Executive Summary

In April 2021, two researchers who had worked together at ETRI settled on a name for their company. The first thing they did next was not to design a product or raise money. It was to write a manifesto. Its title is the Pebblous Manifesto. This piece reprints that original text without changing a single word, and adds a short account of how the declaration connects to the Pebblous of today.

The manifesto opens with one line: "How far are you from your data?" What follows is a metaphor about turning data, scattered like grains of sand, into something you can hold like a pebble, and a promise to create data in a virtual world and treat it as art. The company name Pebblous and the name of its first solution, Pebblo, both came out of that metaphor.

Five years on, some of those sentences have become real products and some have taken other forms. What stayed, and what changed? It is not a long analysis but a short record that shows the company's starting point exactly as it was, without overstating anything.

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What This Piece Is

Pebblous is a deep-tech startup founded in November 2021 by Lee Joo-haeng and Lee Jung-won, two researchers who came out of ETRI (the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute). The two had been longtime colleagues, working together on projects since 2013, and they decided to start a company that April. Right after settling on the company name, the first thing they wrote was the founding declaration below, the Pebblous Manifesto.

ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) headquarters building in Daejeon, where Pebblous's two founders worked for 23 and 19 years
▲ ETRI headquarters — where the two founders worked together before deciding to start the company in 2021 | Source: Wikimedia Commons

According to a founding profile carried in the webzine of the Society of CAD/CAM Engineers of Korea, this manifesto was not a look-back written once the business was established, but the first act of founding the company. The founders call it "a piece of writing that was like a heart," and say they never once wavered from it across the years that followed. Even the phrase the company now leads with, "the sincerity of data," came out of writing this manifesto.

So the body of this piece is not a newly written narrative but the original text itself. The bolded sentences, the paragraphing, even the closing clover line stand exactly as they did in 2021. The English below is a translation of that Korean original.

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Pebblous Manifesto

Pebblous

How far is the distance between you and your data?

Data is cold and hard to grasp. It does not gather easily, and it rarely reveals its meaning. We do research to close that gap, so that people can feel data as something near.

We have used artificial intelligence to draw jewel-like information out of data that is scattered like grains of sand. To do this, we sometimes create data inside a virtual world that models reality. In this way data becomes something we feel and enjoy, and we turn it into art. We believe we can grow closer to data in an intelligent and artistic way.

We placed our first solution into Pebblo. Pebblo is data crafted to be beautiful and useful. It is like a pebble made from grains of sandy data, something you can hold in your hand. We can interact with Pebblo emotionally; we gain insight from looking at it, feel proud of it, and even show it off. Pebblo will be the medium where the virtual world and the real world meet. Realized in the metaverse, a Pebblo can be shared or traded with other users, exhibited, or played with. Visit the Pebblo Gallery or Pebblo Beach and you will find other people's Pebblos laid out before you. There you can be inspired by other people's lives and meet a wider world.

Having grown closer to data, we will come to hold our lives in Pebblo. And someday it will hold the world. Through Pebblo we will gain a way of understanding the world through data, and we will make the world more beautiful.

🍀 The Sincerity of Data, Pebblous

— Full text of the 2021 Pebblous Manifesto, translated from the Korean original

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Where the Metaphors Went

The manifesto had no product yet. It had only metaphors: pebbles and grains of sand, a virtual world, art. Most of those metaphors have since become products with names of their own.

The line about "drawing jewel-like information out of data scattered like grains of sand" led to DataClinic, which diagnoses and improves data quality. The passage about "creating data inside a virtual world that models reality" became PebbloSim, which generates synthetic data. The promise that "we turn it into art" was realized through data artworks made with artists and exhibitions such as the AI Museum at the Gwangju National Science Museum. Looking back on their first year, the two founders wrote that "for a whole year we kept moving forward, one step at a time, exactly as we had first intended."

Not every sentence carried over intact. The "Pebblo Gallery and Pebblo Beach" from the second half of the manifesto, and the idea of trading and exhibiting Pebblos in the metaverse, are not part of today's product lineup. The early vision, tinged with the personal, the artistic, and the metaverse, later narrowed toward the data problems of industrial settings. The question hasn't changed: how do you make data something you can hold in your hand? The company just found a sharper answer.

What kind of company Pebblous has become today is a thread you can pick up in the companion piece "Hello, I Am Pebblous." Set the poetic declaration of 2021 beside the data company of 2026, and where this company started comes into sharper focus.

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The First Scene

The scene that led up to the manifesto is surprisingly plain. It started with a single text message on April 1, 2021, April Fools' Day. Lee Joo-haeng proposed to Lee Jung-won that they build a company together, and Lee Jung-won says he made up his mind within three minutes. It was an earnest message that happened to arrive on a joke of a date.

Leaving a research institute they had spent years in was a real decision, but the weight of it was not overwhelming. Thanks to ETRI's researcher-founder program, they could start the company while on leave, and they received a salary during the preparation period along with early research funding. A path was open, by policy, that let them start a company without having to give up a stable research career entirely.

The two had come to care about data for different reasons. Lee Joo-haeng, having watched distorted information spread, had long wanted to build "a good information system." Lee Jung-won felt the weight of data through the act of recording and organizing his own daily life as data. They set out from different places, but their thinking met in a single sentence: closing the distance between users and their data. That sentence is the first line of the manifesto.

The name Pebblous combines Pebble, a small smooth stone, with Fabulous. Inside the name sits the ambition to take data scattered like grains of sand and make it something you can hold like a pebble. On the day they settled on that name, the two of them wrote the manifesto right away. It was a piece of writing that came before the company.

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