In America, Knowledge Work Is Already Over

A lawyer of 21 years goes zero to one at 47

Today's Bloom community event featured Jeewon Kim Serrato. She lives in San Francisco and immigrated to the US at twelve, after just one month of seventh grade in Korea. She did both her undergrad and law school at Berkeley, majoring in political science and French. She also studied at Sciences Po in France, and her French is fluent.

Her 21 years as a lawyer in the US read like a highlight reel. She spent eight years leading data privacy at the Department of Homeland Security and advised Congress and the government. She was chief privacy officer at the largest financial institution in the US, with $4 trillion in assets, and ran privacy at the world's largest data broker. As she joked, those are the companies people love and hate the most. As an outside advisor, she designed AI products for Meta and Facebook, and advised almost every Fortune 500 company you can think of on data strategy and digital transformation, from eBay and Louis Vuitton (LVMH) to Sony, Citibank and Shell. "I have a very specific, narrow expertise that I apply in a very broad, cross-cutting way. You could call me the most general specialist in the world." That came from spending 20 years digging into nothing but digital transformation.

This February, she left her partner role leading the consumer protection practice at a big San Francisco law firm. The pay was great and the work was interesting, so why leave? "I'm 47, and I'd never done zero to one." She had sat in the advisor's chair thousands of times but had never been a founder herself. So for the first time, she took the founder's path. Today she runs her own San Francisco startup, an AI-native financial services company for the American middle class.

Silicon Valley is the canary in the coal mine

She called herself a Silicon Valley insider. Her Berkeley classmates are all founders or VCs, and she has worked with AI since advising on Toyota's self-driving cars 15 years ago. AI isn't new, she said. What has changed is that now everyone uses it, not just the world's biggest companies.

That's why she sees Silicon Valley as the canary in the coal mine. It picks up on change a few years before the rest of the world.

Right now there's a lot of AI doom in Silicon Valley. Americans are the most skeptical about AI. They picture a Terminator-style end of the world. Korea is the opposite. It's the most positive country in the world about AI and is adopting it faster than anyone. That gap is really interesting to me.

When I added that Anthropic's user research also showed Koreans being unusually positive about AI, she said that cultural gap was exactly what she most wanted to talk about that day.

She didn't hold back on money either. Eighty percent of the world's venture capital sits in Silicon Valley, she said, and 80 percent of that goes right back to Silicon Valley founders.

It's like inbreeding. Money raised in Silicon Valley goes back to Silicon Valley founders.

She said the current AI bubble is bigger and faster than the dot-com bubble. If you have the right founder story and an idea, you can get investment offers off a sketch on a napkin. "That would never happen outside Silicon Valley."

AGI, and the things nobody is preparing for

I asked how she defines AGI. She compared today's AI to a college intern. Right now it handles the tasks you give it. Next comes agentic AI, and after that, AGI. "If agentic AI is when you ask it to book your vacation and it goes ahead and completes the transaction, AGI is when it predicts you want a vacation before you say anything and decides and acts on its own. It's intelligence that thinks and acts for itself."

When I asked whether we're headed for utopia or Skynet, she was firm. "We're going to make the world better. Because the people in this room today are going to make it that way." But a lot is going wrong, she said, and that was one of the reasons she decided to start a company. "I got impatient. I didn't want to leave that decision to someone else."

Her concrete example was quantum computing. Billions of dollars are pouring into it right now, and once quantum computing arrives, every encryption system in the world becomes useless.

Every financial institution, the entire set of systems we rely on for security, all of it becomes hackable. And there's no solution. We push innovation forward, but there's far too little effort spent thinking about its unintended consequences.

She also touched on the tension between government and the AI labs. The US is a huge country of 50 states, she said, and the Trump administration is only one piece of it. "All of Korea is smaller than California, my home state. The population is about a sixth, too." So she tells Korean founders not to look only at the Korean market. California alone is bigger than Korea, and the US is 50 of those. She added that federal and state AI policy are completely different. Democratic blue states like California are trying to hold back the Trump administration, and blue states like California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and New York are leading on privacy and AI regulation. In other words, AI has already become political.

