Flowers That Bloom in the Mud

Bloom 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. It's discovering the "hidden masters" among the people who show up.

Of course, for Bloom, finding hidden masters doesn't mean scouting deals the way a VC does, or helping with hiring the way a headhunter does. So if you ask me what it's for, I don't have a clear answer yet. But people start companies for the money, sure, and I think another privilege of founding something is getting to pick only smart friends you click with and work alongside them. It feels a lot like that.

Personally, I can't even describe how much inspiration, how many ideas, and how much drive I get from meeting these hidden masters. If you ask me what's hardest in the AI era, my answer is "ideas," hands down.

If you ask how ideas can be a moat when AI cranks them all out, my answer is that we live in a society where humans are still the bottleneck, and I think that will probably stay true. However much planning and decision-making we hand to AI, unless someone puts an AI chip in my head and the AI controls me, I don't think any of us will escape a world run by humans.

As Homo sapiens, we have an identity as humankind, and I don't think our DNA allows us to give that up and move on to the next evolved version of humans. It's like this: even if, on paper, giving up self-rule and joining the United States would be the better deal, I think we'd still choose to stay Korean because of our identity, even if that leaves us worse off. If the gap ever became something like 1 to 10,000, completely beyond comparison, maybe then we'd want to be absorbed. Humans are irrational that way, but maybe that's just part of our evolutionary psychology.

Anyway, as long as humanity is alive, I think realistically we'll keep living in a world that humans run. That means the important thinking, judgment, and instinct in society and the economy will all still be controlled by humans, because whatever the outcome, control and autonomy over things matter most to each individual. And however good the work AI brings back, deciding whether it's actually good, what the next step is, and what insight it holds is often filled in by a person's craziness and off-the-wall imagination. That's why I think ideas and thinking become more and more valuable the further we go into the AI era.

I'm not sure this is a good example, but if this really were an era where AI does everything, the Indian folks, with their low labor costs and high IQs, should have taken over the entire US AI market by now. In reality, India is America's subcontractor, and the smart people all move to San Francisco. You could say they go because the capital is tied up in San Francisco and they need the funding. But AI is getting close to dirt cheap, and anyone in India who's reasonably middle class, not at the very bottom, should be able to get enough AI credits. With a population that big, by that logic they should be taking over the world.

So I think San Francisco will keep leading the AI and tech era, and the reason, in the end, is talent density. Even if the talent gathers there because of the capital, it still comes down to talent density.

When talent is concentrated, there are that many more chances for ideas and teamwork. Solopreneurs are hot right now and there's all this talk about one-person unicorns, but if I could find a team I'm aligned with and have real synergy with, I'd have no reason to insist on going solo. I get it when people stick with going solo because they can't find a team like that around them and have no other choice. But in a place like San Francisco, where the best talent in the world is gathered, insisting on going solo means you just aren't attractive or competitive enough. It isn't because there are no good teams.

When people with different strengths come together like that, their ability to execute naturally snowballs, and the technology and influence that come with it grow exponentially. San Francisco isn't a city of the future because flying taxis zip around the sky like in "I, Robot". What makes it the one and only city is the fact that people with a vision of the future are gathered there.

So the saddest situation is not even knowing that your imagination, your outlook, and your ideas are limited. It's a bit like living inside "The Truman Show" or "The Matrix". You don't know how limited the society you live in is, and even if you find out, dreaming bigger feels like a story about people from another country, so it doesn't land and your heart doesn't race. I honestly think there's nothing sadder than that.

But we don't live in San Francisco. So it isn't easy to bump into tech masters just walking down the street. For example, San Francisco has a 24-hour cafe called Corgi, run by a well-known startup insurance company. It's like a holy site for AI people. It works because San Francisco has AI nerds everywhere, so the business does reasonably well and the place stays lively. Korea, on the other hand, has a huge number of idol fan cafes. There are lots of them around the entertainment agencies in neighborhoods like Mapo and Yongsan, and people get together all the time to celebrate idols' birthdays or just to meet up. These things grow naturally out of a country's social culture and economic structure. If I opened a Bloom cafe in Gangnam, would it be packed like Corgi in San Francisco, or like the idol fan cafes in Seoul? I'm not so sure.

Anyway, the point I want to make up front is that these people are "hidden" masters. Seoul has plenty of masters, of course. Somewhere. But the pool is small, so they're hard to find, and that's how Bloom ended up taking on the role of finding them through community activities and putting a spotlight on them.

