Founder Coffee

For this nineteenth episode, I talked to John Kim of SendBird, the user-to-user messaging backend that powers the chat of websites and apps like Reddit. Based on the belief that starting a company was the only way he could do what he loved, John started one of Korea’s first startups, raised money in an environment that had never heard about it, and then was one of the first to sell his startup to a company outside Korea. After this, John started a community for moms, raised money for it, pivoted (before that was even a word) to a messaging backend company, and got accepted to Y Combinator. He’s now leading one of the hottest messaging companies around. We talk about his extremely rational way of making decisions, the Korean ecosystem and work ethic, the Intrinsic Motivation Framework, and yet again, the Regret Minimization Framework.