Business Trip (2)
She must have run over the moment I called her before coming here.
I introduced her to the others.
“This is Trish O'Connor. She’s a reporter for the Wall Street Times.”
“Ah—so you’re the one……”
“I see, the reporter.”
“And these are Lee Dong-ho, the head of Continue Capital Korea, and Kim Beom-seok, the deputy head.”
Trish held out her hand.
“Nice to meet you.”
Dong-ho senior quickly wiped the sauce off his hand before taking it.
“Ah, hello. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
When I first met her, she’d been an unknown journalist. Now, after breaking one exclusive story after another, she’d become a famous reporter.
Once you got famous, tips came pouring in from everywhere, and when you wrote stories off those tips, you only became more famous.
Dong-ho senior leaned toward me and murmured, “She’s beautiful.”
“She is?”
Come to think of it, she had the kind of face that made people call her beautiful even when she didn’t bother dressing up.
“Why are there so many pretty women around you?”
“Who else is there?”
“Sung Yoon-ah and Princess Sara, too.”
“……”
Hmm. Hearing it out loud, I had to admit he might have a point.
Trish naturally joined the table where we were sitting.
“Dad! I’ll have a dark beer, too.”
Dong-ho senior and Kim Beom-seok both looked startled.
Dad?
Someone like that had a daughter like this?
That was roughly the expression on their faces.
They didn’t really look alike, that much was true.
I asked Trish, “How’s the company?”
She answered proudly, “We’re doing incredibly well these days. We’re getting tons of tips, tons of ads, and we’ve even hired new reporters.”
Until just a few months ago, WST had been nothing more than an obscure internet newspaper no one had ever heard of. But starting with its report on Thomas Motors, it had kept landing one exclusive after another and was now becoming a fairly well-known local outlet.
We’d only happened to run into each other at a café, and yet this news organization—one I hadn’t even heard of in the first timeline—had grown this big.
Was this what they meant by the butterfly effect?
“So what brings you to New York? Are you here for investments?”
Her face was full of curiosity.
“You’re going straight to reporting the moment you meet me?”
She smiled at my question.
“It is my job.”
“I don’t really know yet myself.”
“So it’s a secret?”
“Something like that.”
Trish gave me a wink.
“Fine. But if you get a scoop, you have to tell me first.”
“I promise.”
After lunch, we headed to Continue Capital HQ.
Continue Capital occupied a fifteen-story building on a side street a little removed from the center of Wall Street.
Dong-ho senior clicked his tongue as he looked at the names posted on the building directory.
“How many financial firms are squeezed into this one building?”
So long as you had money, you could set up as many of them as you liked. In this world, investment firms existed in numbers as fine as grains of sand.
After passing through strict security at the entrance, we took the elevator up to the twelfth floor.
A handsome blond white man in his early forties greeted us at the entrance.
“Welcome. You must have had a long trip getting here.”
“It’s been a while. Have you been well?”
His name was David Lockhart.
He was the current CEO of Continue Capital and, lately, one of the most famous investors on Wall Street.
Since I hadn’t seen him in months, I was genuinely glad to see him.
“Of course. Everyone’s been eager to meet the boss.”
I introduced the people who had come with me.
Maybe because he was meeting such a famous investor, Dong-ho senior and Kim Beom-seok both greeted him with visibly stiff expressions.
“Ah, hello.”
“N-nice to meet you.”
After the greetings were over, we went into the office together.
Continue Capital used half the floor.
Its headcount had also grown to around twenty, including the plain office staff.
It felt like only yesterday that we’d been huddled in a hotel, investing together with just a handful of people, and seeing it look like a proper company now filled me with a strange sense of pride.
In the conference room, I met some familiar faces.
Morris Pearson, Gabriella Chavez, and Edward Benson.
I greeted them warmly as well.
Maybe because they were standing among professional Wall Street financiers, Dong-ho senior and Kim Beom-seok both looked as if they’d shrunk a little.
I introduced Dong-ho senior.
“This is Lee Dong-ho, the head of our Korea branch.”
David looked at him with the expression of someone wondering why I had hired this man in particular.
Well, because in my previous life he’d saved a country…… no, he’d saved me. I was just glad I’d be able to repay that debt in some small way.
There was a reason I’d bothered bringing him all the way to headquarters.
“You’ll be working here with us for a while.”
At that, Dong-ho senior and Kim Beom-seok both looked shocked.
“What? What do you mean?”
“I told you this was a business trip. Did you think you were coming here to sightsee?”
“……Huh?”
Apparently they had.
That explained why they’d packed a tourist booklet and a restaurant map first thing.
Even if he was a figurehead boss, he still had to be able to do a man’s share of the work. I didn’t want him to go anywhere and feel intimidated the way he did now.
He didn’t need to become some genius, but at the very least, he had to learn how to use one.
The market only revealed as much as you knew how to see.
If he used this chance to learn how the global financial markets worked from Wall Street, it would be a huge help later on.
“What exactly are we supposed to do here?”
“Study English, for one. And while you’re at it, practice writing all your reports in English, too.”
Both of them could probably get by in English, but if you really wanted to do business properly, no amount of English was ever enough.
I said to Edward Benson, “Please take good care of their training.”
