What the hell is a private enterprise?

Chapter 518 Getting Caught in the Crossfire
Although we are currently in the grassroots era of the internet, global connectivity has already been achieved and some characteristics have begun to emerge:

It easily fosters unicorn companies.

These are emerging companies that suddenly appear, rise rapidly, and have the potential to become industry leaders.

An English teacher and his wife spent 2 yuan to create an electronic yellow pages, and earned 500 million yuan in less than three years.
A professor couple recognized the impending widespread adoption of PCs and left their jobs to start their own business. Relying on switches and routers, they went public in less than 5 years, raising $69 million and reaching a market value of $240 million. Seven years later, the market value reached $85 billion.

Amazon, which went public in the middle of this year, has a market value of only $4.4 million, but it will reach $300 billion in two years.

The astonishing surge in market capitalization opened the eyes of veteran financiers and investors, who then poured money into the internet. A high school student could easily raise tens of millions of dollars with just a single idea, a small website that had no competitors for the time being, no profit expectations, no business model, and no profit motive.

Gaijin Network is not a unicorn; it has always been backed by a powerful company and has never sought funding since its inception. However, the industry has never underestimated its valuation.

大名鼎鼎的社交网站二把手斯通立方估值也不过1500美元，然而上半年红杉对盖金网络的预测是2亿美元，并且每隔一个月上调5~10%，10月高盛下属基金还透露愿意按照3.3亿美元估值融资的意向。

But in November, just half a day after Tang Wenzhan took over the imperial land, the latest industry offer reached $500 million.

……

大白舰队的第一次15天预约范围原本包括3个靠港地6万张门票，单价30美元，而去掉1个一等奖、3个二等、10个三等奖后依然能保证每个游客均分到77美元。

After the news was reported, Americans did the math with a calculator and immediately discovered that they could not only play for free, but also make more than $40 for free!

Just like queuing up to get eggs, although there aren't a lot, for those people who live near the port, it would be a shame not to make an appointment.

At this point, we must mention a statistic: home PC coverage.

In 97, there were approximately 150 million personal PCs in China, but only 30 of them had internet access.

Of Gaijin's tens of thousands of daily active users, only a small portion come from families. The majority come from internet cafes and computers used by employees of official organizations while they are slacking off at work. A quick scan of the backend reveals that official IP addresses account for an exaggeratedly large proportion.

97年帝国PC行业对此的预测是从40%上涨至43%，4000多万个家庭都拥有至少1台电脑，联网比例更是做到了几乎完全覆盖。

Therefore, even just a few users from surrounding cities registered, resulting in an astonishing number of registrations. In addition, many more people, out of interest, flocked to register accounts on DaWang BBS.

At that time, there was no well-known "Great Firewall". The only difficulty in registering for the Internet was not being able to understand Chinese. However, Tang Wen's UI design was simple and clear, and even veteran Internet users could roughly understand the specific functions by guessing.

In just 5 hours, the number of online users on Gaijin jumped from less than 2 at midnight to 15, and the speed increased as time went on.

At this point, DaWang BBS hadn't even considered a foreign language version, and there wasn't enough time to create one. At Tang Wen's insistence, Song Nan could only find a temporary solution:
Just six hours later, DaWang BBS added a function to automatically enable machine translation of web pages based on IP address and language.

Although it's a bit rough and laggy compared to the Chinese version, Empire's excellent internet infrastructure and superior bandwidth make up for it.

The rudimentary machine translation was originally designed to facilitate domestic browsing of foreign websites when translating English into Chinese. However, it is only relatively accurate in translating nouns into English. Complex Chinese sentences can only be translated word by word, and it is common for them to be completely unrelated to the original meaning.

Nineteen hours later, a news report that "a torrent of American netizens is rushing towards Dongda University" attracted a large number of domestic netizens to join in the fun with a bunch of English IDs.

This caused a surge in server pressure on DaWang BBS. Within 24 hours, the number of concurrent users exceeded 100 million, breaking the domestic record, and continued to rise rapidly, approaching the server's processing limit. This forced Gaijin Network to once again reduce the load by restricting the sending of emoticons and images.

48小时后，面对新增的100万名用户以及150万同时在线量，大王BBS临时限制每10秒只允许发送1贴，并很快上调至15秒、20秒。    ……

"Websites from the East will become the most valuable websites in the world."

"The number of users on DaWang BBS may have surpassed that of AOL."

"Chanathang announced that the Allied Victory Fund will be increased to $1000 million."

Bill Gates: The UI design and ergonomics of the King BBS are conquering the United States.

"..."

Tang Wen originally planned to switch to the Internet and electronic information field halfway through, but he did not expect that his casual move would have such an exaggerated effect.

The reservation slots were snapped up long ago, but more and more foreigners came because of its reputation, and they were quickly attracted by the BBS's advanced art design and richer and more mature functions. The conversion rate of registrations to active users was very high.

Unable to understand Chinese posts, American netizens created their own forums and posted their own content. Their overwhelming numerical advantage in a short period of time even surprised Chinese netizens who, upon logging in, found that more than half of the homepage recommendations and new posts were in foreign languages.

In just two days, Tang Wen used $5 million to gain three times the number of users and ten times the number of online users, which shocked the entire Silicon Valley and all his Internet peers.

Hughes flew in late at night to praise it as "the greatest advertisement," increasing the valuation to $500 million with $6 million, and telling him that if they raised funds and planned to go public now, Gekkin Network would become the most promising internet company of the millennium.

Tang Wen, who wasn't short of money, unsurprisingly refused. He then made twelve consecutive phone calls to Song Nan, urging him to buy more servers and find ways to retain foreign users.

Establishing a stable user base of foreigners is entirely beneficial, and will replace the ability of traditional print and television media to manipulate public opinion once the era of traditional print and television media has passed.

Even if walls are built in the future, the worst that can happen is that operations will be divided into internal and external zones.

Song Nan, who won the gold medal, also played the role of a boss, directly buying out domestic peer companies along with their personnel and equipment, and then immediately transferring them to Gaijin Network to share the server pressure.

This competitor is StoneCube, which has been struggling since being thoroughly investigated for cyberattacks. The withdrawal of investment from Hong Kong investors only made matters worse. Before the acquisition was even completed, employees spontaneously began to take over the transfer of Gaijin's server resources.

Meanwhile, the world's largest community/email/news service provider, US Online, was completely stunned, inexplicably finding itself targeted and experiencing a sharp drop in data.

They initially comforted themselves that it was a special situation and things would soon return to normal. However, under Guy Ginger's 007 work schedule, a foreign language version of the BBS and a daily chat room were quickly launched, and the latter was renamed Twitter.

The official explanation is that the original meaning of "twitter" describes the "chirping" sound of birds, similar to the notification sound of new messages in a chat room.

The two social media platforms generated even more buzz after the update, with Twitter demonstrating extremely high user engagement, which once again shocked American competitors. AOL, as a leading company, could no longer sit still and approached Johnson a few days later.

……

"A US online community has launched a fundraising campaign to repair the severely damaged USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, announcing that for every user who participates in the vote, they will donate $10, and an equal amount of the final donation will be used to reward patriots."
The first prize is $50… The remaining funds will be divided equally among the remaining voters, with a minimum of $1000 million.

AOL has completely copied the formula of the "Golden Goal" game, only changing the wording and increasing the amount of the top prize.

(End of this chapter)