Zhou Xi’s words had affected Su Wei. As an imperial princess of Grand Zhou, she’d grown up surrounded by politics. She had a strong grasp of a nation’s bigger direction. So what she said was usually right. Su Wei agreed too, but the biggest problem right now was still manpower. She had no experience building a real business from scratch, let alone managing one.
Running a company wasn’t as simple as finding a few people. If you met diligent, reliable workers, that was fine. But if even a few had bad intentions, and saw you weren’t paying enough attention, corruption would be inevitable. In the worst case, they could even ruin the company.
“We’re still short on money...”
Su Wei let out a sigh and started upgrading the Tianyancha Bug software. In version 1.0, it could only detect software bugs and vulnerabilities. After the upgrade, it would also be able to check for website bugs. Before, Su Wei had wanted to go a step further. She wanted one piece of software that could push a website’s defense and performance to the highest level. But now, she didn’t think that way anymore. Or rather, she’d reached a new understanding.
If she were only a developer, that mindset might’ve been fine. But her goal was to become an entrepreneur. How could a qualified entrepreneur keep burying herself in just one piece of software? After packaging the program, Su Wei sent it straight to the Jiucang Group Tianyancha Bug operations department, with a note attached: “2.0 feature: website bug detection.” After that, she handed the software off to others. She had no plans to keep following it.
The moment they received Su Wei’s software, the staff who had been packing up to get off work immediately gathered in an emergency meeting. After a quick discussion, they began testing her software, then added the new function into the original program and pushed the upgrade.
In fact, Tianyancha Bug had already gone through several updates during this period. They had only added some software bugs Su Wei had previously overlooked, along with a few bug-fix methods. But this overhaul drew the industry’s attention once again. After all, there were far more websites in this world than software programs. Once many software products lost their value, they stopped being updated. Even if bugs remained, the operating companies no longer cared.
Websites were different. A website was a long-term project. It needed maintenance almost every day. This software had limited use for top-tier websites, since those sites already had elite operations teams. Most of the bugs Su Wei’s software could find had already been fixed by them. But for small and mid-sized websites, this software was practically a savior. For just a few thousand or tens of thousands of Zhou yuan, they could identify most of their bugs. On top of that, they could pay another fee to apply for Jiucang Group’s technical support and get guided help fixing those bugs.
The next afternoon, twenty-four hours after Tianyancha Bug updated, the operations team called with good news.
“Chairwoman, 2.0 has been live for twenty-four hours. Our total revenue has reached 170 million Zhou yuan, and it’s still climbing. I’ve already rented several more servers on emergency terms. But we’re severely short on technical support staff. A lot of users have to wait several hours before they can even get in line.”
The caller was Zhao Mingyu, head of the project operations department at the main company. Aside from the board directors, he was already one of the highest-ranking people in headquarters. Even Su Wei was startled by the news. She hadn’t expected to make that much money in a single day. Still, it was definitely a good thing.
“Mm, got it. I’ll handle the staffing issue, so don’t worry about it. Tell the employees to hang in there. This month, their bonuses will be doubled, and their salaries will go up too.”
“Thank you, Chairwoman!”
After hanging up, Su Wei turned to Zhou Xi.
“Lend me some people, will you~”
—
At a certain tech company in Zhaoge, the whole company had only a little over thirty employees. Originally, everyone there earned more than 8,000 Zhou yuan a month, and the executives made even more. But now, every single person sat in the office under a cloud of gloom. No one spoke. Even the boss sat at his desk in silence.
“I can’t take this anymore!”
One executive suddenly slammed his desk and shot to his feet.
“Jiucang Group is wrecking market order. This is monopoly! They’re stuffing themselves with meat and won’t even leave us a sip of soup! I’m going to sue them!”
It turned out that in Zhaoge, many companies survived by helping small and mid-sized businesses test software and websites, then fix bugs. Their commissions ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands each time. These companies had been living pretty well before. After all, not every business could afford to maintain its own engineering department. The service wasn’t cheap, but it was still much cheaper than hiring full-time staff.
But ever since Tianyancha Bug appeared, and with the Grand Zhou federal government promoting it as well, their business had plummeted. Then a few days ago, version 2.0 descended out of nowhere, and they were practically starving. Their company, for example, hadn’t gotten a single job in half a month. If this kept going, they really would starve.
The boss looked at the furious executive and weakly shot back, “Sue who? They’re operating legally and fairly. If you’ve got the ability, then make a software like that yourself.”
“Then what are we supposed to do? We haven’t had business for half a month. We can’t just shut down on the spot and go home to farm, can we?”
“At this point, there’s only one way... surrender.”
“Surrender?”
—
“Chairwoman, Jiucang Group has received merger requests from six companies over the past few days.”
“Merger requests?”
Su Wei froze for a moment, not quite understanding what Zhao Mingyu meant.
“What kind of merger?”
“They’re all operations and maintenance companies from Zhaoge. Ever since our 2.0 update, they haven’t been able to survive anymore. So they want our company to acquire them.”
“I see...”
Su Wei thought for a moment, then said, “Perfect. I’m going to the company this afternoon anyway, to meet the HR director candidate the headhunting firm found for me. As for those people, absorb them into the company first. Sign them under temporary contracts for the Britannia branch. Observe them for a while. If they’re good, keep all of them. If they’re just here to coast and wait to die, kick them out.”
“But... there are two to three hundred people. We don’t need that many.”
“Isn’t Qinge’s side short on people too? And that software for the new project—hasn’t Li Yi been complaining nonstop that he has no one to use? We can split them up.”
“Alright, understood.”
The moment word got out that Jiucang Group was hiring, those tech companies with nowhere left to go all came to surrender one after another. Of course, Jiucang Group wasn’t the only one that knew talent was worth grabbing. Other companies also started scrambling for people. The entire internet industry was shaken once again because of Jiucang Group. It was just that Jiucang Group had been in the spotlight too much lately, so in this round of talent poaching, Jiucang Group absorbed forty percent of them.
