South Korea’s thriving startup environment provides an abundance of opportunity for New Zealand firms who want to take their innovations worldwide. Join us to learn why Korea is a great place to begin one’s quest for success.
What's it all about?
The Korea Tech Speaker Series 2 will showcase why South Korea’s dynamic startup network, which provides support and helps investors to find partners, makes the country an ideal place to invest. The speakers for this series will profile Korea’s startup scene, the government support available for new businesses and the accelerator and foreign startup networks which are there for Kiwi firms to leverage. The speakers will also use case studies to demonstrate the opportunities available.
The speaker series will kick off with welcome remarks from Nicole Upchurch, Chair, New Zealand-Korea Working Group, who will discuss the great opportunities which exist between both countries.
Join us! – This TechWeek TV programme is focused on New Zealand tech firms who want to expand in Asia and do business in South Korea.
View the event website for more information.
You can drop into this event at any time.
Speakers
Over the past 15 years, Nicole has helped prepare and transform some of NZ’s
largest companies through periods of unprecedented digital disruption and
change.
Her feeling is that we are on the precipice of the 4th Industrial Revolution
(4IR) with a tsunami of new (web 3.0) technology about to collide with
consumers and business models that will have unparalleled impact on our
lives.
She operates as an executive and advisor to a portfolio of businesses
operating at the bleeding edge of this digital revolution, covering multiple
verticals and markets. The companies she works with are pioneering new
business models which includes developing or leveraging 4IR: Artificial
Intelligence (Aider, Performance Lab); Blockchain (Centrality, PL^G); IoT
(Jasmy, TrackBack); Big Data (Causality); and Machine Learning (IoMob) –
with a strong focus on consumers.
4IR will provide tremendous opportunity for NZ’s businesses. Entities which
collaborate as part of an ecosystem are more likely to succeed as the tech
oligarchs have a significant advantage over us their sheer number of users
and data. With that in mind, she brings a fresh approach to governance; with
unique and unparalleled expose to both 4IR Tech and new business models we
see emerging.
The National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) devotes itself to
reinforcing the competitiveness of the ICT industry and contributes to
economic growth through the efficient support of and laying the groundwork
for industrial technology promotion.
The K-Startup Grand Challenge is a startup accelerator program conducted and
financed by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and NIPA. The program is an
initiative to support foreign startups that want to enter the Korean market.
The program has been promoting Korea as a leading startup business hub since
2016.
Jonghyun Lee is a Manager at NIPA – Global ICT Industry Division / Global
Startup Team. As an ICT and start-up specialist, he is currently working for
the K-Startup Grand Challenge as a marketing and open-innovation manager. He
majored in media engineering and social welfare in college and finished a
master's degree in international development. He is currently a Ph.D.
candidate in international development.
Nr2 is a search engine that finds the most promising start-ups for investors.
It enables informed decisions about technologies globally and gives local
entrepreneurs the best chance of succeeding across borders.
Jordan Monnet is one of France and China’s 40 under 40 in AI. Jordan’s
background is a combination of academia (PhD in Biophysics and Master’s in
International Finance from HEC) and business where he built a data science
team for a management consultancy firm and worked for a Beijing-based fund
structuring and implementing data-based market entry strategies for Western
technology companies.
Solomon Moos is heading the Korean office for Idinvest Partners and leads our
investor relations activity in Asia. Based in Seoul, Solomon is a
French-American binational and speaks Mandarin fluently. Before joining
Idinvest Partners in July 2016, Solomon worked at Allianz Global Investors,
as part of the Business Development department in charge of RFPs for
international institutional clients. Before that, Solomon was an RFP Manager
at Edmond de Rothschild Asset Management.
Solomon holds a master's degree in Financial Engineering from the
Sorbonne University, France, and a Diploma of Chinese Language and Culture
from the University of Hainan, China.
Seoul Startups is the biggest international startup community in Korea, with
1,300 members and growing. Based on the principles of inclusivity and
diversity, it offers a safe space for networking and discovering the Korean
startup scene, while adding a global splash to the local ecosystem.
Community mentoring programs, expert panel discussions, networking events
and insights into the tech industry are just some of the things offered.
Marta Allina (Poland) originally came to Korea 12 years ago as an exchange
student. Having graduated from Yonsei University Business School, she worked
for a few years for THE corporation, before deciding to pursue the path of a
community builder. She is now part of weave, a collective of changemakers
engaged in social impact projects, like ASAN SANGHOE, and is running Seoul
Startups, Korea's biggest international startup community.
DamoGO is a mobile app that helps restaurants, bakeries and grocery stores
efficiently sell the day's perfectly good, unsold food instead of
letting it go to waste. It aims to be an all-one-one superapp to give any
food that shouldn't be wasted a second chance by tackling the food
waste problem across every level of the food industry.
Lin Hwang, CEO of DamoGO, is a Korean-American who has been working as an
entrepreneur for 13 years in all levels of the food industry – In food
processing, distribution and import/export, and he also exclusively imported
the American restaurant franchise "The Halal Guys" into Korea. Lin
has worked closely with U.S. government food trade organizations, consulted
American food manufacturers to export their products into the Asian market
and was named 2011 Small Business Exporter of the Year in the state of
Maryland.
Lin has a B.A. in Economics from The Pennsylvania State University, an
M.B.A. in Marketing and Management from Fordham Business School, and also
studied at Peking University's Beijing International M.B.A. program
(BiMBA). He has been living in Korea since 2015.
Techstars is the global platform for investment and innovation. Founded in
2006, Techstars began with three simple ideas—entrepreneurs create the
future, collaboration drives innovation and great ideas can come from
anywhere. Today our mission is to make innovation accessible to everyone,
everywhere. We do this by connecting startups, investors, corporations, and
cities to create a more sustainable and inclusive world.
Eunse is a founder-turned investor and the Managing Director at Techstars
Korea Accelerator. Prior to joining Techstars, he founded a Los
Angeles-based VC firm ELEVEN:ZULU CAPITAL to invest in early stage tech
companies in the spaces of AI-powered enterprise software, human-device
interfaces and frontier technologies. He also taught strategy and
entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at Yonsei University and Yonsei
Global MBA. Eunse started his professional career in corporate and business
strategy and work with multiple global Tier 1 companies in IT, FMCG and
automotive industries, and also advised multiple agencies and institutions
of the Government of Korea on formulation and execution of the strategies
for the "Creative Economy."
