The Basics of Government Support Programs
“Guys. Let’s call her in an hour so it doesn’t look too obvious. How does that sound?”
“Good. You’re the one who’s going to call her, right?”
“Yeah. I’ll do it myself.”
We were delighted, as if we had already been hired.
And fortunately, when the final acceptance call went out an hour later, Park Jaeyun immediately said she was in.
“Did we seriously just succeed in hiring someone?”
“I-I think so, right?”
“Wow!! We’re finally free from all that paperwork!!”
The word free made me burst out laughing before I could stop myself.
“You’re happy too! Right?!”
The guys were grinning from ear to ear, and I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to them.
Whether this was freedom or not, we’d know soon enough.
“Ugh. This is killing me.”
“There are way too many tiny things to keep track of.”
“Why is this taking so long?”
Sure enough, groans filled the room.
We had to rush out the handoff files before the three days until Park Jaeyun started her job were up.
None of us had ever made handoff documents before, so even after I gave them a template, everyone was still tearing their hair out.
“All you have to do is grab screenshots of the screens we use and write explanations. Why are you all making this so hard?”
“Because it’s hard to explain things in simple sentences.”
“Then just explain them in simple sentences.”
“No, I wrote it simply, but when you read it, you say it isn’t simple at all!!”
“Writing only ‘Click the red button.’ is not an explanation!! Write it so even kindergarteners seeing it for the first time could follow along!!”
They were all geniuses in their own fields, but writing a handoff document more simply than they expected was somehow difficult.
Seriously, was this what engineering students were like?
Aside from Seonghun-hyung, their handoff files were the kind that, well, really, you had to explain line by line in words before anyone would understand them.
“If it’s frustrating, why don’t you just write it yourself~”
“Nope. I need to write our Startup Competition application.”
“Damn it, right.”
In the middle of all this chaos, we also had to prepare for the government-run Startup Competition.
We’d already registered the business, which meant we couldn’t get the benefits reserved for would-be founders. Instead, we had to squeeze out as many support grants as we could for early-stage startups.
Most of the major support programs closed applications before March, but the Startup Competition accepted entries through the first half of the year.
So we absolutely had to go for this one.
If we won here, we’d naturally get strong evaluations from other support programs too, which meant we could keep lining them up one after another.
“Do you think there are people preparing as hard as we are?”
“We have to assume everyone’s preparing as hard as we are.”
Seonghun-hyung, who was working on the application materials with me, was clearly having a miserable time.
For me, the problem was simply that we were short on time in quantitative terms, but Seonghun-hyung was having a hard time with the paperwork itself.
No matter how many business administration classes he’d taken, doing proper market research and turning it into documentation wasn’t easy for an engineering student.
“Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. We have the tech, and the reputation of the institutions we’re working with is solid too, so the odds of getting rejected on paper are low.”
So I had to keep taking care of his mental state so he wouldn’t run away or get crushed under self-loathing.
No matter how mature everyone seemed, they were still college students in their mid-twenties.
In my previous life, I hadn’t looked after my team at all, and they’d all burned out. I couldn’t let that happen again.
“Anyway, the material we used for Capstone Design doesn’t have to change much. When we need to copy and paste, let’s be bold and paste it all in. Saves time!”
“That was your work, though. Isn’t it kind of shameless for me to use it?”
“What’s shameless about that? We’re working on company stuff.”
Fortunately, Seonghun-hyung seemed to loosen up a little and smiled at that.
He’d only joined the club not long ago, and now we were asking him to help prepare for a competition that would have actual adults swarming in, so of course the pressure would’ve been a lot.
There was no need for that.
Just from the sense he’d shown in sweeping university competitions, and from the potential he’d eventually reveal, he was someone who needed to keep walking this road with us.
“Instead, read my section on the product properly later. It’d be even better if you could smooth out the parts that can be turned into tables or graphs, and the parts that were written a little too densely.”
“I can do that.”
What I personally felt good about in this round of preparation was that Badugi hadn’t thrown out a single negative comment.
Maybe it was because we were building on the Capstone Design proposal that had been finished under brutal criticism, but whatever the reason, good was good.
I was writing the first draft of the application with nothing but positive thoughts when Badugi suddenly appeared again.
[Is that all for the expected effects?]
Expected effects.
It was the section where we wrote what benefits this project would bring and what ripple effects it could have.
I’d kept almost exactly the same expected effects we’d used for Capstone Design and when pitching investors, so why was it suddenly complaining?
[Why? This is already convincing professors, and we’re getting good responses from investors too.]
At my answer, Badugi shook its head with absolute certainty.
[Maybe that worked before. But you can’t do it like this now.]
I looked over the expected-effects section I’d written once more.
Our product was an AI that used X-rays to detect a wide range of diseases, including lung cancer.
The size of the market, based on the number of clinics, hospitals, and organizations using X-rays, and the number of patients they served.
The projected revenue based on that was our main expected effect.
I’d been fairly specific not only about what it meant for us, but also about the benefits from the perspective of doctors, the users.
What exactly wasn’t supposed to be done like this?
[What’s missing?]
At my question, Badugi started explaining as if it had been waiting for me to ask.
[Keep in mind that the side running this competition is a government institution.]
Most documents, including proposals, have to be written with a clear idea of who will be reading them.
And you also need to keep firmly in mind why they assigned this to you in the first place.
