You may have read our translation of a recent article by Money Today exploring the trend of Korean VCs pursuing larger investments that one would normally associate with private equity. This article from E-Daily referencing a report from Korea’s Small and Medium Sized Business Administration provides some interesting statistics for perspective.

The blue bars represent new funds raised and the red line is new investments.

According to the SMBA report, in 2011, Korean VCs made 1.26 trillion won in new investments, an increase of 15.6% over 2010. This wasn’t just last year alone. As one can see in the graph above, even in the continuing economic downturn which began in 2008, VCs have been increasing their investments.

It appears however that the economy may have finally caught up with Korean venture capital, putting an end to the growth. The SMBA surveyed 95 VC investors about their plans for the next year and found that they planned on investing only 1.2 trillion won in 2012. While it’s just a projection and may not pan out, it does show VCs confidence faltering.

As for raising new funds, the investors interviewed said they planned on raising funds totaling 1.5 trillion won in 2012, an amount that would place them back at pre-2009 levels. This decrease is likely due to the un-invested money many funds have left over from 2011′s record setting fundraising. While these statistics demonstrate the potential for a downturn, what about the trend away from investing in small, startups mentioned in the Money Today article?

For this, the Korean Venture Capital Association’s Q4 summary report (available here) provides a look at investment trends over the last few years. In 2011, manufacturing companies garnered 29.3% of VC investment followed by IT with 27%, and cultural content with 24.6%. Interestingly, prior to 2009, IT companies received the lion’s share of VC investment. Why IT is receiving less attention from VCs, especially during the boom in mobile application and web technologies, is difficult to explain. Perhaps it reflects Korean VCs lack of familiarity with this emerging technology or maybe the low cost of developing technologies in this field simply requires less investment.

The KVCA statistics also provide confirmation of the trend towards later stage investments mentioned in the Money Today article. In 2011, 44.3% of VC money went to late stage investments while 29.5% went to early and 26.14% to expansion stage companies. This trend developed after 2008 when 40.1% of VC investments were in early stage companies. Since then, most of the investment pie has been going to late stage companies, with the rest divided between early and expansion stage firms.

Again, it’s difficult to tell what is driving this but if you believe the companies interviewed by Money Today, it’s a combination of low incentives, risk aversion, and a preference to exit investments sooner than early stage companies can provide.

Policy makers in Korea are taking steps to boost investment into startup companies. According to the E-Daily article, the Korea Venture Investment Corporation will allocate 300 billion won, 28.4 billion won more than last year, into domestic VCs, with an emphasis on those making angel and early stage investments. It will be interesting to see how this injection of funds, as well as other government efforts like the recently established angel investment support center and matching fund will affect funding for early stage companies in Korea.

It’s a side of entrepreneurship we don’t like to talk about — failure. Unfortunately, it’s a big part of being an entrepreneur and to ignore it would be a big mistake. Below, on an episode of “This Week in TechStars“, Don Dodge from Google gives a talk about failure and setting impossible goals. Here are some of my favorite points from his talk –

• Failure is not an option — it’s a requirement to get to success.
• Failure is making the same mistake twice and not learning from it.
• Think of failure as a step to a success.
• At Google, achieving 60% of the impossible is better than achieveing 100% of the possible.
• Thing big, start small, fail fast, succeed faster.
• There’s a very fine line between a brilliant visionary and a delusional loser. That line is luck.
• “I have not failed, but I’ve found 10,000 approaches that do not work” ~ Thomas Edison
• Failures do not irreparably harm your reputation.

In his talk he gives a few examples of “Failures” that have turned into success –

• Guitar Hero was one of the first games to do $1 Billion in sales. The company behind it took 10 years and failed 9 times to get there. Guitar Hero was their 10th try.
• Angry Birds was the 52nd game the company created. Can you name any of the 51 before Angry Birds?
• Post-it notes was originally a failed adhesive. Super glue was another failure of adhesive, this time, because it was too strong.
• Odeo was a podcasting platform — total failure. Twitter was a side-project of the same team.
• Sticky Bits did a complete turn-around and started Turntable.fm.

Watch the entire video. His talk starts at the 1:15 mark.

Photo Credits: Tinou

Twice as big and twice as exciting — Twist Seoul 2 is now a wrap.

It started with almost 50 applications, and it came down to five amazing companies pitching on Saturday. All of them blew away the audience, the Twist Seoul judges, our sponsors, as well as the hosts of “This Week in Startups”, Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley.

A quick shout-out to our sponsors, KCC and KISA — thank you very much for the support, we could not have done the show without you. And of course to the co-host, Seoul Space.

The Results

Only one team could win the the all-expense paid trip to San Francisco for The Launch Conference, an amazing opportunity courtesy of KCC & KISA.

It was a close race. In fact, it was the very last pitch by Jaeuk Park that stole the crown from high school student, Min Ku Lee and Waffle. At the end, it was a clean sweep for Jaeuk Park of VCNC and their mobile app, Between.Us. Both Jason and Tyler chose them as the winner of the event, with Waffle coming in at a close second place.

