Shabbir Bhatia, a 28-year-old newcomer of Indian origin, came to Silicon Valley when he was in college. After graduating with a master's degree from Stanford University, Shabir Bhatia joined Apple, where he met his colleague Jack Smith, Hotmail was not the first entrepreneurial project of the two men, but Hotmail was undoubtedly the most successful.

Shabbir Bhatia was a little entangled when she received Melissa's call, Hotmail has been in some trouble recently, the company has more than 700,000 user registrations, server maintenance costs are rising rapidly, and hotmail has no good profit model.

Don't say that Hotmail doesn't have a good profit model, these Internet companies in Silicon Valley, one counts as one, almost no good way to make a profit, and now it's nothing more than living on some meager advertising fees and venture capital money, but not to mention, most of them are alive and well, as long as you can tell stories, capital will keep coming over, and this game of drumming and passing flowers still has to be played.

Therefore, Shabbir Bhatia is also looking forward to having investors take the initiative to come to the door, and maybe a way to break the situation will be found.

Now Hotmail relies on only some advertising space on the mail page, which affects the user's experience in some way, but is a last resort.

DFJ used his right of first refusal to prevent Hotmail from receiving funding from other VCs, and they are well-connected. At the same time, they expect to get more shares at a lower valuation, which is really a bad capital that eats people and does not spit out bones.

To add to Shabbir Bhatia's anger, DFJ has also invested in rocketmail, a company that has recently started a business that is exactly the same as Hotmail. Shabbir Bhatia is not afraid of competition, but De Fengjie's approach makes him a little angry, and he wants to kick De Fengjie out of the damn vampires, and if he can't do it, then selling Hotmail as a whole can also be considered.

Melissa's call made him a little excited, so he paged Jack Smith and the two of them had to discuss it in advance.

"Jack, there's a company that wants to buy our hotmail? What do you mean?"

"What do you mean?"

"We really don't have the idea of selling the company for the time being, but if the price is high, it's not impossible to negotiate, I can only say, let's act when the opportunity arises. ”

"Let's talk about it, the financial pressure has been a bit big recently, and Defengjie is too inauthentic. Jack Smith was also resentful of De Fongje's approach.

"That's just because we're so weak, that they can handle us without any scruples. "Let's talk about it, maybe things will turn around."

The next afternoon, in a café in Silicon Valley, Shabir Bhatia and Jack Smith met Melissa and her party as they had made an appointment. Of course, they also saw several cars and a team of bodyguards outside the café. It's not easy to get from Los Angeles, it's a 5-hour drive, and it seems that it is necessary to order a private jet in a hurry.

"Hello, Mr. Shabbir Bhatia, I'm Cang Yaozu, and it's a pleasure to meet you. ”

"Hello, Cang, right? or Chang, you're from Huaxia? I'm Indian. ”

"Well, I know, I'm from Huaxia. This is Mr. Jack Smith, hello!"

"Hello, Mr. Cang, thank you for meeting with us. Jack Smith shook hands with Cang Yaozu, he was a little surprised by Cang Yaozu's youth, so that a young Chinese would have the money to buy a Hotmail company?

"Then let's get down to business, I want to buy Hotmail, do you agree?"

"Ah, Mr. Cang, we have no plans to sell Hotmail, we are preparing to continue to improve our advertising system, which will bring us hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Jack Smith mentions the sizable income of the prospect.

"Hehe, hundreds of thousands is impossible, at most tens of thousands, these can't hide from me. The advertising revenue of your Hotmail website is still very small, and the growth should be very slow, except for this, you should have no other monetization channels, the profit model is a big problem, and the rapid increase in operation and maintenance costs will drag you down, I think, you are now facing a very serious situation so far, and the second round of funds given to you by DFJ is almost used. I don't want to see a good idea go to waste because of a lack of funding. ”

"Mr. Cang, you also think that our idea is very good, in addition, the email system we developed is also very easy to use, the function is very perfect, the current problem is just that the number of servers is too small. We can access the funding we need to grow through technology licensing. Shabbir Bhatia was very happy, his eyes were shining, it seemed that this Chinese man was very optimistic about hotmail.

"Hehe, the more technology licenses, the more competitors you have, your advantage will be smaller, in fact, now many companies are developing such mail systems, your user growth is very fast, but your strength is too weak, hotmail is now like a castle on the beach, a wave of waves hit, it is easy to have nothing, yes, everything. ”

"No way, we already have 700,000 users now, and when the email system they developed comes out, we will have even more users. ”

"Okay, let me put it another way, I'm going to invest $100 million in the email business, I will promise that the email will be free forever, I won't put any ads in the email interface, I give each user 1G of mailbox space, I own an instant messaging software company, which has recently advertised a lot in Citigroup, and the number of its users is now 3 million, and the target of this round of promotion is 30 million users. The reason I'm telling you this is because I'm going to be introducing a one-click email login feature on ICQ. After saying that, Cang Yaozu watched with amusement as Shabir Bhatia and Jack Smith's faces slowly turned white.

"Mr. Cang, you convinced me, I think it's a good choice for hotmail to sell you, I believe you can run him well. Now, I want to know your bid?"

"First of all, I want to make sure, do you two want to stay in hotmail?"

Shabbir Bhatia and Jack Smith discussed for a while before replying: "Mr. Cang, I am a hardware engineer, my specialty is chip design, I want to go back to the industry, Jack is very good at both hardware and software, he wants to stay in hotmail." ”

"No problem, I offered Hotmail $80 million and I don't accept counteroffers. Jack will keep 5% of the Hotmail shares, but I'll inject $50 million later, Jack, your shares will be diluted proportionately. As for Shabbir, I saw that Melissa gave me the information that said that your previous company was designing RISC chips, and it just so happens that I want to acquire several semiconductor companies, so you can continue to work for me, I am sure you will like it. ”

"Okay, Mr. Cang, do you still want to buy a company in the semiconductor field? I know there's a Kingston company, they're doing memory and some foundry business, and it's founded by you Chinese, right over there in Fountain Valley, California. ”

"This, unfortunately, I also like this company, but I can't afford it. Kingston is too expensive, and I have also investigated the situation of Du Jichuan and David Sun, and they seem to have negotiated with Sonmasoshi of SoftBank, and the investment price of SoftBank exceeded $1 billion. The market value of the company I want to acquire cannot exceed 500 million, and I will not consider companies with too high market capitalization. ”

"Oh, no problem. I have a friend who is also of Indian origin, his name is Sanjay Tra, and Sandisk, which he founded with two friends, went public last year, and now the semiconductor industry is in a downturn again, and their stock price is very low, and the market value of this company is more than 200 million points, I can contact him. Coincidentally, he's also on the Silicon Valley side. "Shabbir Bhatia seems to want to get a good position in Cang Yaozu's golden-thighed semiconductor empire, and he is very active.

Shengdi, that is, the company that later changed its name to SanDisk, Cang Yaozu of course knows, Shengdi was founded in 1988 by Dr. LeHarari, an international authority in the field of non-volatile storage technology, and was successfully listed on the NASDAQ last year, but it coincided with the downturn of the semiconductor industry, and the application market of flash memory did not improve at all, and the company's market value was not highSanDisk will be acquired by Western Digital in 2015 for $19 billion.