AIMED venture studio overview

In my teens, I came across the fact that one person dies of hunger every six seconds, and that led me to care deeply about the problem of famine. I was lucky enough to be born in Korea, but I could not shake the thought that if I had been born into that environment, my life might have disappeared regardless of effort or will. The fact that a relatively small amount of money could save a dying life felt even more shocking.

I began to dream of solving that problem. I could become a doctor and provide medical relief, a politician and work on redistribution, or an entrepreneur and earn the kind of money needed to tackle it at scale. In the end, I chose the path of the entrepreneur. I entered Seoul National University to study chemical and biological engineering, took a leave after one semester, later dropped out, and founded AIMED, then called Gameberry, at the age of twenty.

I donated, and even created and ran volunteer organizations myself, but I believed that if the problem could be solved simply with money, Bill Gates would have solved it already. What was needed was innovation that went beyond donation. Just as businesses solve problems in their industries, I believed humanity's fundamental problems must also be challenged with outstanding capability, substantial capital, and creative methodology. So I set a target number, decided to grow the company with everything I had until I reached it, and then devote myself to work I truly believed was valuable. Because that was my reason for founding the company, I always found it difficult to answer when people asked for our vision.

I had loved games from a young age, and with no real social experience when I started a company at twenty, it was natural that I began with game development.

We started with mobile game development, but failed before we could even launch. As I moved through various jobs to survive, I kept thinking about the need for marketing I had felt during the launch process, and about the shift I believed the newly opened smartphone market of 2010 would create in global content distribution. That led me to start an overseas mobile marketing agency. Traditional online marketing agencies were already large at the time, but mobile marketing barely existed as a concept. We were almost the only team in Korea saying we would do global mobile marketing, demand concentrated around us, and from the very year we pivoted we began generating revenue and operating profit.

But after about a year, it no longer felt like we were creating real value. It felt as if we were temporarily providing expertise by relying on an information asymmetry that would soon disappear, and that over time the business would become closer to labor supply than value creation. At its core the business was sales. As a twenty-year-old with no network, in a market where online agencies would inevitably move into mobile, it was neither something I would be great at over the long term nor what I had wanted to do in the first place. I concluded that if I wanted to create bigger value, I needed to build my own products.

At the time, there was a strong assumption that startups had to raise VC money. But I was not persuaded by the model of burning cash to inflate valuation. I decided to see how far we could grow the company without external funding, which meant keeping the cash-generating agency business alive while building products in parallel. For seven years, I repeated the same life: earning money from agency work during the day, building products at night, launching roughly one product a year and failing. As that continued, agency revenue, which I had neglected, began to decline and the company's cash balance started heading toward zero.

That was when I finally realized: if I was going to build products, I should do it in advertising, the field where I had domain knowledge and practical experience. The ad-tech solution we launched in 2017 became the first product to achieve meaningful success. Within a year it reached KRW 10 billion in annual revenue with a 20% operating margin. Cumulatively, it produced KRW 37 billion in revenue and KRW 17 billion in operating profit, and that year I was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia.

At the same time, I felt that if we wanted to grow much larger, we needed stronger talent, and that from the perspective of top talent our company was seen not as a startup but as a small business. I believed the places they wanted to join were venture-backed startups that had raised large rounds from well-known VCs. So, for employer branding, I decided to take VC money for the first time and raised KRW 6 billion from major venture firms. But because we had raised when we did not actually need capital, I felt even more clearly that both our business and our company were a poor fit for the kind of model that grows through VC funding. In the end, after asking for understanding, I repaid the investment in full.

After operating for about another year, I analyzed our global competitors and realized that companies I had assumed would be far bigger than us were only a few times larger, or at most ten to twenty times larger. The market itself had a ceiling. Only then did I truly understand why VCs care so much about market size. After seven hard years, the project had finally begun to work, but I had a larger ambition, so I made a bold decision to pivot. In 2010 I had been right in the middle of the mobile paradigm shift, but I lacked the capability and experience to seize it. Still, I watched the companies that did seize it grow to a level latecomers could no longer challenge. Even while running a small agency and failing with product after product every year, I had kept one conviction deep inside: paradigm shifts come about once every ten years, and next time I would be ready.

