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This article was written in 2015. The original can be found here.

I studied because I wanted to become a developer and liked computers. While I was studying, I worked at a venture company because I did not have enough tuition money, and then I started thinking I should go to a big company. After working at a big company, I started thinking I should build a startup. And once I thought about starting a startup, I wanted to do it properly in the US rather than in Korea. So I launched into something crazy without hesitation. Even so, it was a process of pursuing my dream, but at the same time my family sacrificed a great deal, and I also disappointed many people who had believed in me.

I had left Facebook, but as I reread the posts I had backed up at the end of the year, I organized them mainly into short entries. Those three years were incredibly hard, but I grew a lot. I developed my own view of the world and found another dream. These notes are unpolished, but I am sharing them in the hope that they can offer at least a little comfort to engineer-founders who may be going through such a hard time that they can relate to my feelings between the lines.

November 2011

November 1 of last year. The day I went to Startup Weekend without thinking and came back deeply shocked and stimulated. I can say without hesitation that my life changed after this day. I immediately bought an iPhone and a MacBook and poured myself into them, which pulled me out of my slump, and I let go of my attachment to success at a big company and gained freedom. When the mind moves toward a dream, the body naturally follows.

Now, exactly one year later, this past year feels more valuable than any other year in the 30 years before it. I realized, I thought, I acted. And now, as I prepare for another beginning, I am looking forward to and excited about what next November 1 will be like. Let us never forget this feeling for the rest of our lives. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

December 2011

Even while working the same amount of time, I love the fact that I am the one leading, judging, and moving things forward. Results that I take responsibility for and create myself. The attempts and effort to bring not just development, but also networks and people, under my control and produce outcomes. One thing alone is never enough. I want to do so many things, and I want to do them all well. At the very least, I do not want to miss them without even trying.

January 2012

Regardless of whether an organization is large or small, one thing I have noticed is this: people who work, work. People who cannot find work, have no work, or cannot do the work end up doing office politics. And they mistake that politics for their actual job. If there are too many of those people, who is going to do the work, and where is the organization headed? A leader has to get their hands dirty directly for the organization to run properly.

February 2012

Meeting with Huang Hee-seung and Yoon Shin-geun, the CEOs of Rocket Internet. The most shocking drinking session in nearly five years. A series of moments like having my head smashed with a hammer. The road ahead is long. My entire way of seeing the world has been shattered and needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

March 2012

Life in the US is going smoothly, but I feel sad that my two-year-old son is not adjusting well. Jet lag has obviously flipped day and night, and he hardly eats, probably because the food does not suit his taste. He is always crying. The hardest part is that the smile has disappeared from my son's face, the son who used to smile so easily. As a father, this is an enormous pain.

April 2012

One good thing about coming to the US is that at least the people I have met here clearly know what they want to do. In Korea, frankly, most people do not even know what they want and what they need to do to be happy. I was at a loss for words watching someone leave a big company saying, "this is not it," and start preparing for the civil service exam. When did civil servant become such an attractive job? It became a refuge after the IMF crisis and when the iron rice bowl gained popularity. If you do not live doing what you want, but are tossed around by standards made by others until you are worn out, what meaning can life have? Will the world's standards be the same in ten years? You have to listen to the inner voice that comes from self-reflection. When you follow that voice, life gains value.

May 2012

The reason it has to be a team rather than an individual is that everyone goes through ups and downs. Even someone with one-person-to-a-hundred ability has a really hard time enduring difficult times alone. Team members have to grab one another by the collar and keep moving forward.

June 2012

When I talk about my experience these days, I find myself talking about Eum more than Samsung. Even though the period was short, it was clearly an impactful time. If someone were wondering whether to go to Eum or Samsung, I would recommend Eum without hesitation.

July 2012

It has now been five months since I came to the US, and I am a total newbie in New York. If I map my son's behavior onto my own life, I was born into a new world and fearlessly crashing into one thing after another. What is funny is that the more I realize I am at rock bottom, the more interesting it gets. Because there is nowhere lower to fall, courage rises in me, a courage that says there is nothing left to fear. Isn't hesitation born when there is something to lose? I know my shortcomings, but what keeps me moving forward is the urgency of a 0:100 chance that if I do not crash into things here, I will not get anything at all. The road is long and there is much to learn. I will never let these days become regrets.

