Most Koreans are addicted to the web, I wondered; Seoul must be a breeding place for new web ventures? I approached Chang W. Kim, to get an idea of what is going on. Chang is CEO of the biggest blog portal (80%) in Korea. He explains his views on European projects, the Seoul web-scene and funding in his region.
Chang: “I think it can be said that the startup industry in Korea is still relatively small, although there is a web climate in Seoul, entrepreneurs meet at barcamp meetings, we have something similar to lunch 2.0 and there are conferences. However, from the investors side, there are not enough good startups in this region.”
Chang has written before about why so little Korean companies get ‘Techcrunched‘. He thinks that it’s related to the lack of efforts to bring the Asian Web 2.0 innovations to the attention of the rest of the world. “Less effort to get these companies known, less attention to Asian Web 2.0 industry, less venture money flowing in, less number of startups, and so on.”
I asked Chang if he would see Korean/European web 2.0 projects work together in the future.“Frankly, when Koreans think about web 2.0, they usually think about Silicon Valley, not much about Europe. But if a company is good, I don’t think there is particularly a reason why Korean companies should NOT work with Europeans. When I was at Samsung, I worked with lots of European companies.”
Chang believes that online games are the best money making business models in Korea.