Korea has 52 million people in a country the size of Indiana. Dense population, fast internet, high expectations. It's the perfect test market for e-commerce. If it works here, it works anywhere.
I dropped out of Harvard Business School to start a company in South Korea. My professors thought I was throwing away my career. I was just picking a different one.
Amazon delivers in two days and Americans think it's magic. We deliver in hours. In Korea, two-day delivery would be considered slow.
We lost money for ten years straight. A billion dollars in cumulative losses. But we were building logistics infrastructure that nobody else had. You can't copy that overnight.
SoftBank put in $3 billion. Everyone said Masa Son was crazy. Then we went public at $84 billion and suddenly he looked like a genius again. That's how Masa works.