A new era of virtuous circle: Korean entrepreneurial environment thriving

Domain Name City (domain.cn) October 22 News, according to foreign media reports, South Korea's top mobile internet company Kakao and the second largest portal Daum after the merger of the new company Daum Kakao this month, also let Kakao founder Kim Fansu (Kim beom-soo) Become a billionaire overnight.

The 48-Year-old Kim Fansu now owns about $3.2 billion trillion in corporate equities, and Kim Fansu and his company are among the best-known examples of South Korean start-ups in recent months.

The founders, who sell their own companies, have invested in a new wave of young South Korean companies through their VCs, giving South Korea the most active entrepreneurial outlook in Asia.

In recent months, South Korea's technology sector has also attracted the attention of Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, has visited South Korea twice in the past two years, the most recent of which was last week. Google is also planning to build a 20000 sq. ft. (1858 sqm) entrepreneurial Center in South Korea's Seoul, nurturing more South Korean start-ups and giving these companies more exposure internationally.

South Korean start-ups have had a hard time attracting foreign users, but many of the young entrepreneurs who have been abroad have studied outside South Korea, and the companies they have created have ambitions to move around the world. They are also increasingly being supported by government programs that link individual investments to government subsidies.

Jimmy Rim, a 35-year-old Jimmy Lin in Japan's SoftBank group, has worked with Kim Fansu to create a VC company called K-Cube Ventures after he left office in 2012. He believes a thriving entrepreneurial environment has begun to emerge in South Korea.

"When I was 2007 years old, the entrepreneurial environment was very bad," says Jimmy Lin. Not many investors in the early days, VCs are unwilling to pay, they even want the mortgage companies to take back the money they put in. There are not many potential buyers on the market. ”

Now that's not a problem. South Korea's technology industry has attracted $198 million trillion in investment money this year, four times times more than 2012, according to data from the Asia venture capital journal. This growth is far more than Korea's two neighboring countries Japan and China, of course, the amount itself is not comparable, Japan attracted 370 million wind investment this year, China attracted 3.3 billion.

Through a project called the Incubator for technology start-ups (TIPS), the Korean SME administration will make additional investments in start-ups that have access to venture capital. For example, if an investor invests 10,000 dollars, then the government will invest 5 times times more money, that is 50,000 dollars, the maximum amount of this additional investment can reach 500,000 dollars.

Yin Shiming, Yoon Se-myung, the government official overseeing the project, said it was actually a policy modelled on the Israeli government. It also shows the government's desire to get rid of its economic model of relying too heavily on large multinational chaebol and to invest more in start-ups in the future.

To some extent, with the influence of the government, K-Cube invested in Frograms, Greenmonster and other start-up enterprises. The former created an online film recommendation engine, the latter's small freshness diary service Flava has attracted 1.2 million of users.

K-Cube has also invested in an online community vingle by like-minded people. Founded by Zhang Yaohao (Changseong Ho) and his wife, the community now has 4 million visitors per month, with users from 105 countries and 26 languages in the community.

The two men also started their own company when they were in the United States. Last September, the two shared a video-sharing site Viki, which was created in 2007, for a 200 million-dollar sale to the Japanese electric giant Lotte Group.

The couple now also set up their own VC companies, a company called Theventures, which invests about $50,000 to 200,000 dollars, mainly for domestic start-ups. They had previously invested in a start-up bridge Mobile, a platform for networking telephony, and provided the company with an office location in Seoul Jiangnan District.

Liu (Ryu Jung-hee), a Ph. D., also worked as Zhang Yaohao to create a series of companies after quitting the company. He sold Olaworks Inc., the augmented reality technology company he founded in 2012, to Intel, which also reached $30 million trillion.

This year, Liu Hee used the deal to create a start-up accelerator called Futureplay, which supports start-ups that focus on "deep technology" such as facial recognition and speech recognition.

Futureplay hopes to persuade those engineers who enter the middle of the career to resign from the easy work of big companies such as Samsung and LG to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. In the first year, the engineers could start their own company in Futureplay, Futureplay would provide them with a one-year guaranteed salary, and then they would have to show their ideas and separate from Futureplay, Futureplay a part of the new company's shares.

Futureplay also has two full-time lawyers, one of whom is an intellectual property expert, who will ensure that the start-ups ' ideas do not drain.

Zhang Yaohao couples and Liu have the experience of allowing companies to move to international markets, one of their biggest strengths, and the most desirable experience for start-ups that have Theventures and futureplay investments.