Today is the last day of 2023, and officially my last day as a member of Four Pillars. The reason I haven't written a personal year in review is because I haven't yet created something that warrants one, and I've decided it's time to just move fast and don’t turn back. But who am I to make that judgment? Or am I second-guessing the judgment of others? Anyway, now that I've finally taken a break, I thought it would be good to tie a knot in the middle and move on.
So, when should I start my retrospective? I think a personal retrospective should start at the point where I'm still proud of myself.
Ever since I was first introduced to FL Studio in high school, I've been making beats as a hobby. It wasn't anything fancy, just something I made for fun, something I was happy with, something I played to my friends, something I put on the internet, and that was it. As I had more time to spare during the 2020 coronavirus season, I wanted to give it a serious shot and see if I had any talent or not.
The result of one year was a total of 6 officially published songs and a total of $3.73 in royalties as of the end of December 2023. It seems that I will be able to cover the KOSCAP (Copyright Association) registration fee of $77.25 by 2068. Of course, in addition to royalties, I also received money from selling beats, but in the end, I felt the limit of my talent, and I quit when I started my military service.
I didn't realize it at the time, but many of the activities I did during that time would prove to be very helpful later on.
Creating my own learning guidelines: In fact, before this, I was used to cram schools and academies creating guidelines for me on what to learn and how to learn it, and I just had to consume them. However, when I decided to learn beat making, I decided to learn it myself, and I learned by creating my own guidelines for what and how to learn on YouTube. As I watched my skills improve through this process, I think I became less reluctant and fearful of learning in situations or disciplines without guidelines.
Make something of your own, even if it's not great: It's quite satisfying to see a beat you've made used by someone else and released as a finished song. Even if it doesn't succeed at all, and even if it's so bad that I can't even hear it, it's still a refreshing experience to see something new come out of you.
Make lots of cold calls: Amateur beatmakers have to make tons of cold calls to artists to get their beats used. I went through the same process, and for a while, I think I cold contacted at least 5 people every day. This experience helped me become less afraid of cold emails and contacts.
After joining the mandatory military service in 2021, I spent the first few months adjusting to the military and the next few months studying front-end coding, but in September, I started studying blockchain, starting with Gary Gensler's MIT lecture. Then, in December 2021, I started a blockchain newsletter called 'Why Matters' for personal study and to make my name in the industry. Nowadays, there are so many good blockchain researchers in Korea, but at that time, the number was much smaller than overseas, so I think I was able to make a name for myself relatively quickly. Once I had a topic I was interested in, I would set a period of about two weeks, one week for researching related materials, and one week for writing the outline and full text. I think it would have been difficult to do this without the relatively free atmosphere of the 16th Flight Wing that I served and the support of many others who were willing to help promote the article.
During the course of the newsletter, I wrote a total of 32 articles, with an average viewership of 0.5k - 2k per article, a total of 534 subscribers, and a total viewership of about 29k for the newsletter. With a average 30-second consumption time for each article, I was able to get people to spend about 241 hours with me, which I'm pretty proud of. After leaving the military and joining A41 as an intern, my newsletter activity naturally slowed down.
I think this was a period of time where I unknowingly used the experience I had gained from my past bitmaking.
Relatively speaking, blockchain is a multi-disciplinary industry and has not been around for a long time, so there is no formal curriculum for learning, but I think my past experiences helped me get through it with relatively little stress.
In fact, during the learning process, it was embarrassing and not easy to write and share with others, but my past experience of creating and sharing my own work, even if I wasn't very good at it, made me feel less intimidated about starting a newsletter.
Through my previous experience with cold emailing/contacting, I started my first newsletter and sent out my articles to industry people for a while. The connections I made helped me get the word out about myself and my newsletter.
The connections I made through the newsletter led me to work as an intern - protocol specialist at A41, a top Korean blockchain infrastructure company. While I had previously explored my interests in the blockchain industry as a whole, at A41, I was assigned a specific role, focusing on the Cosmos ecosystem, governance, and new chain discovery.
