AIMED venture studio overview covering games, Web3, martech, commerce, and casual games

As a teenager, I learned that one person dies of hunger roughly every six seconds, and I became deeply interested in the problem of famine. I had been fortunate enough to be born in Korea, but I could not treat the issue as someone else's problem. If I had been born into a different environment, my life too might have disappeared regardless of effort or will. What struck me even more was the fact that a relatively small amount of money could save a life that was otherwise dying.

I started dreaming about solving hunger. One path was becoming a doctor and doing medical volunteer work. Another was becoming a politician and addressing the distribution problem. Another was becoming an entrepreneur and earning enough money to have real leverage. I chose the entrepreneurial path. I entered the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University, took a leave after one semester, and later dropped out. At twenty, I founded AIMED, then called Gameberry.

I donated, and I even built and ran volunteer organizations myself. But I came to think that if the problem could be solved simply with money, Bill Gates would already have solved it. What was needed was not just giving money away, but innovation that actually solved the problem. Just as businesses solve the problems of their industries, I believed humanity's most fundamental problems required even greater capability, larger pools of capital, and more creative methods.

So I set a target number, decided to grow a company with everything I had until I reached it, and then to challenge the kinds of problems I believed were truly worth solving. Because my motivation for starting a company came from that place, I always found it difficult to answer when people asked what the company's vision was.

I had loved games since childhood, and when I tried to start a company at twenty with no social or professional experience, I naturally began with game development.

I started with mobile game development, but we failed before we even managed to launch.

In order to survive, I tried several kinds of work. During that process, I realized how badly marketing was needed for a game launch, and I also believed that the newly opened smartphone market of 2010 would create a paradigm shift in the global distribution of content. On that basis, I started an overseas mobile marketing agency business.

At the time, traditional online marketing agencies were already large, but mobile marketing was barely even a concept. We were almost the only company in Korea saying we would do global mobile marketing, and demand concentrated on us. In the very year we pivoted, we generated both revenue and operating profit.

But after about a year, it no longer felt like I was creating real value. It felt like a temporary specialty built on information asymmetry that would soon disappear, and then become something close to labor supply. At its core, the business was still sales. As a twenty-year-old without an established network, in a market where traditional online agencies were obviously going to move into mobile, it was neither what I ultimately wanted to do nor what I believed I could become great at in the long run.

I came to believe that if I wanted to create larger value, I had to build my own product.

At the time, the common view was that startups should obviously raise venture capital. But I never resonated with the model of growing valuation while running losses. Even if it took longer, I decided to try growing the company without investment. That meant running a cash-generating agency business in parallel with product development.

For seven years, I repeated the same pattern: make money through the agency business during the day, build products at night, launch almost one a year, and fail almost one a year. Meanwhile, the agency business we had neglected started losing revenue as well, and our cash balance approached the bottom.

Only then did I truly understand something. I had always thought I knew the idea that you must build not the business you want, but the business people actually need, and I even believed I was already doing that. But only when I was cornered, when there were no real chances left, did I realize that I had not. I understood it for real only when the stakes became existential. From then on, I stopped trying to manufacture demand where none existed. Instead, I decided to provide value within demand that already existed. And if I was going to build products, I should do so in advertising, a domain where I already had knowledge and experience.

The ad-tech solution we launched in 2017 was the first to generate meaningful results. Within a year of launch, it reached KRW 10 billion in annual revenue with a 20% operating margin. In total, the product generated KRW 37 billion in revenue and KRW 17 billion in operating profit, and I was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 Asia that year.

At the same time, I also felt that if we wanted to grow the company much larger, we needed better talent, and that from the perspective of that talent, our company was seen not as a startup but as a small or midsize business. I believed the companies they wanted to join were startups backed by major VCs. For HR branding reasons, I decided to raise venture capital for the first time and secured an initial KRW 6 billion investment from leading VC firms.

But because we raised it without truly needing the money, I came to feel even more strongly that our business and company were not suited to the model of being scaled through VC capital. In the end, I asked for understanding and repaid the entire investment.

After operating for another year, I analyzed our global competitors and realized that the companies I had assumed would be vastly larger than us were only a few times larger, and at most 10 to 20 times bigger. The market itself had a ceiling. That was when I finally understood why VCs care so much about market size.