If I was going to pivot, I wanted to do it in an industry undergoing that kind of shift. Among the candidates I considered - AI, IoT, VR, and blockchain - I chose blockchain. At first I tried building Web3 products directly, but I concluded that the infrastructure for application businesses was not ready yet. Unless we were going to run an exchange or a mainnet, investing felt like the only real option. After the 2017 bull market, 2018 became an extreme bear market. Web3 startup valuations collapsed and almost no one was investing. I believed that if you want exceptional outcomes, you have to act when everyone else turns away. So rather than trade, I decided to begin venture investing with a longer time horizon. Because no one was investing, even small amounts of capital were enough to enter the market as a venture investor.

My path as an investor began almost unintentionally. I bet my life on personal capital. An investment stake that began in the tens of millions of won turned into returns worth hundreds of times that amount at the peak just two years later. If the first seven years had been the life of an entrepreneur, the next seven were almost entirely the life of an investor. I invested a cumulative KRW 280 billion of personal capital into roughly eighty companies in Korea and abroad. One small startup in Argentina that I backed early became the leading unicorn of the metaverse theme; I continued supporting every round and invested KRW 50 billion into it. A company that began with a valuation around KRW 10 billion became one of the defining companies in its category, at over KRW 1 trillion in value. I also invested in a small Australian game company that had been delisted, supported follow-on rounds aggressively, and watched it become one of the leading global Web3 companies at a valuation of around KRW 8 trillion. I was also the first, and at the time the only, investor backing a major Korean game company that went on to pioneer P2E, standing with it through its difficult beginning.

Because I was both a proprietary-capital investor and an entrepreneur, I was able to see potential in companies no one else was paying attention to. Acting according to the philosophy of Start Where Others Stop, making decisions when others would not, produced unusual results. Being a proprietary-capital investor also allowed me to try a number of unconventional and distinctive approaches. One example was building an investment alliance with major game companies across different countries. We gathered the top three game companies in each market, screened dozens of game and Web3 startups each month at Blocore, selected the single strongest company, and had the investment teams of ten major game companies join one video call at the same time to hear the pitch. There was no common fund; each company decided independently whether to invest. The participants included Krafton, Nexon, NCSOFT, and Netmarble in Korea; Sega, Konami, Bandai Namco, and SNK in Japan; Lilith Games in China; and 2K, part of Take-Two, in the United States.

The goal was not immediate financial gain. It was to build a reputation as a global force in game investing by repeatedly co-investing with the leading game companies in each country. I also believed the strategic synergy created when a major game company came in as a shareholder would improve investment outcomes. Managing funds as an investment firm was also unusual. True Global Ventures, the Singapore-based venture capital firm I co-founded in 2018, began with the goal of building a genuinely global fund from day one. It was run by serial entrepreneurs and investors of different nationalities, spread across countries and operating remotely. The initial plan was to raise private capital from global family offices rather than public institutions, but at first we failed. In the end, the founders pooled their own money to get it started.

That fund produced record-level results, and on the back of that track record we were able to raise a follow-on fund. The ten-year fund we launched in 2021 distributed substantial returns back to LPs within just two years, putting it in the top 3% globally among venture funds by both TVPI and DPI. The fund manages roughly KRW 380 billion, and more than 40% of the capital was committed directly by the co-founders, an unconventional structure meant to signal both responsibility and conviction. It is one of the highest GP-commitment venture funds in the world. I succeeded both as an individual investor and as a fund manager.

But I did not enjoy the work. The essence of succeeding in fund management was not investing well, but fundraising well, and I had neither the passion nor the aptitude for that. I felt clearly that this was not a field in which I could become the best in the world. The pure work of finding startups, investing in them, and helping them was enjoyable and suited me. Yet the pleasure of being right in my investment judgment, or of making a great deal of money, never satisfied me as much as the envy and longing I felt when I wished AIMED, which I was still running in parallel, could grow like the companies I had backed. In the end, what I wanted was not success as an investor, but success as an entrepreneur. I wanted products and services I had built to be used by many people. That was what I truly longed for. This was what pushed me toward the venture studio model, but it also became the starting point of an overly hasty expansion.

