Intro Music

Tyler Finn

How do early experiences with culture, identity and philosophy shape the type of lawyer and leader you become what happens when you build your career through boom times, bankruptcies and everything in between. Today, on the abstract, I am joined by Joon Park Park, Chief Legal Officer at extend, a company reshaping how businesses issue and manage virtual cards before extend. Joon Park has had an interesting career across Skadden, Refco city, American Express, experiencing the full range of legal challenges coming from bankruptcies to FinTech innovation. We're going to dive into his journey today across geographies and cultures, studying Chinese philosophy. I'm excited for that part of the conversation, weathering financial collapses and learning how to adapt your approach to the law and lawyering depending on the environment that you're in. So with that, Joon Park, welcome to this episode of the abstract.

Joon Park

Thank you for having me.

Tyler Finn

Okay, so when we were prepping for this, you know, you grew up in North Dakota, spend time in Atlanta, eventually you find your way to the East Coast. You know, these are pretty different cultural environments. I'm kind of interested in how that moving around or being in these different places shaped you early on in your life?

Joon Park

Yeah, I would say growing up in the Midwest, you developed very sturdy values that inform you the rest of your life. But being in the Midwest is also very homogeneous in terms of racial diversity. So going to Atlanta was certainly eye opening experience and very different. But ultimately, I ended up on the East Coast, because what I wanted most, and probably has to do with growing up in North Dakota, I wanted to be in an urban environment, so I ended up on the East Coast, and I stayed there ever since.

Tyler Finn

You spent time in Hawaii as well, and you were at the East West Center there. I alluded to this in the intro, pursuing a master's in Chinese philosophy. What was it that drew to that that field?

Joon Park

But I always tell people I went to Hawaii to saw us from having been in North Dakota. I don't know if North Dakotans appreciate that or not, but I went to Hawaii. Was when I was an undergrad that I started getting interested in Asian philosophy, and in particular, it was the Tao De Jing. It was Taoism that really drew me. It just resonated. And from that interest, I decided to pursue it after I graduated by by getting a master's degree at the East West Center, which at that time was a think tank located halfway between the East and the West. It was a, it was a wonderful experience where I got to explore my heart's content, what Daoism meant to me, because that was my main focus.

Tyler Finn

Can you remind us? I mean, I of course, learned this, I think, in like, sixth grade history or seventh grade history, but can you remind us Daoism, then there's, like, Taoism and like, what the basic differences are? Because then I'm curious. I'm going to ask you some questions about maybe how studying Chinese philosophy has shaped your your approach to life and and your career.

Joon Park

So it depends on who you to talk to about where Taoism fits in. Into the Chinese canon, there's certainly Confucianism, which some might say is much more formal, has very specific rights that you follow. As opposed to Taoism, which people might associate the words they associated with is like harmony and balance. Chinese philosophy tends to focus around this idea of harmony, this idea of balance, this idea of being holistic. And it's something like here in the West, when we talk now about the way you take care of your body really informs your mental state, there's a definite connection. As we explore those connections, it's something that the Chinese have been talking about for 1000s of years, as it's reflected in such ancient texts such as the Tao Te Ching.

Tyler Finn

How do you feel like studying Chinese philosophy has influenced your approach to maybe decision making, or the way that you lead, or the way that you lawyer, curious, if you still feel like you know this wasn't just a sort of like interest that you had once upon a time, right, but something that actually influences you today.

Joon Park

Yeah, I've always been interested in how things are interconnected. So I always thought that things always have a reference or relationship to other things, and figuring out those relationships that makes things interesting. And so rather than going down a rabbit hole into details, I always like to step back to see, well, I'm taking a look at x and take a look at y. But how do those interconnect? Or do interconnect at all? And so it's a little bit like sometimes like a logical problem, sometimes it's just endless pondering that leads nowhere. But from a legal standpoint, you need actual solutions to the problems that you're looking at. And so if you can look at it holistically, or if you can step back and try to see the big picture, that's how I approach the advice that I give, and that's how I approach lawyering.

