John S. Kim

Sendbird / Valon Capital

Startup founder, investor, and community builder

I’m John S. Kim, Co-Founder/CEO of Sendbird, the first startup in history to originate in Korea, move to Silicon Valley, and become a unicorn.

I also operate Valon Capital/ASQ as a General Partner, investing in startups focused on AI/productivity, deep tech, healthcare, and fintech.

As an engineer, I am interested in the brain, artificial intelligence, deep tech (space, bio/longevity, energy, robotics), productivity, and complexity science.

Learn more

“Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.” – Anonymous

Our mission is to
build and invest in organizations that drive the positive future of humanity.

Sendbird

Sendbird is the world’s most useful omnichannel AI agent platform for delightful customer service. Today, we power over 300 million monthly active users who engage in conversations on our platform. To date, we have raised over $220 million from leading investors, including ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Y Combinator.

Valon Capital/ASQ

The mission of the fund is to invest in the future of humanity by partnering with founders who are changing the trajectory of human civilization for the better. We primarily focus on investments in AI/productivity, deep tech, healthcare, and fintech.

COMMUNITY & VOLUNTEERING

I host events for entrepreneurs to build a community of like-minded individuals who are on a mission to drive a positive future for humanity. I have advised three Presidents of South Korea and have guest lectured at Stanford University, Wharton MBA, and Seoul National University.

Recent Notes

These might be a bit more
random than you expect

The Long Arc of Tenacity: Nancy Wexler’s Journey

Most people underestimate time. We think of effort as something you can measure in hours, days, maybe a few years at best. We live in startup time—sprints, ship cycles, quarterly OKRs. But there’s another kind of time, one that runs on decades. That’s the time Nancy Wexler lived in. Wexler’s story begins not in a…
My Life’s Priorities

I read this quote a long time ago and it has stayed with me ever since: “Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.” – Anonymous This idea sparked my lifelong pursuit of unlocking not only…
Foundations of the A2A Economy: AI Agent Interoperability Protocols

With the rise of Anthropic’s MCP (& quickly becoming one of the emerging open standards) and Google’s recent announcement of the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A), it’s clear the technology world is racing full-speed toward laying the foundations of the A2A economy. What I initially thought would take years is now unfolding in mere months — a…
AI-Default Organizations

Tobi Lütke recently shared Shopify’s internal memo setting the baseline expectation for AI usage across their company. If you think back a few decades, organizations began expecting employees to use desktop computers by default. Then it was Microsoft Office. Then it was the internet. Employees who adopted these tools early were seen as far more…
Evolutionary Prompting: Using modular prompts to improve AI agent performance

There’s a lot to be said about efficiency—whether you’re writing code or crafting prompts for an AI. The basic idea is simple: if you can break something complicated into reusable, modifiable parts, you can build better systems faster. In AI, that means rethinking how we write prompts for LLMs and AI agents. Modular Prompts: The…
The Three Stages of the A2A Economy

In just a few years, AI—specifically OpenAI—has transformed what was once an interesting toy into a force that’s reshaping various industries and jobs in a non-linear way. Enter the new economic paradigm, known as the agent-to-agent (A2A) economy, where AI-driven agents from different organizations—or even between businesses and consumers—collaborate, negotiate, and transact autonomously. At the…