Making Something From Nothing: Tim Jung of XL8 On How To Go From Idea To Launch
An Interview With Doug Noll
Team Competition Can Be Healthy
Sometimes, it’s healthy within a work environment to compete with our colleagues. But if it gets heated too much, then you run the risk of that competitive culture turning out to not be very healthy. In general, I wish someone had reminded me early on how it’s very important to culturally increase some level of competition, but always to remind employees not to take it too personally.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Jung.
Why CEO Tim Jung left Google in 2019 and started his own company, XL8, with a mission of using technology to break down language barriers to help companies expand their global reach and unlock new revenue opportunities.
Tim (Young Hoon) Jung is the CEO of XL8, the only AI company specialized in translating media & entertainment content. Prior to XL8, Tim was a Software Engineer and a TLM (Tech Lead and Manager) at Google, leading and managing software engineers and ML researchers, successfully launching multiple NLP-based (Natural Language Processing) Search features including Events Search, Events Data in Knowledge Graph, and Personal Search. At Samsung Electronics, he has led the UI framework team, successfully launching Tizen, a Linux-based platform for mobile devices. At Columbia University where he earned his PhD in Computer Science, he studied optimizing distributions of computations across heterogeneous devices to offer a testbed for AI applications. In Korea, he served in the Army as a Communication Officer.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
When I was a young boy, I played a lot outside. At the time, everyone was playing outside too. But, as it was the early 90s, that’s when many video games were introduced to households. So I got one, and like many other boys, I was obsessed with some of the games and spent many hours playing.
Another thing I was interested in was electrical devices and how they worked. So, another obsession of mine was the phones at home. At the time, we had rotary phones. I remember breaking five or six phones at home– they weren’t too expensive, but I was always breaking them and begging my parents so they would buy new or used ones for me, again and again.
At the end of the day, I’ve just always been fascinated by how things work and enjoy figuring it out on my own. Through experimentation, I figured out that the rotary phones generate signals when the dials are rotated, using the same initial sound of hanging up the phone. This led me to a discovery that allowed me to call someone using just the hangup switch, without touching the rotary dial. Later on, I actually combined my two interests by connecting a push-button phone with a video game I own. Eventually, I was able to create a joystick out of a phone and play a game with the numeric keypad.
Looking back at that time, the goal really was to truly understand how it works. Then, once you know how it works, you know how you can make it better or how you can fix it. You can also base it on something that works in a similar way.
I think these kinds of habits help grow an idea of how you want to make something for yourself or someone else. This passion for innovation is what starts new companies and builds entrepreneurship.
Q: Did it drive your parents a little crazy?
Of course! My friends and I would always be doing something that they were a little bit worried about, but what I really appreciate looking back, is that they were patient and never scolded me about it. They let me try to figure things out for myself.
Although they definitely didn’t love having to rebuy things over and over, they knew that it was giving me all kinds of opportunities to learn things in my own way. Those experiences helped me to obtain the skill sets and capabilities I now have.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
To live in the current, modern-day life, knowledge is very important and you have to be educated, you have to learn things. In your work and in society, you have to learn the rules and laws of everything around you.
This quote from Albert Einstein says “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I truly believe so, as someone who especially loves invention and wants to always build new things, whether it’s a company or a service.
Because, to make a successful business, you have to build something new. Knowledge may help, but knowledge is like a base where you know what exists and what does not. In this case, imagination kicks in to help you with what does not exist. And if it already does, you build something people would appreciate, love, and use.
Also, it’s the small things– not just the grand idea or grand imagination that you have to come up with to change the world in some way. It’s the very small ideas that you can actually build things onto, and adding those small changes together, that end up changing the world.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
I have a few inspirations, but I would like to point out just one thing. In general, I believe no one person or one book would ever change my course of life completely. I think it all adds up in my life. My life is an accumulation of my past experiences, my imagination, and my thoughts about everything.
About five years ago, I started reading novels, and actually, I now get a lot of inspiration from them too.
For instance, the last one I read was Project Hail Mary, written by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian. The concept of the book is a very fascinating topic. It’s a funny story because if you think about it, the possibility of it being real is almost nearly zero. It’s about one person saving the Earth and then on the way, he meets an alien who also tries to save the planet. They try to communicate, but can’t. So the main character completely wings it and invents a translator device inside the aircraft to communicate with the alien.
All of these kinds of new ways of thinking from other people or authors will always be an inspiration for me because it helps you to envision things in a new way, or have a new perspective. It also lets you see if this is similar to the way that you’ve been thinking.
