John Kim de SendBird

Jeroen: Hi, John. It’s great to have you on Founder Coffee.

John: Hey, man. How’s it going?

Jeroen : Tout va bien, merci.

Jeroen: You’re the founder of SendBird. For those who don’t know yet what does SendBird do?

John : SendBird est une API de chat. Nous alimentons essentiellement la messagerie d'utilisateur à utilisateur dans les applications mobiles et les sites web. On peut l'envisager comme un cas d'utilisation sur les places de marché où de nombreux vendeurs parlent aux acheteurs. Ou encore les produits de consommation tels que les communautés en ligne comme Reddit, ou les jeux, ou les rencontres, ainsi que certains flux vidéo en direct, où vous discutez également avec d'autres publics.

Jeroen: So, companies like Reddit are using your software basically to build a chat so they don’t have to do it themselves. Right?

John: Exactly. So, Reddit has to be one of our most fantastic customers. Obviously they’re one of the third largest websites in the US, and they’ve been using us for their user-to-user direct messaging as well as Subreddit chat.

Jeroen: Cool. How did you get the idea to start a chat backend company? How does that actually happen? Was it like, “A chat backend company, that would be a nice company to build.”

John : Oui. Eh bien, rien n'est aussi facile. Lorsque nous avons commencé notre voyage en 2013, nous avons démarré en tant qu'entreprise B2C essayant de construire une communauté pour les mamans, où vous pouvez trouver d'autres mamans dans votre région avec des enfants du même âge. En gros, pour organiser des sorties de jeux, acheter et vendre des produits d'occasion pour bébés, et ainsi de suite.

When we were trying to create this community for moms and that’s exactly the year when, you know, Mary Meeker came out with a report, “Hey, like messaging is overtaking the world.”

: I think it was around 2014 – 2015 when like WhatsApp, Telegram, these kinds of apps became the most used apps in the world. So, everyone in the industry was trying to see what kind of chat experience they can also put into their own application.

We also wanted to add a chat, and we looked around, tried a couple of different open source solutions, they didn’t really work out the way we wanted, so we also built on top of things like Firebase. That too didn’t quite have the flexibility and feature set that we wanted. So we ended up scratching all that and building everything from the ground up ourselves.

Well the truth is, we were running out of money. We had a couple hundred thousand users, but it wasn’t the next Facebook. So, it was sort of hard to see ourselves getting into a proper series A, with that amount of traction.

While, on the sideline, we had a lot of friends in the industry who were trying to build a chat themselves. We were one of the first ones who build a chat among all our friend groups. You know, a group of entrepreneurs. So they started asking questions like, “Can we use your technology?” We were like, “Of course not. It’s our stuff.” And they’re like, “We’ll pay you.”

And because we had zero revenue and were running out of money, we thought that was a pretty good idea. Very tempting. So we did a hackathon over a couple days, pulled it out to NCK, started selling on the sideline. We started out with a terrible pricing, we just asked, “Hey, how much can you pay me, like 50 bucks?”, and they’re like, “Sure.”

So our first customer was like $49 or $50 a month customer. The next customer we had to go and say, “150 bucks?”, and they were like, “Sure.” So we get had about two dozen customers within a couple of months in the early private testing. And then we applied to YC with that idea at the end of 2015.

To think about it, it’s like first two and a half years we were struggling with this B2C application, and then this small weekend hackathon thing became the core idea of our company. So we completely pivoted in December 2016. At the beginning of 2016 when we launched in YC, and then from there on we’ve grown pretty nicely.

Jeroen : Comment dois-je imaginer la société au moment où vous avez décidé de passer de la communauté des mamans à la société de messagerie ? Quelle était votre taille, disposiez-vous d'un financement de départ ?

John: Yeah, we had some small seed funding. We had four co-founders, and about 10-11 people at large. I said it like overnight, but it was actually a course of 6 months of careful transition because obviously, investors invested in that mom’s community app.