These hidden masters are even harder to spot because their schools and backgrounds aren't flashy. I'm 35 now, and during my years at companies I also rubbed shoulders with the elite of my industry, looked up to them, and built my dreams around them. Less dreams, really, than next year's bonus and salary. Back then I thought that world was everything, so I lived and jostled inside it. Now that I've moved into the startup world, I meet a small number of these hidden masters (not everyone here is one), and conversations with my old office colleagues just don't give me that dopamine hit anymore. Sometimes they feel boring.

I'm not saying I'm a hidden master. I know I'm not, and I have no plans to chase being one. Instead, through Bloom, I naturally build relationships with people like that and get a steady transfusion of good ideas and motivation.

So my position is closer to "let's find those people" than "let's become a hidden master." Someone told me it's like playing chess with people, and that's exactly what it's like. I used to have zero interest in relationships and networks like this. Now, when I meet someone, a picture automatically forms in my head of who they should be connected to or which event they should be invited to, and strangely enough, most of those pictures become reality right away. The picture is clear and everyone's interests line up well.

That's given me a couple of good occupational habits, starting with deep listening and quick understanding. I work my brain hard to figure out quickly who the person in front of me is. This doesn't work because I'm smart. You need to have heard a wide range of things before you can quickly catch on and think, "Ah, so that's what this is." So in the end, my secondhand experience has to be broad, and I have to be quick at reading people.

For that, when someone is talking, it's important to understand them more deeply, run simulations in my head, and try to empathize both logically and emotionally. And the more you do it, the more it develops on its own. When you get good at this, you start giving each other good feedback on the spot, and then the other person tells you more of their hidden personal stories, and your own secondhand experience gets deeper.

So for me, listening, not pitching myself and talking, is basically the strategy. Digging up insights that aren't online or anywhere public, in my own way, and finding hidden masters is turning into my job. And when I move pieces around the chessboard and pull off a checkmate, the dopamine from that is beyond imagining.

So what I'm thinking about lately is how to find more of these hidden masters I've met by chance through Bloom. And a VC told me this:

If you're a good person, good people will gather around you.

I haven't forced any of this so far, so I've come to believe that if I do what I find valuable and fun, hidden masters will come to me on their own. Obviously I can't build connections with every hidden master in the world. Still, I hope that at least the people I'm aligned with, who think and feel the way I do, will more or less all end up connected. What I'll build with this network, though, I'm still figuring out.

In a place like San Francisco, where talent is everywhere, just hustling and meeting people makes the business value explode. Seoul isn't like that. If I could pull people together and build something one-tenth the size of San Francisco here, I think that would still be pretty motivating and worthwhile, at least for those of us who realistically have to be in Seoul right now.

Looking for people like flowers that bloom in the mud

That's why I'm no longer curious about the typical elite. I already know plenty of them, and above all, their backgrounds are flashy, so they're easy to spot and easy to find. The people who aren't like that are the opposite: there's no way I can find them online first, no matter what I try. Even when I get introduced, I have no idea what kind of person to expect. Before Bloom, I almost never met people like that. I only saw them on YouTube.

But through Bloom I've met people with really unusual backgrounds in person. I'll keep them anonymous and mention just a few details.

One person started a company as a teenager, sold it to a foreign company before turning 20, and now runs a US fund that makes early investments in frontier labs. Another, in their 20s, did research in Silicon Valley side by side with Demis Hassabis (co-founder of Google DeepMind), then went on to found a physical AI startup. Another grew up in a well-off family that suddenly fell on hard times, lived in the basement of a company building, and made a name in the industry as a kid by publishing papers instead of going to school. They tried to buy GPUs with a government grant, the grant got cut, the company came close to bankruptcy, and in the end they sold it and made a comeback, over and over.

When you go through every kind of hardship from a young age and get knocked around in startups and big companies, and even politics and global VC, you start seeing the world in three dimensions. These aren't polished stories like the ones on blogs or YouTube. They're just their own lives.

Of course, you can have these experiences in your 40s or 50s too. The thing is, people are like the rings of a tree: there's a vision and energy you can only have at a certain age. You don't live in the world alone, so however little you act your age, other people still see you that way, and you're never completely free of it. And to be fair, these people may have their own regrets about missing the ordinary experiences others have at that age.

Anyway, meeting people like this keeps teaching me how many hidden masters there are in the world. So when I meet some executive with a dazzling résumé, I don't get intimidated much. I've already had my dopamine rush meeting people like these, so those executives just feel ordinary.

What follows are things I heard from the people I met this way, and my own thoughts as I chewed on them. Some I heard right there on the spot. Others only clicked much later, when I was sorting through them alone. I'll go through them in order.