Kudos to ALL the startups. It takes guts and drive to pitch live in front of an audience, much less on a global Web TV broadcast. That’s commitment!

The other startup companies in the finals:
* Shakr - Transform photos and text articles into beautiful videos.
* PixelAmmo – Pitching their new mobile game, Keri Racing. It combines farming & racing.
* Remocon – Turn your TV into a SmartTV with their mobile app.

If you missed the event (or just want to see it again), check out the episode on YouTube.

Tomorrow, Saturday December 17th is our second “This Week in Startups” Seoul Pitch Competition. We had many companies apply and we’re now down to the top 8.

If you applied to attend the event, you should have already received an email with the information on attending. If not, get in touch. Please try to arrive early as we’re expecting a packed house!

Watch Online

If you’re not able to join us for this event, you can watch the final 5 pitches live online. The show begins at 12:00pm Seoul Saturday and 7:00pm on Friday Pacific time.

You can us follow our tweets with our hashtag #TwistSeoul

Missed the Event?

If you weren’t able to catch the live episode, you can watch it anytime on This Week in Startups. 

Announcing The Eight Finalists

On Wednesday, the judges narrowed the companies down from 18 to 8.

Here are the 8 Twist Seoul 2 finalists:

• Between: http://appbetween.us – Social networking site for couples.
• KPOP Tweet: http://www.kpoptweet.com - Follow your favorite K-pop stars in any language.
• Pain Easer: http://www.jeejee.com - Ease your pain with their free acupuncture app.
• PixelAmmo: http://pixelammo.com - New mobile game incorporating growing, raising and racing your friends.
• Remocon: http://remote.cottoni.kr - Buy what you see on TV.
• Shakr: http://sha.kr – Transform pictures & blog posts into beautiful videos.
• TuneRights: http://tunerights.com – A stock market for new songs.
• Waffle: http://waffle.at – Turn a locked Wifi into a free Wifi by having users watch an ad or take a quiz.

Inc. Magazine's Official Website

(원문 기사를 보시려면 이 곳을 클릭하세요)

Its great to see Korea and its startup community highlighted in INC Magazine (thank you Max)! Korea is in the early phase of a rapidly developing startup eco-system. The tide is rising and there has been no better time in Korea to get on and ride the next Hallyru 2.0 “Korean Wave” — Korea innovation and startups!

아래 기사는 Inc. Magazine 12월호에서 발췌한 것으로, 아시아의 뜨는 별 – 서울에 불고 있는 스타트업 (Startup) 및 창업 열풍에 대해 시니어 라이터 Max Chafkin이 작성한 글입니다. 지난 10년간 한국이 이룩한 엄청난 경제적, 기술적 발전에 대한 언급과 동시에 코리안 아메리칸, 즉 재미교포 출신 및 유학파의 ‘CEO 귀향’ 트렌드를 자세히 분석하였습니다. Max Chafkin이 서울스페이스를 직접 방문하여 Co-founder, Richard Min과 가진 인터뷰 내용도 담겨 있습니다.

WHY KOREA?

한국은 특별한 곳입니다. 97년 IMF사태를 온 국민이 금과 힘을 모아 극복했을 뿐만 아니라 그 이후로도 급속도로 높은 GDP를 달성 및 유지한 나라입니다. 한국엔 인재가 풍부합니다. OECD 국가 중에서 한국 직원들이 일하는 시간은 주당 43시간으로 가장 높을 뿐더러, 시간 관리 및 자기 계발이 철저합니다.

WHY NOT KOREA?

기사에서도 언급하듯, 한국은 소수 재벌 기업에 의해 울고 웃는 경제구조를 보유하고 있습니다.  60년대 초 경제발전을 위해 몇몇 대기업(그 당시에는 소기업이었을)에만 치중해 발전시킨 결과, 각 분야에서 독점식 거대 대기업이 대거 생겨났습니다. 대기업 독점식 산업구조 하에 안정적이고 이윤을 내는 기업에만 투자를 해온 정부 협조(?)덕에, 충분한 투자금을 유치하여 스타트업을 시작하는 것은 하늘에 별따기 만큼이나 어려운 과제입니다. 이런 상황에서 청년들에게 ‘꿈을 꾸고’, ‘큰 목표를 세우는 것’을 강조하는 정부의 슬로건은 창업보다는 ‘대기업 취직’ 장려 정책에 가깝게 들릴 뿐입니다.

VISIT SEOUL SPACE!

한국 시장은 기하학적으로 커져만 가는데도 꿈을 꾸는 젊은 창업가의 수는 턱없이 적습니다.  ’서울스페이스‘는 그러한 환경 자체를 바꾸고자 합니다. 보이지 않는 압박에 짓눌려 일어서 볼 시도조차 안한다면 발전의 가능성은 점점 희박해질 뿐입니다. 기술력과 인재, 시장을 모두 갖춘 한국은 그 자체로써 블루오션입니다. IT, 모바일, 어플리케이션, SNS …작은 것을 크게 만들고, 큰 것을 작게 만들려는 기회의 시대에 살고 있는 우리, 서울스페이스는 명목 상의 보조금이나 장려정책이 아닌, 사고의 전환을 위한 환경을 구축하고자 합니다.

