DeepMind (2)
Lee Jaseung returned to Korea.
His first overseas trip had been a success in every respect. His fund had locked in a strategic partnership with Facenote. And that was only the beginning. If the future he had seen held true, Facenote’s stock would begin its real climb as early as next year. Exit at the right moment, and the gains would be substantial.
On top of that, there’s the sixty billion won in success fees I’ll collect from Chae Eunchae.
Thanks to it all, his assets under management were back up to a hundred and fifty billion won. He had extracted everything there was to extract from this deal.
And then there was the most important thing: the future four years out. No—five years. He had spent a year inside that future before coming back, which meant he carried five years of history in his head.
Jaseung calmly reconstructed the next five years. From the mobile era to the opening of the AI age. A great deal would unfold in that short span of time.
The world is growing more entangled by the day.
In the past, every company had a clear core business. Googol was a search engine. Toyoda made cars. Walmart ran supermarkets. Going forward, Googol would build phones, Toyoda would construct cities, and Walmart would plunge into fintech. The world would tangle, grow complex, slip beyond control.
So what was to be done? How could he keep a world this tangled still ordered under his hand?
Buy every promising company?
TikTok. Uber. Airbnb… For a moment, the future in which he had been framed for financial fraud flickered through his mind. Because he had inherited Yuseong Securities, he had been made to answer for crimes he never committed.
Ownership is a weakness.
The less you held in your hands, the freer you were. He needed a way to move the world in its lightest possible form.
There was only one answer.
I have to go after the network itself.
If the world was connecting whether anyone liked it or not—if that was an irreversible current—then he would simply take the lead in that connection. Link the world on his own terms and seize the nodes. Gather the small junctions until the whole of it learned to obey his order.
The first node was the core technology at the center of every coming shift. AI, of course.
AI was not mere software. It was an ecosystem spanning basic research, software, and hardware.
DeepMind handles the software side. With AUM back at a hundred and fifty billion, I have enough for an acquisition.
But time was tight. Soon enough, Googol would acquire DeepMind for six hundred million dollars. He was already racking his brains for a way to clear out the early investors; throw a Big Tech player into the mix on top of that, and the difficulty of the buyout would spike to something near despair.
Before the Big Tech firms started circling. Right now—while DeepMind had yet to produce any real results—was the window.
If I single DeepMind out and say I’m buying it, they’ll get suspicious for sure.
He needed a smokescreen. He had to look as though he were investing across the entire AI sector, not hunting one company alone. After some thought, Jaseung reached his conclusion.
I’ll have to go through Seo Seong Securities.
Convenient timing, really. Seo Minjae was due to move to the next stage anyway.
Seo Minjae sat in front of his monitor and clicked the mouse. Facenote short position: fully closed.
Trusting nothing but the information Jaseung had passed him, he had maxed out the leverage and loaded up on put options. After a month of watching that position with his heart in his throat, it had finally converted into profit.
“Hoo…”
The tension drained out of him, and his shoulders sagged.
Damn. I put in a measly one billion and I was shaking the whole time. That guy dumps hundreds of billions into a trade like it’s nothing.
Moments like this always brought the same thought: Jaseung should have been a trader, not a consultant.
To shake off the nerves, Minjae cracked a can of beer. He took a long pull of the first clean foam and checked his returns. Of course he had followed Seo Seong Securities’ compliance rules to the letter. Seo Minju already had both eyes peeled wide open; he was not about to hand her an excuse.
This trade is even safer because Father took the same position.
Jaseung had tipped him off: President Seo would be in the same trade. Anyone who tried to pick the deal apart would drag the president in with them, so Minjae could afford a little more risk. The higher leverage had paid off; his returns on capital were strong again, and the balance in his personal account had swollen once more.
“At this rate, renewing next year’s membership won’t be a problem. Ah—year-end incentives are coming soon, too. I’ll have a little left over.”
Minjae leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
What do I do with the leftover money?
