1516T2g1 South Korea/Reflection/day2
| Day 2 |
Contents
Day 2: Reflections
VCNC | Between
A visionary product with appealing need that created a lifestyle and culture.
Between is “a romantic dinner compared to a crowded dinner”. Its key differentiator is fundamentally providing a private and exclusive virtual space for couples to communicate. VCNC made efforts to engage users to understand their needs, effectively carved out a solution and changed how the younger generation dates. Relating to WhereTwo – a complementary service offering date spot ideas, I thought that its vison and plans are concrete whereby their strategies to get users to generate content (i.e. Incentivsing, exclusivity and leveraging on existing user base of Between) is a good learning point and relevant for my future reference.
Startup Alliance
An integral part of Korea’s startup ecosystem, an interface where startups gain key opportunities.
Due to legal constraints where lobbying is not permitted in Korea, startups who wants to attain funding have to go through legal means, such as through companies in the Internet company association. Startup Alliance solves this by connecting startups and VCs/incubators through legal means. I thought they are doing a noble job to connect and encourage more startups to turn their dreams into fruition.
Lunit
Superior deep learning research will pay off soon.
Let data define medicine. Lunit uses deep learning, combined with multitudes of x-ray imaging data from hospitals to predict where the cancer lie in given image with high accuracy. Lunit strength is also the access to large amount of medical data (7M annual outpatients with > 10 years of clinic data and a wide spectrum) which is key to train the machine to better detect the cancer cells. In this aspect, I thought that Lunit clearly differentiate themselves well and is able to communicate this well to the hospitals. Here, I got a clearer understanding of how powerful deep learning is when applied to the right use cases (and cancer detection is definitely a noble cause).
Lastly, I thought that Lunit should venture into overseas market (both developing and developed) aggressively with this technology through collaboration with foreign medical consortiums or social enterprises.
BankSalad | Rainist Co.
Going the extra mile to involve users in application development is key in its success.
Speaking with Sunghyun after the company visit, I got to understand more about Rainist Co. previous job matching application which failed. It launched at almost the same time as Job Planet – the Korea Linkedln, but never saw success. Sunghyun mentioned that the key reason it failed was because of he and the team was building an application based on what they think is good. Learning from this failure, Sunghyun decided to involve users for Banksalad and held user feedback sessions every week with new and existing users. Sunghyun unfortunate experience let me to better understand that letting users in the development process is paramount to its success.
In the near future, I will be involved with IT consulting and development work, I believe that Sunghyun’s experience will always remind me that the constant collaboration with users is always worth to go the extra mile.
VCNC | Between
- "Fail Fast, Iterate Often" - they let go of their ideas when it proved that they aren't going to work out.
- They have the Kakao Founder as a mentor, which may have contributed to their success in their messenger and Between.
- Separation of features: Some users of Between need the ideas feature (WhereTo) but some don't; that is where you develop separate apps.
- Big existing user base helps, alot - without messenger, Between would have grown slower, without Between, WhereTo would have grown slower too.
- Great acquisition insights and strategy ('evil' for men) 1) 'Fear Of Missing Out' 2) activity charts to mandate usage of the app 'do you not love me?'
- Growing strategy - sees viral growth in the region > set up office > localized marketing strategies to further grow
- In Edward's opinion, when does a startup become successful? 1) Sustainable profits 2) Fulfil their initial vision / mission and adopts a new one.
Startup Alliance
- Learnt that each region in Korea has its own niche economy and therefore have niche incubators located in those regions.
- Differentiates itself from other incubator by being an association and lobbyist for startups!
- Learnt that success Korean entrepreneurs are more likely to become mentors to contribute back to the society, in constrast to U.S. entrepreneurs who are more likely to become serial entrepreneurs.
- There're differences in the company culture between Japan and Korea, leading to Japanese companies visiting Korea to find startups to acquire or collaboration with.
Lunit
- Developed their technology using a different approach; competitors' solutions are provided location of the cancer growth, while Lunit does not and lets the solution decide and learn on its own.
- Pivoted from Machine Learning to Deep Learning when the CEO found that Deep Learning is a much better technology for the use case.
- Coming as PhDs from one field does not limit one to that field.
Rainist Co | BankSalad
- It doesn't make sense to expand overseas when it's much easier to generate revenue from domestic market by creating a new service.
- An unexpected find on the airplane can turn into a business idea.
- Tasks that seems overly time-consuming (e.g. crawling bank credit card pages and writing rules) can be overcomed by hardwork and hiring more staff (e.g. Financial Analyst).
- Listening to customers and developing what they want can go a long way (e.g. making a spending tracking mobile app by using the SMSes sent by banks)
VCNC
VCNC are founded by SNU students who are experts and have experience in social networking. All founders are with engineering background and their mentor is the founder of KaoKao. VCNC focuses on enriching relationship through their platform. Currently, they have two applications in the market. Between, which acts as a core to all their future services is a private couple messaging platform. WhereTwo, which acts as the enabler is the platform where couples can source dating ideas from. Between has become an lingo and representation in Korea for couples in a relationship. By far, they are achieving they have over 16 million downloads and growing with millions of messages exchanges daily.
I learnt that start-ups should have a clear vision and if all founders have the same vision, pursuing that vision together will be extremely beneficial strategy. Also, their first two application featuring a flip board service never took off because of the Korea’s demographic (Samaung offers many phablets, little demand for tablets). However, they learnt to let go of the failures and start afresh on new ideas.
Startup Alliance
Startup Alliance is a collaboration between the Korean government and Naver Corp. Their aim is to connect start-ups with the relevant help as well as offer networking opportunities. Besides offering free legal and accounting consultation, they often hold seminars and conferences to bring people together for a learning exchange. Startup Alliance is unlike Google Campus as they do not require start-ups to be a member with them before offering help to them. Instead, this is more of a CSR by Naver to aid the CSR scene. The KVIC(government initiative for aiding start-ups) invested $2B that created 380 new VC as the president and her administration is a strong supporter of entrepreneurship.
