Bom Kim

He was born in Seoul but left Korea at the age of 7. At age 13, he went to boarding school in Massachusetts at Deerfield Academy,[4] where he lettered in varsity wrestling and track and later attended Harvard University;[5] He later attended Harvard Business School but dropped out after only six months.[6]

After interning at The New Republic and starting a student magazine called Current, Kim briefly worked at Boston Consulting Group before raising $4 million to start a magazine called 02138, which folded in 2009. He started Coupang the next year.[5][7]

Coupang delivery truck in Seoul, 2017.

Kim founded Coupang in 2010 and since then has gone on to raise more than $3.8 billion in venture capital from investors such as Sequoia Capital, Softbank, BlackRock, and others.[8][9]

It began as a Groupon-like website and now operates as an online retailer and operates a 24-hour logistics service called Rocket Delivery. It was reported in 2018 that Coupang would gross 2.7 trillion won in annual sales and lost 1.7 trillion won between 2015 and 2017 and maintains over 3.5 million daily active users as of 2019.[10]

The company currently employs over 10,000 people with offices in Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Los Angeles, Seattle and Silicon Valley.[11]