THE KOREA SOCIETY

Steve Jang

Maria Bodiu is a New York-based investor at Citi Ventures, covering both fintech and enterprise sectors, with a particular focus on data, AI and machine learning.

Her time spent deep within the machinery of global finance at HSBC and American Express instilled her with a rare understanding of the real-world complexities that founders aim to solve. At these firms, she drove strategic planning for billion-dollar portfolios, led M&A due diligence and built data-driven profitability and sales management systems from the ground up. This foundation, coupled with her prior integral role within Citi Ventures overseeing portfolio operations and leading investments in wealth and consumer tech, provides her with an invaluable insider's view on what it takes for startups to successfully collaborate with, sell to, or disrupt large enterprises.

Maria earned her B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Cornell University and is a CFA® charterholder. Born and raised in Moldova, Maria is fluent in English, Russian, and Romanian and is eager to take on French as her next linguistic challenge. When not traveling to new destinations and discovering hidden culinary gems in New York City, she cherishes time with her family and continues her personal quest to find the world's most perfectly ripe avocado.

Ryan Cheah is the founder of The 21st, a global network for young founders with 800+ members across 66+ universities and partnerships with Anthropic, Mercury, Ramp, Notion, and Hubpot. He is also the founding GP of 21st Ventures, a $4M debut venture fund investing at pre-seed and seed. Over the past 6 months, Ryan has run founder events across Asia-Pacific and is currently expanding The 21st across North America.

Dorothy Chang is a Venture Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, investing in pre-seed and seed stage AI startups. She is also a Co-Founder of Lynx Collective, a weekly event series that connects early stage founders with critical people and resources in the NYC startup ecosystem. Previously she served as President of non-profit Kode With Klossy, working alongside Founder & supermodel Karlie Kloss to bring coding education to thousands of young women every year. Over her career, Dorothy has invested in startups as a founding partner of Liberty City Ventures (now with $1B+ AUM), a communications partner at Primary Venture Partners and an active angel investor in multiple unicorns.

Kirak Hong is the co-founder of Sandbar, a New York-based interface company with a mission to help individuals better navigate the world around and inside themselves. Sandbar's first product is Stream, a self extension for building ideas in the moment and Stream Ring, the 'mouse for voice'. With Stream, Kirak and co-founder Mina Fahmi have created a conversational interface designed to be an extension of your own thinking, helping you talk through ideas and capture notes in the moment.

Prior to Sandbar, Kirak worked on neural interfaces with Mina at CTRL-Labs, a startup acquired by Meta in 2019. Over his career, Kirak's work has focused on distributed real-time stream processing from embedded smart cameras to cloud-based big data applications.

Tim Hwang is a multi-company unicorn founder, venture builder, and investor focused on building category-defining platforms at the intersection of technology and regulated industries. He is the Founder/CEO of Nitra, a healthcare financial and operating platform modernizing how medical providers manage payments, procurement, and back-office workflows. Nitra has raised over $200M+ from leading institutional investors including Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Sazze Partners, Pantera, KB Group (Korea's largest bank), as well as prominent technology leaders such as Jerry Yang, Simu Liu, Will Smith, and Dunamu&Partners. Hwang is also the Founder and Executive Chairman of FiscalNote, a global market and regulatory intelligence company that owns CQ Roll Call Group and provides mission-critical data, news, and analysis to governments, legal institutions, financial institutions, and enterprises. FiscalNote operates across the US, Europe, and Asia, serves nearly 5,000 of the world's most influential law firms, corporations, and governments, and has raised over $230M+ from investors including The Economist, S&P Global, Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Steve Case, NEA, and Renren. At the age of 29, Hwang completed a $1.3 billion public offering of the company on the NYSE in 2021 after exceeding $140m of ARR. Through his venture builder / investment firm, Inauguration Capital, Hwang serves as Chairman or Board Member of multiple high-growth companies, including Amber (digital insurance for electric vehicles), Exponent (modern fintech for franchise operators), Vibranium Labs (agentic AI for on-call and reliability engineering), and Jericho (a next-generation cybersecurity company for the AI era). Collectively, these companies have delivered billions of dollars in value, built cutting-edge products across multiple regulated sectors, and executed dozens of acquisitions globally. Earlier in his career, Hwang began in public service, working on the Obama '08 presidential campaign at age 16 and later was elected to the Montgomery County Board of Education at age 18, where he helped oversee a $4+ billion budget for more than 22,000 public employees. Hwang is a graduate of Princeton University and attended Harvard Business School. He is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a Trustee of the Greater Washington Community Foundation, and a founder of multiple nonprofit and philanthropic initiatives. He is also a member of the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., the Council of Korean Americans (CKA), the Milken Institute Young Leaders Circle, and YPO.

