Jini Kim put on a suit and went looking for people who might explain why nobody was buying. She had already worked at Google. She had a prototype. She had a company, Nuna, and a reason to keep it going. What she needed was a better understanding of the people on the other side of the sales conversation.
Her destination was human resources conferences. The useful question was what prospective buyers actually cared about. It is an awkward moment in any founder’s education: discovering that knowing your product and understanding your customer are separate accomplishments. A résumé can establish that you have done difficult things. A purchasing decision has no obligation to be impressed.
Kim’s willingness to tell this story gives her career a texture that the title “CEO and co-founder” cannot supply. The career contains recognition, investors, and rooms full of students. It also contains revisions. Again and again, she describes a method she believed in, an encounter with reality, and the work of trying differently.
A suit and a better question
She founded Nuna with David Chen in 2010. The conference visits belong to its early search for customers, when conviction had run ahead of understanding. By 2012, that learning was helping the company win business from Fortune 500 clients. The suit was a modest piece of equipment for a fairly serious change of approach.
There is a quiet comedy in this part of the story. Silicon Valley makes room for elaborate descriptions of customer discovery. Kim’s version involves getting dressed and going where the customers were. The smallness of the action makes the lesson easier to believe. Curiosity had to leave the office.
Her account also resists the flattering explanation for rejection: that everyone else simply failed to understand. She allows for a more useful possibility. The builders still had things to learn. For a founder, that admission keeps the next conversation open.
Before the founder, the student
Kim’s route into technology had an earlier public-service direction. At the University of California, Berkeley, she won a Harry S. Truman Scholarship in 2002. The award supported preparation for work in government or public service. Long before Nuna appeared on a company directory, she was thinking about a career with obligations beyond a single employer.
There were other interests, too. A Berkeley account from 2003 described classical archaeology, a dig in Israel, plans for another in Greece, and Tai Chi. These are pleasing details to find beside a later career in software. An archaeological dig is one way to become acquainted with the difference between what you hope is there and what the evidence permits you to say.
She joined Google in 2004. Her work there ranged across products, including the Go programming-language team and Google Public Data. The latter involved making data tools approachable for people without much experience in analytics or visualization. A product manager working in that territory has to pay attention to the beginner at the screen.
The Go connection is a useful reminder of how easily a founder’s earlier work disappears behind the company she later runs. Software infrastructure has its own audience, vocabulary, and expectations. Helping people work with a programming language and helping people explore public data are different assignments. Each demands that somebody translate technical possibilities into decisions about a product. Kim’s job history contains both kinds of work, before the additional responsibilities that came with starting Nuna.
That range matters. Programming tools ask how to help people build. Public-data tools ask how to help people understand. Both depend on decisions about what to expose, what to simplify, and what the user needs next. Kim brought that product background into a company where she would also have to learn how customers chose, how colleagues coordinated, and how leaders explained themselves.
The company named for a relationship
Nuna is the Korean word for older sister, the name Kim chose in honor of her brother, Kimong. A company name often arrives wrapped in an explanation about a market or a technology. This one begins with a relationship.
The photograph offers a quieter view of the founder. Kim and her brother sit at a table with papers in front of them. She is smiling. The scene needs very little explanation to feel different from an executive headshot: people sharing a room, an ordinary table, a name that belongs to a family before it belongs to a business.
Keeping such a name attached to an organization creates an interesting responsibility. As the organization grows, more people must work out what it means in decisions they make without the founder present. The personal beginning can remain clear even while the practical expression changes. That is one of the continuing questions in Kim’s story: how to make an intention travel.
Fifteen people, then seventy-five
At one stage of Nuna’s early expansion, the team grew from 15 people to 75. It is an easy statistic to put on a slide. Living through the change is another matter. A founder can speak to a small team and reasonably expect most people to know the same context. A larger group makes that assumption expensive.
The numbers illustrate a management problem rather than solve it. More colleagues can divide the work. They also need a shared account of what comes first. Every additional person brings another set of decisions about where to spend the afternoon.
Kim has discussed this pressure with John Doerr and Laszlo Bock, including in a 2018 panel about goals. Her description makes room for the untidiness of running a young company. Plans can be sensible when written and difficult to follow when circumstances move. The existence of a goal does not guarantee the attention needed to pursue it.
“When you’re fighting for survival, there are no best-laid plans.”
Jini Kim · 2018 panel
The CEO gets a scorecard, too
Objectives and key results, usually shortened to OKRs, entered Kim’s working life at Google. They offer a way to describe what a team wants to accomplish and how it will recognize progress. The appeal is obvious. A group can argue about something concrete.
Introducing them at Nuna required more than familiarity with the idea. An early rollout faltered. Kim later emphasized that leaders had to participate visibly in the process they wanted colleagues to adopt. Her own goals became open to the team’s scrutiny. A system for keeping other people accountable had to include the person introducing it.
That detail makes the leadership story worth pausing over. The CEO already possesses authority. Putting a commitment where colleagues can examine it changes the conversation. Questions about progress have somewhere specific to land. The leader has made a promise legible enough for somebody else to assess.
For the reader, the inference is practical: a management system inherits the habits of the people using it. If the leadership treats goals as occasional paperwork, the company receives a fairly clear instruction. If leaders return to them, invite questions, and revise their thinking, colleagues receive a different one. The document alone cannot decide which company it is going to be.
Paper has a useful advantage
Kim has described a particularly plain way of keeping priorities in sight: including OKRs in monthly all-hands slides and putting printed copies on walls. It is an appealingly physical answer to an abstract coordination problem. Paper does not require a colleague to remember which tab contains the plan.
“We put OKRs on our all-hand slides every single month.”
Jini Kim · on making goals visible
The repeated appearance matters as much as the medium. A goal announced once can become background knowledge that half the room has forgotten. Returning to it gives people another chance to connect their own work to the shared priority. The wall is useful precisely because it is unremarkable. Nobody needs a demonstration.
Nuna’s stated working values also put emphasis on clear, concise, respectful communication and on considering whose voices have been left out. Those principles suit the practical problem visible across Kim’s career. A tool must be understandable to its user. A company’s direction must be understandable to its colleagues. Explanation is part of the work.
Back in the classroom
Public recognition arrived along the way. MIT Technology Review included Kim in its global Innovators Under 35 list in 2015. Nuna emerged publicly from stealth in January 2017, announcing more than $90 million in funding. Those are dated milestones in a longer business story, useful markers of how far the company had come.
The 2017 funding announcement also recorded a partnership behind the business: David Chen was named alongside Kim as co-founder, and Kleiner Perkins and John Doerr were identified among its backers. A public profile tends to put one person in the foreground. The company announcement makes the surrounding relationships visible. Founding gives somebody a title; operating a company means continuing to work with other people’s skills, judgments, and commitments.
Universities have given her another setting in which to examine that story. She appeared among the speakers for Berkeley’s “How to Build the Future” course in 2017, and Harvard featured her in an entrepreneurs salon in 2021. The classroom creates room for the parts of a career that a company announcement tends to compress.
The recurring lesson is a modest one with demanding consequences. A founder’s experience can be valuable and incomplete at the same time. A personal commitment can remain steady while the approach needs revision. Kim’s story keeps returning to the next piece of work: understand the buyer, explain the priority, let the team question the goal. There is always another education after the title.