Chapter 31: The Garage
Nexus Technologies’ first office was a one-room studio apartment in Gwanak-gu that smelled like mold, instant ramyeon, and ambition.
Minho had found it through his father’s contact—a friend of a friend who owned a building near Sillim Station and was willing to rent a thirty-square-meter ground-floor unit for 400,000 won per month, which was roughly the price of a parking spot in Gangnam. The walls were thin enough to hear the neighbors’ television. The bathroom was the size of a phone booth. The single window looked out onto an alley where someone had parked a moped that hadn’t moved since 2007.
“It’s perfect,” Daniel said.
“It’s a health code violation,” Sarah said, running her finger along the windowsill and examining the dust with professional distaste.
“Every great company started in a garage,” Marcus offered. “Apple. Amazon. HP. Nexus Technologies starts in—” He looked around. “A slightly damp studio apartment near a moped graveyard.”
“The narrative needs work,” Minho admitted. “But the rent is unbeatable.”
They moved in on a Saturday in September 2010. Daniel paid three months’ rent upfront from the portfolio profits, which had crossed 30 million won over the summer as the KOSPI continued its steady climb. The furniture was salvaged: two desks from a university surplus sale, four office chairs that squeaked in different keys (Minho called them “the quartet”), a whiteboard from Sarah’s lab, and a coffee machine that Marcus had purchased with the declaration that “no startup succeeds without proper caffeine infrastructure.”
Sarah set up her workstation in the corner farthest from the window—she disliked natural light while coding, which Daniel suspected was less about screen glare and more about Sarah’s fundamental discomfort with anything that reminded her the outside world existed. Her desk was immediately buried under cables, an external hard drive, and a monitor she’d built from parts.
“Built from parts?” Minho asked, watching her assemble it with a screwdriver and the focused intensity of a surgeon. “Is that—safe?”
“Safer than the electrical wiring in this building.” Sarah connected the last cable and the screen flickered to life. “We need a server. I can build one from refurbished parts for about 2 million won. Commercial hosting is too expensive and too slow for what I’m building.”
“What are you building, exactly?” Marcus asked. He was setting up the “client area”—a corner with a second-hand sofa and a coffee table that he’d found on the curb outside a Gangnam apartment, still in decent condition because rich people threw away better furniture than poor people bought.
“A mobile application development platform,” Sarah said. “Modular. Scalable. Cloud-based—eventually. For now, it runs on whatever server we can afford.”
“In Korean?”
“In every language. But Korean first. The market is here.”
“And the target customer?”
“Every small business in Korea that needs a mobile presence and can’t afford to hire a developer. Restaurants, shops, hagwons, clinics. There are two million small businesses in Korea. Less than five percent have mobile apps. That’s 1.9 million potential customers.”
Marcus’s eyes lit up. Daniel recognized the look—it was the look Marcus got when he saw a market opportunity the way a hawk sees a mouse. Clear, focused, hungry.
“1.9 million,” Marcus repeated. “If we capture even one percent of that at—what, 500,000 won per year for a subscription?”
“19,000 customers times 500,000 won is 9.5 billion won in annual revenue,” Soyeon said from the doorway. She’d arrived without anyone noticing, carrying a box of documents and wearing the expression of a woman who had been calculating revenue projections in her head before the question was asked. “Before expenses.”
“When did you get here?” Minho asked.
“Three minutes ago. The door was open. Your security is terrible.” She set the box on the desk. “Company registration documents. Approved. Nexus Technologies is officially incorporated as of September 3rd, 2010. Happy birthday, Daniel.”
Daniel took the document. NEXUS TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD. His name as representative director. Sarah as CTO. Marcus as CMO. Minho as VP. A stamp from the Seoul Metropolitan Government. Official. Real.
“We’re a company,” he said.
“We’re a company with zero revenue, one room, and a server that doesn’t exist yet,” Sarah corrected. “But technically, yes.”
“Let the man have his moment,” Marcus said.
“His moment is consuming productive coding time.”
“One minute. Give me one minute.” Daniel looked at the four people in the room—five, with Soyeon. In his first life, this moment had happened in a similar room, with similar people, with the same mix of excitement and terror. The difference was everything underneath. The foundation. The relationships. The guardrails.
“Thank you,” he said. “All of you. For believing in this. For believing in me.”
“Don’t get emotional,” Sarah said. “Get coding. Or rather, get out of my way so I can code.”
“She means ‘you’re welcome,'” Marcus translated.
“I know what she means.” Daniel folded the registration document carefully and placed it in the desk drawer. “Okay. First day. Let’s build something.”
The first three months were a crash course in the difference between planning a company and running one.
Sarah worked eighteen-hour days. Not because anyone asked her to—if Daniel had asked, she would have told him where to put his request—but because the platform she was building was genuinely, technically difficult, and Sarah’s response to difficulty was to throw more hours at it until it surrendered.
The platform—internally codenamed “Forge”—was designed to let small businesses create mobile applications without writing code. Choose a template, customize the colors and content, upload your menu or product catalog, and the platform would generate a functional iOS and Android app. No developers needed. No six-month development cycles. Just a working app in under a week.
“This is harder than I thought,” Sarah admitted one night at 3 AM, which was the time when Sarah’s perfectionism weakened enough to allow vulnerability. They were alone in the office—Daniel had started staying late to keep her company, not because she needed it but because he’d learned that Sarah worked better when someone was in the room, even if that someone was just drinking coffee and reviewing spreadsheets.
