Before Hyprnote
Neither of us got here on the first try.
John spent five years cofounding startups — education platforms, social apps, platform businesses. He built an AI-native investment research platform and sold it. Through all of it, he was a heavy note-taker obsessed with how software should feel. Obsidian, Logseq, Apple Notes — he tried everything and had strong opinions about all of them. Hundreds of meetings where existing tools transcribed but never went further cemented what he wanted to build.
Yujong was deep in the open-source world — contributing to Hono, LiteLLM, and other projects. A systems thinker who goes to fundamentals. His conviction: solutions must be transparent and community-driven. Create massive value first, capture some of it later.
How We Met
We were working on different startups out of the same shared office in Seoul. We knew each other for over a year before we ever worked together.
We'd have lunch together every single day — even though we were on completely different teams. On weekends, we were usually the only two people who showed up at the office. John would talk about how he thought about businesses and products. Yujong would talk about dev tools and systems. John would give UX feedback on whatever Yujong was building. We'd argue about what makes software good.
Over time, we became close friends. And at some point we realized: if we ever worked together, we'd be a strong team. John's taste for product and design, Yujong's depth in engineering and open source — different vectors, complementary strengths.
Perfect Timing
LLMs changed everything. Ideas prototype faster, models run locally, hardware keeps improving. On-device AI assistants went from impossible to real. We saw the window and took it.