
Always looking to connect with smart folks and (potential) founders. Reach me at i@inbae.io.
About
I rep the best early stage VC in Korea. I read, write, twiddle, sample, explore, and rave about things and people in tech.
Work Experience
- Deep tech investments (see Projects section)
- Global affairs (fund/GP level partnership, external relations)
- Conscription to parent company as CEO staff
- Incubation and operation of Kakao Brain Corp
- Business development for AI Business Team (smart speaker & voice assistant platform)
- Acquired by Kakao Corp in 2015
- Rebranded as Kakao Ventures in 2017
- Storage software stack for Galaxy smartphones
Education
- BS + MS (integrated) in Computer Engineering
- Minor in Computer Science
Projects
Portfolios I keep tabs on:
๐ฐ๐ท kiboko.team
๐ฐ๐ท rebellions.ai
๐บ๐ธ laseinnovation.com
๐บ๐ธ bluespace.ai
๐บ๐ธ minervaproject.com
๐บ๐ธ spatial.io
๐บ๐ธ getwair.com
๐บ๐ธ mojo.vision
Maintainer of:
โ๏ธ medium.com/kakaoventures
๐ฆ twitter.com/kakaoventures
- Rebellions.ai is Korea's best fabless startup, founded in 2020 by ex- Morgan Stanley / IBM / SpaceX / Samsung / Hynix folks. Boasting hyper scalable/flexible architecture, silicon-proven top notch performance, the team is building NPU accelerators for system trading & AI workload in data centers. Total raise is at 100B KRW ($80M) to date from instutionals Korea and Singapore.
- Participated in Seed, Pre- Series A, Series A rounds
Lase Innovation is commercializing laser particles (invented by Prof. Andy Yun of Harvard Medical School) small enough to be injected into living cells, for scientific barcoding purposes. Laser barcodes to be applied to Flow Cytometry, Microscopy, Single Cell Sequencing for drug & disease researchers to inspect cell or tissue samples better.
- Autonomous driving startup BlueSpace.ai was founded by founders and members of Drive.ai (acq. by Apple) to create perception software, based on 4D lidar tech, no pre-training required, for fleet vans and buses
- Chosen as 2021 NASA iTech Cycle I company
- youtube.com/watch?v=NumYBOโฆ
- Opportunistically invested into minervaproject.com, the backend business entity for Minerva University (minerva.edu), at a later round than Benchmark Capital, ByteDance, and TAL Education
Writing
A ten-part series on the career pivot I made for younger Korean audience
์์ง๋์ด๋ง์์ ๋ฒค์ฒ์บํผํ๋ก ์ ํฅํ๊ฒ ๋ ์ด์ผ๊ธฐ๋ฅผ 10ํธ์ ๋ธ๋ก๊ทธ ๊ธ๋ก ํ์ด ์ค๋ช
ํ ๋ธ๋ฐ์น ์๋ฆฌ์ฆ
A two part exposition on why Kakao Ventures isn't a "CVC" (Corporate VC) of Kakao
Speaking
Appeared on the Korea's national English news channel for a light touch on why Korean startups end up raising growth capital from overseas
Features
Key interview questions:
Q. ๊ฐ๋ฐ์๋ก ์ผํ์๋ค๊ฐ ๋ณธ์ธ์ ์ปค๋ฆฌ์ด๋ฅผ ๋ฐ๊พผ ๊ณ๊ธฐ๊ฐ ์์ผ์ ๊ฐ์? VC๋ ๋น์ฆ๋์ค ๊ฒฝํ์ด๋ ์ปจ์คํ
๊ฒฝํ์ด ํ์ํ ๊ฒ ๊ฐ์๋ฐ, ๊ฐ๋ฐ์ ์ถ์ ์ผ๋ก ์ด๋ป๊ฒ ์ฑ์ฉ ๊ณผ์ ์ ํต๊ณผํ์
จ๋์?
Q. ๋ฒค์ฒ์บํผํ์ ๋ค์ํ ์ฐ์
์ ๊ฒฝ๋ ฅ์๊ฐ ๋ชจ์ฌ ์์ ๊ฒ ๊ฐ์๋ฐ, ์ด๋ค์ ์ด๋ป๊ฒ ์ผํ๊ณ ์ํตํ๋์?
Q. ๋ณดํต์ ํฌ์์ฌ๊ฐ โ๊ฐโ์ด๊ณ ์ฐฝ์
๊ฐ๋ โ์โ์ด๋ผ๊ณ ์๊ฐํ๋๋ฐ, ์ง์ ํฌ์ํ๋ ์
์ฅ์์๋ ์ด๋ป๊ฒ ์๊ฐํ์๋์?
Q. ์ ๋ฅํ VC๋ ์ด๋ค ๊ธฐ์ค์ผ๋ก ํ๊ฐ๋๋์?
Key interview questions:
Q. ์นด์นด์ค๋ฒค์ฒ์ค๋ ์ด๊ธฐ ํฌ์์ ์ญํ ์ ํ๊ณ ์๋ค. ์ด๊ธฐ ํฌ์๋ ์ด๋ค ์๋ฏธ์ธ๊ฐ? / ๋ฒค์ฒ ์บํผํธ์ด ์ ๋์ ์งํ๊ฐ ์๋ ์ด๊ธฐ ์คํํธ์
์ ๋์์ผ๋ก ํฌ์๋ฅผ ๊ฐํํ๋ ค๋ฉด ์ฐฝ์
๊ฐ ์ ์ ์ ์ค์ ์ ์ผ๋ก ๋ณผ ์๋ฐ์ ์์ ๊ฒ ๊ฐ๋ค.
Q. ์คํํธ์
์์ ๋์์ธ์ ๋ํ ์ธ์์ ์ด๋ ์ ๋์ธ๊ฐ? ๋์์ด๋๊ฐ ๊ณต๋ ์ฐฝ์
์์ธ ์๊ฐํ ๋งํ ์คํํธ์
์ด ์๋ค๋ฉด?
Q. ์นด์นด์ค๋ฒค์ฒ์ค๋ ํฌ์ํ ํฌํธํด๋ฆฌ์ค ๊ธฐ์
์ โํจ๋ฐ๋ฆฌโ๋ผ๊ณ ๋ถ๋ฅธ๋ค. ํธ์นญ์์ ํฌ์์ฌ์ ํฌํธํด๋ฆฌ์ค ๊ด๊ณ๋ฅผ ๋์ด์ ๋๋ํ ์ฐ์ ์ด ๋ฌป์ด๋๋ค. ๋ฏธ๋์ ํจ๋ฐ๋ฆฌ๊ฐ ๋ ์ฐฝ์
๊ฐ๋ค์๊ฒ ๋ค๋ ค์ฃผ๊ณ ์ถ์ ์กฐ์ธ์ด ์๋ค๋ฉด?