Feng Deng, co-founder of Northern Light Venture Captical, then co-founder of Netscreen, shared his China investment strategies with HYSTA audience in May 10th. Graduated from Tsinghua University, the No. 1 university in China, Feng has successfully transformed from a well known entrepreneur, achieving great successes in Netscreen, to a top-10 Venture Capitalist in China, enjoying the dragon’s booming economy.

Granted, it is not an easy job to win in China. As a Chinese, Feng had pretty successful business before coming to US. Returning back to China with the glory of Netscreen, he still has to re-learn the China market from scratch. Here comes his first advice: A strong China presence is one of the keys towards investment successes. Flying VCs could hardly deliver good results. Nowadays, mainstream VCs are rushed to China because everyone in the industry is doing that, which is far from enough.

Chinese entrepreneurs have very good survival skills but lack of scaling skills. On the contrary, once a prominent entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, Feng well knows that start-ups in US require good food and much-less-polluted air to become bigger and go public. Thus, his second suggestion for investors is to become a farmer, raising crops, instead of being a hunter, expecting short term easy money. It is important to focus on the company’s potential (scalability and sustainability) and the team, instead of a pure money play. Given the fact that China is far from matured, a good company could grow dramatically for decades even with a very high market share. One excellent example is Baidu.

Last but not least, Feng’s successes root in his good and hard work. After a whole day work in China, he will start another run of back-to-back meetings with folks in US from 7PM until midnight. Chinese VCs, as US VCs in their early stage, are generalists. Thus, Feng has to cover a broad range of companies and industries. Along with hiring assistants, hard work plays a major role to his glory since good old Netscreen time. His portfolio includes SpreadTrum (SPRD), Actions Semiconductor (ACTS), baihe.com — the No. 1 dating site in China, LianLian — mobile based micro-payment, Meng Yang — leading national maker of lamb products, etc.

Last 5 posts by Thomas Pan

• Bye, Oil Bubble? - June 23rd, 2008
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