Seungkook Baek, Co-CEO “Working with such talented Dablers, I believe that we have no choice but to succeed”

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Mar 30, 2022

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As one of the co-founders of Dable, Seungkook develops new products and businesses that allows Dable to quantum-jump ten times more than where it is now. For the past ten years, he has been in charge of business strategy and product development for various companies in the IT/Commerce industry including Samsung SDS, LOTTE Group Strategy & Insight Center and SK Planet. At LOTTE Group Strategy and Insight Center where he spent most of his professional career, Seungkook worked as a researcher and made predictions on the outlook of the distribution industry and was also tasked with industry strategy consulting such as predicting sales across various scenarios. He also was a business development manager at SK Planet. Sungkook graduated from Korea University and holds a master’s degree from KAIST in Future Strategy.

• Please introduce yourself

When I was young, I was a rather peculiar student. I loved mathematics. I used to dream of becoming a meteorologist after reading in a newspaper that one of the most difficult mathematical problems is forecasting the weather. In high school, I read The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and decided to major in biotechnology without much thought. In university, when my classmates were preparing to apply to specialized graduate schools, I participated in the management consulting club’s activities by myself and eventually got a job at a consulting firm.

But in retrospect, I seem to find satisfaction in looking for cool and fun things to do and doing what other people aren’t doing. Maybe that’s why I don’t use mainstream products even when it comes to phones, like iPhone and Samsung Galaxy and used Blackberry, Xiaomi, and Huawei instead. For laptops as well, I’d use a Hansung laptop by installing Linux software, opting for things that other people don’t usually choose.

Of course, because of these tendencies, I’ve also failed several times and might have been going slower than others. But I love to live life looking for new things and want to try and accomplish things that others don’t do.

• What motivated you to establish Dable?

Growing up with a father who ran his own business, I was interested in starting my own business from an early age. After working as a consultant at LOTTE Group’s Strategy and Insight Center, I joined SK Planet’s in-house venture team ‘RecoPick’. There, I met Chaehyun and other co-founders and established Dable together. Until 2019, I was in charge of overseeing the overall business operation like developing the business model and roadmap including raising funds and designing the organizational structure to achieve them. Starting from 2020, I’ve been responsible for developing new products and business models to quantum-jump Dable’s growth.

Working for large corporations had lots of upsides, but I also experienced limitations that are inevitable for large corporations. One of the key competitive advantages to have in the IT industry is the ability to make fast decisions and execute them quickly. But at a large corporation, due to systemic issues, it takes three years to execute something in the field and another three years for the performance results to come around however good your idea and strategy may be. This was difficult for me. On the other hand, at a startup, if I make one wrong decision, I can see the change in sales. And when I do a great presentation and secure a big client, you can directly see the dramatic increase in sales. The fact that you can immediately see the outcome of your thoughts and decisions, and are able to learn from this process, is the biggest reason I decided to start a business.

​Someone who does more work is bound to experience more mistakes and failures, but I try not to be afraid of that. Rather than trying ten times and brooding over one failure, I focus on trying one hundred times and succeeding eighty times. Each approach may have its own pros and cons, but I feel a greater sense of satisfaction and achievement by working at a startup.

• What projects are you working on?

Right now, I’m in charge of two projects. One is called the Y-DSP where we’re developing new digital marketing products (DSP) as a joint task force with Yanolja Cloud, which I am leading. The other one is called the Attenion’D project, where Dable brings in its AI technology and experience in programmatic advertising to innovate the digital out-of-home advertising market. For both projects, we develop deep learning models based on massive amounts of data and turn them into business models. As the targeted markets for both products are so humongous, I think these projects will provide a new basis of business for Dable to grow into a company that surpasses its unicorn status.

• What do you think is Dable’s competitive edge?

I think the biggest competitive edge of Dable is its fast, flexible, and data-based decision-making structure and its organizational culture. Ever since its founding, we’ve thought that the core of a company’s power lies not in capital or technology, but the ability to foster an organizational culture that keeps on changing and improving.

Just because you’re a founder, it doesn’t mean that you have more experience and wisdom than other Dablers (people who work at Dable). So Dable has sought to build a culture where each team tries to achieve a common goal based on their own motivation by collecting individual team members’ opinions and wisdom in addition to the founders’ insight.

Dable also believes in the ‘agile’ philosophy, where instead of investing 100 units of resources to get 100 in return, you invest 50 units of resources to get 70 in return, prioritizing launching the product first and reflecting feedback as you go. Of course, there were a few times when we failed because of releasing our products prematurely without properly developing them, but based on these values Dable has been evolving faster than any other in the market.

I am confident that no other organization can rival Dable and that we consist of members that are nimble to change. Not all companies can succeed and the same goes for startups; but working with such talented members, I believe that we have no choice but to succeed.

• What are your goals?

Whenever I hear Dablers say that they “enjoy working at Dable” or are “proud to be working at Dable,” I feel very rewarded. On the other hand, when a Dabler cannot continue working with us for various reasons, I personally feel distraught. I will keep working to ensure Dable’s continuous growth, and do my best to carry out Dable’s philosophy which says ‘ads that users need are information, not ads’. To achieve this, I’ll find the best colleagues and create the best work environment.

Just like how early members of Google have moved on to companies like Twitter and Facebook to lead the IT industry now, I dream of a digital media market led by Dablers 20–30 years from now.