Chapter 34: Growing Pains
The first real fight happened three months after funding, and it was about a chair.
Not literally about a chair. But the chair was where it started. Nexus Technologies had moved from the studio apartment to a proper office—a 150-square-meter space on the third floor of a building in Gangnam, because Marcus had argued that “nobody takes a Sillim-dong company seriously” and Daniel had reluctantly agreed that perception mattered, even when he wished it didn’t.
The new office had desks, actual internet that didn’t cut out during rainstorms, and a meeting room with a door that closed—luxuries that felt almost obscene after five months in a studio. It also had twelve employees: three engineers Sarah had hired, two salespeople Marcus was training, a part-time accountant from Ernst and Young, and Minho’s assistant—a Korea University senior named Jihoon who had the rare ability to keep up with Minho’s networking pace without losing his mind.
The chair in question was in the meeting room. It was an ergonomic office chair, the kind with adjustable lumbar support and a headrest, and it cost 800,000 won. Marcus had ordered it for client meetings.
“Eight hundred thousand won for a chair?” Sarah said. She was standing in the meeting room doorway, holding a coffee cup, staring at the chair with the expression she usually reserved for badly written code.
“It’s for clients,” Marcus explained. He was sitting in the chair, which somewhat undermined his argument. “When a potential partner visits our office, the first thing they see is the meeting room. If the meeting room has plastic chairs from GS25, they’ll think we’re amateurs.”
“We are amateurs. We’re a six-month-old company run by college students.”
“We’re a funded startup with a growing client base. There’s a difference.”
“The difference is apparently 800,000 won.” Sarah set down her coffee. “Do you know what 800,000 won buys in server capacity? Four months of cloud hosting. Eight hundred simultaneous users. That’s revenue-generating infrastructure. This—” She pointed at the chair. “This generates nothing except comfortable butts.”
“Comfortable butts close deals.”
“Marcus—”
“Sarah—”
“Enough.” Daniel walked into the meeting room. He’d been listening from his desk, waiting to see if they’d resolve it themselves. They hadn’t. “The chair stays. But Marcus, from now on, any purchase over 500,000 won goes through me first.”
“That’s micromanagement.”
“That’s cash flow management. We have 18 months of runway. Every unnecessary expenditure shortens that runway. The chair isn’t unnecessary—you’re right that office appearance matters for client meetings. But we need a process.”
“I agree with Daniel,” Soyeon said. She had materialized in the doorway like a legal apparition, holding a folder. She did this frequently—appeared at exactly the moment when a dispute needed arbitration, as if she had sensors calibrated to detect organizational friction. “I’ve drafted a procurement policy. Expenditures under 200,000 won require department head approval. Over 200,000 requires CEO sign-off. Over 5 million requires board approval.”
“We have a board?” Marcus asked.
“We have Kang Doojin. He counts.” Soyeon placed the policy on the table. “Review it. Implement it. Move on.”
The chair argument ended. But it left something in the air—a residue of tension that Daniel recognized from his first life. The friction between people who cared about different things: Sarah about technology, Marcus about image, Minho about relationships, and Daniel about everything simultaneously, which meant he was constantly mediating between people who were all right in their own way.
This is where it starts. Not with betrayal or crisis. With chairs and coffee budgets and whose priorities get funded. The small disagreements that, if left unresolved, become resentments. And resentments become fractures. And fractures become the thing that kills companies.
The real issue wasn’t the chair. The real issue was velocity.
Nexus was growing faster than Daniel had expected. The Forge platform had attracted 87 paying customers in its first quarter—thirty percent above projections. Marcus’s sales team was closing deals at a rate that would have been impressive for a company twice their size. The Seoul Small Business Association endorsement had generated a flood of inbound inquiries that the team couldn’t process fast enough.
Which meant they needed more engineers. Which meant they needed more money. Which meant Daniel was already thinking about the next funding round, even though they’d only just closed the first one.
