About the founder

As an employee you can only work eight hours a day. Flip it around, and you have to be there for eight hours even when there is nothing to do.

I wanted to work as much as was needed, when it was needed. Now I set my own hours, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With plenty of naps in between, of course.

Back when I was an employee, my work for the day was usually finished by noon. Then I would sit in the office with nothing to do until closing time.

So Ebla hires no staff, and I work with clients directly. No payroll gets built into the price, so costs stay low, and decisions and work start fast. That is the client's side of the benefit of working alone.

Honestly, it's a way of thinking that doesn't fit me. It goes against the spirit of the times, but when it's needed I can work twenty hours straight, and when a project has wound down and it isn't needed, I work two or three hours a day. I realised that this is the way of working that suits me.

Having to work five days and eight hours even when there is nothing to do, and being allowed only five days and eight hours even when there is: that "requirements definition" called the salaried way of working simply didn't fit me. When I can work, I want to work without putting a limit on myself.

Today is the youngest day of the rest of my life. I want to live it so that I would have no regrets if it all ended tomorrow. That is why I work alone.

It is precisely because I work alone that I can promise both.

I used to outsource to a few programmers. They have lives too, and when an urgent problem came up, the chain of client to me to programmer to me to client would sometimes stall for days when a holiday weekend fell in the middle of it. Now the chain is client to me to client. Deadlines and fixes move as fast as they possibly can.

Quality is the same story. I hate compromising, but running a project with several people meant there were times I had to. Now everything happens between the client and me, so there is no reason to compromise at all.

System development. App development gives you that sense of achievement when it ships, and websites take shape quickly and you see the client's reaction right away. I enjoy both.

But what I really love is thinking, wherever I happen to be, "wouldn't it be nice if there were a system like this". That's why system development is where my imagination is at its freest.

Dozens of screens line up side by side in my head, and I fit them together like a puzzle. That is the part of the work I love.

Mostly requirements. I bring the picture in your head and the picture in mine as close to 100% aligned as possible, turning something abstract into something concrete.

Many people haven't formed a clear picture yet, so I come prepared with questions that help build one.

Skip this step and you end up with the worst outcome for both sides: the finished product is not what you imagined. That first conversation exists to make sure that never happens.

Never compromising once, from the first day of development to release.

To give you the small details: I redid the sound-effect volume more than 200 times across development and production. The mascot, Blan, was meant to change daily with 31 poses for 31 days, but only five came out the way I wanted. Five poses won't even cover a week, so in the end I used just the one I liked best. Spending three days and a production budget to settle on a single picture was, honestly, frustrating.

For the AI text-generation feature, I spent close to a month testing how to get output without losing quality. It is the headline feature of Lanbla, so that was the one place I absolutely could not compromise.

Learning languages. It may sound odd coming from someone who used to work as an interpreter and translator, but however convenient interpretation and translation become, speaking to people in their own language closes the distance in an instant. And learning a language is simply fun.

My goal is to be able to say everything I want to say in ten languages. I practise on Lanbla every day!

I've always loved ILLIT, but the group I'm watching most right now is RESCENE. People call them the miracle of the small companies: they broke into the Korean idol market that everyone said only the big agencies could crack. It overlaps with where I am now, and somehow I can't help cheering for them. LOVE ATTACK and Pretty Girl are great, but UhUh is my favourite.

My biases are Eunchae of LE SSERAFIM, Wonhee and Moka of ILLIT, and Woni of RESCENE. The back-and-forth between Woni and Minami gets me every time.

Inefficiency and wasted process. Meetings about meetings, checks on checks. I can't help noticing them.

And traffic jams. Time when all you can do is wait is what I find hardest. They say time is money, but for me time is worth more than money. Given the chance, I would happily buy time with money.

To help make the work and lives of the people I meet better than before.

Whether you work with Ebla directly or reach us indirectly as a Lanbla user, I want to meet everyone's expectations at 120%. That goal has never changed.