Minseok Lee

I'm heading back to Korea. Several investors and accelerators showed interest here, but I realized I don't have a problem I genuinely want to solve for the next decade.

I walked away from a profitable AI service because it felt meaningless. Taking other people's money to build something I'm not passionate about seems wrong. I'd rather work and study until I find the right opportunity.

Meeting impressive people here made me want better credentials and experiences—things I used to dismiss as unimportant. I also realized I don't need to build in America. Korea has plenty of success stories, and it's ultimately where I want to live.

These three months taught me a lot about myself. Now I'll work, study, and build interesting side projects until the right idea emerges. I'm not giving up on entrepreneurship. Just being more thoughtful about it.

I'm grateful I can handle alcohol. At a dinner with the hacker house founder and his friends, we shared stories about unicorn founders and dating mishaps. Several people left early when they couldn't keep up with the drinks.

I stayed until the end and made it to the second venue—a nice restaurant where the real conversations happened. By the end of the night, I had a referral to a top-tier VC and promises of introductions to Korea's best entrepreneurs.

I used to judge people who took pride in their drinking ability. Now I see it differently. Stamina matters when relationships form over long dinners.

Great work doesn't happen alone. Building relationships is everything.

The service launched a week ago and revenue is already flowing in. I picked a validated market, so I expected it to work—but seeing money hit the account is still satisfying.

Building it over the past month clarified something: I need to work on things that matter. The success made this more obvious, not less. Making money by letting people chat with AI characters feels meaningless.

So I'm apologizing to my investor, handing over the service for free, and walking away. People might think I'm crazy for abandoning something that's working, but cutting it off now feels right for everyone involved.

Going forward, I'll work on things I find meaningful—things that improve the world. Money follows competence anyway. I might regret this decision later, but I know it's the right one.

In college, I ran a group called NOW (Network over Wine) where smart people discussed ideas over drinks. The premise was simple: books teach you things, but conversations teach you different things.

Last night felt like those college sessions, except the group included CEOs from major Korean conglomerates. We debated business, economics, technology, and society. Ages ranged from early 20s to late 30s, but everyone brought sharp, well-reasoned perspectives.

What struck me: intelligence doesn't correlate with age. The sharpest insights came from people who never stopped learning, regardless of when they were born.

Success seems to require constant study, good timing, and luck. But surrounding yourself with people who think deeply—that's something you can control.

I sold all three services I built in college. Each had meaningful results and I'd grown attached to them over the years, but holding on felt like the wrong move.

I want to solve bigger problems for more people and make more money doing it. After years of building skills, I'm confident I can create something larger than what I've done before.

If the buyers turn these into massive successes, I might feel a twinge of regret. But I don't second-guess the decision itself.

Success would make this choice feel inevitable in hindsight.

I met actual hackers at the hacker house. The CEO and co-founder both reverse-engineer competitor code to inform their product decisions. I did ethical hacking in the military, but this felt like a different league entirely.

When I questioned their approach, they seemed genuinely puzzled by my hesitation. "Why wouldn't you do this?" they asked.

It made me wonder if this level of ruthlessness is what survival in San Francisco requires. I'm not planning to hack competitors anytime soon, but their relentless drive is worth studying.

Maybe I need to be more ruthless in other ways.

I started questioning my current project—an AI character chat service for the Vietnamese market. Being in San Francisco, surrounded by talks of ambitious projects, made me wonder if I should be building something bigger.

Then today, a product lead from Korea's top AI company visited the hacker house. Turns out he'd worked on something similar. He told me these services are not only profitable but also genuinely help people who lack social connections—those who find comfort in AI conversations to ease their loneliness.

That conversation shifted my perspective. I'd been embarrassed whenever people asked what I was building, giving vague answers. Now I'm starting to see this could actually matter to someone.

I'm launching in two weeks. Beyond the revenue potential, I'm curious how many people we might actually help.

I moved into a hacker house in San Francisco. The room feels like a dorm, but there's a private workspace and the view is decent enough.

What strikes me most is the caliber of people here. On my first day, I met an eclectic group of builders: a team that left Toss (a leading Korean fintech unicorn) and now pulls in $1M annually with their fortune-telling app, partners from top-tier VCs, and an 18-year-old serial entrepreneur obsessed with politics. We shared wine and crashed in the same room, which is how you actually get to know people.

The fortune-telling app founder even offered to connect me with his network in Vietnam for my business there—unprompted, genuine help between strangers who'd just met.

They all checked out the next day, but if this is what day one looks like, I'm curious what the next year will bring. The people you surround yourself with shape everything else.

I recently visited Silicon Valley for the first time for a hackathon. I’ve spent years thinking I didn’t need to be here to build a great company. A few days in, I realized I was wrong.

The network effect is something you have to see to believe. It’s ridiculously easy to meet the top 0.001% of founders here. In just a few days, I found myself in casual conversations with people who had sold their startups to Google, founders of category-defining AI companies, and top achievers climbing the ranks at breakneck speed inside tech giants. Nowhere else lets you consume people like that so effortlessly.

