That's right — we're hiring. Welcome to join FreeS Fund.

峰瑞资本·May 19, 2022

A great workplace is one where you're surrounded by amazing colleagues.

What does early-stage investing mean?

It means having the curiosity to roam the business world, getting a "sneak peek" at new technologies and products before they hit the market, and mapping out the underlying threads and ecosystems of every industry. That freedom to explore comes with responsibility: unearthing valuable companies, growing alongside them, and casting a vote for the future you want to see.

In three months, FreeS Fund will mark its seventh anniversary of exploring the business world. We look forward to walking this path with more like-minded partners.

Before you send in your resume, you might want to know:

What exactly do these roles require? Are they right for me?
What kind of firm is FreeS Fund? What would I gain by joining?
What's it actually like to work here?
And what are the fun little details beyond the work itself?

We'll try to answer all of these questions in this post, and introduce you to FreeS Fund.

**/ 01 / **

Open Positions

Job Description

Think independently and research-driven; continuously focus on and go deep into semiconductors, chip sensors, robotics, industrial intelligence, hardware products, new energy vehicles, assisted and autonomous driving, foundational software, new materials, and other industries; analyze business models and market dynamics, and develop independent investment theses;

Conduct in-depth research into company operations and details, providing solid research support for investment decisions;

Identify outstanding early- and growth-stage investment opportunities in hard tech, with a knack for uncovering potential deals and tracking and managing investment progress;

Capable of producing industry insights and contributing to other project-related work within the team.

The Successful Applicant

5+ years of R&D background in industry;

Unique perspectives on the semiconductor industry and China's macroeconomy, with extensive industry resources and the ability to lead early- and growth-stage investments in hard tech;

Experience at well-known domestic or international companies; overseas Ivy League PhD or domestic Double First Class university PhD in electronics, computer science, or related fields preferred;

Embraces a team culture of open sharing and mutual learning;

Bright, principled, conscientious, diligent, proactive, kind, and genuine.

Please send your resume with the subject line "Tech Investor - [Your Name]" to hr@freesvc.com

Job Description

Think independently and research-driven; continuously track and analyze the biopharma industry landscape; excel at analyzing business models and market dynamics, and develop independent investment theses;

Conduct in-depth research into company operations and details, providing solid research support for investment decisions;

Identify outstanding early- and growth-stage investment opportunities in biopharma, with a knack for uncovering potential deals and tracking and managing investment progress;

Capable of producing industry insights and contributing to other project-related work within the team.

The Successful Applicant

5+ years of experience at top-tier international biopharma companies, in R&D, BD, or strategy roles;

Deep understanding of the biopharma industry with ample industry resources, able to independently lead early- and growth-stage biopharma investments;

Experience as an institutional biopharma investor; overseas Ivy League PhD or domestic Double First Class university PhD in biopharma or related fields preferred;

Embraces a team culture of open sharing and mutual learning;

Bright, principled, conscientious, diligent, proactive, kind, and genuine.

Please send your resume with the subject line "Biopharma Investor - [Your Name]" to hr@freesvc.com

Position Overview

Continuously help portfolio companies find talent and business opportunities, matching resources and providing operational support.

Job Description

Understand portfolio companies' organizational and talent needs, further refine them, and efficiently execute recruitment for critical roles;

Responsible for resource empowerment of portfolio companies;

Respond to and support portfolio companies' needs at different development stages.

The Successful Applicant

5+ years of human resources management experience, strategic consulting, strategic partnerships, or BD; experience at frontier tech or biopharma companies preferred;

Sufficient understanding and hands-on experience of the challenges startups face at different stages of growth;

Empathetic, communicative, with excellent service orientation;

Bright, principled, conscientious, diligent, proactive, kind, and genuine.

Please send your resume with the subject line "Portfolio Support - [Your Name]" to hr@freesvc.com

Among current FreeS Fund employees, five previously interned here and later joined full-time or after graduation. Our research interns bring valuable fresh perspectives. Chen Zinan, who interned at FreeS Fund before becoming an investment team member, noted in his year-end review: "When you're researching something, 'slightly more good than bad' might be the best time to act."

Position: Research Intern

Responsibilities

Assist with foundational industry research on investment directions including consumer, tech, and healthcare, providing decision-making references;
Collect and organize market information on macro environment and industry trends, conducting research and analysis.

Location: Beijing · Liangmaqiao Diplomatic Office Building

Compensation: Competitive internship stipend, breakfast bread and milk provided, fruit and snacks and soft drinks always available, plus endless Three Squirrels snacks and unlimited refills of Saturnbird coffee.

Requirements: Graduates from top domestic or international universities, finance, economics, or accounting majors preferred; as a research-driven fund, experience at top-tier VC/consulting/strategy/FA/public market research is a plus but not required. We value quick learners with curiosity and sensitivity, who are reliable, follow through, and organized.

Early start preferred. Minimum three-month commitment, four or more days per week required.

