In 2018, a friend exited Apple Retail and became a successful indie filmmaker.

We both battled our own hardships while balancing work: I studied at uni libraries after 8 hour shifts; he skipped meals and poured every cent into his debut masterpiece.

He was proud of his Starving Artist roots.

The imagery always lingered on my mental periphery. The Starving Artist can be seen as romantic, noble, and even, aspiring, because of the narrative it creates. A classic underdog tale. David vs. Goliath. Good triumphing evil.

But there’s a caveat.

This narrative only works if there’s a payoff. If the outcome is failure, well, then you were just a hopeless fool.

So looking back, has it paid off yet?

I lived out of my suitcase for the last 7 months. That’s romantic, right?

I moved cities in pursuit of The Dream. That’s romantic, right?

I’ve worked 11 days in a row, while commuting 1 hour each way. That’s romantic, right?

I haven’t touched the Anthrodontics codebase in 4 months. Meanwhile, other healthcare AI companies are fighting each other for any piece of market share, and big tech is throwing billions and billions to be the ultimate frontier model.

But, everything is still romantic, right?

In retrospect, I would say that I have been working 3 different startups: trying to find an identity after 9 years of studying; juggling my new role as a dentist while also trying to see where it takes me; and trying to understand how to pioneer healthcare technology.

Things are starting to settle in these 3 different jobs: I have finally settled into an apartment; I have passed probation at the new place; this all means that I have enough time and mental capacity to focus on the new strategy and direction of Anthrodontics.

In my last update, I was scared and wary of the future. I had to sacrifice a lot to stay afloat. 2 months later, I am no longer a Starving Artist. But now I’m Hungry, and I’m going for the jugular.

I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. Do I believe the world's still there? Is it still out there?... Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different.

Memento (2000)

I’ve been in Sydney for one week now. And I cannot tell whether I am dreaming or living in reality. Though there are constant stresses, such as finding a permanent place to live, settling things with my old workplace, and the pressures from my current one, I cannot believe that I am here.

I moved here because of a singular belief: Sydney is the No. 1 ranked city for startups in Australia. And I poured everything into this dogma for the last month, and here I finally am.

It takes me an hour to commute to work, my housemate’s friends have never heard of the suburb that I work in, my coworkers treat the city as something foreign and alien, and yet here I am.

Last year, a doctor diagnosed me as bipolar. A therapist called me beautifully pragmatic. But I feel like neither of those labels aptly describe the boundless energy I feel daily from being here. I feel like I could run forever; and though the oxygen I breathe burns my lungs and sears my muscles, the pain is just more motivation to work harder and make a greater impact while I’m here.

I feel like I’ll never stop and nothing can stop me.

During my transition from Emerald to Sydney, I tried to rationalise it as a juxtaposition between strength and power. I may not have any power ie. money, influence, charisma or leverage, but at least I have inner strength, ie. resilience - I told myself. And I tried to source that strength from moments of past tribulations, such as spending my high school summers swimming competitively, or the one time I had to make money by participating in a clinical trial.

But I don’t think it’s any of that.

Just like the aforementioned quote, I believe that I am experiencing euphoria simply due to a misplaced belief in something higher than myself. In layman terms, I am delusional. And I have perpetuated a myth so I could find an excuse to change environments, seek new thrills and exert further stress on myself.

We can all cosplay at playing startups and “making an impact on the world”, but, at the end of the day, the difference between power and strength is this: the former affords you multiple attempts to try again, while shielding you from the consequences of hurting people; the latter will have direct consequences, but at least you’ll have various life lessons if you’re able to survive.

So we here go. This is it. Brian, you could play pretend being an entrepreneur when you were in rural Australia, but this is the big leagues now. It cost you everything to transport your life to Sydney, and let’s see whether you have the aptitude to pull it off now, or whether it was the result of a big ego.

Time will tell whether you made the right decision to move, or you were better off fucking off to where you were.

When I was 14, I watched The Social Network and it blew my mind away. I knew then and there that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. My family wasn't interested in technology, so I knew nothing about it either. But Google was my friend, and I slowly taught myself everything.

2011 was a remarkably productive year. I learnt HTML, the basic markup that powers the Internet; I learnt Python, the now de facto language for machine learning; I first dipped toes in the Linux world by booting Ubuntu.

