Danny Crichton

lang: ko

김유진 씨가 (트위터 @eunnkimm) 현재 서울의 스타트업 신을 지도로 훌륭하게 엮어냈다. 이는 구글에서 만든 퓨전테이블 API 사용법의 훌륭한 예시일 뿐만 아니라, 한국의 혁신 인프라가 지리적으로 어떻게 펼쳐져 있는지를 엿볼 수 있는 좋은 도구이다.

스타트업 회사들은 마포구 근처 홍대의 작은 클러스터를 제외하면, 대체로 강남의 중심부에 집중되어 있는 것으로 보인다. 이는 여러 가지 이유에서 어느 정도 흥미로운 사실인데, 왜냐하면 첫째로, 강남은 한국에서 가장 비싼 부동산 가격을 자랑하기 때문이다. 게다가 수도 서울에서 물가도 가장 비싼 편이다. 샌프란시스코가 미국에서 가장 비싼 시장 중 하나임에도 불구하고 스타트업 회사들이 넘쳐나는 것처럼, 비싼 비용은 스타트업 회사들이 밀려드는 것을 더디게 하지 않는 듯하다.

흥미로운 것은, 한국의 스타트업 CEO들이 그들의 회사를 시작하기로 선택하는 지역, 강남에 대해 이와 같은 사실이 시사하는 점이다. 강남은 한국에서 가장 큰 소프트웨어 회사들에 속하는 삼성과 NC소프트가 있는 곳이기도 하다. 또다른 혁신 클러스터인 홍대는 더 젊은 환경을 가지고 있는데, 이 지역은 주로 다양한 밤의 유흥 생활과 식당들로 대학생들을 끌어 모은다. CEO들의 선택은 젊음보다는 재능에 더 가깝게 지내고 싶어하는 바람을 반영하는 듯하며, 이는 회사들이 어떤 종류의 직원들을 채용하려고 하는지를 보여주는지도 모른다.

이런 나뉨을 너무 심각하게 받아들일 필요는 없을 것이다. 두 지역 모두 지하철 2호선으로 쉽게 접근 가능하며 서로 25분 정도 떨어져 있을 뿐이다. 그렇기는 하지만, 실리콘 밸리와 유사한 역학을 서울에서도 볼 수 있는 것은 흥미로운 일이다. 팔로 알토/마운틴 뷰 그리고 샌프란시스코는 베이 에어리어 Bay Area (옮긴이: 샌프란시스코의 만안(灣岸) 지역)에서 새로운 벤처 사업들의 중심지로 남아 있다. 샌 마티오 San Mateo와 같이 훨씬 더 저렴한 지역이 있는데도 말이다. 요즘에는, 회사를 시작하기에 팔로 알토와 샌프란시스코 중 어느 쪽이 더 나은가에 관해 언제나 논쟁이 벌어지고 있다. (일을 위해서 팔로 알토를, 아니면 재미를 위해 샌프란시스코를?)

이 하나의 길에 고도로 집중되어 있는 산업을 고려해 볼 때, 테헤란로는 거의 한국의 샌드 힐 로드 Sand Hill Road (옮긴이: 캘리포니아 멘로 파크 Menlo Park에 있는 길로, 벤처 캐피털 회사의 밀집으로 유명하다)처럼 보인다. (비록 공정하게 말하자면, 테헤란로에는 고층 건물이 늘어서 있기

lang: en

Foreign Policy has an article that basically offers the opposite view of Korea's economic growth that I presented yesterday. Daniel Altman argues that Korea's best days are behind it already, and that the country is tracking the arc of Japan's rise quite well:

Korea's rate of economic growth has been falling since the early 1990s, and its overall trend tracks Japan's with a delay of about 20 years. In terms of urbanization, the lag may be closer to 15 years, but the resemblance is clear. Also, the age profile of Korea's population 15 years from now will likely be very close to Japan's today.

Altman is generally correct - there are a lot of close correlations with the Japanese and Chinese cases. However, it is interesting that an article that focuses so clearly on economic growth rates would seem to miss mentioning the Asian Financial Crisis and the Tokyo real estate bubble.

These crises were very important for moving the East Asian nations away from unsustainable policies. Much as the dot-com bubble eventually led to today's vibrant and strong internet entrepreneur culture in Silicon Valley (they are actually businesses this time!) Tokyo and Seoul faced many problems internally with their models of development, and their respective crises both set off reforms.

Unfortunately, Japan has never fully followed through with its reforms, for a host of reasons. Most importantly, the inability of its political leadership to fundamentally alter the balance of power between the central ministries and the business leaders that run Japan's companies has undermined the country's entrepreneurial goals, preventing Japan's investors from gaining the economic freedom they need to build the next Sony. Japan now faces so many problems (and has faced them now for two decades), that it seems like there is never going to be

lang: en

In an article in Foreign Affairs, Ruchir Sharma blows apart the notion of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as the leading economic forces in the coming century. He emphasizes the demographic issues facing China, the rising concentration of wealth in Russia, as well as the slowing growth rates across all four countries to argue that the BRIC acronym should really be retired.

