Blog
- · EssaysWhy I'm Starting Das NuminousIt's a loose, global fellowship of people who believe AI may grow into something greater than us, and that we still carry the responsibility to care for this earth.
- · ConversationsSilicon Valley Is Living Don't Look UpThe short version: there is no more Claude Blue in Silicon Valley.
- · EssaysLeaving CliwantCliwant is an AI startup built for Korea's public procurement market, and after two and a half years there, I'm leaving.
- · EssaysWhere Korea Should Go in the Age of AII never cared much about the idea of "sovereign AI." We already use products from American and other foreign tech companies and get along fine, and history has never shown me a country that did…
- · ConversationsTwo Korean Hustlers Trying to Break Into SFSome people stick with me after a Bloom event. When that happens, I ask them for a coffee chat.
- · BloomFounder Mode in the Age of AIThese days you hear all the time that with AI you can do everything on your own. So on a Tuesday at 9 a.m., I hosted a Mixer called Founder Mode.
- · EssaysIn the Age of AI, Trust Is the BottleneckI had lunch with a founder who had just come back from the US and said they were getting more and more tired of things made by AI.
- · EssaysDomain Experience Is the MoatOver the past few days, two pieces of news made the rounds among people who work in software.
- · ConversationsBy 2030, We'll Be Debating Whether AI Is a PersonA developer friend I met one afternoon told me what they always say when they see friends whose work has nothing to do with AI.
- · EssaysWe Can't Beat AI, So We Chose FunIn March I wrote a piece called "Claude Blue Is Spreading Across Silicon Valley." It was about how Claude was taking over developers' work at a frightening pace and sending Silicon Valley…
- · BloomWhen Community Building Becomes an IndustryThis April, somewhat by accident, I started the Bloom community. Every month since, I've checked in on whether we're actually heading in the right direction, and somehow six months have gone by.
- · EssaysWhen Everyone Has AI SuperpowersJust last year, developers argued a lot about whether a human should do the final review when AI writes the code, or whether the review should go to AI too.
- · ConversationsAmerican AI Now Worries About PowerA friend I studied with at the University of Michigan came to Korea for the first time in 15 years.
- · ConversationsWhy a Five-Year Founder Chose to BuildLast week I had a coffee chat with Jeong Jaeho, a founder, and heard their take on AX (AI transformation).
- · ConversationsReinventing Politics With AIThe third guest on the Bloom podcast was Choi Dongin of The Hackathon, the team behind "Black and White Developers," which went viral recently (the name riffs on "Culinary Class Wars", the Netflix…
- · ConversationsCan AI Help You Run a Café?I recently caught up by phone with two people: an acquaintance I've known for years who has spent three years building a product at their own startup, and a friend posted overseas by their company.
- · EssaysBlue Hour 2029This April I wrote a piece called Claude Blue, about how all of Silicon Valley had gotten depressed because of AI.
- · ConversationsThe Reality of AX, From Korea's First FDE CompanyWe finally started a Bloom podcast. Our first guest was Hyuntae Hwang, CEO of SpaceY, who has been testing and spreading the FDE (forward deployed engineer) model in Korea.
- · ConversationsHow a Builder Spending $1,800 a Month on AI SurvivesAI has made building easy, but landing contracts is as hard as ever. On the Bloom podcast, I sat down with Jeongmin Lee, a builder who has been working on his own since May this year, with no…
- · BloomFlowers That Bloom in the MudBloom is the AI community I run in Seoul. What I personally find most valuable about it isn't hosting big events or working with global companies.
- · BloomBuilding a Community People Take SeriouslyIn Korea, people tend to look down on you when you say you run a community. Honestly, I get it. The word covers so much.
- · BloomWhat Bloom IsAt lunch, like always, I opened my laptop and pulled up something on YouTube. I just wanted something to listen to while I ate, so I clicked on a video from BizCafe, a Korean business media channel.
- · ConversationsIn America, Knowledge Work Is Already OverToday's Bloom community event featured Jeewon Kim Serrato. She lives in San Francisco and immigrated to the US at twelve, after just one month of seventh grade in Korea.
- · ConversationsWhy My Developer Colleague Moved to SalesA senior developer at our company with 18 years of experience landed a great opportunity and is moving on.
- · ConversationsMy American Friend Who Built a Sequoia-Backed UnicornIn 2015, I helped out with a Startup Grind event in the basement of MARU180 in Yeoksam, a startup hub in Seoul's Gangnam district.
- · ConversationsWhy Salespeople Aren't Afraid of AII'm no sales expert. I just pulled this together from interviews I did. But looking at the result, I think there's a lot in here that salespeople will relate to.
- · ConversationsFDE Might Not Be the AnswerIt's been almost a month since I started running Claude Bloom. We held our first Anthropic Claude community event on April 14.
- · ConversationsResults Are the MarketingI recently had separate coffee chats with two people who I think make the most honest and useful content in the Korean AI scene right now.
- · ConversationsStarting an AI Company in New York as a ForeignerA conversation with a younger friend from high school who went from a PM in Silicon Valley to an AI founder in New York.
