Who I'm Looking For
Who I’m Looking For: The Temporarily Stuck
TL;DR: I said I’d go interview people and watch for the workarounds they’d built. Before I got far, I caught myself aiming at the wrong person — the one being helped, not the one with the power to help — and tracing why led somewhere personal. The people I keep wanting to help are 약자, the ones at a disadvantage, and specifically the transitional kind: capable people caught mid-passage without a map. I’ve got a few markets pulling at me and a plan to go find the people in them, but I still don’t know what to build. I’m writing it down while it’s unresolved.
I caught myself aiming at the wrong person
In the last piece I landed on a way of looking — find the workaround people have already built, mostly in their work — and said I’d go talk to people and watch for it. I thought the hard part left was scheduling.
Then, before I’d really started, I noticed something off about who I was instinctively pointing the search at.
I had already reasoned my way to a rule: study the person with the responsibility and the power to actually fix a problem, not the person on the receiving end of it. The logic was that the reasons people don’t act are too varied and too personal to build anything reliable on — you can’t productize a thousand private hesitations. So you watch the one who carries the weight and can move.
And yet, when it came time to choose who to actually talk to, I kept reaching for the person at the bottom. The individual contributor, not the head of the department. The patient, not the doctor. I was aiming the entire apparatus at the person being helped — right after debating, at length, that I should be studying the helper. I’d written the rule and then quietly broken it without noticing.
The reason was my dad, and it wasn’t the part I thought
When I asked myself why I kept drifting to that end of the room, I ended up back at my father.
He’s a doctor, and I spent a lot of my childhood near the edge of that work — close enough to watch what it did for the people who came to him. For a long time I assumed the thing that stuck with me was the patients. It wasn’t, exactly. What stuck was him: the person doing the helping, and the specific moment when someone walked in stuck and walked out a little less so.
Somewhere along the way I’d turned that into a pull toward the people at the very end of the chain — the ones the help is ultimately for — and it was steering me, underneath my own reasoning, toward studying them instead of the people standing next to them. I was reaching past the helper to get to the helped.
The people I keep helping are the ones at a disadvantage (the transitional kind)
Once I saw that, a more honest question fell out of it: not where the pain is, but who I actually want to spend a decade helping.
When I line up everything that’s ever genuinely lit me up, it isn’t about a topic. It’s about a kind of person — the one at some disadvantage. “약자” is the word I reach for in Korean: roughly, the weaker party, someone without much power in the situation they’re in.
But “the powerless” is too broad, and not quite true to what I’ve actually loved doing. Korean students finding their footing abroad. Teammates trying to fit in. Friends working out how to break into banking, or make the jump into startups, or get through something with their family. None of those people were helpless. They were capable people, briefly without a map, who went on to find their way. Not the permanently powerless — the temporarily stuck. People in the middle of a passage they hadn’t crossed before.
That narrower version feels right in a way the grand one didn’t.
I don’t know yet what that means for what I build
Here’s where I actually am, and I’d rather be honest than tidy about it.
Caring about people at a disadvantage runs straight into a wall: they often can’t pay you, and sometimes can’t act for themselves at all. Which forces a question I haven’t answered — whether you build for them, or for the people whose job is to help them. The one thing the “transitional” part seems to buy me is that these people aren’t helpless; they keep enough agency to take help and act on it, which might mean I get to build for them directly. Might. I don’t know yet.
I could force a resolution here. Pick a population, write a confident paragraph about why it’s obviously the one, and move. I’ve done that before — it’s most of what the first piece was about unlearning. So instead I’m going to sit in it for a bit and let the conversations decide, rather than deciding and then collecting conversations that agree.
I have a few places in mind, and a rule for the hard ones
A few markets are pulling at me right now, and I’m letting them. Getting to the right care quickly when you’re suddenly sick and lost in the system. The elderly who seem to age faster once the people around them thin out. A younger generation that’s somehow lonelier than any before it, in the most connected world there’s ever been.
Some of these involve people who can’t really act for themselves, which sounds like it breaks everything I just said about wanting capable people. It doesn’t, quite. Where the person I ultimately care about can’t act or pay, the temporarily-stuck person I’d actually be serving is usually the one trying to help them — the adult child suddenly thrust into caring for a parent, the counselor, the worn-out parent at the kitchen table. Those people are capable, and dropped into a passage they’ve never crossed, with no map. The same person I keep describing, one seat over.
I don’t know these people yet. They aren’t in the rooms I usually sit in — I live in San Francisco, where most of my friends work in tech and finance, close to the last place you’d go looking for people without power. So this starts as desk research, not to find the answer but to find them: where they gather, who already tries to serve them, where that help breaks. Then I go and ask.
Why I’m posting this unresolved
I know how I want to look, I know the kind of person I want to look for, and I genuinely don’t know yet what to build or who to sell it to. Naming that out loud is also how I keep myself from quietly resolving it the convenient way the moment no one’s watching.
So if you’ve ever been the capable one stuck in the middle of something with no map — or if helping people through exactly that passage is your job — I’d like to hear about it. Right now, that’s the whole search.