Right after I graduated from my high school, I went to a local hospital that said, "Oh, there's a 1 cm tumor in your thyroid." And the doctor confirmed that it's actually thyroid cancer. Hearing this unpredicted way really changed my mind of viewing things in the world. One of the core ways I make decisions right now or after that incident is if I were to die after 10 years, would I be doing the things that I'm doing right now? If you're putting 10 years of a timeline, you can eliminate all the other side tracks and excuses that was clouding your vision and the things you want to achieve in life. Obviously, helping AI to automate grunt work of humanity is meaningful. But at the same time, I don't think there's enough founders who are thinking to use AI to empower humanity. If we cannot empower humanities with AI, we lose purpose. There's no meaning as humanity to evolve as AI gets smarter and smarter than us. I urge all the smart and young founders to go after bolder and harder problems to solve. Act on it. Be bolder than others. Make bold bets. If you act on these bold opportunities, you'll be getting surprisingly bigger returns.

I was born in a small island in South Korea. In Korea, which university you are graduating from matters a lot in civil society success. So when I look back in my elementary schools and in middle school years, I would study by myself until 2:00 a.m. to really keep up and really be competitive with my peers. But then when I was turning 14, it kind of hit me. What am I getting after studying hours and hours and being stressed? And I would just read books in different subjects to really try to find an answer with this very question. Why am I studying so hard? What is it for? That's the time when I first found out about founders, people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates who would create something new making impact globally. And I was just fascinated by their stories. I want to be like them. I want to be like those legendary founders who would make great impacts in the world. And my dad's first reaction was founders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They are geniuses and you don't have the DNA. Yun, you just have to study hard, get to a good university in Korea and then just become a lawyer. Looking back, I do agree in the claim that founders are special people. But at the same time, I didn't think that I'm unccapable of becoming a founder. So other than just obeying to his words were kind of coming down, I really thought if I make this $100 as an allowances that I have saved so far in my piggy bank to $200 and bring back to my dad, he would now believe that I'm worthy of the founder. So I went to a Korean street market and then try to sell backpacks and it was freezing cold and no one wanted to buy a backpack. So I remember I failed selling a single backpack for 2 hours. My hand was frozen like this because I was grabbing my back like this. So now I try to sell in different ways and using a different strategy where what is unique to myself. Oh, it's my story like why am I selling these packbacks in the first place? I was mainly targeting people who seemed like who would have a son like me. So I'll reach out to them and say the thing I'm selling to you right now isn't a backpack. It's a memory. Every time you're wearing this backpack, you'll think of like myself selling these backpacks in a freezing winter in the street market even though you are down or you have some challenges like you are going throughout the day you'll be thinking of those memory and then getting some courage. So I sold my first backpack with that story. But then one thing hit me once again where is this one I wanted to do as a founder? I wanted to found a company that is longlasting creating something durable and something new. That point on I decided if I want to be a founder I need to be technical. I need to learn the hard skills so that I can build the softwares and I can build a product so that I can sell because I really wanted to start a generational global company. Coming to Berkeley I founded my first company after a month I entered to the college. Prior to the current direction of founding Pensive, I was pivoting eight times throughout the whole year and going through a lot of these processes. There was something missing. The biggest thing that was missing was a founder market fit. Am I a founder who can actually pursue this idea for the next 10 years?

I love a framework called Ikigai. Ikigai is a framework where when you're choosing something to do you have to consider four different things altogether: you should do a thing that you love, you should do a thing that you're good at, you should do a thing where the world needs and you should do a thing which you can paid for. Learning and education, energy and climate change and healthcare and curing cancer. Now the thing that I was good at, I thought I was particularly good at experience at learning and education. Prior to founding Pensive, I worked on a lot of machine learning models and language models and adopting them inside education at a company called Grid. Coming to Berkeley, the first class I took was called CS61A. It had 2,000 students. Professors obviously wouldn't even remember my name. Imagine yourself, you're an instructor. Now you are grading 1,000 students worth submissions in a single day. When you were over 500 submissions, you're just mechanically circling. I think that was my biggest pain point when I was a tutor at Berkeley. So that's really the point the pain point that Pensive wanted to eliminate. How can we remove these routine mechanical and repetitive grading tasks so that faculties and TAs can actually focus on giving more feedback. We quickly just designed the landing page in a Figma mockup. We didn't even deploy the landing page. And we show that mockup to the professor. He was saying actually the AI looks cool but AI is the thing that I need the most. Can I try AI first? And that was when we had this aha moment. One of my core strength and the things I think I did well in the past is being resourceful. I would send emails to UCLA faculties. If the full day is actually booked, I would actually fly in and then meet the instructors. That's how we got the first 10 colleges. Basically me flying around the entire nation, meeting these faculties in person and persuading them to use Pensive.

Pensive's goal in 2026 is to be licensed over hundreds of universities across the nation. After that milestone, we want to go after direct to consumers and become an ideal AI native learning institutions. I think in the future AI native schools will be transferring more as a socialization environment whereas most of the components of getting some knowledge will be happen very intimately with 101 AI tutors. The new generation they'll be never have a single chance to be smarter than ChatGPT. That's why I'm founding Pensive. If we cannot empower humanities with AI, we lose purpose. The most unique skills that I think people should learn is an ability to make good decisions in uncertain environments. My personal life motto is that every event feels like a destiny if you know your path. As you practice making those conscious decisions in uncertain situations, you are consciously making a step forward to your own path. As these conscious choices accumulate that forms your unique path. No one including AI can replicate yourself and your path that you have walked on. So act on it. Be bolder than others. Make bold bets. If you act on these bold opportunities, you'll be getting surprisingly bigger returns.