All right. Hey everyone, welcome to K Start, where we're bringing you stories and insights from the top founders, investors, and leaders shaping the future of entrepreneurship. Tune in as we dive into the journeys, challenges, and wins of the Korean and Korean-American community's most impactful innovators. So, let's get started. I'm joined here today by my friend Tim Hwang.
Yeah, well, you know, always good to catch up and thanks for having me on. Happy to share my story.
Awesome. So Tim, you know, this is like it's the KSC podcast, right? So, you know, what we do with most of our guests, we ask them where they grew up. And we're trying to like pull on this thread on whether that had an impact on people becoming founders or becoming some kind of innovator. So, where did you grow up? And you were born in the States or you were born in Korea?
Yeah. Well, so my parents immigrated from Korea in the late 80s. And so I was born in Michigan in the US. And then, you know, when I was very young, maybe about 2 or 3 years old, my parents moved to Maryland. So my dad was working at Bell Labs at the time as a research scientist. And then, you know, transferred over to Johns Hopkins and then over to NIH or NIST as well. And so he was a scientist his entire life. And so I ended up growing up just outside of DC, you know, for maybe almost 20 years after I moved.
Yeah. And so after DC, I guess, you know, I kind of know the story, but you know, we'll let you tell it for the crowd. But you know, after DC, you went to Princeton, right? And then, you know, how like what was the transition there from you deciding to become a founder? Like what was the impetus? What was the catalyst, like the spark for you?
Yeah. Well, you know, so I actually never really wanted to become a founder. You know, so for me, I always wanted to be a politician. And that was my dream growing up. My dream, you know, in middle school and high school, was to be like a prosecutor, like a district attorney, you know, going in and catching bad guys and putting them in jail and, you know, all that stuff. And so, you know, when I was in middle school and high school, I did like everything to that extent, right? Volunteering for the local court. You know, I worked for the local district attorney, you know, worked on, you know, helping him with a couple cases here and there. And then, you know, right around middle school and high school, I got really involved in politics. Class president for a while. And then I, you know, got involved in like the county and state student governments, lobby the state government or the city government or whatever the case is to, you know, make changes in the curriculum or, you know, advocate for student issues and the like. And so, you know, I was very heavily involved in that. You know, my senior year in high school, I ended up running for the school board and getting elected. And this is I think like the 11th or 12th largest school district in the country. So, you know, we probably, you know, we're servicing almost 150,000 students across 200 schools, you know, close to a $2.5 billion dollar budget. And I got elected, so I served there for one term. And, you know, my whole ambition and dream was, you know, to go and run for political office and all that stuff. And so, you know, to your question, you know, I went to Princeton really thinking that I was, you know, going to go into politics. Really, you know, just thinking about, you know, how to potentially go into law school to enter into a political career and the like. I also worked on the Obama campaign back in 2008, 2009. And, you know, right around 2010 was when I entered college and this was when I would say the hyper state of polarization in the country started to really take off. And so if you recall, this was back when there was this rapid rise of the Tea Party and, you know, there was like this very anti-Obama, anti-Democratic backlash in 2010. And so watching, you know, President Obama, who I respected a lot, you know, struggle a lot in Washington, you know, with a lot of those kind of political issues, I felt like, you know, maybe there was a different approach to making societal change. And, you know, in college I started to explore a bunch of different other avenues for making those changes. And so, you know, I was looking at the startup world. I was looking at the tech world. And, you know, I didn't know this at the time, but, you know, if you look back at tech history, you know, from about late 2000, 2001, 2002 to like probably early 2010s, there was sort of like a dead period in startups. And it was because a lot of people were burned by the dot-com bust and, you know, the rate of startup formation had really dramatically declined and, you know, you had sort of a lack of venture capital in the ecosystem. But I think in the mid-2010s as I was kind of entering college and going through college, there was sort of this resurgence of the technology landscape and a lot of people started entering the startup fields, maybe not to the extent that it was today. But, you know, I was probably, you know, one of the only kids at Princeton, you know, in my class who was really seriously looking at joining a startup. And so that's really kind of what drove me to kind of go into the technology field and startups was really this sort of disillusionment with politics and then, you know, wanting to look at, you know, other ways of making change overall.
Right. And, you know, that desire to, I guess, you know, instigate change is not something like really innate, right? Like, and you said your father was a scientist. So, you know, do you think there was something there that was like synthesized while you were growing up where you were like, I want to make an impact. I want to make change. I want to see society improve?