“Series A,” Minho said during a late-night strategy session. They were in the meeting room—four people around a table, coffee cups forming a small ceramic city, the whiteboard covered in numbers. “We need to start thinking about Series A.”
“We’re six months into seed funding,” Daniel said. “VCs want to see twelve to eighteen months of traction before Series A.”
“We have twelve months of traction compressed into six. Our growth rate is three times the benchmark. Kang will see that.”
“Kang will also see that we’re burning through cash faster than projected because we’re hiring ahead of revenue.”
“We’re hiring ahead of revenue because the demand is there. Would you rather miss the market window because we were too cautious?”
This was the tension. Minho’s instinct was always to accelerate—move faster, spend more, capture the market before anyone else could. Daniel’s instinct, shaped by a first life where acceleration without foundation had led to catastrophe, was to consolidate. Build slowly. Make sure every step was solid before taking the next one.
“We’re not missing any window,” Daniel said. “The SMB market isn’t going anywhere. There’s no competitor breathing down our neck.”
“Yet. There’s no competitor yet. But if we’ve figured this out, someone else will too. Speed is our advantage. The moment we slow down, that advantage evaporates.”
Sarah looked up from her laptop. She’d been coding during the meeting—Sarah coded during everything—but she’d been listening. “Minho’s partially right. There’s a Java-based company in Pangyo working on something similar. They’re six months behind us, but they have Samsung money.”
“You’ve been tracking competitors?” Marcus asked.
“I’ve been tracking everyone who’s writing code in the mobile platform space. It’s a small community. People talk.” She turned her screen toward them. “Mobion Technologies. Founded eight months ago. Seed funding from Samsung Ventures. Their platform is less sophisticated than ours—template-based, no cross-platform compilation—but they have resources we don’t.”
The room went quiet. On Sarah’s screen, Mobion’s website glowed—clean, professional, with the Samsung logo prominently displayed as a backer.
Mobion Technologies. In my first life, they were our first real competitor. They launched six months after us, poached two of our engineers, and spent two years trying to copy our platform before Samsung pulled their funding in 2014. They were annoying but not existential.
But that was with full funding and a three-year head start. This time, we’re smaller, younger, and the timeline might be different.
“Okay,” Daniel said. “Minho’s right that we need to move fast. Sarah’s right that we need to watch Mobion. And I’m right that we can’t outspend Samsung, so we have to outbuild them.” He went to the whiteboard and drew two timelines. “Option A: we raise Series A in six months, hire aggressively, and try to dominate the market before Mobion catches up. Risk: we burn cash too fast and run out of runway if the raise takes longer than expected.”
“Option B?” Minho asked.
“Option B: we focus the next six months on making the product so good that customers won’t switch even when Mobion launches. We invest in technology, not headcount. We build the moat deeper instead of wider.”
“I vote B,” Sarah said immediately.
“I vote A,” Minho said, just as immediately.
Marcus, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, spoke. “I vote A and a half.”
“That’s not a thing,” Sarah said.
“It is now. We pursue the Series A timeline—start conversations, build relationships with VCs—but we don’t close the round until the product metrics support a higher valuation. That way, if Mobion forces our hand, we’re ready. If they don’t, we raise at a better price.”
Daniel looked at Marcus. In his first life, Marcus had been the peacemaker of the group—the one who found the middle ground when Sarah and Daniel were too stubborn to find it themselves. Apparently, that skill had survived the timeline change.
“A and a half,” Daniel said. “I can work with that.”
“I can work with it if the product investment comes first,” Sarah said.
“The product investment always comes first,” Daniel assured her. “That’s non-negotiable.”
“Then we’re agreed.” Sarah returned to her laptop. “I need two more engineers. Good ones. Not Samsung rejects.”
“I’ll find them,” Minho said. “My network at KU has three CS graduates looking for startup roles.”
“I said good ones.”
“They’re good. Trust me.”
“The last time someone said ‘trust me,’ they were selling me a used car.”
“Sarah. I’m not selling you a car. I’m recommending engineers.”
“Same energy.”