Tyler Finn

You actually considered maybe continuing on and getting a PhD, but ultimately you decided to go to law school. How did you How'd you make that decision? Or how did you decide, hey, I'm not going to go and do the professorial thing. I'm going to go and be more of a practitioner.

Joon Park 

I wish I could give you a more interesting answer, other than it was financial at that point in time, getting a PhD in Chinese philosophy versus getting a law degree, your future, from a job perspective, was certainly two different paths. So anyone who knows me always knows I talk about the big crossroads of my life, and that was it, whether I stayed in Hawaii to pursue a PhD or come back to the east coast to pursue a law degree, how different my life would have been had I chose the former.

Tyler Finn  06:33

You started your legal career at Skadden. What was that transition like for you moving to New York. Did you, did you really enjoy it right off the bat, or was it, was it kind of hard to, you know, have moved from Hawaii then go to school and now be in this very urban environment at a prestigious but, but a law firm that makes you work pretty hard.

Joon Park 

So when I first got back, when I first got to New York, my wife was my girlfriend back then, always yell at me because I walked so slow. So why things slow down? Your pace slows down. How you you know your time seems to slow down. And apparently when I walked, I walked very slowly. It was a matter of months before she was telling me to slow down. I was walking too fast, and so I picked up the rhythm of being in a big city, of being in New York, being in a law firm like Skadden, which is long hours, is fast paced, is pretty intense. It can be pretty intense. Is a good training ground to figure out whether or not you have what it takes to succeed in the legal world. I think it's a great place to get your feet wet, to interact with partners and learn from them about how you want to negotiate, not just legal legal topics, which is what law school teaches you it's very specific about the lawyering and how you should think like a lawyer, but there are very few practical classes that teach you how you should actually practice the law. So going to a big law firm like Skadden, where there's so many resources, so many lawyers, it's a great place to get your feet wet to figure out the practice of law, as opposed to the theoretical, theoretical legal theories that have rarely come in handy for me since I graduated.

Tyler Finn

You know, you mentioned the sort of financial considerations around choosing a career in the law, as opposed to her as more of an academic. I think, you know, some folks don't or don't, love talking about this, but I feel like you're more comfortable doing so, you know, which is that the sort of debt that you incur to go to law school or something like that is a real reality for a lot of people, and I'm curious if that helped shape or was a motivating factor, and sort of like early career decisions for you,

Joon Park 

It was. Getting money back then was pretty easy. You just go and you sign a few papers, and they throw all this money at you. And so I said yes, and I signed the papers. What do I sign? It paid my tuition. It paid my written board. It got me through law school. What I didn't realize until I got out of law school that I had to pay it back in pretty large chunks of the installments are coming due. It was about halfway through law school that I realized that I was taking on a lot of debt, and the idea is that I would go into public interest law or do something like even a clerkship, became less of a reality when I started thinking about how I would service that debt and make those payments. So the natural progression that you go to law school, if you do well, you take a look at going to New York and spending your summers there, working at a big law I took the very traditional path, because that was the path that would put me on a financial footing where I could manage and live with the fact that I had this crippling debt.

Tyler Finn 

You must have done okay with it, because, like a lot of folks, you went in house after a few years at the firm, you joined A company called Refco as one of their AGCs, and let's, let's explore sort of your tenure there for a little bit, because it's not a company, I think that a lot of people remember, but it's actually now a case study for some folks around, sort of like diligence failures. The company was public and ended up, ended up going bust. Um, maybe, let's start with sort of like, how you, how you joined Refco, and also how you sort of experienced the collapse of the business from the inside.