But what really struck me was how differently people here think. Founders in the Valley are ambitious, motivated, and open-minded. They don’t just want to build a company—they want to change the world, solve impossible problems, or become billionaires (not millionaires). Compare that to the mindset I’ve seen in Boston or Korea, where most people optimize for stability, career safety, or incremental success. Even the older founders here still have the energy and vision of a 20-year-old. That’s how I want to age.

Sure, you can argue there are ambitious people everywhere. And plenty of great companies were born elsewhere. But the density here is different, and it matters. The people around you shape your thinking. Before coming here, I thought I had to start at a top firm first—everyone around me said that was the safe and logical move. Then I had a conversation with a legendary founder who told me to come to Silicon Valley and start an AI company instead. His conviction flipped my perspective overnight. Who you talk to matters.

So now, I’m set on moving here after graduation. A few days ago, I was still debating where to go. Now, I see what I was missing—serendipitous encounters, potential co-founders, investors, and employees all within reach. If you want to build something truly great, you have to optimize for success. Moving to the Bay Area is one of the easiest ways to do that. There are harder problems to solve, but this one is simple.

For any student still on the fence—come visit. See it for yourself. It might change everything.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the fastest way to become a millionaire. After running the numbers a few times, the traditional approach—climbing the career ladder and saving a portion of my salary—seems too slow. I have a clear goal: hit a million before 30. And from where I stand, only two paths seem realistic—building IT projects that generate revenue or finding alpha in the market through quantitative trading.

I’ve spent the last decade building products. I’ve gotten somewhat good at it. But after years of effort, I’ve also learned that getting people to open their wallets is hard—really hard. No matter how skilled I become, the odds of building a product that generates millions in recurring revenue are low. In fact, if a project is making even a few hundred thousand in recurring revenue, raising millions in funding is often easier than scaling the business to that level organically.

Quantitative trading is another option. I’ve spent years exploring it, thinking my technical and mathematical skills might give me an edge. But the deeper I go, the harder it looks. High-frequency trading is out of reach for an individual investor, and finding alpha in small, unexplored markets is a massive challenge. Value investing might be a more practical way to grow wealth—but even that requires capital to start.

Then there’s the most straightforward path: maximizing my income by leveraging my skills. Last summer, I ran a little experiment to see how much I could make trading time for money. Between taking on software projects and teaching at coding bootcamps and cram schools, I realized I could technically save up to $200K a year. That means I could hit a million by 30, as long as I worked like hell and invested wisely to outpace inflation.

I’m still not sure which path is best. But I do know one thing—I won’t be satisfied working for someone else or doing something predictable. I’m only motivated by building something new, solving important problems, and taking risks. The challenge is figuring out how to reach financial freedom first, so I can afford to take those risks. Maybe I’m thinking clearly, or maybe I’m chasing an impossible dream. Either way, I hope to build something that changes the world—and soon.

As I get closer to graduating, I’ve been thinking a lot about what path to take. Will I be a hacker or a hustler? In other words, will I become an engineer who can build anything or a business person who can solve any business problem?

For a long time, I believed coding wasn’t something I needed to learn from a job. I thought self-teaching and building things on my own was enough. Business skills, on the other hand, seemed like something you could only pick up by working in real companies, solving real problems, and dealing with real people. That’s why I spent most of my internships in business roles while building and launching products on the side. But after working in various companies, I realized that assumption wasn’t quite right.

Software people pick up business skills quickly. If “business skills” even exist as a distinct category, they’re often easier to learn than technical ones. But business people trying to learn technical concepts—especially deeply technical ones—struggle much more. And the biggest problem? They can’t build things.

Beyond that, engineers have more leverage. They’re the hardest to replace, often the highest paid, and, in the software world, they’re usually the ones with the best ideas. More importantly, they have the ability to execute those ideas themselves. There have been successful non-technical founders, but being able to build something yourself makes you dangerous. It separates you from the majority of founders.

So here I am, choosing to start my career as an engineer. I’ve never loved coding for the sake of coding, but learning on the job under pressure seems like the fastest way to truly master it. Plus, American investors seem to value builders more than anything else. Hopefully, this is the right call—and that it gets me closer to my dream of building a unicorn tech company.

I've hired over 20 interns for my startup in the last month.

While it was exciting to lead a large team, the drawbacks of overstaffing were more pronounced than the benefits. Interestingly, our team's effectiveness seemed to diminish with 20 members, compared to the initial 5. Why might this be?

This is likely due to a problem of talent density, where even 1-2 just adequate performers can affect the entire group's performance. This idea was notably put forward by Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix.

I was familiar with this concept from his book "No Rules Rules." However, I thought that given the nature of my business, which primarily targets international students, having many international students on my team would create a compound effect in promoting the app and solving the cold-start problem. But this wasn't necessarily the case.

In fact, our most skilled team members often felt demotivated and exasperated, either feeling like they were the only ones contributing or having to navigate the shortcomings of less skilled members. Additionally, the extensive communication required with the entire team turned out to be counterproductive, further impeding our progress.