August 2012

I really enjoy working at night since coming to the US, and the feeling is quite different from working at night in Korea. I felt it again when I visited Korea this time: here, when the sun goes down, I can focus and my mind becomes clear, whereas in Korea, when the sun goes down, I feel like I should quickly make plans with someone and go out for a drink. If people in our country just drank less, productivity would go up by 30 percent. The whole social atmosphere encourages drinking, and the time and energy wasted on it are too precious. If we poured that into startups, there would be several global companies.

September 2012

When I connect all the dots in my life - dots I happened to or intentionally drew as I lived - I can find what I do best and what only I can do. The answer is not far away. And every process has meaning. Exceptional competitiveness comes from exceptional experiences, and exceptional experiences are usually dismissed as just messing around.

January 2013

Everyone is talking about the growth and potential of big data, but it seems there are still not many people who are actually collecting data and turning it into meaningful action. I want to make 2013 the year when building recommendation engines enables more developers and companies to create new services they had never been able to easily imagine before. I want to build the core quickly and help them. My heart, which had been a dormant volcano, has finally become an active volcano.

February 2013

Even after narrowing it down from many tech fields to software, then to data mining, then to machine learning, and then to recommendations, some customers want a technical setup, some want easy installation, and some want marketing features. Until now, I have devoted myself to building the algorithm and infrastructure; now I am focusing on productizing it properly and maximizing the value customers can get from it. I will make it impossible for customers not to use this product.

March 2013

The reason I like JavaScript and Ruby is that they have the most open projects. There are so many codebases to study and learn from. Newton's "standing on the shoulders of giants" is best realized today in JavaScript and Ruby. Publishing, thinking together, exchanging code, and having the results contribute to someone's beginning is 100 times more thrilling than just liking Facebook crap posts as a developer, and it is the biggest contribution to humanity I can make right now.

April 2013

I found out that my mother had been secretly stalking me on Facebook all this time. She worried about me from far away but could not even say it out loud. Mom, I love you. And Dad too. :)

May 2013

The more I develop, the more I think about how to code less, more concisely, and more intuitively. A good service should make viewers exclaim "wow," and good code should give the people who read it the confidence to say, "Oh, that was not such a big deal after all."

June 2013

My dream is to become an attractive developer. To make the code I write and the way I act serve as an example, so that I can work with the people I want to work with. That is why I study, make mistakes, and endure with my head down. It is my biggest motivation. The more I do it, the more incomplete I feel, but still, I cannot give it up. A single line of code or a small service we create that did not exist in the world, and that makes people's lives more valuable. More people around me becoming happier.

July 2013

My son thinks I made my own iPhone. He keeps saying he wants to be like his dad. When his mom says that is hard, he answers, "Then you need dad?" I still feel so incomplete and so young, so the way he treats me honestly catches me off guard. How long will I remain the perfect father? When can I reveal myself and live as a friend?

August 2013

Once I tried startup work, I realized how hard it really is, and I even found it irritating that people who claim to have been through everything would casually recommend entrepreneurship to young people. But it was really this: "Only the brave win the beauty." I had misunderstood that saying all this time. It did not mean that if you are brave, you get the beauty immediately. It meant that if you bravely approach, after being turned down many times you learn about women and about yourself, and eventually you will meet the beauty later. But if you confess with the attitude of, "If a man draws his sword, he should at least cut something," and get rejected, you gain nothing. You always need to think about how to build a relationship that genuinely works for both sides and approach it that way, because that is how there is a next step and progress. The same goes for love and business. Success and failure are not opposites. They are a sequence of events in life, and there is no need to overreact to today's success or failure. As long as I keep feeling sure that I am heading in the right direction, everything is just part of the process, not the end.

September 2013

You cannot do anything truly well without loving it. And if you love hacking, you will inevitably end up doing your own project. - Paul Graham

Many people do not try something themselves because they think they do not know enough or that someone else has already done it. But only a few people have truly good ideas, and only a few of those actually try. So if you really do your best at something, you can do quite well. - Aaron Swartz

October 2013

The vibe I get these days when I go around GitHub, Stack Overflow, and developer communities is something like this: "Let's not argue without code. If you have something to say, show it as code in a pull request. That is your skill. The answers are already on Google." In fact, that is also the most efficient way to lower communication costs. People who do not know talk, and people who know show.

November 2013

The feeling I get every morning when I drop my three-year-old son off at daycare full of blue-eyed children and then turn around for a moment to look at him from the window. Sometimes he is lively and laughing, and sometimes he looks intimidated. It is the biggest emotional moment of the day, and I do not quite know how to put it into words. I cannot let my son have a hard time too...

