"I believed that one day, even a provincial city could produce a platform service with 10 million users."
These are the words of Hur Se-young, CEO of Lucentblock, South Korea's first fractional investment company. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University's computer science program, he turned down offers from global big tech firms and returned home after graduation to start his own company. This promising young entrepreneur chose Daejeon — a barren field for startups — rather than Teheran-ro or Pangyo for his headquarters, and the reason was entirely a connection formed during his military service. He had worked as a researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), where an incubating program supported his venture, and he wanted to return that benefit to the region.
Lucentblock is a real estate security token offering (STO) platform that divides stakes in high-priced commercial properties so investors can buy in with small amounts. The company's motto is to give ordinary people a chance to own a share of an expensive building they could otherwise never reach, for as little as 5,000 won. Across 11 public offerings to date, it has drawn 500,000 investors and 35 billion won, a striking success, and it was expected to clear the "death valley" of years three to five — when more than 70% of new companies disappear — and grow into a unicorn.
Now in its eighth year, Lucentblock faces the prospect of shutting down. It failed to win preliminary approval from the Financial Services Commission to operate a fractional investment trading platform. That slot went instead to a new consortium led by large financial firms and an exchange. What blocked this promising startup was not a funding shortage or a lack of growth momentum, but the towering barrier of entry into the regulated market. The Lucentblock case is not simply one young entrepreneur's failure. It lays bare a structural problem in Korean industry, in which the new company that opened a market is pushed aside during the process of regulation and vested interests take its place.
The government has announced a plan to nurture 100,000 young entrepreneurs by 2030. The 19th of this month is Korea's Youth Day. What is needed now is not raising the number of young entrepreneurs who will end up recorded as failures, but instilling courage and hope in each of them so that their resolve is not broken. Young people cannot be made to sacrifice indefinitely in the name of "failure is the mother of success."
