Kim Young-Chan: Founder of GOLFZON and the Philosophy Behind the Company

Kim Young-Chan

Founder & Chairman, GOLFZON GROUP

Kim Young-Chan left Samsung at 54 to start GOLFZON with a simple belief – that anyone should be able to play golf, anywhere. Twenty-five years later, the company operates in more than 60 countries, with over 13,000 locations and 100 million rounds played annually. GOLFZON is the official simulator partner of both the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open.

Golf Inc. has named him the most powerful figure in Asian golf three consecutive years running, 2023 through 2026 – and he appears on their 2025 global power list alongside the sport’s most recognized names.

For six years, he has donated personally to the Yuwon Golf Foundation for every birdie and eagle he makes in his own rounds. Cumulative giving has reached roughly $220,000, funding scholarships that have produced multiple touring professionals.

His latest venture, CITY GOLF, merges simulator technology with a real green – a hybrid format expanding globally and debuting at the 2026 PGA Show.

He founded this company at 54. He’s 79 now, and still the one asking what golf could be next.

Career Timeline

• 1979 – Joined Samsung Electronics
• 2000 – Founded GOLFZON
• 2010 – Founded the GOLFZON CULTURE FOUNDATION
• 2011 – Listed GOLFZON on KOSDAQ
• 2015 – Restructured the company as a holding-company group; founded the Yuwon Golf Foundation
• 2016 – Established GOLFZON America; opened the GOLFZON Leadbetter Academy
• 2023 – Generated $1 billion ​in revenue​
• 2025 – Launched CITY GOLF, a hybrid indoor-outdoor format, at the PGA Show; secured GOLFZON’s USGA partnership
• 2026 – Officially became Indoor Golf Simulator partner of the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open

The philosophy behind GOLFZON’s founder

1. Direction Matters More Than Distance

If there’s one phrase that captures how Kim Young-Chan thinks about leadership, it’s this: “company and golf are alike — direction matters more than distance.” A shorter shot costs a stroke or two; the wrong direction can cost three or four at once. Kim has applied the same logic to running GOLFZON — favoring a clear, consistent course over short-term speed. (Chosun Ilbo, 2020)

2. Built Around What He Knew, Loved, and Could Sustain

GOLFZON wasn’t born from a market spreadsheet. Before settling on the idea, Kim narrowed his options to a few words that mattered most to him personally: information technology, networking, the internet, and golf. The company that emerged combined the field he knew best — systems and technology, from his years at Samsung — with the one pursuit he genuinely loved. It was less a calculated bet than a search for work he could stay obsessed with indefinitely. (Maeil Business , 2014)

3. Creating New Joy and Value: The First-Mover DNA

GOLFZON has been guided by one core principle since its founding: to create new joy and value. That philosophy is what allowed the company to lead Korea’s screen golf culture — the most advanced in the world — from the very start. A first-mover DNA runs through the organization, constantly reinventing the everyday, with that same challenger spirit generating one new idea after another. Passion, Challenge, and Tenacity remain the driving forces behind GOLFZON’s continued growth. (GOLFZON Group CEO Message, 2026)

4. A Plan Twenty-Five Years in the Making

CITY GOLF, the hybrid format now expanding globally, might look like a recent pivot. According to Kim’s own account, the concept was part of his thinking from the moment he founded GOLFZON in 2000 — what was missing then was the business viability, technology, talent, and investment conditions to execute it. He has said the convergence of accumulated simulator technology with the global rise of off-course, digital smart sports has now made the timing right. (Golf Inc. Korea, 2026)

5. Built for the User, Not the Engineer

Kim has held to one non-negotiable rule throughout GOLFZON’s technical development: usability comes first, no matter how advanced the underlying system is. He understood that even the most capable technology gets rejected if it’s difficult or uncomfortable for the person actually using it — so interface design, controls, and even installation environments were tested and refined repeatedly on real sites rather than in a lab. That user-first design discipline, more than any single patent, is what he considers the foundation GOLFZON was built on. (Innopolis Foundation interview, 2025)

6. Solving Complexity One Knot at a Time

GOLFZON’s growth was never a straight line. There were store-owner disputes, market shifts, patent litigation. Kim has described untangling these as akin to working through a knotted plate of spaghetti — not trying to solve everything at once, but pulling one strand loose at a time until the picture clears. (Maeil Business , 2025)

7. One Store Owner’s Words Reset the Company

GOLFZON’s belief that it should grow together with its store owners is clearly reflected in an episode from the company’s early years. After outside distributors were granted selling rights, locations multiplied with no protection for existing store owners, and some protested outside GOLFZON’s offices. Kim has recalled one moment that reshaped his thinking: a store owner telling him they’d invested everything into their location. It reframed GOLFZON’s responsibility — not just selling equipment, but sharing in the livelihoods of the people running its stores. He halted simulator sales nationwide for a full year, absorbing the loss, to rebuild the system properly. “Our business only works if the people running our stores succeed,” he has said. “We didn’t just want to be their supplier — we wanted to be a partner in their business and their livelihood.” (Chosun Ilbo, 2020)

8. Golf Is, in the End, a Culture

Technology alone wasn’t enough once GOLFZON went abroad. In China, where golf carried negative cultural associations, the company made a deliberate choice not to lead with the word “golf” at all. As Kim has put it, “China had a lot of negative perceptions of golf. So we didn’t emphasize golf — we approached it as a ‘digital smart sport.'” The pitch instead emphasized an activity with no environmental footprint, accessible to anyone at any time, that also built rule-following and self-discipline — markers of modern civic life. The same instinct later shaped GOLFZON SOCIAL’s clubhouse format in the U.S. and the CITY GOLF rollout now underway across multiple markets. (Maeil Business , 2025)

9. Toward a Global Golf Platform

GOLFZON today reaches beyond screen golf into real courses, equipment retail, coaching academies, and now hybrid urban formats — a single network spanning the full range of how people play. Kim’s reflections over the years converge on one consistent idea: lower the barrier to entry for golf, wherever that barrier exists, let more people play, and expand that experience to the rest of the world. (Golf Inc. Korea, 2025)

10. Those Around Me Have to Succeed for Me to Succeed

“The people around me have to succeed for me to succeed,” Kim has said. He views giving not as charity but as a way of creating positive change in society — which is why GOLFZON’s philanthropy spans more than ten programs across two foundations. The GOLFZON CULTURE FOUNDATION runs a golf festival for people with disabilities, charity golf events for artists, and regional cultural initiatives, while the Yuwon Golf Foundation supports young golfers and publishes an annual golf white paper. Each area carries its own reasoning: support for people with disabilities and vulnerable communities as a matter of dignity, investment in local communities as gratitude for the ground GOLFZON grew on, and support for arts and culture as a foundation for creativity and social awareness. (Maeil Business, 2025)