From Seoul Orphan to Unicorn Backer: The Cost of Belonging

From Seoul orphan to French minister to unicorn investor—Fleur Pellerin's journey reads like fiction, but her insights on building networks, scaling startups, and navigating elite circles are grounded in hard-won experience.

As founder of Korelya Capital, Pellerin has backed 7 unicorn startups while bridging European and Asian markets. But her path to venture capital success began with adoption, continued through France's most prestigious schools, and included a stint as the country's first Asian minister.

In this candid interview, she reveals why authentic relationship-building beats strategic networking, how to scale startups in today's global market, and the violent process of reinventing yourself to belong in elite circles.

Fleur Pellerin: I was born in Korea in Seoul, and then I was adopted by a French family when I was just a baby, like 6 months old. My parents, they had very sad experiences of my mother being pregnant and then losing the child, and my parents decided to adopt a child from a country where children were poor or abandoned, so they were in touch with an NGO that was facilitating international adoption at the time.

So my parents came from very modest backgrounds. My mother, she quit school at 14 and she had to work when she was 15, 16, and actually she financed the studies of my father because I was in a family that was really a super loving family, super supporting, and really my parents had a lot of ambition for me, but healthy ambition like not putting too much pressure. They just wanted me to understand that if I wanted to be independent financially and make my decisions, I needed to be good at school.

Fleur Pellerin: Being adopted in this context was not something that I really thought about because it has never been a secret. The only moments where I got to think about it was like when some people in school were calling me the Chinese or something because the knowledge of Asian people was very limited at the time. So an Asian person is necessarily a Chinese person.

And also when I look at the class pictures, I can see that everybody's white. I was the only one with a different face, but honestly, I don't really remember having suffered from it. So really my parents managed to probably educate me in a way that it felt natural. It felt like a non-topic actually.

Now looking back today, my first name is Fleur, Flower. It's very original. I was different and I was original, and I think it gave me some resilience or it gave me some energy to accept to be different and to accept to be a bit original.

Fleur Pellerin: I went into some of the most prestigious schools in France. This was a condition of possibility to enter the elite. I had to learn how to behave in an environment that I was absolutely not familiar with because my family was absolutely not connected to this kind of network. At my home we never had social dinners. I never saw people coming to my parents' home who were artists, who were high civil servants, who were in politics, who were people with very high positions in the economy.

So it was a really brand new environment for me. And so at first I was really observing how other people behaved and I was trying to do the same. Nowadays when I look back at this time, I realize that learning this was not so easy because you have to forget about who you are and how you were brought up to become a bit someone else, and this is quite violent as an experience, but you want to do it because you want to belong to this new world.

Fleur Pellerin: Leaving this social background you come from, entering a new one and how it makes you sometimes feel like a traitor to your own class or to your own family and how you need to adjust to new habits, new customs, new ways of behaving, new ways of talking, new ways of acting. Probably that would be the most difficult part of my journey.

I have a memory that when I was in business school, it was also a very social moment, so I made a lot of friends. We had a lot of parties. We had clubs like sailing clubs, movie clubs. It was a very intensive networking experience and I did some internships in Japan, so I also learned to live in different countries at that time.

Fleur Pellerin: Because I was doing management courses like marketing, finance, I realized that I was not super interested in the contents of these lectures. I was more interested in the macroeconomics, microeconomics, monetary policy, public law, so everything related to the public policies.

I was like, OK, maybe after graduation I should pursue my education and try to learn more about these topics that I find interesting and because I had my diploma very early, like 20 when I graduated from the business school, usually people get their graduation at 23, 24, and I thought, OK, I have time, so I'd better study further in some topics that I really am interested in. So that's when I decided to study political science and this was a sort of gateway to the public service.

Fleur Pellerin: I think my appointment drew some attention because I was first ever female Asian and also Asian minister in the French government. My best achievement, it's difficult to answer. I think I really managed to create some good dynamics in the French tech ecosystem, so in the startup ecosystem in France.

