Preparing the Oddballs for an IPO
Harvard, August 1992.
Classes wouldn’t begin until September, but I was already taking a summer course during the break so I could graduate early.
The humanities lecture, “A Reinterpretation of Eastern Classics,” was one I made time for no matter how busy I was, and I listened to it with real concentration.
Someone might have wondered why I was wasting time like this after regressing—why not just start making money and sprint straight down the path to success?
But I wanted to live this second life more fully, with more depth.
I’d already spent my previous life chasing money and success. That experience was more than enough.
This time, I intended to take care of my family, my friends, and the people around me, while also enjoying the liberal arts and hobbies that would nourish my soul.
...Which is why I signed up for this class in the first place. And, honestly, it’s pretty interesting.
I listened intently as the white-haired old professor lectured on Chinese classics.
Picking up a piece of chalk, he wrote four characters on the blackboard.
Swallowing Pus and Licking Hemorrhoids.
The professor set the chalk down and looked around the classroom.
“Now then, does anyone know the origin of this idiom?”
In 1992 America, there weren’t many people with a deep understanding of Chinese culture.
And when it came to Chinese classics, even less so.
But Harvard was called the birthplace of East Asian studies in America.
There were plenty of Chinese studies majors in this classroom alone.
One student, whose academic zeal was apparently strong enough to drag him here for a summer session, raised his hand.
“It comes from an anecdote about a minister named Cao Shang from the Song state. He was favored by the King of Qin and received a hundred carriages. It’s a phrase that mocks obsequious opportunists.”
The professor smiled faintly.
“Correct. Zhuangzi said to Cao Shang, ‘The man who sucked the sores of the King of Qin received one carriage, and the man who licked his hemorrhoids received ten; what did you do to receive a hundred?’ A scathing insult, isn’t it?”
Laughter broke out across the classroom.
The professor went on.
“But the purpose of our class is to reinterpret old sayings in a modern way. Even a child can learn from this anecdote that one should beware of sycophancy. So what can we, as adults, read into it? Any interesting opinions?”
The room fell silent.
What else could one possibly draw from this tale of Swallowing Pus and Licking Hemorrhoids—this saying about sucking another man’s boils and licking his sores—besides the obvious lesson that intellectuals should guard against cowardice and corruption?
Then the professor suddenly pointed at me.
“How about you, student? Care to answer? Ah, I’m not singling you out because you’re Asian. I asked you because you’re closest to me.”
“....”
After a brief silence, I answered.
“I don’t think Cao Shang actually licked the King of Qin’s anus with his tongue and got a hundred carriages for it.”
“That much is obvious, yes.”
“Cao Shang must have told the King of Qin exactly what he wanted to hear. To do that, he would have had to thoroughly study what the King of Qin desired.”
“Hmm.”
Interest stirred in the old professor’s eyes.
I continued.
“In modern terms... Cao Shang had a remarkable ability to understand consumer needs. I don’t know the exact words he used with the King of Qin, but the key point here is Zhuangzi’s line: one carriage for sucking sores, ten for licking hemorrhoids, and one hundred for saying pleasing things.”
The classroom went still.
“In the end, human beings prefer being pleased mentally over being pleased physically by others. And to provide that mental pleasure, you have to know what the other person wants. That naturally leads to interest in other people, curiosity about them, and a wider capacity to understand them.”
“Mm. Tolstoy said something similar, didn’t he? That the most important moment in life is now, the most necessary person in life is the one standing before you, and the most important thing in life is to do good for that person. The context is a little different, but for some reason your answer reminds me of Tolstoy.”
“That’s true enough. But from a business standpoint, I’d like to frame it a little differently. These days, there are a lot of self-employed people going under. And among them, many focus on what they themselves want to sell or say, rather than on what consumers actually want. It seems to me that the doors of business open wide when you focus on others rather than on yourself.”
“Then we can apply the story of Swallowing Pus and Licking Hemorrhoids to the relationship between a business owner and the consumer, can’t we?”