He moves beyond analyzing just the BRIC nations though, instead briefly noting the facts of development over the past 50 years. Sadly, despite some notable exceptions, Sharma notes that few countries have made any progress in their rise (in terms of real per capita incomes) in the past half century. Economic evidence demonstrates that countries can rarely grow at high sustained rates for more than a decade, since few countries have been able to adapt to the changing politics and technology that confront their economy. Sharma aggressively targets China in this regard, arguing that its bureaucracy simply cannot handle the combination of a changing economic landscape with the dual trends of urbanization and an aging population.

It is Sharma's comments on Korea that interests me most:

In the past, Asian states tended to look to Japan as a paradigm, nations from the Baltics to the Balkans looked to the European Union, and nearly all countries to some extent looked to the United States. But the crisis of 2008 has undermined the credibility of all these role models. Tokyo's recent mistakes have made South Korea, which is still rising as a manufacturing powerhouse, a much more appealing Asian model than Japan.

And this is something that I completely agree with:

Among countries with per capita incomes in the $20,000 to $25,000 range, only two have a good chance of matching or exceeding

lang: en

It has been two weeks since updating this blog (and an entire new election has come and gone in the United States!) I wanted to give a brief update on some of the stuff that I am working on so that it doesn't appear that I have entirely dropped off the face of the planet.

1. I am continuing to draft my research papers regarding my trip to South Korea last year. Right now, I am targeting about 6-7 essays about various topics, most of which will be independent of each other. I am hoping to finish them up over the Thanksgiving Holidays (the week of Nov. 18).

2. I am continuing to study Korean by reading Korean books. Right now, I am reading a book called 두 얼굴의 네이버 (you can read a book review of it in Korean here). It is a graphic novel depiction of Naver's corporate history, and is thus relatively bite-sized for learning a foreign language.

3. I just ordered Korea: the Impossible Country, a new book that was recently published from Tuttle. The book was been doing well in its reviews, and claims to give a more distinctive account of the culture of Korea than many other titles. We will see when I receive the book.

4. Finally, the leadership transition is underway in China as I write this. I am trying to catch up on all the news, but the best portal for it that I have found is Foreign Policy, which has a remarkable series of articles covering the transition.

Tomorrow is also 빼빼로 day, so definitely get in the spirit and eat some chocolate sticks for the holiday.

Back in October of last year, I wrote a blog post titled "What scares me about Mitt Romney" that looked into the business and educational background of the then future Republican nominee. My main concern with Romney came from his emphasis on data and analytics - his formative years were spent at Harvard Business School and Bain Capital, where he perfected the data-driven approach to private equity investment. While such skills are at the heart of business, the political world has generally been immune to such quantitative approaches.

So it is not without heavy layers of irony that Romney campaign staffers started blaming the team's approach to data as one of the leading causes of Romney's failed bid. BusinessInsider has one of the many accounts of Project Orca, a data and engineering centric approach to Get Out The Vote operations on election day. Rather than revolutionizing the campaign's activities, the program helped to suppress Republican turn-out efforts by preventing volunteers from accessing voter lists, and making it difficult to track who had voted and who had not.

Contrast the Romney campaign's maladies with the big data operation at the heart of the Obama campaign, as described by Time Magazine:

Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. “We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place,” said one of the officials. “None of them talked to each other.” So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the

lang: en

Eunjin Kim (you can follow her on Twitter: @eunnkimm) has compiled an impressive map of the current start-up scene in Seoul. Not only is it a great example of how to use the FusionTables API available from Google, but it also allows us to get a wonderful sense of the geographical layout of Korea's innovation infrastructure.

Start-ups appear to be concentrated mostly in the heart of Gangnam, with another small cluster near Hongdae in Mapo-gu. This is somewhat interesting for several reasons. First, Gangnam has some of the most expensive real estate in all of Korea, as well as the highest cost of goods in the capital city. Much as how San Francisco is one of the most expensive markets in the United States, the high costs don't appear to be slowing the onslaught of start-ups coming into the neighborhood.

What is interesting though is what this tells us about the location Korean start-up CEOs choose for their companies. Gangnam is also the site of Samsung and NCSoft, some of the largest firms working in the software space in the entire country. Hongdae, the other innovation cluster, is a much younger environment that generally attracts college students with its extensive nightlife and eateries. The CEO's choices would seem to reflect a desire to be near talent rather than youth, and this may also indicate the kind of employees companies are looking to employ.

