Pickle: A future where the online 'self' is completely replaced
Category
- Band stories
Written by
Son Yang (Director)
Date
Jun 10, 2025
The moment when I feel the greatest joy while making an early investment is when the founder I invested in grows at an insanely fast pace . Earlier this year, Pickle, which is comprised of peers in their mid-20s and attracted investment from leading ultra-early funds such as YC and NfX in the US, is expected to have some great history or experience, but in fact, it does not. So how did they create an attractive AI service and receive investment from top US VCs?
That's because CEO, Daniel Park and co-founders of Pickle have built lessons based on the highest level of ambition and very fast execution , and at least among the startup teams I've seen recently, they've grown the fastest within a unit period . It's a truly overwhelming slope.
Team entry, first meeting
Pickle's pre-incorporation code name was Team Entry, and I first got to know them on March 22, 2024. Heejin Kim, a senior manager at Korea Investment Partners, shared the Team Entry introduction page with me, saying , "I've found a team that hasn't even been incorporated yet, but I think you'll like it." It felt a lot like Team Runners or Unboxers, which I had invested in before. The team name, which was explained as (n * try = entry) because they constantly try, was aiming for a global business that could grow to a scale of over 1,000 trillion won , and the co-founders had an agreement between shareholders in the form of a 15-year cliff lockup.
“Daniel Park, Kim Ki-hyun, Yoo Ho-jin, Jeong Sang-yeop, and Kang Ye-gang gathered together with the goal of creating a big impact (1 billion DAU, 1000 trillion won company). Based on the infinite runway based on a lifestyle that matches one’s passion and job and the confidence that one can draw a fast learning curve in all domains, we have built Lesson Run while maintaining the following perspectives on the vague keywords of AI, Consumer, and Social.”
(Team introduction page shared with excitement)
Team Entry's Daniel Park, whom I met for the first time, had just established a corporation a week ago. He had gone to Kyunghee University School of Medicine, but he had a greater desire to make a big impact by changing the world, so he took a leave of absence, and he was living at Seoul National University Station with co-founders born in the 2000s and creating various services.
But honestly, after meeting them for the first time, my expectations were a little lower. At the time, Team Entry was developing a service that would connect doctors and mothers one-on-one because the pediatric crisis was a big social issue, but I wasn’t sure if it would do well from a market perspective, and since they had little experience in product development/hypothesis verification overall, I thought they would have a hard time going forward.
But there were some memorable things. First of all, his eyes were a bit crazy, and he had a crazy yet kind feeling, and after the meeting, he created a team entry-base group chat room and asked me and Luke Lee (CEO) to frequently ask questions and get feedback . This was a typical attitude of an entrepreneur who is full of desire to succeed while leaving shyness behind , and from our point of view, there is no better way to review investments than to spend a long time and understand how the team works, so we were very excited and agreed.
(Team Entry's appearance, sharing many transparent processes and concerns)
Pivots and Lesson Learns
I was fortunate enough to watch the early execution history of Team Entry for about 4 months. They quickly pivoted from the doctor-parenting mom service and continued to try new things in the global social/dopamine category. In fact, this is a field that I actively reviewed and invested in, but even very smart and capable teams were struggling more than expected, and I was worried because I had seen many cases where 0 to 1 product/metric success did not lead to 1 to 10 business growth. I also thought that the items they had selected were too short-term trends or had a narrow user base. They were things like walkie-talkies between close friends or plotting contests between peers. I kept talking to the team through chat and visited their office and dormitory, but it didn't seem like it would become a sustainable, large-scale business.
However, what was very impressive during the process was that co-founder Jeong Sang-yeop gathered 310,000 Instagram followers in just one month, and he used that account as a basis for selecting new services or as a channel to promote new services.
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The detailed execution process of the team entry at that time, including this process, is recorded on this page.
Pickle, v0.1
Then, Daniel told me that he had decided to stop challenging the global social sector. In fact, I felt really sorry for many great teams who had fallen into the cycle of endless pivoting. However, the founder, who had great ambition and determination, thought that it was a short process, and said that he had decided to go to the United States, where the weather was nice.
When I met Daniel after returning from a month-long drill in the US, the first thing Daniel told me was the concept of a service called Pickle. The idea was to create an AI clone (a virtual avatar modeled after myself) for American professionals who were suffering from Zoom fatigue and have them participate in Zoom calls in their place . We hadn't even started developing the product, and to be honest, I was worried whether five people in their mid-20s, without a single AI engineer, could come up with something good without any funding.
