Entrepreneur's Inspiration

Grateful for being a father of someone.

Having a family, and then having a baby is a big change in life. The changes in terms of priorities, goals, understanding of human being, and meaning of happiness. It’s a big step, that most people endure through life, but also a truly unique and heart-strengthening experience for each individual.

I dream ever mightier things because of the responsibilities that I have, of becoming a relentless entrepreneur, a humble servant to our people, and a respectful father to my family.

Focusing on Execution

I had a dinner with a friend who is one of the more senior managers at a fairly large software company. He was responsible for a big initiative, but after many years of hard work, that business area came to a halt.

Now, there can be many reasons for such failures, but he recalls three main reasons: 1) Having lack of focus 2) Hiring too fast before “center of gravity” was in place (they hired around 80 highly experienced people within first few months) and 3) not seeing through the actual execution of important things.

This is also very true for any startup.

1) Executing without focus, especially when the leaders are always doing bunch of things that add little to no value to the product, is a very common cause to failure.

2) Hiring too fast before any culture sets in, or achieving small victories that binds the team members together, coupled with tons of experienced people pouring into the organization without teamwork or previous working relations may bog down the entire organization.

3) Lastly, he mentioned that a CEO is a Chief Executive Officer, and not a CDO, a Chief Decision Officer. She is the one who makes tough calls, but she also needs to see it through and make sure things that matter gets thoroughly executed.

This struck a cord in me. Many leaders, especially Asian-cultured ones, tend to think execution and detail is for the ‘everyday workers’ and leaders should focus on the big picture and important decisions most of time.

Of course, big picture is very important, but often, things that lead to success can be very basic things, like making sure people within the organization are accountable for what they do, setting the standards for responsibility throughout the organization, making sure all things get executed properly with attention to details, and telling, showing, and actually rewarding actions that the company values and coaching on the areas that need improvement. These daily actions that set the tone for the entire organization is sometimes, what an organization actually needs to be effective.

Like they say in sports, “Never take your eye off the ball.”

Entrepreneurship in Asia

I think this would be a good place to start fresh.

I’ve founded Paprika Lab - a social gaming startup - back in 2007. It wasn’t a social gaming startup back then, more a social networking service company. Then we saw a big opportunity into social gaming in 2008, raised a small round of funding from a local VC in 2009, and here we are, a 25 people company with a couple of titles ready to march out the door.

It seems like there’s a lot of enthusiasm for startups in Korea these days, with lots of funding deals to many many entrepreneurs. I’ve started a small organization called “YES (Young Entrepreneur Society)” back in late 2008, a casual gathering of young entrepreneurs in Korea, and it’s great to see many of them either get funding or gotten an exit.

So, yes. Entrepreneurship is quite active even outside of Silicon Valley, and though the amount of capital available to entrepreneurs here are relatively smaller and the speed of the money market can be slow compared to what we see in the states, we do see a lot of innovative companies emerging in Asian market where few of them will end up making some interesting changes to the world.

In the later posts, I’ll be discussing interesting things happening here in Asia and hopefully dig a bit deeper into potential market opportunities for businesses and investments as well.

Hello World!