Greg Moon

I grew up in South Korea when it was a military dictatorship. I read a lot of science fiction, which fed my imagination about technology and offered me a vision of the future.

I got involved in the democratic protests when I was in college, and it was three years after the Gwangju Uprising. I was arrested four times and tortured twice. But millions of people joined in, the dictator stepped down, and Korea held direct presidential elections for the first time in history. A lot of my friends went into politics, but I decided to pursue innovation and revolution through technology instead.

Well, technology can be used in all kinds of ways, but I think that you need freedom to have real innovation. When companies are too closely tied in with governments, there’s not room for the kind of risk-taking that lets you discover new things. You see that in South Korea, where the big conglomerates are good at a lot of things, but not at innovation. That’s why startups are so important, and why I’m so happy to be able to work with more entrepreneurial companies through the Vision Fund

I think a lot of people look at the Vision Fund and think it’s just about the money, because the Fund is so large. But for me, the bigger thing is the support that we give founders to help accelerate their vision and inspiration. I think our role is really about being a partner and a companion to the founders we work with, which means sharing all of our resources and insights, not just our capital.

I think it has the potential to make human lives better. AI can help medicine take some huge leaps, for example. We can imagine using machine learning to cure diseases. Or transportation—the sharing economy is really changing that. It also has the potential to really improve air quality, by helping everyone make the switch to electric cars, for example.

I’d like to build a foundation to teach and mentor the best engineers in North Korea. There are tens of thousands of them, but they’re raised to believe capitalism is evil. I’d like to help them understand the healthy aspects of capitalism—entrepreneurship and innovation.