One time, at a Google Startup Pitch event in Seoul, I saw this huge guy smothering down some Pizza. In an event where everyone had the investor, founder, or student name tag, he had nothing on. He definitely piqued my interest, so I approached him and started a conversation. After some basic introductions, he asked me, “Are those students over there your friends?”
Me: “Yes, we’re all Business Majors and come from this interesting university that travels the world.”
CEO: “Wow, you’re the first student to talk to me all day; why did you want to talk to me?”
Me: “You just seemed like the most interesting person in the room.”
At this point, I didn’t really know what to say, but it was true; he was built like a professional wrestler, had no identification tag, and walked around like he was the owner of the building. I just knew that this guy would have an interesting story to tell. Well, it turns out I was indeed correct; he recently quit his job as a managing director at a top 3 PE firm and started a PE fund himself to compete with the biggest in the world. Now, I thought he was all talk to start off with, but he goes on to outline this insanely intricate plan: starting at this glaring problem in the Korean beef industry to outlining his connections with the Korean Entertainment industry to raise the necessary capital (at this point he had already raised an undisclosed amount).
I was fascinated by him and wanted to be part of what he was doing, but I needed to show this guy that I wasn’t an average student. I started by dissecting every company that pitched that day and outlined how the best companies had a clear founder-market fit even if they were not solving a fancy problem, while the startups that sounded iffy were trying too much to be another AI startup. My time spent every week going to networking events in San Francisco the previous year didn’t go to waste after all, I thought. Anyways, the CEO seemed to have taken a serious liking to me and said, let’s meet up to talk more this weekend. One meeting turned into another, and he taught me all sorts of things, from the best way to grow my network in Korea to how to craft an Informational Memorandum (IM) for one of his deals.
Making an IM was super challenging, as I didn’t previously understand the amount of due diligence required, spending hours researching the industry, the competitors, and the potential investors. As someone with very limited Korean, my first step actually started with using AI tools to translate all information from Korean to English and then to ensure the CEO that the translation didn’t miss any connotations; this was a very time-consuming process, but it definitely taught me the importance of patience. After gathering the data and formulating reasoning, the most crucial part was the communication design. How can the document deliver all the critical messages without boring/distracting the reader? How can we ensure that the reader of this document understands and sees the same thing we envision? These are elementary things to do, yet many of us still fail. I am occasionally guilty of this, too, but building iterations of the document and using communication design principles for a meaningful real-world project was great.
As I reflect on my time in Seoul from September - December 2023, it is weird to think that I could form such a strong relationship from a random connection I made. However, I am super grateful for the experience and learnings that followed.
