Cooloud (3)
We followed the two men as they gave us a tour of the company.
They had about ninety employees. For a company with that kind of valuation, it was absurdly small.
Then again, it wasn’t all that unusual. DeepMining, an AI software company, had been bought by Guble for $800 million with only twenty-two employees on the payroll.
In the IT industry, one genius could do the work of ten thousand people. People like that were the ones who really shaped the world.
As expected of a startup, and especially an IT company, the atmosphere was loose and free. It wasn’t even remotely comparable to an investment bank.
Even during working hours, employees moved around as they pleased and handled their tasks in an open office without partitions.
A few of them were playing table tennis at the ping-pong table in the break room.
I’d heard that table tennis was the favorite sport of Silicon Valley employees, and it seemed the rumors were true. If you kept your body moving, ideas tended to come with it.
Rolf asked with confidence, “What do you think?”
“It’s good.”
His face was full of pride in the company. Honestly, if I had a business like this, I’d be proud too.
While pretending to inspect the place, I studied each employee’s face one by one. But the person I was looking for wasn’t there.
Did he really not come in today?
No—there he was.
I walked over to a white young man seated in a corner.
Jeans, a T-shirt, worn-out Crocs for shoes. Curly brown hair, a face still dotted with freckles, and a large pair of headphones over his head.
He was using two monitors, and one of them was playing a movie. I didn’t know the title, but zombies were chasing people across the screen.
I stepped up and lightly tapped his shoulder.
He paused the video, pulled off his headphones, and looked at me.
“You like zombie movies?”
He gave a halfhearted nod.
“Yeah, I guess.”
It was the look of someone who didn’t want a stranger talking to him for no reason.
I acted oblivious and kept going. “I know a really fun zombie movie. Want me to recommend one?”
“No, thanks.”
He looked like he had no interest in chatting with a stranger and was about to put his headphones back on.
“It’s called Zombienado...”
At that moment, he turned his head and stared at me.
“Oh! Zombienado!”
“You know it?”
“Of course. It’s my favorite movie in the world.”
When I glanced at David, his expression was one of sheer shock. He probably hadn’t expected to hear Zombienado mentioned here of all places.
“You’ve seen that movie?”
I answered as if it were obvious. “Of course. Who in the world hasn’t seen Zombienado?”
“Exactly! But barely anyone around me knows it. I’ve shown it to a few people, but they all said it wasn’t funny. How can anyone say Zombienado isn’t funny?”
The look on David’s face said, plain as day, that the weird one was him for finding it funny.
He was thrilled out of his mind.
“Wow! I never thought I’d meet a Zombienado fan here.”
I didn’t miss the chance to introduce myself. “My name’s Han Miru.”
“I’m Sid Lucas.”
I already knew his name. In a few years, there wouldn’t be anyone in the world who didn’t know it.
He was twenty-two years old.
Even in the startup world, where young developers were everywhere, that was still considered young.
Well, Rolf Buchi had founded a company at twenty-one, so I suppose geniuses all moved at about that pace.
“You know the sequel was canceled because they ran out of money, right? I’d been waiting for it to come out.” He kept letting out heavy sighs, and it was obvious he was genuinely disappointed.
“There’s no need to worry.”
“How can I not worry? What if it never comes out?”
I solved his concern for him. “Filming will resume soon.”
Sid looked stunned. “What? Really?”
“Yes.”
He frowned in confusion. “How do you know that?”
Because I’d acquired the film company, that’s how.
I handed him a temporary business card I’d had made up. “If you’re curious, call me.”
As Sid took the card, Rolf strode over, snatched it from his hand, and crushed it with his fingers.
He said to me in an irritated voice, “What exactly do you think you’re doing to an employee who’s in the middle of work?”
I tilted my head as if I truly didn’t understand. “Pardon? Did I do something wrong?”
“Then is disrupting work somehow the right thing to do?”
His face and voice were thick with annoyance and suspicion.
Alex spoke to us. “That should be enough of a tour. I’ll show you to the exit.”
Instead of following him out, I rested a hand on Sid’s shoulder and said, “Must be rough working under a bunch of idiots.”
For a split second, everyone went still.
Alex and Rolf looked as though they’d misheard me, and David’s face hardened in disbelief as he stared at me.
The employees all stopped what they were doing and looked over at us.
For a moment, there was only silence.
Breaking that silence, Alex spoke. “What did you just say?”
Rolf shouted as if he were about to grab me by the collar. “You’re done, asshole!”
I looked at the two of them and said, “I said you’re idiots. Didn’t you hear me?”
After Han Miru and David Lockhart left, Rolf exploded in disbelief.
“What the hell was that bastard?”
Alex was just as stunned.
So there was actually someone in the world who’d call me an idiot to my face.
Who on earth would dare say something like that to the Preston family’s prodigy? In a way, it was a refreshing experience.
“I’ve seen some sorry pieces of trash in my time, but that was a new one.”
After cursing for a while, Rolf asked Alex, “You didn’t get angry after hearing that?”
