Zenos Schmickrath and Yoan Kamalski are the founders of Hmlet​ (pronounced Hamlet) – a housing and lifestyle service that originated in Singapore. Zenos and Yoan discuss why services like AirBnB or regular apartment rentals fail at providing ideal living situations for today's mobile, international workforce. They share their company's origin story…

Maria Lee is CEO of Ask Ajumma, a virtual concierge service in Korea.Maria is an American living Seoul, who jumped into her first business after realizing the daily challenges that foreigners face when living in Korea. In this episode, Maria speaks on why she left her comfortable, well-paid government job to become a startup entrepreneur and how sh…

In this extra episode, I recall a conversation that I had with a new startup founder while attending Startup Grind (hosted at Google Campus Seoul). Rather than focusing on getting investment or building the final product, I recommend early entrepreneurs to focus on acquiring potential customers and validating the market need for your product or ser…

Dennis Lee is CEO of Pentui, a pension booking app in Korea.In this episode, I visit Dennis at his office in Seoul to learn more about the pension business in Korea. Dennis tells how he was able to start his business while working at Hanintel and later spin it off as a separate company. Dennis shares his advice on managing communication within a sm…

Ahyrun Moon is one of the founders of Etch, a new keyboard app that was created at the popular LAUNCH hackathon is San Francisco.Ahryun is originally from Korea, but studied and worked in the US as a financial analyst.In this episode, Ahryun explains how she was able to pivot her career from crunching numbers in Excel to now crunching code and laun…

John S. Kim is CEO of JIVER, a Techstars London alum, and previously CEO of Paprika Lab (acquired by GREE).In this episode, John tells what it's like being a part of Techstars London (hint: it's not all fish & chips), and how his company pivoted from providing a social network for moms to JIVER – a chat and communications framework.As a special tre…