There is a question in the MBTI test, which is quite popular these days: “Do you find it difficult to introduce yourself to other people?”
I am one of those who strongly agree with this question. When I meet someone for the first time, during the roughly three seconds of silence after saying “Hello,” my mind is filled with intense conflict and existential questions like, “Who am I, and where am I going?”
Unfortunately, this happens every single time without exception. Those with keen observation might have already noticed the subtle tremor within the ellipsis of my words, “I am…”
Sometimes I feel like a marble. A pendulum marble swinging back and forth, or a marble bouncing up and down.
At the end of last February, I entered Factory Berlin (factory berlin), known as the mecca of Berlin startups in the heart of Europe’s startup scene. Ten years ago, I came to Berlin to study theatre properly, after studying law in university and working in alternative education with the belief that theatre could play a crucial role in art education. And now, here I am at Factory Berlin.
Ten years ago, Berlin was quite “shabby.” The smell of urine in the streets, young people walking around with beer bottles shaking their bodies everywhere—there was a certain raw freshness in the somewhat tacky outfits and shop interiors. There, I studied theatre and felt freedom. I learned intensely and played hard for a year and a half. Then I returned to Korea to direct plays, only to come back to Berlin three years ago.
So I returned. But upon arrival, what I faced for settlement was less of “freedom” and more of the sorrow of an immigrant struggling to settle and the high threshold of administrative processing.
What shall I do here? Theatre? Performance? Art? Or a Korean restaurant? I spent countless nights with (fortunately delicious and cheap) beer and wine. I met many people and saw the bottom of my bank account. However, the situation was actually simple. Searching for a self I couldn’t even find in Korea was too far-fetched; I just had to do legal work within the scope of the visa the country gave me.
I received a lot of help until I got the visa. Fortunately, I got an opportunity to teach Korean at a school, and thanks to that, the Berlin Immigration Office gave me a “visa for those engaged in teaching or research.” With this visa, I can only legally do work related to “education, research, and publishing.”
I used to make documentary theatre based on awareness of various social issues through research. In a broad context, the theatre I had done resembled the process of research. So, I decided to do research that comes out as a book rather than research put on stage in Germany.
That’s how I became interested in writing and making books. However, as someone whose native language is neither German nor English, it was extremely difficult to be hired by someone for book-related work. So, I decided to start my own business.
This is the heavily simplified process of how I came to think about “startup.” Although the situation now is very different from the beginning, I wanted to organize the direction of the path I am taking. And with the modest goal of shortening the hesitation in the process of introducing myself by about a second.
In ten years, Berlin has transformed from a “poor city for artists” to the “Silicon Valley of Europe, the mecca of startups.” It is a natural result of gentrification following the hip city created by artists. Factory Berlin stands right in the middle of it.
Factory Berlin’s second campus located in Kreuzberg, Berlin
Factory Berlin is home to companies like N26, Twitter, SoundCloud, Uber, Rocket Internet, Freeletics, and Pinterest. It gathers entrepreneurs from various levels, from individual founders (60-70%) to large-scale startups (20-30%) and major corporations (10%).
If I was going to do it, I wanted to start at the very heart of this neighborhood. So I became a member of Factory Berlin, and I began to “start things” in Germany.
“Starting things” was something I had been confident in since birth. I challenged almost every field I wanted to learn, met everyone I wanted to meet, and did everything I wanted to do. Now, my task in this new Berlin is to organize and record while starting things, archiving them, and finally stringing these “marbles” together.
Eunseo Yi eunseo.yi@123factory.de