Hearts Responding to Hearts | Oasis Signals

You can't love summer and hate winter;

Summer and winter together form the yin and yang of a life cycle.

Recently, as TMTpost released its 2022 H1 Pioneer Investment Institutions rankings, it sat down with Oasis Capital for a conversation.

TMTpost in Conversation with Oasis Capital

TMTpost: As an investment institution, beyond passion and capital, what else can you offer founders?

Oasis Capital: That's a good question. Investing has both a scientific side and an artistic side. The scientific side is the tangible one.

Let's start with the science. We often describe entrepreneurship as highly individual — full of personality, innovation, industry-specific characteristics. But in reality, building a company also has universal patterns. That's the scientific dimension. What challenges does an organization face as it grows? What inner conflicts do founders experience in their own development? How is leadership built step by step? How do you identify the principal contradiction? What kind of business is this, fundamentally? These universal questions far outweigh the individual ones. A good investor, we believe, understands the universal patterns, not just the particular ones — that's the scientific side of entrepreneurship. Take Carlota Perez, a British scholar who studied innovation cycles: what phases does an innovation go through? What paradigm shifts does it create in industries? Is there a logical and temporal sequence between these paradigms? Through extensive research, she produced excellent works like Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, which lay out innovation cycles with remarkable clarity.

For these universal challenges in entrepreneurship, there are quite a few methodologies. An investment firm continuously accumulates them, like a knowledge base. When a founder hits a particular stage, we can at least offer a perspective — and that perspective is itself a methodology. This is something Oasis has been building all along, and we hope it helps our entrepreneurs, particularly in organization and leadership, to level up. That's the scientific side, the tangible side.

On the other hand, we often say internally: if Oasis were a person, if it had a personality, we would want it to be romantic first. If it weren't romantic, if it weren't cool, why would we even do this? So it should be romantic. And we ask ourselves: this romantic Oasis, from the intangible, artistic angle, what can it actually offer founders? If we say founders are like spiritual practitioners, when a person achieves enlightenment, how do they know they're enlightened? And how does the world know?

The Zen method is: they go chat with someone who's already enlightened, exchange a few words, ask some questions, and the enlightened person can roughly gauge their level — whether they've truly awakened. This process is called "mind-to-mind transmission" (yi xin yin xin). It's quite similar to entrepreneurship. Often when we talk with founders, it seems like we're helping them, or offering some optimal solution. Actually, no. The answer has always been inside each founder. It's just that society can be rather浮躁 [restless/frenetic], and people easily lose their way. In that process of losing themselves, founders forget certain things — things we didn't give them, things they already had, that perhaps just need dusting off. When they're torn between short-term and long-term choices, or facing major strategic decisions, founders need institutions and people who think in longer time horizons to serve as mirrors for each other. This mirroring process affirms their original intention and long-term choices — I believe this "transmission" is what founders and investors need.

But this doesn't mean we're telling them something, or walking them through a thought process or method. These things already exist deep in their hearts — they were the sole reason they chose to start a company in the first place. Sometimes society just makes them lose sight of that. Precisely in such moments, as an investment institution, we should help bring that original intention to the surface, rather than giving shorter-term, more浮躁 [restless] advice that confuses them further, right? Like planting a tree, we should provide a longer-term thinking benchmark, a ruler, so founders have somewhere to turn for mind-to-mind transmission when they're lost. I think this may be our thinking on both sides — the tangible and intangible, science and art.

TMTpost: Hearing that, I feel genuinely moved. Beyond money, entrepreneurship really is quite lonely. Founders need someone to walk alongside them on this path. Maybe at certain junctures, they have a direction in mind, but need someone to affirm it and push them forward. Institutions can play a crucial role here. In terms of industry experience, a founder may be relatively experienced in their particular track, but an institution's perspective is different — it can offer complementary angles. Perhaps more than money, it provides something psychological, something above the practical.

Oasis Capital: Yes, money is something everyone needs — it's the material foundation. But the spiritual dimension should carry the fund's own distinctive character.

TMTpost: That's quite distinctive, what you're saying. This pandemic has made things difficult for everyone. Many institutions may be steadily arranging their work; but many founders face different challenges — possible work stoppages, and now a tough international environment. From an institutional perspective, with all this hardship on their entrepreneurial journey, what message would you want to send them?

Oasis Capital: Give them some momentum. First, Oasis is still investing very actively today. Our pace hasn't slowed at all — we've actually set some fairly aggressive investment strategies and targets.

From the founder's perspective, we often say problems in life fall into two categories: structural problems and rhythmic problems. Some problems are rhythmic, short-term pressures. Forgetting your keys once in a while when you get home — that's a rhythmic problem. But some problems are structural: if you're naturally scatterbrained, you keep forgetting your keys. We must distinguish between structural and rhythmic problems. Much of today's market volatility is rhythmic, not structural. If we let rhythmic problems break our structure, we likely lose our original entrepreneurial intention; our team may disband, our morale collapse. At that point, a rhythmic problem has become a structural one.

If it reaches that stage, even when the rhythm shifts and spring comes, the life force itself may already be dead. Sometimes severe cold or heavy rain isn't necessarily terrifying. What's most frightening is when the seed dies. But if your seed hasn't died, weather and climate will certainly change — because climate is rhythmic, while the seed itself is structural. I think at a time like this, what founders should focus on isn't today's rhythmic pressures or risks, but returning to their structure. How do I optimize my structure? What weaknesses has it exposed? If my cash flow is poor, was I too growth-driven in the past? Did I expand too fast? Do some people need to be optimized? I believe winter is often an excellent time to adjust structure. Because if we can get our structure right during this period, when the rhythmic spring arrives, we can welcome new growth.

You know how it is with trees? Trees can actually only be transplanted after Minor Cold [a solar term]; you can't move them in summer — they'll die. Only in winter can you transplant them. Winter is precisely when you can make structural changes. You should seize this opportunity for structural transformation. Then when spring and summer return, you'll experience a new round of growth. The rhythmic nature of how things develop — these are often opportunities. Winter is merely a lens for interpreting information, not the information itself. As founders, if you can take this chance to optimize your structure even better, I think you may welcome new growth. Everyone should return to growing through structure itself. From our perspective, there are still abundant opportunities in the coming decade.

TMTpost: I see. Actually winter is a good thing too, right? We can look inward more, see what we can optimize better? When winter gradually passes, we'll be poised to channel our accumulated energy toward a better market.

Oasis Capital: Yes. A year has four seasons — there will always be summer, and there will always be winter. No one thinks winter itself is bad; people just find it unpleasant. Yet many people love winter deeply. Without winter, how could trees be transplanted? Without winter, how could trees grow? You can't love summer and hate winter, right? Together they constitute the yin and yang of a life cycle.

So this period is actually an opportunity for good companies to leap to a higher level. I don't think we should overemphasize it as a "winter," or say today's market is pure froth — they are both indispensable factors in this market, and we must embrace them. But the core is this: amid rhythmic changes, have we made our structure healthier, have we made our seed more vital? I believe this is what we as founders should truly care about.

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Oasis Capital is a new-generation venture capital firm in China, dedicated to discovering the most vital entrepreneurs of the next decade and growing alongside them to create long-term value. "Participating in and celebrating vitality" is Oasis's vision and mission. This vitality is both the direction of China's structural transformation and the force of entrepreneurs' resilience and evolution.

Oasis Capital focuses on early and growth-stage investments, with check sizes ranging from $3 million to $30 million USD. It concentrates on technology-enabled services, particularly in healthcare and enterprise services, supporting China's technology-driven new service upgrade.