欢迎您访问韩刚翻译学院官网! 欢迎您访问韩刚翻译学院官网!
最近浏览
您还没有参加班级!马上报班
购物车
购物车(0)

我的购物车

登录
注册
忘记密码
发送验证码
(0)

我的购物车

笔译

返回

外刊阅读| 从北京到硅谷:“网红”风投界迎来华裔“弄潮儿”

2021-09-06 4532

从北京到硅谷:“网红”风投界迎来华裔“弄潮儿”

She’s the Investor Guru for Online Creators

                                                                                         来源:纽约时报中文网

2021年9月6号

Cody Ko, a YouTube star with 5.7 million subscribers, found himself in a pickle in May. Two different start-ups wanted to give him stock, and he was concerned that they were potentially competitive deals.

5月,拥有570万订阅者的YouTube红人科迪·科(Cody Ko)面临两难选择。两家初创公司都想分股票给他,他担心这两笔交易存在潜在的竞争性。

So Mr. Ko called someone he trusted for advice: Li Jin.

于是,科迪·科打电话给他信任的人征求意见:金莉(音)。

Ms. Jin, a venture capitalist, suggested that Mr. Ko, 30, be honest and upfront with the founders of both start-ups about the potential conflict of interest. He agreed and ended up pursuing just one of the deals.

风险投资家金莉建议现年30岁的科迪·科对这两家初创公司的创始人坦诚告知潜在的利益冲突。他同意了,并最终只进行了其中一项交易。

“I’d never hesitate to reach out to her if I needed something,” he said of Ms. Jin.

他谈到金莉时说:“在我需要帮助的时候,我会毫不犹豫地联系她。”

If there is such a thing as an It Girl in venture capital these days, Ms. Jin, 31, would fill the bill. She sits at the intersection of start-up investing and the fast-growing ecosystem of online creators, both of which are red hot. And while she formed her own venture firm, Atelier Ventures, just last year and has raised a relatively small $13 million for a fund, Ms. Jin was among the first investors in Silicon Valley to take influencers seriously and has written about and backed creators for years.

如果现在风投界也有“It Girl”(弄潮儿),那么31岁的金莉当之无愧。她所处的位置正是初创投资和快速增长的网络创作者生态系统的交汇处,两者都是大热门。就在去年,她成立了自己的风险投资公司Atelier Ventures,并为一个基金筹集了1300万美元,虽然规模相对较小,但金莉是硅谷首批认真对待网红的投资人之一,她支持创作者并撰写关于他们的文章。

A Harvard graduate who was inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Ms. Jin is also aggressively pro-worker. She has made it clear in podcasts and her Substack newsletter that creators should get the same rights as other workers. Among the ideas she has championed is a “universal creative income,” which would guarantee creators a base amount of money to live on.

作为受弗里德里希·恩格斯(Friedrich Engels)和卡尔·马克思(Karl Marx)思想启发的哈佛毕业生,金莉也积极支持劳动者。她在播客和她的Substack通讯中明确表示,创作者应该获得与其他工作者相同的权利。她所倡导的理念之一是“无条件创意收入”,这将保证创作者有足够资金维持生活。

Now as large venture capital firms flock to influencer start-ups, and as Facebook, YouTube and others introduce $1 billion creator funds, Ms. Jin’s track record has made her a go-to business guru for many digital stars who are trying to navigate the fast-changing landscape.

现在,随着大型风险投资公司涌向网红初创企业,以及Facebook、YouTube和其他公司推出10亿美元的创作者基金,金莉的过往业绩使她成为许多试图在这个瞬息万变的领域中摸索的网络明星要找的人。

Hank Green, 41, a top creator on YouTube and TikTok, said he often tossed ideas back and forth with her by phone. Markian Benhamou, 23, a YouTuber with over 1.4 million subscribers, credited her with understanding what creators go through. Marina Mogilko, 31, a YouTube creator in Los Altos, Calif., said Ms. Jin “started the whole creator economy movement in Silicon Valley.”

