Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

”President Chen, welcome to Yanjing. Let me introduce you. This is Liang Bo, the head of product R&D at Byte.”

Zhang Yiming made the introduction.

”Hello, President Chen.”

Liang Bo stood to the side, looking a bit awkward. He started to extend his hand for a handshake but stopped, thinking it might be too forward. His right hand hovered indecisively near his pocket before he let it drop.

”Mr. Liang, a pleasure.”

Chen Yansen sensed the other man’s nervousness and proactively took Liang Bo’s right hand in his, offering a slight smile.

Chen Yansen was no stranger to Liang Bo, who was a core figure at Byte.

In his past life, their paths had crossed, so to speak—though it was a one-way street. He knew of Liang Bo, but Liang Bo had no idea who he was.

Although the Feiyu Technology he had founded was just a livestream e-commerce company, it managed female streamers whose core income came from virtual gifts, so naturally, they had a presence on the Douyin platform.

Chen Yansen had once seen Liang Bo from a distance at a Douyin Quality Content conference. At the time, Liang Bo was the CEO of Byte, worth tens of billions, while he was merely the owner of a mid-sized MCN agency.

In this life, however, their roles were reversed.

The twenty-nine-year-old Liang Bo had no notable achievements to his name besides his title as R&D manager at Jiu Jiu Room.

Facing a magnate like Chen Yansen—who had achieved fame at a young age and was worth tens of billions—he was naturally a nervous wreck, terrified of offending the investor.

”President Zhang, let’s go see your studio first,” Chen Yansen said teasingly.

Because Zhang Yiming kept a tight grip on his equity, he had only accepted five million in seed funding. To save money, Byte had rented a small office space for its initial R&D phase, sharing the floor with other companies.

Hence, calling it a studio wasn’t inaccurate.

”President Chen, President Gao, President Song, please follow me.”

Zhang Yiming quickly agreed and led the three of them into the elevator.

With a DING!, the elevator doors slowly opened.

They walked down a narrow corridor, passing the front desks of three other small companies before finally stopping at an office space on the west end of the floor.

Some thirty-odd people were crammed into a space of just over a hundred square meters, including front-end, back-end, and mobile developers, as well as architects, testers, and product managers.

These working conditions were even worse than FoxTao’s had been in the beginning.

Chen Yansen shook his head to himself. ’This Zhang Yiming... he really pinches every penny.’

’To be able to rope in over thirty people with conditions like these... the 2012 job market in Yanjing must not be as good as I imagined.’

”President Chen, this is the product proposal for the Lingxi Mobile Browser. We plan to develop the Android version first. It will use a recommendation algorithm to provide users with personalized content recommendations based on data like browsing history, search queries, and session duration.”

Zhang Yiming opened a PowerPoint presentation and began to explain in detail.

To put it bluntly, the Lingxi Mobile Browser’s content distribution mechanism was no different from Toutiao’s; it was just presented in a different product format.

For example, if a user frequently browsed entertainment news, the browser would prioritize pushing the latest entertainment updates and industry gossip. This would allow users to quickly get the information they cared about, reducing the need to sift through irrelevant content and thereby increasing user stickiness.

Chen Yansen sat in his chair, listening to Zhang Yiming’s presentation.

’Based on my knowledge of where the internet is heading, Zhang Yiming’s product actually has a real chance of succeeding.’

’By integrating content resources like news, novels, videos, and music to find what users are most interested in... as long as the marketing doesn’t fall flat, breaking into the industry’s top ten shouldn’t be hard.’

Chen Yansen’s eyes narrowed as a key point immediately occurred to him: Zhang Yiming didn’t have enough capital. Therefore, the only way he could acquire content like news, novels, videos, and music was through piracy and copyright infringement.

Initial growth might be explosive, but the moment it started to infringe on the core interests of Penguin, Qian Du, and Ah Li, there was no guarantee Zhang Yiming wouldn’t suffer the same fate as Kuai Bo.

”Where are you getting this content?” Chen Yansen interrupted Zhang Yiming and asked directly.

”I can aggregate the news from other portal websites and then make recommendations to users, but to avoid copyright issues, I will add hyperlinks to the original webpages in the content,” Zhang Yiming said craftily. When you’re broke, you get creative.

Chen Yansen laughed inwardly. ’That approach is about as effective as a disclaimer on a pirate site.’

”President Chen, I was actually inspired by FoxTao’s business model. FoxTao is a shopping guide, while Lingxi is a news guide,” Zhang Yiming said with a smile, his high expectations for the product obvious.

Chen Yansen considered it for a moment but decided not to voice any warnings.

’Zhang Yiming is a smart guy. The fact that he brought up a method to circumvent copyright disputes means he doesn’t plan to be a freeloader forever. Once the business matures and ad revenue can cover production costs, it won’t be too late to transition from a ”news porter” to a ”news producer.”’

Chen Yansen nodded and casually offered a few words of praise.

He asked a few more questions and learned that most of the R&D staff were recent graduates. In short, they were cheap, capable, and easy to string along.

Chen Yansen stayed at Byte until eleven o’clock and decided to treat the team to lunch at a nearby restaurant.

The meal cost just over 100 yuan per person, but the young team members were thoroughly satisfied.

Chen Yansen shot a look at Zhang Yiming and cursed inwardly. ’I didn’t think this guy’s methods of exploitation were even more ruthless than my own.’

’No wonder he was able to secure funding so easily for his various ventures.’

’In the eyes of VCs, entrepreneurs like Zhang Yiming—the kind who make every penny count—are the ones most likely to succeed.’