Faced with a difficult choice, the solution seems clear: let go of the less capable members. It's always regrettable to part ways with team members, but it appears to be the only viable option. This action, I hope, will foster the company's growth and propel us forward.

I recently sold my first startup for a moderate amount of cash. At first, I was quite happy to earn real cash from my business endeavor, but upon further reflection, I felt somewhat confused.

The issue was the modest sale price. When I envisioned selling businesses, I expected an exit in the millions, which is still a fraction of my ultimate financial goal.

This led to deeper contemplation. I had dedicated nearly a year to this project and the return was just a moderate sum. At this rate, I doubted if I would ever reach my goal of earning $100 million before turning 30.

Seeking clarity, I embarked on some research, hoping to determine if I was on the path to success. What I found was intriguing. Many of the successful individuals I admire achieved their status through a series of smaller triumphs.

For instance, Elon Musk began by selling his first internet company, X.com, before venturing into groundbreaking projects like Tesla and SpaceX. Similarly, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, launched his journey by selling a modest mobile SNS prior to establishing ChatGPT. It appears that many successes are built on previous, smaller accomplishments. While my initial success may seem minor, I believe it marks the beginning of my own journey to greatness.

Last week, I achieved something rather unexpected: I hired Mike, my boss and a Senior Business Development Manager, to be a part of my startup—and all for a modest amount of equity. The irony isn't lost on me.

Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to intern in business development at a Singapore-based tech startup. My goal was to deepen my understanding of startups and sharpen my business acumen, especially since I'd had some setbacks in my own entrepreneurial endeavors.

That’s when I met Mike. From the get-go, our professional relationship was seamless. So impressed was he by my entrepreneurial spirit that he offered me his business card during our initial interview, suggesting I reach out if I needed employment.

I was fortunate enough to land the job, which allowed me to work closely with Mike. He turned out to be more than just a proficient manager; he excelled in business development, sales, and marketing, earning him the status of the company's top performer.

Recognizing our shared interests and effective teamwork, I saw the potential for something greater. I summoned the courage to schedule a one-on-one meeting where I pitched my startup idea to him. Before I could even conclude, Mike enthusiastically agreed to come onboard.

So here I am, an intern not long ago, now partnering with someone who has years of experience over me. It's an exciting and curious twist, and I can’t wait to see the synergy we'll generate and the impact we’ll have. Keep an eye out for us!

NFT collections emerged as an exhilarating trend in 2022, with digital assets being sold online for astonishing sums. This trend even extended to seemingly simple creations, such as Ether Rock, where basic rock drawings could command up to $500,000 each. But after a significant crash in 2022, and a cooling of the crypto market in 2023, the gold rush seems to have subsided.

The opportunity to easily become rich by selling NFTs has dwindled, making it more challenging to rise above the noise. Yet, I've decided to embark on my first and final NFT venture: Ether Ring.

Drawing inspiration from Ether Rock, I've crafted 100 ring pixel art NFTs, each with an Ethereum gem and unique colorways and narratives. My strategy is to emulate CryptoPunks by gifting the first 50 rings to notable influencers in the collecting community and selling the remaining 49 at $50,000 apiece, targeting a total of $2.45 Million. I'll also present a specially designed ring to my favorite person in the world.

Will this venture transform me into a millionaire? Time holds the answer, and I'm eager to see how this unique experiment unfolds.

A renowned Chinese investor group recently approached me with a proposition that most young entrepreneurs dream of - they wanted to invest in my school project. Famous for investing $300,000 in each startup they back, this offer was a real turning point, propelling me into serious reflection.

After extensive deliberation, I made the unexpected decision to turn it down. My reasons?

1) Education comes first.
Juggling the demands of a startup, especially when funded by external investors, requires a significant commitment of time and responsibility. It's a task that is nearly insurmountable when coupled with a rigorous academic workload. After all, I've invested more than $80,000 per year into my education. It deserves my undivided attention and serious commitment.

2) Lack of passion for the project.
It's a harsh truth: most startups fail. And those that succeed are typically led by founders who are deeply passionate about their idea and are willing to dedicate years of their life to nurturing and developing it. My project began as a two-week long 'toy' experiment in my dorm room. Unless I pivot, I fear my enthusiasm will wane over time, a circumstance not conducive to success.

3) Personal readiness, or rather, lack thereof.
Running a successful startup requires a myriad of skills - from leadership and effective communication to a deep understanding of technology and marketing. I'm a sophomore in college, and while I'm developing these skills, I'm not there yet. To lead a successful company, I need to evolve into a more seasoned individual.

Declining a potential $300,000 investment was undeniably tough. Opportunities of this magnitude are rare, and there's no guarantee another one will come my way. But I'm optimistic.

I believe in growth and progress. I believe that if I continue to improve each day, my opportunity will come. Until then, my focus is to become a little better every day. Sometimes, success is about knowing when to say 'no', knowing when to prioritize, and being self-aware. And this decision was a lesson in exactly that.