Chapter One: Rejection Settled

delivery. Now its servers were offline, its team was gone, and its account held twelve yuan and forty cents. Including his personal guarantees, he owed 8.6 million. SwiftLink had been hiring an ordinary product manager. The interviewer had asked whether a former founder could obey a reporting structure. Jiming said yes. Then the man asked why his company failed. “I misjudged the timing of expansion,” Jiming had replied. “The responsibility was mine, not my team's.” The interviewer nodded as if admiring merchandise he had already decided not to buy. A debt collector's message pushed the rejection notification off his screen. Jiming pressed his forehead to the cold desk and, for the first time, seriously calculated how many seconds it would take to