1/ Patriotism toward Korea

I don't have any special (?) patriotism toward Korea. I'm not sure "patriotism" is even the right word for this, but I wonder if the reason North Korea mustn't invade is, in the end, just that I live here. If I weren't in Seoul, well, I don't know. People dying is heartbreaking and should never happen. But I honestly think the idea of going out of your way to "serve" or "sacrifice" for Korea in particular is a very narrow view.

If anything, my identity is as a member of humankind, and as one person on Earth, I just want humanity to move forward. I never thought Korea could be the leader in that game. Korea's position is more like working hard to support that goal, and I do think it plays a real part. That much I believe.

So when I hear people say we should all work hard so that Korea, as an independent country, does well, it really frustrates me. Since I live in Seoul, of course it matters to me that at least Seoul is safe and prosperous. But that's a somewhat different thing from saying Korea has to do well.

2/ Folding Korea into the US is true "patriotism"

This suddenly sounds like something a politician would say, but I don't mean it that way. I'm just talking socioeconomically.

Right now, the US has the most advanced economy, culture, and national power. Honestly, emotionally we feel closer to the US than to our neighbors Japan, China, or Southeast Asia. I think the best thing for Korea is to make maximum use of the country with the best infrastructure, economically, culturally, and politically. And I'm not just saying this out of nowhere. Since the Korean War, Korea has consistently acted this way, no matter which government was in power.

So whenever Korea suddenly announces it's going to do something on its own, I'm puzzled. But when I think about why that is, it's because living on the Korean Peninsula, we have never built an alliance or an empire and done something with it. The Roman Empire, the British Empire, France, and Spain all have countless experiences of uniting different peoples and expanding by aligning everyone's interests, whether through colonies, territorial expansion, or whatever else. Of course that was long ago, but it carries on as tradition and history. It's the same reason the European Union is possible today, despite a history of fighting each other. The US is really a union of 50 states too.

It's a shame that we've never even heard of anything like that, let alone experienced it. The closest we ever came to an empire was in 1897, when King Gojong declared an empire and took the name Korean Empire. Thirteen years later, the country was gone. So we've never formed a side to make use of someone else or work them to our advantage. All we have is a history of paying tribute and negotiating relentlessly just so no one would take what was ours. Of course, I give our ancestors huge credit and huge respect for the wisdom it took to keep the country from being taken over and to protect its independence. Realistically, we were always in a very tough spot. But it's a fact that we never had the muscle to go out into the world and really build something bigger. I think that's also why we're so reluctant to cooperate with outsiders in the first place. Being a peninsula, we're far from other countries and there's a language barrier too, and that clearly needs solving as well.

That's why, and I think I've written this in an earlier post, I believe Korea should just make English an official language. Hong Kong and Singapore go without saying, English is nearly an official language in Malaysia too, and countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland already speak English almost like natives. Making English something like an official language sets up the most basic condition for elites from all over the world, not just Americans, to come here and mix. Even if we did that, the culture, sentiment, and history unique to Korea wouldn't change overnight, so I think what makes us unique would stay.

Anyway, if I'm allowed to be a little greedy, I can't help wishing Korea had a history of running an empire the way Europe did, and wondering how that would have changed the mindset of the generations after us. It's gotten to the point where, if I could go back in time, I'd want to be a ship captain in the days of the British Empire, or live through the US economic boom of the 1920s after World War I. I don't mean something like Mongolia, where Genghis Khan spent decades just swallowing everything in his path like a nomad instead of forming alliances. I mean the experience of constructively building a civilization, an empire, an alliance.

That's why Bloom deliberately runs its events in English, and thanks to that, quite a few foreigners come. Korean attendees, me included, always ask them how they ended up in Korea. When I think about it, that question itself is very Korean. My European friends are definitely free spirits. They just came because they wanted to, and they don't tend to make deep plans about settling down. An Italian guy who came to last week's meetup got a Taiwanese girlfriend and has been living in Taiwan for six years. Now he's curious about Korea and thinking about moving over, and he makes his money by running his own company remotely. That's it. We've never made a big move, so we're cautious, and we're always on defense instead of going out on offense.

I may have drifted pretty far off topic, so let me come back to the present and look at how this shows up for us today. Why we can't get out there.

3/ The curse of the mid-sized market

Korea is a developed country, no question. But it's a special case: the government dragged it up by the collar, and luck and geopolitics lined up at the same time.

Korea's big conglomerates are, in the end, cases the government dragged up by the collar. I'm not saying that's bad at all. I'm just saying it's a fact. Samsung, SK, Hyundai, Doosan, and so on.

