Feeling Our Way Across the River by Touching the Stones

Beijing time, February 7, 1986, the twenty-ninth day of the twelfth lunar month.

There were still two days until New Year's Eve. Companies across the mainland had begun their holiday break, but Li Ye, over in the Lighthouse, was busier than ever.

In just a few days, Jeff had rented an office, hired staff, put together the framework of the venture capital firm, and immediately gotten to work.

Gary had gathered a large amount of investment information on Silicon Valley. They needed to sift through it for worthwhile projects, and as "interns," Li Ye and Wen Leyu naturally had to get their hands on it and gain some practical experience.

Li Ye had thought that, with his Biological Hard Drive, he could easily pan for gold in the sand and find a whole fistful of opportunities that yielded enormous profits from minimal investment.

But after poring over heaps of material for several days, he had not found a single familiar term from his memories. He had even worked little translator Wen Leyu hard enough to give her faint dark circles beneath her eyes.

There were no handy Chinese-English AI translation tools at the time, and many specialized business terms were not even included in dictionaries.

Wen Leyu was also the sort to take things seriously. Whenever she could not pin down a meaning, she would clutch several thick dictionaries and compare them carefully, refusing to stop until there was not the slightest ambiguity left.

Was my memory capacity limited? Or was it survivor bias, and all these projects had fucking failed?

Li Ye helplessly tossed the documents onto the desk and gained a profound understanding of what the "venture" in venture capital truly meant.

Money was not blown in on the wind, but it could certainly be blown away by