Turning homogeneity into a weapon

So why did she come to Korea? As a 1.5-generation immigrant, she said, she learned the law like a language. She wanted to understand how American society works, and how you move and motivate a large society. After 20 years of work, she found that her family is in Korea. Her parents just moved back, and a sibling works at Coupang, Korea's biggest e-commerce company. So she wanted to work with Korea more and make more Korean friends. "I asked myself what I could do differently as a Korean American, beyond being just another privacy expert or regulatory expert." The answer was The K University. She could have called it an innovators lab, but she deliberately picked a name that shows her Korean identity.

Korea's homogeneity has an upside and a downside, she said. She'd heard the criticism that when 40 or 50 people decide together, they make safe bets, and that VC money revolves around the chaebol, Korea's family-run conglomerates, so it doesn't take enough risk. She'd also heard that it's hard to be an individual here and that it can feel oppressive. "But I want to suggest the exact opposite. A way to turn that collective thinking and sense of community into a strength." Unless you're going to move to Silicon Valley, she said, you're better off building a community that grows together right where you stand. She said efforts like Bloom point in exactly that direction.

The suggestion she made to 15 young founders she met in Busan stuck with me. "What if, instead of each of you starting a company, the fifteen of you built one company together?" None of them could build a billion-dollar company alone, so they actually brainstormed what great thing could come out of combining 15 different sets of skills.

She also pointed out differences in how people communicate. Americans are direct, so a pitch deck starts with the conclusion: why we win. The French circle around, lay out every pro and con, and give the conclusion at the very end. When I said Korea is a lot like France, and that it might be because both have homogeneous populations where some things go without saying, she found that interesting. In the US, she said, people come from such different backgrounds that if you don't say it directly, nobody gets it.

You need a friend on the other side

What she clearly enjoyed telling most were her small culture-shock stories. At her hotel gym in Busan, she was told she needed indoor slippers. Even as a Korean American who visits Korea every year, she had no idea. Last year a pool told her she needed a swim cap, so she bought one, lost it, bought another, and this time she brought ten. "They're 15,000 won each." (About $11.) And yet she didn't know about the slippers.

The point of these small stories was clear.

Think about it the other way around. When you go to Silicon Valley, strange things you don't understand will happen every day. That's why you need a local guide. People like me are happy to do that translating. You need a friend on the other side.

Koreans fly out to Silicon Valley three times a week, she said, but Silicon Valley is actually too crowded for fundraising, and there are plenty of other good places to go.

When I asked about the right timing for expanding into the US and raising money there, her answer was firm.

Now. Today. Don't wait.

But she doesn't know how long this window will stay open. Probably one to two years, she said, and it's already starting to close. So join communities and reach out to everyone you can, your aunts and cousins included, to build connections. She also mentioned walking through Seongsu-dong, a trendy Seoul neighborhood, and seeing a sign that misspelled "The Space." A co-founder or friend who understands the culture, she said, is what real success depends on.

The war on knowledge workers

Her company started with one moment. Last spring, she saw a product a friend had built, a legal tech AI that helps lawyers, and she knew right away.

Every lawyer is going to lose their job. My job isn't safe either.

She started building The K University right after that. In the meantime, four of her friends lost their jobs, eBay let go of around 600 people, Intuit around 1,000, and Meta and Google keep cutting. Some companies use AI as an excuse, she said, but either way, people are getting cut.

She brought up research on jobs published by OpenAI and Anthropic, which found that the top 40 to 60 jobs in the world today can already be done by AI.

Accountants, lawyers, even doctors. Any work where you take in data, process it, analyze it and make a recommendation. It's a war on knowledge workers.

She considers herself one of the best lawyers in the world, with 20 years of experience and all of that knowledge in her head. But she said she can't compete with an AI that draws on the five billion smartest minds on the planet. Within the next two to five years, she said, knowledge workers won't be needed.

If you're thirty today, you won't have the same job for the next thirty years. I can almost guarantee it.

So keep pivoting and adapting, she said, or become the owner of your own company and your own path. Choose whether to stay an employee building someone else's dream, or build a dream of your own that's special enough for people to believe in.

Look at New Mexico

When someone asked whether there were other hubs besides Silicon Valley, she brought up New Mexico. Her husband is Mexican American, and his sister is a politician in Santa Fe, so she has gotten to know the state well. New Mexico produces oil and has the second-largest sovereign wealth fund in the US after Alaska.

There's more money there than in all of Silicon Valley combined, and most founders have no idea how rich New Mexico is.

