, but more like an ecosystem, gathering more people to do bigger things together.