During the two days that Li Mu went to Los Angeles, several venture capital firms led by Sequoia could no longer hold back.
They had been amazed by the rising data of Makino Technology. As a result, Li Mu went to Hollywood and attended a charity dinner of a well-known director, and he immediately became the focus of attention in the entire United States.
Li Mu became the focus of society, and the number of users of YY and Paradise Town would continue to soar. The growth of the number of users would inevitably drive the flow of the entire platform to increase.
For the current Makino Technology, the number of users and flow were the key to affecting the valuation.
If Makino Technology was allowed to brainwash the world's netizens and turn them all into YY users, then Makino Technology might even become the Internet company with the highest valuation in the world.
The most important reason why the industry gave such a high valuation to Makino Technology and YY was that YY's user stickiness was too high, and the user's payment ratio was also frighteningly high.
Such a product, in this era, was almost invincible. Even if other products could achieve the user scale of YY, they would never be able to achieve the paid flow of YY. MSN and ICQ had never figured out the way in value-added services. At the peak of the user scale of such a product, the overall flow of such a product could not reach 1% of the current total flow of YY. Li Mu simply had too many ways to make money, and he won because YY users were willing to pay for his complex paid value-added services.
YY was now spreading around the world at an astonishing speed. Many Internet companies and analysts believed that YY was most likely to become the first super software to cover the world's netizens. In this way, it was very likely to stand in the position of the world's number one Internet company. For such a company, venture capital firms had completely lost their previous arrogance. All they thought about was one thing, and that was to win the investment in Makino Technology as soon as possible.
Series C was definitely the last round of financing for Makino Technology. The next step was Li Mu would definitely send it to NASDAQ, so now was the last chance for venture capital firms to get on board.
Sequoia's executives had been hesitant about the final offer. The valuation of 22 billion US dollars had already become a thing of the past. When Li Mu conquered the American audience at Harvard, the valuation of Makino Technology was equivalent to pulling up several limits in a row. Such extremely good news was something that some companies would not encounter in their lifetime.
Just before Sequoia's executives were ready to offer 30 billion US dollars, it happened that Li Mu had just left Hollywood and returned to Silicon Valley. Anne Hathaway, who was in Hollywood, accepted a joint interview with Hollywood's authoritative magazine, the Hollywood Reporter and a Hollywood TV station.
In this interview, most of the questions asked by the media about Anne Hathaway were related to Li Mu.
It could not be helped. The American people were now particularly concerned about the relationship of this little princess. Everyone was looking forward to the moment when she and Li Mu confirmed their relationship. Although Li Mu's Makino Technology represented a victory for Hua Xia's Internet industry in the United States, for the American people, if Li Mu could fall in love with an American girl, it would be a victory for the American people to a certain extent.
The media reporters asked Anne Hathaway a lot of questions related to Li Mu, such as how she met Li Mu, her impression of Li Mu, the relationship between the two, and how the two would develop in the future.
Anne Hathaway did not dare to talk nonsense in front of the media, so she answered every question very carefully. For example, she and Li Mu had just met and were not familiar with each other. As for her impression of Li Mu, she used the word "worship" and described Li Mu as her biggest idol.
Seeing that Anne Hathaway clarified her relationship with Li Mu, the reporter from the Hollywood Reporter could not help but ask her, "Don't you have any plans to further develop with Li Mu?"
Anne Hathaway did not know how to answer this sharp question for a while. After thinking about it, she could only say, "I have no plans in this regard. Besides, we are just ordinary friends who have met twice. As for what will happen in the future, I prefer to let nature take its course."
The reporter asked her, "You've only met twice. Did you exchange contact information?"
"Of course." Anne Hathaway said, "We added each other as YY friends."
Anne Hathaway muddleheadedly did a media broadcast for YY, which increased the popularity of YY by quite a bit.
After part of Anne Hathaway's interview was broadcast on television, it was like the last straw that broke the camel's back. The board of directors of Sequoia could no longer sit still.
The exposure of YY in the entire Western society was continuous and ubiquitous. Under such circumstances, it was impossible to wait for the topic of YY to cool down in the Western world. In this case, the longer they waited, the higher the valuation of Muye Technology would be.
On the second day that Li Mu arrived in Silicon Valley, Ding Zhenglin told him that Sequoia had adjusted its offer again. This time, Sequoia Capital gave Makino Technology a valuation of 30 billion US dollars.
30 billion US dollars!
