Chapter 169: Sequoia Capital Takes the Initiative

Park Jinshan replied: "I don't know where their trailer office is on campus..."

Tang Xinyi pleaded: "Park classmate, can you help ask one of your seniors? We flew here from Singapore to find Yahoo!"

The beautiful goddess is always invincible!

Looking at the beautiful Tang Xinyi, Park Jinshan found it difficult to refuse her request. He thought for a while and said, "You two, wait for me here. I'll go find out and come back to find you!"

Half an hour later, Park Jinshan ran over breathlessly: "You two, come with me. I found out where their trailer is!"

"Is the road far?"

"It's a little way..."

"Park classmate, take our car. You show the way and I'll drive!"

"Okay!"

Five minutes later, Park Jinshan took them to a place called LymanGraduateResidences, which translates to Lyman Graduate Residences.

Stanford University generally requires all new graduate students to live on campus. For senior students who are not assigned on-campus housing, they will be assigned to off-campus apartments in cooperation with the school.

There are 6 graduate apartments on the Stanford campus. The size, building type, age, structure, surrounding environment, and public facilities of each apartment may vary. Their internal configurations are basically similar. They all have living rooms, small kitchens and separate bathrooms, and the bedrooms are fully furnished.

Students only need to prepare bedding and daily necessities to move in.

The Lehman Graduate Apartment is one of the six graduate apartments at Stanford University. It is located on the west side of the campus and is marked by a tall oak tree.

Although the scale of this Lehman Graduate Apartment community is not large, its community public facilities are very complete, including laundry rooms, TV lounges, entertainment rooms, piano rooms, mail rooms, computer rooms, storage rooms, bicycle garages, outdoor barbecue areas, etc., which can meet the daily needs of students.

In a secluded corner next to the Lehman Graduate Apartment community, a second-hand RV that looks a bit large is quietly hidden under several cherry trees.

The RV was sprayed with English words such as [Yahoo! Homepage isn't ever going to evolve! ] .

Park Jinshan pointed at the RV driveway and said, "This should be the temporary office of Yahoo!"

Oh, this office is so simple. Yahoo actually worked in a broken RV at first. This surprised Li Xiaofan!

In his previous life, Li Xiaofan had heard Sequoia Capital partner Moritz talk about some of the situations when he first visited the Yahoo office. He only knew that the office was probably messy, but he didn't expect that this office was actually a second-hand RV!

Li Xiaofan said to Tang Xinyi, "Xinyi, take a photo of this RV as a souvenir!"

"What's so good about this broken RV?" Xinyi muttered.

"Hey, you don't know, it will be very meaningful in the future!"

So, Tang Xinyi reluctantly took out a Casio digital camera from her bag.

Seeing this camera, Park Jinshan's eyes widened: "Wow, Casio QV-10 digital camera, very expensive!"

The Casio QV-10 digital camera in Tang Xinyi's hand is said to be the world's first civilian digital camera with a built-in LCD screen. Although it only has 250,000 pixels and a resolution of only 320X240, its LCD screen framing structure laid the foundation for the basic working form of modern digital cameras to shoot and view, allowing users to view the photos taken immediately after shooting. This is a milestone camera product!

This Casio QV-10 digital camera was bought by Tang Xinyi's mother when she was shopping in Akihabara, Tokyo a while ago and mailed to Tang Xinyi. Li Xiaofan also saw this product when he went to Akihabara, Tokyo last time. He liked it very much, but he calculated the price of more than RMB 10,000 and couldn't afford it.

After Li Xiaofan took a photo of the RV, he went forward and knocked on the door of the RV with a feeling of both respect and trepidation: "Hello, is anyone there?"

Soon, the door of the RV opened, and a sleepy, swollen-eyed, honest and gentle young man wearing high myopia glasses walked out.

Seeing this familiar face, Li Xiaofan was excited and ecstatic: It was him, Jerry Yang! The Jerry Yang in front of him was similar to the image he had seen on websites, TV and magazines in his previous life, but the current Jerry Yang was younger, more immature and simple.

At first glance, Li Xiaofan suddenly felt that Jerry Yang in front of him looked like Chef Lin Shuwei in the TV show "Chinese Restaurant".

