| Songyee Yoon | |
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Songyee Yoon is a South Korean businessperson and the president of NCSoft. Previously, she was the company's vice president and chief strategy officer. Yoon is also the founder and managing partner of the venture capital firm Chamaeleon. She worked at McKinsey & Company and SK Telecom earlier in her career.
Yoon is a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a member of the MIT Corporation. She was also an advisory board member of the Center for Asian Pacific Policy, a visiting fellow at RAND Corporation's Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy, and is currently a member of the Council of Korean Americans. She is the inspiration for the "genius girl" character in the television series KAIST.
Songyee Yoon attended Seoul Science High School, in Seoul's Jongno District.[1] She graduated from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). She received a doctorate in artificial intelligence (AI) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) department of brain and cognitive sciences in 2000,[2] [3] at the age of 24,[4] becoming the youngest Korean to earn such a degree.[5]
Early in her career, Yoon worked at the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company and at the mobile solution developer WiderThan.com.[5] She was named vice president of the telecommunications company SK Telecom in 2004,[4] [6] becoming the company's first female and youngest ever executive team member, at the age of 29.[2] [7]
Yoon transferred to NCSoft in the 2000s.[4] [6] She has been the company's president since 2015,[8] and previously held the roles of vice president and chief strategy officer.[6] [9] Yoon was also the chief executive officer (CEO) of NCSoft West.[10] Yoon has been credited with helping to launch Guild Wars 2 in the U.S. and Europe,[6] and with leading the establishment of NCSoft's AI lab in 2011.[11] [12] She has also been credited with establishing a 200-child daycare center housed in NCSoft's research and development center in Pangyo, Seongnam.[13] Yoon is the chairperson of the NC Cultural Foundation.
Yoon is the founder and managing partner of Chamaeleon, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm.[14] She is a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,[15] and a member of the MIT Corporation.[16] As a member of the advisory council at Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence,[17] she studies the social impacts of AI and the ethics of technology.[18] Yoon was also an advisory board member of the Center for Asian Pacific Policy and a visiting fellow at RAND Corporation's Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy.[18] She has served on the Asia Business Leaders Advisory Council, which is convened by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.[19] She has been a member of the Council of Korean Americans since 2020.[20] [18]
Yoon has been described as a prodigy of business,[7] information technology (IT),[5] and science.[6] [21] In 2004, The Wall Street Journal named her one of the world's 50 most promising and influential businesswomen.[5] [22] She is the inspiration for the television series KAIST, in which Lee Na-young portrays an engineering prodigy.[4]
Yoon married Kim Taek-jin, NCSoft's founder and CEO, in 2007.[6] The couple have two children.[23] Yoon is a member of the Yun family, described by Worth magazine as "one of the most successful families in the world", which also includes her eleventh cousin Joon Yun.[24] She is popularly known as "Genius Girl" for her young academic achievements.[25]