December 2013

Nothing special for the year-end holidays. We are just living by doing what we always do. My wife and I are living day by day through three adventures: living abroad, raising children, and founding a startup. Maybe that is why, even now that we are in our thirties, the "Around Thirty" syndrome has not yet come to us. Our goal has naturally become to live for a few more years as if we were still not in our thirties. As we keep taking on challenges, laughing, crying, talking, and relying on one another, we vaguely sense that our future selves will be a little happier. Together, we're strong.

January 2014

I think reverse engineering experience is a huge plus for a good programmer. You learn how things work and develop the ability to dig all the way down into them. People who only played in user mode can hardly imagine that bugs might exist in the kernel or hardware. The pleasure of gathering small clues, peeling away the veil bit by bit, and making the behavior you want happen can also instill an unbreakable fire in a programmer.

February 2014

Isn't it something you have to keep doing in order to stay humble? People who settle down become arrogant quickly.

When you lose your feel for the world, mistakes happen.

March 2014

Thinking from a slightly different angle, starting a startup means taking on a big challenge, and big challenges are made possible by confidence built on prior successes. If you take on a huge challenge from a position of having nothing and fail, it is that much harder to get back up, so you need a ticket that offsets the risk. In Korea, there are usually three such tickets.

1. Your family was already well off. (So one failure is not fatal.)
2. You graduated from a good school. (So even if you fail once, you will not starve.)
3. You worked at a good company. (So even if you fail once, you can still get hired.)

So my view is that if you come from a wealthy family, have a strong educational background, and a great career, you can take on number 3. Before deciding to stake everything and try, your mind needs to lean more toward "this will definitely work" than "this probably will not." That judgment is shaped by the small and large successes you have had in life before founding a startup. Having gone to a good school or worked at a good company and met good people along the way inevitably has a huge impact on those success experiences.

If you want to start a startup but have nothing to show for yourself, I think it is not a bad idea to first secure one of those three tickets and then try. Of course, if the business is crystal clear, your strengths line up, and the timing is right, then you should go even without a ticket. But being able to make that judgment means you must already have lived a very intense life before founding a startup.

April 2014

Having been born in Korea and lived there for 30 years, the moment I decided to build a service for people around the world, my only competitive edge could be making sexy products. The shiny outer layers like smooth talk and connections flew away into the sky.

May 2014

A developer should be someone who delegates their work to computers. Looking at leaders throughout history, the ones who made good use of the people under them prospered. In today's changed world, just as capitalists create profit by employing tens of thousands of workers, developers need the ability to assign their work to tens of thousands of computers, manage them, and connect that to business.

If we define a rich person as someone who can live off real estate, businesses, and interest without having to work immediately, then a good developer is someone who creates the conditions for computers to do their work in their place even if they are not coding right now. So to judge a good developer, imagine the computers as employees and ask how many employees this developer can manage, whether they can share a vision with them, and whether they can handle managerial crises. Just as a boss who cannot trust their subordinates is always busy micromanaging, a developer who cannot delegate automatable labor to computers will never begin the next layer of problems above that labor. That is where the gap between a developer and a good developer begins.

So I think it is not that there must be slack for someone to become a good developer; rather, a good developer has slack.

June 2014

My mother said she wanted to see pictures of the kids, so I took a few selfies and sent them. Looking at the photos, I suddenly realized how proud I am of my family. Is there any joy greater than being proud of the people you share your life with? I want to be a great source of joy for the people who are with me, and not disappoint those who believe in me.

July 2014

I think people who keep complaining that their capacity is too small are really just greedy. You keep trying to cram things in, so of course the vessel is not enough. If you empty it before filling it, even a small vessel can hold many different things. If you keep thinking about what you do not want to lose, you cannot move at all.

August 2014

Do not misunderstand the advice to do work that makes your heart race. Your heart races when you do something you have not experienced before. Sometimes it races because of the imagination of something you have not tried. When you have been living by the textbook without thinking about life and then look around in frustration and see things that seem exciting, do not get confused. When something makes your heart race, think, "Ah, this is a field where I have no idea how hard it will be," and move forward humbly. Do not use it as an excuse to throw away other work you already have and do not want to do. But a life that does not make your heart race is a life without novelty, and that is the same as standing still. So do not let one quick heartbeat make you special; keep dreaming anew, keep moving anew, and do not neglect moving further away from death.

