00:00:00 · S0, S1, S2, S3, S4
Ad[00:00:00] S0: This episode is brought to Ad[00:00:01] S1: you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:00:30] S2: As AI infrastructure scales, deployment time shouldn't. At S C 26 in Chicago, Gigabyte is showing their latest innovations, including a modular data center design that drastically cuts deployment time. And also on display, rack scale NVIDIA based solutions built to succeed in the era of agentic AI. From a single server to an entire AI factory, Gigabyte has you covered. Visit us at Booth 2229 at S C 26 November seventeenth to nineteenth. We can't wait to see you there. Ad[00:01:00] S3: Hadestown is Broadway's Tony and Grammy winning best musical. It's an epic celebration of music, togetherness, and hope, says Forbes. And the New York Times raves, Hadestown is as good as it gets. Get your tickets now to Hadestown. Coming Ad[00:01:23] S2: to the Orpheum Theatre February ninth through fourteenth on sale now. Tickets at hennepinarts.org. Ad[00:01:29] S4: Members who switched to USAA auto insurance saved an average of $80 a month. All you have to do is switch once and then enjoy the same excellent service year after year. Visit usaa.com/autoquote to see how much you could save.
00:01:29 · S4, S1, Snow Lee, Hannah Lee
Ad[00:01:29] S4: Members who switched to USAA auto insurance saved an average of $80 a month. All you have to do is switch once and then enjoy the same excellent service year after year. Visit usaa.com/autoquote to see how much you could save. Ad[00:01:42] S1: Restrictions apply. Ad[00:04:11] S5: Yeah. [00:05:32] S6: Hi, everyone. I'm Hannah Lee from the EO team. Welcome to the very first live streaming session of EO Studio. So we're in for an hour of in-depth conversation with the founder featured on EO with Snow Lee. And as many of you are looking forward to the event, I'm just going to give a bit of an introduction into what EO has been doing so far and what we hope to achieve through this webinar today. So EO stands for Entrepreneurship and Opportunities, and we have been making content about startup entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world. And our mission is to empower entrepreneurship in every single individual who watches our videos. And recently, we have launched the EO Builders Club, which features the founders who have been [00:06:16] S5: featured
00:06:16 · Snow Lee, Hannah Lee, S1, S7
[00:06:16] S5: featured [00:06:20] S6: on EO, and we bring in the founders to have conversations with the members. It's a private membership for founders and entrepreneurs that are fit for our mission. So we... And today we have the... And more about the EO Builders Club. We host exclusive content such as webinars where we invite the entrepreneurs to have live Q and A with us. We also have a cohort based learning program where we have education videos from top tier VCs and entrepreneurs who share their insights about what is usually only accessible in areas such as Silicon Valley. So we're very excited to be launching this online membership. And surprisingly, we have been getting a lot of great applicants so far. And today we're very excited to be introducing to you Snow Lee, who has just joined as one of the founder members of the EO Builders Club. And the topic of this session is about how he actually sold his first two startups to Kakao and Buzzvil, two very big IT tech companies in Korea. And at the last exit with the second startup by Buzzvil, he was actually working there for four years as a CPO. And, from then on, he has actually decided Ad[00:07:44] S1: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. Ad[00:07:55] S7: It boosts your job post to help
00:07:55 · S7, S1, Hannah Lee
Ad[00:07:55] S7: It boosts your job post to help Ad[00:07:57] S1: it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. [00:08:13] S6: To found a third startup with the very same cofounders that he did the first two startups with. So we're going to be hearing more about the journeys he had before as an entrepreneur, as a leader, and also what he's experiencing now as a very small three person startup at the moment. So I'm very excited to be introducing Snow for you today and to be able to feature one of our very own members of the Builders Club. So as Snow comes in, I'll be introducing him and then he'll be giving a keynote presentation for about thirty minutes. And after the presentation, there will be a live Q and A session just allotted for all of the participants today. So if you have any questions during the webinar, please leave your questions in the live chat room and we will be doing our best to cover as many of them as possible. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Snow and welcome him aboard.
00:09:17 · Snow Lee
[00:09:17] S5: Hi, hi Hannah. Thank you for the great introduction. Thank you for having me and I will try my best to share the interesting story with you. So let me jump in. Many people equate founders with leaders. Meanwhile not all founders are necessarily good leaders and vice versa. Although founders and leaders share many similarities and have complementary concepts but they differ as much as they converge. Today I will share my experiences as both a founder and a leader. I'm Snow, the CEO of Runbear. Before founding Runbear, I co founded two startups. One was acquired by Buzzvil, was acquired by Kakao, one of the top companies in Korea, and another one was acquired by Buzzvil, a startup but valued at $100,000,000. After joining Buzzvil, I led teams as chief architect and cpo for over four years. I founded Runbear with my third time co founder, Lian. In less than a year, we have experienced a lot of struggles. Last December, we launched Plugbear and it is growing fast. You can think of Plugbear as a zapier for LLM apps. While creating LLM apps or custom GPTs is becoming easier, integrating them into everyday work tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or HubSpot remains challenging. Plugbear enables customers to easily connect their custom LLM apps to their everyday work tools, improving work performance with AI. Within three months, over 1,200 companies have signed up to use Plugbear and the number of paying customers is rapidly increasing. Okay so let's get back to the topic. The roles expected of leaders and founders overlap significantly but there are crucial differences. Let me start with the mistakes I made. My first startup in 2011 had seven seven co founders including myself. We all committed to equal shares and responsibilities which initially propelled us forward quickly. Everyone was CEO. We worked day and night every day. As the team grew and I formally became the CEO, I believed that it was my mission not to break the existing culture. I consistently communicated to my colleagues that my position as CEO was nominal, roles were meaningless, and that we have all equal powers and responsibilities. I believed, I truly believed, that this structure was the best way to motivate all the team members. However, the lack of clear role definitions eventually hindered our growth, leading to prolonged discussions and indecision.
00:12:32 · Snow Lee, S0
Especially when we needed to pivot, we had to spend days and weeks for endless arguments. At that time, I think we had many good founders but no good leaders. This led me to contemplate leadership. So to compare leaders and founders, let's quickly check leadership and entrepreneurship. It's a shame that I didn't truly learn about leadership until after selling my businesses and joining a larger organization. The first significant insight I had about leadership was that leadership can be learned and improved over time. How can we define leadership? Strong charisma, capabilities, charms or power. People think that leaders are born not made. I strongly disagree with them. As you can see, leadership is defined as an activity. Activities can always be learned and improved. Personally, I'm a fan of coaching leadership style. While leading several team leaders at Buzzvil, one of them asked for my advice. Buzzvil, as an ad tech company, really had several customer cohorts advertisers, publishers, and end users. She was struggling with defining priorities between the cohorts. At the time, I was reading the book Coaching for Performance although I had some ideas to suggest, I tried applying coaching techniques. Ad[00:14:14] S0: This episode is brought to