Last time I mentioned that I nodded and accepted the invitation. The next steps were to go through the offer process and discuss onboarding matters.
At that time in my original company, it was the end of the year, and most projects were wrapping up, along with various team-building activities, so my work was not busy. I took advantage of this time to occasionally visit the new company to familiarize myself with the business and the team.
At that time, the position offered to me was 'Solutions Expert', belonging to the Solutions Department led by Eva. The department was newly established, with about 6 people, and I had a headcount plan for 11 people—although there were only 2 people in the team at that time, and one left after the New Year. I was mainly responsible for major client solutions, overseas cluster setup, and storage product design. Soon, I realized that my knowledge in the blockchain field was severely lacking, so during that time, I frantically made up for it, learning everything from browsers, wallets, and addresses to block explosions and linear releases... I learned it all.
The memory froze on a day in mid-December. Eva called me to meet a client, mainly to let me learn by following along. I arrived at the office in the afternoon—at that time, the company was in IFS, the absolute central business district of Chengdu, with a T0 level office environment.
By the time it was almost 8 PM, Eva said the plan was ready, and we went into the large conference room together. Our side consisted of the boss, Eva, and me, with two people from the client side. Eva projected the screen, opening an Excel file listing several types of device configuration parameters. At that time, I was still not fully familiar with the business, so I restored the situation from that perspective for everyone:
Storage devices with 36 slots, about 26 units;
Graphics card devices, about 4 units (later found out they corresponded to projects like Wind, Winn, Lotus);
10G switches, 2 units;
Distributed storage software, 12 PiB.
In short, this is a cluster with a scale of 10 PiB. What really left me speechless was the subsequent quote: storage devices at 280,000 each, graphics card devices at 300,000 each, distributed storage software at 500,000 per TiB... All together, the total price exceeded 14 million.
Oh my! Because I have been deeply involved in cloud computing and participated in many bids, I have a good understanding of the base price of these devices. Just a second ago, I was thinking: 'Doesn't this quote make the customer feel like they are being 'slaughtered'? Can we still negotiate?'
However, the customer just glanced at it and casually said, 'Mr. W, how about we sign the contract today.'
Fuck.
I must have been stunned for a long time, as if there was a tape recorder in my head playing on repeat: What the hell is going on? A project worth over 10 million, no bidding required, a profit margin of 200% starting, and the customer didn't even bargain... Just like that, it was done?
An unprecedented sense of impact swept over me.
Awesome.
Got it right.
Let's do it! We must do it!
#Filecoin #IPFS