What I’m Working On 🛠️

This will be a section where I focus on what I’m currently working on and the learnings or challenges I’ve been facing because of it.

Mockt

To give some context, Mockt was started by Adam, Hasan, and I as we found a need for a mock interview platform. We started with a goal; to democratize access to interview preparation for all students. Since September, we’ve been able to validate our idea and work through some key challenges. Here is what's happening now.

Almost There: Those are the two words I would use to describe our planned partnership with Rotman. We keep having meetings but hit a few roadblocks each time. However, this only encourages us to iterate further and make this work as much as we can. Regardless of our planned vision or what we had in mind, it’s a good reminder to slow down and perfect the fundamentals before having unrealistic expectations.

When it’s Time to Pivot: Our first pivot was from a B2C model to a B2B SaaS, offering our mock interview platform to university career centres. Our new pivot? Eventually having corporate employers join the platform with an innovative talent acquisition system built out. I was always one who is usually scared of pivoting from what I know. The tried and true method. I’m really thankful my co-founders aren’t because I was originally very against transitioning away from the B2C model. But as time went on and conversations were had, it was clear the B2B SaaS model with career centres was the most valuable. As we keep having meetings and pitching our product, it became even clearer to us how important the corporate play would be moving forward, especially from a scaling perspective. More on this later.

Relationships: Working on Mockt has made me appreciate the network and community of people I’ve built around myself and continually recognize the value of networking. So many times has my network already helped us throughout this journey, as has the network of my co-founders.

• Daniel, Founder of Flowbo (YC S21) helped us review our YC application and gave us extremely valuable feedback, beyond even our application - all because I had a short conversation with him about Mockt during my church mission trip

• Wynette, Youtuber and Student just had me on her podcast (coming out this Friday) and we had a great conversation about the value of Mockt. She was also able to give us a warm introduction to students at McMaster in capital markets and an amazing intro to DeGroote’s Career Centre - all because I reached out to her in first year during my Scotiabank recruitment

• Kirsten, Rotman Financial Services Career Advisor, has been our biggest help in getting our company in front of Rotman and advocating and being the liaison for us. I’m also working for her part-time on a work-study to support the finance accelerator program. This was all because I had randomly decided to introduce myself to her in second year, given she was a new career advisor and worked in asset management. Then introduced her to my friends (Adam, Hasan, Akruthi) and then to a mentor, Omar, who eventually helped her build out the finance accelerator program. It all came full circle.

• So many more PE, VC, founders, students, that have helped us through Adam and Hasan’s connections

Rejection: Learning to (and continuing to) deal with rejection has been an amazing journey throughout Mockt. The biggest rejection so far?

 Team: Over the past few months, I’ve recognized how important it is to have a good team backing every step you make. Our dynamic has been perfect in that any idea will always be a 2v1, and the 1 person generally ends up agreeing with the other 2. Rather than being passive and not speaking what’s on our minds, we’re always sending each other voice messages, yapping, or calling each other out on stuff we did poorly. I’m super grateful my co-founders are able to call me out too and that we all genuinely support and care for one another.

Church

I’ve been working on a short video series for my church so that newcomers can feel a little more welcome and get a better understanding of our small church. Our presbyterian church is under the KAPC denomination (Korean American Presbyterian Church) so sometimes people get confused as to what that is. For some context, I’ve been attending this church since 2020 and the senior pastor is no other than Jamie’s dad.

I’m trying to make three videos:

1. What is Yulin Church?

2. What is KAPC?

3. What do we believe?

I’ve been hard at work (although progress is a little slow because of school and work) but thankfully finishing up the scripts and finally getting around to animating the videos. I downloaded the ToonSquid App which costed me ~$8 I think? But apparently it is well worth it.

Life Recently 🌿

This section will be for what’s usually most changing in my life. I may not always update every section, depending on how much has changed or how badly I want to update these parts since the last time.

School

Finally finished my last exam yesterday night. So happy to be free from school. Often times school does feel like handcuffs when there are so many things you want to work on and do.

Family

Excited to head home for the winter break and go on a family vacation together on the last weekend of the break. Always excited to be with my dog as well so I’m happy to be spending time at home with him.

Music

3 songs I’ve really been enjoying:

Religion

Super excited for my church’s upcoming Christmas eve service! If anyone is interested, please feel free to come 🙂 

Looking Ahead

Super excited to have the end of year gathering event with my good friend group from highschool. Some of us are graduating, others going abroad, others still studying - but it may be a long time before all of us hang out together again. Very sad but exciting times…

Reading Room 📖

I hate self-help and productivity books so don’t expect anything of those nature. Mostly going to be Christian books or war novels.

Reason for God - Tim Keller (9.5/10)

Finished this book previously but currently reading chapter-by-chapter with my Church. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about Christianity or are a skeptic - this is the perfect book for you. My favorite chapter: How Could a Good God allow suffering?

Mere Christianity - CS Lewis (8.5/10 so far)

Another great book I’ve been reading from the 1940s from famous writer, CS Lewis (he also wrote the Narnia series). A little lower in rating because it’s a lot harder for me to understand the concepts at times.

The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien (9.5/10)

A memoir of sorts from the Vietnam war with an American perspective. Pretty sympathetic to all sides though, shows you the disgusting cruelty and realism of war. Removes any glimmer of hope or awesomeness you think war comes with. Highly highly recommend! Finished reading this 2 months ago and wanted to have this here as it’s continually on my mind.

Health 🏋️

Holding myself accountable here and documenting any big changes throughout my time since the last post.

Physical

Current Weight: 155 lbs

Current Bench: 170 lbs

Target Weight: 170 lbs

Target Bench: 225 lbs

Been hitting the gym a little less these days because of exams, hoping to go almost every day throughout winter break!

Mental

Nothing to add here, feel free to check next time!

Random 🏁

Might be word vomit, might be very cohesive. Or just random thoughts that have come up (and thankfully remembered).

Adventure

I want to hike the half dome in Yosemite National Park. I also want to go to Japan and China sometime.

Something Random

I’m moving out of my apartment on Bloor-Yonge (aka Hayden) and my roommate sharing with my good friend, Danny has officially come to an end 😢 

Goodbye 30 second apt exit to subway entrance

Goodbye 7 min campus bike ride

Goodbye 30 restaurants within 2 min walk

Hello to Sherbourne Street come Winter 2024….at least the rent is $400 cheaper