September 28, 2024 • 8 mins
In this video, we present valuable wisdom shared by John Kim, the CEO of Sendbird. Having achieved the status of a triumphant entrepreneur after over a decade of relentless dedication, he has distilled five pivotal principles that underpinned his journey to success. Don't miss the chance to explore these invaluable insights that pave the way for achievement. Sendbird, a remarkable startup that came into being in 2013. With a staggering funding of over $200 million and a user base exceeding 300 million individuals, Sendbird has earned the distinction of a unicorn startup. This trailblazing company offers cutting-edge services encompassing advanced chat, voice, video, and livestream messaging that can be seamlessly integrated within a matter of days.
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TikTok
X/Twitter
YouTube
Substack
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I'm still surprised by a lot of founders when I asked them,
(00:03):
like, "How many customers did you talk?"
They're like, "Oh, I talked with three customers last week
or five customers last month.
I'm like, "Are you kidding me?
You need to be talking with three five customers a day.
You will be attending so many networking parties,
going to every single conference,
going to every single speaking events,
but you don't go back to fundamentals of building a strong product."
None of that really matters
until you find a strong product market fit in the early days.
(00:23):
None of the else matters.
Hi, my name is John, founder and CEO of Sandberg.
We are the world's leading conversations platform
for mobile application.
We powered a quarter billion users on a monthly basis
sending seven plus billion messages,
powering major applications like Dordias,
PayPal, Reddit, Y'all, Fanny, Spores, Crafts and in Korea.
Today, we have over 340 employees globally
(00:45):
in seven different countries.
We have collectively raised over $220 million in funding,
which valued our company over a billion dollars.
Something that a lot of first-time founders
don't really think about is they look for market trends
or opportunities.
They think they are interesting and timely,
but a lot of founders pick ideas
(01:06):
that are not really aligned to their own strengths.
So what ends up happening is after two to three years,
they realize that pretty much whatever you do is harder than you think.
It will take longer, it will be harder.
So a lot of smart people end up giving up too quickly,
because it wasn't really something
that they wanted to commit for the next 10 years.
Whatever the next thing you pick,
try to like see if you can really commit to the idea
imagine yourself doing that for the next 10 years,
which is very, very hard.
(01:27):
But if you can really see yourself in the next 10 years,
doing things, hopefully greater at scale,
that's a really more important question
is I would also ask myself,
when I'm starting my next company,
is to can I commit to this for the next 10 years.
I'm still surprised by a lot of founders when I ask them,
like how many customers did you talk last week?
They're like, oh, I talked to three customers last week
or like five customers last month, I'm like,
(01:49):
are you kidding me?
You need to be talking to three or five customers a day.
People who are good with one thing tend to overlook the others.
So for instance, if you're an engineer,
if you love building great products,
it will be naturally biased for spending more time on product.
So instead of spending more time with customers,
you're like, oh, you think you have an idea about customer,
you try to go and build it before even talking to customers
or validating from customers.
(02:09):
If you're so outward facing,
you'll be attending so many networking parties,
going to every single conference,
going to every single speaking events,
but you don't go back to fundamentals
of building a strong product.
So what, think about what your strengths are
and try to make sure that you're balancing out
talking to customers and building a fantastic product.
Try to deprioritize everything else.
None of that really matters
until you find a strong product market fit in the early days.
(02:32):
None of else matters.
In the early days, you were trying to find product market fit.
It was obviously within 24 hours.
You talked to a customer in the evening,
you build something, next day you follow.
22, 40 hours is when you follow.
So when I was doing the sales call myself,
towards the end of the first call,
I will always say within 24 hours,
you'll hear back from me on xyz.
You would have repriced seeing the next steps.
You can 48 hours, you'll get a quote from me.
(02:53):
So I always try to set that milestone
in my very first call that when I will be following up.
It's just a feature development.
They will surely know at least whether we're on a delivery
or not within 24 hours.
And if we do, we'll probably ship it in within a week.
Have about a two weeks sprint.
So every two weeks, we're releasing something new about our product.
So we have that level of iteration.
Once the BB gets to a certain scale,
we can't like to on a daily release,
(03:15):
they'll freak out some customers
'cause like they build one way.
Next day, the documentation changes,
they're gonna freak out.
