盘点从腾讯走出的知名投资人The Investors Who Came Out of Tencent

"Tencent — the internet super-giant that went from being everyone's punching bag to winning near-universal acclaim — crossed $300 billion in market cap in 2017, standing with Alibaba as one of the two poles of Chinese business. The 'penguin factory' didn't just build a vast commercial empire and mint countless billionaires; it also trained and exported a huge amount of elite talent. The cross-disciplinary heavyweights who've left Tencent straddle both the internet and finance, moving hundreds of billions of yuan through the capital markets."

Among the "old penguins" who've left Tencent, some have already reached financial freedom and retreated from the fray, while others remain ambitious and hungry, throwing themselves into the entrepreneurial wave with all their heart — armed with polished technical skills, forward-looking vision, and top-tier networks, and carrying their love of the internet — writing one startup miracle after another.

Zeng Liqing: Chairman of Decent Capital

Bio: the "won't-invest-in-anyone-but-Tencent-people" investor. The first of Tencent's "Five Tigers" to leave, he now focuses squarely on investing. A month after Pony Ma and Zhang Zhidong founded the company, Zeng Liqing joined as Tencent's third co-founder. He was one of the pioneers of Shenzhen's internet, and the driving force behind the first broadband residential community in Shenzhen — indeed in all of China. By the accounts of many longtime Tencent employees, Zeng was the most fun-loving and open of the Five Tigers, and the most charged with passion and rallying power; some called him Tencent's Steve Ballmer (the Microsoft co-founder, all passion and a knack for marketing and sales). After leaving Tencent, he turned to investing, founding Decent Capital in 2007; to date it has backed more than 130 companies, including Taomee, Chengtianyou, Taimei, Tianqu, Taole, Fangdd, Jiwu, and Youai Interactive.

Decent Capital: founded in 2007, focused on angel investments in high-tech fields such as the internet, wireless, and interactive entertainment.

Investment style: Zeng's rule was once "won't invest in anyone but Tencent people," and to this day Decent Capital still treats the Tencent founding community as its main investment target.

Deals: Taomee, 7road, and others. It invested in Taomee in 2007; the company listed on the NYSE in 2011 at $8.49 a share, at a $380 million valuation, with Zeng holding an 18.7% stake worth roughly $57.3 million. It invested 2 million yuan in 7road in 2009 and sold it to Sohu Changyou for 100 million yuan in 2011.

Peng Zhijian: Founding Partner of Genesis Capital

Bio: former VP of Tencent and general manager of its investment and M&A department. Over his seven years at Tencent, Peng Zhijian led investments in several hundred internet companies, totaling more than $10 billion. In 2015 he left and founded Genesis Capital, quickly winning the backing of a string of top internet CEOs — Didi, Sogou, Meituan, Qunar and more — a lineup that formed his "super all-star mentor board." Barely into the journey, Peng had already taken part in investments in Haozu, DataVisor, and Huochebang. In 2016, Peng teamed up with another solo-flying "penguin," Xu Liang, focusing on two themes — "internet-driven efficiency gains" and "consumption upgrade" — and especially the space where the internet meets traditional industries to lift efficiency.

Genesis Capital: at present, each Genesis fund backs only 10 to 15 projects, with each company getting between $30 million and $50 million.

Deals: Xiaohongshu (RED), Didi, and others. Xiaohongshu's monthly sales topped 300 million yuan, and it is now valued above $1 billion. Genesis once invested 60 million yuan in Didi, now valued above $35 billion.