41岁的汉克·格林(Hank Green)是YouTube和TikTok的头部创作者,他说他经常在电话里与她交流想法。23岁的马基安·本哈穆(Markian Benhamou)是一位拥有超过140万订阅者的YouTube用户,他认为金莉理解创作者的经历。加利福尼亚州洛斯阿尔托斯市31岁的YouTube创作者玛丽娜·莫吉尔科(Marina Mogilko)表示,金莉“在硅谷发起了整个创作者经济运动”。

“She was talking about the creator economy years and years and years before anyone else was,” said Jack Conte, a co-founder and the chief executive of Patreon, a crowdfunding site for content creators. “She really sees the future before other people do.”

面向内容创作者的众筹网站Patreon的联合创始人兼首席执行官杰克·康特(Jack Conte)说:“她年复一年地谈论创作者经济,而且比其他任何人都早。她真的比其他人更早看到了未来。”

Ms. Jin, who has invested in Substack and Patreon, said that although her fund was small, she planned to put all the money into companies transforming online work. “Everything I invest in is a creator-focused company,” she said. “I think the impact I have is outsized relative to the dollar amounts.”

曾投资过Substack和Patreon的金莉表示,虽然她的基金规模不大,但她计划将所有资金投入到让网络作品产生变革的公司中。“我投资的一切都是围绕创作者为中心的公司,”她说。“我认为我的影响远远大过金额数字。”

Her credibility has been enhanced because she also operates as a creator. Ms. Jin posts frequently on her Substack newsletter, leads an online course teaching creators how to invest in start-ups and has created Side Hustle Stack, a free resource to help influencers find and evaluate platforms to leverage.

由于她也是创作者,这增加了她的可信度。金莉经常在她的Substack通讯上发帖,主持一个网络课程教授创作者如何投资初创企业,并创建了Side Hustle Stack,这是一个免费资源,可帮助网红寻找、评估可利用的平台。

Ms. Jin, who was born in Beijing, immigrated at age 6 with her family to the United States, where her father pursued a doctorate in economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Their early years in the country were lean, she said, until her father left school and got a job. Her family eventually moved to Upper St. Clair, a town of about 20,000 outside Pittsburgh, where Ms. Jin attended public school and enjoyed painting and writing.

金莉出生于北京,六岁时随家人移民美国,父亲在匹兹堡大学攻读经济学博士学位。她说,他们早年在美国的日子并不好过,直到她父亲毕业找到一份工作。她们一家最终搬到了上圣克莱尔——匹兹堡郊外一个约有两万人的小镇,金莉在那里上公立学校,喜欢绘画和写作。

At Harvard, she studied English and continued her creative pursuits. But at the urging of her family, who she said “wanted financial security for me,” Ms. Jin switched her major to statistics and did banking and corporate marketing internships. After briefly working for Capital One after college, she moved to Silicon Valley at age 23 to work at Shopkick, a shopping rewards app, as a product manager.

在哈佛,她攻读英语专业并继续她的创作事业。但在家人的催促下——她说家人“希望我有经济保障”——金莉转修统计学,并在银行和企业营销部门实习。大学毕业后,她在第一资本(Capital One)短暂工作后,在23岁时移居硅谷,在购物奖励应用程序Shopkick担任产品经理。

In 2016, Ms. Jin landed at the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. At the time, the firm was focused heavily on investing in marketplaces like Airbnb and Rappi, the Instacart of Latin America.

2016年,金莉进入硅谷风险投资公司安德烈森-霍罗威茨(Andreessen Horowitz)。当时,该公司主要专注于投资爱彼迎(Airbnb)和Rappi等平台,后者相当于拉丁美洲的Instacart(一款食品杂货配送应用程序——编注)。

Ms. Jin became fascinated with how different marketplaces worked and wrote prolifically about them for the Andreessen Horowitz blog. She also began thinking about how different marketplace systems could evolve to help people build businesses on the internet.