I learnt that failure of a start-up doesn’t mean a doom career. More often then not, there will be opportunities of acquisition or merger. However, because of the nature of Startup Alliance, they tend to wait for governments or companies to approach them for help instead of reaching out to them.
Lunit
Lunit is a start-up in the healthcare industry that uses image recognition algorithm to detect early signs of cancers and TB through x-ray shots. Lunit has an accuracy of 96% and acts as a first level of opinion for doctors. Three main reasons why they decided on this path: firstly, cancer cells are small and hard to detect. Secondly, radiologist conditions vary over time and is not absolute. Thirdly, it is not possible for them to know every single cancer pattern. They decided that instead of teaching humans of detecting new and every pattern of cancer, it is easier to use a software to crosscheck it to detect for anomaly.
I learnt that although they have government obstacles(unable to upload personal medical image on to butt), they found ways around this, such as physically delivering a thumbdrive to transport the images.
Banksalad
Rainist is a fintech company that recommends financial information to select the most suitable credit card to their users. Through the application Banksalad, their vision is to gather fractioned data of the consumer credit card, with a goal to build a financial management service. By far, they have around 50k downloads. They earn through commission per sign up through referral links and have break even on their business. The next step is to head towards instalment and budgeting recommendation.
I learnt never to give up and to that new ideas may come from the strangest places. Similarly to Rainist, after failing in their job portal and commerce services, they attempted to explore Japan for inspiration and got the idea of Banksalad from the passenger beside them(while looking for credit card information). However, they are few factors that are uncontrollable such as government regulations on prohibiting credit card fee waiver from online sign ups and the fact that some people may choose to use their service but not sign up through their referral links.
VCNC
VCNC has a very niche market, focusing on couples. Between, one of the application developed by VCNC aims to develop an emotional communication channel. Hence, it is no longer just an application that provides communication services but the application creates an unique and personalized experience for each couple. This serves as a competitive advantage as each experience is difficult to replicate by potential competitors who just entered the industry. Moving forward, this application could potentially be a lifelong application as it ingrained into the lives of the couples through their milestones.
Startup Alliance
Startup Alliance is an accelerator established by Naver to support start ups through advisory services. The aim and main differentiating factor of Startup Alliance to other accelerator is that this organization serves as a social responsibility program. Therefore, Naver and other organization partners do not gain or acquire any equity from these start ups. Another takeaway from Startup Alliance is the importance of government support, financially and legally. While financial support significantly eases most of the challenges faced by start up, regulations could potentially restrict and threaten the growth of the start up as well.
Lunit
Lunit develops biomarker algorithms focusing on chest X-rays for medical diagnosis and disease detection by tapping on the clinical big data and subsequently deep learning. Currently, 20 to 30% are missed in mammography screening for Breast Cancer and chest X-Ray for Tuberculosis. This could be a new disruptive innovation in the medical-technology industry as radiologist could potentially be replaced in developed countries. However, in developing countries where diseases may be more prevalent or there is a shortage of medical staff, such system could be used.
Banksalad
Banksalad recommends credit cards based on user’s lifestyle and purchase behavior. As a young company who just started in 2014, they shared many challenges faced during the initial period. Through this sharing, we are able to better understand what are some of the past mistakes made and as well as some of the industry best practices.
Key Learning Points for Day 2 of Company Visits
- It seems the startup scene for the "just beginning" companies have very similar characteristics - secretive, korean (i.e. non foreign) leadership, incubated (seek funding instead of choosing to bootstrap like in Singapore)
- Startups in Korea are passion driven despite entering a concentrated market
Learning Points from VCNC
- VCNC is able to let go of failing projects - many incubators and founders aren't willing to trash their ideas and keep holding onto dreams that just won't work out.
- Retaining the key concept in the "Main App" and the "other features" into another app helps to maintain the purpose and focus of the service - Some features aren't needed by the masses
- Leveraging on the feeling of FOMO Fear Of Missing Out - Creating a campaign on using the Between screenshot as a "virtual wedding ring" creates natural, organic consumer demand
Learning Points from Startup Alliance
- Startup Alliance is a small incubator in the belt - sending their staff to other cities to learn about other incubators will help the organisation grow
- Learnt the concept of serial entrepreneurs
Learning Points from Lunit
- Companies are very secretive about their processes and proprietary technology - sharing sessions are opportunities for startups to increase branding
- Use of Machine Learning and Deep Learning to use data analytics for medical purposes - in fact they started with data, and then it decided to choose a field where there was opportunity (i.e. medical)
- Most companies have all-korean leadership teams
- Data analytics startup need not to have specialist knowledge on the field they enter - they can find talent for that
Learning Points from BankSalad
- This field is very sponsorship based - though they choose not to advertise, the company still features & ranks sponsored cards over others. This gives an unfair advantage and still skews customer perception. Deceptive.
- Analytics is used by this company too - based on spending patterns, they can determine which card fits the user the best. However, the caveat that some people don't use or don't have credit cards in the first place breaks their service model.
- Some loopholes are industry-based - they couldn't avoid customers who used their platform, but did not perform a click-through to the card's website to sign up. Lost revenue here. Their method was to use a HTTP GET request.
1. VCNC – Between
This company’s presentation was particularly interesting because of the methods and techniques engaged to boost popularity of their app in Korea’s market. They ensured that they provided promotional discounts and perks for couples using the “Between” and “Where to” application. They also ensure that people are comfortable using their app. I believe that being certain that you have a proper vision and understanding of what difference you want to make is important for the success of a startup.
2. Startup Alliance
Startup Alliance provided insights on how they function as an accelerator and coordinator to various budding startups through the organization of lectures, seminars and global conferences and activities. I feel that this is essential for startups as they have limited/no capital and by having the backing of Startup Alliance provides them the time and resources for growth.
