What Gives Korean Start-ups Their Edge | Eye on Korea Ep. 44

Yeah, well, first of all, it's great to be on.

So for me, I would say the thing that I have always been really interested in from a very young age is this intersection between the public sector and the private sector.

When I was very, very young, I wanted to be a public servant and wanted to go work in the government.

And for a bit of time, I did.

uh i served uh you know in public education here in the dc area um and really was thinking about sort of okay what is the role of private sector um you know in advancing the economy um and so uh you know to kind of take a step back for for a second um i would say that geopolitically speaking um Here in the United States, you know, we have historically been very laissez faire about how we interface with the economy.

And so I think probably from, you know, kind of early Reagan all the way through, you know, certainly through Clinton and then obviously through Bush.

And then I would say even the later part of Obama, you know, the general stance of the federal government has been deregulation, keeping your hands off of, you know, kind of innovation and the like.

And then I would say probably in the second Obama administration and then certainly got turbocharged with President Trump.

And of course, I would say with President Biden, the U.S. federal stance has generally been, OK, you know what? We're actually just going to 180 on that and we're going to pick industries that we want to win.

And so first it was advanced manufacturing.

Then it was semiconductors.

Then it was clean energy.

Then it was construction.

And then I would say that culminates in sort of the.

the outcome of President Trump being extremely engaged through our tariff policy and through sort of a kind of broader kind of macroeconomic policies.

And so in that environment, I would say, what is the role of private sector? The role of private sector basically is to work collaboratively with the government in advancing the country's interests in these key areas that we have collectively said are important to us, right? There are things like advancing healthcare innovation, protecting our borders through cybersecurity, creating more AI resilience in our infrastructure, being able to kind of advance American capital markets and the dominance of the US dollar in foreign markets and the like.

So in each of these cases, the government stance generally has been to tax, to tariff, to regulate, to incentivize, to grant, whatever the case is, to be able to allow private sector to be able to step in and actually advance these policies.

And so that's why a lot of these companies that we're involved in are the way that they are, right? nitro our healthcare company was founded certainly after covid and the federal government's enhanced investment essentially in the digitalization of our healthcare industry amber our car insurance company for electric vehicles built was built primarily after president biden's inflation reduction act and the intention to try and create more robust electrification industry um and certainly companies like jericho where we're uh you know actively engaged uh a contract a direct prime contractor with the united states air force um on protecting uh the air force on cyber defense in each of these areas the intention is let's bring the cutting edge technology of artificial intelligence of machine learning of big data of um of stable coins, of blockchain capabilities, bring the smartest and the brightest minds from Silicon Valley, from New York, whatever the case is, and have them apply these new technologies in these strategic areas of interest for the government.

That has been obviously both incredibly successful, but also incredibly lucrative, as you can probably think about.

But I think the broader kind of context is really thinking about what those kind of relationships look like and be able to advance those interests overall.