"Hi, do you have anything to do with me?" Jerry Yang took off his glasses, rubbed his red eyes and asked, with a very good attitude.

Li Xiaofan handed over his business card and introduced himself: "Hello, Mr. Yang, I am Li Xiaofan from Singapore Yifan Company. We came from Singapore this time to discuss cooperation with your Yahoo company!"

Jerry Yang took Li Xiaofan's business card and saw that it read: Li Xiaofan, Executive Director of Singapore Yifan Private Limited.

He was surprised and said: "Mr. Li, you know about our Yahoo company project even though you are far away in Singapore?"

Li Xiaofan smiled and said: "Mr. Yang, because I am also an Internet enthusiast who started a business in Singapore. Your Yahoo search engine is very easy to use and is deeply loved by Singaporean netizens! So, in fact, I am also a loyal fan of your Yahoo! , I flew here specially from Singapore to visit you today!”

"Ashamed, ashamed. I'm sorry to have to bother you all to fly all the way from Singapore to see me! Come on, guys, please come in and let's chat inside!"

This second-hand RV is a bit large, about 50 to 60 square meters, with two or three rooms separated inside for offices.

Once inside, just as Sequoia Capital partner Moritz described when he first visited here, it can be said to be a mess.

The fans of the two servers inside kept blowing heat into the room. The answering machine on the table rang every minute. Used pizza delivery boxes were scattered all over the floor, and a few golf clubs were scattered around. It was placed in the corner, and the telephone with its wires was thrown carelessly on the floor.

There was almost no decent chair inside. The chairs were piled with things, either dirty clothes or books. Books, instant noodles, Coca-Cola soda, canned food and other sundries were everywhere. The whole room was dark and smelly. Tang Xinyi couldn't help pinching her nose as she smelled an unpleasant smell.

Li Xiaofan wanted to laugh when he thought of Moritz's words: "I thought that Yang Zhiyuan and Ferro might not be able to tell the difference between day and night!"

There were only three young employees in the RV busy in front of the computer, and the other partner, Ferro, was not there.

But Yang Zhiyuan didn't care at all. He was already accustomed to this kind of entrepreneurial environment. Even when Moritz, a partner of Sequoia Capital, visited here for the first time, they didn't make any preparations.

The greatest attention and focus of engineering men is technology. Almost all their energy is spent on this entrepreneurial project: Yahoo search engine!

They don't really care about other things.

It was their persistence and focus that won the favor of Moritz, a discerning partner of Sequoia Capital.

After Yang Zhiyuan moved away some dirty clothes and books, he finally managed to clear out two chairs to invite Li Xiaofan and the others to sit. Pu Jinshan had already left because he had something to do.

After sitting down, Li Xiaofan asked directly, "Mr. Yang, has your Yahoo project company been registered? Do you need new investment now?"

"Well, just last month on March 5, Yahoo!, owned by Ferro and I, was registered in California in accordance with California corporate laws. The Internet project is very expensive, including servers, employee salaries, and office space. It costs money. We really need investment at this stage. The more for us, the better!”

"Are there any investors who have reached an agreement so far?"

Yang Zhiyuan was very frank: "Institutions such as Reuters and AOL have approached us before, but they wanted to acquire us, so we were unable to negotiate in the end. Later we also talked with ET, Netscape, Microsoft and other companies, and the results were also good. It’s not ideal, but the most unexpected thing is that we got the greatest assistance from Mark Andreessen, the founder of Netscape. In January of this year, Mark. Anderson directed a very important online search button on the Netscape browser to our Yahoo, which brought a lot of traffic to our Yahoo, resulting in an overwhelming number of website views every day! Now the servers are not enough, and problems often occur. , you see that we have to sleep here 24 hours a day to solve server problems..."

"Have you finally found any investors?"

"Later, one of my friends, Mr. Adams, the founder of International Shopping Network, introduced us to Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley. We have had several rounds of talks with Mr. Moritz from Sequoia Capital. At present, we have initially reached an agreement. Sequoia Capital plans to invest US$2 million in our Yahoo project..."

Hearing that Yahoo had reached an agreement with Sequoia Capital for US$2 million, Li Xiaofan couldn't help but feel a little discouraged: Mr. Moritz made the move quickly enough!

I really should have flown here earlier!