3. Lunit
The mindset of Lunit founders revolves around providing better predictive techniques for cancers which was supported in their mission of transforming cancer diagnostics by using deep learning and large-scale clinical data. I found the technology and algorithm used to develop this predictive tool engaging and interesting because it was able to detect beyond what humans could actually do.
4. Rainist – Banksalad app
Rainist’s mission is to have a source of clarity for all financial services and I found their tenacity very impressive as they created 30 different prototypes of constructing and reconstructing to maximize positive impacts. I believe that their perseverance and hard work will bring them far in this industry.
Between
Between is a platform application for couples to share moments together. I find this start up interesting because they are adopting a different approach compared to other apps. They are value creators as they want this app to be a lifetime app for couple’s relationship. Edward mentions that it is important to have your own vision, dream that you want to pursue when you are starting up your company.
Start Up Alliance
Startup alliance bridge connecting amazing people; other startups; and investors together. Before this trip, I didn’t know there are so many incubators that are around in Korea. This was indeed an eye opening experience. They have different meetups to allow people to connect together. Examples include coffee club, book club and even lunch club which are unique meetups that are organized by Start Up Alliance.
LUNIT
Lunit is an interesting startup that aims to use record breaking algorithms for general detection and medical image analysis. This startup brings good benefits to society at large whereby it transform cancer diagnosis by using deep learning and large scale clinical data. Being a small company, it has spent a lot of efforts in obtaining data from the 8 medical hospitals and trying to bring across how their algorithms would make it easier and efficient for the radiologist to obtain results from patient’s xray with just a few clicks.
Bank Salad
Bank Salad aims to be a source of clarity for all financial services. With the complicated and competitive credit card industry, Bank Salad aims to solve all the inequality issues and to recommend a credit card that is best suited for the customer. However, what I felt was that it was focusing solely on one aspect which doesn’t takes into consideration of certain pitfalls. For example when customer wants to terminate the credit card, there wouldn’t be any barrier to overcome this issue. Nevertheless, I learnt that an idea that is spark anywhere like for example Bank Salad, through the discovery of credit cards of purchasing air tickets can lead a company to become a startup.
VCNC-Between
The vision of VCNC is to enrich real and offline-based relationships through an emotional communication service. Edward Lee, mention that we should have a dream, something in common with our partner if we want to open a startup together. I agree on this point because if we do not have a common dream, it will be hard to coordinate with our co-partner. This is where VCNC aims to have all employees having the common aim and work together hand in hand to make it successful. It is important to not have a conflict of interest, as having a conflict of interest will hinder the company progress, as there will not be a common goal where the employees will work. In addition, it is also important to know clearly who’s the target market is as every individual have different taste and preference.
Startup Alliance
The presentation given by the director makes me feel that it is very important for startups to know the existence of Startup Alliance as Startup Alliance will help the startup to connect them with amazing people through networking session. What startup Alliance need is the money and market. Startup Alliance helps to support a healthy startup ecosystem and they would also do their best to link them up with the right contacts to give them the right opportunity.
Lunit
Lunit have a number of record-breaking algorithms for general object detection and medical image and this is amazing and an eye opener for me because I did not expect that such things are possible. It helps physicians make accurate and objective diagnosis through those high technology machine learning technology and this can actually help and benefit those cancer patients as their illness can be discovered earlier rather than dragging it till the later stage which will get worser.
Bank Salad
Vision of bank salad is to gather all fragmented financial data in South Korea and their last goal is to build financial management services. Bank Salad application can help user to give credit card recommendations on what type they can use based on their user’s lifestyle and this is a good thing because it can help users to know which credit card actually suit them based on their spending. With the credit card recommendations given to users, perhaps this will be better for them as some credit cards can help them to earn rebates which will be beneficial for them and they will not miss out on it. How bank salad make their app known to users is through the social media and their number of apps download since last Dec increase till 50000.
VCNC (between)
I learnt that it does not matter how much of foresight and planning you have for the company but it's important to have a competent team to work towards the vision of the company in order to ensure the success and quality of the project.
Startup Alliance
I like how startup alliance provides a pretty, conducive place for startups to hold startups to hold events.
Lunit
I like that this company put all their brains together to serve for a good use (healthcare sector) for the society.
Banksalad
I learnt that scalability is important to the project's efficiency and that company should make it as a goal before development or production of product or service.
VCNC - Between
[1 Line Summary] Messaging features when incorporated with other features correctly, can propel the application to greater heights.
I was really looking forward to visiting Value Creators & Company (VCNC) as I believe whatever they have developed so far is relatively relatable to me. In my opinion, I feel they have targeted a niche market in couples and have successfully created and captured value for and from them respectively. It was pretty interesting to find out how VCNC as a company had tried out different products initially and failed way before the launch of their first successful application, Between. This clearly shows how there are many areas that a startup can venture into and the challenging part is to sieve out the ones that actually have value and work in the long-run. In 2011, Between was born and it has been pretty successful, gathering almost 16 million downloads. One interesting thing I picked up was the term “FOMO” which means the fear of missing out. I believe that such a term is increasingly used to explain the herd mentality that people have when deciding whether to use Between or not. Overall, VCNC has proven that they are a company that requires constant development to keep themselves relevant in their industry.
Startup Alliance
[1 Line Summary] Good accelerators should be able to manage and allocate resources amongst startups.
The second visit of the day was to Startup Alliance who is all about connecting startups to other startups. Their main goal is to enrich the startup ecosystem in Korea and help startups go global if possible. As a company, they mainly organize 3 types of activities, namely: Coffee Club, Book Club and Lunch Club. Kidae, Director of Startup Alliance, mentioned about how startups can easily meet with each other through such monthly meetings over coffee and lunch. He also brought up the role of the government in providing external incubator programs to help speed up the growth of startups. In my opinion, it is indeed vital to invest heavily in such accelerator programs especially if the startup has no other available resources. At the same time it also depends how much investment Startup Alliance is willing to invest in.