Les personnes qui ont rejoint l'entreprise étaient manifestement encore en train de concevoir et de construire des produits pour cette application de communauté de mamans, et quand on y pense, les personnes qui sont passionnées par le B2C ne sont pas toujours passionnées par le B2B. Nous avons donc dû nous demander comment nous aligner, comment gérer les attentes, quel est le calendrier, comment valider que tout cela peut réellement fonctionner.

So internally we had some assumptions, “Hey if we get X dollars of revenue or X number of customers, we might have something that works.” So we had this roughly set internal goals, and we started asking people around. We were running two businesses in parallel, under the same entity.

Nous avions des mamans, et nous continuions à déployer des fonctionnalités, mais un peu plus lentement parce que nous ne consacrions plus que quelques ressources à ce projet. Mais nous avons aussi commencé à réchauffer nos investisseurs pendant cette période. Nous avions une sorte de réunion informelle du conseil d'administration, où nous parlions à nos investisseurs tous les trimestres, ou tous les deux mois je crois.

And then we were telling them, “Hey, well here’s a side product we’re thinking about, it’s nothing serious yet, but if we think it has potential, we’ll let you know,” and we would keep updating them with our progress.

Then once we hit certain milestones and traction, we actually told them, “You know what? This might be something real, and we are going to start charging and once we have enough customers, then we’ll let you know.”

Nous avons donc continué à les réchauffer pendant six mois. En fin de compte, le fait d'arriver à YC avec cette idée, avec des dizaines de milliers de dollars de revenus, a été un très bon signal pour nous. Il s'agissait d'un parcours de six erreurs flagrantes.

Jeroen: Yeah I can imagine, you’re stuck between two very different businesses. Did anyone from the team leave because of your pivots? Did all the founders stay?

John: Yeah, all the co-founders are still with the company. Thankfully they’ve been very flexible in adapting in that manner. A couple of the employees were very specific to B2C applications around graphs and resources and things like that. They ended up finding other job opportunities.

We were very careful in communicating that because ultimately we know and they also accept that they won’t be happy at a B2B company. From an APIs versus community for moms, there’s going to be an amount of pretty graph face, and emojis. So we made that transition. I think one or two people left early on in the company, and maybe one or two later on. After that, the co-founding and the early engineers stayed with the company.

Jeroen: That’s super interesting. Is that your first thought of the mom community?

John : Non, c'est ma deuxième start-up. J'ai fondé ma première entreprise, une société de jeux sociaux, à la fin de l'année 2007 ; si vous y réfléchissez bien, c'était en 2008. C'était une période assez intéressante, avec les subprimes et tout le reste, si bien que tout le marché s'est effondré. Il n'y avait pas de financement.

Anyway, so we again had a dark tunnel of no funding, just trying to barely stay alive. But we ran the company for four and a half years, grew to about 30 people and we got acquired by Gree, they’re a public company in Japan.

So it was an interesting thing where if you just don’t give up, good things happen. So we were one of those guys standing on Facebook, along with Zynga and whatnot.

Jeroen : Et d'où est partie cette entreprise, l'entreprise de jeux sociaux ?

John: Yeah, it was a social gaming company, we ran out of South Korea. We ran for four and a half years and then sold it. Three of the four co-founders have been working with me from my previous start-up, so we’ve been working together for, I don’t know, the ninth year now. It’s been pretty long.

Jeroen: So you started off in South Korea? But now you’re based in San Francisco, right?

John : Oui, un peu au sud de San Francisco, dans un endroit appelé San Mateo. Le temps y est un peu plus agréable. Alors oui, ça marche. Ça marche pour nous !

Jeroen : La température est un peu plus basse qu'en Corée du Sud ?

John : En fait, la Corée du Sud est plutôt froide à cette époque.

Jeroen : Pendant l'hiver ?

John: Yeah, during winter it’s very chilly. Then in summer, it’s very hot and humid, so the volatility is quite high. California is always sunny. California kind of thing.

Jeroen : L'ensemble de l'équipe fondatrice est-elle donc également coréenne ou non ? Et sont-ils à San Francisco ou à Séoul ?

