The subjectivity of aesthetic merit troubled Markopoulou. “One of the things I hated about the art-world is that decision-making is quite arbitrary,” she says. “People could say Picasso is shit just because they felt like saying it. I found that very frustrating, and very political; they’re gatekeepers, and then your life and self-perception is a function of those gatekeepers.”

But the first company he founded after leaving his job at electronics giant Samsung was a gaming platform, which he soon merged with a search engine founded by a fellow Samsung alum—Naver, then a budding tech giant. When Kim left to found Kakao, he didn’t leave his gaming genes behind—he deployed a social gaming strategy that allowed users to play games via the app while also chatting with friends to rapidly boost its popularity.