“Understood. I’ll teach them properly.”
He stepped in front of the two of them.
“Just follow me.”
“Ah, yes.”
Edward Benson led them out, and the others returned to work as well.
I had coffee with David and caught up on everything that had happened.
“I watched the shareholders’ meeting. In the end, you won.”
“You helped a lot, David.”
“What did I really do?”
“You gave me the information on Daejun Construction. If we’d been careless, we might have gotten blindsided. Chairman Kim Sung-gwun also asked me to pass on his thanks.”
David smiled.
“I’m glad it was useful. To be honest, everyone said the odds of failure were high, but I wasn’t too worried.”
“Why not?”
“Because I believed anything the boss took on would succeed.”
His faith in me was rock-solid.
Come to think of it, compared to swallowing up Snow Crash, seizing control of the Hanjeong Group barely counted as anything.
Even one of Korea’s top ten chaebol groups was worth less than Snow Crash by itself.
The fact that a startup founded less than ten years ago was worth more than the market cap of a Korean top-ten conglomerate meant the world’s leading industries were already changing.
“And yet it’s not like we made that much money.”
After all that trouble, the profit came to only 1.7 trillion won once expenses were deducted.
Still, thanks to that, Continue Capital’s balance sheet, which had fallen to the bottom, had climbed back up to $1.8 billion.
David smiled again.
“Considering the return over that period, everyone will be stunned. Besides, didn’t you gain something more important than money?”
He was talking about the trust of Saudi Arabia’s future king.
That was something money couldn’t buy.
“The payment to Alex Preston is coming due soon. How do you plan to come up with eight billion dollars?”
“I’m thinking of selling our stake in Nextrogen.”
I told him what I’d discussed with Sarah.
David nodded.
“Now that they’ve seen your ability, there’s a good chance they’ll agree. But we should prepare for the possibility that they don’t, shouldn’t we?”
“Then we’ll have to find another way.”
I already had a second option in mind.
Once we’d finished catching up, we moved on to work in earnest.
Continue Capital hadn’t been sitting around after merely investing money. We were carefully managing the companies we’d invested in so they could keep growing.
I asked for detailed reports on the companies in our portfolio.
First, Prisoner.
In the film industry, preproduction and shooting alone usually took well over a year. Even after filming ended, editing and post-production still took time.
But Prisoner didn’t operate like that.
They never took more than six months per film. And that included not only shooting, but editing and all post-production as well.
Compared to an A-list movie, it was practically slapdash, but a B-movie had its own charm, didn’t it?
Minimum cost and minimum time were Prisoner’s greatest strengths.
Surprisingly, Zombienado 2 had already finished shooting and was now in CG work. They’d also already closed distribution deals with cable channels and OTT platforms, so they’d nearly recovered their investment costs.
“This is the kind of place you can leave alone and it’ll run itself, so I guess there’s not much reason to worry about it.”
At the same time, though, it was hard to expect any major profit right away.
It hadn’t been an investment made for money anyway, but for Sid, so that didn’t matter.
Next was Purple Games Studio.
Block Valley, the game they were developing, was finally beginning to take shape. Even though it still wasn’t finished, the game was already astonishing.
The physics engine worked perfectly, and you could use blocks to build almost anything, like Lego.
Once a partial build was shown to the public, investment offers started flooding in from everywhere. Some companies didn’t just want to invest in equity—they wanted to buy the whole game company outright.
“Was it really that impressive?”
“Of course.”
“Block Valley isn’t just a game.”
“It isn’t?”
“It’s a game platform.”
Beyond stacking blocks, anyone could use the in-game creation tools to make a new game, and install all kinds of mods as freely as they liked.
It wasn’t the kind of game you played once and moved on from. It could be expanded endlessly, and users could even trade goods within it.
In fact, after its release, Block Valley went on to become the most famous metaverse game in the world.
At any rate, whether these businesses succeeded or failed didn’t matter much to me.
The most important thing, as always, was Snow Crash.
After Continue Capital acquired the company that had originally been run by Alex Preston and Rolf Buchi, it shifted into a one-man leadership structure under Sid Lucas.
The cloud giants—the Big Three of AMZ, NS, and Guble—were all using On-premise systems, building and operating their own data centers to provide cloud services.
Snow Crash, by contrast, provided a multicloud platform that used data stored in other companies’ data centers without needing its own.
Because it focused solely on data utilization, its territory was clearly separate from the existing players.
But the moment Sid became CEO, he immediately started adding feature after feature, as if he’d been waiting for the chance. A good number of them overlapped with services offered by the Big Three.
You could see the system improving almost day by day.
He built separate systems tailored to each industry and company, then organized the data the users wanted into neat graphs that made everything easy to read at a glance.
It was dramatically faster and more convenient than anything the existing cloud companies offered.
Because Mimir handled most routine data organization and accounting work on its own, companies didn’t even need to hire as many employees.
As efficiency rose, the satisfaction of the companies doing business with us rose with it.
All of this had happened within just a few months of changing the company name and shifting its business direction.
That made it sound like everything was going smoothly, but there was one massive problem.
David shook his head.
“As I mentioned before, the Big Three have begun applying real pressure. They’ve said that unless we roll back the overlapping services, they’ll restrict our access to their data.”