The difficulty of being Line’s CTO

Line CTO Park Euivin. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

“I didn’t exactly apply for the position,” says Park Euivin, CTO of Line, a massive messaging app company that’s branching out into a wide array of services.

Park became CTO by default. While leading an engineering team at Korean search company Naver, it was her team that birthed the Line experiment and made it successful.

Today, Line is right up there with the biggest messaging apps of the world, with “only” 214 million monthly active users versus 700 million-plus for WeChat.

It’s facing some big challenges. The main one: how can it continue to grow, and what gaps can it fill between the twin peaks of Facebook and Tencent?

Line’s overall user base is dipping, but it’s still growing in its core markets of Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Line acquired the startup behind this holographic AI assistant and companion. Screengrab from Vinclu video.

It’s also raking in the cash, hitting US$1.2 billion in revenue in 2016, a 16.2 percent surge over the previous year.

“Messaging app” is no longer an adequate description for Line. It’s making a big push into artificial intelligence and chatbots.

Driving that change is a tough job. Park’s engineering team is spread across Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam, making up about 40 percent of Line’s workforce. The platform has 3,661 employees.

“We use English to communicate,” she says. However, that’s often unrealistic as Line hires in countries where people don’t speak English that well. So it’s not a strict requirement.

“We don’t want to limit our potential hires to only English speakers, so we don’t miss out on talented engineers in Asia,” she tells the audience at Tech in Asia Singapore 2017.

Line also has to juggle a sprawling product lineup, from Thailand-focused delivery service Line Man, to selfie camera app B612, to Clova, its latest AI project.

A collection of micro-projects