Branch 04 · #ONCEUncle
Resonance — #ONCEUncle
On September 10, 2019, a single tweet during an Apple keynote made Jack Phan an unofficial mascot of the global TWICE fandom — known affectionately as #ONCEUncle.
During Apple’s September 10, 2019 keynote, Jack tweeted his confusion at seeing “Momo” trend — “What is MOMO?!?” — not realizing it referred to a member of the K-pop group TWICE. The global ONCE fanbase adopted him on the spot, and he became #ONCEUncle: a warm, unexpected icon of a community he’d stumbled into.
The moment was covered by Willamette Week, allkpop, and international press, and later became the basis of Jack’s Adobe Experience Makers Live keynote, “Building Brand Equity (with help from K-Pop Stans).”
Signal and resonance
This is the human side of the theme that runs through the whole site: pattern-recognition resonance. One small signal — a single tweet — rippled across a worldwide community and lit it up. It’s the same phenomenon a matching algorithm chases, only this time it happened to Jack, joyfully and by accident.
Travel forward to The Accelerator, where the work turns toward building an AI ecosystem for others.