mesbooks 56. Upgrade! Lv4
56. Upgrade! Lv4
Li Xiang is a private banking client of Deutsche Bank. He could simply call his account manager if he needed anything, but he still made the trip in person.
"Do you know VKontakte?"
"What is it?" Pierce's newly bought espresso machine was making coffee.
"A social networking site." Li Xiang took the documents he brought out of his bag and placed them one by one on the coffee table in front of him. "It was launched on October 1st, and in just over two months, it already has 920,000 registered users."
"I don't know much about the internet." Pierce made coffee and came over, handing Li Xiang a cup.
"This is the detailed information about VKontakte, this is the shareholding agreement for my personal shares in VKontakte, this is the server leasing agreement between my company and VKontakte, and this is the loan plan."
"How much are you planning to borrow?" Pierce looked at the key points first, picking up the most crucial lease agreement. "Exclusivity agreement. I can tell you're a shareholder."
Li Xiang picked up his coffee and took a symbolic sip. "Eight hundred thousand US dollars."
"The lease agreement itself looks fine, but whether it will pass risk control depends on VKontakte's assessment. I can't answer you right now; you need to give me some time."
Pierce started flipping through the loan application again, and just as he had expected, the loan was for purchasing servers.
Li Xiang said casually, "Hurry up and do it. I need the money urgently. It'll definitely be approved."
"So confident?"
Li Xiang smiled and said, "The hardest part of social networking sites is the initial stage. VKontakte has already grown to a million users, so it has already passed that stage."
"The more users there are, the stronger the network effect becomes. If you use it, I use it, everyone uses it, and everyone gets trapped in it, which will gradually develop into infrastructure."
Whether you like it or not, you can't live without it.
"Although VKontakte has not yet started its Series A funding round, judging from the current situation, its valuation is at least $50 million."
"So you have tens of millions in assets now." Pierce had already reviewed Li Xiang's shareholding documents and reminded him, "It's good to do tax planning early. Every little bit helps. It'll be too late if you wait until you're being watched."
"I'm leaving." Li Xiang finished the rest of his coffee in one gulp, stood up, and made a request, "I imported the equipment from Hong Kong. Is the loan disbursed directly from the Hong Kong branch?"
This request seems reasonable on the surface, but considering the recent blunder where Li Xiang was asked by the police to verify the banknote serial number, there is still a significant potential crisis.
However, this is not a big problem for Deutsche Bank, as "blindness" is one of their core strategies for doing business in Russia.
In addition, Pierce himself is a flexible person.
"no problem."
KYC (Know Your Customer) means that banks have a responsibility to understand their customers.
He pockets the commissions, but if something goes wrong, the bank gets punished. Pierce is counting on making commissions from Li Xiang, understand? If you really understand, how can this business continue if something goes wrong?
The global financial system itself is a makeshift operation, and money laundering accounts for 2% to 5% of global GDP, infiltrating all industries and flourishing everywhere.
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An order worth one million US dollars is not a big deal for Jardine Matheson. As soon as Li Xiang paid the deposit, Jardine Matheson coordinated the shipment.
Yongge, accompanied by the engineer sent by Jardine Matheson, flew to Russia to pick up his daughter.
VKontakte has set minimum hardware requirements for the Red Star data center to allow for future user growth, but it cannot rent that many servers at this stage.
In order to make full use of this "surplus" server space, Li Xiang decided to transform WeTV from a torrent search website into an online streaming media platform.
WeTV is, after all, a pirate website, so it's always necessary to implement some risk isolation measures. The servers are hosted on Red Star, also under the guise of being rented.
Red Star is a server rental company and has not infringed on any copyrights. It was just that it was "blind" to its investigation and did not know that its customers were engaged in illegal business.
If caught, the only consequences are having WeTV's internet cable disconnected and a small fine for the violation.
Li Xiang gave Zahar some start-up capital, telling him to find a place to operate WeTV on his own. It was high-risk, high-reward, and Zahar would have shares in WeTV once it was legalized.
Grace did not go with Zahar. She was an art director and decided to switch careers to work on Game of Thrones. She is currently working as an assistant to Game of Thrones director Guo Zijian.
Of the three members of KinoZal, Zahar and Grace have found their own paths and gone their separate ways, while only Grigori is left behind by Li Xiang to manage the server room at Red Star, feeling frustrated and unfulfilled.
"I'm paying you such a high salary so you can play video games? Can't you do something productive?"
"Is there a problem with the server room? I've done my job well, why are you interfering? If you don't like me, just fire me."
Gerry's willingness to stay was entirely due to being coerced by "friendship." At first, he didn't understand what was going on, but he found out later. He didn't blame Zahar and Grace, but he was very unhappy with Li Xiang for playing dirty tricks behind his back.
Gerry must stay on for a full two years. If he leaves early, Zahar and Grace's interview bonuses will have to be returned. How can they return money that has already been spent?
Of course, being fired doesn't count.
Li Xiang handed the portable hard drive to Gerry, "I brought you some data."
"What is this?" Gerry took it and glanced at Li Xiang, then said sarcastically, "Don't let this have a virus. If something happens in the server room, you'll blame me."
Li Xiang wasn't angry at all, and said with a smile, "Just some information on cloud computing."
"Our servers need to provide services to VKontakte and WeTV simultaneously, and we may connect to more customers in the future. We need to find ways to improve the utilization efficiency of the servers and reduce the unit cost."
"VKontakte's contract is only for five years. To renew it smoothly, we need to reduce the cost of the servers to be lower than that of their self-built data center."
"This is much more challenging than making video streaming media."
Gerry's hidden emotions had been stirred up by Li Xiang, but on the surface, he still maintained his defiant attitude. "Talking isn't enough; you have to pay up."
"I'll promote you right now and make you the project manager for cloud services. As for money, go to Sister Wuyun. As long as you can produce results, spend it freely."
Gerry: "I'm not talking about the project budget, I'm talking about my own salary."
"So you like money too? I thought you were indifferent to everything. Like Zahar, I'll give you stock options. Are you satisfied now?"
"Alright." Gerry plugged the external hard drive into the computer, turned to Li Xiang and said, "Spend freely on the budget. You just promised, so don't regret it when it comes to paying."
Li Xiang tried to salvage the situation, saying, "But you can't just spend it recklessly."
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Li Xiang's system gains experience by satisfying the core needs of the characters he depends on.
After selling SnowFlying, his largest experience pool, [Employees], saw a sharp decrease in number.
With the advancement of businesses such as cosmetics, GG, data centers, and video websites, the pool of experience among its employees has been replenished once again.
Li Xiang stayed at Lv3 for more than half a year before finally accumulating enough experience to break through to Lv4.
Upgrade requirements have been met!
Upgrade complete
【Lv4 |精力：225/400丨当前经验：3/100000】
The increase in stamina and experience cap was as Li Xiang had expected. What he was more concerned about was what surprises the Lv4 [Deep Scan] would bring.