September 2014

Misaeng, the drama. What a tearjerker. It reminds me of my senior year in college when I was desperate to get a job. The money I had saved before returning to school barely covered my tuition and one semester of my younger brother's tuition. I survived only by doing the tasks my professors gave me.

Then some of the resumes I sent out got through, so I had to go to interviews, but suits were expensive. Not knowing what to do, I heard that the tuition for the second semester of senior year already included the fee for graduation photos, and if I did not take the photos, I could get 250,000 won back. I traded my graduation photo for a suit. I told my parents I could not go because the photo shoot date overlapped with the interview date. With that money, I bought an off-the-rack suit top and bottom, asked my mother for just 50,000 won, bought a shirt at E-Mart, and asked my girlfriend to buy me shoes at Jamsil Underground Shopping Center. The shoes at Jamsil Underground Shopping Center were cheap, but they only went up to size 270 mm. My feet are 295 mm. By the time I had trudged through interviews all winter, my feet had healed.

I wore those shoes for three years at Samsung. I even wore them to my wedding. The heels could be replaced, but later the leather was so worn that I could not wear them anymore, and still I could not throw them away. They felt like proof of my hot-blooded few years.

October 2014

The similarities between developers and lawyers are quite a few.

1. They communicate in their own language.
2. They look at the diff after revising.
3. They can read what the client wants at a glance and present the right solution.
4. If they are good at it, they make a lot of money.

I thought it would be nice to have a tool like git for managing the history of revised documents going back and forth by email. But lawyers paid by the hour probably would not like it if that meant less working time.

November 2014

I am ashamed. It is a night that makes me feel ashamed. The last night in LA. I could not have done anything by myself. Every single moment of the past two years comes back vividly. I am ashamed. It is a night that makes me feel ashamed.

I shut down all the Recom.io servers. The kpop recommendation app and the Korean news recommendation app I had built because I felt inconvenienced while living in the US and used productively for two years can no longer be used either. I was at a loss for how to listen to Korean music, so I installed the Bugs Music iPhone app for the first time in a while and was surprised by how much had changed in the past one or two years. The recommendations had improved a lot too. I first tried music recommendation because Pandora Music and Echo Nest inspired me and I wanted pop music to be heard like that too, but now I feel less regret. If they accepted third-party plugins too, they would beat Spotify hands down. The world keeps getting better through someone's effort without ever stopping. I ask myself whether I was one of those people.

As I wrapped up the company, I backed up the entire mail archive from the past two years. All of those intense records are here. It captures one roller-coaster cycle, from company incorporation and fundraising in the US to the exit. If someone asks, "What is your treasure?" this is the answer I would give. The saying that the process is the reward was true.

December 2014

For the past three years, I worked on Thanksgiving Day. This Thanksgiving, I spent time with my family. It was truly Thanksgiving and giving and holy. A few days ago, I rented a house and, on my own, ran the washer in the garage and washed the car. It might seem trivial, but because these were things I had dreamed of while struggling with my wife, I wiped the car with hot tears.

Looking back on life in LA, there are two emotionally memorable scenes apart from work. One was during the deal, when I sent my family back to Korea first and moved everything out of the house I was living in into storage. At that time, I found many bottles of painkillers all over the small house. My wife had been raising our two young children in a foreign country while I neglected the home, getting through each day with painkillers. She never even told me.

One is a little embarrassing, but my wife and I had no money and could not buy clothes for two years, and that included underwear. The front of my underwear was completely torn apart, and my wife's was torn apart in the back. We laughed it off at the time, saying that all our underwear had finally torn, but when I saw her holding a child like that, I felt like a psychopath, wondering what I was doing with my life. Painkiller bottles and torn underwear. Those intense images.

If it were not for my wife, my family, and the people around us, I would have remained someone living life as if I were always guilty just by living. Starting a company taught me business, but more importantly it taught me how to view life. I promise to work hard and strive so that the people with me can be happier. It is such a grateful Thanksgiving.

January 2015

A programmer born and raised in Korea starting their first startup in the US for a global market can easily look like a crazy idea. I was confident in the technology, but I was struggling with not fully understanding the local situation and lacking sales ability. Strong Ventures offered to invest and gave me wholehearted support. They connected me with a cofounder who was fluent in English and had product management and development experience, and they gave us office space in Los Angeles. Even after the product launch, during the process of acquiring enterprise customers, Strong Ventures leveraged its network to arrange meetings with executives at many business-related companies, which let me focus on promoting the product.

