• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.119-130
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• 2019

Although a well-established line of research has addressed the funding decision, the activities of investee startups to receive funding have been overlooked because prior research has been conduced from investor's point of view. In addition, funding does not result from one off decisions but from decision process with many stages. Moreover, the emphasis placed on specific investment criteria varies by different stages during the process. Therefore, understanding the initial funding of startups requires to analyze the strategic behaviors of startups throughout the entire funding decision process from first meeting with investors to funding success. This study investigates the initial funding process of startups, and the analysis is based on a case study of LetinAR one of the successful startups founded by students in South Korea. This study investigates how early start-ups were able to receive funding from startup's point of view, and the analysis is based on a case study of LetinAR, an augmented reality(AR) startup using Pin mirror technology. By adding "legitimacy building" stage that had not been addressed previously, we divided funding process into four stages: 1) legitimacy building, 2) familiarization, 3) screening, and 4) bargaining phase. We did not only analyze major criteria, but also strategic activities of startup at each stage. This study makes a contribution by helping us understand complicated process of funding and the successful strategic behavior of investor backed startups.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.63-73
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• 2016

In these days startup became one of the most hot issue in business world. The problem is many startup couldn't overcome the valley of death. For this reason many startup want to funded by venture capital. However startup's business is trade secret itself, so they have to make strategic approach to venture capital. The purpose of study is to find the way to make strategic decision for startup. By analyzing the relation between startup's characteristic and venture capital's investment portfolio. Four famous venture capital(Sequoia capital, Lightspeed venture, Firstround and Khosla venture) and their seed invested startup Dropbox, Airbnb, Snapchat, Uber and Instacart was selected for this study. As a result, each venture capital has their own invest category characteristic and their seed funding belong to their category. Moreover, between seed funded startup and 36,4% of 244 past invented company shown vertical relationship, beside 0.5% of past 244 invested company shown horizontal relationship. This result shown the importance of the relation between startup's characteristic and venture capital's portfolio. Startup have to check the venture capital's portfolio for the strategic approach for funding and venture capital have to make mutual positive portfolio for decreasing the risk.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.41-53
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• 2014

There has been lots of discussions and new policies to encourage people to start new businesses. However, they key issue such as how to raise the success rate of new start-ups still needs to be resolved. Many believe that the success of policies and discussions for promoting entrepreneurship in Korea highly depends on how to lower the risks with which early stage start-ups encounter. In this backdrop, this study aims at providing an emerging approaches in entrepreneurship, 'lean start-up', which can work as an effective method with which early stage entrepreneurs can minimize challenges they face. Even though lean start-up is a widely accepted concept among practitioners and recognized as a useful tool for entrepreneurship and education, but has not got deserved attention from the academic world. This paper offers basic framework and key principles of lean start-ups, furthermore, shows Korean cases of step-by-step application methods of its concepts. It also suggest key issues in adopting lean start-up strategy. This study has implications and contributions for entrepreneurs, educators and researchers through providing comprehensive perspectives on process of the lean start-up strategy.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1155-1161
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• 2014

This paper proposes a start-up voltage generator for reducing the minimum input supply voltage of DC-DC boost converters to 250mV. The proposed start-up voltage generator boosts 250mV input voltage to over 500mV to charge the capacitor for starting the boost converter. After the boost converter operates initially with the supply voltage charged in the capacitor, it uses its boosted output voltage for the supply voltage. Therefore, after the start-up operation, the proposed DC-DC boost converter works as the same as the conventional one. The proposed start-up voltage generator reduces the threshold voltage of the transistors by adjusting the body voltage at a low input voltage. This causes the higher clock frequency and the larger current to a Dickson charge-pump for boosting the input voltage. The proposed start-up voltage generator was implemented with a $0.18{\mu}m$ CMOS process. Its clock frequency and output voltage were 34.5kHz and 522mV at 250mV input voltage, respectively.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.101-111
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• 2016

Startup has lot of limitation such as time and budget shortage, and few human resources, and may be under the very stressful condition. Naturally in these context, there is always conflict among the startup team members, but the impact of conflict on teamwork or team performance has not been empirically tested. This study examines the relationship among the conflict, teamwork and team performance in startup context. Different two types of conflict and four factors of teamwork for team performance are identified from a literature review and tested; task conflict and relationship conflict as antecedents, teamwork was composed of communication, collaboration, coordination and cohesion, leading to team performance. 142 data points were collected from startup representatives to test these hypotheses. PLS data analysis indicated that the task conflict positively effects on all teamwork factors, but relationship conflict has statistically significant effect on only two teamwork factors, collaboration and coordination in negative relationship. Teamwork factors effects on team performance except communication. Based on the results, we proposed practically several team management skills for startup managers, leaders and even members, and explained theoretical contributions.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.203-215
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• 2014