Well, you know, my parents, I don't think they would consider themselves entrepreneurs, but I do consider them entrepreneurs. You know, my parents were very involved in the church community growing up. And, you know, when you think about their lives, you know, from coming to the United States, you know, in a new land and trying to establish a life for themselves and learning a new language and a new culture, you know, in the Midwest where they first settled in. And then, you know, when they're involved in the church community, my father in particular was very involved in church planting across the country. And so like starting churches from scratch, you know, building the leadership teams, recruiting the communities, you know, getting involved in and kind of building up those organizations. I think that from a very early age my parents were telling me that they had a very heavy emphasis on effectively on making a difference in the community. And, you know, I think in their case they were very involved in the Korean community and wanting to sort of make a large impact in that context. And so, you know, for me politics was always about that. It was never about like Democrat versus Republican or what, I mean, it doesn't really matter to me. Like what really matters is are people's lives improving, you know, and are you solving problems for them at the end of the day. And so, you know, what I saw in early startup land I think was, you know, that same ethos of wanting to look at a problem and trying to solve it. And so like even to this day, you know, as I think about new ventures and new companies and the like, I don't, I mean, I think about business, I guess, in the context of like finances and investment and all that stuff, but first and foremost I think about business as solving problems for people. And, you know, the types of companies that I get involved in and the things that I do, I think fundamentally always, you know, drift back to there's a problem that's unsolved in the market and somebody needs to build the team, the idea, the capital, the infrastructure, whatever the organization, to solve this fundamental problem for people at the end of the day.
So like on that vein, let's talk briefly about FiscalNote, right? So that's the company you founded, the company you're leading. And so, you know, you were looking at data and government and seeing what kind of, you know, impact you could make through FiscalNote. So could you tell the audience a little bit more about what FiscalNote does, like what the vision was initially and then like what it does now as a company?
Yeah. Yeah. So if you rewind the clock to 2012, 2013 when I was thinking about FiscalNote for the first time, you have to kind of open up the newspaper from 10 years ago. And if you open up the newspaper, you know, the headlines were things like, you know, Uber executives were being jailed in Paris because they're illegally operating a ride-sharing company, you know, or, you know, the New York Attorney General was investigating this random company called Airbnb for illegally operating, you know, hotels without licenses. At the time there was a company called Zenefits that had run into substantial insurance brokerage regulations. And then Theranos, of course, right around 2013, 2014 was when they started running into Medicare, Medicaid-related investigations and the like. And so you had these like very high-profile situations in technology where the companies were essentially ramming themselves into, you know, governments and regulators and it sort of seemed like, you know, the private sector, you know, didn't really have a strong handle on regulations. At the same time, you know, this was maybe three or four years after the global financial crisis and the other headlines were, you know, JP Morgan fined record, you know, multi-billion dollar fine, you know, for mortgage-backed securities, you know, criminal penalties or something, right? And so basically all around the kind of corporate world, you looked like companies were just getting slapped with massive fines, you know, running into investigations. And so I was like, okay, well, what if we built a company that took every law in the US at the federal, state, and local levels and then made it searchable and analyzable using AI. And that was basically the genesis of the company. So, you know, I bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley, you know, took two of my friends from school. We were living out of a Motel 6 room for a couple of years, or not, about a year or so. And, you know, the original product that we had was essentially, you know, we built this Python script that scraped, you know, tens of thousands of government websites for their laws, stuck it into a database, slapped a search engine on top of it and then started charging a couple thousand dollars a year for people to be able to access this database and then be able to look at, you know, laws in real time. And so the business, you know, fast forward 10 years later, you know, it's been in business now for about 10 years. It really hasn't changed that much to be honest. You know, we still, that's essentially still what we do. You know, we collect laws from, you know, federal, state, local in the US, but also almost 90 countries around the world. So you can look up Indonesian tax regulations or environmental legislation out of Brazil or financial regulations out of Italy. And then, you know, Pfizer, ExxonMobil, JP Morgan, or, you know, large governments like State Department or CIA or whatever the case is will pay us, you know, $10,000 and half a million dollars a year to access this information. So that's really, I mean, the business is pretty simple to understand. But that was really the impetus and the start of the company overall.
I know you're making it searchable and like this is public information, but still at the end of the day it seems like a relatively sensitive topic. Maybe there are forces that don't want it to be so searchable or they don't want it aggregated. So, you know, there must have been different challenges as you were scaling the company. I mean, in the beginning, you were just, you know, working out of a Motel 6, then you went global, right? And now you're in 90 countries and that's like, that's kind of like summarizing the journey. Can you share like one of the big challenges you had while you were scaling?
Ah, well, there's so many challenges, I don't even know where to start. Financing, product, sales, marketing, hiring, operations, I mean literally every problem you can think of we've had it. So, you know, I had to raise capital every year for the company for like eight years straight. Straight from our seed round all the way to Series F. I was raising capital over and over and over again. There were probably at least two or three times where I, you know, was like weeks away from not making payroll for our employees. You know, product, you know, our first product was pretty good. But, you know, there were several product launches where, you know, I fumbled the ball or we entered the market too early or, you know, we didn't, you know, have the right user experience or whatever the case is. Sales and marketing, you know, maybe you overhire or underhire in specific customer segments or you, you know, don't pay attention to sales efficiency or territory management or commission management or the like. Marketing has always been a challenge from a product marketing perspective or demand gen perspective. And so testing and iterating through all those different challenges, you know, hiring the wrong executives or the wrong operations people at the wrong times. Encyclopedia of problems. So I don't even know like where to start, but, you know, like every single problem you can think of like businesses of like running a business, I'd probably run into it at some point.
