Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

In late May, the weather in Beijing gradually warmed up.

Qihang Technology, located on the 16th floor of Hailong Building, has entered a rare period of stability after experiencing the thrilling May Day Golden Week.

Seeing the dark circles under everyone's eyes, Jiao Liwei took the initiative to suggest to Bai Yuhang that the technical leaders reschedule the shifts according to the situation, and arrange a week of paid leave for the brothers and sisters who worked overtime during the May Day holiday. This would mean that everyone would receive three times the salary during the Golden Week holiday, and would also be able to go back to their hometowns or travel for a paid break.

Upon receiving this order, the office area erupted in barely suppressed cheers.

Taking advantage of this rest period, Jiao Liwei made minor adjustments to the technical department staff, further integrating the personnel. He also conducted two rounds of surveys on the food and accommodation of all employees, and slightly increased the subsidies for meals, accommodation and commuting. Everyone has become accustomed to identifying themselves as Qihangren (a group of people who work for Qihang) and is gradually developing a sense of belonging.

With recent rapid recruitment and business development, Jiao Liwei is already in talks with Hailong Real Estate, the property owner of Hailong Building, to further expand the office space of Qihang Technology.

Yang Bo and Jiang Shuo have been extremely busy lately. They spend half the day at the company overseeing business and the other half at China Entrepreneurship Network, cramming on legal and financial knowledge with Zhang Lei's professional team.

Bai Yuhang locked himself in his CEO office, continuing to work tirelessly on the data compression and distribution model algorithm. Occasionally, he would come out for some fresh air, sitting in Jiao Liwei's small conference room to check on the quality of the newly recruited staff.

He gave Zhang Xiaolong a great deal of autonomy. This tech genius spent all his time at his own office desk, occasionally guiding Liu Zhi on the underlying architecture and Zhang Jian on the email system development, but mostly he was thinking about new products.

Zhang Jian wasn't idle either. Bai Yuhang pointed him to a new path: create Qihang Email, with accounts that could be linked to QQ and the school's intranet, and the domain name would be a subdomain mail.qh.com.

He and several key technical staff members spent their days typing away at email protocols.

Wan Lianghao's team was even more mysterious. He led a dozen or so Flash Action programmers that Jiao Liwei had just recruited, plus the original team members, making nearly thirty people. They occupied two conference rooms in the office area, which was equivalent to setting up a piece of land for closed-door research and development of web games.

Liu Zhi and the rest of the team worked diligently on server optimization, defragmentation, and data hot backup.

As for Su Muqing, aside from attending classes at school, she was rarely seen at the company. She was currently in a coffee shop outside, negotiating with marketing managers from various manufacturers, holding onto a GG list price that had tripled.

At Monday's routine shareholders' meeting, Zhang Jian made a new discovery.

"Sixth Brother, the backend data is a bit interesting lately." Zhang Jian pushed a printed report to the center of the table. "Since the mandatory two-way binding between Renren.com and QQ, the number of active users has indeed increased, but the number of inactive QQ accounts has also increased."

Bai Yuhang flipped through the report and glanced at it: "Tell me the specifics."

"Based on my habits and understanding, people used to go to internet cafes without a fixed QQ number. They would just sit down, register a new one, chat for a while, and then discard it. Now that's different. Now that it's linked to the real identity on Renren, everyone only uses that one fixed number." Zhang Jian pointed to the data on the report. "As a result, the nearly one million QQ accounts that were registered before are now all inactive, occupying our server resources for nothing."

Jiao Liwei, listening from the side, frowned: "Isn't this just occupying a position without doing any work? Our server resources are so precious right now."

Bai Yuhang leaned back in his chair, his fingers lightly tapping the table.

"Easy." Bai Yuhang closed the report. "Have the legal department update the user agreement and add a supplementary clause."

Yang Bo immediately picked up a pen to take notes: "How should I write this?"

"Qihang Technology has the right to unconditionally reclaim QQ accounts that have not been logged into for six consecutive months," Bai Yuhang said calmly.

Zhang Jian was taken aback: "Recycle? Why take them back? To put them back into the registration pool for others to apply for?"

"We can put regular phone numbers into the registration pool." Bai Yuhang smiled. "Have you thought about what we could do with five- or six-digit numbers, consecutive numbers, triple numbers, or number combinations with special meanings, such as birthdays or couple numbers?"

The meeting room was silent for a few seconds.

Jiang Shuo pushed up his glasses, his eyes instantly lighting up: "Sell it for money!"

"Smart." Bai Yuhang snapped his fingers. "Short and special numbers naturally possess scarcity. In the future, a five-digit lucky number might be more expensive than a Santana. These idle numbers aren't dead data; they're our hidden assets for embarking on the future."

Zhang Jian gasped, "Sixth Brother, what's wrong with your brain? You can squeeze oil out of a string of numbers!"

Time flies, and it's now May 29th.

At 3 p.m. on Monday, a burst of cheers suddenly erupted in the office area of ​​Hailong Building, as if the roof had been blown off.

Everyone stood up at the same time, staring intently at the real-time data dashboard on the wall.

A string of numbers representing the total number of registered users after the integration of the Qihang site, like a ticking stopwatch, finally stopped and surpassed a visually striking point after a frantic roll.

10, 000, 000.

The ten million mark has been officially broken.

"Awesome!" Zhang Jian exclaimed excitedly, slamming his hand on the table, making the water glass next to him shake.

Liu Zhi and several employees from his Shenzhen team even hugged each other. The threshold they had never reached in Shenzhen was achieved in just one month in Beijing.

In this boiling ocean, there is only one person who doesn't fit in.

Jiang Shuo sat at his workstation, clutching a chipped calculator tightly in his hand, the keys clicking loudly as he pressed them. His expression was worse than that of someone crying.

"Hey Lao Ba, what are you doing?" Jiao Liwei walked over and patted him on the shoulder. "Ten million users! Aren't you happy?"

Jiang Shuo looked up, his face contorted in pain, and shoved the calculator screen right in front of Jiao Liwei's face.

"Happy? I'm so happy I'm about to have a heart attack!" Jiang Shuo pointed to the long string of numbers above. "Boss, do the math. Ten million users, how much bandwidth does that take up? How many servers do we need? The daily internet fees, electricity bills, and maintenance costs are staggering!"

He stared at the gleaming gold number on the wall with a heavy heart.

"This isn't a user, it's a money-devouring beast that eats people alive!"

Jiao Liwei slapped Jiang Shuo on the shoulder, almost knocking Jiang Shuo's glasses off.

"That's right, a money-devouring beast!" Jiao Liwei chuckled, pulling up a chair and pointing to the data dashboard on the wall. "Old Ba, all those days you spent at General Manager Zhang's place at China Entrepreneurship Network were a waste of time. Didn't you remember what investors say all the time? What are users and traffic? They're the most important core assets of a company! In the eyes of capital, this stuff is more valuable than real gold and silver; it's a goose that lays golden eggs."

Jiang Shuo rubbed his shoulder with concern, clutching the calculator to his chest, and retorted with a pained expression, "Boss, do you think I don't understand this capitalist theory you're talking about? But assets are assets, and this hen is just eating grain without laying eggs! Look at these bills, the bandwidth fees at the telecom data center are going up every day, the server hardware costs keep piling up, and then there's the food, drink, and other necessities for these sixty or seventy brothers and sisters—all of that costs money!"

He tapped the calculator a few more times and shoved it in front of Jiao Liwei.

"The million US dollars in our account looks impressive, but it can't keep up with this kind of spending. What about income? The company's income right now relies on the meager internet cafe franchise fees that Lao Wu in Northeast China collects—it's barely enough to fill a gap! How can I, the head of the finance department, not be worried?"

"What are you worried about?"

Bai Yuhang walked over unnoticed, holding a cup of coffee, and leaned against the partition of Jiang Shuo's workstation. "Old Ba, we can't just look at the immediate cash flow. These ten million users are our confidence to overturn the table at the negotiating table. Believe it or not, there are countless manufacturers outside right now, lining up with money to stuff into the mouth of this money-devouring beast."

Jiang Shuo pushed up his glasses with a hint of skepticism: "President Bai, empty promises won't satisfy me. I only care about the real money in the account."

Bai Yuhang smiled and said, "Don't worry, the bread will be ready soon."