Chapter 16: NexGen’s Golden Year
The year Dojun Junior turned one was the year NexGen AI became unstoppable.
Three government contracts. A partnership with Samsung. The launch of Aether-Lite, a consumer AI assistant that outsold every competitor by Christmas. Forbes Korea put Dojun on the cover under the headline: “The Programmer Who Sees the Future.”
The irony was not lost on him.
Jihoon managed the growth with the manic energy of someone who had been waiting their entire career for a company this good. “We need more engineers,” he said every morning. “Also more coffee. And possibly a therapist for me personally.”
“In that order?”
“The therapist first, honestly.”
They hired 400 new engineers. They opened offices in Seoul, Pangyo, and Busan. They attracted talent from Google, Apple, and every Korean university with a computer science department. NexGen wasn’t just a company anymore—it was a movement.
And Dojun, who had watched a company grow once before and knew exactly where the pitfalls were, guided it with the quiet precision of someone steering a ship through waters he’d already sailed.
“You never seem surprised,” Minji observed one day. She was twenty-one, newly hired, and already the most talented engineer Dojun had ever met. “Good news, bad news—you react the same way. Like you expected it.”
“Good leaders stay calm.”
“Good leaders stay calm. You stay knowing. There’s a difference.”
Dojun looked at her—this young woman who could find bugs in code that God had declared flawless—and filed away a mental note: Watch this one. She sees too clearly.