———————————————— 기사 원문 ————————————————

The Returnees

Seoul is home to a burgeoning corps of young entrepreneurs, a shocking number of them born or educated in America. Why aren’t they starting companies here?

By Max Chafkin |  @chafkin   | From the December 2011 issue of Inc. magazine

Two years ago, Daniel Shin quit his job and started a company.

The act was, by almost any standard, a laudable one, coming as it did in the middle of the worst recession in decades and given that Shin had been enjoying the kind of upper-middle-class life that, once tasted, can be difficult to give up. Born in South Korea, Shin moved to suburban Washington, D.C., with his parents when he was 9. He went to a magnet high school and got into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he studied finance and marketing. By 2008, he was comfortably ensconced in the New Jersey offices of McKinsey & Company, where recession-era cutbacks meant that all-expenses-paid Caribbean bacchanals had given way to comparatively ascetic (but still all expenses paid) ski trips. He had an apartment in Manhattan. He was comfortable. His parents were proud.

And yet somehow, this life, in all its dull glory, did not feel like his own. Shin was an entrepreneur at heart, having started two companies while still in college. The first, a website for students looking for housing, failed miserably. The second, an Internet advertising company called Invite Media, which he co-founded with several classmates during his senior year, was more promising. It won a business-plan competition in early 2007 and raised $1 million in venture capital the next year.

Shin’s buddies would eventually sell Invite Media to Google for $81 million, but Shin had left the company long before that happened. His parents, who had come all the way from Korea precisely so their son could grow up to work at a place like McKinsey, were not about to see Daniel throw the opportunity away for a money-losing start-up no one had ever heard of. “That was the only reason I was at McKinsey,” says Shin. “It didn’t feel like a career to me. I’d always wanted to start a business.”

By late 2009, Shin was through with consulting, but he didn’t have the guts to strike out on his own just yet. He applied for, and was offered, a job in the New York City office of Apax Partners, a European private equity firm. He accepted the offer on the condition that he could delay his start date until the following August, so he could complete the two-year stint he had promised McKinsey. It was a lie; he walked out on McKinsey in November. “It was my chance to get something off the ground without my parents telling me I couldn’t do it,” says Shin. “I had about six months.”

HOME IS WHERE THE OPPORTUNITY IS: Daniel Shin in Seoul

Shin got to work. He and two college buddies holed up in a house with whiteboards, laptops, and an endless supply of McDonald’s for a series of all-day brainstorming sessions. Their goal: to come up with a business that would grow fast and require no start-up capital. They started with 20 ideas and, over the course of two months, whittled them down to one: a Groupon-style coupon company that would offer deals on restaurants, events, and merchandise. Shin liked the business model because it had a built-in financing strategy: Cash came in several months before the company would have to pay it out, giving him a supply of free debt. He picked a name—Ticket Monster—collected several thousand e-mail addresses, and launched the site in May.

A month later, Apax called Shin to rescind its offer of employment. The firm had done a background check and discovered that Daniel Shin was not a second-year McKinsey associate but the CEO of a fast-growing company that was doing $1 million a month in revenue. By the end of the summer, Ticket Monster had doubled in size, growing to 60 employees. By the end of the year, the company had doubled in size again.

When I met Shin last August, just 20 months after he quit McKinsey, he had 700 employees and roughly $25 million a month in revenue. “We’ve always been afraid that we wouldn’t grow fast enough,” said Shin, a baby-faced 26-year-old with a booming voice and a hulking frame. A year ago, he was one of only two salespeople at the company; today, he is sitting in a brand-new corner office acting like the CEO. “We didn’t believe in spending money in the early days,” Shin said. “We had this whole macho idea about starting up.” A week after he said this, Shin sold his company to the social-commerce site LivingSocial for a price that was reported to be $380 million.

An immigrant starts a business, creates hundreds of jobs, and becomes wealthy beyond his wildest dreams—all in a matter of months. It’s the kind of only-in-America story that makes us shake our heads in wonder, even pride. At a time of 9 percent unemployment, it’s also the sort of story we Americans desperately need to hear more of.

But Daniel Shin isn’t that kind of immigrant. He went in the opposite direction. Ticket Monster is based in Seoul, South Korea. Shin arrived there in January 2010 with a vague plan to start a company; the brainstorming sessions that produced Ticket Monster took place in his grandmother’s house in Seoul. Now he is the closest thing there is to a Korean Mark Zuckerberg, despite the fact that upon his arrival, he barely spoke Korean.

