Larry Kim’s parents fled from Korea to Canada following the Korean War, and he followed in their footsteps by moving to the United States. Kim considers starting multiple highly successful marketing tech companies to be a “means to an end.” His true passion is helping people pursue their own American Dream. Learn how he accomplishes this by employing hundreds of people and mentoring entrepreneurs around the world in this episode of JobMakers!
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed and this is JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: A one way ticket. That’s migrating. What you do when you get there is up to you because you’ve left your family and other supports behind. That’s an immigrant. For Larry Kim, founder of WordStream in Boston, which was acquired for $150 million, and of MobileMonkey, a chatbot marketing platform for market and customer support on Facebook messenger, web chat and SMS, that journey began when his parents fled to Canada after the Korean war on a one way ticket. That, in turn, gave him the opportunity to purchase his own one way ticket to the U.S. to fulfill his American dream. Larry is creating hundreds of meaningful jobs for Americans. Something he’s not only proud of but feels is at the core of his values, to give back to the country that gave him the opportunity to actualize bold new ideas. He doesn’t even believe in patents, instead publishing textbooks on software development to foster the freedom for everyone to innovate. Through his technology, he’s helped tens of thousands of companies to grow their businesses. And with nearly 750,000 followers on medium.com, he mentors budding entrepreneurs from around the world as you’ll discover in this week’s JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: Larry Kim, thank you for joining us on JobMakers. How are you?
Larry Kim: I’m doing great Denzil. How are you?
Denzil Mohammed: I am excellent and I’m so glad we got to talk to you. You’re such a tremendous business owner and entrepreneur. A social media maverick. I remember back in 2019 when I met you, you were like two spots behind Hillary Clinton on the top writers on medium.com. Remember that?
Larry Kim: Oh yeah, she hasn’t been blogging for a while, so I’ve actually passed her.
Denzil Mohammed: [laughing] There you go! So we met in 2019 at the eighth annual Barry M. Portnoy Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards, where you were awarded the winner in the “High-Tech Business” category by The Immigrant Learning Center, and you said, “This is the most meaningful honor of my entire professional career.” What did you mean by that?
Larry Kim: Oh, sure. So, Denzil, when you’re an entrepreneur, or just any careerist, you’re going to get all sorts of crazy awards. Some of them are pretty superficial, like, “Having Lots of People to Follow on Social Media,” or these kinds of silliness. Or growth awards, like “Inc 5,000 Fastest Growing Companies in America.” Of course, it’s great to get any of these awards, but it’s important to understand that, well, my perspective on this is that the growth or the number of followers or whatever these other awards are based on, that’s a means to an end. That the true goal here is to create something of value and just ultimately create jobs and employment for people in the community so that they can better their lives and contribute back as productive members of society. So, to that end, I kind of view your industry or your entrepreneurship award as being the only award I’ve ever won that reflects my core belief system. And so that’s why I declared that this was the most meaningful award that I’ve ever been considered for and won in my career. It’s an honor and a privilege.
Denzil Mohammed: When you say your core beliefs, what did that award get at for you? What did it speak to?
Larry Kim: Why is it that entrepreneurs do what they do? You know? Why is it that so many of them are immigrants? And I think part of that is a life calling to provide. To help people to realize their full potential in life, by providing them a framework to be gaining valuable skills, get paid for it and advance to careers. And that is my calling in life. And just the structure by which I do this is by creating these products and companies and selling products. But that is a means to an end. That is what you see. But not the core motivating factor for me.
Denzil Mohammed: Creating meaningful work, allowing people to advance in their careers, certainly…
Larry Kim: More for families. Live the “American Dream.” I’ve employed over a thousand people in the last decade. And we don’t just hire people who already had jobs and they were already flying high. No, we look for these people like one or two years out of college, or in some cases, community college, or no college at all. And we train them how to sell things. We train them how to be a customer support rep. We take people from companies like Best Buy, floor salespeople, really blue-collar work. And I think we’re helping people refine their skills and become even more productive members of society.
Denzil Mohammed: Well said. Allowing people to live out their American Dream. I want to get into your immigrant story. And it didn’t just start with you, right? It started with your family.
