Lee Hae-jin

In 2012 Lee Hae-jin read an anonymous post on an employee bulletin board in which a Naver worker said he was content. Lee eliminated the commuter buses and the welfare perks.¹

Lee is the founder and chairman of the board of Naver Corporation, the company behind South Korea's dominant internet portal and search engine. Naver operates the Knowledge iN question-and-answer service, the Naver Cafe and Blog communities, Naver Webtoon, Naver Shopping, and the LINE messaging app, and in recent years has positioned itself as a builder of "sovereign AI" tailored to Korea. Lee returned to Naver's board as chairman on March 26, 2025, after an eight-year absence, to steer the company through the AI era.

Background

Lee was born on June 22, 1967, in Jegi-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul. His father was a vice president of Samsung Life Insurance and later president of SK Life Insurance, placing the family in a chaebol-adjacent professional milieu. Lee studied electronic computer engineering at Seoul National University, graduating in 1990, and earned a master's degree in computer science from KAIST in 1992, with a thesis on version control systems for CAD databases. At KAIST his roommate was Kim Jung-ju, who later founded the gaming company Nexon. Lee joined Samsung SDS in 1992, the same intake year as Kim Beom-su, the future founder of Kakao; the two had attended the same universities and grown up in the same apartment complex, an overlap that placed several of Korea's leading platform founders on the same early path.¹

Getting started

From 1997, Lee led an internal Samsung SDS project called Web Glider to build a Korean-language search engine. Korean text lacks the English-style spacing between words that standard search algorithms rely on, so Lee's team built native morphological processing to parse it. The effort won a Samsung SDS internal entrepreneurship contest, and its first service launched in January 1998. Rather than compete directly with a rival, Empas, whose natural-language search was backed by Professor Lee Jun-ho of Soongsil University, Lee funded the professor directly, providing capital to start an independent company, then acquired that company through a stock exchange.¹ The move showed an instinct to pay for a capability rather than build it more slowly in-house. On June 2, 1999, Lee spun the project out of Samsung SDS as Naver Comm, based in Seongnam, with Samsung SDS providing initial funding. The name was derived from "navigate" plus the suffix "-er."

What he built

In July 2000, Naver merged with Kim Beom-su's Hangame Communications, whose card-game revenue of roughly one billion won a day cross-subsidized Naver's search research and development.¹ The combined entity was renamed NHN, for "Next Human Network," in 2001 and listed on the KOSDAQ exchange in 2002. Lee and Kim served as co-chief executives until Kim departed in 2007. In October 2002, Naver launched Knowledge iN, a question-and-answer platform that accumulated a large body of Korean-language content indexed only by Naver. This content moat, rather than any algorithmic superiority, is credited with letting Naver survive Google's entry into Korea. Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz cited Knowledge iN as direct inspiration for Yahoo Answers, which launched about three years later, and Naver was also first to show results from multiple categories on a single page, a format Google adopted years afterward. By figures still commonly cited from 2017, Naver held roughly 74.7 percent of Korean web search, counted 42 million enrolled users, and served more than 25 million users who set it as their default start page.¹ The LINE messaging app, which emerged from Naver, became dominant in Japan and Southeast Asia. Lee resigned his operational roles and left the board in 2017, moving to a global investment officer position focused on European and United States expansion.

How he operates

Lee is known as a meticulous and reserved manager who rarely gives interviews or appears in the media, and who is described as building and executing elaborate plans that few dare to confront. He assembled a broad platform by folding in service after service, from Knowledge iN and blogs to webtoons, cafes, and LINE, nearly all of it built in-house rather than bought. The 2012 bulletin-board episode is the anecdote most often used to illustrate his style, and the principle behind it is that comfort is an organizational warning sign. Lee believes that local-language and local-data density can beat global algorithmic scale, a view he summarizes with the idea that a company cannot search what it has not indexed. At Naver's 2025 shareholder meeting he said the company would "build Naver's unique AI service by turning obstacles into opportunities" and would "continue to protect diversity with our proprietary technology," adding that "it would be disappointing if the world relied on only one or two search services."²

Where things stand

Lee returned to Naver's board as chairman on March 26, 2025, specifically to lead an AI-era pivot, retaining Chief Executive Choi Soo-yeon for another term under him.³ Naver reported revenue above 10 trillion won, roughly 6.8 billion dollars, for fiscal year 2024, crossing that threshold for the first time, with search and commerce accounting for about 64 percent of the total; the AI contribution to revenue remained trivial as of the 2025 shareholder meeting.² The company's flagship AI product, HyperCLOVA X, launched in August 2023 and is acknowledged to lag global leaders such as ChatGPT. In May 2024, Naver agreed to work with Nvidia and its chief executive, Jensen Huang, to help build Korea's sovereign AI.² Naver is pursuing an AI Briefing summarization feature and plans to embed AI agents across its services over the medium to long term, while Lee remains low-profile in public despite the company's scale.

Key facts

• Born June 22, 1967, in Seoul; studied at Seoul National University and KAIST, and joined Samsung SDS in 1992.
• Spun Naver out of Samsung SDS on June 2, 1999, from an internal Korean-language search project called Web Glider.
• Merged with Kim Beom-su's Hangame in 2000, forming the entity renamed NHN in 2001 and listed on the KOSDAQ in 2002.
• Launched Knowledge iN in October 2002, building the user-generated content corpus credited with letting Naver survive Google's entry into Korea.
• Left operational leadership and the board in 2017, then returned as board chairman on March 26, 2025, to lead an AI pivot.
• Naver crossed 10 trillion won in revenue in fiscal year 2024, even as AI revenue contribution stayed negligible.