作者 | 王淮Harry

编辑 | 胡艺缤Abby | 张硕何James

图片来源 | 线性资本

编者按 

本文为线性资本创始人&CEO; 王淮Harry于上海美国商会的2019 AmCham Shanghai HR Conference大会上的发言原文。

王淮于会上发表了题为「The Merits of Investable Talents in the Tech Business」的主题分享，着重阐述了线性资本在看人逻辑上的思路。

01.

创始人介绍

Harry was the first Chinese R&D; manager in Facebook and his occupational history consisted of the backend development for News Feed and Social Ads, the product development for Virtual Currency and the development for Payment Backend and Security. 

He used to serve as the CEO advisor in Dianping.com, Baixing.com, and CSDN. Besides, Harry was also the author of a bestseller, How Facebook was Engineered.

In addition to this, Harry owns Stanford's MS&E; degree and Zhejiang University's bachelor degree in computer science. 

Harry also is a Fellow of the third class of the China Fellowship Program and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, and Young Global Leader, Class of 2018, World Economic Forum.

02.

演讲视频与原文

Harry WANG:

Thanks Tony for inviting me to share our thoughts on the talents chasing game.

Basically the script we have been playing is like this - you find a great talent doing what they love, and what you believe as well. 

You put in your money with fingers crossed and hope in 5-10 years, you get 20x back.  And most time you don’t. 

You get zero back if you are betting on the wrong talents or the wrong problems. Clearly it’s been a tough journey giving out money to the hands of the  supposedly right people.

We have had lessons of losing millions of dollars, but also made way more than that during the process.

I’d like to spend the next 20 minutes to try to answer some questions that I think are the most important during the capital chasing talents game.

Before that, let me quickly introduce Linear’s background so that you will see why we act the way we believe.

First and foremost, I would like to share with you of our key code:

I was an engineer, so I wrote a piece of code to guide our fund. There are three conditions taken into account: data-based, AI-driven and commercially applicable.

I was a Data engineer in Yahoo and I tried to get my Ph.D. at Ohio State University, but at that time, I found it more fun in engineering work to build a product.

Therefore, I eventually joined Facebook as an early employee when they were about 100 people back in early 2007.

During that time, I witnessed Mark Zuckerberg recruiting many talents to help build up the company from 100 people to 5,000 people in 5 years. As for now, they have about 50,000 people.

And we want to be the best fund when the above three conditions meet, in other words, we do not want to be yet another general fund.

I think this is a great lesson because people cannot become the best in every profession. People need to find out their strength that they have passion in.

It took us about 2 years and 10 million dollars to realize this and focus on what we are truly good at and what we are passionate about.

We have invested about 70+ companies, dealt with 100x more talents of that number in our 6-years history so far.

Everything we have learned is only based on our experience and background - so disclaimer goes first - what works for us may not work for you but I hope you can take away a thing or two that are useful.

Now, I have time to try to answer two questions that I think are the next 20 minutes:

1. What kinds of talents Linear likes and thinks as investable?

2. How can we win their hearts?

What - 3P3C

Given that we are a tech VC with a focus on data, AI and frontier tech, we have an obsession on technologists - namely these with an engineering or product background.

In the age of the tech-driven growth, we think now is the spring for the technologists.

So the first merit we are seeking is 「being professional」 - are you the best in solving the problem you claim to solve, in terms of technology or product capability?

Being good is not good enough. Are you among the top 1% or even 0.1% of the best professionals?

As for Passionate. We want to see a fire in your heart that you desire to solve this problem. 

It’s like the purpose of your existence.

I know a lot of other investors have expressed their attention on this merit.

The tricky difference we are seeking here is that your passion should have a traceable history.

The passion has its origin. It’s either related to your past job, or a long time cause or hobby.

You cannot tell me that you watched a documentary last week,  or ran into a market report about an opportunity so that you just want to devote the rest of your life to it. We want to see the passion with your sense of purpose.

Persistent, the forth - sure, running a company is very challenging and it won’t be a smooth journey.

You need to ready yourself for the ups & downs in the next few years or decade.

You won’t be well served with the necessary resources for your potential success.

Actually, startup is a journey of winning an impossible war when you are totally under-armed.

A famous Jack said it well - 「Today is bad, tomorrow is worse, but the day after tomorrow is really good. But most people will die tomorrow night.」

You need to persist through all despaired moments until the dawn comes, even if most others die right before the dawn.

In our dictionary, this is the essence of the spirit of entrepreneurship.

Next one is Consistent - this is the only requirement we have on personality or value system. Walk your talk, and speak your thought.

A person will have the bottom line if he or she is consistent in their thinking, speaking and acting, especially to their co-founders, employees, and investors.

When he tells you that he has tried his best for the solution taking everyone's interest into account, you can take his words.

And Credible - if given enough time, continuously practicing the above 5 merits will make you a credible person. And the whole capital-talent game is eventually a trust-based business. 

If you are perceived as a credible person with top skills, I would want to trust you with our money. I know you will try all means to make the impossible possible.

How to win them?

You cannot go to them and say that - I want to invest in you. Show what you are capable of and we are game.

No, you will scare them off.

In our process, talent sourcing predates deal sourcing. We want to make friends with these folks - potentially investable talents.  But not necessarily that we have to invest them.

We want to reach out to them well before they are thinking about running their own companies so that we have enough time to study them, learn from them and help them in many ways - with investment being just one way.

We want to be friends.

If we eventually invest, great for both of us. If we don’t invest but have learned some great science or technology know-how and have brought in some investor views to their worlds, also great.

We practice 「give first, to get second」 principle. We are fine with getting either an investment opportunity or a learning opportunity.

It’s a long journey and we need to plan it out in a long term fashion.

If you come with a transaction mentality, they will treat you as an opportunist and they will by nature be very careful about what information to share with you.

And without thorough and enough information of good quality, you won’t be able to make the right decision.

If you come with a long term mentality and being willing to practice 「give to get」, you will be treated as a friend.

A good friend at the same time a great talent will have a much higher probability to give you a great return. And life is much easier with friends.

Isn’t it?