Larry Kim: Oh, sure. Yes. So about 20 years ago, I immigrated to the United States from the far, far away country of Canada. It was a 45-minute flight from the Toronto airport. It was a one-way ticket, and I flew here following my last exam from college and started at a local startup here. And you know, you might say, “Well, that’s not a … Canada is like the 51st state,” or “This is not really a big journey.” But you’ve got to … if you take a step back, you think of the bigger picture. My parents started this journey back 40-50 years ago. They were just young children during the Korean War in the fifties. And they were refugees, walking hundreds of miles to avoid these conflict zones and carrying everything that they owned in a bag on their back and eating grass and drinking out of rivers to survive. And it was a pretty difficult environment and when they got a little older, they decided to immigrate to Canada. This would have been in the sixties or seventies. And they also booked a one-way ticket here with like 20 dollars in their pocket or something like that. So it’s just a continuation of that desire to want to provide something for your life, for your family, for your community. And you know, this was just sort of the last stop if you will.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s just absolutely fascinating. So many Americans don’t know about these experiences that are in the backgrounds of immigrants today and refugees today. I’m glad that they made that move. It allowed you to be able to thrive and do better than they ever possibly imagined you would have if for instance, you were growing up in a war-torn country. Your journey as an entrepreneur, did you always know that you wanted to start a business? And, and just correct me if I’m wrong, your degree is in electrical engineering, right? And now you’re in digital marketing.
Larry Kim: So, absolutely. It was obvious that I wanted to create a business from the very beginning. My early jobs were doing paperwork and building little recycling businesses in junior high and in high school. And you know, it was a situation where I knew I wanted to … oh, and my parents! My mother was an entrepreneur too. She was a piano teacher. So, she basically taught me everything about marketing. How to get clients, how to get students. “Don’t be the lowest cost piano teacher because then you’re going to get all the worst students. You have to charge a little bit more than everyone else.” She would teach me all of these lessons about how to run a business. That’s another thing about entrepreneurship. There’s usually some family influence, from a young age, where someone is teaching you the difference between being an employee versus an employer. But yes, I think I absolutely wanted to be this … you know, having a company or a business. It was just a situation where I didn’t have the skills or the idea of what to do … like finding that niche, finding the need in the marketplace to fill. And so, you just start off in a regular job and you learn skills. So, initially when I moved to Cambridge, it was to work for a marketing software company called Allaire which was later bought up by Macromedia. And because that was marketing software, I learned a lot about digital marketing. And so that’s where I was able to then identify some needs in the marketplace around search advertising and social media advertising in terms of products that you could build, in terms of being an engineer, an entrepreneur. I think that’s totally normal. Engineering of course is an applied science as opposed to a pure scientific endeavor. And so, you always have to take your engineering skills and apply it to some other area. Biotech or fintech or marketing software.
Denzil Mohammed: So, what was it like in the early stages going out there, asking for money, developing your ideas, finding partners?
Larry Kim: I mean, it’s kind of comical. I was like this 20-something with a lot of ideas and no contacts, not a lot of experience. And I just did cold emailing. If you go to a venture website it’ll say, “Do you want to partner with …”, there’s actually an alias on inquiries at “venture-company-dot-com.” So, that’s not the most ideal way to go about pitching. Ideally, you’d get some kind of recommendation or warm introduction from a portfolio CEO or something like that. But yeah! Just the cold emailing. And sure enough, surprisingly, we got a few dozen inquiries and that led to meetings. And you know, it didn’t happen overnight. But over a few years of getting rejected and trying again, I was able to both build a business that was fundable and find world-class investors to back the idea.
Denzil Mohammed: So, describe MobileMonkey to us. What is it, what does it do? Why is it important?
Larry Kim: It’s a text messaging platform. It’s a very important mode of communication if you’re a business doing business-to-consumer marketing. So, if you’re a realtor, you’re selling to customers. These customers aren’t spending all day in Gmail or whatever. They’re just on-the-go on their mobile phones. And typically, they spend a good amount of time texting or using text platforms like WhatsApp or Instagram Direct Messaging or Facebook Messenger. And so, if you’re a business it’s kind of hard to generate inbound inquiries at scale and then to those inquiries automatically. What we do is simplify this by providing this omni-chat platform that lets you manage all of the different messaging channels that you might encounter customers. All of the social channels, SMS texting, website chat, all in a single unified console and makes it super easy to engage with users at scale and provide better customer experiences leading to more sales and more leads, and then just growing your business.
Denzil Mohammed: I’ve seen in other countries, entire economies run on WhatsApp. It’s really fascinating. On Medium you have over 200,000 followers. On Twitter, you have three quarters of a million followers. That’s a gigantic mouthpiece to speak, not just to Boston or to the United States, but to the world. What’s some of the best advice you have for budding entrepreneurs and probably some of the worst advice, so to speak, to avoid?
