“Are you ready?”

"alright."

"Jump!"

Du Qiu jumped out of the narrow cabin of Cessna 172 and jumped into a height of more than 4,000 meters. He opened his limbs and whistled strong winds in his ears. He fell rapidly between the vast sky and the vast earth. In a heart-wrenching state of weightlessness, he experienced unprecedented stimulation and freedom.

After about two or three seconds, the descent speed stabilized, the sense of weightlessness disappeared, Du Qiu found balance again, looking down at the mottled earth among the white clouds, and only felt that the world was extremely magnificent and life was extremely wonderful. This feeling and scene made people feel excited and worthy of writing poems and singing.

“Oh…Wow…”

With a vague and strange scream, a bald man tied with the coach to play double parachute jumps over Du Qiu from the side, and then two other parachute jump coaches chased him. The three of them fell side by side. After about a minute, at the coach's prompt, Du Qiu opened the parachute and was suddenly pulled up, from falling rapidly to floating, and began to enjoy the fun of gliding in the air.

On November 3, Du Qiu accidentally saw a promotional poster for skydiving while studying private jet materials, so he found a skydiving club in Seattle and tried it. As a result, he fell in love with the sport. This was his seventh attempt in two days. With some experience, he manipulated the ropes under the guidance of the coach. After a long time of struggle, he successfully landed at the designated location.

After Du Qiu stood firm, the bald man clenched his fists and said to him, "Autumn, don't take me here in the future, I hate the sky!"

"Marin, don't you find this exciting?"

"It's exciting to fight sharks in the sea. This is suicide!"

"Okay, let's go out to sea together next time."

The bald man is named Marin Eller. He is a Microsoft veteran Du Qiu met when he came to Seattle to write IE browser in June. He joined Microsoft as early as 1982. He has outstanding abilities and good vision, but he has a stubborn temper and is unpopular, so he has never been promoted to senior management.

As early as 1992, Marin Eller had the idea of ​​developing browsers and scripting languages, but unfortunately he was rejected by senior management. In 1994, he thought video compression technology was promising. He studied it alone for several months and then demonstrated it to Bill Gates. Bill Gates admired this technology very much and arranged a senior vice president to be responsible for subsequent research and development. However, Marin Eller had an old feud with the vice president, so he was kicked away and stuffed it into the IB browser R&D team as a mascot. By chance, he met Du Qiu and soon became a friend.

After the release of Windows 95, Marin Eller's contract expired, so he resigned from Microsoft and jointly opened a company specializing in audio and video compression technology with Du Qiu. Now there are 10 employees, and the R&D is progressing smoothly. It is expected that the product will be released next month.

Marin Eller hated his baldness very much. He usually wore a beret regardless of the weather and weather. He couldn't wear it when he was skydiving just now, which made him very uncomfortable. So he went to the locker room first and put on his hat. Then he went to the lounge of the skydiving club with Du Qiu, each asked for a cup of coffee, and sat on the sofa beside the floor-to-ceiling window to chat.

"Abumn, I heard you went to Bellevue yesterday?"

"Yes." Du Qiu took a sip of coffee and asked, "There is an online bookstore called Amazon, and I invested it in a lot of money."

"Amazon? I've bought a few books on this website, and the discount is very high, and there are links to it on the Icard." Marin Eller seemed to feel that the hat was not comfortable enough, and said while adjusting, "If I were you, I would have acquired it in full."

"Are you optimistic about Amazon?"

"Amazon is not important. I am optimistic about the industry of e-commerce. And the combination of browsers and shopping websites will produce good chemical effects." Marin Eller indeed has a good vision and said: "The Internet has just digitized the real world and has not changed the essence of business. Browsers are like billboards on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which can bring a lot of customer flow to any shopping website."

"I agree with you, but it's not easy to do a good job in shopping websites. I don't have time to mess with this, so I only invest in wealth and not participate in specific operations."

At this time, a white man who was about 40 years old, not tall, not handsome and honest, walked over from outside, stood beside Du Qiu, bent down and whispered: "Sir, Audionet and Cdnow both accepted our investment."

"I understand, thank you."

