Chapter 291: Lu Nan's Proposal

"Bang! Bang!"

Just as he was lost in thought, a knock suddenly came from outside the door.

The sound pulled Sun Cheng back from his deep thinking. He hurriedly closed the video that was looping on the laptop in front of him, picked up his water glass to moisten his throat, and then replied, "Come in..."

The current office space of 【Cybertron Technology Company】 was left behind by a web game company. Because the decoration and such were quite complete, it could be used directly without much adjustment after taking it over, and the space was not too small, so Sun Cheng had rented it.

The decoration style of the original web game company leaned towards a younger aesthetic, and the management offices were not specifically soundproofed, so even though his voice was not loud, the person waiting outside clearly heard him and immediately pushed the door open and walked in.

"Brother Sun..."

Following the familiar voice, Sun Cheng looked up and saw that the person appearing at the door of his office was none other than Lu Nan.

Unlike the casual casual shirt he wore yesterday, Lu Nan had clearly prepared carefully before appearing at 【Cybertron Technology Company】 today.

In terms of attire, he had taken off the casual shirt and changed into a formal suit. Although it looked more like the cheap stuff from a small shop for two or three hundred a set, Sun Cheng had to admit that even if it was just the lowest-grade formal wear, when worn on this young man of the same age as himself, it immediately shed some of his greenness and added a touch of maturity that was not yet conspicuous.

"Lu Nan, you've come?"

Seeing that the visitor was Lu Nan, Sun Cheng couldn't help but stand up with a smile to welcome him.

Young as he was, he had always admitted that if it weren't for the encounter he had experienced, his own achievements would definitely not compare to Lu Nan's.

Lu Nan was able to stand out in Nanjing University of Technology, the country's top science and engineering institution where "intellectual monsters" gathered. Although his own startup had failed, Sun Cheng knew very well that the reason he had once had the idea of starting a business and put it into action was because he had been influenced by Lu Nan.

This young man of the same age as him showed excellent creativity and divergent thinking. Lu Nan, in particular, had quite a few insights in the field of AI. If he could really get support and delve deeper, perhaps he could add a significant stroke to his grand blueprint.

Thinking of this, the smile on his face grew wider. He reached out to invite him to sit down, preparing to go and brew a cup of tea for him personally.

Lu Nan was clearly in no mood to drink tea. After entering his office and closing the door behind him, he stopped Sun Cheng, who was preparing to pour him tea, "Brother Sun, no need for tea. You were busy yesterday afternoon, and I just happened to have some bold ideas about the company's products that I hadn't finished saying. After going back, I spent some time organizing my personal thoughts, and I brought them today for you to look over!"

After saying this, he directly handed the document bag he had brought to Sun Cheng.

"Ideas..."

Sun Cheng, who was about to go make tea, was stunned. He looked at Lu Nan, whose face was filled with anticipation, and after pondering it slightly, he immediately understood.

"Almost forgot, because I had to pick up Ye Qi yesterday, I haven't talked to Lu Nan about his compensation yet..."

Realizing that this alumnus of his would likely never be willing to start from the very bottom like Yang Lin and the others who had joined earlier, Sun Cheng chuckled.

However, he also understood that Lu Nan was indeed different from Yang Lin and the others. From beginning to end, Sun Cheng had never thought of putting him at the very bottom; it would be too much of a waste.

As for his so-called 'ideas', Sun Cheng was indeed interested.

Nodding, he took the document bag Lu Nan handed over. Weighing it slightly in his hand, he was a bit moved.

With this thickness and weight, the other party's contribution was likely far more than just a few simple 'ideas'.

He immediately said to him with a serious expression: "You sit for a while first, I'll take a look at the materials first. If you're thirsty, there are green tea, black tea, and instant coffee in the cabinet, help yourself..."

"Alright, Brother Sun, you take a look first!"

"Mm!"

After responding, Sun Cheng took the documents and returned to his desk to sit down. After taking the documents out of the bag, he first flipped through them roughly; there were probably nearly twenty pages in total.

Looking at the first page, he saw a large title that couldn't help but catch his eye—【Feasibility Plan for New Cloud Storage Device】.

This was no mere 'few ideas'; it was a detailed project proposal.

After realizing this, Sun Cheng completely put away the last bit of skepticism he had left and began to read carefully.

This reading took a full hour. By the time he flipped to the last page of the proposal for the second time, Sun Cheng's brows were already deeply furrowed.

This was not to say that Lu Nan's proposal was poorly written; on the contrary, his ideas were not only very interesting but also highly feasible.