Last December, Shin was summoned to South Korea’s version of the White House—the Blue House—for a meeting with the country’s president, a former Hyundai executive named Lee Myung-bak. In attendance were the CEOs of many of the country’s largest companies—LG, Samsung, SK, and half a dozen others. “It was the conglomerates and me,” says Shin. “They were saying, ‘We have X billion in revenue, and we’re in X number of countries.’ I’m like, ‘We didn’t exist a few months ago.’” Shin laughs—a sheepish, nervous laugh—as he tells me this story and shakes his head. It’s been a crazy year and a half. “I think it was the first time the president had learned an entrepreneur’s name,” he says. A few weeks later, President Lee gave a radio address in which he sang Shin’s praises and urged the youth of South Korea to follow his example. (In Korean, family names come before given names. Throughout the rest of this story, I’ve used the Western convention, as do most Korean business people.)

The offices of Devsisters, a graduate company of the Seoul Space incubator.

The first thing I learned was that Shin was not alone—he wasn’t even the only young, ambitious American in the coupon business. His chief competitor, Coupang, was founded by a 33-year-old Korean American serial entrepreneur named Bom Kim, who last year dropped out of Harvard Business School and relocated to Seoul to start his company. After a little more than a year in business, Coupang has 650 employees and $30 million from U.S. investors. Kim hopes to take the company public on the Nasdaq by 2013. “There’s an opportunity here,” says Kim. “I want this to be a company like PayPal or eBay.”

Kim was one of more than a dozen American entrepreneurs I met in Seoul. They were the founders of media start-ups, video-game start-ups, financial-services start-ups, manufacturing start-ups, education start-ups, and even a start-up dedicated to producing more start-ups. “It’s a big trend here,” says Henry Chung, managing director of DFJ Athena, a venture capital firm with offices in Seoul and Silicon Valley. “There’s a growing number of students studying overseas and coming back.”

The country to which they are returning is an entirely different place from the one they (or their parents) left years ago. In 1961, the southern half of the Korean peninsula—formally known as the Republic of Korea—was one of the poorest places on earth. South Korea has no mineral resources to speak of, and it ranks 117th in the world in terms of arable land per capita, behind Saudi Arabia and Somalia. Fifty years ago, the average South Korean lived about as well as the average Bangladeshi. Today, South Koreans live about as well as Europeans. The country boasts the world’s 12th-largest economy by purchasing power, an unemployment rate of just 3.2 percent, and one of the world’s lowest rates of public debt. South Korea’s per-capita GDP growth over the past half a century—23,000 percent—beats that of China, India, and every other country in the world. “A lot of Koreans still say that the market is too small,” says Shin. “But it’s not. It’s huge.”

South Korea is smaller in area than Iceland but has 166 times its population, meaning that 80 percent of its 49 million citizens live in urban areas. In the capital, retail shops and businesses reach high into the air and far below the earth in miles of underground shopping malls. Many of Seoul’s bars and nightclubs stay open until sunup, but just walking the city’s narrow, hilly streets—jostled by hawkers and flanked by the neon signs that advertise barbecue joints and karaoke rooms and the ubiquitous “love motels”—can be intoxicating all by itself. An hour’s drive west, in Incheon, 50- and 60-story apartment buildings abut rice paddies and vegetable gardens.

The sense of claustrophobic density is magnified by the country’s embrace of communications technologies. In the 1990s, the South Korean government invested heavily in the installation of fiber-optic cables, with the result that by 2000, Koreans were four times as likely as Americans to have high-speed Internet access. Koreans still enjoy the fastest Internet in the world while paying some of the lowest prices. The easiest way to feel like an outsider in this country is to board one of Seoul’s subway cars, which are equipped with high-speed cellular Internet, Wi-Fi, and digital TV service, and look anywhere but at the screen in your hand.

Have you ever heard the term Pali pali?” asks Brian Park, the 32-year-old CEO of X-Mon Games, which makes games for mobile devices. The phrase—often said quickly and at considerable volume—can be heard all over Seoul; it translates roughly to “Hurry, hurry.” Park, who founded his company in early 2011 with $40,000 in seed capital from Ticket Monster’s Shin and another $40,000 from the South Korean government, invokes the phrase in trying to explain the three beds I had noticed in his company’s conference room.

“It’s normal,” he says, gesturing at the makeshift bunkhouse. “Our crazy culture.” By that, he doesn’t mean the culture of the seven-person company. He means the culture of the entire country of South Korea, where the average worker spent 42 hours a week on the job in 2010, the highest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (The average American worked 34 hours; the average German, 26.) I saw similar sleeping arrangements at most of the start-ups I visited, and even at some larger companies. The CEO of a 40-person tech company told me he lived in his office for more than a year, sleeping on a small foldup futon next to his desk. He had recently rented an apartment because his investors had become concerned about his health.

In their personal lives, South Koreans are relentless self-improvers, spending more on private education—English lessons and cram schools for college entrance exams—than do the citizens of any other developed country. Another obsession: cosmetic surgery, which is more common in South Korea than anywhere else in the world.

And yet despite this outward show of dynamism, South Korea remains in its soul a deeply conservative place. Shin told me about meeting, in Ticket Monster’s early days, with an executive from a large Korean conglomerate about a marketing deal. The executive refused to talk business. He wanted to know why a young man with a wealthy family and an Ivy League diploma was messing around with start-ups. “He said that if his kid did what I’m doing, he’d disown him,” Shin recalled. If this sounds like hyperbole, it’s not: Jiho Kang, who is chief technology officer of a start-up in California and CEO of another one in Seoul, says that when he started a company after high school, his father, a college professor, kicked him out of the house. “My dad is seriously conservative, seriously Korean,” Kang says.

