Kakao Corporation

Familiarity, I suppose, isn't it? And you don't want to get outside of that familiarity at the end of the day.

And interestingly, what you mentioned was, like you said, if I'm searching on a particular place to visit or area or restaurant, I would tend to use Naver or Kakao.

Yeah,

yeah.

Next thing.

So, Kakao... as a big company, the conglomerate, is reportedly considered transferring its 21.61% stake in SM Entertainment to Kakao Entertainment, right? The move would increase Kakao Entertainment's stake in SM to 41.5%, potentially making SM its subsidiary.

So I know that they both have the name Kakao in it, but the way it currently was set up was that Kakao Corporate held 21%, right? And then Kakao Entertainment held another 20%.

So they were like all players at the table with SM Entertainment.

But if they transfer all of it, then it makes Kakao Entertainment own 41.5%, which apparently is a controlling stake.

So the thing people are wondering is would it allow Cacao Entertainment to basically fully control SM Entertainment and make all the decisions they want?

I don't know.

The series is the first adaptation of a Korean webtoon in India.

The original work ran on Kakao's webtoon platform between 2015-2017 and it garnered more than 200 million views.

The Korea Times spoke with the webtoon artist about the adaptation of her hopes for the global reach of Korean comics.

And this is a new market where Korean webtoons are going to be quite a sensation.

We always had competition.

Even today, we still have apps like Telegram out there and Line and Kakao.

But we always said that our destiny is really in our hands.

We can't worry too much about competition.

I think for us, the focus has always been on like, well, we want to provide a utility.

We want to provide an application that is purely only about communication.

So if you look at some other apps like WeChat or Line or Kakao, So they do a lot of different things, right? You can order taxes through WeChat, and you can follow people online, Lion has a whole feed concept.

And we always wanted to build something that is really, really efficient and utilitarian, and also fast and reliable.

No, there are actually two major changes to the ever-changing digital comic marketplace that is just like – cannot seem to penetrate like the US market very well.

One of them is the Korean-owned Kakao, which is like the parent company, but Tapas is the Webtoon platform that was used for a lot of, obviously, Korean stuff, but also a lot of English language stuff on there as well.

Yeah.

This is one of those things where it's like millions and millions of viewers and I don't know of a single person that uses it.

So a guy meets a beautiful woman on a dating app.

Her KakaoTalk name is her, just her initials, so just, like, maybe B-A-M, right?

Okay.

And he asks, he asks her real name before that first date, but later forgets it.

She asks him on a second date, he still cannot remember her name.

Then she asks him on a third date, he goes again, still not knowing what to call her.

Eventually, he ends things because their personalities don't match, and his conclusion is people should use their real names on KakaoTalk.

[laughs]So the question is-

So like that's one of the larger issues, and I think that that's something that we're gonna see more because e- to be honest, like East Asian companies, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese are finding more power and footholds in Americans using their apps, that they are depreciating stuff that was formerly made just for American audiences.

So like, uh, so Tapas is owned by Kakao.

Kakao owns Kakao Webtoon, which is very similar to Naver Web- Webtoon, which is what is used in Korea to read webtoons.

Tapas was their like North American English language kind of like subsidiary type thing that gave them the piece of that pie.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see the library either...

It is already reflected in Kakao Webtoon, but Kakao, like Lezhin, runs out, like runs something or launches something that has that English, English language support.

So it seems more like they...

I don't know if Tapas was acquired by them or created by them, but I could easily see this as a consolidation move because American audiences are way more primed to invest their time and money into non-American companies now because it has become commonplace, which isn't me saying like globalism bad.

What's been most encouraging is that we have an incredible team.

I previously founded a consumer app that sold to Kakao for half a billion dollars.

We have Jason Zou, who was the youngest PM at DeepMind.

We have a very unique mix of talents between IP media content, AI, and Web3.

And then when I started Radish, I was, like, 25.

And I was lucky and fortunate enough to have actually found a inflection point in the business that's scaled up from 2018.

And the startup ended up getting acquired by, um, Kakao for almost a half a billion dollars in 2020.

And I left Kakao, and I, I started Story.

Actually, our first deal in Korea was Coupang.

It was March of 2011, and then soon after that we invested in Kakao in their series A. Yeah, when we first invested in Coupang, they were the 28th social commerce company to launch in just South Korea itself.

We launched a survey in South Korea, and we asked dozens of people, asking them to compare Ticketmaster, WeMake Price, Coupang, others, your retail experience as well.

And over and over again, for specifically women in their 20s, 30s, they loved Coupang because of their customer service.

In or differentiated insight, and usually that's through some kind of primary research that you've done that no one else has done itself.

And that was a key to making that investment back in 2011.

Kakao's a really interesting story.

I'm, I'm very thankful to Han Kim, who's a very close mentor and friend of mine, that helped introduce me to the company.