@theventure: Barclays agreed to lend Chung Ju-yung $43 million on one condition: he had to sell a ship before he had a shipyard. That condition is why Hyundai became a shipbuilder when nobody else in Korea could. Every bank he visited was right about the facts. Korea had never built a large ship and Hyundai had no yard, so there was nothing to lend against. That is the wall a founder in a poor country hits every time. The bank wants proof, and the only proof it accepts is the thing you need the money to build. Chung's answer was to get the proof from somewhere else. He put a 500-won note on the table to show that Koreans had built ironclads centuries before Britain, and when the bank asked for a customer, he sold George Livanos two 259,000-ton tankers from a photograph of an empty beach at Ulsan. A paying customer was evidence a bank could accept, and the loan went through. Then he built the shipyard and the ships at the same time. Hyundai was already Korea's biggest construction company, and to Chung a shipyard was concrete and a ship was steel. Ground broke in March 1972 and the first tanker was delivered in June 1974, on time. Today Hyundai Motor sells $128 billion a year, and the yard at Ulsan is the largest shipyard in the world. Follow @theventure for the greatest founder stories ever told.

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Friday 04 September 2026 00:39:28 GMT