I also launched my first ever website in 2011. It was called Connectalise, and it was a very simple social network. My school was associated with a few sister schools, so there was some adoption from the different schools. Unfortunately, the principal didn't share my enthusiasm of tech and promptly asked for it to be shut down.

It's funny. I didn't have a debit card at that age, so I had to beg my dad to buy a domain name. It cost $12? He didn't get it. Why would you pay for something that's intangible? But he finally gave in to my grovelling. I think my dad would still think it's the worst $12 ever spent.

14 years later, I'm showing kindess to my inner child. I'm finally living the dream! Last weekend, I travelled to Sunshine Coast to talk with a potential co-founder. He's been in the game for almost 20 years. During the lunch, he talked about his roles at the various companies - employee No. 1, CTO, cofounder, etc. I felt like I was The Social Network's Mark Zuckerberg meeting Sean Parker during that lunch. I'm on the cusp of entering this exclusive high stakes and fast money society, and this guy is giving me the front seat view.

I'm 28 now.

I wonder where I'll be at 42?

Anthrodontics has been out for almost a month and it’s growing into its own thing. It always has been, but it’s often difficult at times to separate the product from myself. Not because I think that Anthrodontics is part of my identity. Rather, it’s because the boundaries become mixed because the journey of Anthrodontics parallels a lot of my professional growth. Right now, every line of code is infused with a part of my energy. Every version control commit is a record of my joys, my frustrations and my sorrows.

If Anthrodontics is a mirror to my journey, then we both reflect frustrations on slow growth. During the incubation period, things are naturally fast-moving. For the startup - keep up or die trailing behind. For me, everyday at dental school was a race. We made it to the end and have been conditioned to live in a state of hurriedness. But upon being released into the outside world, we are realising the real world works at a much slower pace.

There are no investors blowing up our phones. Appointment books are slowly building. Users are hesitant in registering. Patients are FTA’ing. Roadblock upon roadblock upon roadblock.

My upbringing has conditioned me to believe that this is all my fault. These are external circumstances that are outside my control, and yet I blame myself! The human psyche is truly broken.

But if you look around, and examine the lives of other “successful” people in the world, rarely did they achieve overnight success. There are years of cumulated effort behind each accomplishment. So why can’t I extend the same grace to myself?

So instead, slow growth can be framed as a good thing. It gives me permission to make mistakes. It gives me space to find my footing. It prepares me for when the big opportunity will finally come.

Creatives always refer back to this quote from Ira Glass, of NPR’s This American Life fame.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

So that’s the message to myself. Be consistent. Keep growing. True talent, and its recognition, will only arise through dedication, discipline and curiosity.

So until next time,

Brian Kim

Founder of Anthrodontics

To celebrate this milestone, I want to take a moment and look back on the journey so far.

Back in dental school, I wanted to be an indie Apple developer. I went through all the motions - creating an ABN, registering for an Apple Developer Account, watching the annual WWDC videos religiously. And coding. Oh, the coding. How it would never stop. Any chance I would get, I would whip out my laptop to add one more line of code, run one more build of my app. Anything that would get me to the finish line. Looking back now, I think fondly of those moments. Quiet moments in clinc; my 30 minute part-time lunch breaks; public transport commutes. They were all filled with text editors, terminals and an intense desire to smash my keyboard. Rappers write about their love-hate relationship with the pen, I blame this 14-inch of metal for my bad back and myopia.

Nothing much has changed since graduating. My latest project has me in yet another chokehold: I would debug in-between seeing patients; I would run home after work to begin another coding session; I would pull an all-nighter and go to work the next day.

It's all fun and games, but at the end of the day, the passion needs to become a business. And that's the scariest part. Because you only have one shot to impress your audience, or all your hard work will be buried in obscurity. When the app lives only on your laptop, its ugliness is insulated from any criticism. But once it's delivered into the hands of the public, it's open season. Remember, You Only Launch Once.

But I was never one to shy away from the haters. It's part of the thrill, the chase, the adventure. It won't be easy, but then, nothing really is. And so, with that, here we go.

Will I fail? Will I succeed? Or like the wings of Icarus, will I find overnight success but then become too proud and get too close to the metaphorical sun and end up even worse than I did before? Who knows! Find out in the next issue of the monthly update! (So don't unsubscribe!)

The last month has been an absolute delight developing Anthrodontics. It is now available for general consumption at https://anthrodontics.com. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I've been building it.