Open Culture : Kim Beom-Soo

• Name : Kim Boem-Soo

• Age : 49 years old

• Date of Birth : 8 March 1966

• Nationality : South Korea

• Occupation : Chairman of Daum Kakao

• Net Worth : US$2.4 billion (May 2015)

Kim Beom-Soo is a South Korea billionaire businessman, the chairman of KakaoTalk, a South Korean internet company. He was born on 8 March 1966. He has a BSc degree in engineering, and an MSc degree, both from Seoul National University. He is married with two children and lives in Seoul, South Korea. In May 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$2.4 billion. He is one of the successful entrepreneurs in South Korea.

Open Culture is a concept that knowledge should be freely and growth must come from the developing world, change or enrich the work already existing on the basis of partnership and cooperation, without being bound to the rules relating to the protection of intellectual property laws.

Open cultural trait has been applied by the owner of application KakaoTalk, Kim Beom-soo who invented the hottest smart phone applications. KakaoTalk is a smart phone application that ordering heyday of South Korea. As many as 18 million users worldwide in July 2011 had downloaded and use the application KakaoTalk. This causes the application KakaoTalk got the top spot in the App Store and became the most successful social service across iPhone and Android platform in Korea. By the end of this year, KakaoTalk is estimated to have total of 20 million users. KakaoTalk success continued rising their social application on the world market. KakaoTalk has approximately 1 million users outside the country and this figure continues to grow by leaps and bounds every day. KakaoTalk has now control over 300 million messages per day. KakaoTalk, the successful mobile applications invented by Kim beom-soo has attracted Google to choose KakaoTalk as one of the main developers in Android Market.

He had imagined himself as the owner of his own company in the future since pursues studies at Seoul National University. He majored in industrial engineering at Seoul National University, which is the nation’s top university in Korea. He heard many interesting stories about the school alums become business entrepreneurs prevail. So, he had been determined and trying to hold their own business with an Internet company after setting up a college in the hope that he could join those successful entrepreneurs.

At first, Mr. Kim Beom Soo is a very successful businessman who Hangame, a reputable online game in which prominent. Hangame was eventually merged with the NHN, a top Internet property in Korea with gross annual revenue over $1 billion. Kim Boem Soo’s early work, KakaoTalk was not that brilliant. Few projects such as memo aggregation or personal ranking chart combined with social network features were in production but never really took off. In the SNS market, there were Facebook and Twitter already became global power brands. In web based SNS was already in the “red ocean” and competition was high. So, he turned his attention to the app market. The emergence and rapid growth of the Smartphone market in Europe and North America inspired him to moving forward. He had expected that Korea would follow such a big wave of smart phone penetration soon. Sending short message is not too expensive but mass market loves KakaoTalk that allows users to send short messages back and forth for free.

He has made few interesting points on his success that could be note-worthy to those folks who build their products in the smart phone universe. First, he  emphasizes on “venture mind”. Without it, KakaoTalk wouldn’t be materialized. He values highly of those people with hearts for innovative ideas than lucrative business model. For instance, up until last year, the company didn’t turn any revenue from KakaoTalk. Generating revenue was always second in the row just like Facebook did during its early days. Second, KakaoTalk is also unusual in the sense that it has created a horizontal organization. Unlike other Korean companies, where top-down management is sort of cultural norm, Jae-Bum encourages active communication and debate among peers in order to keep the organization away from unnecessary bureaucracy. In Korea’s typical office setting, it is not common practice. Though, this policy really helps and makes people to get friendly to each other even if there is 10~20 years of age gap between peers. Third, the company has done reorganization of internal team almost 40 times since its inception. It has contributed to KakaoTalk’s unhindered communication among different parts of the company and the team to collaborate. It has also made the company can better understand and react to fast-changing market needs and reflect them into the product development faster.