That older Koreans view risk taking with suspicion isn’t surprising, given the country’s history. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 nearly destroyed the South Korean economic miracle. (In a remarkable show of national resilience, South Koreans turned in hundreds of pounds of gold—wedding bands, good-luck charms, heirlooms—to help their government pay down its debt.) These days, Seoul, which is just 30 miles from the North Korean border, remains on alert for a nuclear or chemical attack. One afternoon when I was in Seoul, the city stood still for 15 minutes as sirens blasted and police cleared the roadways. These drills, which are held several times a year, can be even more involved. Last December, a dozen South Korean fighter jets buzzed the city streets to simulate a North Korean air raid.

Amid all this instability, the Chaebol, Korea’s family-owned conglomerates, have been a redoubt of stability, providing the best jobs, training new generations of leaders, and turning the country into the export powerhouse it is today. The Chaebol grew thanks to government policies, instituted in the 1960s, that gave them monopoly status in every major industry. Their power was greatly diminished in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis, but the Chaebol still dominate the economy. The 2010 sales of South Korea’s largest Chaebol, the Samsung Group, were nearly $200 billion, or about one-fifth of the country’s GDP.

To many South Koreans, being an entrepreneur—that is to say, going against the system that made the country rich—is seen as rebellious or even deviant. “Let’s say you’re working at Samsung and one day you say, ‘This isn’t for me’ and start a company,” says Won-ki Lim, a reporter for the Korea Economic Daily. “I don’t know how Americans think about that, but in Korea, a lot of people will think you of you as a traitor.” Business loans generally require personal guarantees, and bankruptcy usually disqualifies former entrepreneurs from good jobs. “People who fail leave this country,” Lim says. “Or they leave their industry and start something different. They open a bakery or a coffee shop.”

The penalty for failure is even more onerous for female entrepreneurs. When Ji Young Park founded her first company, in 1998, her bank not only required her to personally guarantee the company’s loans—a typical request for a male founder—it also demanded guarantees from her husband, her parents, and her husband’s parents. Park persevered—her current business, Com2uS, is a $25 million developer of cell-phone games—but her case is extremely rare. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, South Korea has fewer female entrepreneurs, on a per-capita basis, than Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Pakistan. “Most of the companies women are creating are really small, and the survival rates are really low,” says Hyunsuk Lee, a professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

Entrepreneurs in South Korea often struggle to raise capital. Though Korean venture capitalists invest several billion dollars a year—about half of which comes from government coffers—most of the money goes to well-established, profitable companies rather than true start-ups. It’s not that Korean VCs hate small companies; it’s just hard to make money selling them. “The Chaebol don’t buy companies,” says Chester Roh, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who has taken one company public and sold one to Google. “They don’t need to. They just call you up and say, ‘We’ll give you a good job.’”

As an American, Daniel Shin wasn’t subject to these constraints. His largest institutional investor was Insight Venture Partners in New York City, where his college roommate worked as an associate. “American Koreans have a big competitive advantage,” says Ji Young Park. “They can raise much larger investments from outside of Korea, and they can take business models from the U.S. It is much harder for a genuine Korean.” This has a cultural component as well: “Korean Americans aren’t predisposed to the Korean mindset,” says Richard Min, co-founder and CEO of Seoul Space. “They’re open to risk.”

"We're trying to get an ecosystem going here," says Richard Min of Seoul Space.

Min, a 38-year-old Korean American, is a former college swimmer who looks as if he could still do a couple of laps. He dresses well and talks fast, with just a hint of an accent from his native New England. He launched Seoul Space last year with two other Americans as a redoubt of Silicon Valley–style entrepreneurship in Seoul. The company offers discounted office space to start-ups, mentors them, and then introduces them to investors, in exchange for small equity stakes. “We’re trying to get an ecosystem going here,” Min says, leading me through a sea of mismatched office furniture at which 20 or so young people are pecking away at keyboards.

Min moved to South Korea in 2001 because he was curious about his roots and because he saw an opportunity in his dual identity. His first Korean company, Zingu, was the country’s first pay-per-click advertising company. When the dot-com bust hit Seoul, he turned Zingu into a consulting firm to help large Korean companies market themselves outside the country. Two years ago, when the Korean launch of Apple’s iPhone gave local software developers an easy route to international consumers, he decided that the next big opportunity was in start-ups. “You have a new generation feeling like they have a pathway that’s not working for Samsung,” says Min, who is winding down his ad agency in order to focus on Seoul Space. “We’re at the forefront of a major shift.”

I had assumed that everyone working in Seoul Space was Korean, but when Min started introducing me, I realized that half of these guys were American—there was Victor from Hawaii, Peter from Chicago, Mike from Virginia. Others were Korean nationals but with a decidedly American way of looking at the world. “I was a pure engineer—one of those nerds,” says Richard Choi, who came to the United States in 2002, as a freshman biomedical engineering student at Johns Hopkins. “I had no interest in business whatsoever.”

