Chapter 130: Co-presidents (part one)
While the repercussions behind Su Can's incident at Nanjing University were still stirring, with the situation remaining unclear, Dustin arrived in Shanghai on Monday. For the American boy, this was his second trip to China within a year.
The first had been for the founding of Facebook Chinese, when he had represented United States Facebook at its launch ceremony. Seeing Facebook Chinese then, like a fledgling waiting to take flight, had naturally reminded Dustin of that apartment with a swimming pool in Palo Alto.
Back then, there had been only a few people, a few computers, several beautiful female engineering students from Stanford and Harvard, a Crown CD stereo picked up at a flea market for playing heavy metal, and Heineken chilling in a refrigerator also hauled back from a secondhand market. They had worked as earnestly as they played, plunging into the pool behind the house from on high and nearly crushing Yan Bai in the process.
Like all freedom-loving young people, they had wanted to "do something you enjoy, with freedom, and drink a few beers in the summer heat," playing rock music and partying. It had all looked very cool. Occasionally, some of them would imagine their futures: whether to work at a firm after finishing their Facebook assignments, inherit the family business, or head to a big city like New York and pursue a career that would bring them into the middle class.
But no one had known that the people in that apartment, who looked as if they were merely dabbling, would become the original core team of United States Facebook. They would receive sixteen million dollars from The Washington Post in one go, instantly becoming a company valued at three hundred million dollars. Their ability to attract money was