NextFin News -- All of a sudden, there is hardly anyone in the investment world who didn’t know the name Zhang Xue.

It's already been seven days since Zhang’s motocycle took the championship at the WSBK Portugal round. But the story is still gathering momentum.

On social media, clips from the video “If you have a dream, go after it” -- Zhang's famous quote -- were reposted millions of times, and the comments section was packed with young people who’d been fired up. Zhang’s personal growth story—and the full process of leading his team into competition and winning the title this time—was etched with a biting satire of meritocracy.

Someone with no connections, no degree, no stroke of luck, and no money reached technical heights that even engineers at big companies—born into privileged families, educated at elite schools, “gilded” by top labs, and backed by virtually unlimited R&D budgets—had never touched. And his team, likewise, fought through layer upon layer of constraints—being thrust into the spotlight at the last minute, running short on funds, working with basic equipment, and lacking experience—to defeat the long-dominant traditional powerhouses with deep pockets, advanced gear, and ample staffing.

This was a real-life “Born to Fly.” Winner takes all, exhilarating and uncompromising—so much so that, in a daze, it brought to mind some long-missed stories from the boom years of the internet.

But on the flip side of this nationwide frenzy, one group fell into collective silence—venture capital.

“Do you have Zhang Xue’s contact info?” After the news of the championship broke, messages like that flooded Zhang Ying’s (a pseudonym) phone. The awkward part was that although Zhang Ying was one of the few investors who actually knew Zhang Xue, he hadn’t invested in him. In fact, throughout Zhang Xue’s eight-year entrepreneurial journey, mainstream VC firms were entirely absent.

Zhang had said that in the early days of his startup he did try to approach capital, but without success. And most of the money he used over the course of building the business came from selling off his own equity, funds he raised on his own, and loans he borrowed.

VCs who had begun scrambling to make up for it searched everywhere for Zhang Xue; some even booked overnight flights to Chongqing to try to intercept him in person. This “belated recognition” felt more than a little ironic, and once again pulled VC institutions into the whirlpool of criticism for being “short-sighted” and having “frozen aesthetics.” One VC partner publicly reflected in his WeChat Moments: “We missed it.”

The doubts spread: Why did venture capital miss Zhang collectively?

But it also seems hard to blame investors for being “slow on the uptake”—because without this victory, Zhang Xue might still not have matched the profile that VC firms ideally look for.

We concede that if China has a million entrepreneurs, then there ought to be a million paths—and endings—to entrepreneurship. But in reality, choosing one founder to bet on and then growing alongside them is always a long process—at every “present moment” when the cost of trial and error remains stubbornly high, one workable approach is to find, within an increasingly clear framework, the person who best fits the criteria.

When we trace how Chinese venture capital’s “understanding” of founders has shifted over the past two decades, we may find part of the answer to what this history has caused people to “miss.”

“Returnee Elites” Versus “Repair-shop Apprentice” (2005–2010)

In the early 2000s, venture capital was almost synonymous with “returnee investing.” Investors such as Neil Shen, IDG’s Hugo Shong, and Bob Xu were looking for entrepreneurs with elite overseas university backgrounds, who had seen Silicon Valley internet models up close, and who could replicate proven products in China.

This kind of “anchoring” wasn’t entirely deliberate. As venture capital—an imported concept—was just taking root in China, it naturally came with a Silicon Valley filter. Investors needed a quick yardstick that balanced localization with their comfort zone, and “returnee” status happened to fit the bill—often implying language skills, a global outlook, firsthand exposure to mature business models, and, to some extent, network-based credibility.

In an early-stage investment market where information was profoundly asymmetric, certainty was more valuable than imagination.

As a result, investing looked almost carefully pre-designed. What founders had to articulate clearly wasn’t just their educational background, but also whether they had worked abroad—and whether they could fluently tell a story that had already played out in Silicon Valley and was about to be reenacted in China. By some investors’ accounts, many deal intentions in that era were finalized at cocktail receptions and parties—formats that were themselves largely imported—where the same pitches circulated around the room and, in the end, determined the outcome.

The result was that people who fit the profile found it easier to raise money; those who raised money were more likely to succeed; and the successful ones, in turn, further cemented this worldview. But once a standard is set, it’s hard to change. Local entrepreneurs without overseas pedigrees—and the hard-won, muddy, on-the-ground experience they had accumulated—rarely entered the field of view of this evaluation system.

In that era, Robin Li returned from SUNY Buffalo with his “hyperlink analysis” patent and founded Baidu; Charles Zhang, armed with an MIT degree and backing from Nicholas Negroponte, founded Sohu; Shao Yibo brought eBay’s model back to China and started EachNet; and Liang Jianzhang, Ji Qi, and others emulated Expedia and Hotels.com to build Ctrip and Home Inn. In those years, what investors were betting on may well have been hidden in these founders’ eyes—a future they had already seen.

