My 19-year journey at Daum, one of the legendary portals in Korea

I grew up at the small town and majored Computer Science at Hallym University in South Korea. From my childhood, I loved new gadgets and products, of course, computers. That’s why I selected my major to be computer science and loved to code. At that time, I learned programming languages, OS, data structures, and many other things. I was a reporter of the University Newspaper and also a member of Science Student Committee. I remember running across the campus all the time. When I was in my final year, I was crazy about HTML, HTTP, and the Internet. As I became an expert at using the Internet without limitation at the Computer Science Lab, I applied to be a teaching assistant there. As I worked as a teaching assistant, I also started to work as a freelancer to build websites for other colleges and companies. In 1995, right after my graduation, I worked as a freelancer. One of my projects was chosen by a magazine as one the year’s best websites, so I was able to get more projects from other universities and even companies. Although it was profitable, I felt getting bored the same sort of projects and fickleness of my customers.

Seeking a new job as a Web Programmer

Later, I started to seek a new job as a Web programmer. In 1995, it was hard to find that specific job. However, I found Daum, a brand-new startup in Seoul, the capital city of Korea. The company was providing an interesting site, ‘Virtual Gallery’. The concept of Virtual Gallery was simple: they allowed visitors to see photos and work of artists on their Web site. I thought it was really cool and new. Most of the IT companies in 1995 were mainly working SI (System Integration) or website development for other big corporations. Unlike them, Daum actually provided its own service at the early stage of the Internet era.

When I clicked the “Recruit” button on the homepage, the page linked me to a chatting window to JW. Lee, the founder & CEO of Daum. I told what I did and what I planned to do; he just answered, “Let’s talk more in my office!”. So, I visited his office, and I met two guys, JW Lee, and Taekkyung Lee, the CTO. The two founders looked young and confident. They asked about basic concepts and what I did. Taekkyung was asking about a lot the sites I implemented, and JW just asked me about my hobbies and asked me, “How did you find us?” I answered frankly. I was searching a lot, but I found only one web service company, and it was Daum. JW told me about his large visions that the Internet could change the world. The office was small and crappy, but there were three kinds of new workstations I really wanted to use and several young engineers. I didn’t negotiate too much about my salary. Instead, my eyes were looking at the workstations and engineers’ monitors.

I started my job as a web programmer. I wrote codes like CGI, Multi-thread server, sometimes HTML pages with some scripts. In 1998, I took a class about data modeling and an RDBMS management class provided by a database consulting firm. The lecturer selected me, saying “you should be a data modeler for this company.” I became a representative data modeler of Daum by the lecturer’s recommendation. It was fun. I worked with several teams to design or redesign data models, and I learned business logic and how to implement data flows and models.

Financial Crisis & Huge Success of Daum

Around 1997, under the Asian financial crisis, Korea’s economy was also struggling in the overall area. However, Daum’s service was a big hit. ‘Hanmail.net’ was the first free Web email service in Korea. After the huge success of the service, in 1999, Daum launched the online web based community service, ‘Daum Cafe’.

In 1999, I worked with the Platform Development Team. The team was in charge of implementing and operating the platform of Daum. As Daum started as a free email/community service provider, it needed to be a portal platform through building global user authentication/authorization platforms and database. We tried to build a stable and scalable platform. I worked as a data modeler and data architect for the project. At that time, there was no Cloud, PAAS, or IAAS systems, so we solely implemented everything. Until then, I programmed some code as well. We worked hard and respected each other. Almost three times a week, we did code inspections and read several articles and books together. I still keep in touch with most of them, and one of them is currently CTO of my new startup, ‘KonoLabs’!

Meanwhile, Daum was able to transform to be an Internet Portal successfully. Daum was able to get a brand awareness as well as to be listed on KOSDAQ at the end of 1999. Like other startups, founding members and many of employees made a lot of money by stocks, stock options, even convertible bond, etc. Before the successful IPO, Daum had a lot of risks, sometimes it could not pay the salary of employees, its cash flow was negative for a while. However after the transformation, Daum could do its advertising business based on huge traffic and finally was IPOed.

The story of Cafe and Tistory.com

In 2001, JW called me to a small room. He told me I could lead the Daum Cafe Team, consisting of product managers, engineers, and designers. He told me, as I had a strong customer-centric mind and engineer background, I could help the team to make growth. As the subscribers were increased exponentially, he may want to pick up the product manager who can care about both the system and service.

Fortunately, I was in charge of leading the team during Daum Cafe(http://cafe.daum.net) was able to be the biggest online community service in Korea, every day more than 10 million visitors visited the site. After that, sometimes I succeeded; sometimes I did not. I had been mainly working as a product manager. Another one of my hit platforms is Tistory.com (http://tistory.com). Coincidentally, I met Mr. Jungseok Roh, CEO of TatterTools, a sort of Wordpress of Korea. We just had a lunch and talked about any possibility working together. Finally, we agreed we can provide subscription based Tatter Tools for the portal users. That’s the start of the Tistory.com. It was huge, and around 8 mil users used the platform.

MIT Sloan & Daum NIS

In 2009, when I was a director of community division, my company sponsored me to take an MBA class at MIT Sloan. It was a Sloan Fellows program. MIT is an amazing place to meet genius scientists, professors, entrepreneurs, experienced professionals, and geeks. I learned a lot as well as met great people there. At MIT, the most important keyword was ‘Entrepreneurship’. Every class stimulated entrepreneurship and I could meet great entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs there. Most of all, I met international friends and they are still real assets of my life.

After coming back to Korea, I worked also various roles. I led several service partnerships with Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. I worked as a VP of an operation company and even the director of corporate strategy unit. Right before quitting my job, I initialized Daum Next Incubation Studio which was aiming to nurture internal venture teams. I led & helped several projects, among them, Cardoc(http://cardoc.co.kr) and BuzzHome(http://buzzhome.yahoo.co.jp/) were successful.

I truly hope they can be sustainable and great companies.

Quit my job at Daum

Last year Daum was merged with Kakao, a leading Mobile fast growing company. Before then, frankly I was getting sick of my job at a big corporation. I felt I wasted my time for meaningless meetings and compromising with stakeholders inside and outside of the company. Thus, I thought I was getting far away from customers, consumers and market.

I have been always thinking about my own business based on advanced technologies. Special thanks to William, CEO of Daum — he suggested me to stay more, but I told him, if I could not start my startup this time, probably when I would be 50s, I would regret it. And then, he just hugged me, and good luck to my new trial.

This is my journey at Daum, one of the legendary Internet Portals in Korea. Over the last 19 years, I saw what happened in the company from the small startup to be a big corporation. There were some successes, failures, and gains & losses. However the fact is that Daum is one of the legendary ICT companies in Korea, and the people at Daum were the pioneers in the IT history in Asia. Daum’s brand is already changed to ‘DaumKakao’, but I am truly proud that I was a part of the brand, ‘Daum’.

Thanks to Daum. Obviously it is much more than a job of my life.