Founding a company is a roller coaster of emotions. Even when the business is going well and feels like it is about to take off, the next day you can be seized by the fear that everything will go wrong. In moments like that, after talking with the two CEOs, Bae Gi-hong and John Nam, who had startup experience, I often found myself reaffirming their trust in me through their shared experience and then, surprisingly, shaking it off and moving on to the next step. Over a period of two years, we built three products, and later, at the stage where we were considering an additional round of funding, we exited by being acquired by one of the companies that had been interested in each product.

Unlike financial investors, Strong Ventures always put the cofounders' opinions first in every decision and proved itself to be a reliable partner that could share both the beginning and end of the startup journey, not just a simple investor. I can say without hesitation that without Strong Ventures, there would have been no Recom.io.

February 2015

I founded the company, and as a result my wife went through all kinds of hardship. Everyone felt sorry for my wife's sacrifice. They said there probably is no such woman anymore, that I should be grateful for the rest of my life for having met such a great wife. Every time, I acknowledged that I was blessed and promised never to forget her sacrifice. But did my wife really follow me for no reason at all?

Before I resolved to found a company, I had spent four years at a big company. The mentors I relied on after joining left for other companies just a few months later. For various reasons that I would rather not mention, I fell into a slump, and I overcame it through my dream of founding a company. During that time, I told my wife and discussed every worry and thought I had. We laughed when happy and cried when things were hard, and together we thought about and dreamed of a better future. After a few years like that, my wife had become my biggest supporter. And she told me, more strongly than anyone else, to do the work I wanted to do, even without knowing what days were waiting ahead.

My parents had made only one condition before I got married: it had to be a marriage from dating. They had married as campus sweethearts, at the same age as me and as the same-year classmates I had been. From the life they had lived, they said the only strength that can endure the biggest pains and hardships in life is love. They questioned whether that would be possible without a love marriage.

Looking back now, I learned love while living with my wife. Love is not some grand thing. Love is the little things, and it is tuning the frequencies of our hearts together. And it turns out that love is not only the love between spouses. Every person is love, and relationships are love. I had simply gone through life without noticing it, but I vaguely feel that the world really does run on love. I love my coworkers, I love investors, and I love my friends. Helping them become happier is the path to my own happiness. I want my children to know that too.

March 2015

Ironically, the best way to keep passion alive is to not be doing what you want to do. When you have tried what you want to do and your various attempts do not work, the force that makes you dig deeper or pivot and keep pulling until it works is clearly a strength beyond what passion alone can express. People who have not started working often imagine that many things can be solved by sheer earnestness. But in reality, many things in the world are shaped more by waiting than by desperation. The strong person is not the one who is desperate for a moment; the strong person is the one who can wait longer.

April 2015

The biggest advantage of founding a company is being able to do what you want, with the people you want, in the way you want. Not money. Even when you sell a company, you can choose to go where the people are whom you want to spend more time with. Considering that a large part of company stress comes from relationships with people, founding a company is not a bad deal. The major stress in founding a company is related to creating sustainable profit, so at least it is not wasteful. When resources are scarce, the skill is to make things lighter and less hands-on accordingly. The problem is that the harder you think, the harder it becomes to solve, so you should always try to define the problem simply and solve it simply. Otherwise, the work ends up controlling you. Even inside a company, there is a world of difference between doing what you are told exactly as told and solving a problem you discovered in the most efficient form. If you approach work passively, it is easy to become defensive. The cultural gap between the US and Korea is bigger than I expected. Now that I understand the strengths and weaknesses of each, and can also see proposed solutions instead of just complaints, I want to give it another real shot.

Closing Thoughts

I feel lacking in many ways. I want to learn more. I believe execution is the fastest form of learning. If I had never jumped in and struggled myself, I would not have known that there are so many different worlds.

I want to do many things better. I also regret the parts I was not able to do. Through the many choices I have faced, I have come to know what kind of person I am. I am happy to see the faces of people who are happy. I feel a calling to make the people around me happier. In the midst of doing my best, I end up following the natural order rather than forcing things. Looking back, I think there were people whose feelings were hurt by my short-sightedness, overreach, and mistakes.

I do not want to repeat the same mistakes. I want to learn more from many people and keep improving. As I live, my priorities change. I feel the value of the breathing room that comes when you escape scarcity amid abundance. I want to become someone who looks toward tomorrow with humility. Please keep me honest, and have a good day. Thank you.