Alex frowned. “It’s bothering me for some reason.”
“Huh?”
Rolf looked genuinely surprised. It wasn’t often that Alex showed concern over another person.
“You’re saying David Lockhart is that impressive?”
Alex shook his head. “No. I mean the Korean.”
David Lockhart was clearly more than Alex had expected. Alex felt like he finally understood why his brother had wanted him.
But what really kept nagging at him was the Asian man who had come with him.
What the hell is that guy?
Alex Preston had been born into a ruler’s seat.
He had inherited not only wealth and prestige from his parents, but also good looks, a tall frame, and a sharp mind.
When he studied, he never lost the top spot. When he played sports, he stood out as the university team’s starting football quarterback.
That ability had carried over into investing, too.
Alex had recognized the potential of the cloud industry early and joined forces with Rolf Buchi, the Silicon Valley genius, to rush into the market.
With his natural business sense, he drew company after company in as clients, and the valuation climbed day by day.
He had met countless people until now, but very few of them struck him as truly superior to himself.
Even Aaron Baker, chairman of White Road and widely regarded as the world’s greatest investor, hadn’t achieved results like these at his age.
Some people would call it arrogance, but to Alex, it felt closer to an objective assessment.
The other man was just an Asian around his own age. No matter how he looked at it, he was hardly worth worrying about.
And yet, something about him felt off.
Why?
After a moment’s thought, Alex thought he could guess the reason.
“What if he was acting that way on purpose?”
“What do you mean?”
He had approached them under the pretense of investing, toured the company, spoken to Sid, and called them idiots. Maybe all of it had been deliberate.
Rolf asked, still not understanding, “What would he even get out of doing that?”
Alex didn’t understand that part either.
If the behavior was intentional, then there had to be a purpose behind it—but he couldn’t figure out what that purpose was.
“He’s just a crazy bastard.”
Alex nodded. “Probably.”
The other man was just some Korean nobody. There was no way he could compare to Alex.
Anyway, I won’t be seeing him again.
Alex erased him from his mind.
We were practically chased out of Cooloud and went back to our hotel.
David yanked off his tie with visible irritation and asked me, almost accusingly, “I have just two questions for you.”
“Ask away.”
“First, what was that talk about an acquisition? Does Continue Capital even have that kind of money?”
I answered matter-of-factly, “Not right now, no.”
David asked again, “Then why say we were going to acquire it if we don’t have the money?”
“Money can always be made.”
“Seventy billion dollars?”
“We’d have to cut it down.”
“How exactly do you plan to buy a company that wouldn’t even sell for seventy billion dollars? And if they cut the price, can we actually afford it?”
Even if they halved it, that was still thirty-five billion dollars.
I was honestly a little curious myself how I was supposed to come up with that much.
“Second, what were you thinking when you said those things?”
“What exactly did I say wrong?”
“Was calling someone an idiot to his face supposed to be right?”
I let out a faint laugh. “It wasn’t wrong.”
“What?”
“Because the two of them really are idiots.”
Rolf Buchi and Alex Preston.
Both of them were geniuses in their own right.
But no matter how bright a light might be, it faded in the face of the sun. Compared to a true genius, even the smartest man was just an idiot.
David stared at my face, and it looked as if something had finally clicked.
“Don’t tell me this was your plan from the beginning?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I needed to catch Sid Lucas’s attention.”
In the future, Sid would openly sneer at Cooloud’s co-founders and call them idiots.
I’d just called them idiots right in front of him while he was still holding back his irritation. He must have felt like a huge weight had been lifted off his chest.
“Who is he, exactly, that you had to win over his attention?”
“A genius.”
He was young, yes, but he had been part of Cooloud from the company’s earliest days.
He’d originally worked at another company founded by Rolf Buchi, then moved over when Rolf started Cooloud and had stayed there ever since.
He was now the head of development, the one who carried out whatever Rolf ordered. In practice, he was Rolf Buchi’s right hand.
In the years to come, he would achieve a feat that effectively changed Cooloud—and no, the entire world.
Experts would later say that his work had completed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and I agreed with that assessment.
Without him, technologies like the virtual reality games I’d seen before my regression probably never would have existed.
“Rolf Buchi gets all the attention because of his reputation, but the actual work is all handled by Sid Lucas. If he disappeared, Cooloud would start to wobble immediately.”
Cooloud was unquestionably an incredible company.
No one could deny that it was a promising business destined to lead the cloud market in the years ahead.
But without Sid Lucas, would that still be true?
“You’re saying the company couldn’t function without one employee?”
“Not in a normal company, no. But startups are different.”
Startups didn’t have many tangible assets like buildings or factories. Most of what they had was intangible. And intangible assets were handled by people.
In Cooloud’s case, the company had only ninety employees, yet its valuation was more than seventy billion dollars. By simple calculation, each employee was responsible for roughly eight hundred million dollars’ worth of value.
That was why, even when large companies acquired startups, they usually included clauses requiring the founders and key employees to stay on for a set period.
“And if that person is Sid, it’s a different story altogether.”