Please send your resume with the subject line "Research Intern - [Your Name] - [School] - [Major]" to hr@freesvc.com

**/ 02 / **

About FreeS Fund and What Makes Us Different

▍Early-stage, tech-focused, interdisciplinary

Early-stage

FreeS Fund insists on early-stage investing, and relishes witnessing innovative companies go from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and 10 to 100. We always strive to find things that may seem unreasonable now but are bound to happen within three to five years and will eventually become major trends.

Since our founding over six years ago, we've invested in more than 150 innovative companies across consumer and TMT, hard and soft tech, and biopharma.

Key point: for 60% to 70% of these projects, we were the first institutional investor.

Tech-focused

In recent years, China's venture capital landscape has shifted from business model innovation to technological innovation. Increasing tech investments aligns with China's current national conditions and policy direction.

However, tech innovation has higher barriers to entry, slower returns, and longer cycles. This requires investment firms to make more forward-looking and specialized judgments on technology and industry trends.

Fortunately, through six-plus years of exploration and practice, we've made active investment deployments in hard and soft tech and biotech. Many of these companies have grown into leaders or top players in their fields, generating considerable returns for us.

Interdisciplinary

Thanks to our balanced portfolio approach and pioneering in emerging fields, we've also captured many interdisciplinary projects.

In 2021 alone, over half of our investments spanned two or more disciplines and fields, including but not limited to chip + biotech, synthetic biology + personal care, AI + new drug R&D, entertainment + new technologies...

We believe that discovering value in interdisciplinary projects has become key to rebuilding our cognitive edge.

Today China has many strong industries, and frontier technologies can build bridges between them. Once such cross-pollination occurs and is validated by demand, it can enable a great deal of novel technology applications pioneered in China.

▍Championing first-principles thinking, research-driven

Over the past three years, FreeS Fund's investment team has published 103 pieces of in-depth industry research totaling over 900,000 Chinese characters, sharing our thinking on digitalization, going global, new consumption and brands, virtual idols, the metaverse, chips and semiconductors, manufacturing, new drug R&D, brain science, new materials, and more.

In 2021, we published 31 research pieces via our WeChat official account: 19 on consumer and TMT, 4 on biopharma, 4 on deep tech, and 4 on macro trends.

▍People with diverse backgrounds growing together

Our team comprises seasoned investors, corporate executives, industry experts, and successful entrepreneurs with deep expertise in consumer, TMT, biotech, IoT, finance, education, and other fields.

We care more about diverse backgrounds and professional depth than investment experience alone. We believe that blending diverse perspectives lets us approach "non-consensus" opportunities with more open minds, while professional depth helps us cut through noise, respect fundamentals, grasp essence, and push toward the frontier.

Young people here get ample room to grow — your thinking and voice will receive full engagement.

There's no sense of hierarchy in our team culture. Young people are an important part of our investment committee and participate in investment decisions. Full-time interns can attend weekly project meetings and get frontline VC exposure. We encourage young people to express their views and make their voices matter.

/ 03 /

What's it like to work at FreeS Fund?

▍Joining early, growing with the fund

After earning my PhD in physiology and molecular biology from the University of Notre Dame, I returned to China to start a business, entering through the diagnostics angle. After that, I went back to the US for an MBA in healthcare administration at Boston University. Later I worked on the commercial side at leading third-party diagnostics companies, pharmaceutical firms, and pharma consulting.

I joined FreeS Fund in October 2015, as a relatively early employee.

In terms of investment approach, I'm research-oriented: I first make directional predictions, then find the technical backbone or experienced management talent in those sectors.

You have to develop your own professional judgment first, knowing what frontier technologies exist in the world, before you go find deals. Everyone wants to uncover the most cutting-edge tech — we need curiosity and a spirit of adventure to have any chance of breakthroughs.

As an early-stage investor, I'm a fairly direct person. In my view, supporting someone to start a business, stopping someone from starting a business, or at least blocking a particular direction, are all equally meaningful.

Basically, in my first meeting with founders, I try to go as deep and thorough as possible. If I spot problems, I spell them out very clearly.

Investing demands a lot from a person comprehensively. Since becoming an investor, I've felt a sense of refreshing myself. I exercise regularly, hoping to keep pace with everyone at any time. I also maintain my research and reading habits.

For over a decade at Carnegie Mellon and Tsinghua University, I was engaged in scientific research on environmental chemistry and nanomaterials. Later at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, I did decision-support research, mainly providing support for environmental legislation, policy, and planning.

When I switched to investing, I needed to do macro and industry research. The biggest motivation for constantly shifting research methods and domains was wanting to broaden my horizons — beyond environmental protection, to understand more fields, and to get closer to the economic mainstream.

After joining FreeS Fund in 2016, the greatest joy and challenge has been maintaining high-intensity learning. In 2018, my investment focus shifted from (environmental) engineering to an entirely new field — biomedicine. The backgrounds of FreeS Fund's healthcare team colleagues are all very strong, so there's pressure from within and without. I needed to absorb massive amounts of knowledge and quickly go from novice to expert.