He had once thought of scraping savings together and moving into a new apartment, but living here had turned out fine enough. Every so often the kids upstairs thundered across the floor and he looked up at the ceiling; every time he met their parents in the elevator, they bowed and apologized nonstop—Sorry, the kids are a bit loud, aren’t they?—and he just smiled it off. An imperfect, quietly peaceful life. The life Jeong Minjae had lived before high school, before he became Seo Minjae.
He looked out the window. Cars were packed tight along the outdoor parking lot in front of the complex.
What is Father even thinking?
President Seo had never transferred him any assets. Instead he had given him the Seo name, membership in the Seo Seong Group, and an unlimited card to maintain appearances. Even after Minjae began taking consulting from Jaseung, that card had never been cut off. Wondering if the man simply found a card too trivial to care about, Minjae had once charged a foreign car in a lump sum—full options, a billion won. President Seo hadn’t reacted at all. The bill had been settled as if nothing had happened. In the end Minjae sold the car secondhand and poured the money into his investment capital.
I thought he’d draw a hard line because of Seo Minju, at least.
When Seonkang Group had tried to run a derivatives trade with embezzled funds, President Seo had specifically assigned the deal to him. That much had clearly been an attempt to get leverage. And yet the financial support never stopped. He pushed Seo Minju openly while looking the other way as Minjae took succession consulting—knowing full well that consulting was a real threat to her.
Was he deliberately looking away, or did he genuinely not care?
I’ll have to climb higher. Once I make it to president of Seo Seong Securities, I’ll understand what Father actually wants.
Minjae turned his head toward the booklet on his desk. The succession roadmap from Makers—one of the services that came with the thirty-billion-won annual membership. A dedicated succession roadmap. Step one: generate results in the PBS division.
PBS is finally starting to stabilize.
Thinking back over what they had already achieved left him with a quiet swell of pride. The division was only two years old, but institutional clients kept arriving and fee income was rising steadily—largely because Jaseung kept feeding them major deals.
Next came…
Independence as the Institutional Sales Headquarters. How long will that take?
Minjae ran the numbers realistically. The division needed more stability. Results had to keep stacking. Above all, he needed a solid political base inside the firm.
“Still… five years ought to be enough, right?”
Lee Jaseung spoke.
“It’s about time you started preparing to spin off as a headquarters.”
Seo Minjae looked startled.
“Already?”
“PBS is finding its feet.”
“That’s true, but we’re nowhere near headquarters level.”
The Global Headquarters sat above any number of divisions—Global Bonds, Global Equities, and a long line of other established shops. Against that lineup, PBS was still the newcomer.
Then Jaseung asked, “Seo Minju’s been quiet lately, hasn’t she?”
“Yeah. No major friction.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Well—you’re planted on the management advisory committee, and she doesn’t really have a reason to get in the way?”
As he answered, Minjae understood. Seo Minju was head of the Global Headquarters; Minjae was her direct subordinate as a division chief. His results fed straight into hers, so she had no reason to sabotage him.
Which also meant—
“Once PBS is more securely established, she’ll push me out and put her own person in.”
The corner of Jaseung’s mouth lifted in a faint, mocking smile.
“Exactly. You’ve already taken that hit more than once.”
“Yeah, yeah. Plenty of times.”
“…What’s with the enlightened tone?”
Jaseung gave him a deeply odd look. Minjae just smiled. Before, he would have flared up. Not anymore.
This bastard is rotten through and through on the outside and the inside—but when it comes to the work, he’s dead-on.
He could talk however he liked. He still delivered everything he was supposed to deliver.
“You’re right. That was the whole point of parking me as PBS chief. Hand me a high-risk business so that if it fails it’s my failure, and if it succeeds it’s Seo Minju’s success.”
Saying it aloud left a strange taste. Yes. That was why he’d been sent to PBS in the first place. That was why he’d hated the appointment. And on that very day, Jaseung had come looking for him. After that, PBS had become something worth having.
“So how do I keep from losing PBS?”
“Turn it into a deal hub.”
Minjae’s expression cracked. That was not the direction he’d expected.
