In 2000, not to mention the spread of the information network era around the world, even in China, no one could define the concept of instant messaging until a long time later. All we knew was that it must have been a memory of an entire era for many people.
It is a time when my name is "Qingwu Feiyang" and your name is "Pizi", and we can open our hearts to each other and chat offline.
During that period, there was a famous saying, "You never know if there is a dog on the other side of the computer." This is also the origin of the term "meeting an online friend." The more literary ones are you taking a magazine and I taking a bottle of Coke, and we meet at McDonald's or KFC, or at worst in a garden. The more ordinary ones are you wearing whatever clothes I wear, and we meet to satisfy the novelty of chatting and talking about everything. Maybe we can become friends for a long time, and what we remember is the purity of the interaction between people. In short, the venue is very simple. The more unrestrained ones are directly in hotels and motels, which are also a place for many people's restless bodies.
This initial period of "meeting netizens" was the first impact of the Internet on human ecology. A word called "dinosaur" was derived from it. When you encounter it, you will inevitably have to ask your best friend to eat and drink for you at ordinary times, but you can be of great use in critical moments.
Accidents happen everywhere, every year, at every moment, and sometimes it just happens that something bad happens at the moment. As long as there is a signal, a pager or a phone rings, and you check the message or answer the call, it is often a disaster.
My classmate was hit by a car, my house was hit by an earthquake, my wife was about to give birth, my dormitory was on fire...
At this time, most people would say the line from "Flirting Scholar": "Who dares to be more miserable than me?"
Of course, this is also an era when, after a cautious "hello" to a stranger, you can truly understand the other person's life and thoughts. In the future, this naivety and innocence will also return to the surging world like this period.
There is no doubt that the phenomenon brought about by CQ's rapid development is affecting many people nowadays. Some things lead to qualitative changes from quantitative changes. Cheng Ran believes that this is also the case. After CQ reached its first one million, the number of users exceeded the previous level, showing the characteristics of shorter cycles and faster speeds, so that the CQ team who personally experienced and participated in it would go from excitement to numbness.
The first 100,000 registrations were broken through, and then the first 1 million registrations were broken through. It was no longer meaningful to calculate them later, and the daily number of registrations became a point of expectation within CQ. When the daily number of registrations started to reach 100,000, people would inevitably look back and intuitively feel the power and speed of growth.
So the people in the dormitory would be excited about discovering a BUG in CQ. To a certain extent, this also shows that this thing is well known enough and has formed a deep and consensus foundation in people's hearts.
But what surprised Cheng Ran, and even different from his previous life, was that up to now, except for one or two funds that came to him and offered an extremely low valuation of only a few million dollars, no one was willing to buy CQ's shares.
With the current scale of CQ's development, if it had to rely entirely on external investors, it would probably have collapsed by now. Cheng Ran thought this phenomenon was very strange. The original form of the previous life could always get financing before it ran out of money, and then struggled tenaciously to survive and grow. Why didn't he have such good luck
There may be reasons for not actively sniffing out the capital market, but this is not the main reason. With CQ's current popularity, it is like a beacon. The statement that no one intends to buy stocks because it has not actively contacted capital is obviously untenable.
Then the rest may be the capital circle, which is not optimistic about the future of CQ? Is it because potential competitors are creating public opinion and leading the trend, or is it because they were frightened by the fire of Nasdaq and are afraid to take action
However, it is true that the current CQ profit model, in addition to the issuance of CQ coins by the Avatar Project, is to place banner ads on the CQ software to make some money. Depending on the scale of the content, CQ sets advertising fees ranging from 20,000 to 90,000 yuan per day, which is very low compared to the prices of current portal websites such as Tonglang.com.
Internet companies during this period had a practice of advertising with each other, and they would discuss privately: I invest a certain amount in yours, and you also invest some in mine, so that they could make the accounts look good. To put it bluntly, they were working together to show off to investors, which was common in the money-burning Internet era.
With the impact of the Internet cold wave, CQ's advertising business is also shrinking, which is also the decline that most Internet companies are experiencing. The returns from CQ's investment in the game field have also made some Internet companies see the potential, so some companies have begun to build game businesses, and the process of introducing some foreign online games to China is also accelerating. However, Lingyu still firmly occupies the first place in the market by subverting traditional MUDs, and also provides CQ with a large amount of cash guarantee, allowing CQ to expand its territory without shying away from server and labor costs, and Cheng Ran has no worries about logistics.
Of course, all the public opinions and official activities arising from this influence were blocked by Li Mingshi. So from the outside, Li Mingshi was the chief CEO of CQ and the incarnation of CQ. Of course, if anything went wrong, he would be the one being blamed.
One benefit of the growth of CQ's user base is that the user base of Lianzhong Game Platform, which is connected to CQ, is also increasing day by day, and the number of active users is also quite prosperous. Unlike large-scale online games, the rules of chess and card games are fixed and there is no technical threshold. The players are highly overlapped with QQ users, and there is no worry of upgrading online games. The casual game group is also expanding rapidly. Lianzhong is currently the leader in casual games and has no competitors. Although there are small websites like Bianfeng Games in the south, it is not a problem for Lianzhong, and life is still quite comfortable.
Coupled with his previous shareholding in Alibaba, Cheng Qi is now famous and his name can often be seen in some related magazines. It is said that he has not attended classes at the university much, but privately the school has actually tacitly allowed him to take an open-book make-up exam when the time comes, and finally get his diploma with all passing grades.
Cheng Qi's name is also very famous in the circle of relatives and friends in Shanhai. I don't know how many families are ready to introduce their daughters to him. At the same time, compared with CQ, which has no interest in it, Lianzhong is very favored by investors. Cheng Qi has contacted many companies, some of which have national backgrounds. Cheng Qi vividly told him that they invited him to come to their house. The place is so grand, located in a building with excellent terrain in the capital, and you can see the deep heritage everywhere. The key is that the price offered is not cheap.
Cheng Ran said that Lianzhong was not short of money and did not need a large sum of money. Secondly, if the other party’s shareholding requirement was not high, not exceeding 3%, and the shares did not carry decision-making power, then it was okay to let the other party come in and take some shares. As a result, the deal fell through and was stuck at the final decision-making seat. The other party probably felt that the Internet winter was not worth the investment without a decision-making seat at Lianzhong, and the final step ended in vain.
After that, Cheng Qi asked Cheng Ran several times, "Many parties have come to us to invest with strong intentions and generous money. Should we let them in?" Cheng Qi always seemed a little restless, but despite this, he finally agreed to Cheng Ran's advice and mostly stayed put, so Lianzhong's shares have not been diluted.
Cheng Ran knew that it was impossible to hold on to the shares of Lianzhong forever. Sometimes, for a company to be successful, in addition to diligent work in its core business, a certain degree of icing on the cake surrounding it is also necessary. As for when Cheng Ran will be allowed to sell out his shares, since there is no shortage of money now, money is not the most important thing. It is a necessary checkpoint on the road to progress. For example, if there are companies with special backgrounds, investments or technology investors with future value who can help resolve various issues regarding the market, policies, and public opinion, Cheng Ran would be willing to sell out his shares.
Otherwise, Cheng Ran would certainly be willing to close the door and bear his own profits and losses, which would seem almost unbelievable to the outside world. No matter how much capital there is, it cannot pry open this door.
However, this approach has also led to a lot of speculation from the outside world, some of which said that Cheng Qi wanted to build an independent kingdom.
Even in a magazine that likes to portray business affairs in a bloody and eye-catching way, Cheng Qi's photo was put up, with a sensational headline: "Young man achieves fame, 'Lianzhong Tsar' Cheng Qi's iron-fisted empire!"
The opening content is a suspenseful and progressive statement, "Some people say that he has become famous at a young age and is called a child prodigy. Some people envy him for competing in the Internet at a young age and creating a precedent for Chinese casual chess and card games. Now he is even more versatile and has joined forces with CQ to divert user traffic, occupying 80% of the casual chess and card game market in one fell swoop, leaving newcomers in the field relying on him to survive..."
"Cheng Qi's Lianzhong is like a lion..."
"What is even more incredible is that despite his young age and ordinary family background, he repeatedly rejected the temptation of high-priced acquisitions by American capital, and was able to spend tens of millions to invest in the e-commerce website Alibaba. His courage and skills are hard to be linked to his age. The Internet industry has always had talented people, and this young helmsman of Lianzhong is gradually realizing his ambitions..."
When Cheng Ran called Cheng Qi, Cheng Qi also said, "This magazine wanted to interview me, so I gave them my photo. How is it? Am I handsome? My mother was quite satisfied with it... But the description was a bit too exaggerated, with strategic ambitions and aspirations. I don't even know what ambitions I have. Also, some of the things written there made me blush, hahaha..."
Moving the microphone a few inches away from his ear, Cheng Ran lowered his head to look at the magazine again, listening to the undisguised laughter in the microphone, and wondered how this man became the "Czar"
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