Choi assumed he would end up in the laboratory of some large company, but when he and several classmates designed a gadget that made it easier for medical technicians to take blood, he found himself in a business-plan competition. His team won first place—a whopping $5,000 prize—and he was hooked. Choi thought about starting a company after graduation, but he had a problem: His student visa had expired. He didn’t have the $1 million in cash necessary to qualify for an investor visa, so he figured his only option would be to get a job and hope that his employer would sponsor his application for permanent residence. He went on a dozen interviews at American medical-device companies, but none were interested, and he finally enrolled in a master’s program at Cornell to stay for another year. When it was over, he gave up on the States, returned to Korea, and took a job at the pharmaceutical division of SK, one of the country’s largest conglomerates.

Choi worked at SK for three years, but he never got the entrepreneurial bug out of his system. Out of boredom, he started an event marketing company called Nodus, and then he met Min at a party. Min introduced him to the person with whom he would eventually (with one other person) co-found his current company, Spoqa, which makes a smartphone app designed to replace the loyalty cards issued by retail businesses. “It’s funny how a small event can change your life,” Choi says.

Over the past two years, the South Korean government has launched a series of policies designed to help people like Choi. The Small and Medium Business Administration—South Korea’s version of the SBA—has created hundreds of incubators throughout the country, offering entrepreneurs free office space, thousands of dollars in grants, and guaranteed loans. There are government-sponsored missions to the United States and regular seminars for aspiring entrepreneurs. “Our economy can no longer rely only on the conglomerates,” says Jangwoo Lee, a member of the Presidential Council for Future and Vision and a professor at Kyungpook National University in Seoul. “This is the 21st century. We need another instrument for economic growth.”

That instrument, Lee told me, will be people like Shin. “He’s part of a new trend in Korea,” says Lee. “He made his success with his ideas and imagination, without a lot of technology and investment.” Lee tells me that although South Korea has been very good at commercializing university research, it has been very bad at nurturing the kinds of disruptive companies that are so common in the U.S. “We need to get our young guys dreaming,” he says.

That, says Min, is the idea of Seoul Space. “We’re focusing on helping people understand how things work in Silicon Valley,” he says. I got a taste of this on a Saturday morning at Seoul Space, as I watched half a dozen new entrepreneurs—some Korean and some American—present their ideas to an audience of 100 in the room and, via Skype, to several thousand viewers around the world as part of a Web TV show called This Week in Startups. The language of the day was, of course, English, and Min, who had spent hours coaching the six entrepreneurs on their pitches, leaned against a wall just off camera, watching nervously as his students performed.

Among the presenters was the incubator’s biggest star, Jaehong Kim, a slight 26-year-old who wore an untucked white dress shirt and black trousers that stopped 8 inches above a pair of two-tone dress shoes. Kim is a co-founder of AdbyMe, an online advertising company that allows companies in South Korea and Japan to pay the users of social media to hawk their products. In his first four months, Kim turned a profit while taking in an impressive $250,000 in revenue.

AdbyMe graduated from Seoul Space earlier this year, moving its 10 employees into a small apartment across town. When I stop by on a Monday, Kim tells me to take off my shoes, walks me past the inevitable bedroom—”I sleep two nights a week here,” he says with a grin—and then introduces me to a group of guys he calls Ringo, Big I, and AI. “His name isn’t really AI,” Kim explains. “We call each other by code names.”

At most South Korean companies—even many start-ups—employees are addressed by their job title rather than their first name, but Kim is trying something new. At the suggestion of one of his co-founders, an engineer who lived in New Orleans as a child, Kim ordered employees to scrap the titular system and pick new names. If they want to get his attention, they refer to him not by the traditional Korean greeting—”Mr. CEO”—but by his nickname, Josh. “The vision is that an intern can tell me something isn’t right,” he says. I had assumed that Kim had been educated in the U.S., but it turned out he wasn’t straight out of Wharton. He lived for two years in Kansas City, Kansas, but his most recent job had been as a first lieutenant in the Korean Army.

In September, Kim raised $500,000 from investors in South Korea. His goal is to raise enough to qualify for an American investor visa.

He isn’t the only entrepreneur who talks about coming to the United States. “I know for sure that I want one more stint in the States,” says Shin. He is curious to find out if he can replicate his success in America’s larger, more competitive market; and even though he now speaks passable Korean, he has never stopped thinking of himself as an American. “I don’t know when, and it’s too early to think about ideas, but I know I’ll probably end up going back and forth,” he says. “I think it’s possible to do stuff in both places.”

Max Chafkin

Max Chafkin Senior writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

한국어 밑에

The countdown is on to Twist Seoul II and the deadline to apply to pitch is fast approaching. This coming Tuesday, December 6^th, is the deadline to apply to pitch.

What happens when you pitch?

