Nearly 3 years later, the Sewol ferry was raised and transported from its watery grave with the souls that were till left inside.

As a Korean-American with family living in Korea, I saw this tragedy unfolding from two angles, hearing directly from my family as it unfolded and also viewed it from the lens of western medium as a tragedy unfolding halfway across the world and while sad, a short lived headline. Meanwhile in Korea, it was the only discussed nearly daily and plunged an entire nation into not only a state of panic, but also one of concurrent rage and depression.

I couldn’t understand for the life of me while several plane crashes around the world had received so much more attention than the Sewol ferry incident, until I realized what remained on the forefronts of people all around the world, terrorism. Anytime there was an attack, tragedy or crash that swirled in or around the mystery of attack, that’s when people took attention, it’s when the world turned their gaze and said that could happen to me too.

What citizens all around the world need to realize was that the Sewol Ferry incident was an attack on the modern fabric of society and a problem that could arise anywhere in the world. As seen most recently with the impeachment of President Park, the Sewol Ferry incident was actually the tip of the iceberg in the corruption and political scandal that unraveled South Korean politics in a great display of new modern democracy in a republic created just over half a century ago.

The corruption and the cancer of cronyism was so deep rooted and completely metastasized through the system and prevented any rescue from occurring at all. No one needs to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the inefficacy and non-movement through the entire political construct was driven by a myriad of reasons that no one could really understand till this day.

The tragedy of Sewol Ferry has already dissipated in the minds of global citizens as it wasn’t a direct physical attack on anyone notwithstanding the fact that it was one of the largest tragedies involving children in modern history. We should be reminded that the Sewol Ferry was not just Korea’s problem but a direct reminder of our own responsibilities in contributing to the governing structure and demanding accountability.

#Sewol

For those who were with us at the time, late in 2014 we decided to make a full transition from Return on Change to DarcMatter. It’s a process that took a lot of time and brainstorming as well as a clear understanding of the market opportunity. We took something that was difficult to do and then decided to pick something that was at least 1000x times harder to execute. We decided that the startup industry as a specific industry had a variety of limitations that would be make the opportunity less ideal and instead thought that the multi-trillion dollar asset management industry was a better opportunity for us.

When we decided to make the page below go live, it was a dramatic and emotional moment for me personally, but also represented some of the huge opportunities that we were going to undertake.

I give a round of applause for every single team member that saw this process. We saw so much difficulty and obstacle together, but now here he stand.

2014 represented so much change for us. Both Kyiv and NYC offices changed physical locations, which in any company’s life cycle is a pretty big deal. It’s not just a change in environment, but also an opportunity to create and strengthen processes that work as well revive our new collective sense of amazement of what we are doing together.

We had team members that (re)joined us this year and also became a part of our full-time family. Natasha had been with us since the beginning, but we were finally able to snag her full time. Dima and Nikita came on to bring us their capabilities where we needed it most. Now we’re on the hunt for new DM family members that will help us grow DarcMatter to the next level.

Having an international team hasn’t always been the easiest thing, but we’re also one of the rare breeds of startups that wanted to be a global company from day 1 by benefiting from the various expertise and opportunity that exists all across the world. Now we’re going into China to tap the investor market and we will face new challenges, but I’m positive that together we will be able to overcome all things.

As we enter 2016 I want to make sure that I emphasize a few things with everyone:

• A vision for everyone

As we continue to build the company, we have to set a vision that we are all bought into together. It’s a vision that’s not only driven by the management of the company, but every single team member. This is even more important for the team that we have now, as the early team members will help us set a vision that will become clear to everyone who joins us going forward.

• Culture built on Clarity and Communication

Being an international company, we have to be even more focused on building a culture that is built upon clarity and communication with each other. Consistent communication and a culture of open collaboration is something that will be super important for every single team member and we’ll make sure everyone is deeply immersed in this culture. This means feedback, good or bad, should be put into the open so that we can deal with it correctly and we know when we have team members that don’t fit with our culture.

