What's up, party people? My name is Sunny Ray. This is Sunny Ray Show. my next guest, his name is Terry Kim, the leap before you're ready from Fortune 100 tech to entrepreneurship. We're going to have a candid conversation on leaving corporate tech to build your own path, covering mindset, risk, early traction, and how to move before you feel fully ready. With that said, DK, how's it going, man?
Hey, Sunny, it's going well. Thanks for having me on the show.
Yeah, you said you you've got some live event coming up soon, right? What's that about?
Yeah, actually, we have Camp Kaizen happening in the Northern California. It's on Camp Navaro, a pretty epic spot with 200 acres of ancient redwoods. And we're bringing together Calling All Conscious Founders, builders, and creators to come join us in the redwoods.
Cool. I might just make a trip down there. No one. TK, tell me what is NextG T and Kaizen OS? Like what are you building? What's the problem you're solving? And then yeah, happy to kind of go deeper into it. Yeah, absolutely. So, I've been working on NGT Academy, which is NextG T. it's an edtech career platform where you can go from zero to engineer in about four to six months versus four to six years of college across IT infrastructure. So, we're talking about AI infrastructure, network engineering, systems administration engineering, and also data center infrastructure and also a bunch in cyber security. So we do basically everything from infrastructure to cyber security to now we're launching a zero to AI engineer track which is la la la launching in la launching in December. So and NGT Academy is a YC company. So we're coming out of YC winter 18. We raised $18 million across three rounds of capital to disrupt the edte space. and yeah, that's kind of my background. And I went I was a network engineer and systems engineer at Cisco Systems and at Arista Networks and we can talk about that where I quit the Fortune 100 company twice leaving a lot on the table to get into the startup world and also Kaizen OS you asked about that that's kind of like my next baby that I'm working on which is part of this big camp Kaizen movement but Kaizen OS is basically a modern operating system that's native AI to help organizations get, you know, clear visibility into their mission values, their org chart, their playbooks. it's like a modern version of EOS, which is what I've been running EOS for probably the past five years across a lot of my companies. if you haven't heard of that, it's the entrepreneur operating system by Gino. he's got a great book called Traction and that book's helped me a lot over the years as an entrepreneur. Yeah, that's kind of like the Bible of I mean I've read that book as well. Attraction. It's a big one. You quit. is that the one with the bullseye?
No.
Is that the book you're talking about?
No, it's.
You know meaning like is that don't they have that bullseye system? Or maybe I'm thinking of a different book called traction. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah. I think the one you're referring to is probably the like how to scale to a 100 million or something. The bullseye like I forget like nail it and scale it. That book comes to mind. Yeah, with the target. I'm trying to think why my books aren't here. I usually have those books.
Yeah, I'm surprised you can't find it right now, but anyways, maybe another time. okay, cool. I guess so. Just to go back to it, so you quit Arista in 2016, kind of at the highest point of your IT career. What made that kind of like the right moment rather than a reckless one? Well, with any endeavor, I think, you know, like we kind of procrastinate or we like don't want to, let's say, take the leap, if we're not too sure about the idea, right? I think we've all been there. So once you get clear on you know what problem you want to solve and if there's alignment true soul alignment and you're passionate you know you ever been in a situation where you get an idea and like the idea alone just pulls you into work align work and so that's what I mean alignment like you have to be passionate about it you have to be like sleeping like on it like thinking about it in the shower but if you do have that like you want to strike and so for me you know this happened multiple times throughout my career, but like I basically felt like I was another like a cog in a wheel and you know another enormous company at Cisco. I was at with 70,000 full-time employees and it was my dream job. But I got the startup buck and I knew there was something bigger out there for me. And I met the co-founder of DIG at a conference in New Orleans or Baton Rouge actually, Louisiana. And I was I had a Cisco booth. I was representing Cisco with some of the new Cisco stuff and you know I recognized him. He did a keynote out there and yeah, I caught him in the lobby and I asked him, "Hey, you like I had this startup idea I've been thinking about, but I don't know when to take the jump." And you know he was just standing at the curb and he said he's like TK you just gota leap and then he just shows he puts his hand like that off the curb and it's like that's how it is like you have to commit and so you have to burn the boats and I did that multiple times in my career and you know I would say that that the job is always there but that dream or that daring project or something you've always wanted to work on like you don't want to be at your deathbed regretting like, "Oh my gosh, what if I did that? What if I tried that part? What if I did this? What if I, you know, like that's kind of like how I kind of been looking through that lens.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, I guess what's the specific gap that you saw between how engineers were trained and what employers needed?"
