Global Entrepreneurs in Korea

As Asia’s 4th largest economy, South Korea continues to offer a competitive and transparent business environment driven by increased deregulation, entrepreneurial activity and foreign direct investments. Despite the recent surge in foreign investments, there are still many barriers to entrepreneurship in Korea. This is attributed to bureaucracies within the system, high setup costs and a prevailing negative attitude towards entrepreneurship including a strong aversion to the concept or risk and failure.

In this week’s fireside chat, Mr. Sherman Li, President of Enswers America, and guest host, Mr. David Lee, Co-Founder and Partner of Kstartup, will share their experiences as global entrepreneurs in Korea.

Founded in 2007, Enswers Inc. is an advanced audiovisual search technology company. Headquartered in Seoul, Korea with offices in Tokyo and San Francisco, Enswers is the leading provider of ACR (automatic content recognition) technology and is striving to dominate the “second screen” industry, providing extra contextual information to accompany televised content. A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Sherman Li holds a B.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford University. As a Stanford student, he was President of the Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society (ASES) and co-founded the ASES Global network. He then started a company, teaming with ASES delegates from Korea and Japan and launching in Korea. Prior to joining Enswers Inc., Mr. Li was the COO of Evixar, Inc. and was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Softbank Korea.

Our guest host, David Lee was one of the first 200 employees at Google, and he was the first executive to lead Google overseas. He launched Google’s offices in Korea, Japan, Greater China, Australia, UK, Germany, and Latin America. Currently a Venture Partner at SK Telecom Ventures, a corporate VC firm, Mr. Lee also co-founded the angel fund, XG Ventures, which has had over 11 acquisitions in the last couple of years to Facebook, Twitter, Google, AT&T, and Disney. Some of Mr. Lee’s past and current investments include Tapulous, Posterous, Twitter, Facebook, Kabam, Greplin, and others. He is an LP in Y Combinator and SV Angels Fund, sits on several boards, and co-founded one of the first start-up incubators in Korea, KStartup/SeoulSpace, in February 2009.

Immediately following the session, we’ll have a short-networking reception from 5:30 – 6:15PM.  This is the fourth session in the US-Asia Technology Management Center’s ten week seminar series on “Entrepreneurship in Asian High-Tech Industries.”

Presented by the US-Asia Technology Management Center in Stanford’s School of Engineering, with support from the Miner Foundation and major series support from ISI Dentsu of America.