Tapas Media CEO Chang Kim is leaving the company he created in 2012. Kim posted on his LinkedIn page that he is moving on to start “a new, exciting chapter of my life!” saying that he doesn’t have any plans yet but intends to “stay within the startup world,” either as a consultant or by starting another company himself.
Kim was a webtoon fan when he founded Tapas (originally called Comic Panda and later renamed Tapastic before settling on the current moniker), and he conceived the platform as similar to YouTube but for comics, a model that was already working well in South Korea. The Korean media giant Kakao acquired the company in 2021 (see “In Digital Comics Mega-Deal, Tapas Is Suddenly the Main Course”). The company has been through a number of changes since then, including hiring a number of DC veterans (see “Tapas Hires Former Vertigo Editor”) to develop original IP in the first half of 2021 and then, a year later, changing directions and laying off many of those hires (see “Tapas CEO Chang Kim on the Company’s Layoffs and Abrupt Pivot Away from Original Content”). Kakao also consolidated Tapas with the prose platform Radish and the fantasy fiction platform Wuxiaworld.
Source: ICV2