Oh, it's just simple, you know? I mean, if you go to a college, what do you do? Take two years of general ed for what reason, right? It's like advanced high school all over again. So, I think the two years of general ed in college is just a complete waste of time. Now, if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, you know, you could definitely go the college route. There's nothing wrong with that. But my point is, you know, like you don't need four years, six years college degrees. You don't need to stack degrees in order to break into it because I broke into it, you know, with an eighth grade education. And I worked my way up, you know, and I knew that being becoming an engineer, you didn't need to get a degree. But being, you know, growing Korean you know, American first immigrant, Asians are notorious for like, you know, parents saying, "Hey, you should be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer." And so be knowing that I could train 18 to 20 year olds in four months with the top secret clearance in the military, like that was my proof. And so I was like, "Wow, why don't we do this in the civilian sector? Why is, you know, colleges charging 80und $200,000 for these tech degrees that are out of date to be honest with you. know, they just sprinkle in some commodity IT searchs and call it a degree." so yeah I had to really go after this problem and solve it because I knew that you know college debt was accumulating to like over a trillion dollars like when I started NGT Academy was 2016 and the college debt just increased to $1.5 trillion and I knew that couldn't continue on. So I wanted to disrupt and solve this problem with, you know, an alternative education.
Yeah, that really resonates. cool. So I guess when did you realize that you could take someone with no background and turn them into essentially like a working engineer?
Yeah, I would say I knew it because I was an instructor. So I did three years in the field and two and a half years as an instructor where I trained thousands of airmen on Kiser Air Force Base in 16 weeks to get them battlefield ready for you know getting deployed to Afghanistan and then having to support mission critical communication network infrastructure. So that was a 16week boot camp.
Wow. Okay. and then I guess you raised more than what you said $18 million. like what did that teach you about whose money you actually want alongside you?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think you know when you're trying different business models and trying to you know inter like disrupt the space for us we try to even do income sharing agreements where we train students for six months for free and we take 10% of their income that model didn't work great on paper but just hard to execute. What we found is students don't have skin in the game. Most students that have come up with the money for the tuition, they're committed. And it goes back to this thing like, are you committed to become an engineer or are you just kind of dabbling with a hundred ideas of where you want to take your career? So for us, you know, this was my passion. I built my I I've been in IT for 25 years, and when I got my dream job in five years at Cisco, I knew there was a better way. And so we've been in business for 10 years now. and when we need to disrupt the industry, venture capital does come in good play, right? So for us, it was during the 2015, the 2016, if you remember, there was like thousands of coding boot camps all around the world. because there was a huge need for software engineers. Well, you know, 10 years later, now we're replacing software engineers with AI, but we're not able to replace IT professionals. And so there's a half a million job deficit going on right now across networking, cyber security and system engineering you know in the USA alone and 3.5 million open jobs across cyber globally. So the deficit is real and colleges can't train them fast enough. So, to answer your question about the fundraising, you know, we did a $1 million preede round back in 2016 going through Angel Pad and then we applied to YC in 2018, got accepted, raised a 2.1 million seed round and then six to nine months later after that right before 2019, we ended up raising 15 million series A. And that really took us, you know, for the next seven years to figure out our model, to figure out the how we can best serve these students, who's our right ICP or avatar that we really want to train. And over the years, it's kind of changed and morphed and now we're last year we did like a thousand veterans and a thousand civilians. And this year we're scaling where it's we're helping more veterans. It's going to be like 80% veterans and 20% civilians. That's awesome. What's the hardest part of a business whose product is someone else's career change?
Well, it's cons what what's the question?
I said what's the hardest part of a business whose product is someone else's career change?
Yeah, it's a very actually great question. It's a very difficult business. I would say anything consumer facing, right? And for a career change, it can take four months, it can take eight months, it can take 12 months, right? So, and then these are also part-time learners, right? They may even have full-time jobs and they're trying to switch careers. So, I would say it it's a very hard business. you have to, you know, have thick skin and make sure that, you know, you're aligned with the mission and seeing it come to fruition. So, it's been a 10-year journey, but it's been a tough journey. I would say we've had our fair share of roller coasters and trying to get product market fit and trying to help these students. And at the end of the day, what we love is we love changing lives. and seeing people not be drowned in massive student loan debt and to be able to launch their careers, you know, at a fraction of the cost. So, we're pretty proud of what we built and we're I feel like we're just getting started. you know, we've had over 50,000 learners go through our learning platform. So, we've changed and impacted us so many lives over the past decade. And we couldn't be more proud of where the team's at, where the company's at. And a lot of people don't know this, but I'm happy to share, you know, it took us eight years to get to a model where we could reach profitability. So everything was always reinvested into our student learning, our staff, our employees, our culture, our academic curriculum. And yeah,.
