Fed up with Silicon Valley, US millionaire starts tech company in Ukraine

Tired of life in California, where he’s sold tech companies for millions of dollars, Korean-American John Kim has come to Ukraine to start again.

Kim has been working in the information technology industry for most of his life. Quite successfully, if one counts earning millions of dollars as an aim of running a tech business. He and other three co-founders sold their cloud-based call center software developer Five9 for $1.4 billion.

But over the last 15 years, Kim has become exhausted by life in San Francisco, a city of workaholics, as he calls it, and a city where one can’t escape IT, whether at the dining table or in a bar.

“People talk about work all the time in San Francisco. It feels like you can never escape IT there,” Kim said in an interview with the Kyiv Post.

In Ukraine, Kim has already noticed, when people get together to have dinner, they rarely talk shop. Besides, those who surround Kim in Kyiv now are not only people of IT, he has friends who are teachers, electricians, and mechanics.

So after a hectic life of 60-hour workweeks in the United States, the American enjoys life in calmer Ukraine, and he’s sure his expertise can help its tech industry.