Again, a Time Unknown to Anyone

Chapter 2

I didn't see Heojun that day either.

When I went to school the next day, my friends were talking about the broadcast from the previous night.

"Did you see Heojun yesterday?"

"No, I didn't."

"Were you up all night again?"

"Yeah."

That year, there was a rumor that on Monday and Tuesday nights, the number of people on the streets would decrease. It was an exaggeration, but when Heojun's show started, restaurants would switch channels and even the pubs in front of the school had TVs turned towards it.

I was at a copy shop near school at that time.

My friends and I were sitting at a table, spreading out printouts. The paper fresh from the printer was still warm, and a few misprinted pages were scattered on the floor.

"How many copies do we need?"

"Five."

"In color?"

"The cover should be in color. It has to look good."

We were trying to start a business.

To be precise, we were making a proposal to get funding to start a business. We had never started a business before, and we didn't have a proper product. We just heard that if you wrote a good proposal, you could get money.

And it turned out to be true.

The proposal we made at the copy shop near school with my friends, staying up all night, was over thirty pages long. We printed the cover in color and gave the title the most grandiose name possible. Looking back now, our ideas for what we would create were less important than the story of how we thought the world would change.

The number of internet users will continue to grow.

In the future, all companies will meet customers through the internet.

The e-commerce market will explode.

We don't remember where we got those words from. It could have been a newspaper, a magazine, or someone's presentation materials. The important thing was that at the time, it sounded plausible.

And in fact, the world was moving in that direction.

There were posters for startup support programs on school bulletin boards.

Youth entrepreneurship. Venture nurturing. Information and communication industry support. University student business plan competition.

The names were slightly different, but the content was similar.

It said that they would provide funding if you had an idea.

One of my friends who saw the first announcement said,

"Should we apply for this?"

"Apply for what?"

"We'll figure it out."

Now, I think the order should have been reversed.

It wasn't that we had something to do and were looking for funding; it was that we had funding and then thought of something to do.

At the time, it didn't seem strange at all.

We weren't the only ones.

Among our seniors, there was someone who received money to create an internet shopping mall, and there were rumors that a company founded by some students from another school had received investment.

Tens of millions of won.

Hundreds of millions.

The amount grew every time we heard it.

At first, it was three billion won, and a few days later it became five billion won. After about a month, someone said that the company had received several hundred million won.

Whether it was true or not wasn't important.

The important thing was the atmosphere that something like that could happen to students like us.

We submitted our proposal too.

We wore rented suits for the presentation.

My friend didn't know how to tie a necktie properly, so he looked at a picture printed from the internet several times. The judges looked over the presentation materials we had prepared and asked us various questions.

"What is your revenue model?"

My friend answered,

"We plan to secure users through free services initially and monetize through advertising and corporate partnerships later."

I nodded beside him.

We didn't really know what that meant either.

The judges probably knew too.

But no one seemed to mind.

Everyone was saying similar things at the time.

Gather users first.

Secure traffic.

Build a community.

And then make money.

How to make money was a problem for later.

We received a call a few days later that we had been selected.

We didn't say anything for a while after checking the amount. It was an amount of money I couldn't even touch, even if I worked part-time for several years.

My friend spoke first,

"Hey, are we really going to do this?"

Only then did everyone start laughing.

That day, we drank at a pork restaurant in front of the school.

We even decided on a new company name.

The first name we came up with was considered cheesy, and everyone agreed that using two English words would make it sound like a venture company, according to someone.

We also decided on the CEO right there.

The friend who gave the best presentation became the CEO.

The one who wrote the best was in charge of planning.

I was in charge of development.

No one officially assigned roles.

It was simply because I knew a little more about computers.

Although I majored in programming, it wasn't that I had the confidence to create something decent.

But there were no other options.

"You have to do the development."

My friend said.

"Okay."

I replied.

That was it.

We also found a space that was too embarrassing to call an office.

We put four desks in a small room and bought computers with the funding. For the first time, I bought a pretty good computer with money that wasn't mine.

Just opening the box made me feel like we were really a company.

We also made business cards.

"Development Team" was written under my name.

The development team was just me.

The first thing we had to do was create a website.

The next task was to create the service we wrote about in our proposal. The problem was that no one knew how to make it.

My friend asked,

"When can you show us?"

"What?"

"What we made."

I thought for a moment.

"A month?"

"Will it take that long?"

"Then how long will it take?"

My friend didn't answer.

Neither did I.

In the end, we wrote down a month as the deadline.

There was no basis for it.

We bought books for several days.

HTML book. JavaScript book. Server programming book. Database book.

The books piled up on one side of the desk.

Every time we needed a new skill, we bought another book.

One day, we opened a book and typed in the example code exactly as it was written.

A button appeared on the screen.

When I clicked the button, it moved to the next page.

We all gathered around the monitor.

"Is this working?"

"Yeah."

"Is this our service?"

"Not yet."

"But it's working, right?"

My friend laughed.

I laughed too.

At that moment, just the fact that it was working was enough.

A few days later, we started staying up all night.

We attended classes during the day and went to the office in the evening.

We ate late-night snacks and coded until dawn.

Sometimes we would push two chairs together and take a short nap before getting back up.

It was hard, but strangely I didn't hate it.

It wasn't something someone told us to do.

There was a thought that if we did well, something good might happen.

I didn't know exactly what that "something" was.

I didn't have a strong desire to make a lot of money.

Some of my friends talked about changing their cars once they succeeded, and others said they would sell their company in a few years.

I just laughed listening to those stories.

My thoughts were a little different.

I thought I'd learn something by doing this.

How a company works.

How to create a service.

Whether people actually use what we make.

That was all.

Maybe from the beginning, I didn't really believe that it would be a huge success.

So when I failed, it wasn't as painful as I thought it would be.

A few months passed, and the schedule we had planned kept getting pushed back. When we launched the service, no one came. There was talk of needing to do PR and sales.

At first, I thought that all we had to do was finish development.

But after development was finished, there were endless things that still needed to be done.

The funding ran out faster than I expected.

After buying computers, paying for office space, and spending a little on outsourced design, the numbers quickly dwindled.

Even among my friends, the talk started to change.

"Should we keep doing this?"

Someone said it for the first time.

From the moment that question was raised, it seemed like everyone had been secretly aware of it all along.

That it wouldn't last long.

The company quietly disappeared.

It wasn't a grand process like closing down a business. We cleaned up the office, divided up the computers, and settled the remaining money.

There was one box of business cards left.

I couldn't bring myself to throw them away, so I took them home.

I kept them in a desk drawer for a while.

I thought of them as the remnants of a failed business.

But strangely enough, I continued to work on development after that.

During a job interview, someone asked me,

"What did you do in college?"

I told them the story.

About starting a business with my friends.

About receiving funding and building a service.

About setting up servers, creating databases, and building a website.

The interviewer nodded.

"So you have some practical experience."

I hesitated for a moment before saying,

"Yes, a little bit."

At the time, I didn't really know exactly what "practical experience" meant.

But thanks to that statement, I was able to start working.

Looking back, there wasn't much left from that business. There was no money, no company, and the service disappeared without a trace.

Still, one thing remained.

That just because no one knows how to do something, it doesn't mean you can't start. If you don't know, you can buy a book. And if it's not in the book, you can try doing it yourself.

If it doesn't work, try a different way.

And then, at some point, it might work.

At the time, I didn't think of it as a great ability.

I thought everyone did it that way.

In those days, a lot of people really started that way.

Without knowing anything.

And strangely enough, that was all it took to get started back then.