zooming in on the floor plan franko is holding there (who wouldn't do that) made me laugh because the apartment he looked at there--which he didn't end up taking--is in the west village, which was thee Gay Neighborhood back in the day...like gays and Artistes and socialists and jews and all that but particularly known (at least to me) for being Gay. with like, you know, leather bars and shit. (also stonewall is there, for reference) i'm just SAYING of course he was there

              “WELCOMING APT 5D TENANT, NO JAESUNG !

INFORMATION

age – 25 pronouns – he/him occupation – noraebang attendant, podcast host moved into treehouse – 6 months ago

PERSONALITY: ESFP, THE ENTERTAINER

positive –

charismatic (excellent people skills) & bold --

jaesung thrives on the attention of others, and everything he does lies on that. it helps, then, that he carries a natural charisma with him, making his presence a comforting one. outgoing (or obnoxious, depending on who you ask), energetic, confident, witty, he’s everything that sounds good on paper until you spend more than an hour with him. he’s easy to be around, has an effect on people that makes it easy to open up, to feel comfortable like he’s an old friend -- but his company can be tiring because he never stops, can’t stand the silence or standing still, both figuratively and literally.

his boldness translates more to impulsiveness, too. irresponsible, even, depending on the situation. if there’s something he wants to do, wants to say, he’ll do it without a second thought, consequences be damned. in the end, it’s a double-edged sword, and maybe that’s what he’s banking on.

negative –

unfocused & mercurial (easily bored)

jaesung’s not afraid of many things, and he’ll be sure to tell you as much. reckless and generally uncaring of his well-being, he’ll do anything at least once. and usually, only once, or for a short period of time because if there is anything he’s afraid of, it’d be commitment. dedicating himself to something is not his strong suit, and it’s why he lives day by day with no plan for the next, why he’s so unreliable, why it’s hard for him to hold down a job for longer than a few months, and why his dedication for his podcast is so surprising.  

but even then, he’s sure most people are just waiting for him to get bored with it. it’s what he does, after all. throwing himself wildly into things before dropping it shortly after. when something doesn’t benefit him or his enjoyment anymore, he finds it’s not worth doing. he won’t stick with things hoping for it to get better. for jaesung, if there’s no instant gratification, then what’s the point? 

HAUNT

not many things haunt no jaesung.

he tends not to dwell on the past and doesn’t think too hard about the future or how his current actions may affect it.

even the things that go bump in the treehouse excite him more than terrify, though the goosebumps that line his arms on occasion may tell a different story.

point is, things rarely plague jaesung’s mind with haunting regularity.

except, because there’s always a but, for one secret. one accident, one ill-fated night that he can’t escape even in his sleep, nightmares forcing him to relive it over and over until he wakes up with beads of sweat on his forehead. sometimes they end differently, like his wrists in handcuffs, or like the blood on his hands being his closest friend’s instead.

whatever the result, the reality of it remains the same, guilt hanging heavy on his shoulders. all thanks to one winter evening, one party with a few too many drinks clouding his better judgment, his vision, one meaningless fight that he can’t even remember unlike the remainder of the night that he knows too vividly. the mistake of swiping someone’s car keys, slipping out of the party unseen, getting behind the wheel and swerving too far into the wrong side of the road and right into another car.

time slows before it freezes, then everything comes rushing back all at once.

the jolt of intense pain, the high pitched piercing his ears, the large amount of blood he can see on the victim, the eerie stillness of the victim, the face of the victim that is far too familiar, the realization that it’s his best friend’s older brother, the panic, hyperventilation, the hot tears starting to fall down his cheek, the strangled noises forced through his throat when he realizes he can’t stay there any longer.

every inch of his body shakes and aches when he gets out of the car but his panic overrides the physical pain and triggers his flight response, gives him enough strength in his legs to run far, far away.

everything after that passes by in a blur. a police investigation turned cold due to lack of evidence, a funeral with his friend crying on his shoulder, guilt clawing at him so incessantly he sometimes wonders how it hasn’t eaten him alive.

now, six years later, the nightmares haunt him even more regularly. perhaps a side effect of the treehouse, or perhaps thanks to the fact that his friend now lives right next door after years of purposefully putting physical miles and miles between like that might make anything better.

