Our guest on this episode is the Founder and CEO of Chartmetric himself, Sung Cho. During this fireside chat, recorded live at our company retreat in upstate New York, Sung talks candidly about where we've been, where we are now, and what our future holds, sharing wisdom, entrepreneurial advice, and predictions on the future of music data analytics.
One thing that attracted me about music was the topic itself is fun.... When I thought about becoming an entrepreneur, I thought about what story I would tell my daughters.... I thought it would be more fun if I worked on something that people can relate to easily and better when I go share my stories to anyone.
Before starting Chartmetric, Sung worked on Sales Cloud as the Principal Product Manager at Oracle Corporation. Prior to that, he was the first employee/engineer at the publicly-traded gaming company Gamevil (which has a market capitalization of $400M), where he initiated mobile game development and eventually positioned the company as a leading mobile game developer.
As a Korean, the advancement of K-Pop was inspiring and interesting to me.... People know about Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Kia ... but when it comes to culture, when people recognize the culture as well ... that feels quite different. When I saw that, I vaguely thought that I wanted to contribute to this. Okay, K-Pop is becoming more popular; is there any way that I can contribute to this?
Sung graduated with a Bachelor’s degree of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management. He enjoys posting ideas on his blog, which has attracted more than 5M views and is considered one of the leading tech blogs in Korea. To date, Sung has invested in 10 startups in New York, Silicon Valley, and Seoul — all while growing the music industry's leading music data analytics platform.
Ups and downs, we all have that.... We feel frustrated, something that we're working on doesn't work.... But one thing that I believe in is as long as smart brains are together thinking about that one problem for long enough, then there is always a way to get through.... It's very rare that somebody or some company are still focused on that same problem for 6-10 years.... As long as we try and continue, there will be a day when we feel proud of our achievement and look back and think, 'Wow, we're already here.' Every day was a small step, but after a while, then we know that it was quite a big stride.
