University Years

Joined a campus startup project called TOAST, an AI-powered curation service.

I worked on product planning, user surveys, notification A/B tests, launch campaigns, and what we dramatically called 'AI personality design' at the time.

It was probably my first experience realizing that recommendation systems are not really recommendation problems. They are trust problems.

We had technology. What we didn't fully understand yet was human motivation.

That lesson stayed with me much longer than the product itself.

Won the grand prize at the Kakao Jeju Coding Base Camp Hackathon with a real-time location sharing service called Yanawa.

The original motivation was honestly very simple: my friends were unbelievably bad at estimating arrival times.

Years later, watching similar ideas appear inside mainstream map products felt strangely satisfying. Not because 'we predicted the future,' but because it reminded me that small behavioral frustrations are often more universal than they first appear.

Joined Virus Network, a startup community focused on entrepreneurship culture.

Organised conferences, recruited sponsors, wrote proposals, cold-called companies, coordinated speakers, and hosted events.

At some point, I realized I was learning more about people from awkward sponsor calls than from marketing textbooks.

Most people are not persuaded by perfect logic. They are persuaded when they feel understood.

That idea later shaped the way I approached product management too.