金莉对于不同平台的运作方式很感兴趣,并为安德烈森-霍罗威茨撰写了大量关于这些平台的博客文章。她还开始思考不同的市场系统可以如何发展,以帮助人们在互联网上建立业务。

That led Ms. Jin to champion the influencer industry. Watching creators struggle to earn a living online felt personal, she said, while she also saw big potential in online work and creators as a business.

这让金莉成为了网红行业的拥护者。她说,看着创作者努力在网上谋生很有亲切感,同时她也看到了网络创作和创作者作为一项业务的巨大潜力。

Her affirmation was meaningful, influencers said. “Her being at that big storied firm and saying these things felt like, ahh, finally someone’s saying it,” said Mr. Green, the YouTube star.

网红们说,她的肯定是有意义的。“她在大公司里说这些话,感觉就是,啊,终于有人这么说了,”YouTube明星格林说。

When the coronavirus pandemic hit last year and the world was increasingly pushed online, Ms. Jin recognized an opportunity.

去年,当新冠病毒大流行袭来,世界被更多推向网络时,金莉意识到了机会。

“I felt like Covid would be such an accelerant to online-based work and people wanting to be entrepreneurs,” she said. “I realized I had an opportunity to start an entirely new fund that was devoted to this thesis and that would be on the forefront of evolving the nature of labor and work on the internet.”

“我觉得新冠会成为在线工作和想成为企业家的人的催化剂,”她说。“我意识到,我有机会启动一个全新的基金专门关注这个问题,并将站在互联网上劳动和工作性质演变的最前沿。”

In May 2020, she quit Andreessen Horowitz and started Atelier Ventures. She has since invested in creator-related start-ups such as PearPop, which lets influencers profit off their social interactions, and Stir, which helps creators manage their finances. She is one of the few investors whom large influencers know by name.

2020年5月,她离开安德烈森-霍罗威茨,创办了Atelier Ventures。从那以后,她投资了与创作者相关的初创企业,比如让网红通过社交互动获利的PearPop,以及帮助创作者管理财务的Stir。她是少数几个被大网红们熟知的投资人之一。

“If you talk to anyone who works in the creator economy, they all say, ‘Oh, you have to talk to Li Jin,’” said a creator who goes by Jasmine Rice, 23, a former OnlyFans influencer who started a platform called Fanhouse, which Ms. Jin invested in last year.

“如果你和任何一个在创作者经济领域工作的人聊天,他们都会说,‘哦,你得和金莉谈谈,’”23岁的创作者贾思敏·赖斯(Jasmine Rice)说。她曾是OnlyFans的网红,创办了一个名叫“粉丝之家”(Fanhouse)的平台,去年,金莉投资了这个平台。

Ms. Jin has also publicly criticized the funds that YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat offer influencers to make content for their platforms. She has implored the tech industry to “stop celebrating” the funds, calling them “bread and circuses,” and argued that creators needed ownership over the platforms that made money off them.

金莉还公开批评YouTube、Facebook、TikTok和Snapchat为网红提供资金,让他们为自己的平台制作内容。她恳求科技行业“停止赞美”这些资金,称它们是“面包和马戏”,并认为创作者需要对靠他们赚钱的平台拥有所有权。

“Without ownership, creators are ultimately enriching and empowering *someone else* — platform owners — with their work,” Ms. Jin tweeted in June.

“没有所有权,创作者最终是在用自己的作品充实并赋权其他人——平台所有者,”金莉今年6月发推写道。

Ms. Jin said the platforms had to take care not “to recreate a ton of the economic disparities that exist in the broader economy rather than truly empowering a new generation of online entrepreneurs.” She has named a podcast that she co-hosts “Means of Creation,” a play on Marx’s means of production.

金莉说,这些平台必须小心,不要“重现广泛经济中存在的大量经济差距,而不真正赋予新一代网络企业家权力”。她与人合作主持了一个名叫“创作资料”(Means of Creation)的播客,这个名字是戏仿马克思的“生产资料”。

Her views have made her a subject of fascination in the tech industry and in leftist political spaces. Replies to her social media posts are full of memes insinuating she’s a socialist. Ms. Jin said she was mostly amused by the hubbub.