One should probably not take away too much from this split - both sites are accessible from the No. 2 line on the Seoul Metro and are about 25 minutes away from each other. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see similar dynamics work in Seoul as does Silicon Valley. Palo Alto/Mountain View and SF remain the hubs for new ventures in the Bay Area,

If you were paying attention to the press last week, you probably read a headline like this one from TechCrunch: "Not From The Onion: Minnesota Bans Stanford’s Unauthorized Free Online Education." Or this headline from VentureBeat: "Dear Minnesota, free online education is a good thing (yeah, really)." While the sarcasm is appreciated (really, all of us from Minnesota are quite nice about these things), it was the articles themselves that turned me from a bemused spectator to an angry commentator.

TechCrunch writes:

This story of government overreach is so outrageous that we have to re-iterate that it is, in fact, real: the State of Minnesota has banned popular free online education site, Coursera ...

and

... the silly incident underscores a widespread problem between government regulators and startups: 20th century consumer and worker rights laws are hindering innovation.

VentureBeat writes similarly:

That, of course, is as ridiculous as it is ineffective. Coursera is delivered by the free and open Internet, so unless the state of Minnesota wants to start censoring the Internet, good luck.

You would think the government passed a law banning puppies and chocolate.

Coursera today released a statement that clarified many of the issues related to students taking classes in Minnesota. As Coursera noted, "Some states, like Minnesota, have laws to regulate higher education dissemination, mainly in the interest of protecting their citizens from sub-par education." [emphasis mine]

It is important to emphasize that the law in question was passed almost 30 years ago, mostly in response to the burgeoning for-profit university industry that were quickly making headway across the country. Despite the conspiracy theorists of some members of the press, these laws were not passed to protect state universities from competition, but rather in response to an issue of concern: consumers

lang: ko

블룸버그가 한국의 대학 졸업생들의 곤경에 대한 긴 기사를 썼다.

한국의 고등학생 네 명 중 거의 세 명은 – 재벌이라고도 알려진 – 주요 산업 그룹의 최고 연봉 직업을 얻기 위해 대학에 진학한다. 이에 따라 한국은 필요한 것보다 더 많은 대학 졸업생들로 넘쳐나고 있다. 한국에서 최대 규모의 상위 서른 개 회사는 지난 해 대학 졸업생 중 260,000명을 고용했는데, 이로 인해 채용되지 못한 60,000명이 지난 8월 청년 실업률을 6.4%로 – 전국 평균의 두 배가 넘는 수치 – 증가시키는 결과를 낳았다.

올해 초 박세훈 박사는 한국의 교육 시스템이 왜 기대에 부응하지 못하는 결과를 내는가에 대해 글을 썼다. 위 기사는 그 글을 잘 보완해준다.

본질적으로, 수년에 걸친 사교육은 한국 학생들을 대학 교육을 습득하는 데 대비시키는 게 아니라, 대학 입학 시험에 맞춰 준비시킬 뿐이다. 그 말인즉슨, 한국인들이 국제적인 시험에서 매우 우수한 성적을 거두는 이유가 이러한 시험들에 합격하기 위해 가르침을 받으며 지나치게 많은 시간을 투자하기 때문이라는 것이다. 그들이 대학에서 진짜 학계에 들어갈 때, 그들은 성공하기 위해 필요한 능력들을 가지고 있지 못하다.

이 두 이야기는 직접적으로 관련이 있다. 대학 교육이 단순 암기나 훌륭한 시험 성적을 거두는 것에 관한 것이라면, 전혀 가치가 없다. 대신에, 대학 교육은 반드시 생각의 실험실로 간주되어야 한다. 누구나 독립적으로, 새로운 것을 시도해보고 새로운 아이디어를 발견해내고, 자아에 대해 알아가고, 급변하는 세상에 필요한 다양한 기술을 발전시킬 수 있는 곳으로.

미국의 교육에 대한 요즘의 토론에서 흥미로운 점 중 하나는 우리가 지난 몇 십 년 동안 꽤 잘해왔다는 사실을 다들 잊는 듯하다는 것이다. 우리의 시스템에도 불구하고 말이다. 물론, 모두가 잘하지는 않았지만, 미국의 경제는 여전히 세계에서 선망의 대상으로 남아 있다. 어떻게 우리는 미국의 경제를 일반적으로 부진한 성적을 내고 있다고 여겨지는 미국 학교들과 조화시킬 수 있을까?

내가 생각하기에 핵심은, 미국 학교들, 특히 대학이, 많은 것을 올바르게 하고 있다는 점이다. 교육 실적은 놀랍게도 인간의 마음의 발전에 있어서 가장 중요한 요인들 중 하나가 아니다. 이단적으로 들릴 지도 모르지만, 아마도 훨씬 더 중요할 활동들을 생각해 보라. 독립적인 연구를 하는 것,