Behind this deeper logic lay a kind of quiet, collective anxiety. In the first decade of the 21st century, China’s internet was defined by a relatively lagging pace of development, alongside a small group of people sensing what was coming ahead of time. The window of opportunity vanished in a flash. Returned overseas entrepreneurs happened to fit that anxiety perfectly—those ready-made, imported lessons might be applied directly to a piece of land that had not yet been cultivated. At that tempo, who had the patience to wait for an apprentice in a repair shop to slowly hone his craft?

More subtly, in this phase there was also a kind of identity-based complicity between capital and entrepreneurs—similar backgrounds meant similar tastes, similar ways of communicating, and similar imaginations. From where we stand in 2026, we can of course argue that it was insular, and that it would miss countless possibilities—when everyone is chasing “overseas elites,” the premium attached to them naturally disappears.

But at least then and there, it was rational, effective, and it even laid the groundwork for our early internet.

And in that decade, Zhang Xue was the repair-shop apprentice from a mountain village in Huaihua, Hunan—the dream-chasing boy who, just to get into a stunt-driving team, ran after a Hunan TV production crew for a full hundred kilometers through the mud. That gap in status also destined his value to stretch out in silence, rooted in the muddy soil of the countryside.

“Product Managers” Versus “Factory Craftsmen” (2010–2020)

As this period began, the tide of the PC era started to recede from the beachhead of China’s internet. People remember it clearly: a time when Internet Plus, traditional on-the-ground sales pushes, 2G networks and Bitcoin, and the boom in mobile internet all surged forward side by side.

The spread of smartphones was a silent revolution, completely rewriting how people connected with one another and with the world. And amid one wrong turn after another, some former entrepreneurial “kings” gradually faded from the center of public view.

The most keen-nosed investors are no longer satisfied with hunting for “copycats” who merely transplant the Silicon Valley playbook back home. The halo around “overseas returnee elites” hasn’t completely faded, but a new label has been solemnly added—big-tech pedigree, preferably as a “product manager.” Layered together, these two identities form, in this generation of investors’ eyes, the ideal founder archetype: someone who understands technology and capital, is familiar with corporate management, and has a thorough grasp of big tech’s traffic-and-growth playbook.

It’s an easy story to believe. These people have honed products and learned through trial and error inside large companies; they know best how to carve out an opening in the cracks. The capabilities they’ve already proven tend to travel with them from one startup journey to the next.

Alibaba’s “China Supply Iron Army” trained A Gan, who later went to Meituan and brought with him a complete, end-to-end direct sales methodology. This playbook not only enabled Meituan to steamroll opponents in the Thousand Group War with formidable collective execution, but also planted a peculiar seed—those who benefited from it eventually dispersed across every corner of the internet world after leaving Meituan, only to meet again on narrow battlegrounds in e-commerce, unmanned retail shelves, O2O, shared power banks… and a series of all-out bloodbaths.

And there’s a long list of other “big names” that shaped the course of the internet.

Fu Sheng founded Cheetah Mobile with 360’s product experience, trying to seize the initiative in the wave of utility apps going global; Tang Yan left his post as editor-in-chief at NetEase to start Momo, taking the business of stranger social networking all the way to NASDAQ; after building up experience at Kuxun, Zhang Yiming developed a deeper understanding of information distribution, and ByteDance’s algorithmic recommendations later reshaped the entire content industry; Su Hua, with a Baidu engineer’s background, built Kuaishou and engaged in a long tug-of-war with Douyin on the short-video track; Cheng Wei left Alibaba B2B to found Didi, using subsidy wars to educate the market at high speed—and changing how cities move.

Their stories share a common undertone, and they quickly pushed investors to update their selection criteria.

The shift wasn’t accidental. The window for mobile internet was short and brutal, and investors needed to quickly judge whether a founder had what it took to “fight a big war.” A big-tech résumé meant they had seen systematic ways of operating at scale; a product manager background meant they knew how to design from user needs; and the combination often signaled lower trial-and-error costs and faster iteration.

At this moment, what VCs are chasing is no longer one idea after another, but execution—the competition is becoming increasingly concrete: who can scale DAU fast, and who can lock in the next round of financing in the shortest time.

Under the reinforcement of this logic, founders’ personal stories became relatively secondary. Investors began applying ever more refined screening frameworks: team background, business model, market size, and even the exit path. For a long time, this methodology did work—and it helped shape the most glorious decade China’s venture capital market has seen to date.

But at the same time, a wall was quietly built with everyone’s tacit consent: inside it lay the collective consensus; outside it were the “misfits” who couldn’t be neatly categorized. During that period, Zhang Xue had just co-founded Kaiyue Motorcycles with his partners. He didn’t come from a major tech company, nor did he have a product methodology. To pursue the dream of developing a motorcycle engine in-house, he borrowed RMB 10 million from the company, led his engineering team to sleep in the factory and live on steamed buns, and ultimately achieved ignition—breaking through the 16,000-rpm limit.