So I was going to wait and see before investing until I confirmed the initial indicators, but the team was selected for YC W25 in the meantime, and received investment from NFX, a global top-tier VC. I missed the opportunity for my first investment. I watched it for quite a long time, quite closely. I worked with it for 6 months with affection, but I kept worrying about whether I could do it well and whether I could create it well. It felt like I was dating a girl I really liked, and then she suddenly told me that she was dating someone else .
I'm quite honest, even at that point, I was worried whether pickles would turn out that well, so it still remains a mystery to me. 'How did you do it...?' So I asked, "How did you do it when you don't know anything about AI?" and the answer was, "It just worked because you did it? We read papers all night, cold-called experts when we didn't know anything, and made it?"
The story of the initial hypothesis verification of Pickle v0.1, shared by Daniel at the time, is as follows.
Pickle v0.1
Problem
I felt quite tired from conducting more than 10 video conferences a day for customer interviews, and when I searched, I found that there was a term called “Zoom fatigue” and that many people sympathized with the motion sickness-like symptoms caused by being conscious of their own appearance on camera.
Also, with 300 million Zoom DAUs and 100 million Google Meet DAUs, video conferencing has become a global standard in the professional industry since COVID 19. However, due to the invasiveness of having to turn on the camera, many users have been experiencing various problems, including Zoom fatigue, every day.
examples
- An IT company manager who has to put on makeup and dress up in front of the camera more than 6 times a day.
- Startup CEO who can't participate in video conferences while driving or jogging
- Users of the r/overemployed channel who want to participate in multiple video conferences at the same time.
- Conference presenters who struggle with camera quality and lighting settings and fail to present a professional appearance
- etc
Hypothesis
We believe that if we can make the Digital Twin (Voice-to-Video) technology recently introduced by companies such as Heygen, D-ID, and Captions into real-time streaming, the AI model can replace the webcam.
1) What are the development trends and potential threats from competitors in the Digital Human sector?
→ After going to Silicon Valley and seeing the co-founders and demos of digital human startups (Tavus, Yuzu Labs, etc.), I became convinced that digital human technology is still in its very early stages of development.
2) Is it technically feasible for our team?
→ The entire team dived deep for a month and successfully implemented a live streaming model.
Problem
I felt quite tired from conducting more than 10 video conferences a day for customer interviews, and when I searched, I found that there was a term called “Zoom fatigue” and that many people sympathized with the motion sickness-like symptoms caused by being conscious of their own appearance on camera.
Also, with 300 million Zoom DAUs and 100 million Google Meet DAUs, video conferencing has become a global standard in the professional industry since COVID 19. However, due to the invasiveness of having to turn on the camera, many users have been experiencing various problems, including Zoom fatigue, every day.
examples
- An IT company manager who has to put on makeup and dress up in front of the camera more than 6 times a day.
- Startup CEO who can't participate in video conferences while driving or jogging
- Users of the r/overemployed channel who want to participate in multiple video conferences at the same time.
- Conference presenters who struggle with camera quality and lighting settings and fail to present a professional appearance
- etc
Hypothesis
We believe that if we can make the Digital Twin (Voice-to-Video) technology recently introduced by companies such as Heygen, D-ID, and Captions into real-time streaming, the AI model can replace the webcam.
1) What are the development trends and potential threats from competitors in the Digital Human sector?
→ After going to Silicon Valley and seeing the co-founders and demos of digital human startups (Tavus, Yuzu Labs, etc.), I became convinced that digital human technology is still in its very early stages of development.
2) Is it technically feasible for our team?
→ The entire team dived deep for a month and successfully implemented a live streaming model.
3) Are the needs and willingness to pay of customers real?
→ After creating a fake demo and making it viral on Reddit and TikTok, we were able to observe a high response rate, and based on the traffic, we were able to collect various customer stories by conducting interviews with close to 60 customers.
→ After creating a fake demo and making it viral on Reddit and TikTok, we were able to observe a high response rate, and based on the traffic, we were able to collect various customer stories by conducting interviews with close to 60 customers.
→ We received early-bird payments in pre-launch status and generated $1,000 in sales.
