"There is a common thread among successful founders. First, immerse yourself in one item for three years, and meet three reliable partners. You also need to have more than three times the commercialization funds than your original plan to withstand difficult times."
The words of Cho Han-gyo, director of human resources development at the Korea SMEs and Startups Agency (KOSME), who has guarded the startup field for 33 years, were anything but light. He joined KOSME in 1992 and, after working in planning, personnel, and corporate finance, set important milestones on the front lines of startups. He helped establish the nation's first startup incubator center, and in 2010, when the decline in youth entrepreneurship and the crisis of aging corporations emerged, he planned the Youth Startup Academy.
"I believed it was crucial for startups to overcome the 'death valley'—the crisis in the early stage of business. It generally takes three to five years to commercialize an idea, and many go bankrupt during this period because no sales occur. We designed the Youth Startup Academy to shorten the commercialization period. We introduced a one-on-one dedicated faculty system and, for the first time in a government program, operated a system that could still fail evaluation even after a support decision."
The Youth Startup Academy is called a "second-generation startup model" that goes beyond providing space to combine mentoring and coaching. The cumulative number of graduating corporations is 8,774, and the cumulative sales of graduating corporations over the past five years have exceeded 4 trillion won. By combining accelerators that provide various support such as funding, mentoring, and networking to early-stage founders, it was expanded and reorganized in 2020 into the Global Startup Academy. Including this year, 297 corporations have graduated, generating about 165.2 billion won in sales and creating 2,161 jobs. Forty-four corporations have entered overseas markets, and export value also reached 16 billion won.
"There are limits to corporate growth with only the domestic market, and the pace of change in products and technology is so fast that the strategy of succeeding as a domestic corporation first and then entering overseas no longer works. It takes a long time to go abroad. You have to target both domestic and overseas from the beginning. Recently, founders also have English and technical capabilities, so they can fully compete on the global stage."
He cited packaged support and a global network as differentiators of the Global Startup Academy. With 26 overseas bases established to help founders go abroad, the overseas expansion experience of senior founders—including collaboration with global conglomerates such as the cosmetics corporation L'Oréal—becomes an important asset for early-stage founders. Recently, in cooperation with the Polsky Center at the University of Chicago in the United States, a pilot project was launched to dispatch deep-tech startups to overseas incubation programs.
"We are going a step further by strengthening collaboration and linkages. Government-related agencies for small and midsize corporations and large corporations are working together to improve the completeness of startup products and to pioneer sales channels. We have transferred the model we are building to other countries such as Uganda and Colombia. Vietnam is benchmarking the Youth Startup Academy model in its own policy."
Director Cho witnessed various success stories while handling startup-related work. A drone company he attracted while serving as Jeonbuk Deputy Minister posted 5 billion won in sales in just one year, and Auto& Incorporation, a corporation that develops and distributes automotive accessories established in 2008 as an in-house venture of Hyundai Motor, went public on the Kosdaq after going through the Youth Startup Academy.
"It seems that startups that rack up multiple small successes get on track. Corporations that hit it big at once do not last long. To that end, solidarity among startups is also important. I have seen many cases where expanding business networking among related industries reduced the risk of failure. We are building this networking."
He also stressed the importance of changes in the startup environment. Even if they fail, people must be given the opportunity to get back up so they can start businesses to their heart's content. That is also why KOSME supports not only youth startups but also restarts. The idea is that government policy must back the will to boldly commercialize one's own idea.
"In the selection process for the Global Startup Academy, we focus on whether applicants are 'challenging and innovative entrepreneurs.' The most important thing is the startup CEO's will to commercialize. Understanding of the market and competence are a given. After that, the CEO must consider the size of the bowl that will hold the corporation and the mode of growth. As sales grow, a corporation's constitution changes, and if the CEO's bowl remains at the 5 billion won level, no matter how good the opportunity, they cannot hold more than that. The place that grows that bowl is the Global Startup Academy."