Joon Park

Yeah, I decided around when I became a mid level associate, and you start to think about whether or not you want to pursue that partner path, or whether you want to pursue a different path. And I decided I wanted to pursue this different path. So I started looking at in house opportunities. I was a securities lawyer at the time, so the reason I ended up at Resco is because they were preparing to go public, and they needed a securities lawyer. That was back when Sarbanes Oxley was brand new, and people didn't fully know the extent of it and what it meant and the impact it would have on their public reporting. So they brought me on board. It was a very short lived tenure, because I was there only about a year and a half before we did go public. It was a successful IPO, only to find out about five weeks after the IPO, right before their first earnings call, their first public earnings call, a controller at Refco started pulling on this thread, and the more he pulled on it, the more he realized there was something deeply flawed with the accounting that was going on there and that unraveled. You can Google it. You can look it up, the story will come out that caused the stock to tank and the company going bankruptcy, I still think, is probably one of the record holders for the shortest amount of time listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Tyler Finn

Was that a scary experience for you? I mean, what was it? What was it like? I mean, on the one hand, you know you're the company's lawyer and you know you didn't know about this, obviously, right? I mean, it's accounting failures. But on the other hand, you've just left the law firm, and this is your sort of first in house role, and you thought it was going to be a very, sort of like high flying experience, right? And now you're having to basically help the company manage a bankruptcy.

Joon Park

Looking back on that time, it was formative, in the sense of you never know how you're going to act or how you're going to behave, unless you're under extreme stress. And that certainly was a situation where you're under extreme stress, and it was eye opening to see how some people reacted, the people who you thought might act a particular way, to act that way, and the people who we never expected to stand up and show their, you know, show their most moral fiber, stood up and show their moral fiber. So definitely eye opening, I would say that in terms of the experience, is something I never want to do again, or never have to. I hope I never have to go through anything like that again, but coming out of it, looking back on it, since it's so far in the past, it definitely made me the lawyer who I am today. Definitely informed how I, how I, how I approach the law, and how I approach thinking about who I want to be and how I want to relate to others. Let's,

Tyler Finn  13:37                                                               

yeah, let's talk about that a little more. I mean, I can imagine, you know, you observe, maybe you know high, high ethical behavior on the part of some, but ethical failures on the part of others, right? There's probably practical sort of things that you take away from an experience like this that shape the way that you work, or you know what you take notes on, or don't take notes on, or, I don't know, curious to hear about, sort of both sides of that, like how it how it shaped you.

Joon Park 

Yeah, so on the practical side, my note keeping is very sparse. I don't put things in writing. I don't I don't document, as you know, nearly as much as I used to. And probably the most important thing I don't do anymore is I never mix personal and work on my laptop, on my email, because it all comes out when it goes into litigation.

Tyler Finn 

Right

Joon Park 

In terms of how I practice, I learned back then, never to BS, never to lie, never, always had the highest standards of you're going to tell the truth, no matter whether it's something that you think they want to hear or not. That's how you're going to lawyer, because it's just the way that I decided. If I'm ever at a company in a similar circumstance where something seems fishy or something seems off, I'll be the first to raise my hand in design, not an atmosphere I want to be in that that's the way I want to live my life, or practice law, and so I've definitely kept that credo throughout my years of practice.

Tyler Finn

Do you feel like that has ever been and you don't have to talk about specific situations if you don't, but you feel like, has that ever been challenging, right? I mean, because sometimes you might have to be standing up to you know, your CEO or one of your peers in the C suite, CFO, or head of sales, or even a board member or right? I mean, those are not they're not easy conversations to have, I guess. And you're putting your career at some at some, you might be putting your career at risk by not having the conversation, but you're also putting your career in a sort of peril by by having it and confronting the problem too.