John : Parce que nous avons commencé en Corée, notre équipe de cofondateurs était entièrement coréenne. Aujourd'hui, deux d'entre nous sont ici et deux autres en Corée. Nous avons donc un bon équilibre culturel et des personnes qui comprennent l'histoire et les antécédents de l'entreprise, et qui sont réparties de manière équilibrée dans la région.

And then we ended up building out a more senior management team over the course of our company. So we have a CFO, and we have a head of sales, who joined our company almost two quarters now, and they are here. So we’ve been trying to add diversity.

It’s weird because we started out in Korea, we are now adding American people into a part of our management team to add diversity. But yeah, that’s how our team has been evolving.

Jeroen: When you started off with your first start-up in Korea, was that a normal thing to do? Because currently the Korean government is putting a lot of money into start-ups if I’m not mistaken, and they have this big award thing going on and a big fund etc.

Mais en 2008, était-ce le cas ?

John: That’s very insightful that you are on top of what is happening in Korea!

Si vous regardez les médias coréens en 2007-2008, voire en 2009, aucun grand média n'a jamais utilisé le mot "startup". C'est dire à quel point les choses étaient encore à l'état brut. À l'époque, on parlait de sociétés de capital-risque. Il n'y avait pas beaucoup de ressources, pas beaucoup de personnes à qui demander. Bien sûr, certaines entreprises ont démarré très tôt, qu'il s'agisse de dot.com ou avant, mais la plupart d'entre elles étaient des entreprises de fabrication de matériel informatique. L'industrie manufacturière est l'une des plus importantes en Corée.

So there weren’t a lot of startups, to be honest, and when you have those kinds of meet-ups where successful folks show up, you meet about 20-30 companies. And if you go to the next meet-up, those same companies show up. So if you go through about three iterations, you literally know everyone in the industries. That’s how small the community was. Whereas if you’re a little venture funding, you might be able to raise a million dollars as Series A, and that would take three to six months, and not a lot of angel investment for sure unless you actually knew people who were somewhat rich.

There weren’t a lot of resources, but it got way better over 2009-10 and by 2011. You could see the word coming out and you could start to see angel investors grouping up. Then around the time when we exited, I think the environment had turned quite a bit.

Nous avons été l'un des tout premiers à être rachetés par un éditeur de logiciels japonais en Corée. Et avant cela, je crois qu'il y a eu une autre entreprise qui a été rachetée par un éditeur de logiciels étranger, c'était une acquisition faite par Google. Même pour les fusions et acquisitions, il n'y avait personne à qui demander.

What’s going to happen, how to prepare, how to negotiate? All those things, resources were pretty hard to come by.

Jeroen: So how did you get into this? How did you think, “Nobody’s doing this here in Korea, but I’m going to start a company and it’s going to end up well”?

John: That’d be a great definition of a crazy person. So I actually approached it from more of a some might call it a ‘first principle basis’. But, I try to look at what I want to do with my life. I’d been thinking about that question for three years before graduating from university.

J'ai travaillé dans une entreprise appelée NCSoft. J'ai eu la chance d'y vivre une expérience formidable, car je faisais partie d'une équipe commerciale. Mais avant cela, j'étais ingénieur en informatique. Je savais donc comment fabriquer des choses et d'autres choses de ce genre.

Lorsque je travaillais dans le domaine des affaires, j'ai vu beaucoup de choses qui étaient très inefficaces. Les gens copiaient/collaient des données dans des documents Word, puis les recopiaient/collaient dans des feuilles de calcul Excel. Quelqu'un a dû apprendre à utiliser des macros pour exécuter des statistiques et collaborer sur un seul ensemble de données, quelqu'un a dû se porter volontaire et télécharger toutes les feuilles de calcul Excel qu'il avait créées sur une période de 30 jours, pour une centaine de personnes, puis ouvrir chacune d'entre elles, copier/coller et ainsi de suite.

So, it was very inefficient. But if you have at least a minimal engineering background you can immediately build an online forum, or an online software tool that you can have people just punch-in the numbers and the stats will always be running in real time, right? It’s not rocket science!

