Kim Beom-su

In 2007, before the iPhone was for sale in Korea, Kim Beom-su bought four of them for his family and concluded that the device was not a computer but a means of communication.¹ Three years later that conclusion shipped as KakaoTalk. Kim is the founder of Kakao Corp, a South Korean technology company whose free messaging app KakaoTalk sits on more than 90 percent of the country's smartphones and anchors a "super-app" that extends into payments, banking, ride-hailing, and gaming. Known in Western press as Brian Kim, he built and voluntarily exited two dominant Korean internet companies, and by the early 2020s was for a time South Korea's wealthiest person.

Background

Kim was born on March 8, 1966, in Damyang, a rural, bamboo-farming area of Jeolla Province in southern Korea. His family later moved to Seoul so the children could be educated, and by one account eight people lived together in a single-room apartment. His father worked in a pen factory and once briefly ran a wholesale meat business that went bankrupt; his mother worked as a hotel maid. Both parents had only a grade-school education.² Kim has described the children largely raising themselves while the parents worked, which he says taught a sense of responsibility.

He was the first in his family to attend university. He entered Seoul National University in 1986 and studied industrial engineering, earning a bachelor's and, in 1992, a master's degree, tutoring other students and, by his account, skipping meals to pay for his studies. In the same intake class at Samsung SDS he met Lee Hae-jin, who would go on to found the search company Naver; the two had grown up in the same apartment complex.

Getting started

Kim spent about five years as a software engineer at Samsung SDS before quitting in the late 1990s. He co-founded a venture called Mission No. 1, reported as Korea's largest PC bang, or internet cafe, and built management software for the industry that he sold to competitors.

In November 1998, during the Asian financial crisis, Kim founded Hangame with roughly 184,000 dollars raised from friends and family. It was an online casual-gaming portal offering card games, poker, and Go-Stop, aimed at PC bang users. Growth was rapid: by his account it reached 10 million users within five months, so that roughly one in five Koreans had registered.²

In July 2000, Hangame merged with Lee Hae-jin's Naver.com to form NHN, standing for Next Human Network. Hangame's gaming revenue cross-subsidized the buildout of Naver's search engine. NHN listed on the KOSDAQ exchange in 2002, and Kim served as co-chief executive alongside Lee. In 2006 and 2007, at the height of NHN's success, he left and moved to Silicon Valley, founding an incubator called IWILAB. He has said he left because, in his words, a ship is safe in the harbor but that is not what ships are built for.²

What he built

The incubator produced little for roughly two years. The turn came with those four iPhones. His team reframed its work around the idea that a smartphone is a means of communication rather than a utility device, and Kim ran three competing internal teams, letting the strongest concept win.

KakaoTalk launched on March 18, 2010, as a free, phone-number-based messaging app with group chat for up to 30 people and emoticons, built without a marketing budget. It reached 1 million downloads within weeks and 10 million Korean users by April 2011. The company was renamed Kakao on September 1, 2010. Kim ran the service at a loss for years, reported at roughly 1 billion won a month on servers, on the conviction that if people gather together, money will follow.¹

Kakao expanded the platform into KakaoPay for payments, KakaoBank for banking, KakaoMobility for ride-hailing, and KakaoGames. It merged with the web portal Daum in October 2014, when Kim's stake was worth around 2.9 billion dollars.³ By 2016, KakaoTalk had roughly 46 million subscribers, close to the entire population of South Korea, and Kim's net worth later peaked at roughly 16.2 billion dollars in 2021.

How he operates

Across both of his companies, Kim followed a repeated pattern: he built a dominant business and then left it while it was still succeeding, each departure prompted by a new market insight rather than by failure. To find KakaoTalk he set several internal teams loose on the same problem and let data decide the winner. He is also associated with a free-to-win approach, subsidizing a product at a loss to build network density before monetizing. He bought four iPhones before the device was on sale in Korea, decided it was a communications device rather than a computer, and built the layer that Korean payments, banking, and mobility now sit on: an edge made of reading rather than of operating skill, which is the Internet Wave Rider pattern. Kim has said that dream is his favorite word and that he could not get over his internet business vision.²

Where things stand

Kim stepped down as chairman and board member of Kakao in 2022 amid rising regulatory scrutiny, while remaining the company's controlling founder-shareholder. In July 2024 he was arrested and later indicted on charges of manipulating the stock price of SM Entertainment during Kakao's 2023 bidding war against HYBE for control of the K-pop label, with prosecutors alleging he propped the price above HYBE's tender offer. A Seoul court acquitted him on October 21, 2025, finding the manipulation case unproven. Prosecutors filed an appeal around October 28, 2025, and the appeal proceedings were reported to have begun around June 2026, so the matter is not fully closed as of mid-2026. His net worth was reported at about 3.3 billion dollars around that time.

Key facts

• Grew up in acute poverty, reportedly in an eight-person, one-room Seoul apartment after his family relocated from rural Jeolla Province, and was the first in his family to attend university.
• Founded the gaming portal Hangame with about 184,000 dollars during the 1998 Asian financial crisis; it reached 10 million users in five months.
• Co-founded NHN, the parent of Naver, with his Samsung SDS classmate Lee Hae-jin, then left at its peak in 2006 and 2007.
• Bought four iPhones for his family before the device was sold in Korea, the insight that led to KakaoTalk, which he then ran at a loss for years.
• Was South Korea's richest person in 2021 and 2022, then was arrested in 2024 and acquitted in 2025 on SM Entertainment stock-manipulation charges, now under appeal into 2026.