Anyway, the government was the one propping them up and pumping money in. The government carried them. But the government needs money to carry anyone, and I think Korea is a truly special case that made the most of a brief moment when, because of its geopolitical situation, foreign capital and troops came in and the whole world was paying attention. Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America may want their governments to carry things too, but without that geopolitical significance or timing to draw global attention, they never got the chance. They know it's not possible, so they fall into a vicious cycle of "let's just take what we can for ourselves," which leads to corruption. That's how I see it.

So which countries are much smaller than us but have done better at going global? Israel gives you a pretty good answer. If you rank countries by the number of companies listed on US stock exchanges, Israel reportedly comes right after the US, Canada, and China. Israel has fewer than 10 million people, about a fifth of Korea's population. Right now, Korea has 10 companies with regular listings on the New York exchanges and Japan has 19. Israel has 135. If you count the ones that were later acquired or delisted, more than 250 Israeli companies have listed there in total.

If someone says, "Why go list overseas when foreign capital will just take it from us?", I want to flick them on the forehead. Don't look at this from a national point of view. If you're running a business, you should focus only on growing it however you can. If someone values the same company at dozens of times more, you just go there.

I don't know if Korea blocks overseas listings out of some special patriotism (probably not). But when you look at why the gap is so big, about 90% of Israeli startups reportedly incorporate in the US, not in Israel. They take it for granted that you start in the US from day one.

I don't understand why Korea keeps trapping itself on this peninsula that might as well be an island. If that's the plan, then at least live entirely inside your own market like China or Russia. We don't do that either, yet we're interested in going overseas. That irony is what I'd call the curse of the mid-sized market.

Even Japan, which we mock as a Galápagos for evolving in isolation, has twice as many New York listings as we do. Meanwhile, Korea has more than three times as many unicorns as Japan. By the same count, Korea has 33 and Japan has 10. What that tells me is that Korea focuses only on listing all its unicorns at home. Capital flight, brain drain, wounded pride. But if you're going to worry that listing in some other country will hurt your pride and drain Korea's capital and talent, well, then you become North Korea.

Country aside, if you want what you're doing to succeed, I think the best thing by far is to pull in as much capital as possible and build the best talent and culture. In that sense, I think the right move is for Korea to just attach itself to the US and become something like America's biggest multipurpose base. Culturally, politically, and socially, the US is the country closest to Korea, and honestly, I think we feel emotionally much closer to the US than to Japan. That includes movies, music, TV shows, and tech platforms. It doesn't feel foreign at all.

If Korea had been a small country like the Netherlands, Singapore, or Israel, we wouldn't have even looked at the domestic market and would have focused only on the US from the start. Structurally, we're stuck in the trap of being a mid-sized market. We're just big enough that there's a strong pull to start comfortably at home somehow.

That's why I was glad when SK Hynix listed on Nasdaq this July. A company at the very top of Korea's market cap going to New York is a chance to make American capital take a second look at Korea. Capital only comes in when people in the US get more interested in Korea and start thinking it's worth investing here early, too.

So when I see people who say their patriotism is strong, I wonder whether it really is, and why it's so strong. If your patriotism really is strong, I think all you need to do is stick close to the US, make a lot of money, show the world plenty of Korean best practices, and build channels that bring more capital to Koreans. Huddling together among ourselves and cheering each other on looks bad and is really pathetic.

4/ Why everything runs on government money

Up to now, I'd thought the reason everyone focuses only on business in Korea was founders lacking nerve. But founders will do anything if it makes money. They aren't that closed-minded.

Then I talked with someone who'd spent a long time in VC, and I learned that the biggest problem is the government-led structure of Korea's industry. Follow the money behind Korean startups far enough and it all ends up at the government. Korea has a history of the government carrying everything, so maybe the government feels too strong a responsibility to keep carrying things, or maybe it's arrogance. I'm not sure which.

The reason is that, legally, startup investment through VCs in Korea is classified as a risky asset right below cryptocurrency, from what I heard. So banks and big companies can't invest directly even when they have money, because of capital requirements. In the US, huge amounts of retirement money flow into startups through 401(k)s. In Korea, retirement pensions and the National Pension Service structurally can't flow into VC or PE.

As a result, LPs, the money people backing the funds, are effectively just the government. So VCs end up taking money from places like the Gyeonggi provincial government or the South Jeolla provincial government, and they have no choice but to cling to central and local governments. But if you take government money, you have to invest in Korean companies and Korean founders. It's taxpayers' money, so of course. It's a structure tied to Korea from the very start.

