What Silicon Valley Can Learn From Seoul

South Korean companies are building software for smartphones that’s chaotic, multifunctional and exciting — everything that American apps aren’t.

By JENNA WORTHAMJUNE 2, 2015

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Then, five months ago, he accepted an offer to work for Woowa Brothers, a South Korean company that runs a food-delivery start-up called Baedal Minjok. The job was great — but living in Seoul was nothing less than a revelation.

“When I was in S.F., we called it the mobile capital of the world,” he said. “But I was blown away because Korea is three or four years ahead.” Back home, Kim said, people celebrate when a public park gets Wi-Fi. But in Seoul, even subway straphangers can stream movies on their phones, deep beneath the ground. “When I go back to the U.S., it feels like the Dark Ages,” he said. “It’s just not there yet.”

While Silicon Valley is the largest and most enduring locus of tech innovation, a number of cities around the planet are nipping at its heels: Tel Aviv, Berlin, Bangalore. But Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is in a sense the Valley’s closest rival. American investors are beginning to catch on, and venture capital is starting to flow west, across the Pacific. An early-stage American venture firm called 500 Startups recently spun off a small fund called 500 Kimchi, which focuses exclusively on South Korea. Last fall, Goldman Sachs led a round of investment in Woowa Brothers and its delivery service. In May, Google opened a campus in Seoul, its first in Asia. The office is in the trendy district of Gangnam — yes, that Gangnam — which is already home to a growing cluster of mobile start-ups and a handful of technology incubators to mentor them.

Much of this was made possible by two decades of enormous public investment. Seoul is blanketed with free Wi-Fi that offers the world’s fastest Internet speeds — twice as fast as the average American’s. Back in 1995, the government began a 10-year plan to build out the country’s broadband infrastructure and, through a series of public programs, to teach Koreans what they could do with it. South Korea also eased regulations on service providers to ensure that consumers would have a multitude of choices — in marked contrast to America, where a handful of cable and telecommunications monopolies dominate the market. Such healthy competition in Korea keeps the cost of access low.

To maintain South Korea’s lead, the country’s Science Ministry recently announced a $1.5 billion initiative to upgrade Korea’s mobile infrastructure. By 2020, the government predicts, it will be 1,000 times faster — so fast you could download a feature-length movie in approximately one second. In the same time frame, the Federal Communications Commission hopes to wire most American homes with broadband Internet with speeds of at least 100 megabits per second, or roughly one-sixtieth of South Korea’s goal.

This is certainly true of KakaoTalk, a messaging app that is installed on 93 percent of Korea’s smartphones. KakaoTalk was developed in 2010 by Beom-su Kim, an early web pioneer in Korea who built a popular online gaming portal called Hangame. A failed effort to take Hangame to the United States happened to coincide with the release of the first iPhone. Beom-su Kim bought several and began developing apps for them, a full two years before the device would arrive in South Korea. KakaoTalk was one of his first creations.

The app was quickly adopted by Korean users as a free alternative to text messaging. Part of its success is due to the fact that KakaoTalk functions like its own version of the Internet within a smartphone: Users don’t have to close the app, ever, to check the news, talk to friends, order dinner or play games. To an American, the app’s design is insane, like stepping into a demented fun house. Pages are drenched in neon and populated with googly-eyed cartoon animals.

By contrast, American mobile design is fetishistically minimalist. Silicon Valley applauds itself for good taste in this regard, but this aesthetic has sprung up partly in response to a deficiency: Americans have learned to strip out bandwidth-guzzling elements because they slow down loading times. Korean designers, lacking such bandwidth restraints, can stuff their apps full of all the information and widgets they like. On-screen real estate isn’t an issue, either, because Koreans prefer massive phones. While the “phablet” — the missing link between a phone and a tablet — is popular as a punch line in the United States, it’s been in high demand in South Korea for years.

This trans-Pacific gap in bandwidth is so pronounced that Korean developers often have to strip down their software if they want to take it stateside. Nicole Kim, chief executive of a file-sharing service called Sunshine, which recently opened an office in San Francisco, said the service had to be adapted to inferior American broadband. “We made Sunshine simpler because the speeds are quite lower than the Korean and Hong Kong networks,” she said. She says her engineers recoded the app to allow for the sharing of smaller items, like design files and business documents. In Asia, people use Sunshine for more bandwidth-intensive files, like music and videos.

Even when Korean firms don’t encounter technological issues, the design gulch can confound their attempts to lure American customers. In 2014, Doyon Kim was tasked with taking Band, a South Korean mobile-messaging app, to Silicon Valley. Band lets friends chat, plan outings, share video files, split bills and even conduct informal polls about where to go to dinner. Doyon Kim says that the sheer number of Band’s functions confused users who were not accustomed to performing all of those tasks within a single app.

“As a newcomer in the United States, products have to have one strong feature to market,” he said. “Band had so many features and functionalities, that when people saw the product, they didn’t really get it.” The app got lost in the mix of services like GroupMe, Venmo, Tilt and Dropbox — well-established stand-alone products that let people perform the individual functions that Band offered. Despite attracting 30 million users in South Korea, in the United States, “It barely made a blip.”

Silicon Valley’s single-use obsession found its most absurd expression last summer in the infamous rise of an app called Yo. Yo allows users to send messages saying one thing only — “Yo.” — and thanks to its charming idiocy, it became an overnight sensation. It quickly raised $1.5 million and was valued at as much as 10 times that, despite having, to put it mildly, extremely limited utility. Still, it spawned a series of other hypersimple applications, including “Lo,” which lets you share your location, and “1minLate,” which automatically alerts your friends when you’re running late. The success of Yo revealed a lot about Silicon Valley ideology: For all the changing-the-world talk, novelty frequently outweighs functionality.