HISTORY

on the edges of a small south jeolla town lies an even smaller sweet potato farm. dirt path aisles line the ground between the plants, and a quaint hanok lies beside it with a worn down sign that reads ‘no sweet potatoes’, hilariously in english (much to the mom of the house’s chagrin).

this is where no jaesung spends his childhood.

the house and farm alike are old, taken care of by a long line of no family farmers, of which jaesung is ostensibly the next generation. it’s a small farm, modest in both physical size and market influence, but it never seems to bother the family too much. after all, they’ve grown accustomed to the simple rural life on the pastoral outskirts over many years, and so jaesung learns to love it too, all while running down the aisles, collecting scrapes on his knees, and dirtying his shoes until it’s time to sleep and start all over again the next day.

there is nothing particularly special about his childhood. when he starts attending school, he makes friends easily, creates bonds that he believes will last his entire life because in this community no one really ever leaves. after all, by six years old he has the farm and he has his two best friends --  so what more does he really need?

he grows into his teenage years like this, reckless and wild, only instead of running the dirt aisles of the farm, he runs down the streets, now. spends all his time outside of school (and even most of the time inside) not studying. there’s no point, after all, when his farming future has been decided for him even before he was conceived. with no dreams to aim for, he spends his teenage years doing whatever his heart desires. and his heart desires a great mixture of things: smoking, drinking, shoplifting, skipping class, vandalizing the warehouse just minutes from home, spending hours at the arcade, and many, many more unadvised things.

for someone with a dead-end future, he lives his life quite well. at fifteen, he discovers youtube. he uploads stupid videos that never go anywhere because they’re poorly made and, well, stupid. he’s long since privated them. at seventeen, his school holds a talent show and jaesung is voted by his peers to be the announcer, not out of merit but out of popularity and the hilariousness of it. turns out, he does pretty well. the crowd laughs at his impromptu jokes and he shines, knows how to fill in the pauses because he’s never really learned to stop talking. at eighteen, he graduates by the skin of his teeth

but at nineteen, everything changes with the accident that haunts him to this day.

blood stains his name, his nightmares, his closest friendship that no longer feels quite so close with this secret looming between them, just waiting to burst.

grief and guilt and anger and fear consume him all at once. hurting more than the measly bruises on his chest he left the car with, the only real ‘evidence’ of his presence that night left behind, unfounded by the police

he survives, but he retreats.

he snaps at people, letting the guilt consume him, locking him in a nightmare. his behavior isn’t considered strange because many people react similarly in this small town. only, he doesn’t go through all the stages of grief, never gets to the final acceptance. instead, he runs. to mandatory military service, then to busan, then to gwangju, then to daegu, then finally to seoul. he pays his way through with multiple part-time jobs and a small podcast he originally starts as a joke after one particularly drunken night.

it grows though, his podcast, into something more. a passion project, one might even say if the man behind it wasn’t no jaesung. whatever it is, it keeps him sane. of course, he’s just a one-man show with no power, no influence, so the podcast doesn’t do nearly enough to sustain him, having to supplement its inconsistent income with a (relatively) stable retail job in the city.

but still it helps. keeps his thoughts on stories to talk about for episodes instead of on the night that haunts him, encourages him to poke around at the spirits of the treehouse for a better reason than hoping redemption will come and take him away.

