Frank glanced at his watch. There were fifteen minutes left until 12:00 PM Eastern Time.
"Prepare a breaking news graphic," Frank ordered. "White text on a black background, keeping the same visual style as the previous teaser posters. It should say only one thing: 100 million clicks in two hours of launch. At exactly 12:00 PM, place it in the top headline position on the go.com homepage."
The technical staff quickly typed the words into the layout software.
12:00 PM.
Richard finished his sandwich and habitually refreshed the go.com homepage.
He wanted to check the afternoon financial news.
At the top of the page, a visually striking banner had replaced the original GG Mail.
100 million clicks in two hours of launch.
Richard froze.
One hundred million clicks.
In 1996, this was a number that could strike fear into any traditional media outlet.
It meant that in the past two hours, a significant portion of the American online population had left their footprints on this website.
This breaking news flash was not only posted on the homepage but also simultaneously pushed to the news feeds of major financial terminals.
On the Nasdaq Trading Floor, traders stared at the news flashing across their Bloomberg Terminals. After a moment's stunned silence, the room erupted in a deafening roar.
"Buy SVOL! Market order!"
"Twenty thousand shares! Twenty-seven dollars!"
The stock chart shot upward, forming a steep, vertical line.
In this instant, the bubble of the internet economy and its true value converged. Capital didn't need to understand the underlying code; it only needed to grasp the logic of traffic monetization. A platform with millions of highly engaged users, controlling the primary gateway to the Internet and offering a full suite of services from information to communication, possessed commercial value far exceeding Netscape's software license model.
Donald stood by his office's floor-to-ceiling window, gazing at the distant city skyline.
Sequoia's internal valuation model would have to be revised again.
The target market cap they had planned to reach by year-end was now achievable in a single day. Executive Director Nakayama's strategy in Tokyo, with its brutal efficiency in harvesting traffic, had just taught Wall Street a vivid lesson in Internet business.
Don't sell software; sell services. Don't sell products; sell an ecosystem.
In the Redwood City office, Frank placed an international call to Tokyo.
"Boss, the numbers are in." Frank cradled the phone between his shoulder and ear, flipping through reports with both hands. "We hit one hundred million in two hours. The stock price has already surged past 28 dollars. Those Wall Street guys are treating our shares like a money-printing machine."
The rustle of paper came from the other end of the line.
"Did the servers hold up?" Takuya Nakayama asked.
"Rock solid. The cross-platform calls for the Passport System are running smoothly, and the daily active user numbers for the BBS and ICQ have been dragged up significantly. The preliminary conversion rate for paid email services has hit 4%. Those Wall Street fund managers are really buying into the anti-theft backup service."
"Send the flash report to all the major newspapers and TV stations," Takuya Nakayama instructed. "Tell the PR Department not to use too much flowery language. Just lay the raw data in front of them. Let the people still running traditional TV networks and print media see what a new business model looks like."
"Got it," Frank replied.
"This is only the first step." Takuya Nakayama paused. "The upcoming special edition for the Atlanta Olympics will be the real test of the portal's content integration capabilities. Get the editorial team moving. We need to turn this traffic into user habits."
Hanging up the phone, Frank tossed the reports onto his desk.
He walked into the open-plan office and clapped his hands.
"Great job, everyone. But don't start popping champagne just yet." Frank looked at his exhausted but exhilarated team. "Raise the load-balancing threshold by another twenty percent. The evening traffic peak hasn't even hit."
The era of go.com had officially begun.
At exactly 4:00 PM New York time, the closing bell rang out across the Nasdaq Trading Floor.
The noise in the hall didn't subside.
Traders loosened their ties, their eyes glued to the electronic displays overhead.
Next to the SVOL ticker, the green numbers finally settled at $28.80.
The order book data was stark.
The buy queue was stacked high—hundreds of thousands of limit orders hung in the air, unable to find a single seller willing to take the bait.
The market's valuation expectations for Silicon Valley Online had long since escaped the reach of the closing price.
In a Sequoia Capital conference room, Donald Valentine tossed a newly delivered trading brief onto the table.
"No one's selling," Donald said, leaning back in his chair. "The floating shares are being held tight."
The next two days were the weekend market closure.
Undeniably, these two days would be a long, agonizing wait for Wall Street's fund managers.
No one could predict what number would need to be typed into the buy orders on the trading terminals at 9:30 AM Monday morning to pry even a few shares from the reluctant institutional sellers.
While Wall Street fretted over the scarcity of shares, ordinary internet users couldn't care less about the capital market's numbers game.
For them, go.com was an inexhaustible treasure trove.
In a dorm room at UC Berkeley, Eric ordered a pizza and dragged his mouse as he ate. He had already been sitting at his computer for four hours.
The website's architecture was designed for maximum addictiveness. After reading the top tech news, the right sidebar would precisely push a few pieces of gossip about Silicon Valley startups. Following the links, the comment section was embedded directly at the bottom of the articles.
Netizens had found a new outlet for their emotions. Beneath a short post about a vulnerability in Microsoft's IE Browser, a thread grew three hundred stories high within half an hour. Netscape supporters and Microsoft devotees traded insults, "greeting" each other's families in the comments.
The same fervor that had characterized the rise of the Silicon Valley Online BBS years earlier was perfectly replicated on this new portal—and even intensified, thanks to the lower barrier to entry.
Richard skipped golf this weekend.
He sat in his home study, dialing into the internet on his old Pentium PC.
He checked the Chicago Bulls' playoff stats in the sports section, then casually mocked the opposing team's defensive strategy on the message board below.
Afterward, he switched back to the homepage and entered the finance section to read the weekend analysis report on Nasdaq.
The experience of completing all information gathering and social interaction on a single page kept users glued to their screens.
Redwood City, Silicon Valley Online Headquarters.
The operations center remained brightly lit even on the weekend.
Frank, holding a paper cup of coffee, stood before the monitoring screen.
The Technical Director brought up a set of the latest statistical charts.
"The average number of clicks per IP is out," the Technical Director said, pointing to a line graph on the screen. "The average visit depth per unique IP has reached 14 pages. The time spent on the site far exceeds our expectations."
This was the most compelling answer Silicon Valley Online had presented to the market: user stickiness.
Please Support me by becoming my Patreon member and get 30+ chapters.
[email protected]/Ajal69
change @ with a
Thank You to Those who joined my Patreon