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."
