Yong Kim

Before Wonolo had a name, before Sequoia wrote a check, before a million people would tap a phone to claim a day's work, there was a 15-year-old walking down the side of a rural New Hampshire highway at dawn. He was cold. He was alone. He was dragging a hastily packed suitcase. And he was trying to reach Boston Logan Airport on foot.

That teenager was Yong Kim. He had grown up in Seoul, the son of a judge and a woman who ran a nursery school. At 12, a monthlong trip to Washington, D.C. planted a stubborn idea: he wanted to live in America. He spent three years wearing his mother down. At an education symposium in Seoul, he approached an American boarding-school representative and made his case so directly that a translator stepped in to help him apply. Brewster Academy accepted him.

The reality was harder than the dream. He spoke almost no English. He struggled to make friends and ran into discrimination. He worked jobs while studying at night in the only lit space he could find on campus - a bathroom. A fight with another student pushed him over the edge, and he ran. A teacher named Mrs. Douglas argued for his return. That second chance, he says, changed everything. He graduated valedictorian.

What followed looked like a straight line up. The University of Chicago for economics and mathematics. Harvard for a master's in statistics, then an MBA from Harvard Business School. A career in technology investment banking that ended with a vice-president title at Deutsche Bank. He was working 100-hour weeks and raising three daughters.

Then, in 2012, a CFO asked him a question that he couldn't shake - the kind that makes you audit your own life. He left finance and joined an innovation accelerator working with Coca-Cola in the Bay Area. To understand the business, he did the business: packing, shipping, stocking shelves. On those floors he noticed something that didn't add up.

The paradox he couldn't unsee

Roughly 80 million American hourly workers earned under $50,000 a year. Many held multiple jobs and still couldn't find extra shifts. Meanwhile, the companies around him complained they couldn't find workers at all. The staffing agencies bridging the two sides were running on methods that had barely changed in 50 years.

In 2014, Kim and co-founder AJ Brustein launched Wonolo - short for Work Now Locally - with angel money from Coca-Cola. The pitch to workers was almost radically simple: no resume review, no waiting. Push a button, accept the job, and it's yours.

Adoption was slow and skepticism ran both ways. Their first real break came when Stitch Fix's COO agreed to a trial for 10 holiday workers. Kim and Brustein had recruited only eight. So the two founders showed up and worked the last two shifts themselves - a detail that says more about the company than any deck could.

Growth brought its own trouble. After a $2 million seed round in 2015 and a Series A the next year, Wonolo scaled fast - maybe too fast, before the underlying operations were solid. Kim, reluctant to let people go, eventually cut his team in half and reset key roles. He describes it plainly as a hard lesson in building carefully.

Then came the regulatory storm. As California debated AB5 in 2019 and how gig workers should be classified, Wonolo argued for a middle path - a "dependent contractor" status that exists in Canada - and built in-app benefits like injury insurance discounts, prescription access, and financial planning tools. When the uncertainty didn't clear, Kim made a costly call: Wonolo pulled out of California, which was about 40% of revenue.

The pandemic hit next, forcing another round of cuts. But as supply chains scrambled and demand for frontline workers surged, Wonolo turned into something close to essential infrastructure - and the platform's worker-first design finally had room to matter at scale.

The drive to Stockton

If you want the clearest picture of what drives Kim, skip the metrics and look at one night. A Wonolo worker's pay was frozen behind a banking typo, and the delay put him at risk of losing his home. Kim cut short a date with his wife and drove 90 minutes to Stockton to hand-deliver a personal check. The worker's reaction, he says, validated the whole mission.

That instinct became policy. In 2021, Wonolo became the first gig economy company to pledge a universal living wage standard for its workers - not a marketing beat, but the logical end of the question Kim had been asking since the warehouse floor.

He frames the goal in terms that reach past staffing. Whether blue collar or white collar, immigrant or fifth-generation, he says, people want to be respected and want the best for their children. His measure of success isn't a valuation. It's whether he has made thousands of workers' lives better - his own version of the American dream, told from the side of the road where it started.