• Constant Learning

Tackling an industry like financial services where there is such a big and long history along with complex regulations requires us to be be constantly up to date on changing trends and market conditions. We should constantly push each other to become increasingly well-versed in everything that we do, so that we are extremely well-prepared to continue to be competitive in all aspects.

I’m really excited for our 2016 as well our very first offsite with more to come where we continue to grow as a company and as a team!

Here are some snapshots of 2015!

I found myself fascinated by the new found excitement and popularity of Korean culture with numerous TV personalities visiting the country and most recently culminating with a Parts Unknown episode in South Korea. A tribute to both it’s food and night culture, but inevitably a big focus on the country’s drinking country. Anthony even put out a list of tips on how to survive the drinking binges of Korea, but found myself curious to the drive that brings Korean people together to drink nearly fearsome amounts.

This is neither an endorsement of the drinking culture of the Korean people nor judgement of any kind.

I personally didn’t grow up with a heavy drinking culture, coming from a religious / conservative familial background. But inevitably grew into it being involved with a strong knit Korean community in NYC. As we got older, we found ourselves potentially imitating those that came before us (for me probably side influence and TV) and consuming alcoholic beverages as many of those before of us.

While it’s one thing to say that culture and history affects the way we live today, I think it’s most interesting for those from a non-Korean perspective to see why the drinking occurs.

Confucian Mentality Driven Conservatism

I think it applies to me as well as to many others, but the general ambience of being brought up in a general Korean background or household implies certain expectations of decorum and behavior during the sober day. Particularly exacerbated in Korea, the work setting typically involves a strict sense of hierarchy and behavior that can cause extra stress throughout the day. This behavior more than not quickly changes with a drink at the end of the day. It often makes me think that Koreans naturally drink because of the stress that is faced throughout the day and the inherent inability to complain sober has left us at the bottom of a green bottle.

Alcohol is Intricately Tied to Culture and Food

As many people may know by now, Korean meals often involve a short green bottle paired with even shorter clear shot glasses. Soju is not a drink that is typically consumed as a standalone beverage. Quite frankly, the beverage itself is quite strong in flavor and medium in strength (about half of vodka) and calls for food to be consumed concurrently. However, even beyond that Korean people coming together to share a meal and commiserate over life is a social contract which has soju built into the fine print. It’s not something that’s really a separate activity, but rather conjoined at the hip and very difficult to separate without active intent.

Drinking is THE Social Activity

For most the phrase ‘let’s grab a drink’ implies connection with the activity of getting people together and enjoying the company of others. Often times with Koreans, the very act of drinking is actually the social activity we are referring to. It doesn’t necessarily have to tie with anything else, but the actual act of libating. You notice this in the ceremony of opening soju bottles, the games that we play that become increasingly complex that involve a certain level of brain power and arithmetic skills. Even the act of actually preparing a drink is a ceremony in and of itself.

I noticed this craze most recently when a new type of soju was released and I found myself frantically searching for availability with my friends. Only a flavored version of the same thing and yet it became an activity.

This isn’t a condemnation of the Korean drinking culture. I’m an active participantant, but I would like non-Koreans to know that the culture is not only full of deliquent drinkers, but that the heavy drinking culture actually has different drivers and causes behind it.

I won’t be using any pictures for this post and I probably won’t be proof reading it either because all of this is accurate in and of itself. There are tons of articles that tell you how to prepare for startups, why it’s so hard, why you should do it, etc, etc, etc. I can keep going, but I wanted to explore the things about your life that may be related to the fact that one becomes a startup founder, but actually have nothing to do with the startup itself. All the sh*t, new found baggage as well as clarity that being a startup founder gives you.

Health Phase 1: Your health goes to shit

Cranking day in and day out, not sleeping just because it’s not the most ideal use of your time and stressing so much that you forget what you’re stressing about:

+ You probably don’t have health insurance and even when you’re paying for health insurance you’re probably too cheap to pay for the deductible unless a bone is sticking out of your left:

x Multiply with eating like shit, attending too many events and probably imbibing too much

= Your health is the first thing to go.