Daniel listened to them argue and felt, beneath the friction, the specific warmth of a team that cared enough to fight. In his first life, the fights had been about money—always money, because money was the language of a company that had lost its soul. Here, the fights were about strategy, product, speed, quality. The right things. The things worth fighting about.
Keep fighting about chairs and hiring and competitive strategy. As long as we’re fighting about the right things, we’re okay. It’s when we stop fighting—when people go quiet and nod along and save their objections for after the meeting—that’s when the real problems start.
He called home that night. It was 10 PM—late enough that his father would be in bed, but his mother would still be awake, because Kim Soonyoung’s bedtime was determined not by the clock but by whether all her children had called.
“Daniel-ah.” Her voice was warm and slightly relieved, the way it always was when he called. “How was your day?”
“Busy. We had a strategy meeting.”
“Did you eat?”
“I ate.”
“What did you eat?”
“Cup ramyeon.”
“That’s not food. That’s a cry for help.” He could hear her sigh through the phone. “I’m sending kimchi. And doenjang. And the leftover galbi from last Sunday.”
“Mom, you don’t have to—”
“I’m sending it with Minji. She has a field trip to Seoul on Friday. She says she’ll stop by your office.”
“She’s fourteen. She doesn’t need to deliver food.”
“She wants to see your office. She talks about it at school. ‘My brother has a company in Gangnam.’ She tells everyone.”
Daniel smiled. The smile hurt—not because it was forced, but because it was too real. The image of Minji, fourteen years old, bragging about her brother’s startup to her middle school friends, was the kind of thing that made the long hours and the chair arguments and the competitive pressure feel worth it.
“Tell her she’s welcome anytime,” he said.
“I will. And Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
“Your father checked the stock portfolio today.”
“He did?”
“He doesn’t think I know, but I do. He opens the computer when I’m making dinner and looks at the numbers. He doesn’t understand most of it, but he looks.” A pause. “I think it makes him proud. Even though he won’t say it.”
“The portfolio is at 35 million now.”
“I know. He told me. He said it casually, like it didn’t matter. ‘The boy’s numbers are up again.’ As if thirty-five million won is just ‘numbers.'”
“That’s Dad.”
“That’s Dad.” Another pause. Longer. “Are you happy, Daniel?”
The question caught him off guard. Not because it was unexpected—his mother asked variations of it every call—but because tonight, in this moment, with a funded company and a growing team and a competitor on the horizon and a meeting room chair that cost 800,000 won, the answer was complicated in a way that “yes” couldn’t capture.
“I’m building something,” he said. “Something that matters. And I have good people around me.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” He leaned back in his office chair—not the 800,000 won one, his was a 150,000 won model that Sarah had approved. “I’m getting there, Mom. I’m closer than I’ve ever been.”
“Closer to happy?”
“Closer to everything.”
“That sounds like something a businessman says instead of a son.”
“I’m both.”
“I know. I just wish the son called more often than the businessman.”
In my first life, the businessman won. The son disappeared. By the end, even the phone calls stopped.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” Daniel said. “And Thursday. And this weekend.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.”
His mother was quiet for a moment. He could hear the television in the background—his father’s evening news, the same anchor, the same time slot. Some things never changed.
“Good night, Daniel.”
“Good night, Mom. Tell Dad the numbers are up.”
“He already knows. He checks every day.”
She hung up. Daniel sat in the empty office—the employees had gone home hours ago, the lights of Gangnam glittering through the windows—and thought about chairs and mothers and the specific, fragile thing called happiness that was always closer than he expected and farther than he reached.
Tomorrow, Mobion Technologies would probably announce something. Tomorrow, Marcus would want to spend money. Tomorrow, Sarah would want to hire engineers. Tomorrow, Minho would find another VC to charm.
But tonight, his mother’s kimchi was on its way, carried by a fourteen-year-old sister who bragged about him at school, and his father checked the stock portfolio every evening while pretending he didn’t care.
That was enough. For tonight, that was more than enough.