Profile: SparkLabs Group's Bernard Moon

The dawn of the internet was a good time to be a college student with the energy and flexibility to completely change courses in life.

One day Bernard Moon, a recent English and psychology alumnus from the University of Wisconsin, was taking grad school classes in public policy at Columbia and liaising with regional government on social issues. The next, he was brainstorming the online start-ups that would eventually lead to the creation of SparkLabs Group, a pan-Asian network of accelerators and global venture funds.

By the late 1990s, the first internet boom was already redirecting the careers of people in all walks of life, but Moon’s advantage was a family history of successful entrepreneurship. His parents developed a number of businesses in the US and were credited with bringing Starbucks competitor Gloria Jean’s Coffees to Korea. 

“The intent was to go to Washington DC and work on the Hill as a policy wonk, but a lot of my friends were working on start-up ideas,” Moon explains. “I was studying internet policy and had some entrepreneurial blood in me from helping my parents with their different businesses. Once I did my first start-up, I realized that I really enjoyed that creation process of taking a concept on a napkin all the way to execution – and I stuck with it for most of my career.” 

After a false-start with an e-commerce idea, Moon found his stride with a video-on-demand provider for cable and satellite services called ViewPlus. The company quickly burned through about $7 million in seed funding and was facing bankruptcy when an existential decision had to made. Moon and his team, which included future SparkLabs partners, agreed to press on, eventually sourcing a desperately needed follow-on round, growing a Korea-based unit, and parlaying the experience into future ventures.  

By 2000, Moon and Jimmy Kim, a collaborator on ViewPlus with a personal connection to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, began working on voice technology platform HeyAnita. As part of the same SoftBank-backed cohort that launched Alibaba, the company raised $14.5 million across two rounds in the wake of the dotcom crash. This precipitated another foray into Korea, and for Moon, his first move to the country in his adult life.  

“For the first six months, I hated it because I grew up in Chicago, which is very mainstream America compared to New York and Los Angeles, so I clashed a lot of times with Korean culture and there was an adjustment period with the strict Confucian hierarchy,” says Moon. “But it was also really interesting timing because that’s when a lot of Western influences started coming into Korea, including all these investment banks, PE professionals, and consulting firms.” 

Innovation hub

Moon remembers Korea’s late-1990s and early-2000s for the sudden flood of interest from the US business world as well as an unusual experience in witnessing the widespread uptake of future technology trends. The experience included a chance encounter with Bill Gurley, VC luminary and boss of Benchmark, who described Korea as the place he came to see what was going to happen in the US five years later.  

During his senior year of undergraduate studies in 1992-93, Moon was among an advanced few who were already using email. But the speed of Korean technology adoption in state-of-the-art areas such as microtransactions and mobile phone photography caught him off guard. 

“At first, I mistook those kinds of things as cultural differences, but they really just come from the fact that technology is ubiquitous in Korea,” Moon says. “The reason the country is a trendsetter is because things like broadband are so prevalent. Even today, the wireless connections I get in Korea are faster than my internet service in Silicon Valley.”

This picture of Korea came further into focus with an understanding that the local culture for explosive fads could drive not only marketing hype but also the dissemination of practical technologies. For example, the popular use of online coins by homegrown video game developers gave virtual assets a head start in becoming a routine part of life.   

“Korea is probably the only place in the world where the use of cryptocurrency is truly a mass market and you see elderly people buying cryptocurrencies,” Moon explains. “If you announce a meetup, within two weeks you’ll see 5,000 people show up, mainly household people, versus the US, where it’ll be almost all engineers and libertarian types. It’s maybe 1% of the population in the US, but in Korea, it’s more like one third of the population.”

As HeyAnita picked up traction in this environment, Moon became more interested in the other side of the VC equation and worked briefly as a Korea advisor for Asia-focused boutique investment bank IRG. This precipitated his first attempt at raising his own fund in 2002 under the name Nexus Capital. The effort stalled, however, as it coincided with both the fallout of the dotcom bust and the first international scare related to the North Korean nuclear program. 

Moon moved back to the US in 2004, where he built on some recent experiences raising capital for various entertainment studios to establish another media-focused technology outfit called GoinOn Networks. This in turn led to more start-up development work with projects such as communication platform VidQuik and Asia-focused online marketing player XS Groupe, as well as a stint as a director with private investment firm Lunsford Group.

Initial spark

By 2012, Moon’s background spanning Asia-US cross-border marketing, technology start-up creation, and institutional investment began to coalesce with SparkLabs. The group was initially formed as a Seoul-based accelerator with Moon working from the US while Jimmy Kim and fellow partner Kanjoo Lee led operations in Korea. 

“There were already 15-20 other start-up accelerators in Korea, so our positioning was to help Korean companies go global with myself and the majority of our mentors being based in Silicon Valley,” Moon says. “That helped us expand rapidly, and after about two years, we were getting first-look of almost any hot start-up that came up in Korea.”

SparkLabs’s growth has included the launch of sister programs in Beijing and Taipei, a corporate accelerator with Ping An Group, an Australian agricultural innovation program known as Cultiv8, a Series A fund for Korea and Southeast Asia called SparkLabs Ventures, and a blockchain and cryptocurrency-focused vehicle under the name SparkChain. 

Most recently, SparkLabs has established its first accelerator outside of Asia Pacific with an energy industry focused program backed by a state oil company in Oman alongside petroleum giants such as Shell and Total. The firm’s demo days are touted as the largest events of their kind in the world, with the number of attendees typically eclipsing 2,000. 

Total funding to date has topped $175 million and at least 18 portfolio companies have gone on to set up offices overseas. The prevailing theme is internationalization, which Moon sees as one of the biggest company building hurdles in the firm’s domestic market. 

“Korean companies get too comfortable in their home market because it’s big enough that you can create billion-dollar companies there,” Moon says. “They delay too long when they should go global earlier, and it ends up benefiting their competitors. We try to identify those companies that can expand, and help them do it, not just in the US, but in Japan and China as well.”

Going global

SparkLabs Global Ventures is the natural extension of this ambition. Moon, Kim, and Lee initially planned the GP as an Asia-US seed investor until they began discussing the concept with colleagues contemplating another cross-continental corridor: London-based Frank Meehan and Tel Aviv-based Net Jacobsson were simultaneously mulling a Europe-US-Israel seed fund. After about six months in 2013, a vehicle hailed as the first sector-agnostic seed fund with a global remit was born, and Moon began working on it full time.   

The first global fund raised about $20 million predominantly from high net worth individuals, family offices, and a few corporates and VC firms. The geography of the LP base matched the investment mandate with participation from across the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, including French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel. About half of the investments to date have been in the US, with the remainder split between Asia and Europe.

SparkLabs Global has moved quickly to capitalize on this momentum in its various fundraising programs, with SparkChain, for example, currently targeting a $100 million corpus. For Moon, the development echoes a familiar growth curve that tends to get fleshed out when supporting new ideas that address a nascent industry evolution. 

“LPs were more comfortable with a very narrow geographic focus or a certain vertical industry focus, so being a general tech fund across the world didn’t resonate immediately,” says Moon. “But we believed in our thesis that entrepreneurs were going global sooner and the makeup of our team, which was six partners who were all founders of companies. Now, just in the past two years, we’ve seen at least four or five other seed funds follow this vision and position themselves as global seed funds.”  

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Early-stage
• Technology
• South Korea
• seed
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