I love that, man. That's I know you kind of touched on it earlier, TK, but can you go deeper into like what is Kaizen OS and who is it like really built for? Yeah. So, Kaizen OS is kind of my new project and it is a modern operating system that's natively built with AI. So, we do merge some ancient wisdom and in and bring in 64 nodes of the business that we've mapped that creates this one unified system that is designed to serve the founders of the company. Whether you're a solo founder or you have three co-founders, it's to serve that demographics. However, there's one caveat. kaizen means change for good. I actually have it on my sleeve here. So change for good. And so change, kai is change. Zen is goodness. And there's two kind of zens. one is peace. It's like the Buddhist zen. And then there's one of the virtue. And so we utilize the virtue as a way for change for virtue as a substrate. And what we believe at Kaizen OS is that we need more you know conscious organizations especially in this time and age with entrepreneurs you know really being kind of like a cool thing or a trendy thing. But what I find is that a lot of entrepreneurs come into or founders come into the entrepreneurship world to just make money or to you know buy a bunch of material possessions. And I think what we want to do at Kaizen OS or the way of Kaizen is to change the story. are you doing it for alignment? Are you doing it because like it is your gift to the world? And so we're trying to spark a new conversation for calling out conscious founders. So, Kaizen OS is built for the conscious founder. so it's an application only. you know, we built it just for that purpose. It could serve for-profit or even nonprofit organizations, but the signal or the mission and values around the organization has to be a conscious signal and that's who we want to support with Kaizen OS.
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Hey, how do you turn continuous improvement into something a person can actually like run daily?
Yeah, absolutely. you know, great question. I think behaviors and habits can change who we are essentially. So, it's like let's break down the S3 framework, right? What is that? That's basically story, systems, and soul. So with the S3 framework in mind how can a founder or any builder that has you know let's say a lot of workload a lot of ambition a lot of drive how they can change their identity is through the Kaizen methodology. So forget habits and things like that for a second like what is the founders's character right because the character is the ceiling is it not when we're building a company and but no one teaches us this right that when the founder becomes coherent and it's clear in its action and its values and whatnot that founder can be the amplica amplification for how the organization builds their culture and so I would say continuous improve Improvement is like working on yourself, working on your character. What do you believe? What what's your values? What's your mission? Who are you solving the problem for? And how do you want to be in service at the end of the day? And that's why, you know, I say all the values even that I've instilled in my company was things that I had to work on myself as a character. And when I started working on myself, the business started thriving, the culture started thriving. And this is not tal talk t thought about as much as it should be. So for the founders listening right and the builders out there is like work on a system next right after you understand what story you are telling yourself that story ultimately creates your vibration and then from that what systems are you using to create your character. So whether that's a morning routine or evening routine or the way you do team meetings all of that is based on systems. So like understanding the systems you're using on a daily weekly basis is actually defining your character. And we could look at the system usually with founders by just looking at their calendar. Like you know I could be like hey Sunny show me your calendar and I can probably see what kind of systems or habits that you've kind of instilled for your week. Is it not? And that basically ultimately leads me to the last piece is the soul aligned right and because I see a lot of founders get burnt out or give up right like when I took my leap right there's so many times I could have gave up on NGT's journey right I like three years ago the company was really in a dire situation and I had to take a merchant cash loan personally at a 35 5% interest rate to even make payroll because I wanted to keep my team intact and keep the company going. So like these are the things that aren't talked about as much. But what drives your mission to make sure that you never give up and you keep your mission going is the heart. has to be aligned. The soul has to be aligned because when those tough times comes, everyone wants to throw in the towel or just, you know, easily just declare bankruptcy, right? So yeah. Cool, man. I love it. makes so much sense. I guess a couple more like what has to be true by the end of this year for Kaizen OS to be, you know, a product rather than a promise.
Yeah. well, Kaizen OS is kind of still in beta and stealth modes to be honest, but the Camp Kaizen is the actual physical movement where we're super excited about to gather builders and conscious leaders and people in actually nature. We believe that nature has the codes, right? And if we can mimic nature as much as possible, that's how we as founders, builders, employees can become more conscious and coherent. Because if we become more coherent to what's aligned with us, like that's going to create a beautiful vibration for not only the founder, but also for the organization and also for the culture and the team that's going to be built based on that mission. And so that's super important in my opinion.
TK, help me land the plane, man. Where do people learn more about this? Where do they learn more about you? That was a lot of fun. Congratulations on your first stream as well to LinkedIn. So, you were great.
Yeah. First time for everything, you know. I think it is just embracing uncertainty to bring this home is to understand we are all on our own journey. And the beautiful thing about the spiritual evolution is that you know we're having this beautiful experience here. Why not enjoy what we're working on? Why not enjoy the mission, the values, the team that we're surrounding oursel with and really get aligned because we take a lot of action. We consume a lot of stuff without returning back to coherent. So that is my, you know, prayer out there is just find a mission, find a company, an idea that is so aligned with your soul that it just lights you up because that there's no other way to live. you know, the best way to live is in coherence. And the way to find us is you can check out Camp Kaizen. We're taking over 200 acres in the ancient redwood forest for founders, builders to come gather around the campfire. Let's talk about these conscious ideas and projects and let's start let's create this spark. What is entrepreneurship all about? It's to help change the world. And I believe founders in coherence can build amazing organizations, can change the future. I love it, buddy. Okay, I'm going to bring this one to an end. bunch of people listening live, so thank you all for tuning in. And, until next time, TK, hang out for one minute. I'm going to bring this stream to.