So far, the documents we’d used for Capstone Design and for raising investment had one very clear goal.
Proving our product can generate revenue.
But government support programs don’t only look at whether a business can make money.
That was the core of what Badugi was saying.
[Whether it can generate revenue only determines if the business can survive. What makes you stand out is proving the government has a legitimate reason to spend money on you.]
At that, I nodded.
It was honestly such a relief to have Badugi steering the business side on its own.
[Then what should we add?]
[That’s for you to figure out. I already gave you the hint.]
Scratch that. It wasn’t that comfortable after all.
“Guys, what positive effects could our product have on our country?”
Rather than think it through alone, I decided to tap collective intelligence.
Even if everyone was looking at me with strange expressions.
“Does it have to be our country?”
“It would be nice if it is, but it doesn’t have to be.”
Fortunately, the answers came pouring out smoothly.
“At the hackathon, you talked about tuberculosis patients and the WHO and all that, right? Globally, it means patients can be seen faster and treated faster.”
“Even if it isn’t specifically tuberculosis, that’s the important point. If patients can get additional tests or a diagnosis and start treatment even one day sooner, that’s good, right?”
“To put it simply, it’d be ‘increased patient survival rates through early diagnosis.’”
I was a little surprised by how quickly the answers came out.
Until now, I’d thought of our business as something I’d come up with and dragged everyone into myself.
Sure, they were all contributing in their own places, but I hadn’t thought they had the same attachment to this idea that I did.
Someone who had brought in a business he’d completely ruined in his previous life was bound to have a different mindset.
“And if our company grows, we can say it’ll raise our country’s standing in the world too. It’s such incredible technology.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to make that more professional, like saying it drives GDP growth on the level of major medical device companies?”
“Ah. To prove we’re not replacing doctors, we should include data showing how overloaded doctors are right now. We need this product to normalize doctors’ workloads.”
“If we sell a lot, we can say our company will create tons of jobs too, right? Job creation.”
But my teammates were just as sincere about the business as I was.
The fact that, the moment I tossed something out, they were all already ready with plausible answers in a rush meant they’d been thinking about this a lot all along.
“You guys are incredible.”
I was genuinely impressed.
It moved me, a little, that they weren’t just blindly following me, but were running alongside me while carrying their own worries and ideas.
“Aren’t those all things you were already thinking about?”
“No. Now I need to combine what you said and add it to the proposal.”
“Do that.”
But they didn’t exactly share my sense of wonder.
Well, fine. That was their flavor.
“If I think of anything else to ask, I’ll let you know.”
“Okay.”
We didn’t need awkward little fist pumps or pep talk rituals. I could feel it clearly enough already: we were all doing our best toward the same goal.
So this time, we had to make the business explode for real.
[What do you think of the guys’ ideas?]
[Good. Organize them well.]
It was strange how a point I’d expected to take a long time to crack suddenly opened like that.
[You need to learn to trust your teammates. That’s how you survive when the company gets bigger.]
At Badugi’s words, I grinned and nodded.
“Wow. The participation rate among college students seems to be going up every year.”
“Really? Any teams that look good?”
“Good teams are rare.”
The document screening for the Startup Competition moved quickly and busily.
But reading one similar application after another got boring, so the judges had started chatting here and there.
“Still, there was one interesting team among the university students.”
“Ah. I think I saw one too. The one working on artificial intelligence, right?”
“I saw that one too. TA Medical, right?”
“That’s right. So it wasn’t just me who noticed them right away?”
Artificial intelligence was still a technology that hadn’t been fully popularized yet.
Applying that kind of technology to the medical field, where people’s lives were directly on the line, was not an easy idea to come up with either.
So just the business idea alone was enough to catch the judges’ attention in Kim Siwon’s application.
“They did a tremendous amount of research. They must have had a hard time fitting it all into the maximum length.”
“Their vision was really clear, and it had a strong public-interest angle too. Right?”
“They’re already collaborating with Korea University too.”
“This year’s applicants really have awful luck. They probably never expected a competitor like that to show up out of nowhere.”
The business idea was fresh, the related patent filings were numerous, the collaborators were impressive, and each member of the team shone on their own.
Even in a pile of applications, TA Medical was the kind of team you couldn’t help remembering.
That was why, even though this was only the first round of filtering out the dead weight, TA Medical was already being kept in mind as a document-pass candidate.
“Well, since it’s come up, should we just put this application on the acceptance list for now? I don’t think we need to keep reviewing it.”
“Yes. I looked it up, and they’ve even been on TV a few times. If there were a problem, they’d have gone down already.”
“We need more teams like this to make the judging go faster.”
Everyone laughed and, in good humor, placed TA Medical on the list of applications that had passed the documents round.
Then they fell back into silence and began reviewing the other applications one by one.
Of course, none of them had ideas that sparkled the way TA Medical’s application did.
But among them, the ones that stood out and had public value were classified as document-pass candidates.
Businesses with especially strong commercial potential, the sort likely to create plenty of jobs, were also looked on favorably.
“Well, this should do it, right? Three times the number we need?”
“We should have about two more teams, but should we pick through the better ones again?”
“Hmm. Hard to say. All right.”
While choosing the additional passers, the judges couldn’t shake the thought: Does this even matter?
They couldn’t forget how overwhelming TA Medical had been.
Everyone thought the same thing.
They just didn’t say it out loud, because admitting it felt unprofessional.