Conclusion
Since the technology to create a Digital Twin is not something that can be solved with a single model, but rather something that is implemented by fusing a large amount of data like a chimera, we expect that teams that solve high-frequency problems will be able to gain a technological advantage.
Since the technology to create a Digital Twin is not something that can be solved with a single model, but rather something that is implemented by fusing a large amount of data like a chimera, we expect that teams that solve high-frequency problems will be able to gain a technological advantage.
(Fake demo from the early days of Pickle, a post on Reddit titled 'Meetings are a problem of a past' went viral )
What you missed: The infinite growth of the founding team
That's how pickles were born.
Pickle is a console and infrastructure that allows you to create, decorate, and utilize your AI Self.
Everyone wants to look the way they want to. Now, we can use AI to bring our imaginations to life on screen in real time. We no longer have to distort or sacrifice reality to get in front of the camera.
Everyone wants to look the way they want to. Now, we can use AI to bring our imaginations to life on screen in real time. We no longer have to distort or sacrifice reality to get in front of the camera.
But what did I miss in this process?
Looking back, I think I missed the growth slope of the founding team, including Daniel's. I reflected a lot on how I was so absorbed in the capabilities or indicators of a certain point in time that I failed to value how many lessons this team learned over the past year and how they made their crazy ambitions a reality . I think I should have welcomed the team's decision-making rather than worrying about it in the middle of the process. I foolishly overlooked the fact that it was the right and quick decision that the founding team could make because they had little ego about the item and were full of ambition for success .
(Chart that we see every time inside the base - when the team's growth is far greater than the business indicators, there is an investment opportunity)
After about a year of ups and downs, we were once again given the opportunity to participate as a lead investor in this seed round of Pickle . We decided to invest when Pickle was performing in the top 5 in terms of ARR size and growth rate in the YC W25 batch, and now, two months later, it has grown more than twice as much as the metrics at that time .
(Video introduction of Pickle by Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator)
(One of the TikTok videos that really shows the usability of early pickles)
Building on these early achievements, the Pickle team is still rapidly moving forward with its ambitious v2.0 product, and is also making remarkable progress in teamwork and leadership. They even purchased the unique domain pickle.com (they're not afraid to buy expensive domains, either).
(Short demo video of Pickle v2.0 in progress)
Having gone through all of this, I think that Daniel, whom I meet these days, is a completely different person from a year ago . He is deeply and fundamentally thinking about the various roles that he must perform as a founder and CEO, such as expanding the vision from Digital Human to AI Self, aligning the product/business roadmap, organizing the organization, and flexibly approaching the necessary funding . And every time I meet him, who is becoming more and more refined in his thinking and execution, this thought still lingers in my mind. 'How did you do it..?'
It's been a while since I've encountered a global product with such a high usage frequency (which I think is very, very important for rapid growth), and I'm fortunate to be working alongside the team as they continue to evolve, with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation about what's to come.
The story so far is the beginning of a story about a team with really big ambitions, who are growing through fast execution and lesson runs day and night, and creating their own kingdom. This is the type of team that BASS Ventures definitely wants to work with, and we definitely want to be the first investor in such a team in the future. I hope to share the second act of this crazy dream with you again soon.
Addendum - Find Great Builders in Pickles!
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Pickle is looking for great builders to create products that will be used by over a billion people around the world.
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If you are inspired by the dream of pickles or have someone you would like to recommend ( 10 million won in recruitment bonus! ), please visit our recruitment page!
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Finally - the golden age of small teams, the one-person unicorn is coming!
The area I'm most interested in recently is AI B2C SaaS, which can grow product-driven.
Last year, OpenAI's Sam Altman made headlines by saying that "one-person unicorns will emerge in the future." Looking at recent companies like Cursor, Midjourney, and Lovable, I think we'll see a lot more companies that produce great results with small teams.
AI + B2C productivty + Product-driven growth (viral/referral/collaborative) ⇒ $$$ + data
Due to AI, development resources have been drastically reduced, paid subscriptions to AI productivity tools have become familiar, and a large number of services are emerging that grow based on viral/referral/collaboration functions, etc. based on structures such as collecting users/data as quickly as possible to improve model performance more quickly. I think these services are areas where Korean startups can do very well, and I would like to continue to meet with them in the future.
If you are wondering 'Where is this?', be sure to look for BASS Ventures!
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