Interview with CEO Park Jae-joon of Antock /Photo = Reporter Kim Hui-sun hwijpg@
The Year of the Blue Serpent dawned in 2025. It's a time when technology companies are also intensely planning company-wide business plans and future strategies, just like making a personal New Year's resolution. Since the investment cold period has been long, setting goals for a new leap forward and growth is more important than ever. Each startup will have different major milestones to achieve significant results this year, such as technology, revenue, and investment.
In 1994, business scholars Jim Collins and Jerry Forres first introduced the concept of “Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG)” as a way to set long-term goals for companies in their book “8 Habits of Successful Companies.” The literal translation is an ambitious (big), aggressive (Hairy), and audacious (Audacious) goal. The explanation is that even if the goal is so huge that it seems reckless, if you seriously pursue it with a long breath, you can eventually inspire the members of the organization, gradually expand the boundaries of the business, and achieve rapid development.
Elon Musk's SpaceX, which plans to pioneer Mars and send humans, is probably a typical example. When Vision was first announced, some people may have laughed at it as a somewhat novel-like story. However, by successfully using a chopstick arm to catch a rocket booster in the 5th test flight recently, they are proving to people around the world that they are getting closer one step at a time to the goal they have set. Rather, since there were ambitious goals, the pace of technological development to meet them may have accelerated even more.
In this context, I'd like to ask ourselves if our vision is big enough and bold enough. In particular, overseas expansion is one of the major topics in the startup ecosystem, and I wonder how many innovative venture companies are dreaming of a global stage beyond Korea. Skills and effort may be necessary to develop a global market, but no matter how many requirements you have, nothing can happen if you don't dream about it. The government's policy to promote overseas expansion of startups cannot send entrepreneurs who do not have a global market to the global stage.
As an entrepreneur, it's actually not easy to set a global vision and pursue it insistently. Overseas expansion fundamentally requires a long preparation period and investment, and various management crises and pressure on short-term results make entrepreneurs focus on the domestic market, which is easy to commercialize, and it is easy to see that as time passes, the business model of the company becomes too entrenched in the domestic ecosystem. Paradoxically, it seems that a certain amount of success and performance achieved in Korea makes entrepreneurs feel complacent.
In this context, the statistics for CES 2025, where Antock, where I work recently, also participated, are very encouraging. There are approximately 130 domestic companies that have won the CES Innovation Award, which is more than 60% of the total. Of the total 1,300 companies on display at Eureka Park, a dedicated startup hall, 625 are at the level of about 48% of Korea's innovative companies. I would like to interpret this as an indicator that the number of companies that are actively targeting overseas since the beginning of the business is increasing, and I would like to think that this phenomenon is not just a trend, but the beginning of a change in constitution.
Entering the global market clearly has physical, environmental, and institutional barriers to entry. However, I think the biggest barrier to entry is the entrepreneur's internal factors and psychology. It can be scary and difficult to move away from the familiar domestic market and move into unknown territory. However, we live in an age where Korean people win Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards. I believe that Korea's innovative technology companies also have sufficient potential to be recognized and led on a global level, and I hope that more founders will work hard with bold ambitions in their hearts.
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