Liu Chengmin: Founding Partner of Redstone Capital

Bio: former senior EVP of Tencent and president of its wireless business system. The efficiency superman of the angel-investing world. Liu Chengmin joined Tencent in 2003 and is one of the penguin factory's founding-era figures, having served as general manager of the telecom business unit, general manager of the mobile-communications department, and president of the mobile internet business group. After leaving, he focused on investing, founding in succession the Longyuan Yunteng Fund, the Tianhui Food Fund, and Redstone Capital. He has backed more than 100 projects across food, agriculture, TMT, gaming, AI, and more — including Getui, Zhangshang Zongheng, Kuaixingxian, Tuotuo Gongshe, Hanshow, Huochairen, and others. Liu places enormous weight on efficiency, making decisions fast and decisively; on average he looks at 1,000 projects a quarter and invests in 40 companies a year. Like Zeng Liqing, Liu favors backing "Tencent mafia" startups — in his view, investing in Tencent alumni cuts a lot of the cost of background checks. And for angel investing, the cost of time is unquestionably crucial.

Deals: Getui, Zhangshang Zongheng, and others. Getui's D round raised more than 400 million yuan and its C round more than 700 million yuan; its push SDK has reached a cumulative 12 billion installs (including overseas) and independently covers 1.6 billion handsets (including 200 million overseas).

Cao Xi: Managing Director at Sequoia China

Bio: former product manager at Tencent. The reigning king of pan-entertainment investing. After graduating, Cao Xi joined Tencent as a product manager, then ran operations at Kingsoft. In 2011 he joined Cowin Capital as TMT investment director, and in 2013 he joined Sequoia. Born in 1985, Cao grew up steeped in the internet, immersed in anime and forums — an upbringing and set of hobbies that, to some degree, laid the groundwork for his later investing in pan-entertainment. His biggest takeaway from Tencent was a sensitivity to data. What made Cao's name in one stroke was his investment in Douyu; as Douyu's earliest institutional investor, Cao is described by outsiders as investing with a style that's steady, ruthless, and precise.

Investment style: when investing, look at just how much room the industry has to grow; when reading people, look at whether they have a pure heart and whether they are "chosen by history."

Focus areas: pan-entertainment, culture and media, sports, community, O2O, consumption upgrade.

Deals: Kuaishou, Douyu, Mahua FunAge, Dongqiudi, Hero Entertainment. He took part in Kuaishou's B round, now valued above $2 billion, and in Douyu's A round, now valued above $1 billion.

Li Haojun: Investment VP at GGV Capital

Bio: former product manager at Tencent's wireless search center. The venture investor who brings product thinking to investment logic. Before entering venture capital, Li Haojun was a product manager at Tencent's wireless search center, responsible for the design and operation of vertical-search products on Tencent Soso's wireless side. He then served as investment director at the China office of the Singaporean VC firm Vertex Ventures, leading and taking part in a number of early- and mid-stage TMT investments, before joining GGV Capital in early 2014. His product-manager background makes Li pay especially close attention to whether a product truly hits a user need. To understand the needs of specific groups, Li has done a lot of legwork: before investing in Keep, he traveled to a Shanghai high school to survey students; when studying blue-collar communities, he went to a Foxconn plant in Langfang and spent a day with the workers there; while looking at Xiaohongshu, he worked through several cross-border e-commerce projects, making his call only after carefully studying user metrics around content contribution, saves, and comments.

Investment style: what opportunities will show up at the industry's next inflection point — these all have their own logic. When what a founder says lines up with his own thinking and judgment, he'll move to invest quickly.

Focus areas: TMT, consumption, social, O2O.

Deals: Xiaohongshu, Keep, Diandian Yangche, Baobao.

Wu Chenyao: Investment VP at GGV Capital

Bio: formerly a deputy director at Tencent, leading data mining and strategic research for Tencent's online-media and advertising businesses, and named a Tencent employee of the year and a core-backbone employee. Before joining GGV Capital, he was a securities research analyst covering the Asia-Pacific telecom, media, and technology sectors at Jefferies & Company, one of the world's largest independent investment banks. During his time at Yahoo China, he served as a product manager and analyst for search-engine result optimization.

Focus areas: TMT.

Deals: 51 Credit Card, Weiying (Wepiao), Tujia, Zhimi (Smartmi), Light Chaser Animation, Kingsoft WPS, Yingying Licai, Koala Mini Storage, Qi'e Chihe Zhinan.