The bigger problem is that when the government is the LP, the screening is bound to be conservative. It's being run with taxpayers' money, so investing somewhere too aggressive, or somewhere nobody really understands, could turn into a big controversy. So the money can only flow to VCs with good past returns, not the best future ones. The same old VCs that invested conservatively keep getting LP money, it's hard for new VCs to form, and nobody wants to stick their neck out with aggressive bets. That's the reality.

Fund lifespans are different from the US too. In Korea, a fund runs 6 to 7 years. In the US, it's 10 years plus about two one-year extensions, so up to 12. That means Korean VCs have to get their multiple within 6 to 7 years, so instead of picturing a long-term vision, all they want to know is how fast they can exit, whether that's an IPO, a sale, or anything else. I think this connects to the fact that Korea legally defines a startup as a company seven years old or younger. On a different note, I've heard that in the US, a VC who asks a founder about their exit plan gets completely shunned in the industry. That outdated, short-term trading culture isn't how things work there.

So in Korea, it inevitably sounds like "Nice tech, this'll make it to KOSDAQ" (KOSDAQ is Korea's Nasdaq-style tech exchange), or "Our target multiple is 3x, but if we can get out fast, a smaller multiple is fine." There's no reason to look at the big picture. If a founder talks about a 10-year vision, it actually counts against them. I'd heard plenty about how government-led industry makes the market sick in a lot of ways, but once I understood it structurally, the reality made a lot more sense.

Finally, it's not just the government. Korean VCs also push startups hard to go global, because it's necessary. The problem is that they ask for it without ever having done it themselves. Helping with global expansion is great. But helping doesn't mean setting up sales meetings and working out strategy. It means helping startups raise follow-on rounds from US VCs and LPs. In other words, you need connections with those people. The game only opens up when money comes in from there, and I can count on very few Korean institutions that can help with that.

Japan at least has SoftBank, a VC that even American startups want money from. Or look at Sequoia, which expanded into China, India, and Singapore through local franchises. That's localizing by borrowing foreign capital and a foreign name. Korea has no foreign VC franchises, and being completely cut off like that is a big deal.

That's why investment rounds in Korea and the US differ in size by dozens of times. It's also why teams that want to do frontier research can't come out of Korea. Hiring talent matters for training models, but in the end you have to buy data or make it yourself. It all comes down to money, and you're stuck from the very start. The first button is already done up wrong.

5/ Don't expand. Settle.

This isn't just my opinion. Look at Israel. If that feels too far away, look back at my own years as an international student. I never once thought of myself as having come from Korea to expand into the US. If you live in a country, that becomes where you've settled. If anything, when I came back to Korea after studying in the US to find my first job, Korea felt more awkward and uncomfortable.

So we shouldn't be "expanding." We should just be settling. Let go of your attachment to Korea and go live there. Because all of us dislike strangers and feel uncomfortable around them. Looking out for your own people, the ones you feel a kinship with, is only natural.

In fact, when you listen to American investors, they say they have zero interest in Korean companies, regardless of the technology. They're strangers they don't know. But pretending to be an American company doesn't cut it either. You become a real American company, and then you prove your technology.

From that angle, the right move is to spend big and bring in someone who worked at a US frontier lab, even if it's expensive, and put them out front. At least at the Chief level. If the game is that you get judged in the first three seconds, then you should design those three seconds.

When they open the box, it can't be kimchi. It has to be at least kimchi pasta. From a distance, if it looks completely Korean, they won't look at all. When they come closer wondering what it is, it should feel more familiar than they expected.

Korean institutions say they help Korean startups expand into the US, yet their own entities are Korean. In the end, what a Korean startup needs is someone who can connect them to Sequoia so they can raise a follow-on round. A one-week business trip to Silicon Valley doesn't do anything. An event hosted by KOTRA (Korea's government trade and investment agency) doesn't do anything. I've never heard of either one actually working out.

6/ How foreign AI companies really see Korea

Through Bloom, I work with foreign AI companies a lot. But there's one thing you can't miss here: they aren't investing in Korean companies or hiring Koreans. They just see Korea as a consumer market.

So what is Korea in their eyes? The numbers make it clear. Korea ranks first in the world in luxury spending per person (according to a 2023 Morgan Stanley study). In total size, China is obviously first, but per person, it's us. Not the US, France, Germany, or Japan.

Korea also reportedly ranks second after the US in the number of paid subscribers to ChatGPT and Gemini (based on OpenAI's announcement). Again, per person, it's first in the world. You could look at that and call it a good thing, but in the end, Korea is a consumer country, not a producer.