So you want to manage the expectation
to cadence a little bit.
So you kind of build that would be two to three weeks cadence
back in the day.
It doesn't matter if it's not a week.
The way I think about culture is they call organizations,
super organisms.
It's a collection of people,
(03:36):
but the collection is greater than the individuals combined.
So one plus one is not two, ideally is three and greater.
So if you're to look at a single person,
a person has a set of core values,
they may have dreams and aspirations.
If you kind of map that to an organization,
you can also think of the culture as your core values.
Personal core values turn into a corporate core values.
Your organization's strength and weaknesses.
(03:58):
All those things collectively combined
is something that we kind of put a label on it called the culture.
A culture is like a muscle memory.
It's very hard to change a habit.
It's very hard to just say,
"Hey, today we're gonna define our culture as XYZ.
We're just gonna change this way."
Like it doesn't work like that.
It's a collection of people's habits.
That's like again, like a super organism.
So you have to like really nudge
and create a iterative feedback loop.
(04:19):
It's a slowly evolving thing.
So that's why it's so critical.
Like your day-to-day decision-making,
day-to-day operation, everyday execution
is really dictated by the culture of your organization,
not by a couple of like checklists.
It's not what you write on the wall.
It's what you do and leave them breathe every day.
And that is the culture.
I came to realize the culture of a company is super important.
(04:39):
Even way before I did my first startup
because I also used to work at other companies
to before finishing school.
We had 100 employees.
CEO studied abroad, you know, his PhD.
Actually, I used pretty cool.
It was like the earlier version of Starlink.
Then I started to see the company kind of
not execute well, missing the goals.
I think what really drove down the company was the culture.
The leadership was disconnected from what was happening in the field.
(05:01):
And then I started to see a lot of good people leave first.
And people who were a little bit toxic
and were not doing a good job.
But they were graded like selling to their senior bosses.
They were getting more power and like more roles.
I can tell these guys who are playing StarCraft all day long.
They were not working.
If I were this person, if I were to see what would I do differently,
what would I have done differently?
And ultimately came to a conclusion like if they had a very strong culture
(05:24):
of understanding, empowering good people
and then knowing what was happening in the company,
maybe they could have a different outcome.
So when I started my first company
and also second company, we started out
with the mission statement set of core values.
We do workshops.
We try to get the early employees and the management
like the founders to get together, spend maybe a day
talking about core values and the culture of the company.
And so since then, we've always kind of thought
(05:46):
culture was one of the most critical
operating system of a company.
People have to realize if your company is growing quickly,
you don't really have a time to organically learn the things
you need to learn.
There's like the skill sets.
So my general advice is continue to seek out companies
or people that are maybe one stage or two stage ahead of you.
(06:06):
And I think this is generalizable to not just to start up
but anyone seeking fast growth in their own professional lives
in their careers too.
What does greatness look like?
Try to seek out people who've been there done that before
and then try to not connect with one
but try to interview three or five, ten people
to see what is a general pattern of greatness
that I look like that will get you to the next level
of the company.
(06:27):
Next stage, maybe a year, 12 months from now,
24 months from now, seek out people
who kind of went down the path a few times.
Then you'll start to find this pattern that start to emerge.
What are the things that you need to have 12 months
from now, 24 months from now that you currently don't have?
Then try to like build a path towards us,
almost like Amazon's or Jeff Bezos mantra of working backwards.
Think about what your end game or next stage looked like
(06:48):
and then figure out your steps to getting there
and who do you need to work with?
Upgrading or coaching your existing team
or recruiting from somewhere else
to really level your leadership.
But ultimately, the job of SEO is to do three things, right?
One is get the strategy right for your company,
making sure it's executed, get the right teams onboard it,
getting the resources, whether it be fundraising
(07:09):
or alking your resources.
So strategy, people or team figuring out
how you need to navigate those things to get to the next level.
Have bigger dreams, have longer time horizon,
also have the patience to hopefully dare
and again risk greater things.
I believe that probably gave me more confidence
to be able to do something like this, coming to the US.
(07:30):
When everybody said, no, you can't do it,
we couldn't really find a playbook
of a Korean startup coming to US
and doing something Silicon Valley.