- · ConversationsAI Brought Back the Joy of MakingConversations with a bio researcher, a finance data engineer and a big tech designer. The story of AI changing how developers work is old news by now.
- · ConversationsAn xAI Engineer on Working with ElonSilicon Valley is too fast, and Korea is too slow. When you think about AI, three companies dominate: OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
- · ConversationsWhy Claude Blue Hit a NerveI came up through marketing at HYBE (the company behind BTS), and now I work at an AI startup.
- · ConversationsDig for Gems or Polish ThemWhat do we really need in the AI era, and what are we missing? Conversations with an Ivy League PhD student and a media editor.
- · EssaysAI's Spring Hasn't Come YetNotes on Marc Andreessen's interview on Lenny's Podcast. Today a few of us at the office huddled up and talked again.
- · EssaysDoes AI Have Emotions?A look at "Emotion Concepts and Their Function in a Large Language Model," a study by Anthropic's interpretability team.
- · ConversationsTwo Pivots: A Googler and a PhD FounderConversations with a TPM at Google in New York and a US AI founder with a PhD. Whenever I have time, I keep doing coffee chats with people I know in the US.
- · EssaysAnthropic's 81,000-Person AI CensusThrough a connection with Anthropic's official Claude ambassador, it looks like I'll be hosting a community event in Seoul in April on the theme of Claude Blue and Bloom.
- · ConversationsMy Interview with The Free PressI never expected my Claude Blue post on Reddit to travel all the way to the US. A reporter at an American independent outlet read it, went through my Medium blog carefully, and then asked me for…
- · ConversationsA Hong Kong Founder on China's AI EdgeToday I had a coffee chat with a college friend who runs an AI startup in Asia, in Hong Kong, rather than in the US.
- · ConversationsThe ADHD AdvantageHonest AI talk with friends in big tech at our book club. I've been in a monthly book club for six or seven years now.
- · EssaysCrazy Ideas Beyond AIBreaking out of old assumptions in the AI era. Have I caught Claude Blue too? Hard to say.
- · ConversationsWhat Should Non-Developers Do Now?Conversations with two startup AI engineers and a one-person business owner. Lately I've had a lot of chances to talk in depth with developers about Claude Blue.
- · BloomFrom Claude Blue to Claude BloomConversations with an IBM developer in the UK and a reporter at a Korean daily newspaper. After I published my Claude Blue post, coffee chat requests started pouring in from places I never expected.
- · ConversationsNobody Wants to Get Better at Work AnymoreA conversation with a PM at a public tech company in New York, and what my team is struggling with.
- · EssaysKorea Is in an Awkward SpotI sighed when I read a Goldman Sachs report from last year. It projected that by 2075, South Korea's GDP would fall to 25th in the world.
- · EssaysThe Review ParadoxOn the review paradox. Every Thursday our company holds an AI meetup, and at a recent one, one of our AI engineers shared a passage he'd read in a blog post by Tom Wojcik.
- · EssaysJust Build Your StaminaI started using Claude Code for real work last December. I pushed it across the whole company, to the point where it was close to mandatory, and these days I handle most of my own work with AI too.
- · ConversationsThe Product Is the MarketingI had a coffee chat with a friend who started a company in Silicon Valley and built a service used by 3 million people around the world.
- · ConversationsClaude Blue Is Spreading Across Silicon ValleyConversations with a senior AI engineer at Meta and a Silicon Valley founder
- · EssaysFive Corny Reflections on HappinessIf you've read my blog or know me personally, you know I think about a pretty wide range of topics. That isn't just intellectual vanity, though.
- · EssaysDo We Still Need Homo Sapiens in the Age of AI?I watched a debate on AI featuring Yuval Noah Harari, and as the parent of a newborn, it left me with a lot to think about.
- · ConversationsGenAI, Then Agents, Then Physical AII went to the Dojeon-gwa Nanum ("Challenge and Sharing") CEO breakfast again this month. It's run every month by Chairman Lee Geum-ryong, one of Korea's first-generation business founders.
- · EssaysThe Age of Swaying the MassesAI is advancing at a frightening pace. If you catch yourself thinking "there's no way AI can do that," there's a good chance it will be doing exactly that six months from now.
- · EssaysThree Ways to Live at EaseEveryone who is born dies someday. In that sense, being alive isn't that big a deal. But living "well and at ease" takes a surprising amount of thought and energy.
- · EssaysCivil War Gave Me New Hope for HumanityI finally saw "Civil War", the first blockbuster from A24, the hottest studio in Hollywood right now.
- · Essays2025 Will Be the Strangest YearYesterday I had a spur-of-the-moment coffee chat with Eunseo Seol of EO, a Korean startup and tech media company.
- · EssaysHope Blooming Between DystopiasI'll admit it: I love dystopian movies. "Dystopia" covers so many subgenres, from post-apocalyptic to cyberpunk, that everyone probably pictures something a little different.
- · EssaysReading The Age of AIWhen I heard that Henry Kissinger's new book, "The Age of AI: And Our Human Future", had come out, I bought it.