Joon Park 

I will say, thankfully, I've never been under in a situation quite like Refco, yeah, where the stakes were so dramatic and black and white in terms of what was right and what was wrong. I feel that I certainly been vocal when I seen things that I think should be addressed, not necessarily things that are fraud or things that are bad, sure, things that are lacking, or things that could use a little sprucing up and being vocal about that without without, ultimately, as lawyers, what we do is we manage risk. We help the business manage risk. And so when you see risk, you need to call it out. You need to figure out how you find a solution if that risk is at an unacceptable level. So I don't think I've ever been shy to speak loudly when I think that risk is at an unacceptable level.

Tyler Finn

You didn't quite escape crises after Refco. You went to Citi. And, you know, I think a lot of folks remember Citi was one of the banks that received a government bailout during the financial crisis. Tell us a little bit about how that period might have compared to your experience at Refco, and what lawyering at Citi during, you know, the great recession was like.

Joon Park 

By very specific criteria after Revco. And this is my thought process. My thought process was, you know, what? The problem with small companies and small legal departments is companies can fail, so they're probably go someplace where they can't fail. And that's the big financial institution like Citigroup, and then I was there when it, when it, when it did, effectively fail. But for the bailout, yeah, financial crisis came. That was a stressful time as well, for different reasons than Refco, but at the same time, it's certainly a being in that kind of uncertainty, not knowing whether everything's gonna like, the world's gonna end this that's yeah, like, at points in time during that financial crisis, the very the difference, you know, it did survive. It's still there, unlike, unlike, Refco, I think, in terms of working at big financial institutions, this is the same view I had toward being at a big law firm, is that as a lawyer, you get very specialized. There's so many of you, whether it's a law firm or whether it's a big institution, there's so many of you, you're necessarily going to go into a particular niche, and then the longer you stay, the more you get into this little hole, where, after certain years, you're an expert in it, but you're an expert in a very narrow scope of something. Yes, so what I wanted at Refco, when I found really refreshing at Refco, was being a generalist. Anything under the sun that comes up. We had the FBI show up one day because someone had some stuff on their computer that they wanted to grab the computer we had. So everything under some Wow, that you have to deal with as a lawyer, as a generalist, rather than going into the minutia of a specific statute, because you're the expert in that particular area of law. And that's the part I liked. I always like to say I'm a jack of all trades, master of none. And that's what interests me. That's what keeps me going, is the constant stream of having something new to learn, learning, and then having a breath of learning across all disciplines, all subject matters, whatever it's it doesn't matter the subject it's more interesting to me that I see a problem that needs a solution, and puzzling out what that solution is, is what keeps me interested in the law.

Tyler Finn

Were you able to find enough of that those sorts of generalist problems to work on? You're at, you know, you're at Refco, then Citi, then another big financial institution. You know, we all have their credit cards in our in our wallets, American Express. You know, were you able to find enough to keep you sort of creatively engaged at those big financial institutions? Or is one of the takeaways, like, maybe I really need to be or I'm better suited to being at places that are a bit smaller and earlier stage,

Joon Park

I think so I would answer that in another dimension, which is not just the breadth of the subject matter that you're covering, but also whether or not you have a pure legal head on, versus if you're almost on the business side as an advocate of the business and just legal department. So a legal department at a big institution is necessarily going to be the the guardrail. It's going to be the stop stopping point that says you can't go further until it's vetted in a particular way. And because the financial institution that's really big has the reputation to protect as a lot of regulators in the building as a brand reputation to protect you're naturally going to be very conservative. And so when you're a lawyer, though, they also don't expect you to give advice necessarily outside your legal remit. At a startup, that's not the mentality that you can have. You, you have to be outside your legal remit. You have to go beyond that to find the solutions that's going to keep the startup going. Because you can't be conservative. If you're conservative, you run out of cash before you have a successful business. You have to, you have to keep running.

Tyler Finn 

Yeah,

Joon Park 

And so that's, that's the part that I would say is the most, I guess I'll use the word refreshing. It's the most refreshing because you're always on your toes. You're always moving forward. There's a sense of propulsion there, at dealing with the unknown that comes at you every day.