In the interests of furthering this subs move from “clickbait get rich quick” posts to more substantive reviews of failures, I am submitting this doozy as the first in a series of my ‘Crazy Ideas’, companies I have started that never went anywhere but had an interesting ride.This is a bit long but it's fun and really far off from the normal “Sell a t-shirt/clean peoples things” posts we see so I’m hoping it's worth the read. It’s also true, even if it sounds insane.Did I mention that this is really really long? Get a coffee, don't complain, you were warned.This story kicks off in 2010/2011 or so. I was working full-time in a high-pressure consulting environment where I’d just taken the rap for a really high profile project that went south. They’d basically put me on ice for about 6 months in an attempt to get me a lower profile while the corporates looked for a scapegoat.With a ton of time on my hands, a steady paycheck still arriving, absolutely no new projects to work on, nowhere really to be and knowing that the end is nigh at some point, I needed to find the next thing. I had always maintained my side-business doing basic web backends using outsourced developers and because of that had a pretty deep roster of potential projects, so I dug into that and used this time to see if I could make something of it.One of my clients was an anti-piracy firm. Not anti-piracy in the BitTorrent sense but anti-piracy in the “We put strong Ukranian ex-special forces troops with neck tattoos on boats with guns” sense, mostly in the Indian Ocean. Knowing the sorts of problems they had, I reached out with some ideas for new cool projects that would make their lives better. Maybe connecting their GPS ping devices to a single map so they could have a global view of what everyone was doing, alerting tools, integrated CRM, stuff like that.The thing about companies in this anti-piracy space is that they are extremely dodgy. It is a grey-market at best, where one year the UN condemns you and the next year they release a policy paper saying that global commerce depends on mercenaries with guns on boats. One year a bank will take your wire transfer, the next year you are funneling money to Malta via someone’s ex-girlfriends account to try to bypass new quasi-regulations. Everyone is always threatening and backstabbing and stealing. Every contract is a 3rd of 4th level sub-contract from some other dodgy entity, usually based on who had access to legal and documented weapons at any given time (a complex topic). The stakes are high, the profit huge and the players scammy at best. The nature of the business means that people that start these companies are not… stable.This client was no exception, let's call the owner ‘Sal’. Sal spent years in Iraq as a private military contractor, providing security via some 3rd or 4th level sub-contracting company. He claimed to be an ex-army ranger but no one ever really saw evidence of that so there is a high probability that he was a southern boy that knew how to shoot and leveraged that into a high-revenue gig during the go-go days of PMC’s in the Middle East. I know he was there, he has pictures to prove it.Sal was unstable, at best. Super fun guy, really engaging, ride-or-die style, and constantly on the go, classic ADHD/BiPolar. He had a loose partnership with a few other players and together they had formed a security company where they could source Russian or Ukranian ex-army/special forces (White vs Asian is a huge thing in this space as Asian’s are seen as less reliable), provide weapons, provide GPS trackers, provide transport, a villa in Sri-Lanka and another in Dubai for off-operations waiting and staff to handle centralized comms. Through this, they had a nice little business that produced a ton of cash flow and subsidized a really nice lifestyle. Eventually, however, the natural instability of these things began to break the association apart and my call happened to come at that exact time.Sal was incredibly happy to chat with me and it pretty quickly became clear, he was ready to backstab these people. He had already collected the ‘loyalty’ of the team, had access to control of all key assets and was ready to make his move and start a new company but, due to his ADHD/BiPolar nature, was really not equipped to do the blocking and tackling it would require. Turns out, I am really good at that stuff and a partnership was formed. We quickly formed the new company by buying a shelf-company out of Cyprus (complete with a bank account), building a quick new website and presenting a business that was ready to go. Sal was able to contact existing clients and providers who, already being used to the constant shifting of names and companies in the space, seemed happy to use a new bank account for their transfers. Given the loose nature of all of this none of it is exactly illegal, but neither is it friendly..Things were immediately popping for the first month or two. Profits, in this case, were about $10k per run from Sri Lanka to the Red Sea, there was about 1-run a week and Sal was living it up in Dubai. I was getting my 10% and it was clear this had potential so we started investigating scale. Could we get our own insurance instead of sub-leasing someone else's? Could we source our own weapons with USA approval? These are the sort of things that turn a $1m/year business in this space to a $50m/year business because all of these are assets that can be sub-contracted at a huge mark-up. A low-cost weapon can be leased weekly for 2-3x its actual cost. Insurance can be haloed to sub-contractors who can’t get their own, etc etc. It's all about the provenance and regulatory approval which is required by shipping companies and they accept most things at face value.But, somewhere in month 3, it became clear that this house of cards was going to come crashing down. Sal just lacked the expertise, credibility, and stability to maintain. He’d go from working out 5 days a week and eating clean to flying to Ukraine for 3-5 day vodka benders where he was probably face down in a ditch by the end. It was clear, adult supervision was needed. Luckily, Sal’s girlfriend, ‘Sofia’, a stereotypical tall, blond Ukranian bombshell, had