• Every company will receive feedback on their pitch and company from the judges. The judges are experienced entrepreneurs, VC’s and angel investors.
• By making it to the live event you’ll pitch in front of 150+ entrepreneurs, VC’s, bloggers, journalists, and early adopters. A great way to get local exposure for your company.
• Pitching on the live show will get your company in front of 100,000+ influential viewers around the world.
• And finally, if you win the Twist Seoul event, you’ll receive a free table at the Launch Conference in San Francisco and an all-expense paid trip to get there!

Event Location Announced

The event will be held in Gangnam, just a 5 minute walk from Yeoksam Station on Line 2.

Baeklim Building (백림빌딩) 4th Floor, 823-33 Yeoksam-Dong, Gangnam-Gu, Seoul.

The Judges

We’re still working on finalizing the judges panel, but we’ve added some great one’s in the past week –

• 허진호 (Hur Jin-Ho) – Jin-Ho is a serial entrepreneur and is currently the founder & CEO of Raker Online and Crzyfish. He was previously the CEO of Neowiz and the Chairman of the Korea Internet Corporations Association.
• Jeong Min Lim – Jeong Min (a.k.a Jeffrey) is the co-founder and CEO of LIFO interactive, a Seoul based game studio for social platforms like Facebook. In less than 18 months it has become the leading social game developer in Korea.
• Troy Malone - Troy is the General Manager of Asia Pacific Operations for Evernote. He previously founded Pelotonics.
• Dan Shin - Dan is the CEO and co-founder of TicketMonster – Korea’s largest social commerce company. They were recently acquired by LivingSocial.

Apply Now

Applications are due on Tuesday at midnight. Get your applications in. And tell your friends, it’s going to be a great event.

==========================================

두번째 TWiST Seoul 대회가 임박해오고 있습니다. Pitch 참가신청 시한은 12월 6일 화요일 자정까지 입니다.

여러분이 Pitch를 했을 때 일어날 수 있는 일은?

• 모든 참가 회사는 경험이 풍부한 기업가와 벤처 투자자들로 구성된 멘토진으로 부터 발표와 회사에 관해 조언을 들을 수 있습니다.
• 여러분의 발표는 생방송으로 150명 이상의 기업가와 벤처 투자자, 블로거, 언론인등에게 전해질 것이며 이는 여러분의 회사와 아이디어가 세계적인 노출 홍보효과를 가질 수 있음을 나타냅니다.
• 또한 여러분의 발표는 전세계 곳곳의 10만명 이상의 영향력 있는 시청자에게 전해집니다.
• 대회 우승자에게는 샌프란시스코에서 열리는 “Launch Conference”에 공간을 마련해드리며 참가비용은 전액 지원 해드립니다.

행사 장소  

행사는 역삼역(2호선)  3번 출구 인근의 백림빌딩 4층에서 열립니다.

서울특별시 강남구 역삼동 823-33 백림빌딩 4층

멘토진

멘토진의 구성을 다양하게 하고자 노력을 했으며, 최근에 영향력 있는 멘토를 모시게 되었습니다. –

• 허진호 (Hur Jin-Ho) –허진호님은 기업가로 활동해오셨으며 현재는 Raker Online과 Crzyfish의 경영자이자 설립자로 일하고 있습니다. 그는 이전에 Neowiz의 경영자로 활동했으며 한국인터넷기업협회장을 역임하기도 했습니다.
• Jeong Min Lim – Jeong Min(a.k.a Jeffrey)는 LIFO interactive의 경영자이자 공동 설립자이며, LIFO interactive는 서울을 기반으로 하며 페이스북과 같은 사회적 플랫폼을 지원하는 게임 업체 입니다.
• Troy Malone - Troy는 Evernote의 아태지역담당 매니저로 일하고 있습니다. 그는 이전에 Pelotonics를 설립하기도 했습니다.
• Daniel Shin - Daniel은 한국의 거대 소셜커머스 업체인 TicketMonster의 경영자이자 공동 설립자입니다. 최근에 LivingSocial에게 인수 되었습니다.

지금 등록하세요

등록 마감기한은 화요일 자정까지 입니다. 등록을 하셨다면 주위 사람들에게도 알려주세요.  멋진 행사로 보답하겠습니다.

Since the beginning of November, there has been a large shake up in the rankings. Previously, the Korean government required all games to submit their games for ratings board approvals. While local game publishers went through the process of getting their games approved and published in the Entertainment categories, large foreign publishers such as EA or Rovio did not bother do go through this approval process. The Korean government changed their stance in the beginning of November and games were opened up to the Korean market. Games, many of which are created by foreign publishers, now dominate the rankings in Korea.