Hao Yiwen: Investment Manager at Source Code Capital

Bio: formerly at Tencent, responsible for the overall planning of the Enterprise QQ product line. He joined Source Code Capital in 2014. Over a nearly ten-year career, he worked on corporate strategy and market-growth consulting projects at Asia Business Group (Yashang) and Frost & Sullivan; he also founded, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Ingle Games — one of China's earliest publishers of online games aimed at overseas markets.

Focus areas: mobile internet.

Deals: Suishouji, Haigebian, Huishoubao.

Deng Jing: VP at Shunwei Capital (departed)

Bio: formerly head of QQ Music at Tencent's digital multimedia product center, with full responsibility for the development of Tencent's music product business. She helped QQ Music become the No. 1 online-music product by market share in China. With more than eight years of internet experience, she has a distinctive read on internet products, user operations, and marketing.

Focus areas: matching/transaction platforms, consumer electronics, lifestyle.

Deals: Egret Engine, and others.

Liu Xiaosong: Founder of Green Pine Capital Partners

Bio: currently founder of Green Pine Capital Partners (Qingsong), and founder, chairman, and CEO of A8 Music Group. In 1994 he dropped out to start a business, founding Xinlide Systems; in 1999 he invested in Tencent as one of its early backers; in 2000 he founded A8 Music Group, which listed on the Hong Kong main board in 2008, becoming a leader in China's digital-music industry.

Focus areas: content industries, mobile internet, social.

Deals: Chuangmeng Music.

Wang Ruyuan: Founder of Hongliu Investment

Bio: worked at Tencent in 2003. The reigning "first lady" of the fund world. After leaving the penguin factory, Wang Ruyuan moved through Haitong Securities (as a TMT analyst) and Bosera Fund, making her name in one stroke with the Bosera Core Advantage fund, before jumping from public funds to private funds in 2014. As a fund manager who came to the trade by an unconventional route, Wang was profoundly shaped by her time at the penguin factory (the IT industry). Her understanding of the sector lets her screen out the temptation of pseudo-growth companies. iFlytek, East Money, Yinzhijie — these are all treasures she has kept unearthing. In the coming years she remains firmly bullish on the internet, internet finance, mobile health services, and information security.

Deals: the public funds she managed once exceeded 5 billion yuan in total; under her, the Bosera Core Advantage mixed fund rocketed from eighth-from-last to first, with returns topping 126%. After moving into private funds, the assets she raised once reached 10 billion yuan. In 2013 she claimed the crown as the top-performing public fund manager.

Xiao Wenjie: Founder and CEO of Fenqile; Founder and CEO of Juzi Licai

Bio: former director of Tenpay at Tencent. An ambitious figure out to rewrite the landscape of internet consumer finance. A year ago, even though hundreds of college-student installment-service providers already existed in the market, Fenqile broke through the pack in just two years to firmly seize the top spot. "I live in a sense of crisis every day," Xiao says. In the face of a constantly shifting market, the competitive moat Fenqile has built keeps it far out in front; the company is now valued above 20 billion yuan. Xiao's ambitions run large — he has gone on to found Juzi Licai, Tiqianle, Dingsheng Asset, and other companies, determined to build a complete internet consumer-finance ecosystem. Of these, Juzi Licai is positioned as a "micro-finance" operating model, focused on small consumer finance and diversified bonds. In 2015, Juzi Licai secured a $100 million B round led by the top-tier international firm DST.

Case: Fenqile, Juzi Licai. Fenqile is the most highly valued internet consumer-finance startup in China, now worth more than 20 billion yuan.