Lunit
[1 Line Summary] Deep learning techniques can be used to create meaningful predictive models for healthcare.
Lunit, founded in 2013, is a platform that aims to transform cancer diagnostics by using deep learning and clinical data. It was the first time that I've witnessed a startup that deals with health care with such detail and interest. In fact, their rationale for such an application is to increase the rate of detecting different types of cancer at an early stage. What I found interesting was how seamless the application looked during the demo. It was so simple: just upload a x-ray image of your chest and the system will automatically indicate the possible areas of infection. Overall, the amount of potential Lunit has is yet to be fully discovered and I'm curious to see how it will impact the health care industry in the future.
BankSalad
The last visit of the day was spent at Ranist Co and it was a fulfilling experience to get to know more about the fintech industry. CTO, Sunghyun, shared with us more about the origins of the company about how they tried building a Korean style LinkedIn and failed. I found it interesting that the aim of banksalad is to solve the inequality of information due to the multiple credit card companies present in Korea. Their approach of ranking the top credit cards that bring the most value to the customer is based on customers' indicated spending patterns. In my opinion, I believe this application is still relatively new and would have to stick around for another few years to get a better evaluation of whether such a service is beneficial and desired.
Between is an app for couples to share moments together.
It symbolises a close relationship and commitment in a significant relationship. #makeitofficial I was actually quite surprised to hear that the team’s startup journey was relatively smooth and did not encounter much challenges. Personally I feel the start is always the hardest, there are many uncertainties, lack of support and funding. After their first successful attempt with Between, they have now proceed to develop WhereTwo which provides dating suggestions for couples. It is evident that the team had put in a lot of effort in the whole planning process.
Startup Alliance
From the presentation, we learnt that the government actually provide a lot of support to the startups. The increased funding from govement contributed to the growth of startups and there were rules to protect the local industry. Big companies like Samsung are not interested to buy small startups because they already have a lot of subsidiaries. If the startups fail, it will usually merge and form bigger company like SMEs.However, the success rate of the startups in Korea is comparable to Silicon Valley. Many successful founders of startups actually serve as advisers to help other startups. Also, an interesting fact comparing Japanese and Korea work culture was shared. For instance, an employee in Japan company tend to be able to stay until retirement while an employee in Korea usually gets fired after their 40s.
Lunit
Ranked 5th in works largest image recognition challenge. It aims to make a disrupting software - transforming cancer diagnostics by using deep learning and large scale clinical data The business model is to make a machine and let the data define the cancer pattern. Research shows that 32% cancer patients and 26.5% cancer patients missed in mammographing screening and chest X ray screening respectively therefore Lunit sees the opportunity to create something that can identify the cancer signs earlier. I personally feel this startup is quite different from the usual startups such as messaging app and process is more complicated because they would require to go through more strict process and regulations as it can affect human life.
Maru 180
Do not not only have startups in the buildings but also venture capital and accelerator in the bridling. Easier for them to mingle. Startup ecosystem in this building
Bank Salad
Their initial idea was hoping to be Korea’s LinkedIn however it failed. However, this incident actually inspire them to do their current idea which is to recommend customers according to their lifestyle.Their aim is to gather all fragmented data in Korea and to become centralized hub of financial data.However, I think that Rainist Co could have do more research while developing their idea and plan for further development.
VCNC
- Cultural difference between countries how technology can be embedded as part of culture.
A startup at their mature stage with established user base. Interesting to find out that the company adopts the scrum methodology for its team of 20+ developers. Between success is already part of young Koreans culture and at an intimate place in their hearts. Their startup philosophy also resonates with me as seen from the right.
Startup alliance
- Role of associations within Korea economy, they act as the voice of industry they represent.
As part of Naver's CSR startup alliance is aiming to be a association for startups. Their responsibilities includes organising talks, networking events that connects entrepreneurs and investors. Speaking to their manager Ms. Nari, her exposure to plenty of startup talks and networking events help her grow as a person, unlike her previous career in the government which was rigid and routine.
Lunit
- Regulations regarding deep learning technologies are catching up with times
With little expectations about the company, Lunit surprised me with their level of technical depth and meaningful vision. It is my aspiration to solve today's problems with deep tech.
Maru180
- Embracing the open "living room" mindset
A startup incubator which houses investors together with startups they provide a conducive environment for start ups to grow. I particularly liked the model of FuturePlay who invest in high technology companies.
Rainist - BankSalad
- Understood the complexity of credit cards rewards system and the effort needed to design a suitable data model.
It was fun to enjoy dinner with the employees, we compared life in Seoul and Singapore, I noticed many similarities like price of living and dating culture.
Value Creators and Company
- It is an emotional communication service. The founders identified their strengths, that they all were good at building social networking and messenger platforms. With that, they came up with the app ‘Between’ which has functionalities such as chat, photo album, calendar, and anniversary reminders.
- As the founder uses the number of active users as one of the key KPIs to track the success of his application, he credits the high number of active users to the chat functionality.
- With the huge success of Between, they made plans for an upcoming application that complements the Between app, WhereTwo. The user base for the WhereTwo app is from Between, however WhereTwo is a separate application compared to having WhereTwo being integrated into Between. The reason for separating it out into a separate application is due to the company wanting to separate the core functionalities out. - They marketed their application through searching for companies with the similar number of user base and form partnerships to promote each other’s application. This done repetitively allows their company’s reach to almost double every single time.
Startup Alliance
- It is a social responsibility program conducted under NAVER, where they help venture startups through organizing seminars, networking sessions and community events. Examples of events are the Coffee club, Book Club, Lunch club and Global activity. The clubs are basically networking events where startups present and pitch their ideas, and get reviewed by startup industry experts. Global activity such as Demoday, will be where investors select about 20 startups who will pitch their startup with a possibility of getting funded.