Chang Kim ("CK") is a 3x founder and angel investor/adviser for 50+ companies and venture funds. CK is currently co-founder and CEO at Saywise, a new startup with a mission to use AI to unlock more human wisdom. Formerly, CK was the founder and CEO of Tapas Media, a mobile storytelling platform for original IP creators, which was acquired by Korea's Kakao Entertainment at $510M in 2021. Prior, he was a product manager at Google's Blogger. CK joined Google when the company he co-founded, TNC (a leading blogging software company in Korea), was acquired by Google. Prior to TNC, CK was at Samsung Electronics, in charge of Samsung's mobile content strategies. CK has a B.S. in Physics from the University of Michigan and also studied Biology Education at Seoul National University.

Dr. Min Kyung Lee is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She has been a director of a Human-AI Interaction Lab since 2016. She is affiliated with UT Austin Machine Learning Lab—one of the first NSF funded national AI research institutes, Good Systems—a UT Austin 8-year Grand Challenge to design responsible AI technologies, and Texas Robotics. Previously, she was a research scientist in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Lee has conducted some of the first studies that empirically examine the social implications of algorithms' emerging roles in management and governance in society. She has extensive expertise in developing theories, methods and tools for human-centered AI and deploying them in practice through collaboration with real-world stakeholders and organizations. She developed a participatory framework that empowers community members to design matching algorithms that govern their own communities.

Her current research is inspired by and complements her previous work on social robots for long-term interaction, seamless human-robot handovers, and telepresence robots.

Dr. Lee is a Siebel Scholar and has received the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, research grants from NSF and Uptake, and eight best paper awards and honorable mentions and two demo/video awards in venues such as CHI, CSCW, DIS, HRI and MobiSys. She is an Associate Editor of Human-Computer Interaction and served as a Senior Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction from 2017-2023. Her work has been featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, New Scientist, Washington Post, MIT Technology Review and CBS. She received a PhD and a MS in Human-Computer Interaction and an MDes in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS from KAIST.

SY Lee is a serial entrepreneur and investor building infrastructure for the creative and data economies. He is the President and Cofounder of Poseidon, an open data platform for AI training incubated by Story and backed by a16z. Poseidon addresses the bottleneck of ethically sourced AI data by enabling individuals to contribute real world data, including audio, video, and sensor logs, while retaining IP ownership and receiving compensation.

As the Founder of Story Protocol, Lee leads an intellectual property infrastructure project backed by over $140M from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Samsung. Story makes IP programmable, allowing creators and brands to license and remix work at internet scale. The protocol has secured IP registrations from artists such as Justin Bieber and BTS, and has partnered with Stability AI and World Network to integrate IP protections into generative AI.

Previously, Lee founded Radish Fiction, a mobile storytelling platform that pioneered serialized microtransactions in the U.S. market. Following its $440M acquisition by Kakao Entertainment as part of a $950M deal, Lee served as Kakao's Global Strategy Officer, overseeing international M&A and investment strategy. He is also the Co-founder and Chairman of SOPO, a New York-based Korean fast-casual restaurant company bringing Korean comfort food to a modern dining format.

Lee was the first East Asian President of the Oxford Union, where he hosted speakers ranging from John McCain to Peter Thiel. He is a Trustee of the Asia Society, a David Rockefeller Fellow at the Trilateral Commission, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and was a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30. He read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Hertford College, Oxford.

Dr. David K. Park, Ph.D. is Managing Director and Head of AI & Strategy at Warren Equity Partners. A Senior Fellow at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought, he previously served as Senior Vice Provost at Northeastern University and Dean of Strategic Initiatives at Columbia, where he founded the Digital Storytelling Lab. Dr. Park's career spans academia, private markets, and entrepreneurship, with scholarship and writing focused on AI, institutional design, strategy and judgment. He has founded and advised multiple technology ventures in machine learning and natural language processing, with a focus on how institutions build enduring strategic advantage in periods of technological disruption.

Peter Yoo, Ph.D., is the Senior Director of Neuroscience and Algorithms at Synchron. For over a decade, he has been developing minimally invasive brain–computer interfaces aimed at restoring independence for people with paralysis.

He leads efforts to build more general and scalable models of brain activity, with the goal of moving beyond narrow, task-specific systems toward broadly applicable neural decoding. His work sits at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning, focusing on how to translate complex brain signals into reliable, real-world interfaces.