Finding the Office
The conversation wrapped up beautifully.
I almost felt silly for having been so tense about it.
“Thank you for your hard work, Juwon. You did great.”
“We’re the ones in the weaker position, remember? Of course we have to do well.”
“Huh? Oh. Right.”
I was relieved that the talk I’d been worried about had turned out in our favor after all.
“Just head home for today. Once we finalize the contract with Director Son Boyoon, you’re going to get pretty busy.”
“No, I’m actually grabbing drinks with Seonghun tonight.”
“Oh, really? Just the two of you?”
“Yes.”
What’s more, it seemed like the friction between the two of them had mostly healed, too.
“After studying the PM role, I realized I’d been sticking my nose way too much into marketing.”
“That’s what happens when the R&R isn’t clearly defined.”
“And that too, but I think I’d misunderstood what a PM actually does.”
She could be blunt, sure, but when it mattered, she was very capable of looking at herself honestly.
Even in my previous life, that was one of the reasons I could never let go of Ha Juwon.
“I’ll cover it with the company card. Eat and drink as much as you want.”
“Okay~”
“And tell Seonghun to go straight there now. That way he won’t have to wait in line.”
“Oh~ I’ll pass that along.”
In the middle of that peaceful exchange, we reached the building where the club room was located.
Seonghun was just coming out of the building, so we waved and called out to him.
“Oh. Perfect timing, huh?”
“Yep~”
“I’ll park and head up right away. You two have fun~”
“Yep, yep~”
The moment Ha Juwon got out of the car, she didn’t even look back; she just walked toward the main gate with Seonghun.
I watched them for a moment with quiet satisfaction, then parked and headed up to the office.
Inside, everyone was busy deciding what to eat for dinner.
“Thanks for your hard work~”
“Not at all. I talked things through well with the director.”
“Not about that. We mean you worked hard getting things sorted out between Seonghun and Juwon~”
Sure enough, the whole team had been suffering because of the conflict between those two.
“I’m sorry I noticed it so late.”
“No, it’s fine. You all usually get along just fine, and it was only the occasional clash between the two of them. You couldn’t have known.”
“Anyway, it’s Siwon who fixed it, isn’t it? I don’t know how you did it, but still.”
“Seonghun asked if anyone wanted to come eat with him, and none of us went, remember? We told them to please, just work it all out properly.”
Everyone wore thoroughly satisfied expressions.
They were people who lost their minds over free meals, so seeing them stay put even after hearing they could use the company card made me feel a little bad.
“You haven’t ordered dinner yet, right? I’ll treat everyone here too. For fairness.”
“Oh? Then should we switch to an expensive place?”
“What should we get? If we’re ordering something pricey, jokbal is probably the way to go, right?”
“Sounds good!”
We ordered jokbal and I shared the details of my meeting with Director Son Boyoon with the team.
I figured that unless something involved security or was still undecided, it was best to explain future changes in as much detail as possible.
“So basically, nothing changes much on the development side?”
“I think it’d be good for me to talk with the director a lot, even if it’s just in the support team role for now. It’s a chance to hear what things are like in the field.”
“For research, we might end up needing to communicate with people later on, but it sounds like nothing’s been mentioned about that yet, right?”
As expected, everyone started thinking about how the information I’d given them would affect their own roles.
Questions came quickly, and before they’d even have to face Director Son Boyoon, they were already preparing in their own ways.
“But I do have one question.”
“Yes?”
“So will Director Son Boyoon also be working here, in the club room?”
At Jae-yoon’s question, everyone looked up and around the room.
A room of just over ten pyeong.
A large table in the center and sofas lined up beside it.
“Hmm.”
Honestly, even as a startup office, it was pretty rough around the edges.
And the distance to the meeting room was a little inconvenient, too.
“I was actually planning to apply for one of the campus office openings for founders if one came up.”
“Okay.”
“Being close to school would make it easier for all of you to come in during the semester, after all. Hmm.”
But no matter how big the advantage was, looking shabby from the outside was a much bigger drawback.
Honestly, it was ridiculous that our business registration certificate listed this university club room as the company address in the first place.
“I’ll start looking for an office tomorrow. Let’s keep the club room only as a sort of annex we use during the semester.”
At my words, everyone cheered, and I mean really cheered, springing to their feet as they did it.
“Waaah!!”
“We’re finally getting out of this rat hole!!”
“Amazing!!”
“We won’t have to run into school people every single day!!”
“I already made a list of offices around here! Starting tomorrow, you can just call and ask whether they have any vacancies!!”
I hadn’t expected them to be this happy.
“If you wanted to move that badly, you should’ve said so sooner.”
“How were we supposed to say anything when we didn’t even know how much money the company had?”
“And you kept saying we were getting support for this and that, so we figured we should just stay quiet.”
“The list Jae-yoon made? We all made it together. More like we were building a wishlist of places we wanted to work in.”
I really hadn’t expected it to be this much.
“All right, then. It’s not even 6 p.m. yet, so I’ll start calling right away.”
“You don’t even need to go to the meeting room, Siwon~ Just call them now!”
