Don't Be Evil
When the two men appeared on stage, murmurs rippled through the audience. The flow felt slightly off. Yoo Jae-won had already seemed to crown IDDC 99 with the Xbox announcement, yet here he was again. This was entirely Gilbert's doing. At the same time, Yoo Jae-won felt certain the crowd's skepticism would not last long. The SNS service TokTok, chosen to deliver the final presentation that would close out IDDC 99, was the creation of the venture team led by Gilbert Owen.
However, Gilbert and his team had no idea how extraordinary the item they had built truly was. That was precisely why Yoo Jae-won had decided to stand on stage with them—to open their eyes to its potential.
Gilbert Owen had sought out Yoo Jae-won, who was deep in preparations for IDDC 99, only five days earlier. At their meeting, Gilbert laid out every business model and internet service idea he had created so far. Yoo Jae-won listened with genuine interest. Then he saw TokTok and was stunned. He decided to invest on the spot and even asked Gilbert to handle the final presentation of IDDC 99.
Gilbert Owen, who could no longer endure school life, had approached Yoo Jae-won on a whim and struck gold. What he never expected was that Yoo Jae-won would show interest not in GiftIcon or SuperPay—the projects Gilbert had been most confident about—but in TokTok, the one he had included merely to round out the list.
More than that, Yoo Jae-won was not simply providing funding. He was inviting Gilbert to stand beside him on the grandest stage ID Group had to offer. The situation still felt unreal to Gilbert. As he stood there, memories flashed through his mind like a reel—from his first meeting with Yoo Jae-won at Stanford's freshman orientation years ago to this very moment.
Until high school, Gilbert had been teased as a nerd. He was simply shy and not very active; he preferred computers over sports. That shyness had once left him speechless when a girl he liked showed brief interest in him. Still, Gilbert had talent for academics. He won awards in competitions, and his teachers paid him attention, so he was never truly ostracized.
It was only natural that Gilbert's path led to Stanford's Computer Science department. There he met Yoo Jae-won, the man who would completely change his future.
Yoo Jae-won had already become a legend by solving the Millennium Problem and had entered the fast track, so he rarely attended classes. Yet whenever he did come to campus, he often ran into Gilbert. From that point on, Gilbert was captivated by Yoo Jae-won.
In truth, it was not only Gilbert. Everyone at Stanford held Yoo Jae-won in high regard. He was the most successful alumnus the school had ever produced. Moreover, he was generous with his donations. His contributions went beyond scholarships, development funds, and building dedications. Stanford's computers were always state-of-the-art, reaching their peak after Yoo Jae-won released the iWorks series. Where the computer labs had once been filled with NewEgg machines, they now ran iWorks workstations.
Gilbert naturally wanted to become like Yoo Jae-won. Building a massive conglomerate might be beyond him, but he dreamed of founding a compelling internet company and becoming Yoo Jae-won's partner. That dream, however, proved difficult to realize.
Gilbert possessed a brilliant idea called GiftIcon, yet practical obstacles kept pushing it back year after year. Stanford had advisory bodies to help students with startups and even legal teams to review investment contracts. The advisors raised several concerns about GiftIcon. In Western culture, the act of opening a gift in front of the giver and showing immediate delight was important. Sending only a distant token of affection lacked appeal. Furthermore, using barcodes to pay for goods required the latest POS systems, which had poor adoption rates.
Gilbert was devastated. He had charged forward with the single concept of gifting tickets or items via barcode, completely blind to these real-world issues. He built a remarkably complete system and visited multiple venture firms for investment, only to receive the same feedback the advisors had given.
Yet Gilbert could not give up. He had not created the GiftIcon system alone. He had formed a team of about five fellow Stanford students and alumni. If he had been working solo, he might have abandoned the project and focused on his studies, but the responsibility of leading a team made that impossible.
