Chen Mo is an ordinary urban delivery rider. Thanks to the notebook he filled over three years of working through all kinds of weather, a “living map of the city,” he unexpectedly earns the admiration of business magnate Zhou Jianguo. With 500,000 yuan in startup capital and a three-month trial project for “instant neighborhood delivery,” Chen Mo is catapulted from the bottom of society to the front lines of entrepreneurship.
There’s no flashy golden finger, just hard-won survival smarts. Chen Mo joins forces with Su Qing, an internet-industry elite forced into “graduation,” and Da Fei, a loyal but directionless fellow rider, to form a grassroots team. From persuading the first braised-food shop to sign up, to expanding under the scrutiny of property managers, from refining every step of the delivery process to answering the questions capital raises about their data, they use the most old-fashioned, painstaking methods to ask a fundamental question amid the giants’ blind spots and the city’s hidden corners: Is human connection the ultimate purpose of technology?