Compared to others' recognition, whether you can establish research methods in a new field, learn quickly, and build confidence is probably more critical.

But on the flip side, an unexpected insight: sometimes investing precisely requires cross-disciplinary integration. When you're on sound logic but not too bound by conventional paths, you might get some unexpected gains.

In biotechnology today, engineering frameworks, computational assistance, and data-driven approaches iterate continuously. My previous engineering training helps me better understand these changes. Of course, the process is full of challenges.

Today, what makes me even happier is that with biotechnology as the foundation, biomedicine, biochemical engineering, bio-environmental protection, and bio-agriculture can all ultimately unify under the framework of the bioeconomy — nothing I've learned and explored has gone to waste.

▍Young people growing within the fund

Since college, including after returning to China, I've always been in entrepreneurial circles and was quite drawn to investing. In the first half of 2016, I'd been back in China for a year of entrepreneurship and was facing new career choices.

Compared to continuously advancing in technical fields, I probably prefer and am better suited to combining technology with business. Investing gives me a bigger platform, broader perspective, and faster learning opportunities.

FreeS Fund is an institution that's very committed to early-stage investing within the VC circle. Early-stage investing isn't just a process of financial investment and judgment — more often, we need to autonomously uncover under-the-radar projects, which is itself a process of value creation. I greatly enjoy accompanying founders through their growth, witnessing a company's ups and downs from zero.

Another characteristic of FreeS Fund is transparency and openness. Internally, all projects are open to everyone, and I think it's precisely because of this that we've developed our unique style of capturing interdisciplinary projects.

The company is very flat, encouraging everyone to try what interests them and take responsibility for it. I can clearly feel that whether you're an analyst or a partner, your way of working isn't much different.

As for investing itself, previous industry experience helps me learn and iterate faster. On the other hand, having worked at both large enterprises and startups, when I look at enterprise service companies, I can judge from a relatively comprehensive perspective whether these services truly bring tangible value to customers, and what their technical moats and implementability are.

Maintaining curiosity is extremely important in investing. You need to capture all the changes happening, think about what's behind them, and constantly close the distance between phenomena and essence. At FreeS Fund, everyone's discoveries and perspectives are valued and become topics for collective thinking and research.

Also, early-stage investing is a process of finding 0 to 1, often requiring going through what startups do from not being fully recognized to gradually heating up. This journey from "not hot" to "hot" is usually long and full of twists.

From interning to officially joining, these two years at FreeS Fund, I've witnessed portfolio companies' step-by-step growth, sharing in their joy, while also learning to maintain sufficient optimism and patience for what's happening or about to happen.

What's more, the most attractive thing about FreeS Fund is having a group of colleagues from different industries and fields. Investment decisions themselves move from repeated disagreement toward convergence, and in this process, everyone has the opportunity to apply what they've learned and gained to provide different perspectives and views.

At the same time, because of this diversity of backgrounds, discussions become more multifaceted. Eager to share, fond of tinkering, continuously discovering — nothing is more exciting than doing interesting things with a group of like-minded people.

▍From industry background to investing

Having been at FreeS Fund for over three years, I see it as a very eager-to-learn organization. There's a strong learning and research atmosphere, encouraging the team to do deep industry research and strive to be the first to discover future new demands and new technology directions.

Roughly every 40 days, investment teams in each direction will conduct in-depth research and sharing on a topic they're following. All team members, including both pre- and post-investment, can participate in discussions. Whether new colleagues or senior investors, everyone shares their thinking and experience.

You grow very fast in this team and gain deeper understanding of industries. It's an excellent environment for both career development and capability building.

Even someone like me with 30 years of workplace experience has gained much from the FreeS Fund family — heightened industry sensitivity, expanded scope, and deeper understanding of primary and secondary market dynamics.

Welcome to FreeS Fund. Let's work hard together, share together, and progress together.

I had previous experience as a serial entrepreneur, then spent five years at a major tech company. In early 2021, I joined FreeS Fund and gradually went through the transition from entrepreneur to investor. This process takes time — there was some initial confusion (mainly because investing and running a company have different requirements and evaluation methods for certainty), but it became increasingly interesting, and I've come to genuinely enjoy it.

In my first six months at FreeS Fund, I maintained a high daily average of projects reviewed. I looked at projects across all industries and types, and never tired of it. Why? Because it enormously satisfied my curiosity.

Every day, so many outstanding entrepreneurs and business leaders share with you what they've seen and learned across industries, their ideas and plans for changing the world, and you can share your own insights and takeaways with them — this kind of deep communication is truly wonderful. By comparison, the resulting investment outcomes feel more like a natural byproduct (just a threshold of team, project, and industry understanding being reached).

FreeS Fund is a learning organization where almost all information is open. Colleagues don't hide things from each other — there's a culture and habit of deep discussion, exchange, and mutual learning. Welcome more "newcomers" to bring new things into this organization, and let's all learn together.

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