Let’s shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?
I think every idea has its own advantages and disadvantages. Even having a startup based on AI technologies seems like a very good idea, right? But it also has a lot of challenges. I think everyone who has started their own business resonates with this.
Just building a company, for example, can be challenging. Hiring the right people can be challenging. Creating company culture is challenging. Generating sales and getting your company name out there is also challenging. There are a lot of steps to building a company that can be hard, especially if you’ve never done it before, but you have to do it. Because as a founder or entrepreneur, these are the things you have to finish to make the vision a true thing.
It’s a really serious process where you have to put a lot of time and energy into diverse efforts, but it all boils down to execution. There’s a famous phrase from the late chairman of the Hyundai group in Korea that when told “no” by an employee or anyone really, his famous response was something like: “Have you ever tried? Did you even try it?”
Because in theory, many things might not work, but if you give up, before even trying, just think of the innovations and breakthroughs that wouldn’t exist today.
Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?
As a CEO of a company, I also have a lot of notes from people, customers, and fellow entrepreneurs. They may say, “Well, this might not work,” or “Your idea is great, but I’m not sure it would work in real life,” or something like that. When everyone else is saying no, or calling it impossible, you should be someone who is still trying out something in maybe a little bit of a different way to see if there is absolutely no way to make it work.
For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about things like how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.
I think it depends on what type of company that we’re talking about. As a software company, we have some patents we filed and registered. We have some research papers we published and even an open-source project. For any material or manufacturing companies, a patent is also the way to go as a good protection for your company and your knowledge.
As a software company, the value we are developing and delivering, especially as an AI company, is the quality of the services we are offering. But to achieve the best quality through our products, we have to run millions of different executions of experiments. You want to compare the technology with the status quo, any other open source projects, and other market products, to establish where you are, how you can further improve, and to get an understanding of how competitive you are.
Ultimately, it’s how we can compete with ourselves to make sure that we are the best of the best in what we can deliver.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?
1 . Get Educated on What Marketing Is
Through the course of the past four and a half years of marketing and sales that I did, I had never done anything related to that, prior. I didn’t even realize the importance of marketing before as well. I learned a lot. There are a lot of theories, practices, and experiments that you can do to get your company’s name out there.
It is important to have a company name be well recognized by the target market. Because even if you have very good products, even if your product delivers the best quality out there, if people have never heard your company’s name, it’s very difficult to sell your product.
This is something that I learned the hard way, and I would say if I could redo all of this again, it would be to learn more about marketing and sales support going into starting a company.
2. Communication Matters
As a B2B company, your customers are end users, and in our case, we talk a lot with media companies, who can be very conservative. There are certain ways to communicate with these types of customers, and I’m even still learning every day. I am a person who immigrated from a different country, that speaks a different language, and comes from a different culture. It was an interesting process for me to learn just how to have regular or break-the-ice types of conversations. I learned these things the hard way about sometimes the founding team doesn’t always have the same relationship skills as a sales team.
A story that I can give is that one day, while on Zoom with a potential new customer, we had a great conversation about our product, how they can use it, and what values we can deliver. We discussed pricing and everything. I thought it went great!
With a few minutes left, the customer started talking about a recent coaching change at a football team at a university. I don’t remember the specifics, but they were having a very vivid and active conversation on the subject, and I had nothing to add, knowing very little about college football. I kept thinking, “Oh God, this is something that I really need to learn about!” and made me appreciate great sales people who can carry any type of conversation with a customer.
3. Team Culture is Key
I knew a few things about engineering culture because I spent four years at Google. It was one of the best companies to learn engineering from. One example that they have is “Blameless Postmortem,” which is a kind of analysis of the root cause of a problem or when some incident happens. But, while doing that, nobody blames anybody, because they believe everyone is the same, no matter their mental strength. When individuals specifically get blamed, people automatically change into more of a protection mode so that they can toss the blame or point at someone else.
The most important thing here is to never point fingers at someone else. Rather, focus on what is the root cause of a problem and then how it will be addressed in the future. That’s something that we are trying to incorporate in our company as well, and I think we’re doing a great job with that. Another thing is not just the engineering culture, but in general how we communicate and how we respect other people as colleagues. I think that’s a really important part of what we do at XLI. We’ve been doing great with that. Also, as a small company, we are still learning how we can better recognize other people’s achievements.
