Park Woo-in, Tech Growth Desk
"The myth that winning a government support program equals success collapsed long ago. Upgrading the system in a structured way should come before increasing the number of applicants."
A Korean venture capital industry official I met recently expressed skepticism about "Startups for All," the initiative the government is pushing on a large scale.
The policy intent behind the program — lowering the barriers to starting a business, as its name suggests — deserves applause. Public enthusiasm was intense as well. A total of 62,944 people applied in the first round, and 5,000 were ultimately selected.
But startup policy does not succeed simply because the number of founders rises. The real report card depends on the technological capability of new companies, market validation, private investment and, above all, survival rates. Gathering many people with good ideas and creating many companies that survive in the market are entirely different problems. The one-year survival rate after founding is about 62%, the three-year rate about 41%, and the five-year rate only about 30% to 33%.
The harsh reality of entrepreneurship is that even technology companies that received concentrated government support collapse. According to startup investment platform TheVC, 23 of the 88 startups that shut down in the first half of last year, or 26%, had been selected for the Tech Incubator Program for Startup (TIPS), a government startup support program.
Starting a business is not an idea contest. An idea must become a product, and the product must open customers' wallets before it becomes a business. Validating the market, beating competitors and raising funds — that process truly begins after founding.
Yet the government expanded the numbers again before building a structured management system to verify the technological capability and commercialization of the founders selected in the first round. In the second round of "Startups for All," which began on the 20th of this month, the selection target was doubled from the first round to 10,000 people.
This is not to say that expanding the scale is itself the problem. But as a program grows, the work of upgrading the system that manages its performance in a structured way also becomes more difficult. The National Assembly Budget Office, in its "Analysis of the First Supplementary Budget Bill for 2026," pointed out that because the first and second rounds of Startups for All are being carried out close together, there are concerns about budget waste stemming from confusion in program administration.
Creating many founders cannot be the ultimate goal of startup policy. What the government must build in the end is not a startup policy that gets many businesses started, but a startup ecosystem in which many companies can survive.
