After working on countless projects and a few startups, I’ve recently made it a serious goal to become employed by a company where I can create value and learn.
This is the first time I’ve wanted to be employed ever in my life.
So what changed? Am I optimizing for a different set of priorities? Have I given up on my dreams of becoming a serial entrepreneur and an independent artist? The answers to these questions stem from my past year in the Korean military. My life here as a soldier taught me a couple things that made me change my outlook on work and freedom.
1. Freedom of time is not a virtue
The biggest motivator of my dreams of becoming an independent artist / founder was that I wanted to own my time. I did not want anyone else to dictate how I spend my time. Living in the army, a disciplined environment where I do not have control over my time, made me realize that time is not an asset you can save up like money. Time is meant to be spent, committed, and exchanged.
By my second year of college, I found it difficult to commit to anything. I was scared that any form of commitment was locking away future time that could have been spent doing something better. I looked down upon normal jobs, student clubs, formal organizations. But, by not committing to a single thing, I was not saving time, I was losing it. I wasted valuable time that was given to me to be spent arduously on a job, a relationship, a research problem, an organization, so forth.
My life so far has been like wandering around tasting counters. I’ve lived around the world with several different titles: [student, rapper, songwriter, software engineer, soldier, founder, “frat guy”]. While I found success in a lot of these positions, I haven’t committed deeply enough to any of these titles to the point where I fully identified with it. My time was always divided and so were my identities.
Working as a soldier here, I fully identify myself with the work that I do here and it makes me happy. I spend my 8-to-5s serving the country, and spend time off by learning and writing. Although my time is the furthest thing away from being “mine”, I feel a sense of alignment that I’ve never felt before, a freedom of the mind, not of time. I believe that I can find this alignment outside the army (which is not without its negatives, or else I’d just stay here) by committing my time into companies with high talent density and mission-driven culture.
2. Consistent effort requires a community
Here in the army, I go through the same motions every single day. I am required to; soldiers are enforced by a system and a community. I am surprised now at how much joy I find in this communal system of living in rituals. Previously, I was bounded by endless opportunities and ideas that I could not stick to for more than a month. I realize now, that since I worked on most of these ideas alone, I had the easy option of quitting or neglecting the project until I moved onto the next idea.
Looking back, most of the times I’ve stuck to a single endeavor was when I was a part of a team. That is how I kept myself accountable and was able to start profitable startups or projects that led to results. Social friction kept me from slipping away from focused work.
Of course, not everyone is the same as me. There are many people who can stick to things by themselves until they succeed. But I have too many ideas. The least resistant path for me is to simply explore a new idea when my current one becomes stale. My experience at the army is what showed me that it’s possible for me to keep working past excitement through habits and rituals. When the initial spark of motivation subdues, I need a system and a community to keep me working until the fruits of my labor ripen.
Now that I’ve chosen to seek employment, this brings me to the following questions:
- Where do I want to work?
- What do I want to do for work?
- What skills and interests do I possess that I can apply at a company?
I will now shift the target audience of this article toward potential employers who may be reading this.
Where I’m headed next
I’m looking for a company that obsesses over talent density, first-principles thinking, and thoughtful impact. Preferably, I want to work toward a mission of bettering human-AI interaction, enabling humans to wield AI, and not the other way around.
My current interests are:
- Mechanistical Interpretability
- Distributed Model Training / Inference
- Modern Anthropology, Online Cultures
- Applied AI on Human-Centric UX
- Efficient Language for AI
My previous works (in chronological order represented by age)
Songwriting, Music Marketing (16-18)
- Brought in 100M+ impressions for rappers on platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram
- Independently recorded, engineered, marketed my own music in the genre of alternative rap & pop. 1.5M+ streams on Spotify, peaked around 50k monthly listeners
ML Research / Self Learning (19-20)
- TeenageAGI
- AI Agent that “thought” before acting (before the explosion of inference-time compute) and kept memory stored in a vector database (considered new at the time)
- ~1k stars on Github
- Multimodal Speech Recognition for Language-Guided Embodied Agents
- Using vision to assist noisy speech recognition of embodied agents
- End-to-end multimodal model that retrieved 30% more masked speech compared to unimodal architecture
- Research presented at INTERSPEECH 2023
- Weighted Cosine Similarity
- Proposal of modified cosine similarity algorithm based on human neurology concepts such as recency and context bias
- Council of AI
- LLM-based judge system that only allows safe inputs to be accepted to an AI agent through multiple models that act together to form a decision
DSNR (19)
- Technical Co-founder of an AI Image generation assistant based on Discord that helped non-technical users seamlessly prompt Midjourney through AI-generated questionnaire based UX.
- 20k users, 70-100k projected ARR, exited by selling it to a solo-entrepreneur
Mutual (20)
- Hired as a Technical Co-founder for startup building AI NPCs with memory, role-playing abilities, and prompt-injection security (based on council-of-ai) that can be deployed into virtual environments such as video games and websites through an API.
- Managed 3 mid-level SWEs and a web designer as startup hired more through funding
- Tested in beta-production for Goose Goose Duck, Steam game with 67M registered users and 700k concurrent users at its peak
Essays / Literature (20-21)
- Where are we, at 2025? - cultural critique / reflection piece on AI’s sociocultural impacts accelerating the attention-driven economy brought on by COVID-19
- Where am I, at 21? - a poetic reflection on turning 21 years old
- love is a painfully boring thing - a comparison between the repetitiveness of love and a military flag-raising ritual
Ponder (21)
- Media consumption platform designed to make users ponder about small pieces of AI-generated lessons and writings, full-stack solo-project made during military service
- Memory based algorithm that learns about users as they interact with the system; platform generates content more suited to the user as time goes
- Tag feature where user can steer generations to certain topics or combination of topics
If you’re recruiting and you think that I can make an impact at your company:
let’s have a chat!
Side Notes for Potential Recruiters
- I’m a Korean citizen studying CS + Business at the University of Southern California
- I’m currently a rising junior (after my service) and am looking for a Summer internship or a full-time job which can support a visa that can legally replace my F-1.
- I have access to STEM OPT, allowing me to work under OPT for 3 years.
- I’ve written more about my personal story here, if you’re interested.