After my investment success gave me significant capital, I converted the existing ad-tech company into a venture studio because I wanted to grow AIMED into something much bigger. I injected personal capital into the company, expanded the organization, and added new business units.

Outstanding people from Google, Naver, Kakao, Nexon, Krafton, Coupang, EA, and other leading companies joined in large numbers, and in a short time we scaled to an organization of more than two hundred people. A company that had once been profitable turned into one burning roughly KRW 2 billion a month. Expansion into industries where we had no expertise, star-level C-suite hires made without enough thought about role design. Looking back, the expansion came not from a clear vision of the venture studio model or deep reflection on industry and business, but from simple ambition to make the numbers bigger. Along the way, the company lost many of the strengths that had once made it special and began to lose direction.

When capital was abundant, our thinking did not reach the essence. We focused more on what to do and what numbers to hit than on why. It is not that there were no results at all. Some of the businesses raised money from global investors such as Supercell, Pantera Capital, and Griffin Gaming, and some generated hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. But instead of making qualitative decisions grounded in meaning and vision, we chased larger quantitative outcomes.

Only after liquidity problems emerged did we begin asking fundamental questions. How did our company end up like this? Why am I doing this work? During this period, multiple business units that had absorbed billions of won of our own capital had to be shut down. It was painful trial and error, but it led to equally deep realization. The time that followed was a process of putting down my ego, returning to the beginning, and starting again not as an investor but as an entrepreneur. It was a period in which I rediscovered my genuine commitment to building a great company without giving up, and in which I thought deeply about why I do business, what kind of person I am, and what kind of leader I need to become.

That led me to more fundamental questions. Is the parent company nothing more than a functional organization? What contribution can it truly make? Is the governance sustainable? Is the structure itself fighting against human nature, both in fundraising terms and in terms of the incentives of subsidiary CEOs? Is there a reason venture studios, unlike VC firms or accelerators, have never truly industrialized, because they are that difficult, or structurally close to impossible? What would actually have to be different for the venture studio model to work, and could we be different?

And then the most fundamental question of all: beyond launching multiple businesses simply to produce outcomes, did we have our own reason for existence and our own vision for the venture studio business itself?

After sixteen years, I finally found the vision. It had been a long struggle. Are we an investment company, a game company, an advertising company? What kind of company are we, really, when we operate so many businesses? It felt like we should have a vision, but what was ours? Could a target aimed simply at producing larger numbers really count as a vision?

Looking back, there were things I genuinely enjoyed and loved even while I was chasing results and scale. There was a reason I never gave up on this company despite repeated severe crises. Only after revisiting what AIMED truly meant to me did I understand it. It had always been there, obscured by my greed for numbers, and now it had begun to come into view.

In retrospect, AIMED was never a company that fit the VC growth model. I had taken investment once and even returned it in full after deciding it did not fit. I had also spent more than seven years making venture investments myself, so I know the structure and limitations of VC better than most. There are clearly businesses in the world that VC cannot back, or can only back with great difficulty, yet are still immensely valuable. Businesses that must be grown at a different pace, in a different way. Businesses that must be judged by a different standard and supported through a different kind of endurance. Businesses that do not need capital merely to lift valuation, but a structure that can grow the vision, the organization, and the management team - one that invests not only in the outcome but in the growth process itself.

The businesses AIMED is building today are exactly that kind of business. Whether it is investing more than KRW 10 billion of our own capital into SLG R&D in a genre no one in Korea had dared to challenge, or enduring losses while building teams to break the vicious cycle of the advertising agency business, these are only possible because AIMED exists. The fact that VC cannot invest in these businesses does not mean they cannot succeed. It means they are the kind of businesses that can only come into being through a vision, faith, and conviction that go beyond reason and logic, and that need support until they bloom. And I believe the results will be remarkable in ways that are not visible in businesses that follow the standard investment track built on ordinary rationality alone, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Building, nurturing, and proving businesses that would struggle to bloom without us: that is what AIMED does. I still hope for success, of course. But I have found something even more important to me, something I want to pursue. Even if I fail, I will not regret it, because the pursuit itself already carries more than enough meaning.