Well, I think the fact that you were raising capital every year is like the nightmare for every founder. Did you have any like tricks that let you like power through these challenges? Did you learn any new, you know, tips for yourself right on dealing with the stress or figuring out like a better way to solve your problems?
You know, I think in looking back, I had a really strong network of friends that kind of got me through a lot of stuff and, you know, a lot of advisers and mentors that helped me along the way, you know, when I had specific problems. You become very self-aware when you're doing a startup around like where your weaknesses are, what you like doing, what you don't like doing. And so I think that ultimately, you know, you need to be very self-reflective and understand like I can't do everything alone and I need to be very cautious around the things that I'm not good at or I need to outsource or need support in. And so I think for me, you know, that's always been, you know, really, you know, just being really conscious about that. And then, you know, just realizing that you are going to make mistakes and, you know, I think from that perspective, it's always been, you know, really good to sort of take a look at a mistake, think about it pretty deeply and then think about, you know, how not to make that mistake again.
And in that self-reflection, where did you find yourself, right? Like are you more product or are you more people? You know, where did you find the shortcomings for yourself?
For me, my strengths are in like strategy, corporate M&A, finance, product, because a lot of these startups are like, you know, they're not like services companies, right? So your product strategy is your corporate strategy, right? Like if you say we're going to build this product, then you're now in this market and you have these competitors and you have these market dynamics that are dependent on these partners or whatever the case is. And so for me, thinking about like where the market is headed, you know, where we need to make investments, you know, where competitors are going to, you know, most likely kind of shift into, like those are things that I'm very, very strong in. I would say I'm definitely not as strong in like core day-to-day operations. Like I'm, you know, like I'm pretty good at hiring and identifying the right people at the right time, but I would say if you need me to build a KPI-driven process to, you know, drive weekly execution against, you know, this particular target, like I'm not that, like that's just not something that I am very good at. As a founder, it's always challenging to think about, you know, kind of balancing, you know, investments in your core market versus, you know, new opportunities. And so, you know, one of the weaknesses I would say that I have is mistiming things. So I might say like, you know, we actually at FiscalNote had developed a vertical language model in the legal space back in 2019, 2020. So you can imagine it as like ChatGPT for law and regulations. And, you know, we launched this chatbot and I had this like very strong vision that enterprises were going to move towards chat-based interfaces. But, you know, I would say like probably my market timing was off by about two and a half or three years. And so, you know, I think that that's the type of thing where like, you know, you try and have like a very strong vision of where a market is headed. But, you know, for me like timing the market and stuff is still like incredibly difficult from a product perspective overall.
I was reading something recently that I think it was about Mark Zuckerberg when he got the billion-dollar offer and he had to convince Thiel and other investors to turn it down. That, you know, Thiel said at the time that the best entrepreneurs have the best vision of the future, the clearest vision of the future and they can articulate that very clearly. But like you said, I do think most founders have a timing issue. You know, you kind of leapfrog into the future and you see like the ideal situation, but the market's not always catching up to you, right? In terms of speed.
Well, I mean, if you look like a good example is like Elon Musk, right? I mean, he's been promising robo-taxis for seven years now. And so like, I mean, is it going to come next year? Is it going to come three years from now, ten years from now? I don't know. I mean, but like he clearly has a very clear idea of like fleet-based infrastructure and robo-taxis and, you know, subscription-based mobility, like but the market is just not there, you know. So like, you know, you just keep articulating it. But that is a very hard thing to do, I think.
Right. Right. Right. It's almost like you're building the market too, right? Like you have to evangelize it so that people actually head in that direction. And so, you know, you scaled FiscalNote from a domestic company, which was hard enough, and then you went global. And you had a specific strategy to go global. Can you share a little bit about that?
Yeah. Yeah. So as a North American company, the easiest thing you can do is just go to Europe. And so, you know, we made a small acquisition in Belgium, actually, because, you know, that's sort of where the headquarters of the European Union is, the European Commission. And then we expanded into the UK. And then from there we expanded into, you know, various parts of the European Union. And then in Asia as well, we did the same thing. And each step along the way, we made, you know, probably, you know, a small bolt-on acquisition. You know, it wasn't more than a couple million dollars with, you know, maybe, you know, a dozen or two people in each case. Established like a beachhead kind of position in each of those countries and then, you know, basically tried to expand our business in each of those territories. So the business model that we are operating in was so globally, there's just so much global potential that, you know, that it made sense for us to kind of keep going along this direction and we now operate in the UK and Brussels and Korea and Taiwan and Australia and Singapore and kind of all these different markets that really need our information overall.