Back then, no one would have associated him with a “unicorn.” He seemed to have only a clumsy, almost primal kind of persistence. The mobile internet wave was roaring, but it was destined to belong to only some. Few people were willing to stop and listen to a mechanic’s apprentice talk about his racing dream. What’s more, in the market’s perception at the time, motorcycles were a shrinking sunset industry——city bans and restrictions on motorcycles were tightening, and young people were flocking to ride-hailing and shared bikes. This track appeared to have neither a tailwind nor a story.

The Age of the “Outlier” (2021–Present)

Today, we can only aim at a relatively rough investment yardstick.

After its most prosperous decade, China’s venture capital industry entered a brief “cold snap.” The dollar-based system faded from the stage, while the RMB ecosystem and state capital moved to center stage. In this phase, hard tech and scientists have underpinned the industry’s vitality.

This academic- and patent-driven investment model differs fundamentally—objectively worlds apart—from the logic of the dollar era, and people began to miss that red-hot, imagination-fueled age of venture capital.

In November 2022, the sudden arrival of ChatGPT-3.5—seen as an opening act for the global tech industry—also quickly thawed the freeze in China’s VC scene. “Large language models” propelled an AI industry that had been stagnant for years into a brand-new phase. Almost overnight, internet and tech elites and venture capitalists formed an overwhelming consensus——the silicon-based revolution had officially begun.

The pace of this technological revolution exceeded everyone’s expectations. In just three short years, people had already crossed the dangerous shoals of cryptocurrencies, walked out of the metaverse garden, and were now charging toward a bright future of foundation models and embodied intelligence.

Breakneck technological iteration and ever-shifting hype cycles are driving everyone to sprint for their lives. Even as the bar for starting a business has risen to the clouds—and even as top talents and scientists from elite institutions are everywhere—the startup fever has still climbed to levels approaching the peak of the mobile internet era.

Yet as the entrepreneurial “wind” has moved closer and closer to the AI application layer, the once-familiar figures—brilliant scientists from the world’s top tech giants and university labs—have gradually faded from view. In their place is a group of young people who don’t quite fit investors’ traditional aesthetic. They may not come from Ivy League schools, but they might be top-tier, self-taught geeks who live in open-source communities; they may not have big-tech résumés, but they could have spent a decade grinding in a specific vertical; they may not even have college diplomas, yet they’ve already built—by hand—multiple AI plugins that were bought out by major companies. We’ve gotten used to calling them “Outliers.”

This anti-traditional entrepreneurial path, in fact, reveals the core logic of AI application-layer startups——the infrastructure has already been laid by the compute giants and the model giants. The focus of competition is no longer whose model is stronger, but whether an AI application can truly land in real-world scenarios.

VC tastes are being forced to evolve again. The once-revered formula of “top school + top big-tech + top conference papers” is starting to fail. In its place is an evaluation system built around “industry know-how + product intuition + rapid validation.” People who couldn’t get a ticket under the old framework are suddenly realizing that their past isn’t a disadvantage anymore——there’s a newer term for it now: differentiation.

Non-consensus founders always feel more legendary: Liang Wenfeng, who did quantitative investing, crossed over and built DeepSeek, stunning Silicon Valley; Wang Xingxing, with “average credentials,” helped Unitree Robotics rise to the top globally; Liu Jingkang, who dropped out of Nanjing University, took Insta360 and swept the global panoramic camera market. What they share is this: in mainstream investment frameworks they were all “misfits,” yet each of them redefined industry standards in their own field.

The wall separating consensus from outliers has already crumbled, but Zhang Xue still hadn’t entered capital’s line of sight. After serious disagreements with shareholders over investment in engine R&D, Zhang Xue chose to sell all of his shares and leave Kaiyue Motorcycles, the company he founded with his own hands. In 2024, he began his second entrepreneurial journey——Zhang Xue Motorcycles. He embodies almost every trait of a “non-consensus founder,” yet in the AI frenzy he feels especially out of sync——he’s too traditional, traditional to the point of clashing with the main narrative thread of the era. He is indeed an Outlier, but an Outlier from the previous era.

"A fund has to pursue predictable returns, and Zhang Xue represents an extreme outlier who can’t be replicated," one investor told us. "Given her background and résumé, in the eyes of VCs of that era she was never a hand with a high probability of winning—especially once you factor in the limitations of the motorcycle market and the limited room for imagination in the public markets. It’s safe to say that no mature venture capital firm would ever put its chips on that hand. For VCs with a proven playbook, discipline trumps everything."

Those investors who were frantically asking around in their WeChat Moments for "Zhang Xue’s contact information" were no longer betting on the Zhang Xue who "did it out of passion," but on the Zhang Xue who "became valuable because she won a championship."

Maybe it wasn’t Zhang Xue who missed her era—maybe the era missed Zhang Xue.

This shift in venture capital firms’ preferences is, at its core, capital’s pursuit of certainty under the tailwinds of different times. In the next era, what kind of aesthetic will investors evolve—and will they end up missing the next Zhang Xue all over again?