Health Phase 2: Your health becomes an actual concern

There are multiple things that actually occur here some of which includes a certain maturity (which I’ll talk about in a bit), but more importantly the realization that you’re performance is suboptimal (to put it lightly) as your health is slowly deteriorating. If you’re really wise, you’re the lukcy few that has a sage like realization that without health none of this actually matters (I’m not one of these sages). You start eating crazy healthy and start going to the gym and become more disciplined in your extra curricular activities. Take note here.

Money Phase 1: You think you’re richer than you actually are

This can actually apply to the company as well, but I’m only talking about founder finances here. As brave and resourceful as founders are, people need to stop talking about the unbelievable heartbleed stories of working at night in fast food to be able to make it through the days of starting a startup. While intensely motivating, planning better and assuming what you have is NOT enough is a much better way of proceeding. You’ll cut your spending down considerably or work that much harder and faster. Funny thing is there’s a lot of stigma in the industry that startup founders need to lead a pauper life. That’s actually not the case, it’s really just a matter of choice on where and when one spends their funds.

Money Phase 2: You stop thinking about money and start thinking about value

As things start changing and hopefully evolving for the better, as a startup founder you start thinking about value or bang for buck instead of just the almighty dollar. This extends to obviously what you think your money can bring, but also your time, your skillset, partners, investors among so many other things. It’s hard to see the forest from the trees when you are scrambling for every single dollar, but it’s actually really during that time that you have to stop and take a look around.

Personal Phase 1: You’re lonely as sh*t

As a startup founder, it’s hard to find other people to commiserate with. Other founders are typically as busy as you are and have their own unique challenges. Successful entrepreneurs have a different perspective because their successful. Most of your friends aren’t entrepreneurs and while your significant other tries really hard, it’s not something that happens easily. Your family thinks your insane. What ends of actually happening is a long bout of loneliness that you don’t fully appreciate while it’s happening, but potentially manifests in other types of emotional upset. It’s actually loneliness, but when most people haven’t felt this type of loneliness before, it’s hard to b*tch about it, let alone embrace and deal with it.

Personal Phase 2: You realize the difference is your character

As mentioned above, it all starts with this crazy loneliness where you feel like you’re all alone in the world. What you start to realize is that what made you a startup founder is actually your character. It’s as obvious as saying there are no people that are exactly alike. The desire to create, the ambition to stress, the courage to struggle and the audacity to risk it all is actually what made you lonely in the first place. It’s this great awakening that I think can make or break someone.

There’s so much more that I can go on and on about, but these are some of the key realizations that I’ve had in the last 1.7 years or so of entrepreneurship at my own startup. Clarity and going into it with eyes wide open is most certainly helpful, but I doubt there’s anything that can universally prepare all new entrepreneurs.

It probably sounds like a dumb title that’s working to get read. Read or not it’s intended on addressing some of the most ‘important’ topics that have come up in our world recently. Much of it has to do with a hot new social blogging tool called Medium, permeating into the world of film and the realy understanding of Ferguson. If you find it confusing and incoherent, that’s probably because it actually is. I’m trying to find answers for questions that typically arise late evening or potentially over a scotch, but seemingly a lot of these topics have come up over several of these topics that I’ve been thinking about as well.

As a self-proclaimed physicist wannabe, Interstellar dealt with all of the topics that I love thinking about and have even more fun discussing while pretending that I know that I’m talking about. We had spaceships going to black holes, regression of mankind and of course time travel.

I think people love to watch exciting and loud things that stimulate the senses. Without a full appreciation or desire to understand what’s going on in the movie, it can easily become an elongated and more action packed version of the Brief History of Time, which in turn would be very boring because you’re not interested in physics. Further more, I really loved the most hardcore allusions to the time period of the Grapes of Wrath, where the world literally ends.

History nerd, physics nerd and proclivity toward space related loud movies. I know why I like it, but sometimes I ask the question of why others enjoyed it a lot as well.

