Hello!
Welcome to The Placeholder, the place to go to create your own path in your career! You are here, not because you want to find the next job but because you long to create truly meaningful work for yourself.
If so, you are in the right place. 😉
The Origin Story
Switching from 20 years of the corporate career with a cushy job with golden handcuffs to entrepreneurship couldn’t happen overnight. For this to happen, I had to first break down in the Moment of Truth, which pushed me to enter the Placeholder, the radical period of active self-reflection, ideation, and experiments.
Wanna learn more about this Moment of Truth? Read the following story! ⬇️
The Moment of Truth
Have you seen children crying out of control on a bus or train? What about a thirty-seven year old woman?
Why The Placeholder? An Opportunity, Not a Crisis.
What is a placeholder? A placeholder serves various purposes depending on the context. In graphic and web design, placeholders—often grayed boxes or dummy text like “Lorem ipsum”—show where images, text, or other elements will be placed before the actual content is available.
As you can tell from this general use of placeholders, the “Placeholder” in the context of our work serves the same purposes. The Placeholder is an in-between period we enter to create a new input for our career with novel ideas and experiments because whatever we’ve been doing no longer serves us.
What am I doing here? Am I living the life I want? What do I even want?
Encountering these questions after building a great career you thought you wanted could be completely debilitating and perplexing. You may think you cannot afford to act like this, you are too old to have these questions now, or you are too young to have a so-called midlife crisis.
Such reactions are legitimate and understandable. However, you are neither too old to ask these questions nor having a midlife crisis. You are allowed to question what you have been doing. Doing so is not a crisis but a great opportunity for you to look into your new “why” for work so you can live a life truly meaningful to you.
And you don’t have to do it alone. In the Placeholder, we reflect, ideate, and experiment together to make that happen. We’ll walk together in the Placeholder.
About Me
Hi! 👋 I’m Miroo Kim. As the Founder and CEO of People+Culture, I enjoy dedicating my time to cultivate systemic well-being in startups and tech companies. What does this mean? I offer coaching and consulting services and facilitate workshops and training to help individuals and teams to work more effectively with balance and resilience so they thrive together.
You don’t need to sacrifice your sense of well-being to be successful. I learned this in the hard way. In my 20 years of career at tech companies such as Apple, Meta, and Microsoft, I discovered the power of the human mind in making wonderful technology products and services, but no one was paying attention to it as much as they do for products.
This led me to feel deeply interested in how to take care of human minds at workplaces. So I became a “product manager for people and culture,” as one of my clients called me. I helped more than 3,000 individuals and over 100 teams to achieve their goals with emotional intelligence and psychological safety. This is my Noble Work now.
Feel free to say hello to me on LinkedIn (if you reach out to connect, I always appreciate a message to say hi) or Instagram. If you want to ask any questions about the Placeholder experiences or share your own Placeholder experiences, reach out to me directly by replying to any email from The Placeholder.