- They are the middleman linking incubators and accelerators to startups, which is similar to other startup communities such as D. Camp, Google Campus, Maru180 and D2 Naver.
- They differentiate themselves through advocacy work.
- They partner up with Naver and the government to help actively raise funds for the startups. They promote entrepreneurship through finding funding for the startups as if the entrepreneurs were to spend less money on the startup, if the startup idea were to fail, there will a lower amount of cost involved, thus entrepreneurs will be more willing to try again.
- An interesting thing learnt about startups is that when they fail, operations do not just stop there and close down, but there is also a possibility that they merge with other startups with similar portfolios.
Lunit
- Their vision is transforming cancer diagnostics by using deep learning and large scale clinical data. Currently the company is focusing on improving cancer screening through the use of unsupervised machine learning algorithm compared to the common supervised machine learning algorithms which radiology programs are using out there.
- They have two market adoption strategies; firstly to increase the efficiency to mammography screening thus helping screening centres lower their cost, and secondly to target lesser developed countries where there is a huge shortage of a lack in radiologist.
- Their machine learning algorithm is also very scalable to detect other diseases which uses the similar imaging type for radiography.
BankSalad
- Their vision was to increase information accessibility in terms of credit card rewards as they found the reward system for credit cards to be very complicated with many terms and conditions. By inputting the card type and expenditure patterns, the web application is able to analyse the user’s spending and recommend the ideal type of credit card for the user.
- They earn by collecting commission fee from users applying for cards through being referred from their website and collect monthly fee from the card companies for using their platform.
Between
I learnt that money is the arsenal to dating. I personally think that this app may be another cause of friction in romantic relationships.
Startup Alliance
I like that the company provides pro bono services to the start ups registered under them. This serves as a great help because legal services are not cheap.
Lunit
The technology introduced by Lunit is very amazing and ingenious. This may help save millions of lives in the future thus increasing their impact on humanity.
Banksalad
I learnt that social media is used to bring users to the service provided by banksalad.
VCNC
Their morning stand up scrum meeting was eye opening and I love this concept very much. Starting the morning afresh with goals.
Startup alliance
I love their idea of having coffee, book and lunch clubs. It is a good idea to bring people together. Moreover, they offered complimentary legal and accounting services for startups which is quite necessary as startups may not have enough funds.
Lunit
Their prototype is impressive as it could shift the paradigm of how we detect tuberculosis and breast cancer in future. In areas where there are lack of these specialization, this technology could be a compliment in the future.
Bank Salad
the company name allows me to remember what their company does, which is to have different types of vegetables/ingredients (credit cards) in one bowl(website)
VCNC | Between
Prior to this visit, I had no idea that VCNC had multiple failed platforms in the past. Yet, they are able to keep their spirits high and quickly adapt to market needs which led to them to Between.
Knowing What do you want to do? How do you want to do it? and What kind of difference do you want to make? is important when starting a startup. and when you have achieved those initial goals like VCNC has done, you aim for the next goal and the next in order to grow. Their ultimate vision is to be the app for significant lasting relationships. This consists of the three more significant stages in a relationship: Dating -> Marriage -> Have Kids! D:
This visit was very interesting because so many good questions were asked during QnA so I shall focus on one question I found very helpful. So how did Between increase their number of users?
- When Between was at 100k users. They look for other companies who are also at 100k users. VCNC will then promote them and they return the favour.
- This was done repetitively until they eventually increased in numbers
- Then they started working with bigger companies
Another interesting point was that marketing is tailored to local markets. The example given was on Thailand where they created a hashtag and asked users to post their between app screen shot with the hashtag "#icommited". They managed to attract a few influential Instagram users and by having them also take part in this, many other people followed suit and downloaded the app as a result.
This just shows that there is no one way to doing a certain thing and I am wowed by how creative they have been in doing this.
Startup Alliance
Startup Alliance is an incubator that acts as the middle man between startups and VCs who have the means to fund these startups.
During QnA, it was interesting understanding why Japanese companies are more willing to invest in startups in Korea as compared to the ones in their own country. It boiled down to the how the culture in the startup scenes differed in the two countries. In Japan, people have high job securities and only retire in their 60s. In contrast, people in Korea are kicked out of their jobs in their early 40s. Due to the lack in job security, people are greatly motivated to start their own businesses and this in turn cultivates a rich and dynamic startup community.
Lunit
I had no expectations when I came to Lunit but after getting to know what they do, I am extremely excited for them and cancer patients around the world. I hope that theyre technology will be able to help less developed countries where qualified radiologists are not available.
BankSalad
They made 30 prototypesto arrive at where they are now... wow...
VCNC
Learning Points
- Never be afraid to try, trial and error is the path to success. I would be able to refine and narrow what works and what does not. In addition, projects that failed may not mean that it has zero value. It can be a stepping stone. In VCNC's case, they had plenty of chat messaging knowledge after 'failing' in the messaging market, currently dominated by KakaoTalk.
- Trial and error is complemented by failing fast. Learn from what went wrong and move forward.
- Applying what you've learnt. VCNC applied what they've learnt from their previous messaging application into Between.
- Step back and identify the core of the project. VCNC identified their application core capabilities and made WhereTo seperate from Between.
- Capitalize on what you do best or have succeded. VCNC used information they have gathered from Between to propel WhereTo forward.
Startup Alliance
Learning Points
- Government and Naver are actively helping startups to get connected and accelerate them into the industry.
- Just like Google Campus @ Seoul, never be afraid to ask. There might be people willing to help.
- Startups does not really fail in Korea. They usually get acquired by other firm and merge together.
Lunit
Learning Points
- Understand the core problem and tackle it. In Lunit's case, they identified that human inevitable miss out certain diagnostic due to human error.
