RBCT Chapter 37 Twenty Thousand Angels
Chapter 37 Twenty Thousand Angels
A 20 million yuan angel round! That's an astronomical sum in a college student entrepreneurship competition. The three members of the Jingbei team were so excited that they bowed repeatedly.
Gu Feiyang put down the microphone, his gaze sweeping over the front row and landing precisely on the backstage entrance.
The stage he wanted has been set. With such a masterpiece before him, now it's time for that arrogant, ignorant country bumpkin to come up and embarrass himself.
"Thank you to the Jingbei team for the wonderful presentation."
The host glanced at the cue cards. "Next, please welcome the team from the Department of Physics at Peking University. Project title: A High-Speed Data Compression Algorithm Based on High-Dimensional Topological Manifolds. Speaker: Lin Yu."
A slight commotion arose in the auditorium.
"They're here! The top-ranked team that boasts a 100x compression rate!"
"These past two days, there have been countless press releases online, exaggerating things to the point of being even more fantastical than quantum computing."
"Let's see what they can come up with. Sequoia just invested 20 million in Jingbei. This is going to be interesting."
Lin Yu walked out of the passage.
He was still wearing that black T-shirt and the baggy school uniform with the zipper undone. He wasn't wearing a suit, and he wasn't carrying a speech.
Wang Lei followed behind, clutching his laptop, head down, avoiding looking at the audience. Xia Zijing walked last, her expression as indifferent as if she were just getting food at the cafeteria.
The three of them walked to the front of the stage.
Wang Lei connected his laptop to the projector via data cable. The large screen flickered and switched to Lin Yu's team's presentation interface.
The entire room fell silent.
There were no elaborate PowerPoint presentations or dazzling promotional videos.
A dark command-line window hung alone in the center of a ten-meter-wide screen. It contained only a few lines of dry code paths.
There isn't even a company logo.
The silence lasted for five seconds, then a burst of laughter erupted from the audience.
"That's it? This is a groundbreaking product valued at over 100 million?"
"This must be the final assignment for my first-year C programming course!"
"I spent 500 yuan to find an outsourcing company on Taobao, and their interface is much nicer than this."
On the judging panel, a bald engineering professor frowned and immediately picked up the microphone to launch an attack.
"Lin Yu, this is a national business entrepreneurship competition."
The bald professor said sternly, "I've read your preliminary review report. It's full of pure physics theories like high-dimensional manifolds and Hamiltonians. Now that we're in the finals, you can't even produce a complete commercial demo?"
Another judge immediately chimed in: "Technology is meant to serve the market. How can this black box be integrated into the existing streaming media ecosystem? Who would buy a half-finished product that doesn't even have a graphical interface?"
Faced with a flood of doubts and ridicule, Wang Lei stood in front of the computer, his face flushed with anxiety, wanting to explain that it was because there wasn't enough time.
Lin Yu raised his hand and stopped Wang Lei.
He leaned on the podium with one hand, his gaze sweeping across the judges' panel.
"Graphical interfaces are just a fig leaf for laymen to watch the show."
Lin Yu's voice resounded throughout the venue through the loudspeaker; it was calm, yet possessed an extremely strong penetrating power.
"What I'm selling is the engine core. If you think it's ugly, you can buy it and spend five hundred dollars to put a shell on it yourself."
The entire audience erupted in uproar.
That's incredibly arrogant! How dare they speak like that to judges and investors who hold the power of life and death over them!
Gu Feiyang looked at Lin Yu on the stage, a hint of mockery flashing in his eyes.
Go crazy, the crazier you are, the faster you'll die.
Gu Feiyang stretched out his finger and tapped the microphone twice.
"Lin Yu, capital doesn't believe in arrogance, it only believes in logic," Gu Feiyang said, his voice gentle yet deadly.
Gu Feiyang's voice echoed in the auditorium, carrying the composure of someone in a superior's gaze upon someone in a subordinate's.
"I've read your technical white paper. You claim that your algorithm can achieve a hundredfold lossless compression."
Gu Feiyang leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. "But this violates the fundamental principles of Shannon's information theory. No matter how beautiful your mathematical model is, the physical limits are insurmountable. Moreover, your team doesn't even have a single person who understands market operations."
He turned to look at the investors and media below the stage and made a helpless gesture.
"Sequoia Capital has always encouraged innovation among young people. But we do not encourage academic fraud, much less use unrealistic fantasies to swindle investors' funds. Such behavior is not only unfair to other teams that work diligently, but also damages the entire venture capital environment."
Every word is piercing to the heart.
Gu Feiyang didn't utter a single dirty word, but directly labeled Lin Yu's team as committing academic fraud and financial fraud.
The audience buzzed with discussion, and reporters from various media outlets were already furiously typing out sensational headlines on their laptops. Gu Feiyu, sitting in the back row, was laughing so hard his shoulders were shaking.
The far right of the judges' panel.
Shen Yue, another investment director at Sequoia Capital, was looking down and flipping through a document.
She wore a sharp burgundy business suit, her long hair styled in an updo, exuding a cool and aloof aura. She was Gu Feiyang's biggest rival within the company, and was here today purely as an observer sent by upper management.
Shen Yue didn't look at the black frame on the big screen; her gaze was fixed on the hardware stress test data table submitted by Lin Yu's team.
"Peak memory utilization is 2.1%... CPU multi-core scheduling latency is less than 1 millisecond..."
Shen Yue frowned, her fingers quickly tracing the data.
As a top venture capitalist who has invested in three unicorn tech companies, she possesses exceptional technical intuition.
If this data is fabricated, then the fabricator is an idiot who doesn't even understand basic common sense, because the data is too good to be true.
But if this data is true...
Shen Yue raised her head and looked at Lin Yu on the podium.
Faced with a barrage of accusations from the crowd, the eighteen-year-old remained completely calm. He neither defended himself nor refuted them; he simply stood there quietly, like a hunter watching his prey slowly walk into a trap.
He was fishing.
The thought suddenly popped into Shen Yue's mind. This freshman deliberately used the ugliest interface, deliberately letting Gu Feiyang say the absolute truth, waiting for a turning point.
"Are you done talking?"
Lin Yu spoke, interrupting the noise from the audience.
He looked directly at Gu Feiyang in the center of the judges' panel. "You just said that capital only believes in logic. I agree with that statement."
Lin Yu turned around and walked to Wang Lei's computer.
"Switch the interface to the external live streaming source," Lin Yu instructed.
Wang Lei's hands flew across the keyboard, his ten fingers creating afterimages.
"Intercept Douyu's main live streaming network. Capture real-time 1080P original video streams from top streamers."
Wang Lei shouted and pressed Enter.
The large screen instantly split in two.
On the left, a live stream of a popular game streamer appeared. The top right corner displayed the raw data: bitrate 8000kbps, frame rate 60, consuming a huge amount of bandwidth.
"Mr. Gu, you just invested 20 million in the Jingbei team."
Lin Yu pointed to the screen on the left, "Their technology can reduce bandwidth by 10%."
Gu Feiyang frowned slightly: "That's right. This is already a leading level in the industry."
"That's too little."