“What’s the blocker?” Daniel asked.
“Cross-platform compilation. Getting the same app to work on both iOS and Android requires either two separate codebases—which doubles the development time—or a single codebase that compiles to both, which nobody has done well.”
“What about React Native?”
Sarah looked at him. “What’s React Native?”
Damn. React Native won’t be released until 2015. I keep forgetting what year it is.
“Nothing. Just a concept I was thinking about. What if there was a framework that used JavaScript to build native mobile apps for both platforms?”
“JavaScript for native mobile?” Sarah’s face went through several expressions in rapid succession: dismissal, consideration, curiosity, excitement. “That’s—theoretically possible. You’d need a bridge layer between the JavaScript runtime and the native APIs. It would be slower than native code, but for simple apps—restaurant menus, product catalogs—the performance hit might be acceptable.”
“Could you build it?”
“Could I build a JavaScript-to-native bridge that compiles cross-platform?” She was already typing. “Give me three months.”
“You have two.”
“Why two?”
“Because Marcus has already started selling the platform to businesses, and he’s promised a working demo by February.”
“Marcus is selling something that doesn’t exist?”
“Marcus is selling a vision. That’s what CMOs do.”
“That’s what con artists do.”
“The line is thinner than you’d think.”
Sarah’s typing intensified—a sure sign that she was no longer listening to him and had entered the coding flow state that Daniel had learned not to interrupt. He went back to his spreadsheets and let her work.
The coffee machine gurgled in the corner. The moped outside the window hadn’t moved. And somewhere in the code streaming across Sarah’s screen, the seed of Nexus Technologies’ first product was being written, one function at a time.
Meanwhile, Marcus was doing what Marcus did best: selling the future.
He’d designed a pitch deck—twelve slides, clean and compelling—that described Forge as “the Wix for mobile apps, built for the Korean market.” The demo consisted of screenshots that Sarah had created from the development version, polished with enough design work to look like a finished product.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” Sarah complained when she saw the pitch deck.
“It’s aspirational marketing,” Marcus corrected. “Everything in the deck is what we’re building. I’m just showing people the finished version before it’s finished.”
“Isn’t that lying?”
“It’s storytelling. Every product launch in history starts with a story.”
Marcus took the deck to fifteen small businesses in the first month. Ten of them were interested. Six signed letters of intent—non-binding, but powerful proof that the market existed. One of them—a samgyeopsal restaurant in Sinchon—actually paid a 500,000 won deposit for “early access.”
“Our first revenue!” Marcus announced, waving the bank transfer receipt like a flag. “Five hundred thousand won! We’re officially a business!”
“We’re officially a business with one customer who’s going to want a working product in eight weeks,” Daniel said.
“Details. Beautiful, motivating details.”
Minho, meanwhile, was building relationships. Not just with potential clients—Marcus handled those—but with the ecosystem around them. He met with KISED representatives, attended startup networking events, joined the SNU entrepreneurship club’s advisory board, and somehow secured a meeting with a venture capital firm in Yeoksam-dong that had never met a college-age founder before.
“How did you get that meeting?” Daniel asked.
“I met the partner’s daughter at a coffee shop. She goes to Ewha. We talked for forty minutes about nothing, and then I mentioned I was starting a company, and she said her dad invests in startups, and I said ‘what a coincidence,’ and she said she’d introduce us.”
“You charmed your way to a VC meeting through someone’s daughter.”
“I didn’t charm anyone. I had a genuine conversation with a genuine human being. The meeting was a natural outcome.”
“That’s literally the definition of charm.”
“Then I accept the label with grace.” Minho grinned. “The meeting is next Thursday. Wear a tie.”
“I don’t own a tie.”
“Then buy one. We’re about to meet people who decide whether startups live or die based on a thirty-minute conversation and a gut feeling. The least you can do is look like you take it seriously.”
Daniel bought a tie. It was the cheapest one at the department store—navy blue, polyester, slightly shiny in a way that suggested ambition on a budget. Soyeon took one look at it and sighed.
“I’ll lend you one of my father’s,” she said. “He hasn’t worn it since the economy crashed, and it’s silk.”
“Soyeon—”
“Consider it an investment in the company’s image. You can pay me back with equity.”
“I can’t give you equity for a tie.”
“Then give me equity for seven months of unpaid legal work, and throw in the tie as a bonus.”
She was joking. Probably. With Soyeon, it was hard to tell. But she’d been doing legal work—real, substantive legal work—since before the company existed, and the fact that she’d never asked for compensation was something that kept Daniel up at night.
“We’ll talk about equity,” he said. “Properly. When we have revenue.”
“We have revenue. Five hundred thousand won from a samgyeopsal restaurant.”
“When we have more revenue.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” Three taps on the desk. “Now go practice your pitch. And wear the silk tie. Navy blue polyester makes you look like a funeral attendant.”
Daniel practiced the pitch. He wore the silk tie. And on a Thursday afternoon in November 2010, he walked into a VC office in Yeoksam-dong with Park Minho at his side and a dream in a PowerPoint file.
Nexus Technologies was three months old, had one customer, zero revenue (the 500,000 won was technically a deposit, not revenue), and a product that was still being coded in a studio apartment near a dead moped.
But it was real. It was alive. And it was just getting started.