“It’s the goal for everyone to know ICON as a brand and as a smart contract platform, as something that powers a lot of our everyday activities. I think I really want it to be a brand, a household name.”
That’s a lofty goal, but one ICON Foundation member Min Kim believes the project is on the path to achieving. The veteran investment banker, financial executive and startup founder is proud of what the team has achieved so far. And there’s much of which to be proud – in just a few years, ICON has grown from a tiny startup into one of Korea’s, nay the world’s largest blockchain platforms.
For Kim, it’s living the proverbial dream.
“Every day is like a blessing,” he says. “It feels like yesterday I was debating with an executive team at DAYLI Financial Group about starting a blockchain company. Fast forward three years, we’re able to hire over 100 people and we’ve built one of the largest communities in the blockchain space. We’re moving to a new office, we’ve got a team in San Francisco, we’ve got partners around the world. It’s just an incredible feeling.”
Important, meaningful things
Having outgrown its original home at Euljiro’s WeWork building, the project and some of its partners are moving to a new office nearby, a larger, better-appointed space capable of supporting 470 people. The new home not only will allow ICON to host more get-togethers and events, but also leaves room for it to grow further. Kim says, “At the rate we’ve been growing, the space will hopefully support us over the next three years.”
While the bear market has killed a lot of blockchain projects, ICON keeps getting busier, he says. It’s not just a matter of money. For Kim, what separates the survivors from the fatalities is purpose. You’ve got to give your team a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
“A lot of these projects have nothing going on in terms of development or the business side,” he says. “Eventually, their engineers or other employees, well, they’re human beings, they get burned out. They need to do something else more meaningful with their time.”
“It’s the goal for everyone to know ICON as a brand and as a smart contract platform, as something that powers a lot of our everyday activities. I think I really want it to be a brand, a household name.”
This is one problem ICON does not have. “At ICON, the difference is that our deal flow is getting stronger, our team is getting stronger,” he says. “We have more and more projects we’re going to be extremely busy on. We have zero interest in quitting at this moment. We have so many meaningful, important things that are happening at the moment. I can’t see myself doing anything else.”
Body in the present, mind in the future
Though some members of the community seem to think Kim is ICON’s CEO, a misunderstanding born in part because he’s so often the English-language voice of the project, he is just one member of the ICON Council, its true governing body. His main duties include solidifying the project’s finances and making sure it’s running smoothly on a course to fulfill its original vision. This second duty involves assembling the best team possible, putting the right people in the right places.
“A lot of my time went into actually finding the right management executives to lead different groups within the organization,” he says. “Those who haven’t done it underestimate the time and effort that goes into it. You just can’t hire anyone.”
Ultimately, it’s the ICON Council that is piloting the plane, though Kim admits the plane runs mostly on autopilot, as do many well-managed companies. Pointing to Jeff Bezos’s management philosophy at Amazon, he says Council members come together to make a few “big, high quality decisions.” They do not make small, day-to-day decisions.
There is a good reason for this. Council members don’t live in the day-to-day. They live in the future. “We try to live two to three years from now,” he says. “We envision what the world will be like two to three years from now and we start making products and start strategizing to position ourselves to build that vision.”
“At ICON, the difference is that our deal flow is getting stronger, our team is getting stronger. We have more and more projects we’re going to be extremely busy on. We have zero interest in quitting at this moment. We have so many meaningful, important things that are happening at the moment. I can’t see myself doing anything else.”
We’re not selling a product. We’re building tech.
Though you might view platforms such as EOS or Ethereum as ICON’s competitors, Kim doesn’t see it that way. “We’re doing our own thing”, he says, and ICON’s got a lot of resources dedicated to what they’re doing operationally.
More to the point, ICON’s not interested in playing number games. “We’re not trying to be the largest DApp platform. That’s not our goal,” he says. “The goal is to create a very usable, very user-friendly platform our partners can use.”
Kim stresses that blockchain, especially public blockchain, is not a product. It’s infrastructure, a piece of technology that many liken to the internet. “We’re not actually selling a product. We’re building a technology along with our partners,” he says. “A lot of people think of blockchain as a consumer product, something that you use, that you play around with. It’s not like that. A lot of the pieces have to be very easy to build on.”
2019: the year of real-world adoption?
Kim hopes that this year marks a turning point in blockchain technology when we’ll finally see meaningful real-world adoption. He says, “I think everyone expects something more.”
He thinks there are plenty of places where blockchain could be used, even with today’s technology, but regulations stand in the way. Contrary to what you might expect from a tech executive, however, Kim doesn’t rail against those regulations. “For decades and decades, we’ve been building regulations to protect consumers. These are good laws that had good purposes,” he says. “We can’t expect that to flip overnight.”
Kim calls for patience. Tech developers need to show regulators and the general public that blockchain is a safe, superior technology. He points to the example of eBay when it first launched. “A lot of people were like, ‘I give them my money and you’re expecting someone to send me a bicycle when they could just run off with my money? Are you serious?,” he says. “That’s why CraigsList and other Web 1.0 companies stuck around so long. We need to start building out easier ways for people to keep things on record on the public blockchain. It will take time for people to adjust.”
Partnerships to salivate over
In the meantime, ICON has been busying itself building an impressive list of partnerships, including deals with some of Korea’s biggest corporations. Many of those partnerships involve enterprise blockchains and are led by ICONLOOP. Pointing to this, some in the community have expressed doubt about what those deals bring to ICONLOOP’s public project, ICON. Kim dismisses this criticism, saying, “Everything that we do is interrelated to ICONLOOP’s success and ICONLOOP’s success is interrelated to ICON’s success.”
Besides, people should realize what these partnerships say about ICON. “A lot of other projects would salivate about the partnerships we have. You just don’t walk into LINE’s office and say ‘Hey, let’s do a partnership,’” he says. “Getting that type of access, that kind of trust from a larger corporation in order for them to put their name next to your name, it’s extremely meaningful and nobody should take that away from us because we’ve worked extremely hard for it.”
“They could have chosen any other project to work with,” he adds. “Why would they choose us? Because they trust us. They know our team. They know our capabilities. They do their due diligence. They’re not stupid. They don’t just read the news and say we want to get into this partnership because they say they can do things. These large corporations have their reputations on the line. They need to know we can really pull it off.”
“We try to live two to three years from now. We envision what the world will be like two to three years from now and we start making products and start strategizing to position ourselves to build that vision.”
More fun in the years ahead
Though he’s a former investment banker, Kim likes the financial side of operations the least. “Money is always the biggest headache,” he says. “It’s the least fun part of the job.”
He also fears getting the call in the middle of the night to tell him something’s gone terribly wrong. He doesn’t lose any sleep from it, though. “This is not the first time I’ve build a company this size,” he says. “After you do this for a little bit, you stop panicking. The most important thing is to keep calm and keep the ship going.”
And keeping the ship going forward Kim and his teammates continue to do. He’s confident that the project’s best years are still ahead of it.
“Things are looking good from our side. There’s nothing wrong with the product. Every day we’re becoming a stronger product,” he says. “It takes time, we have a lot of good things ahead of us, and we’ll have a lot more fun in the years to come.”