Alors que je travaillais sur l'aspect commercial, j'ai constaté des inefficacités, et j'ai donc construit un outil interne, presque comme un projet secondaire au sein de l'entreprise. Cet outil est devenu l'outil officiel de l'entreprise. Ce fut une expérience vraiment enrichissante de voir comment une petite technologie peut créer un tel effet de levier pour les gens de tous les jours.

So, that got me pretty inspired, and I thought like, “Wow! I want to do this for the rest of my life.” Just to be able to acknowledge what sort of makes people’s lives easier, and get feedback on it, because the feedback I think is the most important part – when people say, “John, this is great,” or “this is so easy to use, can you fix this?”, or “can we add this to that?”

And just that process alone was so rewarding. So I’m like “I just want to do this for the rest of my life.” So I went back to school, finished my studies and then as soon as I graduated I kept thinking about how do I do this forever?

J'ai essayé de faire de la rétro-ingénierie et il y avait plusieurs possibilités, n'est-ce pas ? Vous pouvez commencer tout de suite, ce qui était la dernière option, ou vous pouvez vous adresser à une société de conseil. À l'époque, je pensais que c'était la chose rationnelle à faire, mais maintenant que j'y réfléchis, ce n'est peut-être pas la meilleure voie. Passer par une société de conseil, puis faire un MBA, puis créer une entreprise, ou travailler dans une autre société de technologie, puis aller étudier aux États-Unis, et faire des choses comme ça.

So I drew out a decision tree, ordered a type of path, waited and what I found to be interesting was, I also put in burn-rate and the risk of losing whatever I had, as an important input. If you do a simple maths, the lowest risk of running a tech company is when you start right away. When you’re not married, you don’t have kids, you have a very low burn. You can just go by with soya mince and raw mince.

Sort of like, starting right now is the lowest risk thing I can do, because if I go through all the consulting and MBA and things like that, I’d be married, have two kids, this is how my burn-rate would go up, there’s a social reputation now I’ve to keep up with, my parents would be disappointed. There are so many things that I had to think about, whereas if I start right now, I lose almost nothing – maybe a couple of years. But if something works, then you know. You learn how to ride a bike, sort of.

Long story short, I think it’s the lowest risk thing that I could do at the moment.

Jeroen : Et vous avez calculé tout cela à l'aide de l'arbre de décision, d'une feuille Excel, etc.

John: Yeah, it was actually a pretty long thought process. I came back to school, I finished my studies over the course of two and half years, graduated. So while over the course of two and a half years, I wrote a lot of notes so that I didn’t regret my decisions, and part of that process was that decision tree. So I think over the course of a year I was thinking about what to do with my life, and yeah, that was sort of was the result.

Jeroen : Y a-t-il quelqu'un qui vous a particulièrement inspiré dans ce processus ?

John: A few, obviously the founder of the company that I worked for briefly. But also there’s a pretty well known intriguing billionaire, a gaming mogul named Jay. And then Masayoshi San of SoftBank. I don’t think he was statically famous, but I read a biography of him and that really was inspiring. Richard Branson was also pretty cool. But I guess Masayoshi Son was a little bit more of a lion. Sort of like a figure I really found to be very inspiring, but now he’s at a much larger scale now. So I’m like, “Oh, how will I ever catch up with that guy.”

Jeroen: What is it that you like most about growing a startup? You mentioned a few things like building software, solving people’s problems, getting their feedback and improving it.

John: I guess a couple of things. One is, the opportunity to grow as a person is just so rewarding. You get to meet so many incredible people, be able to work with them, learn from them directly. So I guess just being able to connect with a lot of very, very smart people really quickly, has been a very rewarding thing. Sometimes, helping them join our company, that was so much fun. And very rewarding. I’m very grateful for that.

But I guess, when you think about, Daniel Pink, intrinsic motivation framework, there are three things: purpose, autonomy and mastery. Literally founding and running a start-up has the highest alignment in all of those three factors. Like purpose, of course, you’re starting this because you are passionate about it, you have a meaning for it. Of course, you don’t want to start a company because you read something cool about those industry and tech giants. Those companies tend to fail miserably, not always, but mostly. So finding a purpose, your inner calling, is very rewarding.

