[Startup Lecture Series] Open Gallery CEO Ui-Kyu Park “Startup is not a common sense”
On December 4th (Tue) 18:00, the fourth KUBS Lecture Series 2018 was held at KUBS Startup Station, level 2 of KUBS Main Building. Ui-Kyu Park, CEO of Open Gallery, gave a special lecture on ‘Culture & Art Startup’. Open Gallery is a rental on-file platform of pictures. Consumers can rent a piece of art for a certain period at a relatively low price, and painters are given the opportunity to show their work to the public and sell them.
Ui-Kyu Park explained the difficulties of Culture & Art Startup. He said, “Culture & Art Startups tend to grow slowly in the beginning compared to other industries” and “People having interest in something and actually paying money to buy it is a totally different story. The point is to ‘marketize’ the public’s interests.” According to Mr. Park, startups can grow the market by utilizing initial marketing expenses with competitors, but when competitors do not exist, the startup must solely deal with the marketing expense which as a result makes the initial growth slow.
Mr. Park also stressed that the growing formula of Culture & Art Startups are different from that of preexisting startup industry. He explained “Consumers use cost-effectiveness as a standard when buying necessary goods related to food and shelter, but when it comes to emotional goods, the same standard is not applied”. He also stated the difficulty of a ‘market with a lot of bias’. Mr. Park said, “Since there isn’t much of a successful precedence, most people express negative thoughts when I say that I will begin a startup”. Nevertheless, he emphasized the entrepreneur’s mindset that “1 person may be right and 49 can be wrong out of 50people. Even if others say no, it does not mean it can’t be done”.
Each semester, KUBS Startup Institute holds practice-based lecture series ‘Lecture on Demand’ and ‘Startup Lecture Series’ about startups and business venture. Anyone interested in the KUBS startup business teams and any KUBS students are welcome to participate in the lectures. For further inquiries, please contact KUBS Startup Institute at 02-3290-2551.