When I was looking at the Israeli or the Silicon Valley, I thought, what are the ingredients? I didn't want to copy because you cannot copy because there are too many very specific ingredients. And also Silicon Valley was built in dozens of years, but I said, what makes an ecosystem successful, and I thought it's really a lot of different things, not just one thing.

French tech was a way for people to feel they belonged to the same community. So I think the French tech ecosystem has become much more mature compared to what it was 10 years ago.

Fleur Pellerin: What has changed is that the mindsets of entrepreneurs has really changed a lot. I see now people with a lot more ambition, global ambition from the start and I remember when I was in business school, for example, in the early 90s, no one wanted to become an entrepreneur. Everybody wanted to work for Unilever or Arthur Andersen at the time. I mean very boring when you think of it nowadays and very few people said, I want to create my own business.

I think now if you go to the same school and if you ask the 200-250 people who make one class of this school, I think probably a majority want to be self-employed and want to create their business. The relationship to risk taking, the relationship to entrepreneurial mindset or creating your own business has changed dramatically, and this makes the ecosystem very vivid because now there's a lot of startup creation.

So I think now our challenge is really to create businesses that can scale, that can create new markets, that can grow global. So really now it's not the startup creation which is a challenge, it's startup scaling.

Fleur Pellerin: Actually, I was made to quit. When you're in the government, it's an equation that is very complex. So I did not come from a political background. I came from a civil service background. Actually, I was the only one with this kind of profile.

So when you're a member of the government, sometimes when there are some local elections or midterm elections, the president needs to refresh a bit and change, reshuffle the government, so you know by definition that your job is a really precarious one and that you cannot be guaranteed that you will keep your portfolio forever. So it's part of the contract, right?

So in 2016, I was Minister for Culture and Communication, and then the president at the time, President Hollande, decided that someone else might be more relevant in this position for the rest of his mandate. I was not very happy, of course, to be fired because that's the way I perceived it. But at the same time I was sort of relieved because I said, OK, I'm going to regain my freedom. I can think of other things to do, and very soon I came up with this idea that I wanted to create my business.

Fleur Pellerin: Korelya Capital was founded in 2016. We have like 7 unicorns in our portfolio. They were not unicorns when we invested. Now they became unicorns, so I think it's a great achievement.

And the thing that I'm most proud of is that I'm trying to create a bridge between France and Korea, Europe and Asia by creating synergies for the portfolio companies I invest in, so we help them develop the business in Korea, find partners, and that's, I think, also an achievement that I'm really proud about becoming myself this kind of bridge between France and Korea.

Fleur Pellerin: The world to come is going to be very different from the world I lived in, I think. I really started my professional life without network. I managed to build it. Maybe the advice that I would give first is that don't use the people. My approach was never, OK, this person can be useful for my career, so I should really go and talk to that person.

I was super shy, so I was never like that, and I think I never gave the impression to people that proved useful to me afterwards. I didn't, I never tried to use them. I think it's important and now I know that because I am in a position where people can ask me things, and I don't like when I feel that people want to get to know me to obtain something from me.

I'm happy to do something for the people I like if I can be useful to them, but I don't like feeling like I'm an instrument of something of an ambition or a plan. My advice would be you can build a network without being like that. You can build a network just by being yourself, and people would find some interest in being with you because anyone has interesting things to do or say.

Fleur Pellerin: I would recommend to try not to use people and also to dare. Sometimes it can be difficult to try to change your habits or the way you behave, but observe around, be like a sponge by learning from the environment and learning from the others, and that can help you really, I think, break doors, get to places where you think you don't belong to, and achieve a lot of things that you don't think you're able to achieve.

If someone had told me when I was 12, you're going to be a minister in the French government, I would have laughed. I would never have thought it was possible. So things happen, not all the time, but sometimes, and probably if you can help chance and destiny, then it's good.