Then two is the mastery piece, where literally you’ve just started a company, you have to learn so many things and you have to be somewhat good at it, that itself opens up a great chance of mastering the last piece: autonomy.

Again, we are running a small company. You don’t have to deal with a lot of processes, learning about the systems of the company, and whatever that thing is. You have a lot of autonomy, especially in the beginning stage when you can literally steer the ship, too quickly sometimes. So you get all of these three dimensions fully checked, and then there you have it: you have this intrinsic motivation.

Jeroen : Et en tant que fondateur d'une startup, comment cela a-t-il changé pour vous entre le début du mois de décembre et aujourd'hui ?

John: Wow. I learned so much, I think I’m constantly changing. I have to change, so much. But I guess one way to phrase it, our CFO said a term like, “Live the dream,” and I do feel like I am living the dream. Of course, I’m not saying that every day is an easy-peasy kind of walk in the park, but back in 2007 in May, I was in Korea, out of this small studio with a friend and just pushing out code, and we were always searching articles from Silicon Valley. You think of like a Y Combinator and I’m like, “Oh my god, that’s so cool! One day I really want to be there,” but then it was like, Y Combinator was this star that was far, far away, raising money from Silicon Valley so-called Sand Hill Road investors. Even meeting them was a dream for me, building a tech company that had global users with great logos, whether it be Reddit or just really big companies with a lot of users.

Ce sont des choses très rêveuses auxquelles nous avons pensé, en Corée, lorsque nous n'avions pas d'argent. Maintenant que j'y pense, je fais partie de ce processus. Le voyage. Je suis ici, je travaille avec des gens fabuleux, je parle littéralement avec des ambassadeurs de la Silicon Valley tous les jours. Pas tous les jours, mais peut-être une fois par semaine. Et je parle à tous ces clients extraordinaires, et à des dizaines de millions d'utilisateurs chaque mois.

It is a slog. There are so many problems to solve but, if you take a 10,000 feet view, a bird’s eye view, it’s like, “Wow! I am sort of living that dream.” It is not as glamorous as I thought, but I don’t care about glamour, so it’s okay.

So it’s been fun. A lot of that has inspired me and changed me in hopefully good ways, I guess.

Jeroen : Que faites-vous personnellement aujourd'hui ? A quoi ressemble votre journée, ou quelles sont les choses qui vous occupent ?

John : Oh wow ! J'envisage donc les affaires sous quatre angles différents. C'est ce que j'appelle le cadre des 2 PM : les personnes, le produit, le marché et l'argent. En tant que PDG, vous devez constamment jongler avec ces quatre éléments. Marché/clients : vous essayez de vendre, mais aussi de parler aux clients, de comprendre le marché, de trouver une vision et les problèmes à résoudre. Ensuite, il faut cristalliser le tout dans un produit, qui est une solution à ce problème ou à cette vision. Pour ce faire, il faut embaucher les bonnes personnes, et pour embaucher ces personnes, il faut avoir le bon modèle d'entreprise ou une collecte de fonds, des choses comme ça.

Once you solve a certain problem, then the next problem comes in. It cuts costs and sort of like a circle of life where one problem comes right after, or sometimes in parallel with the first. So these days, I’ve been trying to focus more on obviously, the go-to-market side of things. Talking to bigger customers.

Hiring is one of the highest valued activity any leader can do, or any manager can do. So I do spend more time hiring, meeting customers, and just talking to our product/engineering executives team about what is sort of like a more start for our product, and what are some of the high-level product ideas and items that we want to put in the roadmap that’s maybe not in the immediate items that we’ll issue next week. Or something that we want to think through to 2019 and what are some of the items that we want to deliver by when to open new markets and position our company a little bit differently.

So it’s things like that.

Jeroen: You’re talking about ambitions now and future plans, where do you see SendBird is going in the long-term?

John: So we actually have a mission statement on our website that says, “We’re digitizing the human interactions for businesses,” because when we think about “chat” many people think about it as just a feature where you send a text on the screen.

