6 Start-up Lessons you can learn from “Start-up” Korean Drama

Despite the slow pace, Korean love story and interlaced 3 party relationship(typical korean love story). Actually we can learn some good lesson from this drama :

1) Not everyone can be CEO.

If you are passionate about coding and get excited by solving the problem. You should be the CTO. CEO is someone can tell the story, visionary, pitch investor, drive the company success and do whatever it take to push the company success even begging for the talents to join your team.

2) Startup Team mix:

Before Samsan Tech, the trio founder and cofounder all is from technical background. They can create the solution and passionate in coding but non of them have the business model mindset. When they try to pitch the investor, always telling the techinical things in A.I. and machine learning. They failed to get any investor except his own father that start to disbelief his empty promise. After the college dropout girl Seo Dal-mi join the team, They started to unlocked their technical capability they have to create product that solving the user problem.

3) User Vs Customer:

User is the one who use the product. Customer is the one pay the product. Normaly user= customer. Internet startup you have to rethink who is the real customer, You user Tiktok. you are user. but company who pay to tiktok for ads is the customer. Mr Han couch Seo Dal Mi in many business model user not neccessary is customer. And guide her to sell this solution to the big corporate as CSR program. Yes , many listed company have CSR budget. When you are doing something about social entrepreneur you should know who is your real customer

4) Mercenaries Mindset Vs Missionary Mindsets

The Head of Sandbox after seeing Won In-jae startup started to close a big contract and earn money in early stage , She said “I thought she will doing something bigger beside earning money “

Many company started with hearn money at first priority. They keep on chasing an project to another project that can earn money eventually became a outsourcing company. Some founder started with a mission, and they keep spreading the message of their mission and build product to actuallize their mission.

5) Dont drink the salt water

During the pitching session to VC, The VC ask for the monetization plan. And the guy is runing the startup with no income and cash crunch.SH Venture head asking about the business model how to made the platform as paid version to earn more money. The father insist he wont charge the user so that can grow more user and give user best experience. “You are drifting in the vast ocean and you either die because of hungry or thirst. You are so thirsty would you drink the salt water ? “No matter how thirsty you are, you should never drink the salt water. you should hold until the rains coming “ Yes. paradoxically , the result of drinking salt water is dehydration. I see many founder raising fund by promising the investor by 20% interest. There are so common in Vietnam people raising fund like this, especially those so call crowd funding scheme. To me those money is salt water. once you drink it ,it will dehydrate your body.( “dehydrate” your business because you have to pay high interest cost “ Startup is not something you can predict the revenue like SME, startup have to go throught the process of J curve. your company have to sacrify the profit in order to push the hyper growth.

6) Follow your dream !

Your dream ! not your father dream. This scene, when the baseball star signing a ball to the little boy, asking what is your dream. The parents whisper on his ear. I want to get the Nobel Price. The kids parrot what his parents said. The Baseball star put the ball in the boy hands and emphasize to him. Follow your dream..”Your” dream!. Many of us having the dream that possibly is because of what the parents , friend and peers or the society told you what you should to so that you can be successful. You are the only one know what is your dream. A good mentor do not try to push their thought to his student, but draw out the best of you from within.

Netflix effect : After the Start-up Korean Drama, I think many AI startup will pop up. People will talk about FFF, Dilution and Valuation. Raising fund, GP/LP partner This drama provide many explaination for those jargon use by the VC industry and explaining it in the side note. This is good education for general public to know more about angel investing , vc and startup .

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Post from Marcus Leng in Launch