I did not start building ohm. because I thought the world needed another social platform. I started building it because I know what it feels like to become legible before becoming real.
Much of my early life in Korea was spent inside systems of praise, comparison, and recognition. I was a high-achieving kid. I learned quickly how to survive through discipline, titles, and external approval. For a long time, I believed endurance itself was virtue: that if I worked hard enough, tolerated enough, and achieved enough, I would eventually arrive at the life I was supposed to want. I mistook admiration for alignment. I was praised, and I deceived myself into thinking the path was mine.
It was not.
From sunrise to midnight, I studied for what I thought was my dream: becoming a doctor. But even then, there was a split inside me. My body kept working while my mind was already elsewhere. I continued not because I was certain, but because stopping would put me nowhere. Back then, failure was never just failure for me. It meant falling behind, becoming nothing, proving that I had misread my entire life. That was the violence of it: I was being rewarded for a self I had not consciously chosen.
The crack came one August night. I remember looking at the sky, watching a plane pass overhead, and feeling something become clear with frightening force: I had to leave Korea. I could not live like that anymore. It was not yet a plan, but it was imperative. I felt a larger world calling me outward—toward freedom, risk, and a future I would have to author for myself. No one around me was doing what I was about to do. There was little guidance, no obvious structure, and no guarantee that any of it would work. But obedience had become more frightening than uncertainty.
After high school, with almost nothing certain ahead of me, I left alone for London on the cheapest flight I could afford. I was eighteen. I wandered through parks, free museums, unfamiliar neighborhoods. I had too much time, too little money, and no stable narrative about who I was becoming. So I did the only thing I could do: I talked to people. People of different ages, backgrounds, professions, and temperaments. People whose lives would never have crossed mine in the world I had left behind.
That changed me more than any institution ever had.
I began to understand something that has never left me since: when two people meet, it is not merely person meeting person. It is world meeting world. Every individual carries a private interior universe—of memory, longing, fear, contradiction, and possibility. To enter conversation with another person is to stand at the threshold of that world. And strangely, it is often through the encounter with someone else's life that one becomes more able to perceive one's own.
That is how I became more myself. And I wish I had done this sooner.
Not through certainty. Not through titles. Not through optimized self-definition. Through friction. Through contrast. Through surprise. Through hearing stories that made my own life appear differently. I was ambitious but lost, high-achieving but disconnected from myself. What I needed was not more validation. I needed human context. I needed spaces where I did not have to arrive already coherent.
There is very little space for that now.
We live in a culture obsessed with conclusion. Labels, answers, identities, solutions, validation, positioning. Everywhere, there is pressure to become fixed before one has even had the chance to fully unfold. I have become increasingly convinced that one of the deepest crises of modern life is that there is no real space for people mid-process. No space to be intelligent but uncertain, ambitious but unformed, contradictory yet alive. We are pushed to present ourselves as finished products long before we have actually become anyone.
That is why I care so much about honesty—but not honesty in the shallow confessional sense. I mean the courage to remain corrigible: open to revision, unafraid of being wrong, willing to be changed by encounter. To me, that is one of the most human qualities a person can have. Not perfection. Not certainty. Revisability. The capacity to stay alive inside one's own becoming.
The modern technological environment often works against this. Existing social platforms reward performance over presence, consumption over encounter, speed over depth. People are flattened into signals, brands, identities, and utilities. We increasingly relate to one another as means rather than ends. The architecture of these systems encourages browsing, sorting, and extracting—not meeting. Even when they promise connection, they often produce a thinner, more instrumental version of it.
This concerns me not only at the interpersonal level, but at the civilizational one. Human beings are not designed to be fully self-contained. We are porous, relational, and shaped by other people and by the environments we inhabit. That is not a weakness to eradicate. It is part of our design. We become through contact. We discover ourselves through relation. Mutual recognition is not sentimental excess; it is part of the structure of human flourishing.
The more powerful AI becomes, the more urgent this question becomes. I do not fear AI because it will become capable. I fear the kind of human atrophy that follows when capability is mistaken for completeness. Answers are becoming cheaper. Execution is becoming cheaper. Optimization is becoming cheaper. But none of these resolve the deeper problem of meaning. None of them answer what is worth caring about, what kind of life is worth building, or what kind of society can sustain actual human presence.
This is why I believe the future needs new infrastructure for genuine encounter.
A few weeks ago, at a free lecture at California College of the Arts on design in the age of AI, I met a new friend. I had first noticed the intelligence of his questions to the panel. Afterward, we spoke. What stayed with me was not only that he was insightful, but that he was profoundly present. We came from different generations, different backgrounds, different worlds. Yet the conversation held something rare: mutual respect, openness, curiosity, and the unmistakable feeling of being genuinely heard. That encounter pushed me further toward building ohm. It reminded me that some of the most important conversations in a life do not happen inside one's demographic, one's network, or one's algorithmic bubble. Serendipity is not noise. It is one of the deepest forces in human development.
That is what ohm. is built around.
At the surface, it may look like a platform for one-on-one conversations. But that description is insufficient. At its deepest level, ohm. is about the possibility of I–Thou relationship in an era increasingly organized around I–It. It is an attempt to create a space where people can meet prior to reduction—before title, status, money, performance, and fixed social identity harden around them. A space where they can encounter one another not as functions or profiles, but as consciousnesses. A space where unfinished people can still be met with dignity.
I want to build toward a future in which humans are freer, not merely more efficient. Freer from excessive social scripting. Freer from the compulsion to perform completion. Freer to become through encounter. And beyond that, freer to leap.
Because I believe one of the greatest unlocks of human possibility is not artificial intelligence, but human encounter itself. Another person can redirect your life, expand your imagination, challenge your assumptions, return you to yourself, and call forth parts of you that would otherwise remain dormant.
That is why I would not give up on ohm. This product is tied to how I became myself. I know what it is to live according to other people's recognitions. I know what it is to leave a world that no longer fits. I know what it is to be changed by strangers, by difficult conversations, by moments of unexpected recognition. And I know, with unusual certainty, that one conversation can alter the direction of a life.
The most powerful technology for human potential was never artificial. It was always another human being.