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Fostered from School, N9NE Has Grown to Be a Global Entrepreneur Community Builder

May Jang

July 31, 2024

About three months ago, the Seoul Entrepreneur Summit was held by the multicultural team, N9NE Team Company(N9NE). N9NE has also been involved in the Seoul Well-being Workshop and the Seoul Women Entrepreneur Summit to encourage and empower the entrepreneurs in South Korea.

With roots spanning across Spain, Germany, and South Korea, N9NE’s international background suggests a unique perspective that combines diverse business cultures and practices, potentially offering fresh approaches to the Korean market.

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N9NE was incubated in Mondragon Team Academy(MTA), an international community of team-entrepreneurs focused on fostering innovation and entrepreneurship through a unique educational approach. MTA consists of over 2,500 team-entrepreneurs and 19 international MTA Labs, creating a global social innovation ecosystem.

‍N9NE is one of these teams and is now known for organizing entrepreneur-focused summits, events, and workshops, as well as building entrepreneurial communities, currently based in South Korea.

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We met three members of N9NE: Valeria Jimenez Cordoba, N9NE co-founder and team leader; Sangsoo Lee, N9NE financial leader; and Juseok Cha, N9NE team member. It was a good opportunity to hear what they have learned from their unique international business experience and what kind of business they are developing in South Korea, which we are here to share with you.

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Forging Business Resilience Through Real-World Challenges

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Q. Could you introduce Mondragon Team Academy?

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) It’s an entrepreneurship school with their own ‘learning by doing’ methodology. We, students, are implementing this with our projects in other countries to both expand the methodology and make the global entrepreneurs achieve their own goals. So we run our own projects to learn ourselves by getting support such as the business coaches.

Mondragon Team Academy offers both remote and on-site programs. In the remote programs, students can complete four years of educational courses from their home countries. The on-site programs, on the other hand, require students to travel around the world to run businesses as part of their graduation requirements.

Personally, I finished my freshman year in Bilbao, Spain, and my sophomore year in Berlin, Germany. Then I came to South Korea to start N9NE.

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*Valeria Jimenez Cordoba, Sangsoo Lee, Juseok Cha (source : N9NE)*

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Q. N9NE was fostered through one of the Mondragon Team Academy programs. Could you provide more details about it?

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) We started from 25 members in the course for the degree but now we are nine members as some left. So actually N9NE was born this year and, again, it’s still a learning process of how to work together as a team. The biggest point of this is learning from what we do as when you start your career as an entrepreneur, you won’t have this much room to make mistakes.

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Q. What’s challenging for students to learn by doing?

(Sangsoo Lee) I think the challenge is having no theoretical base of entrepreneurship. Especially for those who haven’t studied business at all, but joined to achieve the global business degree, everything’s new and challenging.

For example, I majored in computer science and now I have to go in the street to do the sales job to build the business. So it would be a barrier that’s hard to break when you adapt to learning by doing. However, as time goes by, even those members will embrace it surrounded by these motivated entrepreneurs who try to make things happen.

(Juseok Cha) The most challenging part for me is understanding international users. When you go abroad, you don't know how and what people think, which means you don't know the cultural background of the users. Therefore, as a foreigner, I tried hard to understand why Spanish people have siestas and why supermarkets don’t open on Sundays in Germany. However, we always try to face these problems together as a multicultural team, so I was able to overcome these challenges.

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) I faced two challenges.

Firstly, with the learning by doing methodology, I had to learn from the book and implement the concepts in real life right away and continuously. Sometimes, when I read books about user experience, I realize, “I didn’t apply this in the previous project!”. Like this, you will encounter both big and small failures, which we call ‘golden mistakes’.
Secondly, I had a hard time communicating with team members. Since the ways of communicating with each other vary significantly from country to country, this was a huge challenge for me.

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Q. Could you share your experiences with communication challenges in a multicultural team?

(Sangsoo Lee) Sharing emotions among colleagues was not familiar to me. When I worked on a government-supported project as a high school student in Korea, I didn’t put any emotions into my work, so I thought it was the norm. However, I had a very different experience in my first project here.

I built a platform where entrepreneurs could sell expensive jewelry and donate to an animal activist group. I worked on it with a Korean, two Bolivians, and one Estonian. I couldn't help but be surprised by how emotionally attached the members became to the project. They wore their hearts on their sleeves to express their excitement and disappointment. Now that I think back, my team members might have found it hard to understand what I was saying at the time, leading to several conflicts. However, we were able to understand each other better as we tried to spend more time together.

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) It was especially hard for me because I wasn't confident in my English. As a Colombian, who places great importance on context and reading between the lines, I couldn't express things directly. As a result, I frequently didn't make myself understood.

I remember working with a Romanian colleague who told me, "You need to tell me things really directly, or I'm not going to catch it". She said this because when I said, "Maybe you need to do this", I actually meant, "It needs to be done".

However, we can communicate better if we spend more time together, as Sangsoo said.

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Q. Which ‘golden mistakes’ did you make in Korea?

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(Juseok Cha) We didn’t set the proper KPI to identify what’s the success and the failure which led us to not finding the root cause why we failed. We fail every second in our lives and we need to know why to achieve the little bit of success and to go one step further today. So I think how we faced our failures not figuring out the cause was the golden mistake.

