Tyger Cho graduated from Stanford in 2019 with an economics degree and intended to be a lifelong investor. He worked at Goldman Sachs and by his mid-20s felt his career path—good pay, long hours, and climbing the corporate ladder—was predetermined. He moved to Korea four years after graduation for a planned three-month sabbatical and now lives in Seoul building a business to create community for the Korean diaspora. Cho grew up in suburban Illinois near Chicago, with parents who immigrated from Korea in the mid-1970s. His family celebrated key Korean holidays but did not maintain extensive Korean language instruction. A childhood family job loss caused financial hardship.
Now, he's living in Seoul andbuilding a business that aims to create a community for the Korean diaspora like him. Getting here required leaving behind everything he knew. By his mid-20s, Cho felt like he could see exactly what the next 20 years of his life would look like. Good pay, long hours, and climbing the corporate ladder in finance. "I felt like a dead person," Cho, now 28, told Business Insider about his job at Goldman Sachs.
His parents immigrated from Korea when they were children in the mid-1970s. Chicago's Korean population grew from just 500 in the early 1960s to 10,000 by 1972, after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished quotas that had long favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. Based on the 2023 Census Bureau's American Community Survey, Chicago has the fifth-largest Korean American population among US metropolitan areas, trailing cities like Los Angeles and New York City.
Collection
[
|
...
]