Not to discourage hardworking students, but another living proof that you can be successful even without a master’s degree is Bom Kim, the man behind Coupang, South Korea’s most valuable startup and is poised as Amazon’s greatest competition in the country.
As of 2018, it has a $9-billion valuation and if rumors that it would become public are true, then this amount may exponentially balloon.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs are successful entrepreneurs who famously dropped out of college, but Bom was already in grad school when he decided to quit.
He was admitted to Harvard’s MBA program — a highly regarded institution for budding entrepreneurs.
While others see this opportunity as a great way to achieve their goals, it only took six months for Bom to realize that he could make it on his own.
Best believe that this e-commerce company only started in 2010 and within three years, it saw sales exceeding $1 billion, an impressive feat for a company that’s less than 5 years old.
There was an offer to make the company public, after all, Coupang was booming, plain as day. But the road to success wasn’t smooth-sailing, so Bom had to reinvent how the system worked.
This was what Bom regards as the most difficult decision he ever had to make. The six months of the listing process were long and rigorous, but at the eleventh hour, he knew that the company wasn’t ready for it.
In short, IPO plans were shelved. But Bom had no regrets — this might have been the hardest decision he had ever taken but he learned a lot from it.
Bom transformed Coupang into an e-commerce giant that gives importance to customer service. He admitted that at the time, they turned green with envy at Amazon’s success so they tried their hardest to grow as well.
There are 5,000 Coupangmen who deliver packages ideally in less than a day. It also boasts the Dawn Delivery, wherein if you order the midnight before, you can receive your item before 7 a.m. the next day.
With the success of Coupang that shows no sign of slowing down, many people are interested in the company. While Bom has maintained in previous years that he has no plans of making the business public, rumors on the grapevine have it that the stalled plan will happen in 2021.
Some of its investors are Sequoia Capital, BlackRock Inc., and Vision Fund.