Week 23 report - 2024

Events:

• Released a new version of Sophia for web. It took us about 5 days to put it together. You can try it for yourself, if you're a value investor in Korea. (Currently it displays results in Korean.)
• Met Min, an awesome friend of mine, who's working on Umoh — a closed social network for networking events or conferences. She told me that I should be more aggressive and shouldn't too intimidated. She asked if anyone's paying right now and I said no. She said, "Then what are you scared about?". I guess that I was being waaaaaay too conservative. Plus, she said that if the market is big enough, the users that you've let down will be so small compared to what it will become later. Funny thing cuz I've known this as a fact and have conducted multiple user tests but haven't really felt it at heart. Back to becoming reckless again — not taking any comments on that I am acting like a fool. I'd rather live as a fool than die as a smartass. (Already scheduled 10 meetings today.)

Thoughts:

• Really thinking that Philo needs to be built ASAP. Otherwise, we're going to die for sure. We are never going to build a business that is solely based on Sophia
• Been thinking about the essence of business lately. I think that how a business works can be broken down into three parts: team(corp), product, and customers(market).
  • The equation is simple. Team makes product, customers use product. Product is valuable, customers pay for it. Team uses money to make better product, customers keep paying.
  • For each entity underlies risk factors that decides the fate of the business. Either the team operates shitty, product is shitty, or the market is shitty. Factors depend on what the business is.
• Starting to understand that what building a good business and an interesting startup is different. FYI, they are not exclusive from one another.
  • Building a good business focuses more on the intrinsic value of what the organization, and how it can spread it to the world in an everlasting way. A good business is a gold ore. It is persistent.
• Building an interesting startup is quite different. Investors must LOVE it. You know for sure because they start pouring money. An interesting startup is a bomb. It needs its fuse extended regularly.