I’m only going to live once. I’m going to take the biggest risks and pursue my passion.
Me:
- CEO (Chief Hustler) and Founder of Redeemr
- On leave from Babson College (Double concentration of Tech Entrepreneurship and Design & Entrepreneurial Studies)
- Former-VC at Romulus Capital
- 20 years old. Celebrating my birthdays on April 12th, circa 1991.
Longer story…
Where I Started
I dove into my first trade and commerce when I was 9 years old. Having just immigrated from my birthplace of Seoul, South Korea, I needed to connect with my peers in a way that would bridge my language barrier of not being able to speak or understand English. I quickly grew an obsession over popular trading card games as I drew up my favorite characters and sold them to my peers in my summer day care center for rare (and more powerful) trading cards. By the end of that summer, I learned how to speak English, but more importantly, I had a trading card set that would make a 40-year old virgin jealous.
First Failure and Success…
After spending all of the $300 grant from my parents on trying to create my own clothing line at the age of 15 and only selling a handful of t-shirts, I was devastated. It was one of the worst feelings I have had in my entire life. During my senior year at Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado Hills, CA, I was fortunate enough to win some scholarships (including NFIB and The McKelvey Foundation’s National Young Entrepreneur award) with two local scholarships who wrote me a check in the amount of $1,500 to my name. Instead of putting that towards my upcoming expensive tuition at Babson, I decided to start my first major startup called nüFlw Entertainment that held near-monthly high school only night club events for the Greater Sacramento Area. In the 8 months of operation and 5 events before I dropped it due to moving to the East coast for college, I quickly turned the $1,500 into $50,000 (it made my parents pretty happy). It was with nüFlw that I got my first crack at managing employees and staff as I hired around 30 staff members including managers, security, DJs, and promoters. nüFlw was the talk of the town and the demand kept growing with every event. Sacramento doesn’t have much entertainment for high school students on the weekends and it made me happy that what I had started, at least, alleviated some of that problem.
However, I wanted to do something bigger with my life and not provide a place for underaged students to do all kinds of illicit things that I won’t state here. (Pro tip: Don’t start high school night clubs. Ever.)
Trying to Make a Difference in the World…
In my second semester of my freshman year at Babson, I got my first exposure in corporate entry-level and internship recruiting as my upper-classmen friends expressed their stress and frustrations about how “broken” the whole process was. As a naïve 18 year old, I laced up my gloves and tried to attack the problem head-on. Just like many first time entrepreneurs, I didn’t talk to anyone about it because I thought they would “steal” my idea (like I said, I was naïve). Needless to say, I failed pretty hard. No corporate recruiter wants to talk to a freshman and college counselors were just as quizzical about meeting with a 18 year old trying to sell them on the Next Big Thing. 6 months of my life was “gone”, but I was thankful I got my first splash in the tech startup scene as I was able to make friends with some amazing people in the Boston tech startup scene (Thank you – you know who you are – for mentoring me, a young no-name, through this process).
Then, I spent the entire summer reading blogs written by successful tech entrepreneurs and VCs like Chris Dixon, Fred Wilson, Paul Graham, Dave McClure and many others where I was able to learn about things from legal aspects of a tech startup all the way to how to pitch to investors. In the Fall of 2010 (my sophomore year), I made more friends (entrepreneurs and investors) in the startup scene by asking for intros and going out to events and parties such as DartBoston’s Family Dinners (thanks, Victoria!) and Bill Warner‘s unConference. It felt great to be “in” the scene out in Boston with people who I felt free to ask questions and get advice from. From these personal connections and friendships, I even got the opportunity to work from the “other side of the table” by working as an Associate VC at a micro-VC firm in Cambridge, MA.
However, having a set of parents running their own small businesses (my dad running his dentistry and my mom running a florist studio), I wanted to apply new technologies and the now-tech driven consumer culture to help out SMBs like theirs. Soon after, a friend of mine approached me with an idea to make it easier for consumers to keep a track of their paper loyalty cards (identical in concept with Punchd and RewardMe – but they weren’t “around” then). Because he didn’t have time to do it himself, he wanted me to pursue it. Fast forward a few months of being a full-time student, collegiate athlete, learning Ruby on Rails, researching the SMB space and changing the entire model around, Redeemr was born in February 2011. I was very fortunate to have had a few friends who believed in the idea, but more importantly, in my abilities to execute on it so much that they invested a large amount into Redeemr (read: on why I left). A few months after, I fulfilled one of my goals of winning the Babson College Business Plan Competition and decided to take a leave of absence from school and recruited three of my friends to pursue Redeemr full-time with me. I left everything non-Redeemr related, including my VC role and obviously, school and decided to come to the tech mecca in Silicon Valley so I could also be closer to my family.
Now…
After the end of the my second semester in sophomore year, my teammates and I drove for 46 hours and 0 minutes straight from Boston, MA to San Francisco, CA where Redeemr is currently HQ’d. We are working in the intersection of local, loyalty, marketing, and hustle with Redeemr and it’s been going amazing so far. It’s a lot of hard work and late nights often working into the morning, but like I am confident in my team and in our hustle that we can solve this huge problem for SMBs.
So, that’s my life story from the perspective of an entrepreneur…
I know how lucky I was to have had people believe in me and giving me a chance even though I was just a naïve, bright-eyed kid (which, I think I still am) and because of this I love meeting with and helping new entrepreneurs or people who just want to dive into the startup life. Startup life isn’t glamorous as it seems if you happen to read TechCrunch all day, but for those who are committed in trying to change the world for the better, no matter how hard and arduous the journey really is, I encourage you to keep moving and breaking through barriers. Looking forward to meeting you all.
“You can have everything you want in life, as long as you help enough people get what they want in theirs.” – Zig Ziglar