“…A deal hub?”
A deal hub meant the center through which every transaction passed. Jaseung held a vast amount of information, but not all of it was useful to him. Some of it was too small; some of it didn’t fit his investment style. So he sold those pieces to his VIP members.
“I already agreed to give you investment intel twice a month. Use it well. Say there’s a one-billion-won venture deal. Too small for me, but perfect scale for the alternative investments desk.”
Minjae’s eyes sharpened.
“You’re telling me to hand high-probability deals out to other divisions.”
“Right. At first nobody will think much of it. ‘Huh, PBS occasionally passes along a good deal.’ That’ll be all. Two a month, three every two months… but if every single one of them works, what kind of rumor do you think starts?”
“That deals coming out of PBS always succeed.”
Jaseung’s mouth curved.
“Once that perception sets, the other divisions start leaning on PBS on their own. The word spreads that the real good deals come through PBS.”
“Then the other division chiefs start watching my face.”
“That’s exactly it. At that stage you’re no longer just a division chief. You’re the power broker who controls deal allocation.”
Deal allocation. The authority to decide which deal went to which division was power itself. A ten-billion PE deal to alternative investments. A five-billion startup check to the VC team. A major M&A advisory mandate to the IB headquarters.
“By then, even if Seo Minju tries to touch PBS, it won’t matter much. I can just go to another division and run the same hub.”
“No. Bigger than that.”
Jaseung met Minjae’s eyes.
“Did you forget what I said at the start? You think I’m doing this just to protect a single division? You’re becoming the new function itself.”
Minjae let out a short breath of wonder. Of course. Jaseung was drawing a much larger picture. This was never only about holding on to PBS.
“Independence as the Institutional Sales Headquarters.”
Jaseung smiled as if in confirmation.
Seo Minjae. You take the Institutional Sales Headquarters. I take you.
That was what he was truly after. Seo Seong Securities’ core divisions would come to depend on Minjae’s information, and Minjae would depend on Jaseung’s. In the end the Institutional Sales Headquarters would move on the basis of Jaseung’s intel. Without owning a single share of Seo Seong Securities. Without being a formal employee. He would still hold the most profitable arm of the firm under his influence.
A structure in which you controlled everything without owning everything.
This is where the network begins.
“Along those lines, send investment proposals to these companies.”
Minjae took the folder. DeepMind, Vicarious, AlphaGenomic… Roughly a dozen company names, and even at a glance the common thread was obvious.
“All AI startups. So you’re going all-in on the AI sector? …No, you’re not.”
Investment terms were listed for each company. Most were twenty-to-thirty-percent equity stakes. One alone was different.
“DeepMind—one hundred percent full acquisition.”
Minjae pulled that sheet free.
“That’s the real target. The rest are Grade Two smokescreen deals.”
Minjae’s instincts really were sharp. Jaseung liked that about him.
“Right. The others are just for the show. Once this is over, feel free to pass them to other divisions.”
Even the Grade Two deals had already been through Jaseung’s first filter. Distributing them that way would naturally grow the deal hub.
“But DeepMind? What is this place that you’re going through all this trouble?”
Still puzzled, Minjae started searching. DeepMind had closed its Series A only four months earlier, so the information was easy enough to find.
“Let’s see. Basic AI research startup… investor list: Sequoia Capital, Frontier, Nikola…”
His voice slowed as he spoke. He looked up at Jaseung with an expression of pure disbelief.
“You’re going for a full buyout of a place packed with major investors?”
“Yeah. So dig into the ownership structure for me.”
“…You know this thing just finished Series A, right?”
A little chin-tilt. That same infuriating little nod. Minjae sighed. Truly a rotten bastard.
Then a critical point struck him.
“Wait. The investment intel you promised twice a month—that’s separate from this list, right?”
Jaseung looked at him as if he’d asked the most obvious question in the world.
“Of course. This is just a byproduct of helping with my personal investment. The promised information comes separately.”
Minjae nodded, satisfied. Yeah. When it came to the work, the man really was dead-on.