Top 5 Paid iOS Apps

1. Dead Space, $0.99

2. Angry Birds, $0.99

3. 비밀 사진촬영 (Secret Camera), $0.99

4. FIFA 12, $2.99

5. 아스팔트6 아드레날린 (Asphalt 6 Adrenaline), $0.99

Top 5 Free iOS Apps

1. 메이플스토리 시그너스기사단 (Maple Story )

2. FIFA Superstars

3. 도둑 루팡 (Lupin Thief)

4. 영화속명대사 (Famous Lines from Movies)

5. 데이트엔 (Date&)

Top 5 Paid Android Apps

1. Talking Tom Cat 2 – 1076 won

2. PowerAMP Full Version Unlocker – 5252 won

3. kakaotalk Alarm Bundle – 1900 won

4. iPhone Go launcher theme – 1800 won

5. 갑자기말되는영어 문법세상 (English That Makes Sense All of a Sudden) - 1000 won

Top 5 Free Android Apps

1. 필수어플백과사전3 (무료게임, 폰꾸미기) (Must Have Apps, Free Games, Decoration Apps)

2. KakaoTalk Messenger

3. 갭순이2 (무료 게임 모음) (Game Rankings, Free Game Collection)

4. phone decor collection 2

5. 밸소리천국3 (카카오톡/톡톡음/알람/벨소리) (Ringtone Heaven for Kakao, Tik Tok and Other Uses)

Top 5 Nate/Cyworld Apps

1. 에브리스타 (Every Star)

2. 리조트타운 (Resort Town)

3. 카드삼국지 (Three Kingdoms Cards)

4. 퍼즐사가 (Puzzle Chronicles)

5. 창세기2012 (Genesis 2012)

1.) OK, starting off, what went through your head when you arrived in Beijing and realized that you were about to pitch your startup on stage in front of successful investors, entrepreneurs and a worldwide audience online?

Moglue CEO, Taewoo Kim, and CMO, Chris Riley, pitch their company at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011

2.) Have you ever participated in a pitch competition before? How about on this scale?

We’ve done pitches before, to both Korean and English speaking audiences, but this was by far the biggest event for us. We’d applied to the past few Disrupts, so we weren’t really expecting to get accepted. We were at an overseas event  when we got the word. I think I swore out loud a few times, and then told TaeWoo. We were psyched, and proud. It was really hard to not tell anyone and accidentally leak that we’d be going.

3.) What did you do to prepare ahead of time? How did you pump yourself (and your team) up ahead of Disrupt?

We’ve both done similar versions of the pitch before, so we knew it well. TaeWoo was going to use a clicker to advance the slides, so we only did a couple run-throughs together, mainly to coordinate the demo portion of the presentation. As should have been expected, the clicker didn’t work on stage, but TaeWoo’s a smooth operator. He still made it look like he was using it, so I was able to watch his hands to know when to advance the slides.

One of the most important things to do when you present is to have fun, and even if you’re not having fun, smile. I must have walked around for an hour backstage with a big grin on my face. For me it doesn’t feel natural to smile when I’m nervous and on stage, so I had to practice. Also, I listened to a lot of 2NE1, particularly 내가제일잘나가. If that doesn’t pump you up, I don’t know what will.

4.) What did you want to achieve by going to Disruput in Beijing? Was it experience, publicity, the chance at investments, or something else?

Obviously the experience, publicity, etc. are great, and they help feed each other and what we’re doing. I think most importantly for us, however, was a feeling of validation. It’s one thing for you and your users to love your product. It’s entirely different when an outside entity sees something in you, and chooses you from a pool of over five hundred applicants. That was huge for us.

Everyone at TechCrunch was so friendly, helpful, and encouraging. At the conclusion of the first day, members of the staff made a real effort to come up and tell us how much they liked our platform. Then, we advanced [to the second round] and got to present on day two. It was really hard to fall asleep that night.

5.) Moglue made it to the final round of the competition, making it one of just six companies to do so. Do you consider that a success? What did you come away from the competition with?

Of course for us it is something that will always be a road marker, and relate to a certain level of achievement. Perhaps more importantly, however, was that it helped us gain a different view on our product.

Entrepreneurs need to occasionally switch their perspective to one that’s outside, and slightly elevated. This can be difficult. Techcrunch gave us that, and helped reaffirm our belief in what we’re doing.

6.) What was the most memorable part of the conference? What lessons did you learn?

The ‘Juice Man’ was great, haha.

More seriously, I’ve always admired Phil Libin, and really enjoyed seeing him speak. Evernote is meaningful to him, his users love it, and both these factors have enabled the company to grow organically. I cannot imagine a more perfect way to build a company. I also love Angry Birds, so I enjoyed meeting Peter Vesterbacka. The brand is one of the most copied in China, but instead of whining, they’ve been smart and identified it as an opportunity.

Beijing was a reminder that there are amazing people everywhere, building cool stuff. Perhaps this is too “meta,” or simple a perspective, but the energy was terrific, and it felt really good to be a part of that.

7.) Was it worth it? What would you do differently if you went back to Disrupt again. What advice would you offer to other startups or entrepreneurs who are thinking of presenting at a major conference?

I’m outgoing when amongst friends, but can be somewhat of an introvert and shy around people I don’t know. I am conscious of this and am constantly trying to improve it, but I would have made an effort to be more effective at networking. Overall though, it was a positive experience, and definitely worth it.

8.) Do you have any final thoughts to close with?

If you’ve ever thought of starting your own company: just do it.