I wrote a total of 6 articles during the period, and in terms of viewership, the governance articles averaged 100-200, and the other articles averaged 1.5k. Here's what I learned during A41.
Working in a company: Despite A41 being a relatively free-atmosphere company, it was my first job, so I experienced for the first time what it's like to work with other people in a company. It was my first job, so I was very inexperienced, but I'm grateful to my a41 coworkers for helping me work in a good atmosphere.
Thinking about governance: Since A41 is a validator company and I was part of the governance team, I was able to do a lot of research on governance. In fact, governance is a fancy way of saying "making good decisions," and its importance is not limited to the blockchain, but applies to our lives and society as a whole, so I think that's why I became interested in a wider range of topics.
Developing a sense of smell: When I was in charge of discovering new blockchains, I thought a lot about how to find promising blockchains faster than others, and it ended up being a process of 1) gathering information quickly, 2) extracting only the necessary information, and 3) training my own sense of success projects. I don't think this is a skill that applies only to the blockchain industry.
After leaving my previous company and going back to university, I got a great opportunity to co-found a blockchain research company. As someone who was interested in both research and entrepreneurship, this was a great opportunity for me, and that's how I ended up co-founding Four Pillars. As I leave the company on December 31st, I look back and realize that the process of starting a company has had its ups and downs, but in retrospect, I feel very fortunate to have had this experience.
I had two main roles: researching onchain games as a researcher and handling finance/accounting as a co-founder. The problem was that both roles were new to me. Before Four Pillars, I didn't have much interest in gaming in general, including onchain gaming, and the same was true for finance/accounting. Anyway, looking back, I did both, but I don't think I was 'exceptionally good' at them, but I did get to write a total of 19 articles during this time, give my first public speaking presentation, and win my first hackathon with my friends.
However, I think my biggest learning experience was actually starting my own business. The various lessons I learned from actually starting a business, as opposed to just wanting to start a business, will probably be very helpful in the future. I can't disclose the details, but I think I learned a lot about whether I have the right personality for entrepreneurship, the impact of a single decision, the difference between reality and ideals, and I got to know myself a little better. I would like to thank my three co-founders and the rest of the team at Four Pillars for making this experience possible. Regardless of my off-boarding, Four Pillars will continue to be the best blockchain research firm, so I will continue to be a fan, and I hope people reading this will continue to support them.
If there's one goal I'd like to accomplish in the coming year, it's to care as little as possible about what others’thought and not comparing myself with others. It seems to me that over time, it becomes easier and easier to fit myself into the mold of other people's views or the general mood of society, instead of being myself. That doesn't mean that I want to be a dissident for the sake of being a dissident, but it does mean that I want to focus more on the things that I find good and fun.
In my short subjective life, there are already decisions that I wish I had made differently. Some of these decisions are entirely my own, while others are the result of other people's perceptions or opinions. The former I have no intention of reducing in the future, the latter I would like to reduce.
Recently, when I felt like one phase was coming to an end, I realized that I needed to quickly define a clear future for the next phase, but I wondered if I should rush into it. I realized that the reason I was trying to rush to decide a clear career path in the first place was because I was afraid of falling behind others, or because everyone else was moving forward, and I thought, "If I don't consciously decide not to care about others, it will gradually seep in”.
Therefore, in an effort to be more proactive and build a list of things I like, am interested in, and find interesting, I'm going to start this new newsletter. The main purpose of this newsletter is to discover and cultivate my tastes. I believe that if I actively look for things you like and enjoy, and keep track of them, I can better develop my own tastes.
In fact, in the future, good taste will be the biggest differentiator between humans. As the cost of distributing information through the Internet and the cost of producing information through AI plummets, it has become a game of choosing the “right “ information. For example, personal preferences are the starting point of every decision, from the music we listen to on the way to work, to the job we choose when we grow up, to the values we live by.
So, for this new newsletter, I'm leaving the frequency and subject matter undecided, except for the above sole purpse. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, please subscribe to this new newsletter and join the journey.
Moyed
