Startup Success, Built Through Collaboration and Love
With Christmas and New Year’s falling early in the course, it was hard to focus at first. But a few weeks in, my development skills improved and I came to understand the essential parts of building an app, which helped a great deal. In particular, by actually building out ideas that each of us had long carried but never had the chance to implement because of coursework, I got a real taste of the atmosphere of an early-stage startup.
Education in Korea often focuses on competing with others or following predetermined answers. But this course emphasized forming teams autonomously and valued communication and collaboration. I’ll also long remember watching instructors who had achieved great success still give back to society, and treating students with genuine respect as equals. I believe this kind of education contributes to more than just learning skills or making money — it helps build happier companies and a happier society.
Startups fail far more often than they succeed. Like humanity’s first steps on the moon, you have to take on great risk while continuing to research relentlessly and stay humble. But if you want something badly enough, you can move closer to that dream — and even if it doesn’t come true, the experiences and stories gained along the way stay with you. In fact, what we call innovation today may well be something someone else dreamed of and worked out centuries ago. Alan Turing drew inspiration for mathematics and science from a childhood friend, Christopher Morcom, and after Morcom’s early death, he came to hold deep questions about the relationship between spirit and matter, mind and machine. Those questions later led to his pioneering work on “thinking machines.” Even if you lead a nation to victory in war, or gain wealth no one has ever possessed, happiness ultimately lies in being with the people you love. Someone who has realized that can live a fulfilling life even with very little right now.
Many of Korea’s large corporations have been struggling lately, and the problem of job creation hasn’t been easy to solve either. But if you shift your perspective, there’s so much left to do. Korea, too, will one day need the capability to reach the moon and Mars, and someone needs to show a different path to students who, caught up in an exam-driven system, haven’t had the space to reflect on their own lives. A moment of success or wealth might guarantee a somewhat stable life for a while. But aren’t we living to a hundred these days? If you keep researching and working steadily toward something over a long stretch of time, is there really anything in the world you couldn’t achieve?
Rather than measuring success by power or social status, I hope that stories of success built on sincerity and love will keep appearing, one by one, giving people hope. Time spent with someone you love is, in itself, something like a miracle. I hope more of those miraculous stories keep being written.
Additional Resources
- CS492 Startup and Mobile App Development Practicum ( Seok-Young Ryu, Byung-Gyu Chang ) – Final project result: https://github.com/SuminHan/UnityChan
