95% of this channel's viewers are men, and at every offline event someone asks us to bring on a female guest. This is our first.

Our guest is Jaeyoun Han.

From KMLA, Korea's elite boarding school, to Seoul National University's business faculty. She joined McKinsey's Seoul office in 2018 — an intake of about eight that year. She stayed two and a half years, spent six months on a project in Singapore, then transferred to the Munich office. Singapore was the first time she had lived outside Korea.

From there she moved to KKR. Her student internships were at Morgan Stanley and Unison Capital, and by the time she chose consulting she already intended to move into PE or VC.

Today she is the founder of Bangpae Tea, a Korean tea brand. "Bangpae" means shield in Korean, and she blends every product herself.

Three things we talked about.

Where Korea's elite business graduates actually go. About a third of her cohort went to law school; consulting and investment banking are the niche path. And the reason the hours are long turns out to be the client's clock, not the firm's culture.

What a PE associate actually does week to week — deal longlists, IC memos, financial models, management meetings. And why carrying a megafund's name still does not make a management team change anything.

From the finance track to founding a consumer brand. What she learned about building something that is not the Elon Musk version of a startup, and why demand alone is not enough to make an idea worth doing.

For anyone partway up the elite track without a plan for what comes after it.

Jaeyoun's tea brand, Bangpae Tea (Qoo10 Japan): https://m.qoo10.jp/su/1469550916

―――
00:00 Cold open, and our first female guest
02:54 Where Korea's business graduates go
04:29 Two and a half years at McKinsey, then Munich
06:04 Seoul's working hours, and choosing PE
08:08 How she found out PE existed
10:08 Women in finance, and the absence of role models
12:40 What a PE associate actually does
14:53 Digging into a business, and what consulting was worth
16:58 Leaving KKR — why tea
18:42 Choosing a market you can win
21:35 The hardest part of founding, and unlearning
24:20 Bangpae Tea, the "shield"