This year, I went through a couple of significant changes in my life. First, I just turned thirty in Korean age, which means I will now be under a pretty heavy social pressure to really know where I’m going with my life. Second, I recently joined a membership club for female professionals based in Seoul called Hey Joyce.
Hey Joyce is a membership-based networking club open to career women, mostly Korean nationals, who are interested in exchanging information relevant to professional development opportunities. Some also join just to become part of a community of motivated, driven women. Contents of the ongoing activities at the club include lectures, seminars, large scale networking parties, purpose-based meetups (e.g. book writing, investment, tech industry trend analysis), and many more. Sometimes these activities feature or are led by high-profile female guests referred to as “inspirers,” including but not limited to serial entrepreneurs, executives, and partners from major local and international firms, high-level government officials, and influential media people. The majority of these gatherings take place in the club lounge located in Seolleung, Gangnam. Over two hundred members joined this community only two months into its official launching in September 2018.
The slogan for Hey Joyce is “stay true to yourself, forever” as a woman and a professional. While this may be guaranteed for women in some parts of the world, South Korean society is still struggling to realize the full potential of its female workforce. To offer an illustration, OECD claims that South Korea has the biggest gender wage gap among member countries, ranks fifth lowest in the representation of women in the parliament, and has only 10.5% women in managerial positions in the private sector. These conditions, combined with demanding expectations on adhering to gender roles, challenge young women who are as devoted to their personal life and career as to the roles in a family and the broader society. My personal observation is that this is more the case for Korean women born in the 1970-80s and less so but still applicable to the millennials.
On Wednesday, October 31st, Joyce visited Hey Joyce club lounge and talked to about half of the total club members about her life and her work in the cryptocurrency space. What made Joyce interesting is that she was so many things in a single human body. A surfer, entrepreneur, ex-lawyer, a once child prodigy and a now woman with a strong sense of humor, Joyce told us that she was currently at the stage of her life where her mission is to invest the resources from the crypto world to tackle one of today’s most pressing social issues, income inequality.
Joyce started off the talk with a reflection on her educational and professional background. Her experience was very unusual compared to most other stories I heard from Korean Americans who usually come from highly demanding families that prefer conventional elite education. For instance, she left high school before graduation, decided to attend Cornell for B.A. at the age of 16 and graduated three years later, went to Harvard for a Master’s and considered continuing onto a Ph.D., but instead decided to go to Columbia for a J.D. She mentioned that she mostly went to law school to persuade her parents who did not agree with her leaving Harvard. She then joined a law firm, went on to venture capital, founded a K-pop media business, and after selling it created Stellar. Leaving all that behind she is now working with her current fund, SparkChain Capital.
From what I understand, Joyce’s point was twofold: for her, the best decisions that she made in life were the ones disregarding social pressure. Another thing is that life and career almost never go as planned. I have to admit that some of the stories Joyce shared were not relatable to everyone because they are such unique experiences. But some of the more darker bits (e.g. how she felt she undersold her first company despite the endless nights spent burning the midnight oil, or the pressure she experienced during her company’s end of the year party thinking that she is responsible for guaranteeing her employees and their families’ living) were more than enough to illustrate how much Joyce went through before she came to terms with her achievements, just like in the case of everyone else.
Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Social Impact
As the Managing Director of SparkChain Capital, Joyce also shared some of her insights about the cryptocurrency market and how her fund’s vision is somewhat different from those of other investors. Truth be told, I knew nothing about the cryptocurrency before attending her talk but somehow had some negative bias against it. Recent governmental regulations against ICOs in South Korea have of course contributed to my limited understanding of cryptocurrency. To finance illiterates like me, cryptocurrency is often seen as a risky investment option for people who are into hit-the-jackpot opportunities.
[Reference #1] About Joyce and SparkChain Capital
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/19/led-by-stellar-cofounder-joyce-kim-sparkchain-capital-is-a-new-100m-fund-for-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency-startups/
Joyce explained that this is not necessarily the case, and added that cryptocurrency and the underlying blockchain technology are in fact handy tools that help tackle issues of socioeconomic inequality. For instance, it resolved the issue of transaction fees African immigrant workers in European countries deal with when sending a portion of their earnings back home to their families. While this specific type of international transaction is as important as ODA for development in low-income countries, using the conventional banking system burden the workers with high trading fees because it is designed to benefit the middlemen involved in the process. As a result, less financial resources flow into developing countries. According to Joyce, Stellar helped get rid of these problems by decentralizing the financial system and promoting inclusion for the poor though making money transfer more accessible.
Another product designed to tackle income inequality using blockchain technology that Joyce introduced is Bext360, a coffee bean sorting machine that guarantees on-the-spot, transparent trade between farmers and buyers in Africa. These efforts are similar in its nature in that they all acknowledge the fact that, as Joyce said, “it is expensive to be poor” and uses technology to solve a social problem in a scalable way.
[Reference #2] Blockchain-Powered Financial Inclusion (World Bank Doc)
http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/710961476811913780/Session-5C-Pani-Baruri-Blockchain-Financial-Inclusion-Pani.pdf
[Reference #3] On Bext360, a Coffee Bean Sorting Machine
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/11/bext360-is-using-robots-and-the-blockchain-to-pay-coffee-farmers-fairly/
Joyce’s Pearl of Wisdom
Before concluding her talk, Joyce made some final comments about what she expects from her field. She explained that she saw cryptocurrency and blockchain as a powerfully disruptive technology capable of decentralizing an existing system to make more inclusive societies, just as the Internet once did. This aspect of cryptocurrency also happens to be the reason Stellar was developed at a non-profit organization, because she wanted to treat it as a public good like the Internet. Joyce also added that she personally hopes to see more businesses using blockchain and cryptocurrency to come up with actual products and services instead of focusing just on the trading and exchange aspect of things to realize the full potential of the technology.
hyeminchokim 