Mais si l'on revient quelques années en arrière et que l'on pense à la première fois que nous avons eu un modem commuté, l'un des premiers cas d'utilisation a été la mise en place de salons de discussion en ligne. Après cela, il y a eu ICQ, IRC, chaque type de technologie en progression, les gens ont demandé de meilleurs outils de communication et une meilleure technologie. Et je pense que le chat est l'une de ces choses qui existent parce que c'est probablement l'un des moyens les plus efficaces de rester en contact et d'interagir avec les gens.

So that’s why we have a messaging app category. It is the most widely used app category in the world. So we think that a lot of human interactions being digitized will continue as long as our population grows and more and more people get the internet.

If you take a step further, when you want to chat with your significant other or someone you’re dating, or your family, sometimes you get into this argument, where you’re like, “Hold on, let’s jump on a call, or let’s meet up for a coffee,” and that gets the result. That means there’s still something that’s missing from that interaction. Whether it be emojis, or videos, or voice, there’s got to be another layer to augment some of the things that are I guess you could call them, “shortcomings” on chat.

So we’re thinking of different ways, how do we make this experience, even more, richer, so that one day we can fully say, “Oh, let’s just chat”, and then you can sort of have a real, genuine human-to-human interaction. And then after that will come a phase where things are only possible on digital media, whether sending a 3D photo that you can look around in AR or VR, or things like that. So how do we make this experience even better, so that we can actually help that digital interaction become the defacto standard of human communication?

That’s sort of our long-term thing. And to get there we have a lot of, part of the roadmap features, a lot of different things to learn from customers, and we just need a lot of people to build up this vision.

So yeah, that’s sort of our, I guess longer-term goal. But in terms of actual traction, we’ve been growing, like tripling every year for the past couple years or so. We’re trying to see how far into the future can we continue with this rate of growth, and that part is also pretty exciting. Because growth is not just dollar amounts, but how many people are chatting through our platform, how many messages are being sent through our platform. Things like that.

It’s exciting.

Jeroen: So you’re kind of seeing the impact of your platform?

John: Yeah. And especially when you meet customers in real life too. You’re so inspired it’s like, “Oh we thought you were just a million MAU, with ten million messages.” Now if you look at it, you’re like, “Oh you’re a real company, these are your vendors or customers or service providers” – things like that. You see them in action, and we are so inspired because you are actually making their lives easier.

Jeroen: And is everything chat-centric, to make chat better basically? Or do you also see SendBird going into other types of communication? Or will everything remain around chat, even if it’s a video call, it just comes from chat?

Comment cela fonctionne-t-il ?

John : Pour l'instant, nous redoublons d'efforts en matière de chat, car nous voyons encore beaucoup d'opportunités inexploitées et beaucoup de clients qui devraient nous utiliser et qui ne le font pas. Nous voulons vraiment les aider à migrer vers notre plateforme.

We think we have probably one or two good years of just fully focusing on that, but getting back to our mission, we think there are other ways to communicate in real time that can be a great augmenting factor to our chat experience. So we’re also doing some research on those areas, that could be voice, that could be video.

But right now, to your question, it’s mostly centred around chat.

Jeroen : Un peu plus sur le travail et la vie privée. À quoi ressemble votre journée ? J'imagine que vous travaillez avec des Coréens, alors comment adaptez-vous votre journée en termes d'horaires ?

John: I hope someone has a silver bullet for this because we have a situation in our time differences – between US and Korea. It’s good and bad. It’s good because you at least get a couple of hours to overlap, but bad because you don’t have the entire overlap if you do really want to collaborate with Korea more sensibly. You got to work double shifts, meaning, let’s say you come into the office around 9 or 10, work till whatever, 5 or 6, or even 7 and then you start getting these Slack and email notifications when you’re like 4 or 5 PM here. Then if you really want to chat or communicate with the Korean office a lot, then you’ve got to work until 10 PM or midnight, so it is a slog.

It’s worth it though because you are communicating more. But it’s not so worth it if you’re starting to hurt your relationship with people around you. So you’ve got to find the right balance, and the right cadence and things like that. So far, we haven’t found like a super silver bullet, so we’re just trying to work hard so that we can always be in sync.

Jeroen : Vos journées de travail durent-elles jusqu'à 22 heures ?

