full of wonder

During the two-hour midterm chemistry exam where leaving early wasn't allowed, I organized my fundamental thoughts about startups on the answer sheet. I wrote in illegible handwriting, interspersing chemical formulas throughout. Although I filled almost the entire answer sheet, unfortunately I couldn't take it with me or photograph it, so I've reconstructed the key points from memory. It was quite interesting to organize fundamental questions like "Why i founded?" and "If Palantir goes up 50x, would I quit doing this?" after such a long time.

Wonder

The Plato's One Liner is "We Make Something Wonderful." Here, 'Wonder' as a noun means not only amazement, surprise, and admiration but also "curiosity and questions." It's natural to become curious when we see something amazing or marvelous. Conversely, we feel amazement or wonder when our questions, including those we hadn't even recognized, are resolved. We believe a product can be "Wonderful" either by being remarkable enough to spark people's curiosity, or by helping people resolve questions they hadn't even recognized they had. Creating products that make users curious seems closely aligned with my personal life goals.

why i founded

I don't want to lose my curiosity about the world. This has been consistent both when reflecting on my past five years and in my current outlook. I enjoy being curious about various aspects of the world, adding and connecting what I discover to existing knowledge, creating new value from these connections, and sharing it with others. I have a kind of faith that this will continue.

My reasons for starting a business are similar. It's also why I never even considered moving to companies other than Palantir. (If I hadn't met you all, I probably would have enjoyed working as a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir, acquiring and implementing tacit knowledge from various legacy companies.) While it would be nice to exit in the short term and make hundreds of millions, I don't yet think I'm ready to handle that kind of money. Realistically, I'm not convinced it would make my current life better.

Instead, I want explosive growth. I look forward to having skin in the game beyond the framework of software engineering, not limited to theoretical study in fields I'm curious about. I anticipate the high-sensitivity knowledge acquisition this brings and the chain reaction of curiosity it creates.

This connects to how I want to live 10, 20 years from now. Having keen curiosity about the world and persistently turning this curiosity into value - these are two core elements of my child education that haven't changed for 5-6 years. Refining this is a crucial aspect of my life.

Furthermore, I want to spread this to those around me. My personal life goals align with future generations, vaguely including solving the low birth rate problem and supporting the middle class so democracy can function properly.

As Marx mentioned in Das Kapital, the superstructure has more power to manipulate the masses than we might think. To counter this power, we need skepticism and First Principle Thinking, which I believe are rooted in curiosity. Increasing the amount of curiosity in the world will increase Wonder and become the foundation for revolution and a better future.

what we can do

I initially advocated for the company mission to be "Be aware of the Platonic Fold" as recognizing the Platonic Fold is my life motto. This concept significantly influenced the naming of "The Plato." However, I realized it wasn't as accessible to the general public as Apple's "Think Different." When Evan suggested "We make something wonderful," I could agree with an "Oh, that's good!" At the time, I couldn't clearly explain why, but it just felt right. Now, after deeply considering the concept of Wonder, I've found some of those reasons.

I want Plato's products to be recognized as providing Wonder to the world. While the adjective "Wonderful" might not explicitly include "curiosity," we can interpret it as "Wonder + full" or "Full of Wonder." I believe curiosity is as primal an instinct as sexual desire or hunger, as it's based on survival from an evolutionary perspective. Not showing "Wonder" towards new things could threaten survival. In this sense, Wonder is always an important response that provides both a tickling, exciting yet fearful appropriate amount of stress and dopamine simultaneously.

Wonder can be interpreted in two ways: as "curiosity" and as "the amazement that comes when curiosity is satisfied." I believe these are crucial elements in moving and influencing people. The experience of drawing out things people didn't know they were curious about, making them aware of these things, and solving them can lead to a sequence of curiosity generation → curiosity resolution → amazement → recognition as a Wonderful Product. It seems that to generate curiosity, we need to enable people to look at things from various angles.

The axis of curiosity is a crucial pillar that will sustain me for more than five years to come. I want to refine our products based on this axis.