To everyone who will become our new teammate

Hello everyone, this is Zeon, Hyunjun Ji of VACATIO.

What is your dream?

A dream, out of nowhere — is it a word you have not heard in a long time?

I want to calmly lay out why I started a company, and what philosophy I run it with today.

All of it is deeply tied to that one word: “dream.”

As a child I had a dream, just like you.

To do something great.

Reading a few biographies of great people when I was young, I believed I had been born to do something big for the world. And I thought that once I got into university, I would find out how to make that dream real. So I spent my school years diligently and got into the university I wanted.

But to my surprise, the life I imagined — freedom as a university student, saying hi to friends from abroad — turned out to be the same thing day after day.

Neither classes nor grades meant much to me. I could not accept the reasons I was given for attending lectures and studying hard. I entered Yonsei University at the top of my class, but I cared so little about school that I lost my scholarship in the very first semester.

People around me said I could not live that way, but following the way of life they described felt even more dangerous to me. And so I spent that time as a problem child, a troublemaker.

So in 2016, my sophomore year, I left for the United States to run a food truck. It was only selling bibimbap out of a truck, but it felt more powerful than anything else.

Exchanging the small value I had created (bibimbap) for someone else’s money.

The experience of becoming a producer rather than a consumer.

It made my heart race.

A university student who used to live on an allowance from his parents was now earning over a million won a day and traveling freely on money he had made himself. It felt like I owned the world.

Still, it was hard to say I had achieved my dream.

No matter how day and night I worked, the amount of food I could produce in a day was limited. Because output was limited, my impact on the world was limited too.

From then on, a concrete dream began to grow inside me: “I want to do work whose output and influence are limitless.”

What nourished that sprout enormously was the environment I was in at the time.

Because I was doing business near Silicon Valley, I ran into employees of famous tech companies fairly often. Those were the first founders I ever encountered.

What I first felt looking at them was not awe but “relief.” They were young people in their twenties and thirties, not so different from me.

That was the moment it truly sank in that Steve Jobs of Apple, Larry Page who built Google, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook all founded their companies when they were still juniors.

From then on the sprout became a big dream and started generating real momentum.

“I will build a globally powerful company.”

Since everything that changed the world was done by juniors, the world’s advice that you must first accumulate all kinds of professional experience felt like a lie. And I decided that one day I would start my own company and come back to Silicon Valley.

After wrapping up the food truck business, I came back to Korea with my fists clenched, determined to change the world.

And like a midsummer night’s dream, I looked back on those days and searched hard for something I could actually do.

But there was nothing much I could do. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say I did not know how.

I had no clue how to start a business, how to raise money, or who to partner with.

And so a long dark period began.

For comfort I buried myself in books — my heart raced reading the stories of entrepreneurs, and reading management books I promised myself, “this is how I will run things one day.” I walked and walked down a pitch-dark road with no end in sight.

After walking that road for a long time — studying on my own, building an app, shouting like a madman that I would change the world, all while holding the dream of doing something big — this many people appeared to help me make that dream come true.

Our teammates are remarkable.

They accepted my offer to work together without even knowing what exactly I did. They are the people I am most grateful to — the ones who said my big dream was surely going to come true, and that we should make it happen together.

As we quietly walked our path, dependable investors joined us on the journey. Springcamp, a VC in the Naver family, is cheering for our dream as well.

Along the way there were achievements large and small. We won the Minister’s Award as the youngest recipients at the country’s biggest startup competition, we raised investment the moment we incorporated, and there were many other results.

But honestly, these are things any team with good people would naturally accomplish.

So the only thing I brag about is our team. I doubt that will ever change.

I believe those reading this are people cut from the same cloth as me.

You certainly have the power to change the world.

Your potential is overflowing.

But we face two villains: time that slips helplessly away, and social pressure. They whisper to us endlessly.

“Live the way everyone else lives.” “First get a job and gain some experience.”

With a single compromise you will probably cross a river you cannot come back from.

The small sense of stability you taste once turns into an opportunity cost you feel you must not give up, and that makes our dreams and our courage hesitate.

You know you can accomplish something, you want to throw yourself madly into something and produce overwhelming results — but you do not know how?

I was the same.

I was the same throughout an incredibly long and dark period. So I read books all day, sought out entrepreneurs around me, and tried everything I could.

That is why I, and our team, want to be your guide. Thinking things through fiercely together and producing results.

That is what we can do, and what we do best. Backed by Naver’s investment and transaction volume in the hundreds of millions of won, we will support you in every way so you can spread your wings.

We are not building a business that only looks good on the surface — we are building a startup that delivers real results.

The ages between twenty-five and twenty-nine are truly dangerous ones. There is so much to take into account, and you have not fully escaped the influence of the adults around you.

So it is easy to shut your eyes and compromise, and the choices you make in this period can turn you into someone who spends a lifetime merely envying others.

If you do not want to live a life of repeating “Must be nice for you… at least the things you did are paying off… Me? I really want to quit my job, but what can I do…” — now is your chance.

Building the world you want with your own hands. That is what founding a company is, what a startup is, and what the VACATIO team is doing.

We will be the team that fiercely unleashes your potential.

I want to build a great company together with you.

And around this time next year, I hope we are a company growing on the world stage.

Of course, that will not be my doing alone — it will be the work of you and our team. Our dream will come true in the end.