(Sangsoo Lee) When I developed my own project with the healthy food delivery application for the international students in Korea, I made mistakes. I always thought there are only unhealthy types of food on the delivery app so I was trying to make a new app with relatively healthy food such as salad and panini. To promote the app, I even handed out the flyers at the places where the potential users might be. But we found out nobody was buying it.

As I analyze the reason, I think there’s a mindset problem. It means that we tend to figure out the pain points from the domestic point of view. I saw the problem to solve as a Korean, not as users - international students. So I learnt from this golden mistake in that I need to try harder to be in the users’ shoes.

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) I think our mistakes are more based on the business point of view at least such as how we can approach the users. When we tried to open the first camp, we had only one month to plan but we were too focused on the content, not the camp itself. So everything in the plan was perfect but in reality, we didn’t have much budget and couldn’t hire people to assist us. Instead, we made an excessive amount of DIY candles without considering the needs or qualities. However, after that we haven’t made any serious golden mistakes this year which I’m proud of.

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Deep Dive into N9NE company in South Korea

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Q. Why do you think we need the international entrepreneur community?

(Juseok Cha) I believe there must be entrepreneurial teams that suffer from the same underlying issues as we do. Therefore, I think it would be beneficial to solve these problems together as a community. The reason we want to go global is actually the same. There must be global entrepreneurs who want to address these issues but have difficulties entering the local market and engaging with the local society because they don’t know anyone there. As a result, we also face challenges in this area.

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Q. Could you explain about your business model in Korea?

(Sangsoo Lee) We are going to host or be involved in the summits and the events with our community as we have done. At the same time, we are thinking about providing an education program for entrepreneurs with our Korean partners such as Underdogs. We will offer this not only in Korea but also in Spain and Colombia as there are a lot of people who want to start a business but they don’t know what to do.

In this field, Underdogs has a good reputation and we also want to deliver our entrepreneurship education for people in need in other countries so it can be win-win for both of us. We would like to make it as a main business model for now.

After that, we would like to build an online community platform where people can come to find the right connection. Of course we will test the viability of it and decide how it should be priced and figure out what’s missing.

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) I will add a bit more detailed plans. We will host the bootcamps around November in Spain, Korea and possibly in Colombia. Plus, we don’t want to lose the engagement we had with the previous events and summits so we will continue that too.

We are internally talking about building the online community a lot. As we would love to make it strong and make it grow well in the future, we are not starting it right away. Instead, we are first trying to understand the user base. To do this we are running the website and Instagram account properly, and making the educational materials.

So now, we are prioritizing and focusing on what to do first to make the online platform very well later.

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Q. The summits have clearly represented your vision. How did you persuade and acquire your first customer or partnership?

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) To acquire customers and partners, I engaged extensively with people who might be interested in what we do, aiming to persuade them to see me as a cool person and my idea as a great one. Even though I’m still struggling with imposter syndrome, feeling that our portfolio is not enough or that we are of lesser value, N9NE has already hosted two summits, and we have a solid enough MVP: free small workshops and seminars. Therefore, I put a lot of effort into highlighting the benefits we can offer to potential partners.

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Q. Could you share the attempts you made in Korea?

(Juseok Cha) We have tried hard to build the community first who can take the issues we cast seriously. Furthermore, we have listened to the users to make something they want, not what we want.

(Sangsoo Lee) We made the Seoul Entrepreneur Summit and then the Women Entrepreneur Summit happen. But it was quite limited as it was hard to connect with people through multiple platforms and also because of lack of the time and human resources. As Juseok mentioned before, we went through hard times to get in touch with local people as an international entrepreneur. This is the problem that still needs to be solved.

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) At first, we had a hard time finding the international group for our community even though they were always there. They are already making their own groups as they would like to share their problems and try to find the cause and the solutions with others. We could realize this only when we went out to meet them in person after some deeper research.

To be honest, as an international entrepreneur, I’m realizing that meeting people in person is even a better way of learning about Korean culture than reading it in a book. For a while, Korean culture has had this pressure of working hard and it has affected my well-being quite negatively in a lot of ways. However, the summits that we held with the community members made me so happy. Actually it was people who made me feel the bond with them and feel joyful.

Currently, I try to meet more people not only as an entrepreneur for the users but also as a collaborator and colleagues.

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Advice for young entrepreneurs

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Q. Based on what you have experienced, what advice can you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?

(Sangsoo Lee) You should have authenticity in yourself and in your business. When you are under pressure to make money and are short on budget, it’s hard to be true to yourself. However, especially in this situation, you should focus more on the reason why you started this. If you lose your authenticity, you risk losing sales and, in the worst-case scenario, the entire business.

(Juseok Cha) Just do it. I think that’s the most valuable thing I’ve learnt.

(Valeria Jimenez Cordoba) There are three pieces of advice I want to share.

Firstly, you need to see the whole big picture. Sometimes it’s easy for you to focus only on the users or the environment or even on yourself. But you need to focus on everything as a holistic thing.

Secondly, you should know how to shine. You need to embrace who you are to believe in yourself and boost the energy to keep up with things. You are actually making something good!

Lastly, you should enjoy the whole process and the emotions you can feel in it. Yes, I know it’s like a roller coaster. You can fail and you can succeed, and sometimes it feels like there’s no improvement at all. But it’s not the end and they are just a part of the process.

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Interview by Jinny Kim

Written by May Jang

UNDERDOGS ORIGINALS

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