Aired on the 17th, the SBS program "Tails of Tales" shed light on the culture that brought people together in an era before smartphones under the subtitle "Respond, Freedom and Challenge!"
Following the PC communication era—where people endured staggering phone bills just to secretly log on—the high-speed internet era opened up, sparking a dot-com craze.
As IT venture companies popped up everywhere to lead the dot-com boom, Freedom & Challenge, led by CEO Jeon Je-wan who graduated from Seoul National University's Department of Business Administration and worked at Samsung C&T, gathered talented individuals connected to Seoul National University and Samsung one by one to create and launch Freechal.
Jeon Je-wan taught himself computers during his days at Samsung C&T and created a new human resources management system. Recognized for his contribution to reforming Samsung's HR system at the time, he received the 1st Proud Samsung Employee Award.
In 1997, amidst the IMF foreign exchange crisis, he left Samsung to establish Freedom & Challenge and gathered talented people one by one. They created Freechal, allowing anyone to easily build a community anytime and anywhere, which became a massive hit, surpassing 1 million members and opening 35,000 communities just three months after its launch.
Musinsa, South Korea's representative fashion platform, originated from a community here. Thanks to people gathering and interacting through the online community, Freechal soared as people flocked in for the joy of a new world opening up.
Around the same time, Good World, which provided club services, envied Freechal's capital and talent pool and created their own new service.
They launched Cyworld, featuring a mini-homepage service that marked the beginning of Korean-style social media, and achieved massive success by introducing the industry's first BGM service and cyber currency, Acorn.
Moving from a shared community space that people visited directly to a personalized space where people came to visit, Cyworld positioned itself with innovative new services, growing into a service comparable to South Korea's Naver and Daum.
Feeling a sense of crisis due to Cyworld's appearance, Freechal launched a mini-homepage service that closely resembled it and declared that community operations would become paid services.
However, this triggered an explosion of public backlash, causing users to leave instantly and cutting its user base in half.
Then in 2010, dot-com companies faced the unexpected era of smartphones, and with the emergence of feed-based social media where information comes to find users, the dot-com era met its downfall.
With the basic structure of services changing, Cyworld was pushed aside by foreign social media. Finally, in 2013, Freechal announced the termination of its services.
Since then, Cyworld's founders have been active in the new era, while former Freechal employees have grown into pillars of South Korea's IT industry, currently serving as the head of Naver's design division, co-CEO of Kakao, member of the Presidential National Artificial Intelligence Strategy Committee, and the representative who created Pinkfong.
Yet, among them, Freechal's CEO Jeon Je-wan was missing. Currently working as a cleaner at a pension in Yangyang, he said, "The pain of facing hardships after running a business is immense. Actually, my life is almost in ruins, and I'm cleaning here because I need to forget the agony. Since I need to focus on one thing to forget it. Still, the reason it keeps coming to mind is because I haven't been able to let go of those feelings. But is it easy to let go? Having built a structure that entered the domestic top 3 in just a year, if I could let all those feelings go, I would be an enlightened person."
Jeon Je-wan, the former CEO of Freechal, cut ties with everyone and now lives by cleaning pensions and working as a designated driver. In fact, Freechal had a structure where the more the site thrived, the more deficit the company incurred.
Consequently, investment funds quickly ran out, and around that time, the collapse of the dot-com bubble began with the plummeting of IT-related stock prices. Former CEO Jeon ran around to secure investments, but as the potential of IT companies was not recognized and Freechal was driven to the edge of a cliff, they declared paid community operations. Just when they thought they found a breakthrough, it was short-lived.
In December 2002, former CEO Jeon Je-wan was arrested. Even though he explained that it was an inevitable management decision due to the company's financial difficulties and not for personal gain, he was sentenced to one year in prison. Former CEO Jeon expressed his apologies, saying, "I want to take this opportunity to apologize to Freechal users for not being able to protect their data to the end."
Later, thinking that the historical value and importance of Cyworld's data should not be overlooked, former CEO Jeon acquired Cyworld and invested over 30 billion won to develop it. However, with the outbreak of COVID-19, he ultimately failed to save Cyworld either, leaving a sense of regret as people are left to only reminisce about those days.
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.