My Founding Story of Cyworld.com

This is written by Yong Joon Hyoung, CEO of StoryBlender.com* My Founding Story of Cyworld.com1997. November, when I was on Ph.D course at Kaist (http://www.kaist.edu/as_global/as_gb_lopu/as_gb_lopu.html) , I started making the site ,peoplesquare, which was pre-name of cyworld.com now , with Mr Jung (Web Developer) whom I met when I was in military service those times, we didn’t have much money. I learned photoshop skill and designed the site myself. but it was so ugly that I worked part time job(Participated in Research project in NCA (http://www.nca.or.kr/eindex.htm ) about Virtual organization : Virtual Company Strategy Utilizing ERP and PDM on CALS environment) for making money to hire a web designer for peoplesquare.

At initial stage, we benchmarked the match.com for starting dating service. But We soon realized that match.com way couldn’t go well with Oriental culture. Because in America, especially on match.com culture, divorced women frankly registered they are divorced and have some children. In korea, in 1998 those kinds of culture we couldn’t imagine without pushing members to telling a lie. Online as anonymous users, they can tell they are rich and handsome. We couldn’t prevent those telling lies. So, that day, only anonymous dating service (don’t ask me who I am , but just enjoy~ ..) could exist. So I thought of the idea of Transformation of real society into online digital world. I thought that was possible because this society consists of Social network infra.

We have parents as first social network nodes as soon as we come out into this world. What is second nodes? Yes, brothers and sisters. As we grow up , we makes lots of nodes(relatives, alumni, circle friends, pre coworker, present colleagues, friends of relatives and colleagues etc..) So, I really believed this real society as conceptually social network. My main studying fields was ‘Trust based Information Sharing’ when I was on Ph.D course. That concepts originates from lots of articles including Harvard business reviews about ERP,PDM,SCM philosophy. Yep, Trust based information sharing is core infra for IT process based solution or service. When we unite this concept and Social network , then we can regard SN(social network) as a trust based information sharing channel. Perfect channel.

Yes! Fortunately, sixdegrees.com was then a fast growing site ,so I got the news about them. They were servicing six degrees of separation of Millgrams’ model. Wow… Of course I benchmarked them, but I had the philosophy of trust based information sharing and Personal Resource planner.(Vs. Enterprise Resource Planner) I regarded people as a big information resource (people they know, profile sharing like automatic addressbook similar to kukubox.com or plaxo.com , Sharing calendar ,car, music, bicycle,photo, movie,foods, restaurants,hospital and law service experience etc. As for example of mini case of trust based information sharing is..Hospital service review or amazon’s book reviews but we see sometimes that can be a lie or ads. ) and then if we can share this valuable experience or feelings about commodity or service on the basis of Social network infra, I thought SN service could produce lots of value added service as dating service, career service etc. (Only few years ago , in USA friendster.com or linkedin.com way SN service boomed up and growing you know..and cyworld.com now earns big money from social network based service ,MiniHompy,but it’s so virtual yet.)

And also, society consists of lots of groups like alumni, company, family etc. so We made Secret Club ,project club, alumni club functions etc. in the way of very real society transformation concept. (Later in 2000, iloveschool.com similar to classmates.com of America boomed up very fast , which was concentrating on alumni function of cyworld.com ) These days, Sharepoints of MS or http://www.grouper.com/ all based on these Personal Resource Planner concepts I think.. After we got some investments from Angel(?) , in 1999.10.26 we participated some Competitive Presentation for New BizConcept at Walker Hill Hotel. And we won the prize of Millennium Rookie for that concept of PRP and cyworld service. And one of contest judges who was a professor said he may want to install PRP concept into Harvard business review. And some month later I had resign CEO position for some reason.

And then cyworld.com was acquired 2 years ago, into SK telecommunications (http://www.sktelecom.com/eng/index.html ) at about 7 million dollars (I think it is very cheap though.comparing to big leaping revenues of cyworld.com after M&A.) After some additional big investment by SK into cyworld server infra and marketing and with the trend of a digital camera and phone camera effect, cyworld.com’s revenue quadrupled every year. I think koean investing market is not so wide and active for some round of investments. That’s why we should target to china and USA or Europe markets first for networked online business…

After some month later Adecco headhunter (http://www.adecco.com/ )…contacted me and said CEO of yahoo korea wants you, but then my resume was not so good comparing to new CTO resumes..and dropped by yahoo.com .(maybe Jerry Yang? ^^; ) And after that event, Neowiz.com CEO who was once my alumni at Kaist, introduced me to Michael who was then http://www.matchmaker.com/ board member. So, I started Oriental style dating service, http://www.saycupid.com/ ,where Michael, Neowiz and Yahoo CEO invested.

Saycupid started as quite paradigm shift way . Because , that time generally when we were singles, we felt as we had to have some lover , so we had to find someone . And that time, most marriage offline company requested resumes sorts official papers from customers for authentication of career, academic backgroud and not marital status. And offline marriage service was not so good ,not so bright image to general people, you know.. I wanted to change the meaning of Singles(exactly being alone without lover) very brighter directions.

So, we got slogan , “Enjoy your single life, Single community” with singles, you can have various activities like inline skating, snowboarding, hiphop dancing , Latin dancing or all kinds of interest. As you enjoy your hobby with singles or friends, if you fortunately find someone you want to love ,great, but you don’t have to find someone because at least you are enjoying your single life in quite productive way..(social networking, various member’s club hosting party, Main central party, various hobby or interests exercise. With good peoples... )

We didn’t request some sorts of papers for authentication, but we made that process automatic and convenient for customers. We started networking digitally to lots of university office or governments office for that purpose.. saycupid for authentication process for customers identity(career,school, marital status,photo ) is quite well defined using concept of SPR (social process reengineering Vs. BPR ) All these kinds of stuff will be perfectly Virtual soon I think, as government and school goes plugin based digital economy style service.(As Malone professor of MIT said..i like his articles about virtual organization or virtual economy concept )