Tyler Finn

Was that really the primary thing that led you to extend what was it that brought you into the business and into your current role?

Joon Park

Well, to be honest, a startup was the furthest thing from my mind many years at big financial institutions that are stable, that don't fail. If you think that, you know, fresco was a pretty big company. It managed billions of dollars in assets at the time, and I'm thinking, that's too small. You know, what do you think my my, my viewpoint was about startups, they statistically will fail. Yep. So when I started thinking about whether or not I would join a startup, my initial thought was, No way in hell would I ever join a startup, because statistically, what they're going to do, they're going to fail. But then the more I thought about it, the more it was intriguing to be in that kind of environment that was so fast, that's so propulsive, that's that's an environment that I thought this is something that I'd love to try out and give it a shot. And you know, here I still am in that, in that world, and enjoying every minute.

Tyler Finn

Do you feel like there are, you know, sort of skills or instincts, talk about being the guardrails in a big financial institution that you had to sort of like, unlearn or relearn in the early days, at extend, being in a much, sort of faster paced and also environment where, as You say, right? Like, if revenue is not coming in the door, the business is not going to be around in 6 months, 18 months, whatever it is,

Joon Park 

yeah, I would say one of the things you have to unlearn is that conservatism, that naturally is there, that you've learned to say, Oh, these are risks. But when you join a startup, you now look at risks in a much different way. You say, these are risks, but they're not necessarily important to a company that if they tried to solve for all these risks, Risk Number 78, 79, and 80 and would not really have enough time in the day, nor do they have the resources in order to tackle that kind of risk. So it's risk that you're just not going to address and not worry about as a startup. And so taking away that mentality, like relearning how to prioritize properly, to say these are the risks I used to think about, and certainly they're important to a big financial institution, but now I have a whole new set of risks I need to prioritize very aggressively, which ones I'm going to pay attention to, and that calculus is completely different. So there's a little bit of a learning curve there in terms of shifting your priorities.

Tyler Finn 

Do you feel like you view yourself differently, also, just in terms of maybe the ownership you have over like you're a member of the executive team. Now, do you think of yourself differently, as not just the person who's meant to be at the table giving the legal advice, but someone who needs to, sort of like, work with your peers in the C suite to get to the right answer, even if, like, what we're really deciding is a business outcome as opposed to something strictly legal?

Joon Park  24:41

Absolutely. I think there's always a calculation that's going to say, what's the right business outcome, what's a specific technical answer to a particular question, and how are we going to approach it? And there's a lot of flexibility, as there always is. And what you want is the flexibility to think through how you be responsible, about how you address risk in a way that still allows the business to move forward at the speed that it needs to move forward. And so when you're in the room with other leadership, you are holding hands trying to find those creative solutions to help the business move forward. You don't want to be the you don't want to be the gate. You don't want to be the blocker. You don't want to be the naysayer. You want to say, maybe you can't do that, but how about this? You want to always suggest the solutions that say this is how you're going to move forward, not necessarily in the way that you outlined it originally, but there is a way forward. And here's here's what it is. And sometimes that takes creativity, sometimes that takes a lot of thinking, but you get there in the end.

Tyler Finn 

Are there things that you've learned as extend has grown about how legal can also support businesses that are in the process of scaling or in the process of growing, like you know, lessons for other folks who might be in a similar place, where they're joining a business that's at one point in time but expects to experience quite a bit of growth over the course of two, three years.