Larry Kim: Well, the worst advice is going to be the opposite of the best advice so I’ll just tell you what my best advice would be, and that is to really understand that initially the enormous leverage comes from the idea. What is the solution that you are trying to provide? Who is the target market? How will we find them? Like that kind of confluence of questions. You can build anything you want, and you can sell it to anyone you want to, and you can come up with any number of ways to take that product to market. But how well those concepts click together is going to provide enormous leverage on how big a business this could be, how fast this business can grow, whether or not it will even get off the ground in the first place. And so, I think what happens is that a lot of entrepreneurs, especially first-time entrepreneurs, they tend to overestimate the novelty of their own ideas. Sure enough, you’ve come up with a great idea, but four other companies are doing the same thing. And then the second thing that they do is they downplay the competitiveness of these other products and up-play the uniqueness of their concept, if that makes sense. While it’s in kind of the “stem cell phase” of a business, where you have a lot of freedom to decide what to bill, who to sell it to and how to sell it, getting to a really great place before scaling is the best advice.
Denzil Mohammed: So finally, given your amazing social media reach, we know that people who have their own businesses want to be able to build up. Build up their brand, their personal brand, their company’s brand, engage with customers. On social media what are some of the best advice you have for entrepreneurs?
Larry Kim: So, the advice changes over time, because it’s so dependent on how the algorithm is tuned. It seems to me that it’s pretty obvious that the algorithm is just trying to create food fights in the newsfeed. If the content that you’re producing is like family photos or like, “Hey, buy my product,” it’s not, it’s going to be cloaked. It’s not going to really generate a lot of response or not a lot of people are going to actually see that. It just means that in 2021, you need to be a little bit more controversial unfortunately. If you’re just putting up content out there, that’s very centrist, like a “water is wet” kind of thing, it’s just not going to go anywhere. So, you really need to think about the issues that divide the community and you need to straddle that line. In terms of just a stupid example, say you’re a fitness company and you’ve got people who swear by Keto diet or Atkins diet or something. But there’s a lot of strongly held convictions depending on what diet they ascribed to. Instead of just creating “What is keto?” you would create something like “10 Reasons Why Keto is a Load of Crap!” What that’s going to do is get all the other fad folks up in arms and commenting and sharing and saying, “This is a load of crap!” and hitting the mad face emoji. Which apparently is weighted five times more than the like button. That came out of the documents on Capitol Hill. So that’s really the way to go viral and get everyone … it’s kind of stirring the pot a little bit, and that’s sad. It’s kind of sad, but that’s how I would give the algorithm what it’s looking for. The hot button topics that exist in every industry. Try to provoke a response.
Denzil Mohammed: Yeah, it’s not a fistfight necessarily that you’re getting into, but something to generate responses by way of putting information out there. The last thing I wanted to bring up was I interviewed Semyon Dukach on this podcast a while ago. He is part of a group called One Way Ventures and you talk about your parents buying a one way ticket.
Larry Kim: I bought a one-way ticket here.
Denzil Mohammed: You bought a one way ticket. What is the significance of that one-way ticket?
Larry Kim: This is not a tourist trip. You know, this is … we’re not planning a one month stay or something like that. We’re going all in. There is no plan B. This has to work. And you know, that’s the mentality of an entrepreneur. It’s also the mentality of an immigrant. If you look at all the companies that are investible, there’s a very high chance that one of the founders is an immigrant because that’s the DNA of the immigrant. It’s essentially the same as an entrepreneur/founder type person.
Denzil Mohammed: I often say that the act of migrating is itself an entrepreneurial act and you just spelled it out in tremendously personal and beautiful terms. Larry Kim, thank you so much for joining us on JobMakers and for participating in this discussion and I wish you all the best with you and your family and Mobile Monkey.
Larry Kim: Oh thanks Denzil, it’s great to be here, have a great day.
Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston, and The Immigrant Learning Center, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thank you for joining us for this week’s fascinating story on how immigrants benefit and create jobs for all Americans. Have a comment? Email Denzil, that’s D-E-N-Z-I-L at jobmakerspodcast.org. Next week we speak with Alex Nowrasteh, Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute about his recent publication, “The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong.” I’m Denzil Mohammed. Join us next Thursday at noon for another episode of JobMakers.