Lu Nan had clearly put a lot of effort into researching Sun Cheng, or rather, the products and operational thinking of 【Cybertron Technology Company】.

The only product 【Cybertron Technology Company】 had launched so far was 【Cybertron Cloud Drive】.

Although the Pure Version XP system had a greater influence now, anyone with a bit of brains knew that this thing was actually a double-edged sword, something that should be kept hidden if possible.

Microsoft was not called the 'Tsar of the Internet' for nothing. Over the past twenty years, it had wielded a weapon called 'copyright' and cut down countless opponents. It was truly not something an ordinary person could provoke, even if what Sun Cheng was touching was the XP system they had long looked down upon and abandoned.

The cloud drive was Cybertron's flagship product. However, although he still held a few good cards in his hand, Lu Nan knew very well that as of 2016, the cloud drive/network drive had long become an outdated concept. Not only did investors look down on it, but even consumers were hard to win over.

Sun Cheng had actually felt this point too.

He had spared no effort to expose the relationship between Cybertron Technology and the 'Pure Version XP' system to run an advertisement.

Later, Wang Lu even took two million in promotional funds from him to run promotions everywhere, but to this day, their number of registered users had just broken one million, and there were only a little over one hundred thousand users who had used it for more than three hours and uploaded files to the terminal. If it weren't for the fact that Cybertron Cloud Drive hadn't opened the recharge option yet, Sun Cheng really suspected they might face the embarrassing scene of 'zero recharges'.

From this, it could be seen that the golden age of network drives had passed.

Last time, in order to persuade Lu Nan to join his company, he had frankly admitted to Lu Nan that although his company was launching a cloud drive, it was not a pure cloud storage company, because they also had their own hardware products, namely mobile hard drives with larger memory and lower prices.

Clearly, Lu Nan had spent a lot of thought on researching how to perfectly integrate the two products—the cloud drive (software) and the mobile hard drive (hardware)—which had completely different positioning.

In the plan, he proposed a very bold new product: designing a mobile hard drive that possessed a massive memory of no less than 10T, while simultaneously allowing it to have the ability to automatically link to the Cybertron Technology cloud like a mobile device.

Lu Nan seemed to have been influenced by Amazon's Intelligent Speaker Echo; he also proposed writing a voice-controlled software for it, playing heavily on the concept of intelligent voice control.

Sun Cheng had to admit that these ideas of Lu Nan's, taken separately, had nothing particularly brilliant about them. 10T mobile hard drives were expensive, but they could already be bought on the market; mobile storage devices that could connect directly to the internet were rare but not non-existent; and various voice-controlled devices had spread rapidly across the world after Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo became popular.

Especially the last one, voice control; it is no exaggeration to say that in China alone, there were no fewer than hundreds of companies and products touting voice control; it was almost becoming a dime a dozen.

Yet, it was precisely these three unremarkable concepts that, when combined, made Sun Cheng's eyes light up just by thinking about it.

It was absolutely bursting with trendiness; it was very likely to become a phenomenal hot-selling product just like the Echo.

Of course, in Sun Cheng's view, Lu Nan's ideas were still very crude, and there were many problems that needed to be solved in terms of specific implementation.

But for him, holding a portion of Cybertron black technology, these were not big problems.

Lu Nan's plan seemed to have opened a window for him; for a moment, all kinds of whimsical ideas popped up in Sun Cheng's mind.

And the reason he was frowning was that if they really went ahead with this, then the promotional plan Sun Cheng had designed with Wang Lu, as well as the subsequent product promotion plans, would all have to be overturned and redone.

Calculating the time, the difficulty of completing all this within a month was really not small.

After considering it seriously for a while, he soon had a plan in mind.

He raised his head, about to exchange views and opinions with Lu Nan, who had been waiting in his office for a long time and was now looking somewhat restless for fear that his proposal might not be appreciated.

Just at this moment, the phone on Sun Cheng's desk rang.

He had no choice but to press the speakerphone button first and asked, "It's me, what's the situation?"

The next moment, Wang Lu's voice came through from the other side of the phone, his tone extremely agitated.

"General Manager Sun, you would never guess who just contacted me! Just a moment ago, Panda Communications Group somehow got a hold of my private number; they just reached out to me, saying that President Chen Li of Panda Security Protection Company has already booked a flight to Nandu, and he hopes to meet with you to discuss a partnership in detail!"

"Panda Communications Group?!"

Sun Cheng's expression turned solemn all of a sudden.

PS:

I messed up the chapter number in the previous section, and since I didn't finish before twelve o'clock, I'll just give you nine hundred free words.