We have a huge audience of developers, engineers, and programmers who want to transition to becoming successful entrepreneurs. This conversation explores the journey of such a developer. Fantastic story! Sramana Mitra: Let's start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? What kind of circumstances? Aparna Dhinakaran: I was born in Chennai, India and my parents immigrated here when I was six months old. They immigrated all over – Boston, Chicago, Illinois. They settled down in the Bay Area. I really liked Math. That led me to go do a computer science degree at Berkeley. Sramana Mitra: What year did you graduate? Aparna Dhinakaran: I graduated in 2016. Sramana Mitra: What did you do when you came out? Aparna Dhinakaran: My first job was with Uber. In retrospect, I'm so glad that I did that. Uber was going through its growth phase. The company was doubling every six months. New orgs were being created. There's a reorg every six
Sramana Mitra: How many consumers do you have currently? KunHee Park: Five million. If I counted paid subscription, we have over one million. Sramana Mitra:
Sramana Mitra: You became the CEO of Kocowa? KunHee Park: No, CTO in the beginning. My original plan was to stay in the States for a year. After one year, they
Sramana Mitra: Then what happens? KunHee Park: I could not speak English at all at that time. It was my handicap. NDS is a global company. I could hear Indian
There's quite a bit of white space in the domain of regional language content. KunHee talks about Korean content. It should give you ideas that you can extrapolate into other languages. Sramana Mitra: Let's start from the very beginning. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? KunHee Park: I was born in Busan, South Korea. I majored in industrial engineering. I founded companies when I was still a university student. I dreamed about all the good entrepreneur experiences when I was a student during the dot-com bubble at the end of the 90's. Sramana Mitra: In the first dot-com bubble, you were not an entrepreneur yet? KunHee Park: Not yet. I was struggling to get a VC with my plan. Luckily, I found the opportunity to build a company. My colleague made a platform company. Sramana Mitra: Platform for what? KunHee Park: It was a translation e-commerce platform. At that time, we could see the price differences across countries. When I