Reborn in 2010, the AI ​​in my mind is too powerful.

After being told by Gao Dewei that she didn't have an office, Chen Yiran called Emily the next day.

"Is Mr. Chen going to buy another house?"

"No, this time we're renting an office. The company needs to hire people, and we can't have them working in the garage."

"Don't you tech companies love garages the most?"

"We are a legitimate company, okay? We're not some random startup by a few college students."

"Okay, I'll take you to see a few places this afternoon. We have some office resources here."

"You're free today? You're a real estate agent, you seem to have a lot of free time. Your commission must be low. Look at our new company, although it's a small company with few employees, we still need an administrator. You can help with the preliminary preparations."

"What are you doing? Trying to poach me? Don't you know I just bought a house worth over two million a few days ago, and you still have to pay me commission? I can sell about two or three houses a month, and rent out even more. You can't afford me."

Chen Yiran was defeated; hiring a separate administrative or general staff member would be quite troublesome. Chen Yiran began to consider whether to bring Hannah over as a work-study opportunity.

In the afternoon, Emily drove her new car over, an Infiniti sports car, looking rather ostentatious. Afterwards, she took Chen Yiran to see three places.

The first one is in downtown Palo Alto, a 1200-square-foot second-floor apartment facing the street, with a monthly rent of $4500. There's a French bakery downstairs, and Emily laughed, saying it would be nice to go to work smelling bread every day. Chen Yiran disagreed. Although the surrounding area was convenient, the street was too lively and noisy, and there were only four parking spaces.

The second one is a newly built small office building on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, 1400 square feet, with a monthly rent of $11000. The location is unbeatable; venture capital firms are all next door, and meeting investors and partners is just a walk away. But this isn't very useful to Chen Yiran, as he doesn't need funding, and mainly feels it's a bit small.

The third one is in a business park in Menlo Park, near Highway 101. It's an unassuming little building with high ceilings, but only one story, surrounded by small tech companies. It's 2600 square feet, with a monthly rent of $5800. There's ample parking, a reception area, four individual offices plus an open workspace, a kitchenette, and a meeting room.

Without a doubt, the third option is the most suitable. Following the subprime mortgage crisis, many small tech companies went bankrupt or downsized, resulting in very cheap rents in this area. The interior is actually quite nice; you can start working right away without needing any additional furnishings.

"This one."

"You've made a decision so quickly?"

"That's fine. It's not far from my home. The price is reasonable, and we don't need a location too centrally located."

"Okay, this landlord wants a three-year lease, and the rent can be prepaid quarterly. He must be scared off by what happened before. Look at this area, it used to be completely full. Now only about a third of it is occupied."

"Okay, no problem, this is fine. Paying quarterly is too much trouble, I'll just pay for a year directly. The security here is too poor, I'll have to install some security doors or something myself, is that okay?"

"I have no problem with that."

They signed the papers on the spot, and Emily called the agent to bring the keys over. The two of them waited at the door.

Emily hesitated for a moment before asking, "You said your company needs an administrative staff member, right? To put it bluntly, someone who does odd jobs, right? They don't need to handle the messy technical stuff that your tech company does, do they?"

Chen Yiran was a little speechless: "What do you mean by 'messy technology'? It makes it sound like we're not doing anything serious. But administration is indeed about doing odd jobs. For example, once this office is rented, I can't be here to oversee all the renovations later."

"After I start working, my duties will include things like running out of paper in the printer, ordering coffee for everyone, receiving packages, and answering the phone. If there's nothing else, I'll just sit at the front desk. It would be even better if I could also act as a part-time security guard."

"Get lost! The security guards and cleaners are all employed by the park! I'm not kidding, I have a friend who's currently unemployed, want to consider him?"

"What friend?"

"Okay, it's my girlfriend, Catherine. After graduating from her undergraduate degree, she went to UC Davis for pre-med, and she broke down from that. She's been cooped up at home for over six months now. She majored in accounting, so she can handle odd jobs."

"That's not normal. Wouldn't it be better to have her stay home and warm your bed?"

"Good my foot! She's still dreaming of going back to study medicine. She spends all her time buying bloody stuff and cooking awful things. She's just not cut out for it, but she's fine with odd jobs."

Chen Yiran thought about it for a moment. He was just an administrative staff member doing odd jobs, so it didn't seem to matter much.

"Alright, let her come over and sign the contract. She's employee number 002 in the company."

"Okay, okay, I'll call her over right now."

Right at the entrance of the future company, the landlord delivered the keys, exchanged a few words with Chen Yiran, and then left.

Soon Catherine arrived; a blonde beauty with blue eyes, she was half a head taller than Emily.

Two good cabbages, and they just wasted each other like that!

The three of them entered the office and sat down. Catherine got straight to the point: "Emily told me you need someone to do odd jobs."

"Administration, administration, plus a little bit of miscellaneous work."

"Okay, I know. I don't think it will be any kind of weird or complicated tech work. It should all be pretty basic."

"You don't need to do anything else. My company is very small. I just handle package delivery, food orders, document organization, answering phones, scheduling interviews, and maybe I'll have to manage payroll and things like that in the future."

"That's no problem. I studied accounting, so your company doesn't need an accountant. I can work part-time. Please give me a higher salary, boss."

"I didn't want to hire an accountant in the first place. We already have more than a dozen people, what would we need an accountant for? Besides, have you even taken the CPA exam?"

"Okay, okay, so how much money can I make in a year?"

Chen Yiran was a little embarrassed. He had no idea how much this would cost, but he couldn't lose face.

Chen Yiran countered, "Don't ask me how much I can offer. You need to ask yourself, in order to keep up with the company's growth rate and not slow down our march into the heart of Silicon Valley, how much valuable work can you produce? We don't encourage an employee mentality here. You can't just focus on a fixed salary! You need to know what our company's future holds, and you need to keep up with our growth!"

Catherine said somewhat hesitantly, "Is four thousand five hundred a month okay? Most of my college classmates started at that salary. Life in Silicon Valley is a bit expensive, so I asked for a little more."

"Okay, you still need to work hard to pass the CPA exam so that you can keep up with the company's pace in the future."

"I understand, boss."

Emily, standing nearby, exclaimed in shock, "I never imagined you'd already look like a Silicon Valley conman!"

Chen Yiran remained unmoved, took out the template contract that TED had sent him that morning from the car, made some edits, and signed the contract with Catherine.

With the company's employee number 002 in place, many things no longer required his personal attention, and Chen Yiran naturally handed the keys to Catherine.

"Here, these are the company keys. You see how important your responsibilities are; I'm even giving you the company keys directly. I'll be having someone improve the company's security later, and you'll need to follow up on that. Also, you'll need to oversee the subsequent equipment installation. That's all, I'm leaving now."

As a real estate agent, Emily is certainly familiar with security system contractors, licensed commercial locksmiths, and general commercial renovation contractors. Once you've found them, have them provide proposals and quotes, then give them to me for review. If you have any questions, just ask Emily.

Under Emily's unfriendly gaze, Chen Yiran quickly walked away.

He hurriedly went to sign the contract with Gao Dewei and then informed us that we finally had a company with an office!

Then the two of them discussed the equipment they needed.

Gao Dewei took this very seriously: "EDA development is different from writing a regular webpage; it has very high requirements for the machine. Running a full benchmark with the placement engine typically takes dozens of hours. If the configuration is inadequate, it's a waste of time, and this cannot be cut corners."

The two sat down and settled down one by one.

First is the foundation, which is the workstation.

Gao Dewei said that Cadence mainly uses Dell Precision series computers, and he has used this series at Cadence for almost ten years without any major problems.

After discussion, we settled on the T3500, a Xeon W5590 quad-core, eight-thread processor at 3.33GHz, paired with 24GB of DDR3 memory. EDA is extremely demanding on the CPU and memory; logic synthesis, placement and routing, and timing analysis all run at full load, so the graphics card isn't the bottleneck. We configured six machines, which should be sufficient.

There's not much to worry about with the monitors; they're Dell UltraSharp U2410s, 24-inch IPS panels, 1920×1200 resolution. Each workstation will have two: the main screen horizontally for coding, and the secondary screen vertically for viewing documents and waveforms.

The servers consist of three Dell PowerEdge R710 servers, each with two Xeon X5670 six-core processors, 72GB of RAM, and six 300GB SAS hard drives configured in RAID 5.

Gao Dewei didn't agonize over the network equipment, but he required enterprise-grade components. He ultimately chose a Cisco 2960 switch and an ASA 5505 firewall, which he considered stable enough for various network environments.

The printer was more flexible; I ordered an HP CP2025 color laser.

However, Gao Dewei confidently asserted that the coffee machine was also work equipment, which seemed a bit absurd. Chen Yiran actually enjoyed drinking coffee, but he felt he wouldn't come to the company very often, which made him feel a bit cheated.

However, after much pleading and cajoling from Gao Dewei, they finally agreed to purchase the Jura Impressa X9, a high-end Swiss fully automatic coffee machine that delivers coffee beans to the cup in one go and even has a steam milk frother.

Regarding the tables and chairs, Gao Dewei began complaining that he was fifty years old and still had to start a business despite his aching back and sore waist. Finally, Chen Yiran made a grand gesture and provided everyone with Herman Miller Aeron furniture.

After everything was ordered, Chen Yiran sent the list to Catherine and asked her to place the orders.

There are many companies in Silicon Valley that help startups procure these kinds of equipment; just have Catherine find one that is fast and reasonably priced.

I also got her to set up ADP, a payroll service. They charge a few dollars per payslip for management, and automatically calculate and deduct taxes. Catherine will need this system to manage payroll in the future.

After a long day, Chen Yiran arrived home feeling exhausted. Running a small company has brought a mountain of tasks, and she has interviews starting next week. Just thinking about it gives her a headache.

But at least, the company is beginning to take shape.