He asked customers for nothing but a phone number. Twenty million of them said yes. The builder behind Dodo Point, Carry Protocol, and a 15-year bet that the corner store deserves better software.
Walk into a Seoul coffee shop a decade ago and there was a tablet swiveled to face you, waiting. No app to download. No card to fish out of a wallet. Just your phone number, tapped in across the counter. That tablet was Dodo Point, and the person who put it there was Grant Sohn.
Today Sohn is co-founder and co-CEO of Spoqa, the company he started in 2011. He is not a household name. He has never wanted to be. His entire career has pointed in one direction: toward the small offline merchant - the cafe, the salon, the restaurant - and the unglamorous question of how to make that shop as smart about its customers as any e-commerce site.
The answer kept changing shape. First it was loyalty points. Then it was a blockchain token. Now it is a box of fresh ingredients delivered to a kitchen door. The customer stayed the same. The tool kept reinventing itself.
What ties it together is a conviction Sohn repeats often: repeat customers are roughly 80% of a store's lifetime value. If that is true, then everything a shop owner does should orbit the regular - the person who comes back. Most software ignores them. Sohn built a company around them.
Figures per Spoqa, TechCrunch and Crunchbase reporting.
Sohn studied economics at Stanford between 2002 and 2006, then did what bright economics graduates do: he joined McKinsey & Company, advising technology firms on strategy and operations. It was a fine path. He left it.
The move was deliberate and a little contrarian. Instead of staying in the United States and climbing the consulting ladder, he relocated to South Korea to build a product of his own - software for offline shops, an industry consultants rarely romanticize.
Seven years of running loyalty programs taught him something the slide decks never had. The problem was not the points. It was the plumbing underneath: the middlemen who sat between a store and its customers, quietly taking a cut and, in the case of payment data, quietly selling what they learned. That frustration became his next company.
Stanford - B.A. Economics, 2002-2006
McKinsey & Company - Business analyst
Spoqa - Co-founder & Co-CEO, 2011-present
Carry Protocol - Co-founder, 2018
Loyalty points. Then a crypto token. Then restaurant ingredients. The small offline merchant is the only constant.
Most loyalty programs die at the moment of friction - the signup, the download, the password. Dodo Point stripped each one out. The lower the ask, the higher the adoption. The bars below tell that story in spirit.
Illustrative - Dodo Point's design principle was to require only a phone number, no app or signup.
In 2018, with Dodo Point already a fixture of Korean cafes, Sohn did something founders of a working business rarely do. He started another one, and pointed it at the same problem from underneath. Carry Protocol was the bet that the real value in offline retail was not the loyalty points - it was the data those points generated, and who got to keep it.
His argument went like this. Brick-and-mortar still accounts for roughly 90% of all retail, a market he sized at 25 trillion dollars. Yet the shopper, the person actually generating the data, sees none of its value. Credit-card networks and ad platforms sit in the middle, learn everything, and sell it onward. “They sell that data,” Sohn said, “and we actually consent to it without really knowing.”
Carry's CRE token was designed to flip that. Reward the shopper for sharing data on their own terms, cut out the intermediaries, settle it on a chain where trust does not depend on any one party. “The beauty of blockchain is trustlessness,” he liked to say - a line that doubled as a worldview. Any business where a middleman takes a fat cut, in his telling, is a business waiting to be unbundled.
It was an ambitious detour, and a revealing one. Sohn was not chasing a crypto trend so much as following his own grievance to its root. The frustration that started behind a coffee-shop counter - that small shops were data-poor while the platforms grew data-rich - had simply found a new instrument.
In February 2022, Spoqa sold the Dodo Point business to Yanolja, the Korean travel and commerce giant. For most founders that would be the end of the story - the exit, the headline, the quiet exit interview. For Sohn it was a clearing of the desk.
Spoqa did not wind down. It turned. The company aimed its attention at the restaurant sector through Kitchenboard, formerly known as Dodo Cart, a service built to take the grind out of sourcing ingredients. The mission statement got shorter and more concrete than anything in the loyalty years: “We make ingredients easy for restaurant owners.”
It rhymes with everything before it. Same instinct - find the small operator's daily pain, then engineer it away. The product changed from a tablet to a token to a pantry, but the customer in Sohn's head never moved.
2022: Dodo Point sold to Yanolja.
Spoqa refocuses on restaurants with Kitchenboard (formerly Dodo Cart).
New north star: make ingredient sourcing effortless for store owners.
A tablet on the counter that turned anonymous foot traffic into named, returning regulars. It became Korea's #1 offline rewards service and crossed 20 million users.
A blockchain stack that hands transaction data back to the shopper and pays them for it. Sohn's read: brick-and-mortar is ~90% of retail, a 25 trillion dollar industry thick with middlemen - exactly where blockchain bites.
After selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, Spoqa turned to restaurants. The new mission, in Sohn's words: “We make ingredients easy for restaurant owners.”
Dodo Point lived on the shop's side of the counter, not yours. The tablet faced the customer - the loyalty program belonged to the store, the convenience belonged to you.
He left a U.S. consulting career to move to South Korea specifically to build for small offline shops - an industry most of his peers would have considered a step down.
His blockchain thesis is blunt: any business with greedy middlemen is ripe for disruption. In offline retail, he saw advertising as the worst offender.
Raised about $3.9M back in 2014 to push a Korean loyalty app into Japan - a cross-border bet years before it was fashionable.
There is a version of Grant Sohn's life that never happened. The Stanford economics degree leads to McKinsey, and McKinsey leads to a partnership, or a fund, or a corner office advising the very platforms that swallow small businesses whole. That version is tidy. He walked away from it.
Instead he moved to South Korea and spent more than a decade asking a narrow, stubborn question: how do you give a coffee shop the same intelligence about its customers that a website gets for free? The answer was never elegant on the first try. Loyalty points worked but left the data in the wrong hands. A blockchain token tried to fix the ownership problem but arrived into a brutal market. The restaurant pivot is the latest attempt, and it may not be the last.
That willingness to keep reshaping the tool while refusing to abandon the customer is the most consistent thing about him. Sohn does not appear to be chasing a category. He is chasing a person - the owner of a small offline business, outgunned by platforms, deserving of better software. Each company is a new sentence in the same argument.
He keeps his own name quiet and his customer's name loud. In an industry addicted to founder mythology, that restraint is its own kind of signature. The tablet on the counter is gone. The instinct that put it there is still working.