And literally everyone spoke to whether it be sharing US
or Korea said, no, it cannot be done,
that's stupid, that's too risky,
you'll lose all the money in your time, et cetera.
But still, if the take that bell was probably coming
from that first time experience,
being able to achieve something,
have the positive feedback loop
(07:51):
and increasing the time horizon of the next journey.
So I think that's probably one of my greatest learning.
(gentle music)
(gentle music)
(music)
I'm still surprised by a lot of founders when I asked them,
(00:03):
like, "How many customers did you talk?"
They're like, "Oh, I talked with three customers last week
or five customers last month.
I'm like, "Are you kidding me?
You need to be talking with three five customers a day.
You will be attending so many networking parties,
going to every single conference,
going to every single speaking events,
but you don't go back to fundamentals of building a strong product."
None of that really matters
until you find a strong product market fit in the early days.
(00:23):
None of the else matters.
Hi, my name is John, founder and CEO of Sandberg.
We are the world's leading conversations platform
for mobile application.
We powered a quarter billion users on a monthly basis
sending seven plus billion messages,
powering major applications like Dordias,
PayPal, Reddit, Y'all, Fanny, Spores, Crafts and in Korea.
Today, we have over 340 employees globally
(00:45):
in seven different countries.
We have collectively raised over $220 million in funding,
which valued our company over a billion dollars.
Something that a lot of first-time founders
don't really think about is they look for market trends
or opportunities.
They think they are interesting and timely,
but a lot of founders pick ideas
(01:06):
that are not really aligned to their own strengths.
So what ends up happening is after two to three years,
they realize that pretty much whatever you do is harder than you think.
It will take longer, it will be harder.
So a lot of smart people end up giving up too quickly,
because it wasn't really something
that they wanted to commit for the next 10 years.
Whatever the next thing you pick,
try to like see if you can really commit to the idea
imagine yourself doing that for the next 10 years,
which is very, very hard.
(01:27):
But if you can really see yourself in the next 10 years,
doing things, hopefully greater at scale,
that's a really more important question
is I would also ask myself,
when I'm starting my next company,
is to can I commit to this for the next 10 years.
I'm still surprised by a lot of founders when I ask them,
like how many customers did you talk last week?
They're like, oh, I talked to three customers last week
or like five customers last month, I'm like,
(01:49):
are you kidding me?
You need to be talking to three or five customers a day.
People who are good with one thing tend to overlook the others.
So for instance, if you're an engineer,
if you love building great products,
it will be naturally biased for spending more time on product.
So instead of spending more time with customers,
you're like, oh, you think you have an idea about customer,
you try to go and build it before even talking to customers
or validating from customers.
(02:09):
If you're so outward facing,
you'll be attending so many networking parties,
going to every single conference,
going to every single speaking events,
but you don't go back to fundamentals
of building a strong product.
So what, think about what your strengths are
and try to make sure that you're balancing out
talking to customers and building a fantastic product.
Try to deprioritize everything else.
None of that really matters
until you find a strong product market fit in the early days.
(02:32):
None of else matters.
In the early days, you were trying to find product market fit.
It was obviously within 24 hours.
You talked to a customer in the evening,
you build something, next day you follow.
22, 40 hours is when you follow.
So when I was doing the sales call myself,
towards the end of the first call,
I will always say within 24 hours,
you'll hear back from me on xyz.
You would have repriced seeing the next steps.
You can 48 hours, you'll get a quote from me.
(02:53):
So I always try to set that milestone
in my very first call that when I will be following up.
It's just a feature development.
They will surely know at least whether we're on a delivery
or not within 24 hours.
And if we do, we'll probably ship it in within a week.
Have about a two weeks sprint.
So every two weeks, we're releasing something new about our product.
So we have that level of iteration.
Once the BB gets to a certain scale,
we can't like to on a daily release,
(03:15):
they'll freak out some customers
'cause like they build one way.
Next day, the documentation changes,
they're gonna freak out.
So you want to manage the expectation
to cadence a little bit.
So you kind of build that would be two to three weeks cadence
back in the day.
It doesn't matter if it's not a week.
The way I think about culture is they call organizations,
super organisms.
It's a collection of people,
(03:36):
but the collection is greater than the individuals combined.
So one plus one is not two, ideally is three and greater.