As long as Li Mu nodded, there would be three billion US dollars in cash immediately. This money was of great significance to Li Mu's future strategic map of the world's Internet.
Li Mu was almost ready to agree, but he suddenly thought of something that he had neglected.
The Yahoo reporter had criticized him at the media conference in Harvard. He had not fulfilled his promise to create an English portal and vigorously develop YY email.
Therefore, Li Mu immediately made two decisions.
First, immediately poach the content teams of Yahoo and other English portals. It was really a lot of money. He would directly give them more than five times the salary to ensure that they would quickly obtain a strong English content operation team. As long as the content team arrived, they could directly open an English version on YY website to meet the needs of the English portal.
Second, immediately shut down YY email's support for Yahoo email.
The first one still needed time to be implemented step by step, but the second one came too quickly.
Li Mu wanted to use forceful means to force email users to pick a side.
YY's email function was indeed very powerful. It was simply irreplaceable for business people. YY's email reminder function alone was extremely convenient. Not to mention that it was embedded with a whole set of email sending and receiving functions similar to Foxmail, as well as YY's exclusive online preview function. In this case, even if YY users did not register for YY email, they would definitely use YY email to send and receive other emails. YY users who used Yahoo email could directly add their own Yahoo email to YY email. This way, they could use Yahoo email on YY and use the entire set of YY email functions.
However, when YY stopped supporting Yahoo email, YY users of Yahoo email could no longer use YY's own email related functions to support their own Yahoo email.
This move was Li Mu's drastic measure against Yahoo. If YY users who used Yahoo email wanted to continue using YY's powerful email function, then they would have to change Yahoo email and choose any other email other than Yahoo.
Therefore, Makino Technology announced to the public: "Due to a technical problem with the internal interface of YY email, it is currently temporarily unable to support Yahoo email. All users, please be informed!"
Makino Technology did not say that he deliberately shut down the support for Yahoo email. Instead, he used the all-purpose excuse of "technical problem." The main reason was that he did not deliberately shut down the support for Yahoo email. He just had to stop it due to technical problems. Moreover, he had no idea when it would be restored. Perhaps it would be restored tomorrow, perhaps it would not be restored next year.
Such an excuse was basically impeccable. This was because even if the whole world knew that Makino Technology did it on purpose, no one could accuse Makino Technology of any wrongdoing.
The email sending and receiving function was a free additional function of YY email. Makino Technology itself was not obligated to provide 100% support for the sending and receiving function. It was completely reasonable and legal to suspend the service for some emails due to technical reasons.
As soon as Makino Technology's announcement was launched, Yahoo immediately experienced the huge influence of Makino Technology.
Currently, about 40% of Yahoo Mail's users were using YY Mail's surrogate sending and receiving function to facilitate all of their Yahoo Mail operations within YY's software environment. Now that YY had stopped supporting Yahoo Mail, these 40% of users were suddenly cut in half.
Yahoo's stock price fell by 7% because of this incident. It was enough to show the proportion of email services in the entire Yahoo system.
YY was a closed ecosystem product of Li Mu. He allowed YY email to support sending and receiving for other email, which was equivalent to opening up a small gap in YY's closed ecosystem. However, for Yahoo email users, they had to immediately give up on Yahoo email for the super strong experience of YY email. They had to register for other email accounts and gradually migrate to other email accounts.
Faced with a product like YY, those who had to make a choice almost all chose YY. As a result, there was a huge loss of Yahoo email users!
A large number of Yahoo email users started migrating to other platforms, and this was just the beginning of Li Mu's attack on Yahoo. Not only email, but everyone was still waiting for Li Mu to fulfill all his promises, which was Yahoo's more precious lifeblood — the portal website.
Makino Technology subsequently issued an open recruitment letter to the public, recruiting content personnel for the website with high salaries from all over the United States. Although it did not explicitly state the purpose of Makino Technology's recruitment of content personnel, everyone knew that Li Mu really wanted to create an English version of YY website. Once the English version of YY was released, coupled with the YY pop-up window, Li Mu could almost monopolize the traffic resources.
Li Mu's approach was applauded by the entire American netizens. This was because everyone had seen the scene of Yahoo's reporter attacking Li Mu, and they also felt that Yahoo's reporter was a little too arrogant. Now, Li Mu's sudden counterattack was especially in line with American values. Now, they only hoped that YY could bring some more impact to Yahoo, so that Yahoo would know the price of being arrogant and arrogant.
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