John: I hope people won’t freak out, but on an average I go to sleep around 2 AM. This is a pretty long working hour situation for the past about 3 years. But these days I’ve been trying to cap myself to work only, or to go to sleep at least before midnight. It’s been hard. It’s not like they’re constantly pinging me late in the evening, they are also aware that the US has to sleep. But sometimes you see them chatting with Slack, or you’re seeing an email that comes in and you’re like, “Oh, I can help Bob with that,” or like, “Oh yes, I have some thoughts on that,” and you jump in, and you’re like, “Oh right, here we go again. My brain is fully awoken, so let’s jump on another call.”

So that’s how it works and I have been very blessed, that I don’t almost ever get stressed from work, I really enjoy it. So that part’s not really hard for me. You cannot expect everyone in the company to work that way, and that’s not how to run a company. So I’ve been trying to get people to have some more harmony to life.

Jeroen: Now that I think, isn’t there a culture clash right there? Because if I’m not mistaken, in Korea you work quite late, and you do long working hours. And then in the US, it’s a bit more moderate.

John: Wow. Okay. Again, you are on top of Korean culture. They’re not to the extreme – I don’t want to stereotype but when you read about these things online from Michael Morris or things like that, people say, “Hey China work 9-9-6.” Well Korea, we’re not like 9-9-6, we’re maybe closer to 9-8-5, or 9-9-5, sometimes 9-10-5. A little bit better.

But yes, that’s your point, we do in general work longer hours. But I think it is a different culture. Here it’s not necessarily when people go home they shut off and they don’t work. They have dinner with their family, and they log back in and they work if they need to. So I guess it’s more flexible and fluid, and the culture is different.

Also, Korea and Japan, maybe Germany, is very sensitive around time, even with team things – not necessarily meetings, say client meetings and stuff like that. Showing up to office exactly on time, for instance, is more cherished in those cultures. Whereas here in Silicon Valley, where there’s less focus on manufacturing or things like that, the strictness around time is a little bit different. Of course, with customer meetings, we all are very punctual.

So those things do create a discrepancy in culture, but ultimately I think I read somewhere, was what HSBC said, “World’s local bank, you have to think globally, but act locally.” We are also trying to adopt policies and systems that cater to local culture and evolve towards that direction. So we are working on those kinds of things.

C'était une très longue réponse.

Jeroen : Y a-t-il quelque chose que vous faites en plus de travailler régulièrement ?

John: A couple of things I guess. I like reading books, but I guess that’s almost a cliché. I do like cars quite a bit because I don’t think I’ve fully matured internally. I like cars and big noises and things like that. I do enjoy driving on the mountain roads, and things like that when I sort of feel like, “Oh, this is a lot of stress,” and I go on a quick ride to the mountains and then come back and I’m like, “Okay, this is great.” So I do that.

Jeroen : Quel type de voiture conduisez-vous à la montagne ?

John: After selling my first company I went through a lot of different cars. Terrible ways to invest. Never buy a lot of highly depreciating assets – it’s not even assets, it’s just things. But yeah, I generally small cars that make noise.

It’s not good for the environment so I know I have to transition to the electrics soon. But I know it’s coming, sort of old school in that way.

Jeroen: What’s your favourite car right now?

John: Oh boy! There are a few. But I do like the overall German engineering. Kind of precision with perfection, and obsession over quality. So brands like, whether it be Mercedes, or Porsche is a brand I like. BMW’s M2 series are really nice too. Obviously being frugal, if you want to go up, Ferraris are obviously really nice. But if I had to pick my poison, Porsche would be favorite.

Jeroen : Quelle est cette Porsche ?

John: 911, GT3 or GTS. I drive a GTS, it’s a nice choice. But it doesn’t have a backseat, so it’s not really good for a family. Well one can argue, is GTS even remotely good for a family? But I do think GTS is a family car, so.

Jeroen: You also briefly mentioned you like to read books, what’s the latest good book you’ve read? And why did you choose to read it?