Ninety percent of Silicon Valley VC money goes to thirty-year-old Stanford MBAs building B2B SaaS, she said. So if you're an engineer working on robotics, physical AI, energy infrastructure or logistics, Albuquerque, New Mexico is a better bet than Silicon Valley. It has the highest share of PhDs in the US and three national labs, and it's where the Manhattan Project built the atomic bomb. "Silicon Valley founders build social media apps. They don't know what to do with your great deep tech. Albuquerque knows exactly." She said she had already heard back from New Mexico's economic development secretary, who agreed to visit Korea, and that for a Korea focused on physical AI and infrastructure, New Mexico is a better match than Silicon Valley.

Breakthrough, and the 100 days that turn a bear into a person

The core idea of The K University is "breakthrough." She introduced a book called "Pattern Breakers". She said every VC in the US has read it over the past two years and it's the language they speak. It comes down to two things. One is the inflection, a huge change happening out in the world, such as AI, social media or geopolitics. The other is the founder's insight, the unique ability to seize that change.

You need both: the ability to see that the world is changing, and an insight of your own to catch that change.

What frustrates her most is founders who take the easy route. She told us about a 25-year-old founder she met last week who was starting a logistics company because their boyfriend works in logistics. You have to do what you're good at, what only you can bring to the table, she said. Then she drew a hard line.

A unicorn and a lifestyle business are different things. VCs don't invest in a lifestyle business that makes 3 million won a month. A unicorn is a company that can grow into a billion-dollar business across 100 countries. If your company can't get that big, VCs won't take your call. That's fine too. Just don't be disappointed when VCs don't answer. You're simply not who they're looking for.

(3 million won is about $2,200.)

She said she built The K University on the myth of Dangun, Korea's founding legend, in which a bear spends 100 days in a cave eating only garlic and mugwort and becomes a woman, while a tiger gives up. The "100 days of garlic" start on July 1. Founders, investors and advisors spend 100 days doing hard things together, on the same program every day, and at the end each of them asks: "Am I a breakthrough founder? Will I make the sacrifices it takes to build a billion-dollar company? Will I be the bear who ate the garlic and finally became human, or will I stay a tiger?" Staying a tiger is fine, she said. But once you're infected with a founder's dream, you can't get rid of it, and The K University wants to be the platform where you chase it.

In the end, business is selling happiness

At the end, she talked about her own time. She's the mother of two kids, nine and five, and she was missing dinner with her family to be there.

At 47, I cut out everything that doesn't bring me joy. I decided I'm done building wealth for other people. I'm going to build wealth for myself, my family and the friends I care about.

That's why she quit advising and is building her own company.

Then she gave us her biggest challenge. The Korean government is focused on AI policy and AI development, and she thinks that's wrong.

What everyone in this room should really focus on is increasing happiness.

Korea has the highest suicide rate and the lowest birth rate, she said, and if those trends don't reverse, the country will disappear. If there are no Koreans left, there's no reason to invest here. It was painful to hear, and honest.

This was the conclusion she drew from working with the world's largest companies.

Business is selling happiness.

Whatever you build, if you can frame its mission as "how does this increase happiness," the money and the customers follow and it becomes a billion-dollar company, she said. She pointed to a founder in the room who is building an app that teaches Korean to English speakers and told them to reframe it around how it increases happiness, instead of being one of thousands of language apps.

She sees Korea's success as built on community. "Only 20 percent of Korea's land can be farmed, so people helped each other build terraced rice paddies fifteen levels high. If you see the founder next to you as a rival competing for Silicon Valley money, you won't succeed. You don't have the access Silicon Valley people have." She said she was deeply moved by an exhibit on the Saemaul Undong, Korea's 1970s village development movement, in Gyeongju, and talked about how a country left in ruins by war went from receiving aid to giving it in 60 years. The K University's classes will be held in Gyeongju, not Seoul, she said. If Korea grows in the same direction with that village spirit, it will become the happiest country in the world, and the money will follow.

The two hours flew by. We had put the event together quickly around her short stay in Korea, and it was packed with knowledge and experience. Her last request was that people connect with her on LinkedIn as "Jeewon Kim Serrato." Then she asked The K University members in the audience to raise their hands. Three people did.

Originally written in Korean on Brunch, June 30, 2026.