Although many studies about start-up existed, It is almost never shown study about ICT convergence start-up enterprise. This study tries to analyze success factor to start-up enterprise in rapidly growing ICT convergence area. Based on 10 entrepreneurial success cases, We figure out the total 29 units success factors utilizing ERIS model. We classify ICT commercialization with 4 types which are software-R&D centric, software marketing centric, software plus hardware R&D centric, software plus hardware marketing centric. Among success factors the most success factor is related entrepreneur;s ability and include major and professional knowledge about ICT's filed, insight through sensitivity about technical paradigm etc. It was derived the success factors indicated in the course of commercialization of ICT Covergence Unlike other forms of the existing start-up entrepreneurs and contributed to typified in four forms startups for ICT Covergence start-up entrepreneurs.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.63-71
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to reduce the barriers to entry into the government- supported startups and to contribute to the improvement of public policy services of the government. To do this, we identify the difficulties and problems that pre-founders are experiencing through startup cases of young entrepreneurs established in 2018, and provide practical help for pre-founders to experience their utility in preparation for government-supported startups, the need for public services to do so. And to propose a mentoring service to help the successful startup of policy-oriented user. This study is effective to adopt and apply the public service design process and methodology to the development of public policy service for the pre-founder who is preparing for government support centered startup. This study is meaningful that it presents one approach that can be considered when the government wants to develop and improve public policy services.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.127-135
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• 2020

The purpose of this paper is to classify individual startups by growth stage based on data-based quantitative criteria. This is to provide a basis for systematic support for government startups based on accurate statistics on the startup growth process. This startups were the TIPS (Tech Incubator Program for Startup) support company, which used a relatively reliable startup. We found seed money to complete MVP (Minimum Viable Product) within 1.5 years after establishment, verified PMF (Product-Market Fit) within 1 year, attracted Series A investment within 2.5 years after establishment, and successfully commercialized it. It attracted Series B investment for stable growth within 1.5 years (Series B investment within 4 years from start-up). The results of the study, the division of government programs that support stage-based startup commercialization, that is, within three years and within seven years of establishment, is significant to date. Three directions are suggested for future research. First, develop indicators for monitoring startup growth stages. Second, it continuously updates the annual changes and tracks the growth stages of individual startups. Third, we discover the successful growth law of technology-based startups by applying in-depth case analysis of successful startups to the model.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.1-9
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• 2016

In this study, we investigate the announcement effects of M&As with a start-up as a target firm on shareholder wealth of an acquiring firm. We use M&A events in KOSPI or KOSDAQ market between 2002 and 2014 after the financial crisis. Among the total 1436 mergers and acquisitions that took place domestically during this period, 1383 cases were selected as cases to be studied, excluding 53 cases where acquiring firms were unlisted firms. The results of the analysis are as follows: First, as a result of a comparison between the acquiring firms' CARs of the whole sample group(n=1383) occurred during the (-2, +1), (-5, +2), (-10, +5) periods of M&A announcement date(t=0) and the sub-sample group(n=468) where the target firms are start-ups which were established within five years, the acquiring firms of the whole sample group do not show significat CARs, while the acquiring firms of the sub-sample group show the significantly positive CARs. This suggests that M&A with start-ups have a positive effect on firm value of acquiring firms. Second, when merging unlisted start-ups, the acquiring firms show positive CARs, showing that there exists a listing effect in the merger of start-up. Third, merging the start-ups belonging to the high-tech industry shows the higher CARs than the case of merging the start-ups belonging to the non-high-tech industry. This study has great significance as the first in Korea to investigate the effect of M&A announcement with a start-up.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.29-43
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• 2016

The Lean Startup, a methodology for minimizing failure rate of startups, has been receiving attention since its publication in 2011. Although it has been receiving enormous attention as an effective methodology of startups' growth and the emergence of unicorn companies, it is undeniable that the theoretical research and cases on this topic have not been fully accumulated in Korea. Progress of management theory has been made when combining the theory and case studies. In this paper, we thus excavated the 'Cardoc' case, which has applied the lean startup concept to the entire process of service and customer development from the inception of its product design. The following are the findings of the case. First, for the successful application of lean startup, it is essential that all team members to understand the lean startup concept and are willing to apply it thoroughly to the business management. Second, the prompt launching of MVP(Minimum Viable Product) is more important than table discussion. Third, it is crucial to select the appropriate key metrics and analytic tools for effective learning. Fourth, startup must scale up promptly as soon as it verifies the product-market fit through the BML(Build-Measure-Learn) iteration cycle. Fifth, all new business expansion should be lean. Cardoc is currently testing new MVPs in order to move onto the next scale-up process with huge investments in newly added segments. This study is meaningful in that it elaborates the representative case of a Korean startup that has applied the lean startup strategy under the circumstance of insufficient discussion of Korean startup cases in comparison with growing attention both in concept development and case accumulation abroad. We hope that this paper can be a stepping stone for future relevant research on the implementation of lean startup methodology in Korea.