Time travel is an interesting concept that comes up in a lot of movies, but one of the pervasive themes relating to the time travel itself is the ability to go back FROM the future in order to teach our past selves what to do or not to do to create a more favorable outcome in the future. The whole Ferguson issue brought up flashbacks for me in my relatively short recollection of racially motivated or perceived as racially motivated events involving law enforcement officers. The incidents that I recall from my childhood which I won’t mention here actually involved much more egregious and obvious examples of excessive force. Unfortunately, for those incidents, we didn’t have social media and the connectivity that exists today.

Ferguson became a huge issue, but having seen what I have seen it doesn’t really make sense to me why it’s even a topic of discussion particularly as there is credible evidence involving the physical assault of a police officer. Death is unfortunate in all cases, but what really confuses me here is the fact that this incident somehow became a highly contentious and deemed a racially motivated event that would pervade through life within the United States. I think an important lesson to be learned here is not to break the law and not to assault an armed police office.

What do you think?

I, like many other entrepreneurs, have moments of serious self reflection on the decisions that brought me to become a startup founder and also the decisions that were made from that starting point till today. It’s often such a blur that even sitting down and writing this post is difficult as it takes time to digest and process the last several years. I wanted to digest and process some of the things that I’ve personally experienced as often times I feel like people have polar extremes in terms of misconceptions. Let’s conquer a few myths.

My son is now an ‘entrepreneur.’ That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job. — Ted Turner

Myth

I should start my own company because I hate my job.

If you’re thinking about becoming an entrepreneur because you hate your day job, think again. I’ve heard of countless stories where people have ventured off by themselves because they didn’t like the freedom of creativity or had issues with reporting to the man and living under authority. If you’re seeking the entrepreneurship route not because you’re passionate about it, but because you dislike something else, it’s guaranteed that you won’t last very long. Maybe think about getting another job or exploring different corporation sizes.

If you are indeed a long wolf and you don’t mind standing alone much of the time, startup life may be for you. You’ll be charged with your own authority and responsible for creating a business from scratch while dealing with your team members and managing other stake holders more directly than potentially any other business. Sounds good? Keep reading

Myth

I need a well structured business plan to build a successful startup.

If you’re a planner, it’s really hard to deal with the emotional hits you’re going to take when you realize that your plans aren’t worth squat. If you do decide to take the leap, you’ll quickly realize it’s actually pure chaos that you’ll have to manage and that your job is to make structure and meaning behind this chaos.

Even I made the mistake of spending some time and resources developing what I thought was a robust plan. That document quickly became an internal and living document that allowed my team to come together on vision as opposed to speaking to what be a successful business model.

Myth

Startup life is too stressful to conquer

I think there are a lot of horror stories that have been told around the massive consequences founders have faced with their personal lives relationships with family and friends. This is not to say that startup life is not without it’s sacrifices. However, this is something that you should go into with two eyes wide open. Not expecting outsized amounts of risk and associated stresses is just lying to yourself.

Having said that one of the things that is absolutely true is the irrelevance of the work-life balance. I’m pretty sure I will have many that disagree here, but the Startup life itself is a lifestyle choice which automatically demands that the two blend together if not becoming one and the same. This isn’t a bad thing if you appreciate and love your work.

Myth

If you’re not killing yourself with work, you’re not doing it right

The worse myth of all and I fell for it myself as well. I work more than I did as an investment banker, but from when I started my business till now I work significantly smarter. I’ve met many founders that think that working hard is the key to success, but the risk of burnout and exhaustion is too high to ignore.

Some of the best entrepreneurs I know always talk about working smart and taking time for their family, but this requires a higher form of discipline because having a startup is indeed a crapload of work.

I realized that I do like writing, but often times I find myself completely distracted by the noise of my own thoughts and it’s really hard to put anything together. I saw that more and more people were posting with Medium and I wanted to try it out.

I love it so much more already. There’s no fuss and no widgets that I have to worry about.

Well, this is enough talking about writing and I should probably get to writing, but that will be reserved for the next post. Might even come tonight if I’m still awake.