After the Internet Conference in August, Du Qiu recruited Bai Jie as a business assistant in China, recruited Aiko Komatsu as a business assistant in Japan, and while waiting for the flight at the Beijing International Airport, she also tried to recruit Jennifer as an American business assistant, but she ended up teasing her.

Afterwards, Jennifer gave Du Qiu some popular science on several ways in which billionaires manage their lives and assets in developed capitalist countries, so that he knew for the first time that in addition to the private banks that often appear in movies, there is also a "family-office" that provides full-service types, which is the so-called family office.

There are two types of family offices. One is a single family office that only serves one family, and the other is a joint family office that serves multiple families. It provides services to the Jennifer family. It is a capital company called theia, which belongs to the second type. Du Qiu joined it with her recommendation and became the sixth customer of the company.

With a professional team providing services, it is much more convenient to make trouble, whether it is personal or commercial investment. For example, when investing in Amazon yesterday, if Du Qiu went to discuss it personally, he might pay US$2 million to get 20% of the shares and let theia's investment consultant discuss it, and he would get 20% of the shares in US$800,000...

For example, Audionet and Cdnow, Du Qiulian didn’t know where the office locations of these two websites were. He just saw them online and felt that the products they operated meet their needs and were full of gimmicks, which was very suitable for cutting leeks during the peak of the Internet bubble. So he entrusted theia to help him invest, and it was done in one day.

"Malin, audionet is a website that provides broadcast services on the Internet, and cdnow is a website that sells music products on the Internet. After our audio compression format is completed, we can borrow them to promote it."

"These two websites, like Amazon, invest a sum of money and get a 20% stake?"

"Yes."

"Auto, I don't understand what you do. You can use the money you invested to start your own website." Marin Eller disagreed with Du Qiu's investment and said, "You are the king of the Internet now, and they are not qualified to compete with you."

"That's too tiring. I like a relaxing life." Du Qiu raised his coffee cup and said, "If I do everything myself, I will definitely be called a dictatorship by consumers, besieged by peers, and suppressed by the government like Microsoft in the future."

“That’s right.”

The two chatted for more than ten minutes, and after drinking coffee, they left the lounge and prepared to go back to their homes. On the way to the parking lot, Marin Eller said: "Autumn, I know you are very concerned about Microsoft's trends in the Internet. There is a very boring gossip that may be useful to you."

"What news?"

"Yesterday morning, Bill sent the memo of "Internet Wave" he wrote in May again." Marin Eller said with a very obvious sarcastic expression on his face: "In addition to internal management, he also sent it to some media reporters, claiming that Microsoft is now the backbone of the Internet wave."

In May, Bill Gates was shocked after logging into the Internet using the iView browser for the first time, so he sent a memo titled "Internet Wave" to all senior management of Microsoft via email, requiring all departments to transform to the Internet, and forcibly requiring the integration of msn and IE browsers into Windows 95 that is about to be completed, which almost made this epoch-making product difficult to produce.

The memo for "Internet Wave" was the cause of the cooperation between Microsoft and Snapdragon. Du Qiu saw it on Marin Eller's computer when he wrote IE in June. He was deeply impressed by it and said: "This memo is well written, and it's nothing to repost it once, right?"

"It's certainly nothing to resend the memorandum." Marin Eller took a step toward Du Qiu and said: "Every time Microsoft makes strategic deployment, it will set up corresponding groups, such as electronics products teams, office software teams, etc. However, after Bill resends the memorandum, he told John Ludwig that there is no need to set up a special Internet team, which is capricious and does not know what he is thinking."

John Ludwig is the head of Microsoft's Internet R&D department. Du Qiu once met this person and knew that his status within Microsoft was not high, not even a senior vice president. Now, after hearing what Marin Eller said, he thought this rumor is very useful, but he didn't know what it was for a while, so he decided to pass it on to Chen Dayou, who is quite talented in figuring out his opponent's mentality.

When leaving the skydiving club, Du Qiu turned around and looked at the small planes on the apron, and said to the private consultant of theia who had been following behind, as if he was a transparent person: "There is no single-engine fixed-wing aircraft I want in the market now. I plan to acquire or invest in an aircraft manufacturer to build it myself. Please help me find out if there is any suitable one."
Chapter completed!