About the History Issue In 2003, Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennström from Sweden joined forces with Estonian back-end developers to create Skype (#HOV8135) – Note: the #HOV refers to an entry in our History of Venture database – see p.8 for more details. In 2005, Skype was sold to eBay, the U.S. auction house, for US$2.6 billion. In 2011, Skype was then sold to Microsoft for US$11 billion. Contrast …

对100年来风险投资的主要观察 The mass of information in our CIVHOV centurial database presents many potential insights, but these can take many years to study and coax out. What follows are initial key insights that emerged in the past year from our own observations. Naturally, as with any historical review, these stem from our own biases and perspectives. Each insight can be developed further and argued for: they can be applied and …

“风投巨龙”的成长—中国 The development of the Chinese venture capital market imitates the remarkable growth of China’s economy between 1985 and 2015. Venture capital was a concept that was unheard of in China in the mid-1980s, when the first Chinese VC firm was established purely with government funds. By 2006, however, the Chinese venture capital market had become the second largest in the world after the United States, and it still …

苹果公司的遗传基因 Ever since Steve Wozniak filed the first patent in 1977, Apple has been significantly increasing its yearly patent output: while only 19 were published during the first decade after its founding in 1976, currently about 100–200 patents are published each month. (see Table 1 and Figure 1 for details). Despite Apple’s usual secrecy surrounding its new product lines, this increase in patenting activity has led to wider public …