It was a project that had only just begun to produce results after seven years of hardship, but because I had a larger ambition, I chose to pivot decisively.

In 2010, I had been standing in the middle of a mobile paradigm shift, but I did not have the experience or capability to seize it. Later, I watched the companies that did capture that shift grow to levels that latecomers could barely touch. Even while running a small agency business and failing at products year after year, I had a conviction deep inside me: paradigm shifts come roughly every ten years, and next time I would be ready.

If I was going to pivot, I wanted to do it in an industry where such a shift was unfolding. 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-layer businesses was not ready. Unless I was going to build an exchange or a mainnet, it seemed that the only thing I could really do for the time being was invest.

After the 2017 bull market, 2018 became a brutal bear market. Web3 startup valuations collapsed, and no one wanted to invest. I believed that if you want extraordinary outcomes, you have to act when everyone else is turning away. So I decided that rather than trade short-term cycles, I would look several years ahead and begin venture investing. Because nobody was investing, it was possible to enter the market as a venture investor with relatively small amounts of capital.

Somewhat unintentionally, that was how my path as an investor began.

I bet my life on it with my own capital. What began as investments worth only a few billion won produced returns that, at peak, reached hundreds of times the original amount within two years.

If the previous seven years had been my life as a founder, the next seven were largely my life as an investor. I invested about KRW 280 billion of my own capital across more than eighty companies in Korea and abroad. In one case, I kept supporting a small Argentine startup through every round until it became the unicorn that led the "metaverse" theme, ultimately investing more than KRW 50 billion into it. A company that had once been valued in the low tens of billions of won became a category-leading business worth over KRW 1 trillion. I also invested in a tiny Australian game company that had been delisted, supported it aggressively in follow-on rounds, and watched it become one of the defining global Web3 companies at roughly KRW 8 trillion in value. I was also the first and only investor in a major Korean game company that went on to pioneer P2E, sharing its hardest early days.

The combination of being a self-funded investor and a founder allowed me to see the potential in companies nobody was paying attention to. Acting on the philosophy of Start Where Others Stop, making decisions when others would not, produced unusually strong results.

Because I was investing my own capital, I could also try many non-standard and unconventional approaches.

One representative example was building an investment alliance with major game companies in each country, what we called Core Alliance. We brought together the top game companies in each market, selected the single most outstanding company from dozens of game and Web3 startups screened by Blocore every month, and had the investment teams of ten major game companies join the same video call to hear the pitch together. There was no shared fund. Each company made its own investment decision independently.

The participating companies included Krafton, Nexon, NCSoft, and Netmarble in Korea; SEGA, Konami, Bandai Namco, and SNK in Japan; Lilith Games in China; and 2K in the United States, ten global major game companies in total.

The goal was not immediate financial gain as much as it was to repeatedly co-invest with the leading game companies of each country and build a brand as a global force in game investing. I also believed that the strategic synergies created when a major game company joined the cap table would improve investment outcomes.

It was also unusual that, beyond deploying my own capital, I operated funds as an investment firm. The Singapore-based venture capital firm I co-founded in 2018 began with the explicit goal of creating a truly global fund. It brought together serial entrepreneurs and investors of different nationalities, operating the fund remotely from different countries. The original plan was to raise private capital from global family offices rather than public institutional money, but we failed at first. In the end, the founders pooled their own capital to get it off the ground.

That fund went on to generate record-setting performance, and based on that track record, we succeeded in raising a follow-on fund. The ten-year fund launched in 2021 distributed substantial returns to LPs within two years and landed in the top 3% globally among venture funds on both TVPI and DPI.

The fund manages about KRW 380 billion, and more than 40% of it was directly committed by the co-founders, an unusual expression of responsibility and confidence. It is one of the venture funds in the world with the highest GP commitment ratios.

I produced results both as an individual investor and as a fund manager.

But I did not enjoy the work. The essence of success in fund management turned out not to be investing well, but fundraising well. I had neither the passion nor the temperament for that, and I concluded that this was not a field in which I could become world-class.

I genuinely enjoyed discovering startups, investing in them, and helping them. But the thrill of being right in my investment decisions, or the fact that I was making a great deal of money, was less satisfying than the sense of envy and longing I felt whenever I wished AIMED, which I was still running in parallel, could do as well as the companies I had invested in.