- Be bold and switch path when required. Lunit changed their algorithm when they discovered deep learning even after investing in it heavily. Sunk cost should never affect rationality.
Bank Salad
Learning Points
- Opportunities can be found by solving complex issues that nobody wish to solve.
- Know your own limitation and possible pitfalls. i.e. Rainist know that they are not able to stop customers from going to the banks directly.
Between
Between is a dating app for couples to share moments together. It has even exceeded 10 million downloads just within 3 years. Its primary market is Asia. I feel that this is a very different dating app as compared to other dating apps because it belongs exclusively to two users and it has basic but useful functions like chat, calendar etc. The company even created its own unique stickers to enhance the appeal of the chat function. I think it's a really smart idea of VCNC to take advantage of the character of females who tend to desire exclusivity by their boyfriends. So if their boyfriends do not download the app, it would mean to the girlfriend that she is not important. They even included analytics in their chat function to show how frequent their chat conversation is which really shows how much effort the users put in to nurture the relationship.
Startup Alliance
Korea is home to many successful IT companies. There are many more internet companies than ever before and Startup Alliance is a startup that focuses on helping the startup community to succeed. Their philosophy is "Connecting Amazing People". Thus, they provide free working space and seek funding opportunities for startups. They hold 3 regular schedule meetings namely:
1. Coffee Club
2. Book Club
3. Lunch Club
The main purpose of these meetings is for startups to network and build connections. They believe that if startups have access to the right resources to develop and grow, this is further enhance their success.
Lunit
Lunit is a startup that aims to implement their cancer screening algorithm to the local hospitals in order to help doctors detect cancerous tumors.
Here are some of the facts:
1. Cancer screening (Preventive Medicine)
Breast cancer
- 32% cancer patients missed in mammography screening
Ling cancer
- 26.5% cancer patients missed in chest X-ray screening
Why we are missing cancers? 1. Early stage cancer is small and hidden 2. Radiologist's condition varies in time 3. We don't know every possible cancer pattern in medical images
Their goal is to lower cost and maximize the number of uses of such screening for early detection of cancerous tumors.
I really like like what they're doing as it is very meaningful and it would help a lot of people. I hope that they will take off in developing countries especially as that is where such healthcare services is really needed. Although it is said that this new technology might replace radiologists, I feel that it might actually help to compliment their job. I hope that they get to achieve what they aimed to do as it would really help the great masses especially the developing countries which do not have access to expensive healthcare facilities.
Bank salad
They tried a LinkedIn similar app but failed in 2013. So Bank salad started in 2014. The inspiration came from the fact that a flight ticket can be bought just using credit card reward.
Reward system - complicated (many conditions)
Increase information accessibility
Input credit card and expenditure
Analyze spending patterns
Future: installment saving/ deposit financial product recommendation
The birth of this startup stemmed from an inspiration that a flight ticket can just be bought via a credit card reward. They were astonished by this simplicity and thus wanted to do more to simplify and streamline the finances of consumers. However, I feel that they should do something to ease the complexity of their algorithm. Because whenever there's a new credit card, they need to alter their algorithm over and over again which is really time consuming. They should also try to be more active in targeting their users instead of passively waiting for people to download their app. I get that they do not receive advertisements at all because they want the consumers to believe in the authenticity of the product which is something I'm really proud of because most companies these days are just aiming for profit.
VCNC
VCNC’s between application is a private and secure way for couples to store and share their memories, providing an exclusive communication channel just between two special people. My impression and key take away is that data and analytics is very important. I found that they have very clear goals that was backed by a lot of data analysis. Personally, I feel that having a good analysis of data would enable one to make better decisions and formulate better strategies. In addition, I was impressed on how they were comfortable in trashing a bad project and how they were able to pick themselves up and try again.
Startup Alliance
Startup Alliance is similar to Spring Singapore in a way that it exist to enrich the Korean startup ecosystem and help Korean startups go global. It is a joint effort between the private sector, the South Korean government’s Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning. “Connecting Amazing People” is one of the goals of Startup Alliance where it acts as a connector to bridge startups with other organization. When the speaker mentioned that the Coffee Club session starts at 7.45am, I was amazed at how people are still coming to the session despite the early timing. It struck to me then and there that if you want to learn from people and gain the golden nuggets of their success, one would need to change their mindset to things and be willing to work hard for it. At the end of the day, running a startup is not a 9 to 5 job, it is a 24 hour business that requires tremendous amount of time and effort.
Lunit
Lunit is a medical diagnosis company that is towards data driven medicine. They aim to help physicians make accurate and objective diagnosis through machine learning technology. The stuff that Lunit is doing is very noble and has the potential to improve the life of so many people through early detection. Having lost relatives twice last year due to late detection, the visit to Lunit was one that was sombre yet filled with hope. At least there are people out there that has recognize and acknowledge that current medical diagnosis needs improvement and that machine learning technologies can extend human ability beyond limitation of time and physical constraints. The key takeaway that I got from Lunit is that having a good team is vital to the success of a company. Look at them, they are a bunch of experts in their domain (Most of them holds a Master from KAIST). Furthermore, Lunit business model is very hard to replicate due to the medical industry being a very niche market that requires deep researching and knowledge.
Bank Salad
Bank Salad is a finance application that recommends users a credit card based on spending patterns. Their goal is to be a source of clarity for all of life’s financial decision. I found their application to be interesting and I could relate to how it provides value to the users. In the past, people bank or stick with a certain bank based on trust. These days, people choose a bank based on how much value they can get out of the bank. These value can be in the form of discounts and rebates. Having a platform like Bank Salad has empower users to make informed decision on Credit Cards that would better suit their lifestyle.
