Bon Kim was born in Seoul and from the age of seven, he spent much of his life abroad. At 13, he went to boarding school in Massachusetts. He was a varsity athlete in track and wrestling. When it came time for college, Kim stayed local and went to Harvard where he started a student magazine called the Current. Newsweek took the magazine over in 2001, a year after Kim graduated. He also interned at the New Republic. Kim enrolled in Harvard Business School in 2010 but dropped out a year later. He had been bitten by the e-commerce bug and wanted to start a business in Seoul. At the time, Groupon was a hot commodity and Kim set his sights on the daily deal model. Coupang became the 30th Groupon clone in South Korea. Kim registered as a limited liability company in the U.S. to make it easier to raise money from American investors. He spent nearly a million on advertising. However, he soon learned that daily deals are a lousy business model. Customer retention is nearly nil. By the summer of 2013, Kim had transformed Coupang into an e-Bay style site while experimenting with true e-commerce. Two years later, Coupang had $400 million in capital from Silicon Valley behemoths Sequoia Capital and BlackRock and had made a big commitment to its own inventory. Kim made a more than billion-dollar investment in logistics infrastructure. The new capital, which follows SoftBank’s initial $1 billion investment from June 2015, will be used to shore up technology platforms that will allow for faster deliveries, a one-touch payment system, and an AI function to provide purchase recommendations. South Korea has the second largest GDP in Asia. Almost everyone is on a smartphone and a high-speed network. Half of the country’s population lives in and around Seoul, making it easier for Coupang to deliver on their impressive promise of same day delivery.
