Dialpad - the company that could (and should) have been Skype
Web 2.0 | 2007/08/16 13:43 | Web 2.0 AsiaMr Doyon Kim, the founder and CEO of Spotplex, was featured on a recent Found|Read blog, the site I frequent to.
I met Doyon earlier this year in Seoul, and found he follows the Wolverines as avidly as I do. He's a brilliant person, and I think he should be proud of himself as he's one of few Koreans who'd had some significant playing time in the majors ( i.e. the Valley).
His previous stints include the co-founder of Dialpad, an early-generation internet telephony company, and the co-founder of Opinity, an online reputation tracking service.
So why is Doyon Kim not as famous as people like Nicklas Zennstrom? Because Dialpad wasn't as successful as Skype.
Is the name "Dialpad" familar to some of you? Well, it certainly is to me - or any Korean who'd been around in the industry circa 1998.
Think of Dialpad as the Skype of pre-2000. Around 1998, Dialpad took the Korean market by storm. Even back then Korea was a highly wired country. Dialpad was the company that let people know they can make cheap phone calls from their internet-connected computers (although calls within Korea wasn't and isn't that costly anyway). Koreans swarmed to give Dialpad a try - just like they do with anything new.
Suddenly the headphones with a little microphone attached, which were called no other than the "Dialpad headsets", were selling by millions. Dialpad's parent company (Serome) was the charm of the Korean stock market.
And then, the company went downhill. The company wasn't making money mostly because the Dialpad service was for free (the service was supported by online ads, but this was pre-Adsense era). But I think what's also to blame is the fact that Dialpad was simply too early (low broadband penetration = poor call quality). The market simply wasn't fully ready. By the time Skype came along, many more people around the world were using the web in their everyday life. And Skype, in return for charging the customers for outbound calls to regular phones, provided a great call quality and top-notch user interface.
At some point, Dialpad got so frustrated that it tried to close a three-way merger deal between themselves, Daum, and Naver. In hindsight, the planned merger looks like a really far-fetched idea, especially the two other companies are now the Google and Yahoo of Korea.
Well, I think most of you readers won't care about Korean IT history (rightly so), but at least you can take away a lesson from Dialpad: The first doesn't win. The first is actually quite likely to die. The first to do it right always wins.
Sometimes, however, the first just hangs in there, perservering until the market becomes ready, and reaps a huge benefit. That wasn't the case with Dialpad. Which is a shame - to Dialpad, and to many (including myself) who wanted to see a globally successful Korean IT company other than Samsung and LG, the Chaebols.
Hope Doyon's third startup will turn out great.
