Cooloud (1)
After dropping our bags at the hotel, we gathered everything we could find on Cooloud and started breaking it down.
To be exact, David put the material together, and I merely received it. Having an employee really was convenient.
If I had to describe Cooloud in one sentence, it was a cloud-based data platform.
When I was a child, school taught us about the Third Industrial Revolution.
That was where words like informatization, digitization, and the World Wide Web came from. But by the time I was in college, people were suddenly talking about a Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, virtual reality, IoT, blockchain, cloud computing, autonomous driving, and so on.
Even when I wrote reports at the securities firm, talk of the Fourth Industrial Revolution never failed to appear. The companies themselves would subtly ask me to work it in.
Supposedly, investors liked that sort of thing.
No one had fully settled whether this was really the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or even what the definition was, but there was no denying that changes were taking place across every industry.
One way to define those changes was digital transformation. Everything that existed was turning into data.
People shopped online now, took classes online, talked with friends online, ordered food online. The important part was that all of it was left behind as data.
Cooloud was a cloud-based data platform that gathered fragmented data in one place.
Through DWaaS—Data Warehouse as a Service—it provided services that collected and analyzed the data companies needed for their operations.
The most innovative startup!
A company leading the future!
A new wind sweeping through Silicon Valley!
Those were the labels Cooloud currently wore. And in truth, the company’s blistering growth made them sound less like hype and more like plain fact.
It had only been three years since its founding, yet its valuation had already climbed past seventy billion dollars.
“The losses are bigger than I expected.”
“Renting servers, building systems, and using the data all cost a great deal, while fierce competition keeps revenues low. Still, with sales and client numbers rising, the losses are shrinking quickly.”
Platform companies always prioritized growth over immediate profit.
Once they had swallowed the market, the thinking went, they could raise prices afterward. Investors knew that, which was why they were willing to pour money into loss-making firms.
“Cooloud’s growth is frankly terrifying. For companies, using big data has become a necessity. Think of it as similar to the way investment firms use Bloomberg terminals.”
“Ah, Bloomberg terminals.”
Those were the terminals made and provided by Bloomberg Media Group, founded by Michael Bloomberg.
With one of those, you could search and compare not only stock markets around the world, but also derivatives, commodities, inflation indices, purchasing indices, employment data—everything related to the economy.
The annual fee per terminal was roughly fifty thousand dollars.
If a hundred employees used them, that meant five million dollars a year.
That kind of data was available anywhere on the internet, so why pay such absurd sums for Bloomberg terminals?
I only understood after I entered the securities firm. They delivered information faster, more accurately, and in a far more digestible form than anything else.
Compared with the losses caused by bad or late information, fifty thousand dollars a year was nothing. That was why, even when the annual fee went up every year, nobody could simply stop using them.
David asked, as if it were only natural, “You said you worked at a securities firm. Didn’t you use one?”
“Well...”
I had seen other people use them from nearby.
Unlike him, a professional investor, I had been nothing more than an RA. It wasn’t as if they would put a terminal more expensive than my annual salary on a rookie’s desk.
“In any case, Cooloud provides that sort of service to companies.”
“Yes.”
Cooloud organized the data needed for corporate activity as quickly, as accurately, and as clearly as possible.
Even people who knew nothing at all about cloud or big data could click a few times and see the information they wanted visualized before their eyes.
In truth, innovation was not all that grand a thing.
Improving and developing something that already existed so that anyone could use it with ease—that was innovation too.
It was simply something no one else had managed to do.
It might still feel unfamiliar now, but ten years from now every company would be using this kind of cloud-based platform.
Even the chicken shop I had opened with Seonwoo would have relied on something similar.
First, from market analysis to choosing the location, we would have used big data to determine where a store should be opened so that business would go well.
When it came time to run the shop, it would analyze the day’s weather, events, foot traffic at that hour, and all sorts of other variables to predict which menu items should be ordered and how much of each.
The accuracy of those predictions was astonishing.
From my experience, it got about ninety percent of them right, and thanks to that, we were able to make steady profits.
And then, of course, it all collapsed under the head office’s bullying.
If I hadn’t regressed then, I would have been shut down and left out on the street. I was glad I had come back before I had to see that fate.
“Let’s talk about the founders.”
The founders of this incredible company were Alex Preston and Rolf Buchi.
David explained the two of them to me.
“Alex Preston is the third son of the Preston family, one of America’s financial dynasties. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Prestons.”
I nodded.
“The eldest is Michael Preston, the man who founded Shark Management.”
“That’s right.”
John Preston, CEO and patriarch of the Preston Group, had entrusted each of his children with ten hundred million dollars to manage.
If they blew it, that was the end of it. If they showed results, he would invest further and expand the group’s assets.
