Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Ticket Monster’s Daniel Shin Talks About Sale of South Korea’s Biggest Deals Site to LivingSocial (Video)

As luck would have it, I was in South Korea this week and was able to talk to Daniel Shin, the CEO and co-founder of Ticket Monster, this country’s largest social buying site, which was acquired by LivingSocial yesterday.

Shin is a big Internet star in this digitally connected Asian country, even though he only recently returned to start Ticket Monster a year ago.

He lived in Korea until he was nine years old, when his family moved to the U.S. to live. Shin stayed through college and worked at several jobs before coming back.

Since then, Shin and his colleagues have grown Ticket Monster at a frightening pace. In the past year, the company known popularly in South Korea as TMon has grown rapidly to 600 employees, 60 deals a day and from virtually no revenue in May 2010, when it was founded, to $24 million last month.

Here’s a video interview that I did with him in Seoul — with a guest appearance by Walt Mossberg — about that and more, including the differences between the explosive online commerce market here and elsewhere:

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik