Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

The morning mist in Harbin had not yet dissipated, and the dim light bulb in the hotel room cast a long shadow of Bai Yuhang.

After staying up most of the night, a thick hardcover notebook was slammed onto the table, making the ashtray on top of it jump.

"Fifth brother, here you go. You'll be in charge of things at the Harbin company from now on. Keep a good eye on the franchised internet cafes in other places. Take advantage of the momentum from the Harbin competition and you'll need to travel around a lot. In the future, you need to expand the e-sports competition business completely."

Liu Jing, with a toothbrush in his mouth and foam all over his lips, leaned over and casually flipped through two pages. The handwriting was somewhat messy, clearly written overnight, but the content was frighteningly detailed.

"Standardized Manual for Urban Esports and Internet Cafe Promotion"

From what brand of cigarettes to offer the internet cafe manager when you enter, to what to say as the first thing to the owner, and even the posters that are most conspicuously placed on the wall at a height of 1.6 meters, with everything clearly written on them.

"Holy crap, Sixth Brother, is this some kind of secret manual?" Liu Jing wiped his mouth hastily, his playful grin vanishing. He rubbed his hand along his trouser seam before taking the notebook. "It's this detailed?"

"We're a regular army now, not bandits coming down from the mountain. From now on, we'll expand our ground sales team, and everyone will have to memorize this." Bai Yuhang pointed to the somewhat reserved young man standing at the door. "You know Wang Jun too. He used to be the manager of New Century Internet Cafe. I specially borrowed him from Brother Zhao last night. He'll be working with you on business from now on. He's an expert in internet cafes. You two should discuss things more and not always try to settle things by shouting."

Wang Jun nodded to Liu Jing: "President Liu, please guide me in the future."

Liu Jing looked at the heavy notebook in his hand, then at Bai Yuhang, his Adam's apple bobbed, and finally he just pounded his chest hard: "Don't worry, if I don't do a good job, I'll bring my head to Beijing to see you."

At Taiping Airport, Shi Hongchao and Zhao Jianjun escorted Bai Yuhang and his group to the security checkpoint.

Yang Bo had to stay in Harbin to assist the police in handling the prosecution of Chen Yuan's case. Only Bai Yuhang, Zhang Jian, and Zhang Qingheng returned to Beijing this time.

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the departure lounge, a massive Boeing passenger plane was loading and unloading luggage. Bai Yuhang looked at the plane in the distance, then suddenly turned around.

"President Shi, let's push forward with what we discussed yesterday as soon as possible."

Shi Hongchao, who was reminiscing about parting, immediately leaned closer upon hearing this: "Brother Bai, what do you need me to do?"

"The classmates and investment bankers you mentioned yesterday, help me register a wholly-owned local company in Delaware," Bai Yuhang lowered his voice.

"name?"

Facebook.inc.

Shi Hongchao was stunned, chewing over and over again: "Face...book? Facebook? What kind of lousy name is that? It sounds like a police suspect roster, so corny! How about something like 'Global Connect'?"

Bai Yuhang didn't explain, but a playful smile appeared on his lips, his eyes so certain it sent chills down one's spine: "That's it. The more rustic, the easier to remember."

Although Shi Hongchao was completely confused, seeing Bai Yuhang's "listen to me and you won't go wrong" attitude, he could only nod helplessly: "Okay, you're the boss, you call the shots. I'll call the East Coast later."

"Don't look back, we'll get it done in a bit." Bai Yuhang turned to Zhang Jian, who was using his laptop to catch the weak Wi-Fi signal at the airport. "Third brother, are you connected yet?"

"It's connected! This internet speed is terrible, like I'm constipated." Zhang Jian typed furiously on the keyboard.

"Check the domain name facebook.com, and register it now, immediately."

Although Zhang Jian didn't know what had gotten into Lao Liu, he didn't stop working.

The progress bar on the screen crawled like a snail, and several people held their breath and stared at it.

Thousands of kilometers away on the other side of the ocean, a curly-haired high school student might be dreaming about social networks, unaware that his domain name was hijacked on this Harbin morning.

"Done!" Zhang Jian pressed Enter, pointed to the green "Registration Successful" message on the screen, and said, "One hundred yuan, all done."

Bai Yuhang looked at the screen with a smile, as if he were looking at a golden mountain that had not yet risen.

"Let's go, board the plane. We're heading back to Beijing."

The plane landed in Beijing, and the three of them, travel-worn, headed straight for the Hailong Building.

As soon as the elevator doors opened, Zhang Jian's suitcase fell to the ground with a thud.

The once tense office area has been completely transformed.

Jiao Liwei somehow found a construction team that managed to open up the 300-square-meter office space that had just been vacated next door in just six days.

The obstructive non-load-bearing wall in the middle is gone, replaced by a transparent floor-to-ceiling glass partition.

On the left, a bustling office area and meeting rooms spanning about 400 square meters, is a carpeted rest area with even a few decent-looking beanbag chairs and massage chairs.

Directly opposite the elevator at the entrance is a brand-new brushed bronze plaque that reads "Qihang Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd."

On the background wall of the reception area, there is also a blue sailboat logo that is not yet finalized, shining brightly under the spotlights.

"This is what a company should be like!" Zhang Qingheng touched the glass door, looking completely unsophisticated. "Was the place we were working in the other day an internet cafe?"

Jiao Liwei walked over with a folder in his hand. Although his eyes were bloodshot, his face was full of pride as someone in charge: "Welcome back, General Manager Bai and the two General Managers Zhang! How is it? You like it? To meet the deadline, I've been supervising the workers for three consecutive nights."

"Boss, that's impressive." Bai Yuhang patted Jiao Liwei on the shoulder. "But that's just for show. How are the people from Shenzhen doing?"

Jiao Liwei's smile faded slightly, and he gestured towards the large conference room inside: "They're all inside. These guys from Shenzhen... they're a bit arrogant."

Pushing open the door to the large conference room, the air inside seemed to freeze.

On one side of the long table, in three rows, sat forty-two “office elites” dressed in shirts and trousers, wearing proper name tags.

They sat upright, their laptops lined up in a row, looking like a regular army.

On the other side were the "executives" of Qihang, dressed in T-shirts and jeans.

This visual contrast makes the atmosphere truly somewhat eerie.

Liu Zhi, the former technical director of Tencent, sat at the head of the table. He was in his early thirties with a slightly receding hairline and was twirling a Parker pen in his hand. He looked at Bai Yuhang, Zhang Jian, and Zhang Qingheng as they walked in, his eyes revealing a kind of disdain that a big company elite would have for a makeshift team.

"Mr. Bai," Liu Zhi nodded without standing up, "we're currently discussing the technical handover between the old and new teams. However, if I may be frank, while the original OICQ architecture does need optimization, isn't our proposed restructuring plan a bit too 'radical'?"

He deliberately emphasized the word "radical," making it sound like a compliment, but it was actually a sarcastic remark that these college students didn't understand industrial-grade development.

Zhang Jian tossed his laptop bag onto the table, pulled out a chair, sat down, glanced at the man's name tag, and said bluntly, "So you're Supervisor Liu? Are you saying our proposal is no good?"

"It's not that it's impossible, it's just that the risks are too great." Liu Zhi pushed up his glasses and pointed to the architecture diagram on the projector. "You want to completely strip away the communication layer and introduce distributed storage and data compression algorithms. Theoretically, it's feasible, but we have millions of users now. If the data is lost, who will be responsible? We wouldn't dare try this kind of unorthodox approach in Shenzhen."

The technical staff behind him chuckled softly and whispered among themselves.

"Unorthodox methods?" Zhang Jian laughed in exasperation, and was about to slam his fist on the table when Bai Yuhang grabbed his shoulder.

Bai Yuhang walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and without responding to Liu Zhi's words, wrote down a number: 10,000,000.

"This is our target user count for the end of the year. Ten million." Bai Yuhang turned around, his gaze calmly sweeping over Liu Zhi and the three rows of well-dressed elites beside him. "Manager Liu, I know you are Pony's team, with a strong technical foundation and a preference for stability. But at Qihang, stability is not the top priority; we need to be both fast and stable."

"You think the current architecture is stable, but that's only based on a maximum of three million users. If the number of users doubles next month, your 'stable' architecture will become the biggest time bomb."

Liu Zhi frowned: "Double? That's impossible. Internet user growth follows a pattern..."

"Rules are meant to be broken." Bai Yuhang capped his pen with a crisp "snap." "Zhang Jian is now the CTO. For technical matters, listen to him. If you think he's a maverick, let's have a competition. I'll give you three days: one team will optimize using the old architecture, and the other team will refactor using the new architecture. Whoever runs faster and has a lower crash rate will be in charge from now on."

Bai Yuhang placed his hands on the table, leaning forward, exuding an imposing aura: "At Qihang, we don't look at seniority, we don't look at employee badges, we only look at the code. Understand?"

The meeting room was completely silent.

Liu Zhi stopped writing and looked at the "boss" who was more than ten years younger than him. For the first time, he realized that this office was not as much like a child's playhouse as it seemed on the surface.