'That was the most miserable fucking day of my life!'
Ludo could barely contain his excitement of finally leaving that cesspool of misery calling itself a bank.
He truly believed that had just been one of the top 10, no… top 5 worst experiences of his life.
With the loan secured and the money already sent to the business account he'd just set up, Ludo transferred the rest of his savings to it as well, bringing the total up to $200,000.
Normally he'd be smiling from ear to ear seeing such a pretty figure in his bank, but the excitement was all gone after what he'd just been through to get it.
Ludo had already rented out a small first floor office space for him to work out of and store the hardware for the AI the previous night, right before he went on a caffeinated spree of procuring all the necessary documents for the loan.
It wasn't like he was completely broke, so he could afford to speed things up by renting a place before heading out to get the loan.
Still, it did leave quite a bad taste in his mouth, since the realtor demanded the whole term of the lease up front, since Ludo chose the minimum period of 1 year.
Seeing $20,000 disappear from his account just like that…
Thankfully, it being on the first floor actually made it one of the cheaper options for him in Metro city, since most people wanted a high floor office to look down at the city below.
Ludo was the same, but he chose money over aesthetics in this particular case.
But now that he had everything secured, he hopped back in his truck and headed over to his next destination, the computer store.
Normally you'd have to custom order special equipment directly from the supplier to obtain the kind of quality, powerful hardware Ludo required for the Virtual AI Assistant, but this was Metro City — the holy land of entrepreneurship and tech startups.
There were so many businesses looking to buy these high end industrial grade computers that specialised stores had set up shop just to accommodate them.
This was quite handy for Ludo, as it saved him what would have been weeks of time of waiting for a supplier to build and deliver it to him.
When he arrived, he naturally garnered a few looks from all the men and women in suits, while he casually strolled around in his sweaty shirt and sweatpants.
Ludo couldn't give a rat's ass about their stares, though, and made his way over to the section where the low to mid-end servers were located.
Here, the price points ranged from anywhere between $100k for the cheapest server and up to $400k for the most expensive, but even that was only a top-of-the-line midrange server.
The high-end range and even higher-spec servers went for millions…
'I have 200k left to my name, but I can't spend every penny of that on the server alone. I need to store some away for bills, maintenance, but most importantly marketing. Let's say I set aside $25k for the bills and everything, and another $25k for the marketing.'
Ludo had to be rational with his spending. If he just spent everything here all in one go, then he may as well just throw everything in the trash and declare bankruptcy.
Marketing was the make or break for companies like his. It didn't matter how revolutionary his virtual AI assistant was; if he had nowhere and nobody to advertise it to, it was useless.
Especially in a market as competitive as today's internet.
That was the case, at least unless the AI was so powerful that he could bypass any marketing entirely...
Ideally, he'd like a six figure marketing budget but that was just wishful thinking with his current finances.
In the end, Ludo settled on a server with a price tag of $147,000, marketed as the cheapest mid-range server on sale.
He didn't want to end up with a low-range one if he could help it, since that would significantly impact the performance of the AI, and if he was unlucky, it might not even be enough computing power for it to develop dumbed-down versions of itself.
His safest bet was this cheapest mid-range option.
It boasted 1TB of RAM optimised for server usage, 100TB of dedicated, solid state storage, dual CPUs, with each cpu alone apparently going for $40k, which is what soaked up most of the budget for the server.
If it wasn't for him already seeing what kind of specs the higher-end servers had, Ludo would be quite satisfied with his purchase.
He also made sure to pay $500 extra for immediate delivery, where the store worker instructed him that they'd load it up right now into a custom van they had built specifically for transporting expensive server equipment like this, and all he had to do was hop in his truck and instruct the delivery driver to follow him back to the office he'd rented.
The office was located nearby, only a short 15 minute drive away from the store.
Ironically, when asked by the delivery driver where he should park to offload the expensive server, Ludo had to embarrassingly ask him to wait a few minutes while he scouted the place out himself, as it was also his first time seeing the place in person…
He managed to sort things out relatively quickly though, with the sacrifice of being on the floor with no view actually being helpful in this scenario, as wheeling in the heavy equipment didn't require the use of specialised elevators or the such, and it was a quick install job as the infrastructure for the equipment was already installed into the building itself.
Being the technology centre of the country, it was standard for all buildings to come preinstalled with all the necessary requirements for such heavy load equipment.
The whole job only took an hour overall, which was much better than some of the installation jobs he had to oversee at his previous job…
Those sometimes took up the whole day and forced him into overtime.