His second attempt repurposed one of the technologies developed while building the GiftIcon system: payment processing. The GiftIcon mechanism was actually quite simple. The person sending the gift prepaid and received a barcode. That barcode could be used later by the sender or given as a present. When the recipient presented the barcode at a store and the POS system recognized it, a charge was sent to Gilbert's company, which paid instantly.
Gilbert realized this mechanism could be applied not only to GiftIcon but also to secure transactions and various shopping malls. The P Market, which had risen to prominence in peer-to-peer commerce, was plagued by fraud complaints. Stories of buyers receiving bricks instead of goods were already legendary online. With a payment processing service, however, fraud would become nearly impossible. Transactions would only complete after the buyer confirmed receipt of the item. Sellers benefited equally; they would never ship goods without receiving payment, though they might have to wait slightly longer for confirmation.
Moreover, Gilbert built a trust system. The more successful transactions a user accumulated, the higher their trust score rose, granting benefits such as lower fees and faster payouts. Most importantly, the payment processing service eliminated the need for buyers and sellers to exchange credit card or bank account numbers. Gilbert's system acted as an intermediary, allowing transactions without sharing financial information—an attractive feature for privacy-conscious North American consumers.
The service also offered advantages in fees. One-click purchase systems used by P Market and other shopping sites directly connected card companies with small-scale sellers. Large card issuers imposed the highest commission rates on self-employed merchants. By having Gilbert's system represent those merchants in negotiations with card companies and banks, economies of scale could reduce fees to corporate levels.
"Excellent!" Stanford's advisory body had nothing but praise for the payment processing service that followed GiftIcon. They even offered to connect him with investment firms. After all, North America's e-commerce market was growing at an astonishing pace—tens or hundreds of percent annually—and the online payment sector was expanding accordingly. Gilbert's service was a powerful weapon that could cleanly eliminate the insecurity in that market. It was also platform-agnostic; any site could integrate it with a single button click.
The problem was capital. Maintaining a stable payment processing service required substantial funds. Stanford's advisory body had been eager to introduce investors for that very reason. Despite their enthusiasm, Gilbert decided to hold off on external investment. He wanted to show the service to Yoo Jae-won first. GiftIcon had been set aside for now, but the payment processing system born from it looked promising even to Gilbert himself.
He immediately requested a meeting. Instead of going through ID Group's secretarial office, he sent a direct message to Yoo Jae-won via ID Talk. At the time, Gilbert had been a little nervous. He had bragged to his teammates about his connection to Yoo Jae-won and even shown them his ID Talk friend list as proof. The issue was that their conversations had grown infrequent lately due to busy schedules. He worried Yoo Jae-won might not even read his message.
Fortunately, his concern proved unfounded. Yoo Jae-won replied at once, saying it had been too long, and a meeting date was quickly arranged. Yet Gilbert suddenly felt that bringing only the payment processing system would seem rather thin. Wanting to prove he had not been idle these past years and fearing Yoo Jae-won's cold judgment, he gathered every other item he had been working on and went to the meeting.
The result was that he now stood beside Yoo Jae-won, closing out IDDC 99. Still, as Gilbert hurried onto the center of the stage after Yoo Jae-won, he could not understand why TokTok—rather than the payment processing system—had become the main attraction. TokTok was simply a messaging system his team had created to exchange short notes about project tasks and daily matters.
Yoo Jae-won's stunned reaction after seeing TokTok had been satisfying, yet even now, standing under the spotlight, Gilbert still did not fully grasp how remarkable it truly was. Everything felt dreamlike to him.
"PayPal!"
That was the word Yoo Jae-won had shouted a few days earlier when Gilbert, claiming he had something to show, spread out his ideas on an iWorks laptop and revealed the payment processing service. PayPal had been the most famous payment processing service in Yoo Jae-won's previous life. Originally named Confinity, it had been renamed PayPal after receiving investment from the venture capital firm BlueRun Ventures. In early 2000 it merged with Elon Musk's online banking company X.com, briefly setting the PayPal name aside, only for Peter Thiel to take over X.com in 2001 and restore PayPal to prominence. PayPal then surged forward, strengthening its remittance services. In 2002, barely a year later, it was acquired by eBay at the high price of twenty-three dollars per share and became a legend.