“Call at least one place first, Siwon~”
Watching my team celebrate the office hunt three thousand times more enthusiastically than they had the news of hiring Director Son Boyoon, I actually felt a little guilty.
So I started dialing even faster, using the list Jae-yoon had sent over.
“Hello, I’m calling because we’re looking for an office space.”
A phone call this suffocating would not be something I’d ever want to repeat.
The conditions for the office we were looking for were very simple.
It had to be close enough to the university, it had to have a meeting room, and its interior had to be decent enough that outside visitors wouldn’t think we were a joke.
So I’d assumed we could just rank any vacant place by price and pick the cheapest one.
“A shared office is the type of office space startups in the U.S. use a lot.”
“This one’s big, and the rooms are divided up nicely, so it’d be great for arranging seats by department~”
“A vacancy just opened up in a hurry, and the CEO who used it before said he’d dump the chairs and desks for next to nothing and be done with them!”
But it turned out there were way more office options than I’d expected.
[You’ve contracted office space before, haven’t you? Just choose based on that.]
[Those were all offices we got through different support programs, one by one.]
[Then ask the team.]
[You saw the group chat too. Not a single person agrees with anyone else.]
I’d thought we could wrap up a contract in a single day, but choosing an office was far more difficult than I’d imagined.
Even something as basic as where and how we could hang our company sign was different from place to place, so how on earth was I supposed to decide in one day?
[If you really can’t decide, bring everyone together and have a proper discussion.]
As I sat there in gloomy silence, blankly staring ahead, Badugi popped up in a speech bubble as if telling me to snap out of it.
It sounded like a throwaway suggestion, but right now there was nothing better.
“Yeah, that’s probably what I should do. I guess I’m not built for this side of things.”
I immediately sent a message to the group chat.
Please gather in the meeting room at 4:30 p.m. today. Let’s discuss which office to contract for.
It was an extremely straightforward message.
Honestly, the reaction to my message was pretty dry.
A simple yes, got it, or okay.
But once I actually got to the meeting room, everyone’s expressions were no joke.
“You’re here now, Siwon.”
“Then shall we start right away?”
“Please decide who goes first, Siwon.”
It was 4:25.
“Uh, um. Since Jae-yoon made the list, should we go clockwise starting with Jae-yoon?”
“Yes. Then I’ll connect my laptop to the screen.”
They had even made a PowerPoint.
“This image shows the office interior of the world-renowned company Google.”
It was a PowerPoint that included market research.
“Since we’ve set each presentation at five minutes, we’ll move right into Younghoon’s presentation.”
There were rules for the discussion, too.
[Wow, they’re seriously intense about this.]
[Why are they taking this so seriously?]
[They don’t know what kind of work environment they want, so it can’t be helped.]
I was flustered, but I didn’t even have time to stay flustered.
Every member took turns delivering their own five-minute presentation without pause, and each one was so clear and forceful that I didn’t have room to think about anything else.
When I opened the shared folder to take notes and keep a rough meeting record, everyone’s PPT files were already neatly uploaded there.
It really was turning into a far more serious discussion than I’d expected.
“Now we’d like to hear Siwon’s opinion. Please understand that we planned to leave the Q&A until the very end for the sake of fairness.”
When the storm of presentations finally ended, it was immediately my turn to speak.
All those crisp, well-prepared presentations had come at me in a flood, but nothing I could say was on quite that level.
To begin with, I didn’t really have any strong preference in the matter.
[For now, just knock out the weaker options by majority vote.]
I was staring at the laptop monitor, not knowing how to respond, when thankfully Badugi appeared to help me.
“Then let’s start with an anonymous vote. Each of you pick three options.”
“Understood. I’ll put the vote up in the group chat right away.”
Just by saying a word, everything happened smoothly.
Everyone was so deeply serious about this that it was actually hard for me to offer an opinion.
Even so, it was amusing how all those bulldozer-like personalities were slow to choose anything other than the two places they’d already picked.
“I’ll sit this vote out. Take your time and choose.”
While they did that, I looked through all the PPTs the team had made.
On the surface, they were simply presentations about offices, but within them were all the kinds of company culture the team wanted.
There were reasons written down for everything—whether they valued teamwork, whether they prioritized individual space, whether they cared about how the company looked from the outside, and so on.
Thanks to that, I could start to get a sense of which direction I should lead the company in and how I ought to treat each member.
[Good thing you suggested a presentation. Everyone’s being proactive, which is even better.]
[Yeah. It’s nice that we’ll be able to hear more about things outside work from now on, too.]
In the end, two places tied in the vote.
So we discussed only those two, and I was able to listen in on people’s thoughts about company culture and office space for more than thirty minutes.
“Then shall we do the final vote?”
“Sounds good.”
“Let’s make this anonymous too.”
“Understood.”
Finding an office.
I’d thought it was just one of those annoying tasks we had to get through, but it turned out to be a pretty useful session.
“All right, everyone head home for now. I’ll report the voting results tomorrow at 9 a.m. and take care of the contract myself.”
Now I’d have to go home and think about how to shape the company culture based on what came up today.
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