Julie Kim’s Long Apprenticeship in Making Technology Feel Human

Julie Kim’s first working lesson in beauty did not arrive in a strategy meeting. It came in high school, inside a fashionable hair salon in Southern California. There were stylists, a makeup artist, customers and the compact theater of a service business: expertise had to become trust before it could become a sale. Years later, Kim would run a company trying to give artificial intelligence a face, a voice and a readable emotional presence. Between those two rooms sits a career assembled less like a ladder than a syllabus.

Kim was born in South Korea and came to California as a baby. She grew up in the south of the state, studied communications at college in San Diego and developed an interest in international studies. Her first job after college took her to London, where a public-relations agency specialized in beauty. She worked with models and editors and encountered brands including Shu Uemura and Aveda as they expanded in Europe. One assignment involved training department-store cosmetics staff to apply makeup across different skin types. The work was part product education, part cultural translation and part stagecraft.

After nine months, Kim chose the United States over a longer European chapter. Los Angeles technology work followed. Then she moved north, pursued an MBA at the University of San Francisco and worked full time as a branding specialist at NEC Electronics. International product launches widened the frame: a product could be technically complete and still need careful translation into a market.

The invisible machinery behind a clean page

At Gap Inc., Kim helped build ecommerce across Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy. She has described learning digital marketing, fulfillment and search optimization there. A retail website can look like a collection of photographs and buttons, but the promise behind it is operational: the right inventory, a useful description, an accurate delivery and a reason to return. The page is the visible inch of a much larger system.

This was an extended institutional apprenticeship in Kim’s public career. It also clarified what she wanted from the next phase. She said her moves were not always aimed at the next promotion. She wanted to acquire capabilities that might help her own a company. The distinction is small enough to sound like career advice and large enough to redirect a life. A promotion optimizes the current path. A new capability creates another one.

Three years after hours

The company Kim eventually built was Saison Beauty, a cosmetics line organized around the seasons. It began as an after-work education. Kim took formulation classes on evenings and weekends. She built a database of ingredient properties, experimented with products and worked with a third-party laboratory to verify the results. The line took three years of nights and weekends to prepare.

The setting was revealing. Kim found an early workspace through Craigslist, sharing a unit with a food business inside the American Industrial Center in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. It offered the practical things a maker needed - room to formulate, package and store - along with a community that a solo founder could borrow. She later moved into her own rooms in the building, drawn to its light and the surrounding workshop culture.

Launching in 2015 did not end the lessons; it changed them. Kim described the first year as testing and learning, the second as sales, shelving and wholesale. Making the product was only one job. The founder also had to name the idea, package it, explain it and find the channel where a customer might care.

A later marketing interview captured her small-team operating rule: favor work that is comparatively easy to execute and likely to produce a meaningful return. It is the language of a limited budget after the romance has worn off. Every founder has more possible work than useful hours. Kim’s answer was to compare effort with return, then protect the work that could move.

Convenience becomes the product

By 2019, Kim had joined Postmates in a senior marketing role spanning membership, product, brand partnerships and retail. After Uber acquired Postmates, she became Uber’s global head of membership marketing in 2021. The object had changed from bottles on a shelf to access inside an app, but the operating puzzle was familiar. A good customer experience depended on complicated machinery disappearing at the moment of use.

Kim worked as Uber pushed beyond restaurant delivery and into retail partnerships. Beauty brands made an especially legible bridge between her chapters. In 2021, she described Uber Direct as a way for retailers with ecommerce operations to use Uber’s backend for same-day delivery. She also said membership programs tried to make everyday life effortless. Speed was the pitch, but reliability was the product. A fast promise that arrives wrong is simply a faster disappointment.

The sequence from Gap to Saison to Postmates and Uber produced an unusually broad view of commerce. Kim had seen the large retailer, the solo maker, the loyalty program and the delivery network. She knew both the product photograph and the fulfillment system behind it. That range became relevant when she moved to a company selling neither an object nor a ride, but a new kind of interface.

When the interface looks back

Kim became chief executive of Soul Machines in September 2023, succeeding co-founder Greg Cross. The company, founded in 2016, builds animated digital people designed to see, hear and respond in conversation. Its thesis is that software can become easier to approach when the interface carries familiar human cues. Kim’s official brief is to lead a mission around human-AI interaction, bringing experience from both technology and consumer brands.

There is a practical tension inside that mission. A lifelike face can attract attention, but enterprise customers also need the face to do work. In May 2025, Soul Machines launched a connector for ServiceNow that paired its conversational agents with the workflow platform. Kim described the collaboration as a way for a human-like interface to trigger workflows. The verb matters. Expression without execution is a character demo. Execution without a comprehensible interface is another system the user has to learn.

Soul Machines’ latest chapter is difficult. The New Zealand company entered receivership on February 5, 2026, with KPMG appointed as receiver and a buyer sought for the business. It is part of Kim’s record as surely as the product launches: ambitious technology still has to meet timing, capital and durable demand. The human face on a system does not remove the economics underneath it.

A useful kind of range

Kim’s career does not supply an easy fable about one industry preparing her perfectly for the next. It offers something more practical. She repeatedly worked at the boundary where a complex organization meets an ordinary person: a cosmetics counter, an ecommerce page, a small-batch brand, a membership program, a delivery app, a digital face. Each boundary asks the same quiet questions. What does the customer understand? What do they trust? What happens after they act?

There is another lesson in the order of those chapters. Kim encountered the front of the house and the back of the house in alternating turns. Public relations taught the story told in public. Ecommerce exposed the operations beneath the page. Saison put both burdens on one founder. Delivery connected the promise to a clock. Experiential AI makes the interface itself perform the conversation. This is a useful form of executive range because it resists the temptation to treat presentation and execution as separate disciplines. The customer experiences them as one event.

Her stated aspiration in the Saison years was “a balanced, independent and creative life.” The scale of the work has since changed, and so has the institution around it, but those three words clarify the method. Independence required owning capabilities. Creativity required moving between fields. Balance required deciding which work deserved attention.

The line from a high-school salon to experiential AI is not straight. It is useful because it bends. Kim’s story shows how operating range accumulates: one launch teaches translation, one website teaches systems, one workshop teaches constraints, one delivery network teaches immediacy. Eventually the job title arrives. By then, the real résumé is the set of problems a person has learned how to see.