Sparklabs founder talks about Korea’s new generation of startups and his accelerator’s third batch of teams

Bernard Moon, co-founder and managing partner at Sparklabs, poses for the camera at the accelerator’s second demo day.

It’s been a busy December for SparkLabs, the Seoul-based accelerator that burst into the Asia startup scene in August 2012 and quickly became a leading link between Korean entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley investors.

Last Thursday the organization, which belongs to the highly-esteemed Global Accelerator Network, announced nine new entrants into its third three-month accelerator program. Hailing from Tokyo, San Francisco, Chicago, in addition to Korea, the startups will each receive a $25,000 investment from SparkLabs itself, along with the usual office space, mentor relationships, and networking perks.

Then, on Friday evening, SparkLabs revealed the first two beneficiaries of its $30 million seed-stage fund, which was announced back in October.

With its first major investments underway and a hat trick of accelerator batches officially under its belt, SparkLabs’ co-founder and managing partner Bernard Moon fired up Skype to talk to Tech in Asia about entrepreneurship in Korea, the Asia-Silicon Valley divide, and the art of hand-holding.

Below is a modified transcript of our discussion. Scroll down past the text for blurbs and screenshots of SparkLabs’ latest startup class and investment recipients.

Can you talk a little bit about your background and how SparkLabs came about?

I’ve mainly been a tech entrepreneur throughout my career though I’ve done brief stints in finance at an investment bank and a family-run firm. In 2012, after jumping back into technology with my startup Vidquick, my friend Hanjoo Lee, who’s a co-founder at Hostway, convinced me that it was time to do a Y Combinator style accelerator and help a lot of the Korean entrepreneurs we were seeing come out. And then I convinced him to bring on Jimmy Kim, who I did my first two startups with and was also Nexon’s first CFO.

If he had asked me five years ago, I don’t think I would have done it. But within the past five years, I’ve seen a change in these entrepreneurs that come from Korea.

Can you elaborate more? What are some of these changes?

They’re more global, they’re more bilingual and internationalized, and they also know that just because they have one million or 10 million users in Korea, that doesn’t mean anything if they’re going to launch in the US. They know that they’ll have to take a different approach if they want to launch there. Just understanding that not everyone operates the same online or offline in different countries, basically.

For example, Nexon was the first online multiplayer game company. It produced the first MMORPG game. They came out in 1996 and created the whole micro-transaction ecosystem in the late nineties. This is just hypothesizing, but I think that since Korea was the leader in that area, but wasn’t good at expanding those techniques globally beyond Asia, that was a hindrance. There might have been some sort of arrogance since they were the leaders in those fields, and assumptions that other markets would follow, without realizing that there are online behavior patterns that vary online from country to country.

Five or six years ago I would meet these entrepreneurs from Korea that were horrible at research. They wouldn’t know who their competitors were on the market, or why they were successful in terms of attracting their user base. But the young entrepreneurs nowadays really take the time to know the competitive landscape, and the nuances of their competitors’ success in the US.

Sparklabs, unlike some accelerators in Asia, is pretty firmly focused on taking Korean companies international or taking Western companies to Asia. Can you explain your preference for working with companies that have global potential?

The nine companies joining Sparklabs’ third batch are: