In 2016, there was an institution with no funds under management at all. Ten years later, that institution's assets under management (AUM) had surpassed 120 billion won. The person who had helped design that growth from the very beginning recently moved into a director-level post at Korea's Ministry of SMEs and Startups — and this was the first thing he said.

"Rather than inflating our own valuations among ourselves, we need to build unicorns that earn recognition abroad."

It sounds like policy language. But read from a slightly different angle, it touches on a question that founders, product planners, content directors, and solo entrepreneurs alike should be asking about their own businesses: Where am I setting my benchmark?

How Domestic Dominance Gets Discounted Abroad

For several years now, Korea's venture capital industry has periodically debated what's called the "domestic valuation illusion." Startups that raised Series A funding at a valuation in the 50-billion-won range domestically would sit down with global VCs and get re-valued at around 20 billion won — a pattern that kept repeating. The gap has less to do with investor stinginess than with differences in how value gets assessed.

Domestic investors evaluate a company by domestic-market standards. If there's no competitor in Korea and the company's Korean user metrics are strong, that becomes grounds for a higher valuation. Foreign investors bring a different yardstick. They ask first what share the Korean market holds within the global whole, and whether the product creates the same value in other languages and regulatory environments. If those strong domestic numbers depend entirely on a Korean-language service, Korean users, and Korean distribution channels, that becomes, by global standards, grounds for a discount instead.

Mok Seung-hwan, now a director at the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, is one of the people who watched this dynamic most closely from the ground. He joined as head of an investment team in 2016 and, over nearly a decade, screened and supported dozens of early-stage companies. His remark carries the weight of watching, again and again, companies that drew attention at home run into a valuation gap the moment they tried to expand overseas. I'd rather read this statement as the language of field data than as policy rhetoric — the phrase "valuations we raised among ourselves" is a choice of words that only someone who lived through that pattern repeatedly would make.

Not Every Business Needs to Meet a Global Standard

Read simplistically, this remark leads to the conclusion that every business should aim for the global market. But that misses the context of what was actually said.

Korea is a domestic market of more than 50 million people with high purchasing power. Businesses rooted culturally and geographically — food and beverage, beauty, local services, regional B2B — can build a fully sustainable revenue model on the domestic market alone. Companies aiming for a listing on KOSDAQ or KONEX, Korea's secondary stock exchanges, or ones building steady revenue around Korean customers, have their own logic that has nothing to do with global VC standards. Their investors are different, their exit paths are different, and their success metrics should be different too. Holding someone running a café or growing a locally embedded service to a standard of "nothing counts without recognition abroad" is simply misapplying the remark.

What Director Mok was actually targeting was unicorns — startups aiming for a valuation above 1 trillion won that presume global scale from the outset. His point was that for companies using domestic capital as a springboard into overseas markets, a domestic valuation becomes a ceiling.

But here's where the fork appears. For people building digital products or running online content, platforms, or subscription services, this discussion connects differently. This category of business can exceed physical borders, and that possibility becomes a variable that defines the ceiling on how far the business can grow. That's exactly how pricing and positioning set purely by domestic standards end up narrowing a business's own growth potential. Whether something was designed exclusively for the domestic market, or simply started there — those are two different directions entirely.

Setting Your Benchmark Comes Before Strategy

In the world of venture investing, corporate value is expressed as a number. In the world of solo entrepreneurs, the equivalent metrics are things like pricing, customer retention, repeat-purchase rate, and word-of-mouth reach. Where you set the benchmark for those metrics determines the direction your business heads in.

Among Korean founders, planners, and freelancers, the benchmark used most often is the "domestic industry average" — the rates people in similar fields charge, the follower counts similar accounts gather, the review scores similar products receive. Doing well within that frame brings a sense of relief. It resembles the same structure that keeps producing the domestic valuation illusion. When the benchmark is set domestically and nowhere else, the gap with the rest of the world stays invisible.

Many venture capitalists point to the same thing during early-stage investment decisions: when judging a product's potential, what they look at before current market size is how well it answers the question "why now, why this team." If that answer is bound entirely within the context of the Korean market, capital that presumes expansion loses interest. The implication for solo entrepreneurs is similar — it's worth asking, at least once, whether what differentiates your service only holds up within the context of the Korean market, or whether it survives once that context is stripped away.

There are practical checks worth running. Can the way my product or service works exceed language or geography? Someone making Korean-language content might ask whether its structure, format, and core question would still hold up translated into another language. When you conclude there's no competitor domestically, it's also worth distinguishing whether that's because the market itself doesn't exist, or because a global player has already absorbed that demand. And even if your current rate sits above the domestic average, it's worth checking where that same work would land if offered in an overseas market.

None of this means the check has to lead to global expansion. Growing a business deeply rooted in the domestic market is itself a valid strategy. But for a digital-based business, there's a real difference between knowing your benchmark is tethered to the domestic market and not knowing it at all.

The fact that "recognition abroad" was the first thing said by the person who built 120 billion won in AUM, upon moving into a policy role, shows exactly where a decade of on-the-ground observation lands. Being called a unicorn within the domestic ecosystem without that same assessment carrying over abroad is a situation that planners, content directors, and solo entrepreneurs face too, each in their own way. Where you set the benchmark for evaluating your business is a question every business owner has to answer for themselves at some point, regardless of company size.