Read time: 3 minutes
You know what’s powerful?
Shared experiences.
Think about concerts, conferences, or even sporting events.
If you’ve ever been to a packed stadium or arena, you know that energy—that buzz running through the crowd.
It’s hard to explain, but undeniable.
For a moment, thousands of strangers are united by the same song, the same speaker, the same spirit.
That’s the power of collective experience.
Korea’s Soundtrack
For Koreans, that shared experience has always had a soundtrack:
Arirang
A slow, melancholic tune with lyrics about separation and longing.
On the surface, it sounds depressing.
A modern listener might even condemn it—“toxic,” they’d say.
But to Koreans, it was a mirror.
A mirror of poverty, colonization, division, and loss.
Singing it together was a way of saying:
We all carry this sorrow, and we are not alone.
Not Just Sadness
At the heart of this is a uniquely Korean concept:
Han (한).
An unresolvable sorrow, mixed with stubborn hope and defiance.
Arirang wasn’t just sadness—it was catharsis.
By singing something mournful, Koreans transformed grief into beauty, dignity, and connection.
The Lyrics
Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo…
My dear is crossing the Arirang pass.
If you abandon me,
Your feet will grow sore before you’ve gone ten miles.
Simple words.
Yet behind them? Separation, longing, a plea not to be left behind.
Multiply that feeling across a whole nation—and you begin to see why the song became timeless.
My Confusion
During my formative years, whenever I heard this song, I thought:
Why would someone’s feet hurt just because they left you?
Why sing about that over and over?
And I even wondered:
Does this make Koreans a vindictive group of people?
No.
It wasn’t about wishing harm.
It was about expressing a pain so deep that even the act of leaving would come back to wound the leaver.
Not revenge—resonance.
Not vindictiveness—han.
The Lesson
Only later did I realize the lyrics weren’t meant to be literal.
They were symbolic.
A way of binding grief, longing, and defiance into a single verse.
And that’s exactly where entrepreneurs connect.
The Founder’s Arirang
When the world abandons you...
Investors ghost you.
Customers ignore you.
Partners walk away.
You don’t waste energy plotting revenge.
You turn that pain into fuel.
You transmute sorrow into resilience.
Rejection into defiance.
Loneliness into drive.
That’s not vindictiveness.
That’s the entrepreneurial version of han.
The founder’s Arirang is taking the pain of being abandoned—and turning it into the anthem of survival.
The Arirang Dream
Today, K-pop groups are topping the Billboard charts.
But long before K-pop, there was Arirang, a 600+ year-old song that carried generations through pain.
And here’s where it connects to us.
The Arirang Dream is, to me, the 21st-century American Dream.
Not about one country.
Not about wealth, white picket fences, or visas.
It’s about those who had to leave home—sometimes by choice, often with no choice at all—just to survive.
That’s the story of the global entrepreneur.
You leave what’s familiar.
You step into a new land, a stranger, a guest.
You don’t have the luxury of failing.
You have to make it.
America. Korea. Vietnam. India. Nigeria. Brazil.
Doesn’t matter where you land.
What matters is that you endure.
That you build.
That you carry your own han into something the world can’t ignore.
The Arirang Dream is not about escaping pain.
It’s about transforming it.
That’s what founders do.
Founder Chapel
And maybe that’s why founders keep showing up to Founder Chapel every week.
Because Founder Chapel is our modern-day Arirang.
A space where founders bring their sorrow, their setbacks, their questions...
...and refuse to let them end in silence.
Maybe that’s why, every week, over a dozen founders keep showing up.
Hundreds have signed up.
But a core group—battle-worn yet unyielding—return again and again.
The Spirit
It’s not about depression.
It’s not about wallowing.
It’s about strength.
It’s about refusing to lose.
That’s the Arirang spirit.
Grit. Tenacity. Endurance—together.
Your Turn
👉 So let me ask you: What’s your Arirang?
The sorrow you carry that, if sung out loud, could bind you to others and fuel your dream?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every email.