4. Foster Loyalty the Your Company
In some organizations, especially if it’s a bigger corporation, educational institute, or government, there are often employees who are extremely loyal to their supervisors. What I’ve seen in successful startups is a clear correlation between employee loyalty to the overall company mission vs loyalty to just their boss or supervisor. When everyone is working towards the mission, only then, will the company most likely be successful. Especially when, by definition, companies are for profit, but with startups, for a certain period, they are purely driven by making the mission come true.
5. Team Competition Can Be Healthy
Sometimes, it’s healthy within a work environment to compete with our colleagues. But if it gets heated too much, then you run the risk of that competitive culture turning out to not be very healthy. In general, I wish someone had reminded me early on how it’s very important to culturally increase some level of competition, but always to remind employees not to take it too personally.
Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
When developing a product, and ultimately before execution, you want to research and factor as many of the unknowns as possible. This could be formulating how the customer will react, how the market will change, or how your competitors will be moving. I think it’s a good idea to get a brief idea or a general sense of how the market will respond. What is the market size? What is the trend?
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
There are very clear pros and cons to working with a consultant. Usually, for the product or services you are envisioning as an entrepreneur, you are the best person to know your product the best. Of course, there are always instances where it’s a good idea to consult with other people who have some knowledge of the industry.
For example, a consultant can offer some insight from the customer’s viewpoint, which is very important, or see what the opportunity is or what the customer’s pain points are. You can then use that knowledge and address it. But apart from that, generally, working with a consulting company is like following formulated procedures, which try to give you steps like, if you see these kinds of opportunities, do this, and with this change, you’ll be able to make this much money with it. But overall, the final decisions should always come from the founder themselves.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
I think that there are no right or wrong approaches, and I think it also depends on what type of market you are in.
I’ve seen many successful entrepreneurs who bootstrap everything with their own funds or offer employees equity for a period (vs pay), which works great sometimes. But I think VC funds are necessary when you already have an established business and a clear plan to build it.
For example, if you are building a business where nobody else is actually working on that idea, and it’s a very genuine idea, you want to focus first on putting a strong moat in place, starting to make money, and then having a plan to accelerate growth. With that in place, VC funding can then help to scale the business faster.
Meanwhile, there are industries where execution is more important than the idea, especially when there are other companies that might be a threat or competition to your business. In this instance, capital can play a great role in helping you to scale and outperform your competitors, resulting in an economy of scale.
So really, these are two or more different plays here, but they heavily depend on the preferences of the entrepreneur, type of business, and market, for example.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I actually consider doing a startup business as doing a good thing for the world.
I still consider myself in the very early stage of the startup venture experience, but I’m using the skill sets, knowledge, and experience I’ve built so far for the greater good of the world and the startup ecosystem, too. One thing of course, if you think about our mission at XL8, is that we are building AI technologies to overcome language barriers, which is already a great challenge for many populations across the world.
It’s a problem that has always existed in human history really, over different regions and countries. Additionally, if you imagine the other extreme, where there’s absolutely no language barrier, would there be any limitations in friends when speaking together? Or perhaps in people from different countries wanting to do business together. There would be no limitations, right?
That is the mission we are trying to achieve with AI. We are still far from that, but we are taking each step every day to get there at some point, which is why I am proud that we as a company are contributing to society and the world in a greater sense.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Personally, I want to inspire a moment where people make the effort to try and make a friend who doesn’t speak your language. That’s going to be a very interesting thing, right? Either you may want to learn how to speak the language the friend is currently speaking, or vice versa. The friend may want to learn how to speak your language, or maybe you two can land on a completely new language that you would never normally speak.
Learning a new language is obviously very difficult, but in an era of technology and AI improving our lives, it just might make it easier and faster somehow. I would just like to inspire people to try through human connections first.
Q: We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Some people want to meet other people who are perhaps similar to them, but I think that I am the type of person who wants to meet another person who is completely different from me so that I can also learn from them, or try to see things from a different angle.
Relevant to languages, there are languages written right to left, and some with no vowels or completely different alphabets. Not just culturally or linguistically, but because I am in business, it would be very interesting if I could meet someone who is doing business in a successful way, in a completely different domain, and in a completely different culture and country, so that I can see and learn how business thrives in another part of the globe.
I think that would be fascinating. Now, I know that isn’t a specific person, but as long as someone fits into that category, I’d be very interested in speaking with that person!
How can we connect with you on Social Media?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-yh-jung/
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and apply.