Gilbert's payment processing service possessed a far more evolved model than that PayPal. It seemed he had learned painful lessons from GiftIcon's failure and sharpened his focus on completing the revenue model. Yoo Jae-won hesitated slightly. Investing in Gilbert's team would significantly affect Elon Musk's future as well. Elon Musk was a fairly important figure in Yoo Jae-won's original master plan. The realization of massive projects such as electric cars, reusable rockets, and the Hyperloop had been possible thanks to Elon Musk's bullish drive. In particular, the OpenAI project, which greatly accelerated the technological singularity, had been able to take root because of Elon Musk's support.
Naturally, Yoo Jae-won's basic policy was to cooperate with Elon Musk. In the recently revised master plan, Elon Musk's presence had become somewhat weaker than in the original. ID Group had succeeded far beyond Yoo Jae-won's expectations, so there was no need to borrow someone else's hand when ID Group could handle matters directly.
Yoo Jae-won's mind changed completely the moment Gilbert, looking slightly embarrassed, presented the platform called TokTok.
"This is Twitter!"
The word that immediately came to Yoo Jae-won upon hearing Gilbert's explanation was Twitter—an SNS service that allowed users to exchange short messages of up to 140 characters. Yet Gilbert's TokTok was far more advanced than Twitter's early form. It had no 140-character limit and supported not only text but also image files, links, and even video files under one minute. It could be accessed via web browser on PCs, and client applications had already been developed for Tiffany Phone 2, Livepod, and T-Touch Phone.
Gilbert explained that he had created TokTok for work purposes. Because his teammates were students, it was difficult for them to stay in one place for long periods while working. ID Talk was focused on one-on-one communication, making it hard for multiple people to discuss a single topic together. So he had simply built a tool that allowed teammates to easily share short ideas, document files, and images. It worked quite well. The only inconvenience was that his teammates owned different types of phones, so he had to develop separate applications for each.
After completing TokTok, communication within the team became much smoother. Thanks to TokTok, they had been able to finish the payment processing service with relative ease. Still, Gilbert had never considered TokTok a particularly remarkable item. To him it was merely an efficient tool for handling work.
Gilbert's fixed notions began to crack the moment he met Yoo Jae-won.
"You don't realize what this is? You've just created the world's first proper SNS platform, Gilbert."
"Me?"
Unlike the bewildered Gilbert, Yoo Jae-won had instantly grasped TokTok's essence the moment he saw it. The only missing pieces were a follow function and hashtags, both of which were easily resolved with Yoo Jae-won's technical support. Implementing a timeline that displayed only posts from followed users was not particularly difficult. Once the follow function was added and hashtags could be attached to posts, images, and videos, TokTok became complete.
Gilbert's jaw dropped as he watched TokTok transform in just a few hours. Seeing Yoo Jae-won's enthusiastic reaction also filled him with the expectation that securing investment would become much easier.
Meanwhile, Yoo Jae-won, who had solved TokTok's problems, fell into deep thought—not about TokTok itself, but about an external issue. It was the problem of monopoly. Yoo Jae-won foresaw that there would be more cases like Gilbert's in the future. No one could deny that ID Group was the sun of the IT industry. Therefore, talented individuals with outstanding ideas would knock on ID Group's door first when seeking investment. Yoo Jae-won could not easily judge whether this phenomenon would ultimately benefit or harm him.
Yet a single phrase that suddenly surfaced in his mind allowed him to stand on the finale stage of IDDC 99 with Gilbert today. It was a phrase that had been all too cliché in his previous life, yet famous nonetheless: Don't Be Evil.