“Exactly. Cao Shang understood the King of Qin’s needs and profited handsomely from it. If he had taken that talent and directed it not toward a single king but toward the entire world, he would have become a far greater figure. He would have gained wealth and fame that couldn’t even be compared to a mere hundred carriages.”
“Yes. Interest in others, understanding others, and the ability to fill their lack and desire through that understanding—that is the essence of communication. At least in business.”
Back and forth we went until the class time ran out.
The professor ended his lecture, and the students started filing out of the classroom.
I gathered my things and headed outside as well.
My next destination was the club room.
A red-brick building buried beneath ivy.
I headed toward the room assigned to Blood & Guts.
...Creak!
I opened the door with the newspaper still in hand.
It was early, so nobody else was in the club room yet.
I sat down on the sofa, unfolded the paper, and a small article on the society pages caught my eye.
I read the article to the end.
There’s a stereotype that Asian immigrants handle a lot of cash.
Because of that, they often ended up as easy targets for armed robbers like this.
One family has been torn apart, and all they get is a tiny little article like this... It’s not some other person’s problem.
Because it was an Asian family expanding a business in Texas, I felt a certain kinship.
If my business grew any larger from here, my family and I could become targets for those trash heaps too.
It was time to hurry up and build out security and protection systems.
Simply hiring a few big-bodied private bodyguards isn’t enough.
To protect the infrastructure I was building, I needed a force with real combat experience—something on the level of a private military company, where no one would hesitate in a firefight with their life on the line.
The security firm side is already in the works, so results should come soon enough.
Just as I was laying out, piece by piece, the security plan that would soon be launched...
...click!
The club room door opened.
Grace stepped inside carrying a bag.
When she spotted me sitting on the sofa, she came over with a face flushed with excitement.
“Oh, you’re here early? Perfect timing! I wanted to share how my personal business is going!”
After making a little money from the lottery business before, Grace had moved on to a new venture called angel investment matching.
It was a brokerage business that connected wealthy venture investors with promising startup hopefuls at Harvard, taking a fee from both sides.
The important part was that the fee Blood & Guts took came partly in cash and partly in equity from the startup.
The fee structure wasn’t cash-only, and it wasn’t equity-only either; it was a mix of both.
Thanks to my memories from before regression, I already knew that Grace would make a killing from this business and even end up listed on Nasdaq, which was why I had personally invested a modest sum in her.
“The angel investment brokerage business is doing far better than I expected.”
“Good news. What are the numbers?”
“Over the past two months, I’ve connected seven Harvard startups with outside investors. The brokerage fees alone are already over twenty thousand dollars.”
“No problem securing equity?”
“I’m collecting small early stakes in each startup. On average, it’s around two to three percent. Not a single one has refused.”
“What about risk? Upfront costs, for example.”
“Since we’re partnered with the Harvard Alumni Association, we don’t need a separate marketing budget. So the initial cost is almost zero, and the profitability is basically infinite. Just imagine what those equity stakes will be worth later.”
I did the math in my head.
The model she was describing was the early prototype of the massive venture capital ecosystem that would one day link Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
If I followed my memories from before regression, a few companies that started in Harvard dorm storage rooms around this time would go public on Nasdaq ten years later and generate thousands of times the original investment.
Grace was scooping up the seeds of those jackpots for pennies on the dollar.
And I, who held half the equity in Blood & Guts, would also enjoy the astronomical downstream gains that Grace would create in the years to come.
I sincerely encouraged her.
“Your plan really is perfect. Just like the lottery business.”
“That’s all because of you. If it weren’t for you, I never would’ve pulled off the lottery business, and without that, I never would’ve been able to make contact with the Harvard Alumni Association. Naturally, this business would’ve been much harder too. I probably would’ve had to beg the older people in the family for money. And they would’ve taken a pretty huge chunk of equity.”
Grace shook her head as if the thought alone made her dizzy.