Joon Park 

So one of the things we did, since we're in the financial technology space, so there's a lot of regulation that might not directly apply to us, but certainly apply to the partners that we partner with who are heavily regulated, sure. And so from the very beginning, we knew we wanted to create a compliant atmosphere and a robust infrastructure around compliance, especially around data security, obviously. And that was from day one. So when I look at other startups, and I see some of the non attention, I'll call it that vacate to having any kind of infrastructure in place whatsoever, that, to me, would be like, Oh, that's something that if you approach differently, you need to start from day one, because you need to have everybody in your company on board with understanding why you have these programs in place, why you address this risk is so important, and why it becomes really important. When you start to scale you have 10 customers, maybe it's not that big of a deal. Once you have 10,000 customers at that scale, you need these compliance mechanisms in place, absolutely necessary. Start, Early Start, put it in place. And then what you're playing with is the balance between you could drown them in compliance policies all day long. They could read them and train them all day long, right? And they're all going to leave the company because they're going to hate it. So what's the balance between making sure they're aware of the things you want them to know as they think about product design, or as they think about marketing, or as they think about just working at the company. What are the compliance things you want them to pay attention to, but teach it to them, or train to them in a way that's edible, as opposed to just, you know, they're going to run away from it.

Tyler Finn 

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things that that sparks for me also is that think legal is in very is a very important function, or is a very important team in terms of shaping the culture of a business or a company, and that that sometimes can get a little bit overlooked, whether it's culture around compliance, it's the way that people treat each other in the business, right? I mean, I think actually, really, a lot of times, even going back to our sort of earlier conversation around, you know, wanting folks to make ethical decisions even in times of high pressure or high stress, right? Legal can shape that sort of thing through policy. Legal can also shape that through, you know, your actions and the way that you interact with your peers and the way that you talk? Yeah, I don't know if you have any observations on on that.

Joon Park

Yeah, I would say the number one thing, and whether it's the legal department instilling it or other people at the company, the most important thing to me is accountability, the ability to raise your hand when you screw it up or you made a mistake, to say, I screwed up, I made a mistake, and come forward and own it, as well as transparency. So you're not going to hide things. You're going to you're going to be open about what you did or what you didn't do. And so I think the understanding I have with the leadership that extend is I'll be the first to raise my hand if I think I screwed up. I'll be the first to come and be open and transparent about something that maybe I should have addressed, that I forgot to address, or something that that we should have done, that, you know, maybe I didn't give the best advice the first time around. So here we're going to come around and do it again. Yeah, that kind of accountability and transparency is something that people observe. So whether you're saying it in words or whether you're just carrying yourself in that particular way, I think people will see that. People will understand that, and understand that seeps into the culture of the company when you have that kind of ethical standard that you practice.

Tyler Finn

if you look back on your courage and you know, you've had these sorts of like Crossroads moments, I guess, do I pursue more of any path or go and go to law school and be more of a practitioner? You know, big law versus and partnership versus going in house, large institution versus startup, anything that you would share with our audience, around the sorts of frameworks for making these decisions, or how you've made choices during moments of transition in your your career.

Joon Park 

I've certainly seen a lot of people who they fear. If your number one desire is ambition to be somewhere high up in a power position, partner and a big offer, right? That's that's one thing. If that's your ambition, or if you want to be financially secure and have that job, that unlikely they'll have downsizing that might leave you out of a job. It's a little bit more stable. It's not like a startup that's going to fail. That might be your priority. I think for me, the number one thing you have to ask yourself, or any lawyer has to ask himself, is, is this something when you wake up in the morning, you're looking forward to, or is this something that you're actually threading? Is this something that you're actually interested in that. There's still that curiosity that brings you to the table to say, you know, I'm going to find these solutions. And by finding these solutions, I actually get some kind of joys, maybe to maybe that's not the right word, but it's, it is satisfaction, that you get some kind of satisfaction out of what you do. And if that's not there, then I think you probably want to reassess at some point what it is that would bring you back that curiosity, or back that joy, or back, you know, bring back that spring in your step that says this is the job that I actually enjoy going to, as opposed to dragging your feet and saying it's another Day, another day. Let the grind scope.

Tyler Finn 

I've got some questions that I like to ask all of my guests. And I come to you too, talking about that sort of joy or meaning, right? I mean, I think, I think people want meaningful careers. What's your favorite part of your day to day?

