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?
Mark Leong
CALIFORNIA STYLE: The offices of Devsisters, a graduate company of the Seoul Space incubator.
Mark Leong
HOME IS WHERE THE OPPORTUNITY IS: Daniel Shin in Seoul. Click to enlarge, and see (at left) an ad for Ticket Monster.
Mark Leong
NEW TRADITIONS: "We're trying to get an ecosystem going here," says Richard Min of Seoul Space.
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."
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.)