For a moment, I thought I could see the reason Grace had failed before I regressed, hidden in the way she’d just phrased things.
Grace and I sat on the sofa together and talked for a long time about the potential for our current business to grow.
Eventually, Grace said, “Ah, this is nice. Talking to you somehow makes all the frustration in my chest just open up and breathe.”
“I’m glad I can help.”
“Just help? You inspire me in other ways too.”
“Me?”
“What do you mean, ‘me’? You’re my muse. You bring out business passion, desire, and inspiration all at once.”
Grace turned to me and said it with complete seriousness.
Then she mumbled a little.
“...And I want to be that kind of person for you too. Like the girl next to you.”
“The girl next to me? Victor?”
“No, not him. The girl, you know? The blonde. The one who was always by your side at the last party.”
“Ah, Caroline.”
“So you hired her after all? As your secretary?”
Grace had once objected when Caroline was offered the job.
She said in a slightly prickly tone, “Is she good at the work?”
“She’s good. She’s got a decent sense for it. Not as good as a professional secretary, but impressive for a student.”
“I can do better.”
“....”
I was briefly left speechless by the abrupt, straightforward shot she’d fired at me.
Grace cleared her throat and continued.
“I-I mean, I’m just saying... I could do better. That’s an objective fact. I’m not saying you should hire me as your secretary or anything. I’m just stating the fact itself. That I could do the secretary work better is, well, a fact. I’m the one actually running a business, after all.”
“Of course you would be. But I can’t exactly ask you to be my secretary, can I? You’d be incredibly busy, and, naturally, the scale of your income is different. If I were your secretary, that would be another matter.”
“You as my secretary? That image has some appeal too. It’d be very stylish.”
At my joke, Grace snickered.
Watching her, I felt a strange warmth—something fresh and youthful, but mixed with an oddly complicated feeling.
The Grace Fairfax of my previous life was, quite simply, an iron woman.
She spent her entire student life shuttling between the library and the lab, and after graduation she lived as a lifelong single woman, known by nicknames like the “Witch of Wall Street” and the “Queen of Silicon Valley.”
She was someone who had never even glanced at a man, let alone been rumored to be in love.
...Probably the first business failure, and the trauma of having to go begging everywhere for money so she could start the next venture, along with the whole chain of negative dominoes that followed, left her with a wound that never healed.
I didn’t know exactly what humiliating experiences she’d had because of a shortage of investment capital, but the awkward way she’d just referred to her brothers and relatives as “the older people in the family” gave me a rough idea.
In that sense, I’d become a partner she could trust—someone who spoke her language and had already built some human connection with her through our work together.
A neighbor nearby is better than a distant relative. Something like that.
Right then—
...BANG!
The club room door flew open.
Victor burst in, out of breath and flushed with excitement, shaking a sheet of mail in the air.
“Extra, extra! The news is in—you two won first place in the Oddball Entrepreneur Competition! Ta-da!”
What Victor had brought was an official notice that looked like it had just been sent from the administrative office.
Victor’s face was dotted with beads of sweat, and he looked like Pheidippides, the soldier who had run forty-two kilometers to carry news of Athens’ victory in a marathon battle.
Grace looked at the notice and nodded.
“As expected. Well, that’s about right.”
“Huh!? G-gee, Grace really doesn’t even flinch at results like this!”
“Of course, Victor. My plan and Sanha’s support were perfect. If we don’t take first, who would?”
“Next time, be sure to include me too!”
“Sure. You contributed your share.”
Grace gave Victor a cool nod.
But I noticed it.
Tap-tap-tap-tap—
Under the table, the tips of Grace’s dress shoes were lightly drumming against the floor.
Looks like she’s in a terrific mood.
Smiling to myself, I checked the contents of the document.
As the note at the bottom said, a letter was enclosed with the documents.
It was an elegant invitation printed with gold leaf.
Grace fiddled with the White House invitation for quite a while.
