In 2019, Tyger Cho graduated from Stanford with a degree in economics and a plan to be a lifelong investor. Four years later, he moved to Korea for what was meant to be a three-month sabbatical.
Now, he’s living in Seoul and building 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.
A Korean American in suburban Chicago
Cho grew up in Illinois, about 25 miles northwest of Chicago. 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.
Cho grew up around other Korean American families and saw his parents as quite Americanized by comparison. He attended Saturday Korean school briefly, but it didn’t last long.
“Although we celebrated the main Korean holidays, such as the Korean New Year’s traditions of eating rice cake and dumpling soup before our annual bowing ceremony, we were not able to invest in teaching our kids the Korean language or more of its culture,” his mother, Gina Cho, told Business Insider.
Growing up, Cho was often the only Asian in his group of friends. His classmates often assumed he was Chinese. He says he felt fully American.
When Cho was 12, his father’s business closed and he lost his job, plunging the family into financial difficulties. The experience sparked Cho’s fascination with money management.
By high school, he was reading economics books and dreaming of becoming a professional investor. “The idea that you could multiply money through good decisions felt magical,” he said.
He went on to attend Stanford for college. In August 2017, he spent a week in Korea visiting a family friend. It was his first time there, and it planted the seed that Seoul could be a fun place to live.
After graduation, Cho accepted a job offer and joined Goldman Sachs in their Chicago office. His typical day involved preparing quarterly presentations for wealthy clients, executing trades, and doing market research. He’d often work late and on weekends.
“I was surrounded by brilliant people and genuinely interested in the markets. But other aspects would bother me. Not having full ownership over projects, dealing with hierarchy, the long hours — those were really frustrating,” Cho said.
Seoul calling
After two years at Goldman, he joined a startup. When that folded a year later, he spent two years as chief of staff at an insurance firm.
It was during this time that the idea of going to South Korea started nagging at him.
Watching his older brother and sister get married and have children made him realize he had a narrow window to do something radical while he had no family obligations. Cho is one of six children, and all members of his family live near Chicago.
“We were somewhat surprised when Tyger shared his plans to move to Seoul,” his mother, Gina, told Business Insider. “It was very out of character for him to take such a big risk.
Life in Korea
Cho spent six months saving before the move.
He arrived in Seoul on September 1, 2024, thinking he’d stay for two or three months. He didn’t speak the language, didn’t know anyone, and had no job lined up.
And yet, the adjustment was surprisingly easy. By day two or three, he felt comfortable. “Everything felt familiar: the food, the sound of Korean that my grandparents would speak, the culture. It all felt very warm,” he said.
But the practical differences between Korea and America shocked him. “I had expected that my quality of living would maybe take a slight bump down,” he said. Instead, he found the opposite.
When he injured his ankle and knee, he got X-rays and physical therapy for less than $50 without insurance.
In Chicago, rent for his one-bedroom apartment had cost $2,300 a month. In Seoul, he pays $1,600 for a similarly sized space.
Building a community
After around seven months in Seoul, K-Bridge, his new company, started taking shape.
Cho got a visa through the Overseas Koreans Act, passed by South Korea’s National Assembly in 1999. One part of the law lets Koreans living abroad, including former citizens and their descendants, live and work in the country.
Living in Seoul, Cho realized just how many others like him were out there — not only Korean Americans, but also Korean Germans, Korean Canadians, and Korean Australians. In 2023, there were around 7.1 million Koreans or people of Korean descent living abroad, according to the Overseas Korean Agency.
These days in Seoul, Cho records podcasts with members of the Korean diaspora and hosts monthly events, some drawing over 70 professionals.
He also runs a K-Bridge group chat, a LinkedIn group, and a monthly newsletter. He’s doing it full-time as the sole founder.
Cho is self-funding the platform with around $4,000 a month from savings, which he expects will last about a year. He plans to make it sustainable through membership fees and corporate sponsorships.
‘My mentality feels so foreign’
Throughout the journey, what’s surprised him most is how American he feels. “Even in brief interactions with English-speaking Koreans, my mentality feels foreign,” he said.
Cho is one of thousands of Korean Americans who have returned to the country their families once left.
South Korea government data shows that the number of Korean Americans in South Korea has hovered around 50,000 for the past 15 years.
And Cho is also not alone in terms of feeling displaced.
“Despite the emphasis that Koreans place on blood ties, as a non-citizen, your status as a ‘Korean’ in South Korea will always be conditional,” Stephen Cho Suh, an associate professor of Asian American Studies at San Diego State University, told Business Insider.
“Paradoxically, most of the ‘returnees’ I’ve interviewed claim to feel more American upon moving and settling in South Korea, not more Korean,” he said.
Suh added that while Korean diaspora internet communities and message boards — similar to K-Bridge — have existed in the past, they’ve typically been in Korean and have seldom focused on professionals.
These days, Cho’s biggest challenge is the distance from his family, still in the Chicago suburbs. “That’s a major pullback to America,” he said.
But he sees few other advantages to returning. If his company continues to grow, he hopes to stay in Korea.
“I’m probably more comfortable living in Seoul now than I am in the States,” Cho, 28, said. “Most importantly, my future feels full of possibility rather than being predetermined.”
Additional reporting by Alexandra Karplus
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