Founders, Foreign Markets, and Going Global from Korea with The Ventures' Ethan Cho

TheVentures gets up to 3,000 pitches a year and reads them with an AI agent named Vicky before a human ever steps in. Ethan Cho, their CIO, explains what survives the filter — and why he'd rather hear a grammatically broken sentence from your own mouth than a flawless one written by AI.

In this episode, we sit down with Ethan Cho — CIO of The Ventures, one of Korea's earliest accelerators-turned-VCs — on building an AI-native fund, why “good companies” beat “good stocks,” and the brutal, practical signals he uses to separate real founders from tourists.

Highlights

• The open-door policy that pulls in 40 applications a week — and how Vicky, their in-house AI agent, became the “first line of defense”
• Why a perfect, AI-polished deck can hurt you: how seasoned investors “disarm you from that clean sentence” in the Q&A
• The 3-question framework behind every check: “Why this? Why now? Why you?”
• Why he gives unfilled military service a “yellow flag” — and why it's “too easy of a reason to say no”
• The one thing AI can never mass-produce — and why it should shape what students build next