Joon Park 

Oh, at extend by far, it's the other people. It's the people that I'm surrounded with. They are there. They're good at what they do, they are creative, they are insightful, they're intelligent. Is a great bunch of people to work with, and that's it's I've never been surrounded in this kind of atmosphere before, yeah, where you are collectively working towards something, and everyone is pulling their weight in the way that they should. And so that's, that's, that's a great environment to be in.

Tyler Finn 

That's really cool, okay, the flip side, but I think this is kind of a funny question. It's if you have a professional pet peeve,

Joon Park 

a professional pet peeve, you know, my pet peeve. And this goes for, like, if you play a lot of board games, okay, there's always that person that's called the rules. The rules lawyer actually very technical. And sometimes, like, you know, I don't want to call it the DMV, but I'll call it the DMV. When you go to the DMV and you see that person who's like, you forgot to.an i, and they sent you back because the application is incomplete. It's that kind of rules blurring. There's a certain level of you can be a little sloppy because the spirit. You're there in spirit, or you're there most of the way. So everyone will understand that you're basically done. But then those rules were come in and they say, No, you still have two eyes to dot. That's actually important.

Tyler Finn 

That's a good one. I have not heard that one before. I like that. I might have to steal that myself. Is there a book that you would recommend to to our audience?

Joon Park 

I mentioned the title before the Tao Te Ching. 81 chapters, that's very it's almost like poetry. And like poetry, you can read a lot into it in terms of coming up with your own interpretation as to what you think it means. It's been around for 1000s of years, and there's no agreement as to what exactly it's trying to say, but there's certainly a lot of passages that, if you are in that space where concepts of harmony, concepts of yin and yang, concepts of balance, appeal to you, this is something that, as you read it, might resonate. And I think it's worth picking up, because it won't take you very long to read it. It's a very short book,

Tyler Finn 

very cool. And then I'll plug it when we were when we were talking, before we got on and started doing the podcast, you mentioned that your wife just won a Prize for a book that she wrote. Can you tell us about that? Because I'm gonna go order it. I think it sounds pretty cool.

Joon Park

Yeah, so, so my wife is Lillian Wu. She won the Pulitzer in 2024 Pulitzer for biography for a book called master slave husband wife, and it's about this enslaved couple that start off in Macon, Georgia and make their way north, but rather than following anything like the Underground Railroad, they actually go in plain daylight, because she is so fair. Her complexion is so fair that she disguises herself as a disabled master, and her husband pretends to be her slave. And together they travel on by train, by first class coaches staying at the top hotels, and escaped to freedom that way. And it became a sensation once they reached the north because of the way in which they escaped. And so that's the story that she's telling in this particular it's everything is true. The amazing thing about this book is it's creative nonfiction. It reads like a novel, but everything you read in it is factual.

Tyler Fnn 

It sounds like it should be made into a movie,

Joon Park

a pretty fantastic movie. I think

Tyler Finn

That's very cool. Okay, last question for you, Joon Park, my traditional closing question for my guests, it's, you know, if you could look back on on your career and look back maybe your young days as a lawyer just out of law school or at Skadden, what is one thing that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then?

Joon Park

I wish I had known about startups sooner, and I say that flippantly, because of all the places where I practice law, in terms of just how I am very curious about being as broad as possible, as being comfortable not knowing the answer and but but wanting to find the solutions. If there's any place where that is something that you do every day. It's at a business that's just getting its feet wet. Yeah, so if I knew how much I would have enjoyed being at a startup way back then, I think I would have jumped a lot sooner rather than thinking that there's no way in hell I'm going to join the startup because they statistically fail.

Tyler Finn

It's never too late, never too late to learn something about yourself too, I guess, right, that's great. Well, Joon, this has been a lot of fun.

Joon Park

Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of the abstract.

Tyler Finn

Great it's been a pleasure to be here and to all of our listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we hope to see you next time you.

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