So if you're to look at a single person,
a person has a set of core values,
they may have dreams and aspirations.
If you kind of map that to an organization,
you can also think of the culture as your core values.
Personal core values turn into a corporate core values.
Your organization's strength and weaknesses.
(03:58):
All those things collectively combined
is something that we kind of put a label on it called the culture.
A culture is like a muscle memory.
It's very hard to change a habit.
It's very hard to just say,
"Hey, today we're gonna define our culture as XYZ.
We're just gonna change this way."
Like it doesn't work like that.
It's a collection of people's habits.
That's like again, like a super organism.
So you have to like really nudge
and create a iterative feedback loop.
(04:19):
It's a slowly evolving thing.
So that's why it's so critical.
Like your day-to-day decision-making,
day-to-day operation, everyday execution
is really dictated by the culture of your organization,
not by a couple of like checklists.
It's not what you write on the wall.
It's what you do and leave them breathe every day.
And that is the culture.
I came to realize the culture of a company is super important.
(04:39):
Even way before I did my first startup
because I also used to work at other companies
to before finishing school.
We had 100 employees.
CEO studied abroad, you know, his PhD.
Actually, I used pretty cool.
It was like the earlier version of Starlink.
Then I started to see the company kind of
not execute well, missing the goals.
I think what really drove down the company was the culture.
The leadership was disconnected from what was happening in the field.
(05:01):
And then I started to see a lot of good people leave first.
And people who were a little bit toxic
and were not doing a good job.
But they were graded like selling to their senior bosses.
They were getting more power and like more roles.
I can tell these guys who are playing StarCraft all day long.
They were not working.
If I were this person, if I were to see what would I do differently,
what would I have done differently?
And ultimately came to a conclusion like if they had a very strong culture
(05:24):
of understanding, empowering good people
and then knowing what was happening in the company,
maybe they could have a different outcome.
So when I started my first company
and also second company, we started out
with the mission statement set of core values.
We do workshops.
We try to get the early employees and the management
like the founders to get together, spend maybe a day
talking about core values and the culture of the company.
And so since then, we've always kind of thought
(05:46):
culture was one of the most critical
operating system of a company.
People have to realize if your company is growing quickly,
you don't really have a time to organically learn the things
you need to learn.
There's like the skill sets.
So my general advice is continue to seek out companies
or people that are maybe one stage or two stage ahead of you.
(06:06):
And I think this is generalizable to not just to start up
but anyone seeking fast growth in their own professional lives
in their careers too.
What does greatness look like?
Try to seek out people who've been there done that before
and then try to not connect with one
but try to interview three or five, ten people
to see what is a general pattern of greatness
that I look like that will get you to the next level
of the company.
(06:27):
Next stage, maybe a year, 12 months from now,
24 months from now, seek out people
who kind of went down the path a few times.
Then you'll start to find this pattern that start to emerge.
What are the things that you need to have 12 months
from now, 24 months from now that you currently don't have?
Then try to like build a path towards us,
almost like Amazon's or Jeff Bezos mantra of working backwards.
Think about what your end game or next stage looked like
(06:48):
and then figure out your steps to getting there
and who do you need to work with?
Upgrading or coaching your existing team
or recruiting from somewhere else
to really level your leadership.
But ultimately, the job of SEO is to do three things, right?
One is get the strategy right for your company,
making sure it's executed, get the right teams onboard it,
getting the resources, whether it be fundraising
(07:09):
or alking your resources.
So strategy, people or team figuring out
how you need to navigate those things to get to the next level.
Have bigger dreams, have longer time horizon,
also have the patience to hopefully dare
and again risk greater things.
I believe that probably gave me more confidence
to be able to do something like this, coming to the US.
(07:30):
When everybody said, no, you can't do it,
we couldn't really find a playbook
of a Korean startup coming to US
and doing something Silicon Valley.
And literally everyone spoke to whether it be sharing US
or Korea said, no, it cannot be done,
that's stupid, that's too risky,
you'll lose all the money in your time, et cetera.
But still, if the take that bell was probably coming
from that first time experience,
being able to achieve something,
have the positive feedback loop
(07:51):
and increasing the time horizon of the next journey.
So I think that's probably one of my greatest learning.
(gentle music)
(gentle music)
(music)
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