Then Victor said, “By the way, who’s the runner-up? Jane Ryu? It says she’s a third-year at Harvard, but there isn’t much else on her.”
“I know her,” Grace replied.
“She’s Chinese-American, and there are rumors she’s the illegitimate daughter of a mainland Chinese conglomerate family. The item she brought in this time was pretty fresh and ingenious too. Her projected returns were high as well. She probably came down to the wire with us.”
“Huh? Really? That good? Rivaling your lottery business? What kind of business idea was it?”
“An electric scooter rental business on campus. They’d set up charging stations around Harvard and rent them to students by the hour. The returns were pretty high, and it was praised for reading the eco-friendly trend well. But electric scooters themselves were still at the very beginning of commercial rollout, so the total market was too narrow. Even if you rented them out, they were only really useful inside the campus, so I think the limited scalability probably cost her a few points.”
“Ah, electric scooters. I know what you mean. Becky’s been riding one around lately, apparently. She said the lack of charging stations makes it a huge pain...”
“Who’s Becky?”
“Mm? My girlfriend. She’s the prettiest and cutest girl in the world. We broke up for a bit in our first year, but we recently decided to get back together—listen to this! The reason was...”
“Oh, she’s the girl you brought to the last party. Right. Hope the love life works out for you.”
Grace turned away as if she had zero interest in Victor’s romantic affairs, but Victor kept talking about Becky anyway.
Meanwhile, I was turning over Grace and Victor’s conversation in my own mind.
...Jane Ryu. That’s a familiar name.
She was a year above me.
I knew a fair bit about her.
One of the names I’d tipped off to the Internal Revenue Service not long ago overlapped with hers.
John Liu.
The heavyweight tax dodger and wanted man I had sold out to the IRS in a judicial deal.
In America, an unidentified man or unidentified male corpse is called John Doe.
An unidentified woman or unidentified female corpse is called Jane Doe.
It’s a pseudonym that originated in medieval English courts to refer to anonymous parties, and over time “John” and “Jane” became the most common names in the English-speaking world, while “Doe,” originally meaning a female deer, became a legal idiom for “someone nameless.”
In that sense, was it really a coincidence that the Chinese-American crime boss “John Liu” I’d briefly brushed against and the Harvard student “John Liu” shared such similar names?
As a regressor, I knew it wasn’t.
...We’ll be tangled up again before long.
In any case, if I was going to touch rare earths—one of the key subterranean resources of the future—I needed to lay groundwork with China too.
I’d pull that card when the time came. For now, I needed to focus on the present reality.
Just then, Grace spoke to me again.
“This White House dinner was probably arranged by Director Winsrop. He’s on the Harvard Alumni Association’s finance board, and he’s one of the President’s closest aides. I think he wanted to introduce the competition winners to political figures. The notice here says he’s on the guest list too.”
Once again, I couldn’t help thinking that coming to Harvard had been the right decision after all.
Grace asked me again, “This must count as a pretty great first achievement at school, doesn’t it?”
“We scaled up in one shot. This isn’t a toy we can play with on campus anymore.”
“Exactly. I’m planning to push this angel venture business beyond the school too. What about you?”
Victor also turned to me with curious eyes at Grace’s question.
I answered, “I’m going to build an investment firm and expand beyond America.”
“The global market? Already? Wouldn’t it be better to consolidate your footing in the U.S. first? Your cash reserves probably aren’t that huge yet, and mining gold and oil must’ve eaten a lot of capital.”
“There are ways to patch that. And my first target is the United Kingdom.”
“...The United Kingdom?”
Grace tilted her head.
“I mean, if somebody else had said that, I’d have laughed it off. But when you say it, the whole mood changes. Just stepping outside Harvard makes me break out in a cold sweat, and you’re talking about crossing an ocean. But what are you planning to do in Britain?”
What was I going to do in Britain?
If I had to reduce the answer to its most extreme essentials, it would be this:
“First, I’m going to go see the Queen and get knighted.”