On September 12, Mr. Dave Chenn, the founder and CEO of Oceanpine Capital attended to the first HICOOL Global Entrepreneur Summit and Entrepreneurship Competition and gave speech of “The golden age of Deep Tech entrepreneurship” in Beijing.
Speech Guest: Dave Chenn
The event, featuring business elites from 82 countries and their 2,026 high-quality projects, drew attention from 11 high-tech cities and 72 major investment companies. The summit also helped bring together startup owners, billionaires, and investors for potential future cooperation. Beijing has developed into an ideal hub for entrepreneurs over the years, a sentiment shared by several successful industry leaders at the summit. Those included Mr. Jun Lei, Founder & Chairman of Xiao Mi; Mr. Xing Wang, Chairman & CEO of Meituan Dianping; Dr. Kaifu Lee, Chairman & CEO of Sinovation Ventures; and Mr. Lei Zhang, Founder & CEO of Hillhouse Capital. In recollecting their personal experiences starting their businesses, they stated that the city had helped to nurture their dreams.
Speech Guest: Lei Zhang
Speech Guest: Xing Wang
Speech Guest: Jun Lei
Highlights of Mr. Dave Chenn’s Speech：
First, let’s review the history of entrepreneurship in the new economy. I went to study in the United States in 1992. When I first arrived in the United States, I was exposed to email and Mosaic browser (the predecessor of Netscape), the world's first graphic browser. Jack Ma came into contact with the Internet in 1997. He came into contact with the Internet later than me, but he was more business savvy than me, so he returned to China and founded China Pages and later Alibaba. Since 1995, the birth of Netscape has led to a global Internet revolution, including the birth of Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and Google founded in 1998 in Silicon Valley. At that time in Silicon Valley, the Internet economy was surging, and this trend soon came to China. At that time, three major portal sites like Yahoo appeared in China, such as Sina, Sohu, and NetEase. In my opinion, the entrepreneurship of this era is called New Economy 1.0, which is portal + e-commerce. Internet Economy 1.0 has lasted about ten years, including more e-commerce and search engine websites such as Ali and Baidu that have emerged.
In 2005, domestic Internet entrepreneurship entered the next stage, including 58.com, Ganji.com, Youku; various group buying websites including Meituan, etc.; and ByteDance and Didi founded in 2012. Basically, it belongs to the more detailed development in various sub-sectors of e-commerce, and the further innovation around the business model. In addition to continuing to expand in the field of e-commerce like Amazon, the United States has done a lot of expansion in cloud computing, enterprise services, streaming media and other fields. At the same time, a large number of basic technology companies serving the Internet economy have been born, whether it is chips or materials. Cloud computing, network security, or big data, including the very popular Zoom in the previous paragraph. In 2005-2016, these ten years, it’s the new economic entrepreneurship 2.0 era. China’s New Economy Entrepreneurship 2.0 era is mainly based on e-commerce, and further expands, strengthens, and deepens in various vertical consumption segments, while at the same time achieving another extreme in business model innovation; while in the United States, apart from business model innovation In addition, it has also done a lot of expansion in the field of Internet infrastructure.
After 2016, China's economy has begun to enter the new economic normal, because the traditional economy and the real economy have encountered bottlenecks. The domestic production capacity is far greater than what is actually needed, and supply exceeds demand. At the same time, the Internet economy has also reached a turning point. The market has gradually realized that business model innovation has reached the ceiling, and it is difficult for industry giants to surpass. On the contrary, due to various factors including the Sino-US trade war, everyone has realized the need to develop core technologies, and the traditional real economy needs digitization and Internalization. Several entrepreneurs and listed companies have emerged in the field of chips, AI, cloud computing, and medical technology. This is what I said from 2017 to the next ten years, the era of new economic entrepreneurship 3.0, that is, the era of Deep Tech entrepreneurship. Unlike China, the U.S. has actually been intensively developing in the field of Deep Tech since 2005. It has been leading global development in the fields of cloud computing, chips, corporate services, and biotechnology. Its 2.0 era and 3.0 era are basically fully integrated.
We just discussed the semiconductor field. In fact, there are still many fields in China, such as cloud computing, corporate services, biotechnology, and other fields that are still far behind the United States. So now is an era of hard core technology entrepreneurship and investment, the reasons are as follows：
First，because business model innovation has reached the extreme in China. For example, nowadays, you can see advertisements everywhere in buses, subways, taxis, elevators, and toilets. The innovation of business model has reached its extreme in China. That’s why our entrepreneurship today must start with hard-core technology, not just an idea, in fact, there are more opportunities.
Second，the economy has developed to a certain scale of natural demand. Just talked about the chip, our market share in the global application market has accounted for 60%. However, our core technology, from manufacturing to design, to materials, to equipment, does not match our needs in the entire market, so this is also a natural demand for economic development to a certain scale.
Third, China has the industrial upgrading of trillion-level traditional industries, namely the demand for digitalization and Internalization. Because China has a large population and a huge economy, any industry is ranked first in the world, not first or second. So many trillion-level industries are in urgent need of transformation and upgrading, digitization, Internalization, and embracing the new economy, which contains huge business opportunities.
Fourth, it is the country's strategic needs, requiring safety and control. We call it the "Encore" strategy. It's like a building that is well built and beautifully decorated, but the foundation is unstable, or the foundation is built on a beach, it is very dangerous. With such a large economy in China, the security and control of the underlying technology must be considered. Based on the above four points, it can be said that this is the golden age of our hard-core technology entrepreneurship.
There are great opportunities and great challenges in the future, but there is no doubt that the era we are in today is the golden age of hard-core technology entrepreneurship. This is also the reason why I decided to transform from doing business to investing three years ago. Oceanpine Capital is also a professional investment institution positioned in hard core technology. We focus on hard core technology and focus on docking industrial resources. Our founders are all from the industry and have a deep industrial background. We have a deep understanding of the challenges and pain points faced by various industries and industries in China today. We know how to help these entrepreneurs connect with industrial resources, help them make product planning, achieve further product upgrades, and connect various resources.
In just three years, Oceanpine Capital has invested in more than 30 leading companies with great potential and leading positions in China and the United States. Whether in the field of AI, chip, semiconductor equipment, semiconductor materials, cloud computing, corporate services, biopharmaceuticals, healthcare and other fields, we have done a lot of layout. As a unique institution with deep industrial resources, our investment is mainly in the mid-to-late growth stage, but we also have a layout for very outstanding early-growth companies.
Source: Oceanpine Capital
