South Korean executives often pick U.S. business icons like Jack Welch or Warren Buffett as role models. Not Lee Jae Woong. The 34-year-old founder of the country’s biggest Internet company, Daum, identifies instead with Che Guevara, Fidel Castro’s chief lieutenant during the Cuban revolution. Lee explains that he likes to think of himself as a “rebel and antiestablishment person.”
And, like Che, he knows how to wage guerrilla war. Using the $10.5 million he raised on the Korea Stock Exchange in November 1999, at the height of the dot-com craze, plus $30 million from a convertible bond offering the next year, Lee aggressively marketed Daum’s services by playing on nationalist sentiments. He won the hearts and minds of South Korean customers while outmaneuvering such big foreign-owned rivals as Lycos Korea, Microsoft’s MSN Korea and Yahoo! Korea.
“We have better local content and a strong Korean identity,” says Lee. Daum’s e-mail service, Hanmail, has 24 million users -- roughly half of all South Koreans. Lee’s latest venture: a Korean-language search engine with Google as partner.
The entrepreneur, who dropped out of a University of Paris Ph.D. program in cognitive sciences in the 1990s, still shows up at his Seoul office in jeans and a T-shirt. He’s not casual about results, however: The company made $21 million on $130 million in sales last year, and analysts expect 2004 to be even better. Daum shares rocketed 80 percent higher in the 12 months through February. Lee is now mulling a Nasdaq listing for the seven-year-old company. “We haven’t made up our mind on the timing,” he says. Perhaps he’ll wear a Che T-shirt to the listing ceremony.