她的观点让她成了科技行业和左翼政治领域的关注对象。在她社交媒体帖子的回复里充满了暗示她是社会主义者的米姆。金莉说,大多数时候,这些喧嚣让她感到很好笑。

“I’m very careful to not use that word, the S word,” she said of socialism. “It’s unnecessarily polarizing in the U.S.”

“我非常小心地不使用那个词,那个S打头的词,”她在谈到社会主义时说。“这在美国是不必要的极端化。”

Ms. Jin said she had also become a believer in crypto networks because they are decentralized and “aim to turn over control and ownership to their users.” She has begun investing in crypto-related platforms, recently backing Mirror, a decentralized publishing platform, and Yield Guild Games, which is building a gaming guild for the “metaverse” to help people in developing countries make money by playing video games. She has also teamed up with creators to mint and sell artwork as NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.

金莉说,她也开始相信加密货币网络,因为它们是去中心化的,“目的是把控制权和所有权交给用户”。她已经开始投资与加密货币相关的平台,最近还投资了去中心化出版平台Mirror,以及Yield Guild Games——它正在为“元宇宙(metaverse)”建立一个游戏工会,帮助发展中国家的人们通过玩视频游戏赚钱。她还与创作者合作将艺术品变为NFT(非同质化代币)并出售。

“There’s been a simmering awareness for my entire life,” she said, “that the world is unfair and we need to push it in the direction of justice and fairness.”

“我一生中都在酝酿着一种意识,”她说,“这个世界是不公平的,我们需要推动它朝着正义和公平的方向发展。”

Since starting Atelier Ventures, Ms. Jin has moved away from Silicon Valley and run her fund out of her childhood bedroom in Pittsburgh. This summer, she was nomadic, traveling around the world surrounded by a changing cast of internet stars, artists, Gen Z tech founders and crypto pioneers.

自从创办Atelier Ventures以来,金莉离开了硅谷,在匹兹堡儿时的卧室里经营着自己的基金。今年夏天,她四处流浪,在世界各地旅行,身边围绕着各种互联网明星、艺术家、Z世代科技创始人和加密货币先驱。

In July, she co-hosted a packed happy hour on a New York City rooftop attended by a who’s who of internet culture and techies, including the founders of the NFT platform OpenSea, product people from TikTok and Twitter, and other investors. From New York, she jetted to Paris for a crypto conference and hosted a “creator salon” at a cafe on the Left Bank.

7月,她在纽约市一个屋顶上共同主持了一场热闹的欢乐时光聚会,出席者都是互联网文化和科技界知名人士,包括NFT平台OpenSea的创始人、TikTok和Twitter的产品人员,以及其他投资者。从纽约出发,她飞往巴黎参加一个加密货币会议,并在左岸的一家咖啡馆举办了一个“创作者沙龙”。

She then flew to Greece on an invitation from Daniel Ek, the chief executive of Spotify, and later attended a dinner on the beach with Emma Watson, Nicky Hilton and others, which was organized by the Brilliant Minds Foundation.

随后,她应Spotify首席执行官丹尼尔·埃克(Daniel Ek)的邀请飞往希腊,然后与艾玛·沃森(Emma Watson)、尼基·希尔顿(Nicky Hilton)等人参加了聪明头脑基金会(Brilliant Minds Foundation)在海滩举行的晚宴。

She has since headed home to Pittsburgh to regroup and reflect.

之后,她回到了匹兹堡的家,重新整理和反思。

“It’s just so improbable that I’m here,” Ms. Jin said, “that I was born in Beijing speaking Chinese as my first and only language and something happened to bring me to the U.S. and now I have the tools to be able to have a voice and influence.”

“我能在这里真是太不可思议了,”金莉说,“我出生在北京,中文是我的第一语言,也曾经是唯一的语言,后来发生了一些事,让我来到了美国,现在我有了发声和有影响力的工具。”