So from an AI company's point of view, Korea is a big spender. But here's the difference between Korean companies and foreign ones. For a Korean company like ours, the Korean market is the only market. For them, Korea is one of many markets. So we're already Korean companies, we get localized even further for Korea, and then we can't get out. Foreign companies have already been doing global business in the US and Europe and have just stopped by Korea for a while, so they have no reason to get tied down by localization.

That's why, unless you're doing something mass-market that the whole country uses, like a messenger app or a secondhand marketplace, it's awkward to do business only in Korea, and going overseas runs into structural problems. On top of that, even when performance is the same, Korean conglomerates prefer working with foreign companies over Korean ones. The reason is that the US is the major player, and working with them helps the conglomerates go global too. Teaming up with other awkward players just makes you more awkward.

I heard something similar from a Korean semiconductor company. Their main customers are Korean conglomerates, but those conglomerates each have partnerships with American AI companies. It isn't because the Korean companies are poor value for money. Korean companies get treated as vendors, and foreign companies get treated as partners. That's the social structure here.

And because this is Korea, age still comes up. If you're in your mid-to-late 30s, the conglomerates quietly look down on you for being young. But nobody checks a foreigner's age. OpenAI's FDEs (forward deployed engineers) are even in their mid-to-late 20s. Nobody gives them a hard time about their age.

So what we need to understand is that foreign companies aren't coming to Korea to buy. They're coming to sell. And if they're selling, they'll sell to the conglomerates. Small startups have nothing for them to sell to. A giant like AWS can shake every last coin out of the market as the money trickles down.

Do you know what foreign AI companies are most interested in in Korea right now? In the end, selling data. As I said earlier, cleaning up data yourself to build a model is extremely expensive. Companies that supply training data, like Scale AI, take orders worth tens of billions of won, even 100 billion won (roughly $70 million), and there's a lot of demand to sell that kind of data to Korean conglomerates. That's how foreign companies look at the Korean market. Palantir going into HD Hyundai and Doosan Infracore (now HD Hyundai Infracore) a while back is exactly that kind of case.

7/ YC won't come to Korea, but it'll go to Stockholm

Koreans love Y Combinator. But YC doesn't give us a second glance. "You come to me, I don't come to you" is the company's attitude. Yet recently, Paul Graham and the YC team all went to Stockholm, because a lot of global startups, Legora and Lovable among them, are coming out of Sweden. Korea, by comparison, is a market built around conglomerates.

The same goes for a16z. They see the best deals in the world in Silicon Valley, so they have no reason to come to Korea. There are even cases where the Korean government gives money to foreign VCs and tells them to invest it in Korea. But I'm told they won't fly twelve hours to collect something like 10 billion won (around $7 million). On top of that, once they take the money they have to invest it, and if they invest in Korea and their portfolio returns lag behind their American deals, that report card stays on their record forever. It's a pointless risky bet.

So the government invites "foreign VCs" nobody here has heard of, says they'll invest in Korea, and when you look closely, they're all Korean-American people. On the outside they're called foreign VCs, but they aren't too worried about returns. They just come to collect Korean government money. And the Korean government doesn't have many other options, so it keeps repeating this.

8/ Working with Korean conglomerates

So what if you give up on going global and just win contracts with Korean enterprise companies? The Lotte case is well known. That's the one that caused a controversy when the conglomerate allegedly took a startup's idea and used it as its own.

First of all, conglomerates always start with a PoC (proof of concept). That's normal. But they won't even give you a no-bid contract for the PoC. They make you go through competitive bidding. When you first meet, they say they have plenty of money so don't worry. Then when you hand over your proposal, they say there isn't much budget this year and cut it to a tenth. Meanwhile, they keep you salivating by saying the main contract will be huge down the line.

If the PoC succeeds, they immediately ask you to dinner, and instead of a business partnership, they offer you a job: why not come work for us and run that business here? If you say no, the conglomerate hires away your key people. The pay levels are so different that there's no way to stop it. They're famous for poaching people, not partnering or acquiring, as soon as a startup looks good. Even when a startup does get acquired, it only looks like a happy ending. There's an article saying it sold on great terms, and when you check back a few years later, it's rare for the original team to still be there.

To some people this might sound like making excuses. If you say I should just defend myself and negotiate well, I have no answer to that. But it's a fact that this culture is more of an open secret than you'd think, so I'm writing it down because I think it's good to know.

9/ Conglomerates care a lot about AI branding these days

More conglomerates than you'd expect sponsor us and ask us to host AI events in their spaces. Not just space, but money too.

