Chapter 372 Sino-Indian IC and $0 Million Valuation

"Mr. Zhu, how is the development of your Internet online conference service project going? To what extent?" Li Xiaofan asked.

"I define this project as a visual call center for knowledge workers, built on Microsoft's video conferencing platform Net meetings. A preliminary demo sample has been developed..."

Having learned from the experience of his last project being pushed to the ground by Microsoft and other giants, Zhu Min now deliberately avoids the sharp edges of Microsoft and other giants when developing new projects, choosing win-win cooperation.

"Are you developing this project alone?" Li Xiaofan continued to ask.

Zhu Min smiled and said: "I actually have two partners in this project. One is my wife Susan Xu Yuqing. The other partner is an Indian friend of mine. This Indian friend needs to be kept secret for the time being. I can't tell you yet." his name."

He continued to explain: "Because I sold myself to Quarterdeck Afterdeck Systems for a year, this project is currently being researched and developed under a company called Silver Computing that my wife and I founded before..."

In fact, even though Zhu Min didn’t say the Indian’s name, Li Xiaofan also knew that the Indian’s name was Su.

ah Iyar Subraea.

In his previous life, Quarterdeck acquired Zhu Min's Future Labs project, and he "kidnapped" Quarterdeck's Indian executive Subraea. The legendary story of the two of them creating WebEx was almost well known in the investment community. .

Since the 1990s, a very interesting new term has appeared in Silicon Valley: IC.

The meaning of this IC has nothing to do with integrated circuit boards, but refers to India and China.

Because there are so many Chinese and Indian talents in Silicon Valley, they are so eye-catching that some people jokingly say that the English abbreviation "IC" of "Integrated Circuit", which is famous in Silicon Valley, represents the initials of the two English words India and China: India and China.

The combination of Zhu Min and Subraea, the founders of WebEx, is one of the typical IC combination representatives.

Subraea previously worked at Apple and is currently responsible for post-acquisition integration at Quarterdeck.

After Zhu Min came to Quarterdeck Company to serve the new boss, she met Subraea. The two hit it off and they had the same chemistry!

At that time, Subraea also wanted to start a business, but he lacked technical partners. Zhu Min was the right partner he was looking for.

Subraea highly recognized Zhu Min’s idea of ​​designing and producing interactive software based on the client, and believed that the market potential was huge.

In his previous life, because Zhu Min had a one-year work contract with Quarterdeck, he temporarily placed the WebEx project under the Silver Computing company where he and his wife worked.

After the binding period ended the next year in 1997, he and Subraea immediately left Quarterdeck and formally founded what would become WebEx.

This Quarterdeck company is also very unlucky, because the executives of the previously acquired company and the two guys they recruited are not interested in the old employer. They only want to secretly start their own business and wait to fly away.

Can Quarterdeck still succeed?

Sure enough, just after the IC duo Zhu Min and Subraea left Quarterdeck, Quarterdeck's main product was defeated by Microsoft before Quarterdeck had time to integrate the purchased technology.

Later, Zhu Min and Subraea repurchased the intellectual property rights of Future labs at a low price of more than 2 million U.S. dollars, making a profit of 10 million U.S. dollars!

Looking back at this period of history, it doesn’t seem so glorious.

…

But for Li Xiaofan now, he must seize the opportunity and invest in Zhu Min's new project.

"Mr. Zhu, does your current new project need financing?" Li Xiaofan asked with a smile.

"Need it, really need it!"

Behind Zhu Min's success is a great woman, his current wife Susan Xu Yuqing. In the previous life, the two later divorced.

Xu Yuqing is also from Mingzhou. In the early 1980s, she used her weak shoulders to shoulder the important task of raising her children and supporting her husband Zhu Min to study at Stanford University. Together they founded WebEx in Silicon Valley, served as vice president, and successfully listed it on Nasdaq, successfully transforming into a veritable "Female President of Silicon Valley"!

She trained her son Zhu Lei to be admitted to the youth class of Tsinghua University at the age of 14. At the age of 15, he was admitted to the computer science department of Stanford University, becoming the youngest undergraduate at Stanford University. Later, he sent his daughter and daughter-in-law to the Stanford Business School, and the whole family was Stanford student.

And she has become a well-deserved "Stanford Mom."

In order to help her husband Zhu Min start a business, Xu Yuqing traveled between Silicon Valley and mainland China, recruiting more than 30 graduates from prestigious universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University and Zhejiang University for the company.

At present, after the Future labs project is sold, Silver Computing, which is run by Xu Yuqing alone, can only take on some outsourcing projects from large companies to train troops on the one hand and maintain the company's operations on the other.

Although after selling the Future labs project with my partners, I got some money.

But after all, they have to maintain the expenses and operations of the company's more than 30 people, so Zhu Min and Xu Yuqing are not having an easy life at the moment, and they are strapped for money.

Li Xiaofan stared into Zhu Min's eyes and said seriously:

"Mr. Zhu, after Yahoo went public, I launched Singapore's first venture capital fund with a scale of US$100 million. Now I am looking for good projects in Silicon Valley. If you are interested, you can send me the business plan of your project. I am willing to cooperate with you to promote the visual call center project you just mentioned based on Microsoft's video conferencing platform Net meetings..."

At the moment, Zhu Min looks thin and tall, with sharp edges, dark skin, and deep wrinkles on her face. Its appearance is like the famous painting "Father" by Luo Zhongli.

Before the country resumed the college entrance examination, Zhu Min worked as a farmer in the countryside of Mingzhou as an educated youth.

For three years from 1969 to 1971, educated youth Zhu Min was engaged in monotonous and repetitive manual labor in Dongxiang, a suburb of Mingzhou. During spring planting and autumn harvesting, he had to work from 2 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day.

His rye-colored skin came from his days as a farmer. People who don't know think it's because he plays golf often, but in fact he doesn't know how to golf at all.

When he heard that Li Xiaofan said that he was interested in investing in his new project, and that there was a huge amount of venture capital funds behind him, a bright smile broke out on Zhu Min's dark face, and the wrinkles on his face became even deeper.

He said in surprise: "Director Li, that's great! I'll draft a project plan and send it to your email when I get back to the office!"

Seeing that Zhu Min was interested in cooperating with him, Li Xiaofan asked: "Mr. Zhu, have you ever evaluated this new project?"

"I haven't really calculated the valuation of this project, but I think it's worth one million US dollars, right?"

When Zhu Min said one million dollars, he felt very guilty.

His project, the strategic positioning of transforming from a basic service operator to a value-added service provider, is reasonable in theory, but it does not work in reality.

At that time, Microsoft's video conferencing technology Net meetings itself was still immature.

At that time, Zhu Min also felt that his new project would be caught in a dilemma in the future: if it only relied on Microsoft, the future seemed uncertain; if it wanted to accelerate development, it would become an enemy of Microsoft...