Li Hua: Founder and Chairman of Futu Securities

Bio: an early Tencent founding-era figure and its employee No. 18. A pioneer of the "internet brokerage." Futu Securities is a heavyweight star among Hong Kong-stock internet brokers. As a Hong Kong broker, Futu actually targets mainland investors, touting "the world's lowest commissions" — 0.05%, or even zero commission. Futu has a heavy Tencent "tint": beyond the founder, most of the other early team members also carry Tencent DNA. Outsiders call Futu a "Tencent-mafia brokerage" — not only because of its founder and team backgrounds, but also because of Tencent's capital support: both Futu's A and B rounds were led by Tencent, with Matrix Partners and Sequoia Capital as co-investors. Predictably, Futu is an important piece of Tencent's "internet + securities" strategy. The Futu Securities that Li Hua built became the only internet broker in the whole market to withstand the trading surge in Hong Kong stocks, with cumulative turnover already past 100 billion yuan; it was one of only two internet brokers on the 2016 Hurun New Finance Top 50 list.

Case: Futu (Futu Niuniu).

Huang Junpeng: Founder and CEO of Wealthpai

Bio: former COO of Tencent-affiliated Gaopeng. Huang Junpeng spent ten years at Tencent, holding the internet as an article of faith. Firmly bullish on internet finance — especially high-end wealth management — he pivoted, without hesitation, into the finance sector. The Wealthpai he founded differs from the internet-finance platforms in the market that focus on "money-market babies" or P2P: it is positioned as a high-end internet wealth-management platform for white-collar and middle-class users, aiming to let more investors enjoy private-banking-style service via the internet. The Wealthpai team Huang leads secured strategic investment in 2014 and 2015, in succession, from Noah Wealth — the domestic third-party wealth-management leader — and from Sequoia China; in the two years since its launch, its wealth-management scale has topped 30 billion yuan, with an average investment of about 210,000 yuan per person, making it one of the dark-horse breakouts of internet finance over the past couple of years. Huang is now building an AI team, positioning early for the intelligent asset allocation of the future.

Case: wealth-management scale broke through 30 billion yuan within two years.

Cao Tong: Chairman of Xiamen International Financial Technology

Bio: former president of Tencent's WeBank; a heavyweight of the banking world. To join Tencent's newly founded WeBank, Cao Tong gave up the deputy governorship of the Export-Import Bank of China. Under intense public scrutiny, however, he tendered his resignation before completing even a year. Leaving the still-nascent internet-banking field, he chose to join a Xiamen state-owned enterprise and push into internet finance, making asset securitization his main direction. In Cao's view, most internet entrepreneurship today falls into the B2C bucket, but the B2B model will grow more and more viable in the future — asset securitization being one such case. On September 5 this year, Xiamen International Financial held a press conference to announce the official launch of its full-workflow shared platform for asset securitization, "ABS Cloud"; yet just one day later, JD Finance also announced the official launch of its ABS Cloud platform. Which one will come to dominate the field remains, for now, unknown.

Marquee case: launched China's first asset-securitization (ABS) cloud platform.

Tencent has seen relatively low talent attrition. From its founding to today, Tencent has been one of the most stable of all internet companies at the executive level (founders aside); apart from strategic-structural adjustments in areas like search, e-commerce, and Weibo, it has kept the whole organization steady, which has objectively lowered employee turnover. Fox, who has worked at both Tencent and Baidu, once described the culture gap between the two: Tencent's corporate culture is relatively down-to-earth. The executives seem approachable, both in appearance and in reality. Leaving work at night at Tencent, if you run into Martin (Tencent president Martin Lau) in the elevator, people will say hello and chat a bit. At the Baidu building, riding the elevator down with Robin (Robin Li), everyone who steps in on each floor — no matter how animated their discussion was a moment before — falls silent the instant they enter; the atmosphere is stifling.

Notable founders from the Tencent mafia include: Ma Delong, CEO of Lagou; Wang Haibing of Taomee; Li Jiancheng, CEO of Fangdd; Ji Xinhua, CEO of UCloud; Jiang Xiaowei, CEO of Zhangchu; Jin Xing, CEO of SoYoung; Peng Wangcheng, CEO of Dida Bus; Zhang Bo, CEO of Meila Meila; and more.