We're very grateful, but when I heard what was behind it, it comes down to hiring and partnerships. And there aren't many conglomerates in Korea with an AI brand. SK Hynix and Samsung have one, but they're in semiconductors.

So the end goal seems to be hosting lots of AI events in their own spaces and turning them into something like a hacker house. Lending out space isn't the point, and they don't want a generic AI event. They want an AI community event.

Anyway, this doesn't seem to be decided at the working level. In most cases, it seems to come from the owners at the top. Which might be why, when they do it, they go all in.

10/ Why conglomerates care so much about art and branded spaces

I used to think it was just about tax breaks or legacy. What I learned later is that this, too, is huge business.

Art becomes a financial product once it's paired with finance. There are funds that use artwork as collateral and structures built around auctions. And the most interesting part of the conversation where I heard this was about the second and third generations of chaebol families. They have plenty of cash but don't want to take over the family business, and they want to prove something on their own. They used to flock to art or blockchain, and now they're flocking to AI. When I heard that, it didn't sound that different from people in my own generation. Everyone wants their own game, not the one they inherited.

There's a well-known saying on Wall Street: the rich envy artists and artists envy the rich. In other words, gather artists in a museum, and rich people will gather too.

So in the end, a museum is just a way to draw in global investors and partners. Rich people don't gather around money. They gather around fun, entertainment, and art is just one form of that. Past a certain level of wealth, people spend their networks, their time, and their money on fresh experiences.

And now that art has moved over to AI. The interesting part is that AI is something rich people rarely get to do themselves, so they actually approach it with even more admiration. So I'd guess the admiration artists feel looking at the rich is the same, too.

That's why some people seem to see AI as a mega-trend, like NFTs used to be, rather than as a technology. The substance is completely different, but if you only look at the role it plays, they're not exactly wrong.

11/ We can't find talent inside anymore

These days conglomerates are running everything themselves, from AI hackathons to communities to hacker houses, to develop talent. The goal is obvious. They've hit the limits of finding talent internally, so they're going outside to look. They've probably gotten all the referrals they can. Now they want to find the hidden masters.

Kakao (the company behind Korea's dominant messaging app) has gone as far as setting out to build regional AI ecosystems. Under the name "AI Dot," it's teamed up with Korea's four science and technology institutes, KAIST, GIST, DGIST, and UNIST, held an 800-person summit in Busan, and is running hackathons for aspiring founders. It says it'll go all the way down to elementary, middle, and high school students to develop talent.

One conglomerate reportedly picks sharp people from all its affiliates and trains them as FDEs. It teaches them vibe coding, sends them on tours of Silicon Valley startups, and has them present to executives when they get back. I have no idea how effective that will be.

The government runs something called "Startups for Everyone" too, but from what I hear from people who went as mentors, almost nobody is ready. People get on the audition stage without ever having built a product, found customers, or put together a team. There's nothing in place to develop them, and nothing planned for what happens after the funding runs out.

12/ Why people become boring middle-aged guys

So are there really no people? Do Koreans really lack imagination and a spirit of challenge? Actually, no. It's just that the more worn down you get by society, the more you end up that way. Everything is a short-term game, and we don't have the historical DNA of running alliances, expansions, or empires.

You know the story. Put fleas in a jar and close the lid, and at first they keep hitting the lid. Then at some point they only jump exactly that high. Even when you take the lid off, they don't get out.

Even ambitious founders, after three to five years of being called "crazy" over and over, have the spark of their ambition go out and turn into boring middle-aged guys.

13/ Let's hustle and get knocked around in the field

To be honest, I'm 35 now, and I think this is the point in my life when I'm getting knocked around and running into things the most. I'm grateful, too, that I'm doing it at all, even now. Of course, I used to work hard before as well, pulling all-nighters, working weekends, under a lot of stress. But rather than living hard and diligently, I think I was just getting through the grind of work and killing time fast. Inside that structure of earning money through labor, I tried to complain as little as possible and lived for bonuses and praise from my boss.

Now it's a completely different game. In a way, I think of myself as a video game character, clearing one level after another with no manual at all. The funny thing is, it's my own life, but looked at that way, it's pretty fun and I feel like I can take on bigger challenges.

Everyone's different, but for me, doing things inside rules and a game that are too fixed actually brings more stress and frustration. Sure, the results are more stable, but I still never felt at ease. When I think about why so many office workers do so many side projects and networking events, I honestly get it completely. When I was at a company, even when work ran past midnight, there was a kind of emptiness, so I'd push my friends to start new side projects and get together on weekends to try building something. It definitely wasn't because I had a lot of free time. It was a feeling that something wasn't filled, that my life had no substance.