Among them, the two who stood out were the eldest, Michael Preston, and the third son, Alex Preston.
Unlike Michael, who had graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics and followed the standard elite-finance track, Alex had gone to Caltech and mixed with people from the IT world.
He invested mainly in startups and scored several successes.
Along the way, he realized the potential of the cloud and data markets, joined forces with Rolf Buchi, and dove into founding a company that went on to achieve enormous success.
After that, the Preston family succession battle effectively turned into a showdown between Michael Preston and Alex Preston.
But...
Come to think of it, I had taken David Lockhart away from the man he was supposed to belong to, Michael. Without him, Shark Management would never grow even to half of what it had in the first timeline.
And this time, I intended to acquire Cooloud myself, so... I wondered how the succession struggle would play out later on.
Well, whatever happened with someone else’s family was none of my business.
What mattered was my own situation.
“What kind of person is Rolf Buchi?”
“In a word, a genius.”
David explained him to me.
Unlike Alex, who had been born into a financial dynasty, Rolf Buchi had been born to ordinary parents.
He had loved tinkering with computers since childhood, started coding at nine, and developed his first program at twelve.
At seventeen, he sold one of his programs to NS for three million dollars, and with that money as his base, he founded an online dating app around the time he was twenty, while studying computer science at MIT.
Two years later, he sold Tinting to the global dating app company Matching Group for 1.5 billion dollars and rose into the ranks of the billionaires.
Rolf, who had become worth more than a billion dollars at the age of just twenty-two, was nothing less than a startup legend.
He dropped out of college and went on to found companies in fintech, content delivery, crowdfunding, and social networking. He was a Silicon Valley star and the greatest genius in the IT industry.
Whenever Rolf founded something, investors rushed in with money in hand.
“But after that, he went through a long slump.”
He had a few successes, but nothing on the scale of Tinting.
After a series of failures that burned through investors’ money, he founded an anonymous social network company with a fellow MIT alumnus.
But that, too, did not go as well as he had hoped.
As the failures piled up, media attention faded, and before long people started murmuring everywhere that Rolf Buchi might be washed up after all.
But then...
“Cooloud exploded into a once-in-a-generation success and stamped his genius across the entire world all over again.”
“I see.”
Hearing stories like that always felt strange.
What had I been doing at that age? Probably wandering off to PC bangs with my friends and wasting time without a care in the world.
Back in the first timeline, I had read the autobiography of Satya Sharmalan, the third CEO of NS.
Born in India, he described himself as an utterly ordinary boy who liked cricket and games.
But after just one or two pages, the book suddenly started pouring out bizarre stories.
He said he had wanted to prove the P-NP problem, and that he had become fascinated by quantum computers, so he had researched ways to implement quantum superposition and interference.
From things like that, it seemed geniuses were simply geniuses.
“Is Rolf really that incredible?”
“Yes. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call him the greatest genius in Silicon Valley.”
“A genius, huh.”
I happened to know another real genius.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Cooloud had been created by Alex Preston and Rolf Buchi working together.
Since Rolf provided the technical power, he invested one hundred million dollars at the start, while Alex Preston put in five hundred million.
Cloud was nothing less than a gold mine in the digital world. Competition was fierce, but if you managed to seize the lead, you could grow into a giant company.
Building the company required massive capital.
Rolf added another eight hundred million dollars, and Alex contributed another 1.6 billion. After that, they brought in 3.8 billion dollars from PrestigeA PE, a private equity fund under the Preston family.
At present, Alex held 38 percent of the shares, Rolf 37 percent, PrestigeA PE 20 percent, and one employee held the remaining 5 percent.
Since PrestigeA PE was a Preston Group fund and Alex Preston sat on its board, he effectively held 58 percent of the shares in total.
Both the exchange and the IBs kept urging them to go public, but they deliberately dragged their feet.
As time passed, the company’s value would only increase, so there was no reason to rush an IPO.
Unlike the relaxed executives, the investors were growing restless. Requests to invest came in endlessly from every direction.
Among them were Redstone, the world’s largest private equity fund, and White Road, led by Chairman Aaron Baker.
Negotiations with Redstone had broken down once over price, but talks were underway again.
Then, after checking one email, Alex Preston said to Rolf Buchi, “There’s a place called Continue Capital that says it wants to invest.”
“What do they do?”
“It’s the first I’ve heard of them, too.”
He searched, looked into them, and found almost nothing.
No information on who had invested, how much capital they had, or how many employees they employed.
As long as a firm had capital, that was all an investment company really needed, so there were plenty of unknown outfits and shell companies like this one.
Normally, a proposal from some nameless investment shop would never have merited a second thought.
But then...
“The person who sent the email was David Lockhart.”