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Jeong Kim
President of Bell Labs

Jeong Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. His parents divorced when he was very young and he was raised by his father and stepmother. At age 14, he emigrated with his family to the United States. He entered school in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, speaking almost no English. Although a good student, he quarreled with his father and left home at age 16. He worked the night shift at a convenience store to support himself while he finished school and won a scholarship to study electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Kim earned his bachelor's degree in only three years. While still a student, he became excited by the possibilities of the computer revolution and began to work for a start-up company called Digitus. Kim quickly became a partner in the company and believed he was well on his way to making his first million in the computer business when, upon graduation, he left the company to join the U.S. Navy. He believed it was time to repay his adopted country for the opportunities it had already given him.

Jeong Kim spent seven years as an officer on a nuclear submarine and watched from the sidelines while the company he helped build fell victim to the accelerating consolidation of the computer industry. While still in the Navy, Kim took the opportunity to earn an additional graduate degree in management. Kim resolved that on leaving the Navy he would start his own business and avoid the mistakes he believed had been made by Digitus.

Unable to obtain financing for his own start-up, Kim applied his naval background and worked as a contract engineer for AlliedSignal Inc. at the Naval Research Laboratory. At the same time, he earned a doctorate in engineering from the University of Maryland in only two years. At the Naval Research Laboratory, he became aware of the asynchronous transfer technology used to link different modes of electronic communication. He saw the need to bridge the gap between the integrated technology of the future and the many differing systems in use today. The military, for one, had a need to link its divergent systems of voice, video and electronic data transmission, especially from remote areas without existing communications infrastructure.

Kim believed he had missed an opportunity to benefit from the computer revolution while he was in the Navy; he now saw a second opportunity to capitalize on the evolution of telecommunications. In 1992, he borrowed against his house and his credit cards to start Yurie Systems, Inc. His company soon became a world leader in advanced data transmission, one of the fastest-growing companies in America.

In 1998, Jeong Kim reached an agreement to sell Yurie Systems to Lucent Technologies for over $1 billion. At age 37, Kim personally earned more than half a billion dollars from the deal. Kim, who had been accustomed to working 120-hour weeks when he was building his company, could not imagine retiring at this stage of his career, and went to work for Lucent running several divisions at once. He is now President of Bell Labs at Alcatel-Lucent. Jeong Kim makes his home with his wife and children in Potomac, Maryland.

WYD Team