Kim Beom-Su

Kim Beom-Su was born on January 26, 1979 in Seoul, South Korea, South Korea, is Chairman, Kakao. "Brian" Kim Beom-Su hit the jackpot with KakaoTalk, which has tens of millions of users using it for gaming, shopping and chatting. In 2014 the free smartphone messaging service announced plans to purchase publicly traded Internet company Daum Communications in an all-stock transaction, thus avoiding an IPO. In January 2016 it bought a majority stake in music outfit Loen Entertainment. That same year the South Korean government classified Kakao as a large company, making it subject to roughly 35 antitrust and competition regulations. It's the country's first technology startup to make it to the big leagues. Kim, who grew up in poverty, paid his way through Seoul National University by offering private tutoring, sometimes skipping meals to save money. After finishing with undergraduate and master's degrees in industrial engineering, Kim worked at Samsung before founding online gaming company Hangame in 1998. He merged that company with another Korean Internet outfit, Naver, in 2000, creating NHN, which would come to dominate the country's search and Web portal traffic. When smartphones arrived around 2009, he hit upon the idea of creating a messaging service that would outshine utilitarian SMS texts. He launched KakaoTalk a year later.
Kim Beom-Su is a member of Technology