just the person in Odessa, Ukraine.Let's call him ‘Sergei’. Sergei was the owner of a successful shipping company and looking to diversify. He understood the market because he was hiring these firms and saw a great opportunity to not only diversify but also cut out the middle-man for his own shipping needs. Sergei and Sofia knew that Sal was the missing link in this plan and so a new company was drawn up, funded by Sergei, and we moved our ‘assets’, such as they were, over to it.Not sure if you have ever done business with mid-level Ukranian/Russian businessman in Odessa so a quick note: They are untrusting, conspiracy focused, and highly intelligent individuals that know how to leverage in equal parts money, relationships and the quiet threat of violence to achieve their goals. Lucky for us, Sergei was actually a good guy and really trying to make a go of scaling his business. One of his ships had been unknowingly caught up in some blockade running during one of the conflicts running around the Med in that time and it had hit his reputation a bit and he wanted to recover that.Pretty quickly it was clear though that Sergei and Sal were oil and water. Buttoned up Russian Businessman and insane bipolar American cowboy. In order to get this kicked off, it was critical for all of us to get together and for Sergei to understand that Sofia and I were behind Sal so it would be OK. So, like any sensible person, and against the wishes of my wife and our two young children, I took a week vacation from my day-job and hopped on a plane to Odessa for a week of meetings.Odessa is a trippy, interesting and dangerous city and my time there was no exception, lots of good stories from my week there. They put me up in a nice little apartment downtown and we had a driver. But let's be clear, this was not some UberBlack service, it was literally an old smoky Lada being driven by a guy who did not speak English, had tattoos all over his neck, and was still wearing his desert camo. This car would smoke on up to my apt and Sofia would grab me from the lobby where we would then careen through Odessa to the office, careful to not be followed. As I said, they were paranoid.The only thing that was accomplished that week was Sergei and Sal fighting endlessly. Lots of smoky meetings in restaurants filled with angry conversation. When I left, the only thing that really changed was that I was given an IT Support person to supplement my team and help manage the field teams with tech. This was important given the timezone shift everyone is operating on.Predictably, when I returned home, things went to hell within a month. Sergei realized that Sal was just unmanageable, Sal felt that Sergei was ripping him off and Sofia was just pissed, in that inimitable Russian-Woman way, that all the men couldn’t get their shit together. As the owner of the original shell company and all of our comms assets, I worked hard to keep it together but eventually, Sergei turned on everyone and had his local IT guy take control of all the assets via his administrative access to our Gmail domain. Game set and match he thought.Of course, it wasn’t. After 2 weeks of me working with Google to prove ownership and Sal pushing to move clients and assets back to the original shell company we regained control. I’ll never forget that final call from Google to move the domain back into our ownership, I was on a mountain bike ride and pulled over to take the call, approve it, and then resume my ride, knowing that the team on the water at that exact moment would now be communicating with Sal directly. At the time it felt very Neal Stephenson/Cryptonomican, and I was quite impressed with myself.Again, predictably, things just fell apart. Bills couldn’t be paid, villa’s were taken away, access to weapons was lost as Sal become increasingly unpredictable and Sofia left him which sent him into a 6+ week binge that left the entire system crippled.A year later I decommissioned that Cyprus company and put it all into my past. My final email to Sal on this :Heads up. Banks are closed and company will be dissolved with a month or two.It was an interesting ride. Good luck out there.Sergei is still doing great and the tech company idea he told me about over drinks and steak in Odessa eventually launched and is doing quite well. His shipping business continues to grow and, even though he devolved into implied threats of violence against me at the time, we are now connected on linked-in and exchange occasional pleasantries every few years via email.Sal ended up in a southern US state doing construction with some buddies until he could save up enough to move to Thailand where he bought a share in a strip club. Being unstable he quickly lost that, returned to the US, did some more construction, and then returned again to Thailand to buy a stake in a rental lodge. Recently that went belly-up as well and last I saw he is living on some beach with his Thai girlfriend. He seems happy but I imagine he will be back and contracting again to prepare for his next Thai adventure.I look back on it with fondness. It was a crazy amazing adventure that had the potential to pay-off and, while dangerous, was also invigorating, interesting and exposed me to so many things I’ve never seen. It is also a great conversation piece and I made some relationships that, while tentative, may someday be useful and/or fun. No regrets other than making my loving and supportive wife angry and worried and also the fact that I put myself into danger that they didn’t sign-up for. That was pretty stupid in hindsight, but we all get blinded by the chase sometimes.My day job? I was released about a month after I returned. Took a few months off and then started my only successful business with my now dedicated time.About me: Since I was in college, I’ve always started various businesses while working full-time and all of them except one failed (coincidentally, the one that I was committed to, go figure..). It has always been my dream to hit a home run in a strange business. My hit ratio is pretty bad but that's part of the journey, I just can’t help myself. It is fun to explore the past so I’ll probably write a few more of these for the downvotes.