VCNC
Value Creator and Company, VCNC is founded in 2010 but the products back then weren't successful. All those didn't stop the company from coming out with new idea. Their vision is to entrench both real and offline based relationships through an emotional communications services. Between was born in November 2011. They got KakaoTalk founder as their mentor and had contributed to the success. It is an application for couples and have more than 16 millions using it, will the biggest market in Korea followed by Japan. They want Between to symbolise love and going out. The latest application, WhereTwo, aims to recommend dating food places and have gathered the data from their existing Between users because getting from Google or Yelp is illegal.
The quote "Fails faster, Iterate often" is really something that startups should apply because I feel that being new to business, there bound to be failures. In order to go further and be successful, learning from your failure and move on. Next, to seek mentorship from someone in the same industry does help in providing some best practices guides. Lastly, creative and impactful marketing do help in influencing and attracting users. Marketing & branding are the face of the product/company. This can be done through social media since it has great influence in recent years. For example, VCNC just made use of hashtag - #makeitofficial to encourage couple to use Between for couples to be committed and this is used to target the female community. The result of this was that many participated and top influencers were included as well. Also, it is also important f or social startups to understand the sociological and psychological aspects and leverage on it if needed.
Startup Alliance
Startup Alliance is a startup community that provides meeting spaces for startups companies and venture capitalists. This space is opened by the government and Naver. It aims l club, lunch club and book club where they get to mingle with others and exchangpe knowledge. Others events such as conferences and global activities were organised to meet people from all around the world.
From this visit, I can see that the entrepreneurship circle in Korea is expanding quickly with so many spaces created for opportunities to network with people. Also, for job security, Japanese companies will come to Korea and bring back good startup. And one interesting fact I learnt was that those companies that were brought to Japan could spend their life in the company up till 60 years old as compared to Singapore where you will be squeezed till you are dry and will ask you to leave at 40 years old.
I feel that the complimentary accounting and legal consultation given to these companies really helped the startups especially so when the Fintech industry is already having legal problems in Korea and big companies are not liking the expansion of startups.
Lunit
Learning unit, Lunit in short is a startup that is focusing on breast and lung cancer screening diagnostics through deep learning and large scale clinical data. It is founded in August 2013 with only 11 members. 32% of the cancer patients missed their mammography screening and 26.5% of the lung cancer patients missed out on their chest screenings. This is very important because lung cancer grows very fast and the survival rate is less than 20% and is likely to increase to 50%.
I find that this company is really different from the rest because they are building an application that deals with the healthcare Industry. It is not an industry that startups will touch on. They have developed a simple, easy to use application that would definitely served the radiologists well. It is because of the deep learning algorithm that they have made use of to analyse the X-Ray. Although they started not Long, what they have provided is really good and I'm looking forward to seeing their applications running in different hospitals and help to save lives.
Bank Salad
Rainist's mission is to be the source of clarity for all financial decisions. It is established in 30 June 2012. It first started out to develop a Korea LinkedIn but it failed. Bank Salad is the next project that the company embarks on. The CEO came out with this idea on his trip to Japan. He was surprised to find out that the person sitting beside him got his flight tickets via credit card. The algorithm of it is to determine the most amount of savings that one gets depending on the spending transactions.
And if there's a new credit card in the market, they have to revamp their business model. I felt that this might not be sustainable personally if the company wants to expand to include new credit cards and platform. The employees will have to repeat the whole process of development. It might also be difficult to bring it global because of the different regulations in foreign countries. I feel that since this is still their early stage of the project, they could look into how to better their business model and also to find a way to interpret transaction data instead of using SMSes.
VCNC
It feels great to be able to meet the team behind the application I use, Between. I feel that they have really solid products in place, including the Where Two app as a beta tester. What shocked me was the effort that they put in to study research papers and how much they understood the sociological and psychological aspects, such as targeting females with the “fear of missing out”, FoMO.
I believe in the idea of “one app, one purpose”, which led them to developing two separate apps. One could argue that combining Between and Where Two could make things easier for couples, but I beg to differ. Take WeChat for example. You can practically do EVERYTHING within the app, but the tradeoff is the ease of use, and how fast you can get to accomplish a task. The more features available in a single application, the higher the learning curve, and to make things easier, there needs to be even more effort put into heuristics analysis to smoothen out the entire user experience. The separate VCNC apps actually makes it easier to attract couples!
They were having their daily scrum while we were there – this was a great sight since I was exposed to scrum during my internship, as well as during IS480. It was something that I could easily relate with. Looking at the scrum board really brings back memories. You could also tell that software development teams in different countries actually work in similar ways – people actually do follow the best practices no matter where they are.
Startup Alliance
Startup Alliance (SA) feels like a more formal Google Campus, designed for just meetings instead of working. This company feels like a CSR effort by Naver since Naver pays SA, and SA does not require anything in return for the startups that they help. I feel that SA helps in being the voice of the startup community through the three different kinds of organised meetings: Coffee Club, Book Club, and Lunch Club.
I also got to understand how the emergence of the iPhone actually changed the startup structure in korea. It never occurred to me how much the iPhone impacted the startup industry – and I believe most of us took it for granted and never gave it much thought.
Looking at this company and Google Campus, it seems that there is a vast difference between how startups can work in Singapore and in Korea. In Singapore, no matter where you go, you will bear significant costs for the space rental. But in Korea, there seems to always be free work or meeting spaces. This difference is huge since it affects how much of the startup's capital can be used for other resources. The rental cost saved could mean hiring of additional talent, or purchasing of equipment.
Lunit, Learning Unit
A startup full of geniuses - I have never seen such a strong team of co-founders and members, where all of them are either PhD holders or PhD candidates. What's more mind blowing is the fact that all of them are from KAIST, a University located in the Silicon Valley of Korea.
During my Polytechnic days, I have worked on medical software projects, and I can understand the pain that they have to go through, from the gathering of data to proving that their solution can have an impact in the medical industry. Although unspoken, even if the tool can be used in the medical industry, it will never be a replacement for radiologists, but a compliment tool to. There still needs to be a doctor making the decisions since there is no way to hold the software responsible, unless Lunit is willing to bear all responsibility, which I do not think is reasonable. They have taken image recognition to a whole new level, and I believe we will soon see this product used in the medical industry.
