Doeon Kwon
I'm building Zero, a multiplayer voxel sandbox you can play on the web, your iPhone, Mac, or Windows.
I grew up in Korea, into the internet, games, history, and stories about people who built big things. By the time I was 15, I knew I wanted to start a software company.
Southeast Asia felt like one of the fastest-growing places for internet and mobile, so I went to university in Sydney, which felt like a good base and had a solid CS program. I lasted a year, then dropped out to join Disquiet as part of the founding team.
These days I'm building Zero, a multiplayer voxel sandbox where you can build, explore, and mess around with other people across browser, mobile, and desktop.
J2KB & Junction
During my military service in Korea, I started J2KB, a community for teaching people without a tech background how to code. It grew to 500+ members in a year, and I got nonprofit funding for it.
That was probably the thing that pushed me to leave school and chase startups for real.
Around the same time, I helped run hackathons like JunctionX Seoul and Junction Asia. As Head of People, I looked after hundreds of participants, learned how teams actually work, and realized I liked being around people who make things.
Disquiet
I had been posting about J2KB and startups online, and somehow got asked to help start Disquiet as part of the founding team.
Disquiet was a social network for software builders. We raised about $1.5M across seed and pre-A, and grew to 130,000 monthly users before shutting it down after three years.
That was where I really learned how much a startup lives or dies on the founder's drive, curiosity, and the team around them. I wrote more about that here.
Zero
Right now I'm building Zero, a multiplayer voxel sandbox for browser, mobile, and desktop. It's free.
The thing I'm proudest of is that it's the same world on every device, right down to the bytes.
Under the hood, Zero is one voxel engine written in Rust, running from the same core on every platform. Building one thing that feels native everywhere has been the most interesting problem so far.
The hard part has been turning a blocky voxel world into something that looks smooth and stays watertight, with no cracks where chunks meet. I didn't plan to write a whole engine for it six months ago. It just turned out to be what the problem needed.
Multiplayer works now. You send a friend a link, you both walk around the same terrain, and you build together. It's still rough and early, but it gets more fun every week.
Notes
Contact
Say hi anytime at doeon@0.space. I'm also on X, Instagram, and LinkedIn.