This is a story from a business trip I took to the GDC conference in San Francisco. I had only recently been assigned to the U.S. office, and several colleagues from headquarters were also attending the conference with me. During the day, we attended lectures and visited exhibition booths as part of our schedule, and in the evenings, we went to networking parties hosted by sponsoring companies. The party was held at a bar across from the Moscone Center that had been rented out entirely for the event, and to put it simply, the rest of us and the visitors from headquarters felt like “fish out of water” there.
Looking back, I hadn’t been assigned to the U.S. branch for very long at the time, and I hardly knew anyone in the gaming industry. It was only natural that I didn’t recognize a single face at the networking party, but I felt terribly sorry for the visitors from headquarters. Even now, my face flushes when I recall that awkward moment when we were all standing there awkwardly, each holding a beer bottle. That was the stark reality of my global network at the time, and it also reflected the current state of South Korean startups entering the U.S. market.
After that day, I joined LinkedIn and connected with everyone I met, determined not to repeat the same mistake at the next networking party. Fortunately, as my network gradually grew and my business expanded, a few years later I reached a point where attending networking parties no longer felt awkward. Although I’ve since left the gaming industry, I draw on those experiences to share survival tips with junior expatriates and startup CEOs, helping them avoid the same trial-and-error process.
While working in Silicon Valley, I met many executives and employees from Korean companies and hosted visits to the U.S. by startup-related organizations. One thing I consistently observed was a lack of understanding of American business culture. Public settings—such as business meetings, conference presentations, and marketing events—are fundamentally different in nature and approach from private settings like closed-door meetings, networking parties, and deal negotiations. Even with the same counterpart, the weight and meaning of a conversation vary depending on the setting and the topics discussed. Maintaining the boundary between public and private and safeguarding that trust is an ironclad rule that must be followed when doing business in the U.S. market.
For example, let’s assume you’ve partnered with Apple, signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), and are testing app development on an unreleased iPad prototype. If you were to disclose the details of that partnership without authorization or use them for promotional purposes, your development company would have to be prepared to never do business with Apple again. This illustrates just how crucial it is in the U.S. market to clearly distinguish between public and private matters and to uphold business etiquette that preserves trust.
Recently, when I saw the President publicly bring along the heads of major domestic conglomerates to meet with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and exclaim, “We’re family,” over drinks, my first thought was, frankly, “That’s awkward.” At the same time, I couldn’t help but see a parallel with my own awkward figure standing there holding a beer bottle at the GDC party. The difference is that while my embarrassment back then was mine alone, this embarrassment now belongs to the entire nation. And as I read his autobiography, The Thinking Machine, I tried to imagine how Chairman Jensen Huang—an icon of the AI era—might have viewed this awkward, baggy-clad figure from South Korea who could barely make himself understood. #FAFO
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