Nice Ink: China's Wave

Terrific article in today's Shanghai Daily on China Team. In your Editor's humble opinion, it is sooo nice -- and good for the event and the sport -- to have first-time challenges from China (arguably the world's largest economy), South Africa (Africa's largest economy) and Germany (Europe's largest economy)....


Venture capitalist Wang Chaoyong, whose name suggests "surging wave," is the force behind China Team that aims to be China's first entry in the prestigious America's Cup yachting race series, writes Zhou Zuyi.

One's name has long been a crystal ball for Chinese fortune tellers. They go to great lengths to plumb the characters comprising the names of their customers, seeking omens about career and life.

But it doesn't take an all-mighty prophet with extraordinary insight to answer Wang Chaoyong's question about his future.

The 41-year-old venture capitalist has two characters in his name related to water, with Chao meaning "wave" and Yong connoting "surging." So, for fatalists, it's no wonder he would make a splash in anything aquatic.

But Wang himself had to wait until he was 20 years old and enrolled in Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University before he got his first glimpse of the ocean.

But Wang could hardly have foreseen his role two decades later as the founder of a successful investment firm and head of a historic team of Chinese and French sailors hoping to compete as the mainland's first entry in the prestigious America's Cup yacht race series. The first event is in April off the coast of Valencia, Spain.

"When I first saw the ocean, I had a great passion for it, and it had a big impact on me for its immensity and power," says Wang, who founded the technology-focused venture capital firm ChinaEquity seven years ago.

Using many of the same skills that helped him invest in and nurture upstarts such as search engine Baidu.com, Wang, the founder and syndicate head of China Team, has rallied government officials, corporate sponsors, and the international sailing community behind his plan to put China on the yachting map. Sailing is an Olympic sport and the 2008 Beijing Olympics will hold the sailing event in Qingdao, Shandong Province.

Wang fell in love with sailing in 1998, when, as a young investment banker for JP Morgan Chase in New York, he joined a company team-building exercise aboard a sail boat.

"I wasn't aware of it when I first got on the boat, but through the years, when I thought of my sailing experience, I could more closely correlate business and sailing," Wang says.

"We invest in very risky and early-stage high-growth business, and the most important element of our business is to be optimistic and to be able to face the uncertain future, because not only do you need to navigate your team but you must also help the ones in which you invested.

"You have to help the portfolio companies and their management teams to run a better business and go through tough times. So it's totally the same skill set."

Wang, who took his five-year-old son on a week-long yachting vacation on the French coast this summer, is still a fan of sailing but his approach to the America's Cup has been that of an entrepreneur, not an athlete.

In 2004, eager to found the first Asia-based team, Wang began by tapping into his network of wealthy Chinese businessmen, such as Charles Zhang Chaoyang, founder of the portal Sohu.com and William Ding Lei, the founder of NetEase, the online game company that also owns the 163.com portal.

"My way to promote it to them was to say, 'Look, you guys are so successful, you see yourselves as China's Larry Ellison, you want to build a successful company like Oracle, and this is the best way to make this statement,"' he recalls.

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