How Busan Gathers People

18 Questions for Next Busan · Day 15 of 18 Gray (Kim Hyunseung) · 2026

Today is an age when you can build a company alone. In 2019, a quarter of new startups in the United States were solo founded. By 2026 it passed one in three. The average headcount of a company in its first year has shrunk for twenty years straight — once seven or eight, now two or three. Code, design, marketing, customer support — one person handles it with a few tools. Work that once took ten. So it is easy to think this way. People are needed less now. There is no need to gather. Each in their own room, before their own screen, doing it all alone.

The claim of this essay is the opposite. The more you can do alone, the more people gather. What calls a person somewhere is not a policy or a building — it is another person already making something there.

And yet, they gather more In the very age when everything can be done alone, people are instead clustering in one place.

San Francisco was said to be finished. The data said the opposite. More than half of new startups settled back into San Francisco, and the share is climbing faster with the AI boom. In an age when everything can be done remotely, people take on the visas and the costs to converge on one city.

Why? One founder put it this way — remote work slows down generating and executing new ideas. At a coffee-shop gathering of CEOs, that founder picked up, firsthand, information that the news and reports would never have delivered. Who runs which model cheaply, who solved the problem you are stuck on — that does not get searched. It passes only between people. A study analyzing location data in Silicon Valley confirmed in numbers that the effect of chance face-to-face encounters on innovation is substantial.

Being able to do everything alone, and being fine alone, turned out to be different things. What gathers people So what gathers people into one place? Not a good office. Not cheap rent, not a polished support program. If those could call people, the city with the best buildings and the largest budget would have gathered everyone already. What calls people is — another person already making something there. Builders come to see builders.

When one person is truly making something there, another who sees it comes. And a third who sees those two comes. What keeps a gathering alive is not the headcount. One real person brings a place to life more than ten onlookers. When that one recognizes another, and something passes between them — only then does the place become a living thing. An event can call people, but it cannot make them stay. What makes them stay is another person worth meeting again. This is the hardest thing. Buildings are built with money and programs are opened with budgets, but a real person cannot be brought in with money. You have to make them want to be there.

This is not to say gathering people cannot make money. Some places will not let you in just because you paid. They screen their members and manage who is inside. Why? Because who is there is the whole of what the place is. A room where the real ones have gathered — that density itself becomes the value. Money does not gather people. The density kept by recognition is what calls the money.

That is the order. Then the question turns to Busan. Busan has built buildings, opened startup spaces, made support programs. But buildings and events only call people; they do not make them stay. As the last essay showed, Busan is practiced at raising talent and sending it out.

One reason that talent leaves is here — where it went, there was another person already making something, and in Busan there were not enough places to meet that one person. What Busan must build is not more space, but the density where one real person meets another.

The work of gathering people In an age when everything can be done alone, tools stand in for more and more. They write code, draw images, compose text, find answers. But one thing they cannot stand in for — the work of gathering people. AI cannot be there in your place.

To look someone in the eye and recognize them, to make them want to come again, to connect them to someone else. That is not measured, not automated, and cannot be replaced by a tool. It is the most human work, and so it becomes the most precious. The more we can do alone, the more the place of the one who gathers people grows, rather than disappears.

And among the people Busan must gather — there are also those who have already left it. Where are they, and how are they reconnected? The next question.

18 Questions for Next Busan Day 15 of 18 · Gray (Kim Hyunseung)