March 24, 2024
Hudson Valley, New York
"I can't believe how hard it's coming down."
Ji-pyeong glanced over at Mi-rae, hoping for a response.
His wife was staring straight ahead with both hands on the steering wheel. She was wearing all black, apparently in solidarity with her mood.
Mi-rae nodded her head. And remained silent.
Ji-pyeong pursed his lips and shifted in his seat.
This is ridiculous.
They had been driving in silence for nearly an hour.
Ji-pyeong let out a sigh in the hopes that it would prompt his wife to finally turn her head and look at him. But Mi-rae's eyes only narrowed as her fingers gripped the wheel tighter.
His stomach dropped. Ji-pyeong turned his phone over in his lap and took refuge in its screen. He scrolled through the thirty emails that he had received from his Birdhouse management team since he last checked. The subject lines had resumed a more typical tenor of urgency rather than the utter panic of Friday. Ji-pyeong scrolled through them quickly and then he opened his itinerary for his trip tomorrow to Boston.
My plane leaves at 7 am?
Ji-pyeong pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. And then he leaned his head back and opened them to stare out the window. The naked woods passed by in an endless gray blur beyond the rain streaking across the glass. Ji-pyeong could not make out a single individual tree as the car hugged a turn on the Taconic State Parkway.
It was the Sunday of a weekend away that had not turned out as either of them had imagined.
Mi-rae had planned this getaway as one of her Christmas presents to him: a cooking class for the two of them at the Culinary Institute of America, followed by a vineyard tour, and dinner at the institute's experimental restaurant. Ji-pyeong had looked forward to it for weeks as he struggled to keep up with the constant demands of Birdhouse. He missed the quiet ritual of preparing meals in their kitchen. And his wife's thoughtfulness had touched him deeply. She was carving out the space for them to breathe again since their short sojourn to Miami at the beginning of the year.
Miami.
It already felt like a year had passed since then.
Ji-pyeong's fundraising prowess as a CEO had shocked even him. The sizable investments that he had solicited from venture capital funds and Silicon Valley and pharmaceutical giants eager to diversify had allowed the company to scale up on an accelerated timeline. But it had tripled his workload. Investors of that magnitude demanded constant reporting from the face of Birdhouse. In addition to his regular duties, Ji-pyeong had spent this past month personally inspecting potential expansion facilities in Waltham and hiring staff for a second Birdhouse research campus.
It was any startup's dream to be this flush with resources. Birdhouse was a marvel — securing patents and already navigating FDA approval a few months into its founding. But Ji-pyeong was strangely taking little pleasure in its success. The role of CEO leveraged his talents — he could lead, he knew how to weigh risk, he was decisive and bold. But the rhythm did not suit his nature. Ji-pyeong felt frustratingly mired in the grind of running the same company day in and day out. He missed the challenge of learning about new industries and turning different kinds of problems around in his head. He was weary of answering questions posed by investors who knew far less than him but could loom their purse strings over him anyway. Han Ji-pyeong had advised hundreds of startups on exactly what he was doing every day. It felt rote to do it for himself, not thrilling despite the prestige of his title. The obstacles were mundane even if the scale of execution was staggering. CEO Han was toiling in the weeds. Even Vice President Han had flown high above the field with the open sky before him.
