Chapter 341: Turning Stone Into Gold and Midnight Xiaoxun

Li Xiaofan was pleasantly surprised to see the familiar "Hotmail"!

In his previous life, after returning to China in 1998, he had used the Hotmail free email account and the associated msnmessenger for a long time. At that time, these two Internet tools were almost standard for domestic white-collar workers.

At that time, white-collar workers in Shanghai disdained to use QQ. Almost everyone used Microsoft Hotmail accounts to log in to msnmessenger as a chat tool for work and private life.

At that time, there was no Momo or WeChat. msnmessenger could be said to be the best tool for picking up girls.

In his previous life, Li Xiaofan's first female bedmate in Shanghai was hooked up on msnmessenger...

Li Xiaofan was familiar with the entrepreneurial story of Hotmail and the case of its acquisition by Microsoft when he was studying for an MBA in his previous life.

Stanford University is really a magical place. Sabir Badia, the founder of Hotmail, also graduated from this famous university in Silicon Valley, and like Jerry Yang, he graduated from the electrical engineering major.

Sabir Badia and another founder, Jack Smith, were both working at Apple at the time, and they were colleagues and partners. At the beginning, they wanted to use Web software to remotely manage the database. According to the popular words now, it is the most common "cloud management", but this technology did not exist in 1996.

However, Sabir Badia and Jack Smith found that due to the firewall set up in the company's intranet, their email software could not connect to the external server to send and download private emails, which made it very difficult for them to exchange files. They often had to copy and transfer disks to allow the other party to receive the program they wrote, or print out the data before handing it over to the other party, which was very inconvenient.

One day, they suddenly had an idea, why not use the browser to send and receive emails? Using a web page to make an email system will not be blocked by the company's firewall.

So the two later successfully developed a free web-based email system, which later became the famous Hotmail.

Two years later, Microsoft was acquired by Bill Gates for $400 million.

At present, a well-known venture capital company from North America, DFJ, has invested in the Hotmail project. DFJ valued the project at $2 million. The first angel investment in Hotmail was $300,000, which gave it a 15% stake.

DFJ was founded in Silicon Valley in 1985. It is a venture capital fund focused on early and growth stages and one of the world's top venture capital funds. In its previous life, DFJ entered China in 2000 and invested in a number of well-known projects including Baidu and Focus Media...

Later, it was not until January this year that the free web-based email software was officially released to global users. It had 100,000 users in the first month of its release, and by the end of the second year, it had soared to 12 million users. It was then acquired by Bill Gates for $400 million...

And now it's only the end of April, and I still have three months to go!

Thinking of this, Li Xiaofan couldn't help laughing.

"Brother Fan, what are you so happy about?" Liu Mengchen, who came back to the living room after washing clothes, asked curiously when he saw Li Xiaofan holding a laptop and grinning.

"Haha, Mengchen, thanks to your laptop, I found another good project! If I can reach an agreement in the United States next week, I may be able to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in two years!"

"Wow, one hundred million dollars, it's unimaginable! Brother Fan, why do I feel like you have recently mastered the magic of turning stone into gold? For ordinary people like us, one million dollars is already very scary. You can easily make hundreds of millions of dollars, which is incredible!"

"Haha, is one million dollars scary?" Li Xiaofan laughed.

"Well! One million dollars can be exchanged for about 8.3 million yuan in China. After I remitted the money back to my family last Sunday, I called them and my mother told me that the current one-year deposit interest rate in China is as high as %. If you have one million dollars, the annual deposit interest income alone will be 900,000 yuan, and the monthly income will be more than 70,000 yuan. It feels like this money can't be spent in several lifetimes..." Liu Mengchen counted on his fingers.

Li Xiaofan smiled and said, "Mengchen, you and Yueyue should follow me and work hard. It won't be too far to realize the dream of one million dollars! Do you remember that I mentioned to you two last time that I would give you a small gift after Yahoo goes public?"

"Well, what small gift? We are very curious?"

"To thank you for holding Yahoo shares for me, I plan to give each of you one million dollars, but not all at once. I plan to give you this million dollars in ten years, which means one hundred thousand dollars a year..."

"Brother Fan, is it true? Let me calculate it. One hundred thousand dollars a year is 830,000 yuan. The one-year deposit interest rate is %, and the deposit interest income alone is 90,000 yuan a year, which is more than 7,000 yuan a month. My God, the interest alone is 7,000 yuan a month. My parents don't earn that much a year!"

After calculating the account, Liu Mengchen smiled and said, "Brother Fan, if you give me one hundred thousand dollars now, I want to go back to China and enjoy a peaceful life!"

"Look at your lack of ambition! Don't you want to get a Singapore PR status, achieve financial freedom, buy a HDB flat in Singapore, travel back and forth between Singapore freely, and bring your parents to Singapore to play and stay for a few days when you have time?"

"Haha, Brother Fan, I'm kidding you! You've been so good to me and Yueyue, and now our monthly salary is over 2,000 Singapore dollars, which is more than 10,000 yuan. How can I bear to leave you!"

"Haha, then keep working hard! If nothing goes wrong, your EP permits will be issued soon, and you can apply for PR in a year or two..."

"Brother Fan, you're so good to us! It's a great fate to meet you in this life . A year ago, I never dared to imagine that my income would exceed 2,000 Singapore dollars and more than 10,000 RMB one day, and I could also apply for an EP permit. And this 100,000 US dollars, it sounds like a dream, there is a feeling that seems unrealistic..."

"The future has come, it is coming! Mengchen, believe me, all your efforts will be rewarded."

"Brother Fan, it sounds great!"

As he said, Liu Mengchen took out two cans of Tiger brand ice beer from the refrigerator in the living room and handed one to Li Xiaofan:

"Brother Fan, thank you, come, I toast you a can of beer!"

"You're welcome, cheers!"

Liu Mengchen then took out some spicy beef jerky, Tianfu peanuts and other snacks from his hometown from the food cabinet.

After Li Xiaofan ate a piece of beef jerky handed over by Liu Mengchen, he called Yang Zhiyuan in San Francisco, USA.