"When you have a good product, then the money will come", was what the CEO said when asked if he is in this for the money. It is good to hear that they're actually committed to refining their solution.
Rainist, BankSalad
It seems like they have built a really useful solution and put in a lot of effort in their user experience design. Who else prototypes 30 times before settling on a design?
However, I feel that they should try finding a way to make things easier for themselves. Right now, every time a new credit card is released, they will have to capture the data manually, and if there is a slight difference from other credit cards, they got to change the whole data model. This is extremely tedious and it would be great if there was an easier way to do this.
When I asked about the most challenging aspect in the development of the application, the CTO said that it was capturing the transaction data. They do this by capturing the free form SMS that consumers receive when making transactions. It is a really innovative solution, but this only works on the Android as iOS does not allow for message access. So I then checked with him if there were plans for an iOS application, he said there was, and I highlighted this challenge to him. What they plan to do is to make use of the iOS clipboard manager, so consumers will have to do a copy on the message they receive. This quick and easy solution could be the best solution, unless there is a way for them to capture transaction notifications with in the app itself, which may not be possible at all.
VCNC - Between
“When you want to create a startup, it’s important for you to have your own vision & your partners must have similar vision too”
VCNC first started their business by introducing tablet PC. However, it did not take off as this sector is not very well received in Korea. VCNC then tried to make use of tablet PC and created a product which was targeted at children and it also failed. They gave up these 2 projects in 6 months.
VCNC decided to shift their focus and created a dating app called “Between” which is globally used around the world. The purpose why they have created this application was to create an enrich real & offline relationship through an emotional communication service. They believe that 1 person will usually talk more to the most important person in their life. Up to date, they have more than 16 million users whereby 230k comes from Singapore. Their largest audiences based from South Korea followed by Japan. I feel that the reason why they are so successful is due to the fact that they understand their consumer’s needs well enough to create a platform that will cater to them. For example, they have a calendar for couples to plan their schedule together, they allow couples to keep track of moments from the past and also provide activity history. In addition, they also create this “special feelings” that will make users use their application (symbol of going out/love).
They are also releasing an upcoming application known as “WHERETWO” which I believe will be as successful as between due to the fact that they have a strong consumer based.
The presentation stressed the importance of having a vision as it guides you on where your business is heading to and what it will look like when it's arrived. It will really help to force entrepreneurs to know what is their ambitions for their business. This is one of the reasons that made the business so successful to where they are today.
STARTUP ALLIANCE
“Build startup companies as a startup voice”
Startup alliance is another incubator that we get to visit this trip. It aims to connect people because money and market are what startups truly needs. They have arranged several meet ups (Coffee Club, Book Club and Lunch Club) for their members which are conducted at various time of the day. These events are conducted by different professionals (e.g. 2 entrepreneurs, famous authors, well-known speaker). Kidae who is the Director of Startup Alliance educated us that most of the time, most “failed” startups are usually being acquired or merged with other companies.
LUNIT
"Towards data-driving medicine"
Laiho and I were in charge of Lunit. The reason why we chose Lunit as compared to the rest of the healthcare sector startup was because we showed great curiosity in the algorithm that they used. Lunit is a company that transforms cancer diagnostics by using deep learning. As there is limited information about their business, there were a lot of doubts that we had on how their product works in reality.
I am amazed by how they have come out with pattern recognition machine learning by making machine self-define cancer cells. These machines are so smart that they learnt by themselves to identify how cancer pattern looks like. They have made things more efficient for the society. Because of what they have built, radiologist does not need to spend too much time on manual discovery instead they can further focus on treating the patients! In addition, the software that they have created is extremely straight forward & user-friendly with short processing time (even someone with no IT background will have no difficulties with it)
The team in Lunit amazed me as none of them actually studied medicine related courses and they are doing so well in this industry! Their product is 85.3% accurate in detecting visual imaging!!! Their determination and hard work by making a trip down to the hospitals EVERYDAY to collect clinical data make sure that their software is accurate. Not only that, they also aim to lower cost for single use & maximize the number of usage (even that such technology may be sold for about $10k but they want to make it more affordable to medicine institutions). I can see that their main aim is to make an impact to the society & that is definitely something that I truly admire about them.
BANK SALAD
“Source of clarity for financial decisions”
As the Korea credit card reward system in Korea is complex, Bank salad is a company that provides recommendations on credit cards based on the customer’s needs. They automate spending patterns based on transactions. The CTO of Bank Salad, Sunghyun, also shared with us about their challenges faced when first service, a product which was similar to LinkedIn, has failed. It has made me realized that it is normal for startups to fail for the 1st time. However, what is most important is that the company don not give up despite their failure.
Oh well, I really wish that there will be a similar service in Singapore! It will be a great help to me in future.
Startup Alliance
From this visit, I think that Startup Alliance is basically doing CSR, to contribute to the society by provide avenue for startup companies to gain funds from investors. Funding is important for startup companies for them to expand and grow. Also, I have learnt that Startup Alliance acts as a ‘middleware’ for startups companies in the incubator programs and the accelerators, to allow mentorship between them and possibly reduce the risk of failure.
Lunit
I think Lunit has a great ambition in the medical industry. The team has worked hard to reach an achievement. The demo during the visit has impressed me. Their capabilities to anaylse thousands of data within seconds with high accurate could.
Between
I think that VCNC is successful is mainly due to their different marketing strategy they have adopted for their applications, Between and WhereTwo, for example, partnering with companies, free movie ticket campaign and rewarding user. Apart from attracting more users, these could also retain existing users.
Bank Salad
The business model is good, but it might be hard to expand in the future as there are still many manual process.
