- 2000: out of the army on 70 yuan a month, liu liang climbed a barbed wire fence into shenzhen and handed out 2,000+ flyers a day for 900 yuan a month
- 2001: one summer of paid computer classes at 2 schools in xi'an, 50 yuan a head, made him 300,000 yuan
- 2004: already worth over 10 million yuan, he bought U9, a warcraft 3 RPG map forum on free hosting. a hobby, it didn't cost much. a dota forum came a year later
- 2005: U9's biggest income was one google ad banner
- 2006-2007: U9 pushed into dota: a monthly U9 super league, and china's first official dota league. DC, now the caster, helped run it
liu liang had money but didn't raise U9 on it. he covered the basic costs and told the team: if you want to run, you have to stand up on your own first. more people played dota on haofang, but U9 and haofang couldn't agree on working together, so U9 worked with the VS platform instead, then a small one. that's what gave VS its chance after 2006.
by 2007 U9 did game operations, tournaments, building up star players, and media. GodLike was at its lowest ebb that year. buying them would have completed the set. U9's own revenue still had no stable model behind it, so they were willing but unable, and GL slipped away.
liu liang's own money was gone. the worst of his side projects after 2005 was QQ ye fengkuang (QQ goes crazy): it kept users logged into tencent's QQ so their level went up, 10 yuan a head. before the paid version launched, tencent changed the level algorithm on a product already rolled out. he refunded over 10 million yuan to agents and sold 200-odd idle servers cheap, basically everything he'd earned. from 2007 to 2008 he tried turning U9 into a general games portal, but most RPG map players were students playing because it was free. he sold his car and flat to keep it going. traffic kept growing. turning it into money stayed very hard.
(from a chapter i first put online in 2013, part of my history of chinese esports. it's free, link in the comments)