Now my life feels completely full of substance. The results show up in proportion to how much I take on and build, and that feels strange and fun. Of course, doing anything comes with moments when my heart sinks, or things don't go as planned and I lose my temper. But I think that's the real game. When you leave the Matrix, there's a jungle out there, and once you think of that jungle as the real world, you don't want to go back into the Matrix. Maybe it's like how Neo knows about the safety net of the Matrix but doesn't want to go back. Of course, I have zero intention of saving the world. I just want a taste of the real thing, whatever it is. Following a GPS someone else built actually weighs on me more.

Who can say what the right answer is? But you only live once, and I believe I should get out of the Matrix no matter what, live in the jungle, dig up insights from my own knocks, and keep moving forward. Of course, if you're in the Matrix, making the most of it while you plan when and how to get out is a skill too, and it's good if you can do that strategically. I'm not really someone who makes plans like that, but maybe I did it that way myself. In the end, it isn't about showing anyone anything. If you feel full of substance yourself, that's good in a lot of ways.

There's one story that really shows what getting knocked around means. It's from someone I know who recently went to see factories in China in person. They said the automation was much less advanced than they'd expected. The lines built for PR were just decorations that didn't actually run. The reason was simple: labor is cheap, so there's no need to automate. They're already making things cheaply enough, so they don't bother. That's what it means that you have to go to the field to know. Innovation really does come from getting knocked around and being hungry.

14/ Manufacturing innovation costs a staggering amount

There's a reason Silicon Valley does so much AI and software but doesn't solve hardware and manufacturing problems. People hear about the problems that they or the people next to them run into in their own environment. And in Silicon Valley, AI and software are far more familiar and relatable.

We're the opposite, because Korea is a manufacturing powerhouse. Realistically, there are problems everywhere on the factory floor. The trouble is that Korea has no big money people to fund solving them. Silicon Valley has the money people, but they don't really understand this and aren't very interested.

I also heard about the subcontracting structure that's typical of manufacturing. When the economy is bad, the prime contractor stops sending orders and does the work itself. It only sends work to subcontractors when times are good. So subcontractors' margins keep getting squeezed, and when margins are squeezed, they can't put money into R&D. Going down from first-tier to second-tier to third-tier suppliers, the squeeze keeps getting tighter.

So even when the equipment is 40 years old, orders are piled up and there's no time to stop the line for repairs. They're too busy to fix things, and because they can't fix things, they stay busy. A factory built from the start to make 100 units and a factory that started with five and tacked on one warehouse and one line every time demand grew have fundamentally different workflows. It's the difference between a planned city and urban sprawl.

If you're going to take on manufacturing in Korea, I think you'd have to fix things down to these roots to see real innovation. But this takes more money than even the government can handle, so I think getting American capital interested is where innovation starts.

15/ Keep a wide view, and treasure people

Going around hearing stories like these, I end up looking back at myself. I think I have high self-esteem, but I'm not an arrogant person. I've met so many people with better credentials than mine that I never had a chance to get full of myself. Even so, imagining all sorts of things and seeing good examples like these, always going around looking for inspiration, I think my view has gotten fairly wide. Maybe it's just my nature: I can't trust my own eyes, so I never settle and I keep looking for ways to widen it.

At the same time, I've developed an attitude of my own. I think I've treasured other people since I was very young, because I've never been high enough up to look down on anyone. When I studied abroad, as an Asian I always had a guest's mindset. Out in the working world, I was always learning from people above me. I never once had reason to throw my weight around.

I figure I'm going to heaven when I die anyway, so I don't have much ego. Zoom out and we're Koreans. Zoom out further and we're each just a dot in the big picture of humankind. "Who's better, you or me?" never interested me in the first place. Somehow my personal value system became this: dig up as many fun stories and insights as I can to help my brain get its catharsis, and enjoy the ride. So if someone asks me what my dream is, honestly, these days I don't have one. My dream is just to hear lots of insights and write them up on Brunch, haha.

So rather than racking my brain doing research alone, it's much more efficient to meet lots of people, dig for insights, and hear their experiences secondhand. These are stories that could never come out of me. I also have fun helping make connections and passing along the insights I've heard. Growing up in a society where, given my circumstances, I always had to treat people with care, that's the attitude I ended up with. So I think I'll keep going out to find people. It's something I can do from where I am right now, and it's fun.

Originally published in Korean on Brunch, September 6, 2026.