Euntaek Hong is the Executive Vice President of Kakao, Korea’s leading mobile life platform company. In addition to its reach in the mobile social platform, Kakao has recently proven its potential in the life platform business through the launch of Kakao Taxi last year, which instantly dominated Korea’s call taxi market. Hong began his 14 years of journalism in 1989, as a reporter for Dong-a Daily News, a major newspaper in Korea. Here, he also served as a correspondent in Washington, D.C. and covered the Iraq War in Kuwait in 2003. In 2006, he moved to NHN to serve as the information architect of naver.com, Korea’s largest web portal site, where he was in charge of operating the portal’s main page and news service. Hong joined Kakao in 2012, where he successfully developed a paid digital content marketplace called Kakao Page. Recently, in February 2016, Hong spearheaded the launch of Makers with Kakao, a production on-demand platform, where artists/manufacturers receive orders for their goods through Kakao Talk prior to actual production. As the first of its kind, Makers with Kakao is introducing new innovations to the conventional production scene, making inventory-free manufacturing possible. Hong is the author of three bestsellers: Riding across America; Finding Blue America; Long March Across China on a Bike. He received a B.A. degree in Asian history from Seoul National University and a M.A. degree from the Missouri School of Journalism.