In the end, what I wanted was not success as an investor. It was success as a founder. I wanted products and services I had built to be used by many people.

That was the trigger for the transition toward a venture studio, though my impatience also became the trigger for overexpansion.

After my investing success gave me access to substantial capital, I decided I wanted to grow AIMED much larger. I converted our existing ad-tech company into a venture studio, invested my own capital into the company, expanded the organization, and added new business units.

Outstanding talent from companies such as Google, Naver, Kakao, Nexon, Krafton, Coupang, and EA joined us in large numbers, and in a short time the organization grew to more than 200 people. A company that had once been profitable became a loss-making company burning roughly KRW 2 billion every month. We expanded into industries where we lacked deep expertise. We hired star C-level executives without enough reflection on roles. Looking back, that expansion came not from a clear vision of the venture studio model or deep thinking about industry and business, but from a simple desire to make the numbers bigger. In the process, we began to lose the very strengths that had made the company good in the first place and drifted off course.

When capital was abundant, my thinking did not go deep enough to reach the essence. I focused more on what to do and what results to produce than on the question of why.

It is not as if there were no results at all. Some businesses raised capital from global investors such as Supercell, Pantera Capital, and Griffin Gaming, and some generated profits worth tens of billions of won. But rather than seriously wrestling with meaning and vision, we kept chasing bigger quantitative outcomes.

Only when liquidity problems emerged did I begin asking the essential questions.

How did our company end up in its current form? Why am I doing this work?

During that period, several business units into which we had invested tens of billions of won each had to be shut down. It was a painful phase of trial and error, but the depth of the learning matched the pain.

The time that followed was a process of setting myself aside, recovering my original intent, and starting again not as an investor but as a founder. It was the period in which I rediscovered the sincerity of my desire not to give up and to build the company into something much larger. I thought deeply about why I do business, what kind of person I am, and what kind of leader I need to become.

As a result, I was forced to confront a set of fundamental questions.

Is the parent company merely a functional organization? What contribution can it truly make? Is the governance structure sustainable? Does it go against human incentives, both in terms of fundraising and in terms of alignment for subsidiary leadership? Is there a reason venture studios have not become industrialized the way VCs or accelerators have, because they are that difficult, or structurally close to impossible? If the venture studio model is to truly work, what has to change, and can we be different?

And then there was the most fundamental question of all: beyond simply launching multiple businesses that might produce results, do we have our own real cause and 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 firm, a game company, or an advertising company? What exactly are we, a company running several businesses? It felt as though a company should have a vision, but what was ours? Could a goal that exists only to produce big results really count as a vision?

Looking back, even in the period when I was chasing performance and numbers, there were things I genuinely loved and that truly made me happy. There was a reason I never gave up on this company, even through multiple severe crises. Only after reexamining what AIMED really meant to me did I understand it. That meaning had always been there, hidden behind my appetite for numbers, and now I could finally see it clearly.

In hindsight, AIMED itself was never a company that should be grown through the standard VC model. I had raised investment and then returned it all because it did not fit, and because I had personally done venture investing for more than seven years, I understood the structure and limitations of VC better than most.

There are clearly businesses in the world that VCs cannot invest in, or struggle to invest in, even though they are valuable. Businesses that have to be grown with a different tempo and a different method. Businesses that need to be judged by a different standard and supported with patience. Businesses that do not need a structure that grows valuation through capital alone, but one that can grow vision, organization, and leadership, a structure willing to invest in growth itself, not just performance.

Those are the kinds of businesses AIMED is now building. Investing more than KRW 10 billion of our own capital into SLG R&D in a genre no one else in Korea had chosen to challenge, or accepting losses while building an organization to break the structural cycle of the ad agency business, those are challenges that are only possible because AIMED exists.

When I say these are businesses VCs cannot invest in, I do not mean they are impossible businesses. I mean they are businesses that can only be born when there is vision, belief, and conviction that go beyond pure logic and rationality, and businesses that can be supported long enough to bloom.

And I believe the results will be remarkable in ways that ordinary, logic-driven investment tracks rarely produce, both in quantitative performance and in qualitative meaning and value.

Building, growing, and proving businesses that would struggle to bloom without us, that is what AIMED does.

I still hope we succeed.

But I have now found something even more important to me, something I truly want to pursue. Even if I fail, I already feel enough meaning in the pursuit itself that I would not regret it.