John: Oh wow, okay. Recently I’ve been reading Stephen Hawking’s latest book, I think it was ‘Brief Answers on Big Questions’ that has been pretty fun to read. Just getting a refresh on black holes, on the latest in the quantum mechanics, just frameworks around how to look at life, and things like that. That has been fruitful.

Also, I like Gil’s ‘High Growth Handbook’ that’s been pretty nice, I’m about halfway through it. I try to read through three books in parallel. Just to not to bore myself to death.

Je lis simplement beaucoup de livres scientifiques, qu'il s'agisse de neurosciences, d'évolution, de sciences cognitives, de psychologie ou de sciences de la complexité. Ces domaines ont tendance à m'intéresser. Puis l'économie comportementale. J'essaie simplement de trouver des modèles et des règles dans la vie dont je peux tirer des enseignements, que je peux appliquer aux affaires, aux relations humaines ou à d'autres choses de ce genre.

Jeroen : J'aime beaucoup la réflexion sur le premier principe, le fait de le trouver dans les livres et de l'appliquer.

John: Yeah. This is interesting because I’d never really heard about the first principle thinking until recently. But I guess anything you get the urge, you sort of tend to do that because you don’t want to create code versus things that are overly complex, that solves the problem in a very efficient way. So you always have to make it into a simpler and more elegant form.

Cela vous fait réfléchir, je suppose que c'est ce qu'on appelle le premier principe de réflexion.

Jeroen : Y a-t-il une chose que vous auriez aimé savoir lorsque vous avez commencé ?

John : Oh là là ! Tout ce que je sais aujourd'hui.

Jeroen : Oui, évidemment.

John: Things like people management is something that you just have to learn. I mean some people are better with people and they’re so even when they are young. But I was a pretty antisocial kid, who only played a ton of games. I was a professional gamer in Korea when I was young. I was a very geeky guy. Not good with people at all. Just totally did not understand how people think, operated or got motivated. So I learned it the hard way over the course of the past decade, on how to work with people. That has been an interesting journey. So if I had known that earlier, it would have made everyone’s life easier.

And things like expectation management – how to communicate with not just the people who work with you, but your investors, your family members. Just how to set the right set of expectations, and how to provide the right set of feedbacks. Those have been things that I really just have to learn by just making a ton of mistakes.

J'aurais donc vraiment aimé connaître ces choses plus tôt. Mais il y a d'autres choses que l'on peut apprendre en cours de route.

Jeroen: Last question. What’s the best piece of advice you ever got?

John : Le meilleur conseil. Oh, wow ! D'accord. Il y a deux mantras qui me guident : il n'y a pas de bonnes ou de mauvaises décisions. Vous devez prendre les bonnes décisions, bien sûr en vous basant sur le fait que vous devez être moralement et légalement correct, mais d'un point de vue commercial, vous voulez prendre la décision avec 30% d'informations, pas quand vous avez 70% d'informations.

A quick decision is always better than a slow and right decision, so try to make up your mind faster. That’s been of great advice.

The other thing would be: this too shall pass. As I assess as a start-up founder, you go through this emotional roller-coaster. I had a severe one in my first company. And when you raise your first million dollars you’re like, “Yeah! I’m king of the world. I can go and conquer the world now!” And you just quickly realize a million dollars is money that you can probably spend really quickly, just by hiring a couple folks.

So this too shall pass, as in when you have great moments, make sure to plan for the future, don’t get overly excited. But also when there are really dark tunnels, when you go through dark tunnels you’re like, “Okay,” but as long as you get through. There’s almost always a way out. So just keep persevering, don’t give up.

Things like that, have been pretty good advice. But overall, the framework I use is something called “MicroMentor” which is, everyone around you has at least one superpower that you want to learn from. So just focus on that and don’t try to look at the entire person, because no one is perfect. But if you just look at that one single dimension of that person, that person has that superpower, and you constantly could try to create a collection of superpowers around you, to learn from. Literally, 30 people around you can be like 30 micro mentors.

In that sense, I’m then getting advice literally every single day.

Jeroen: That’s some great advice. Well, thank you again, John, for being on Founder Coffee.

John : Oui, c'était amusant. Merci pour ces questions intéressantes.

Jeroen : Merci.