YouSaid · the spoken record

Michele Kang

lines on the record: 31
first: 2025-10-16
most recent: 2025-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think I've got my hands full, and so I still, this is all work in progress, right? So I want to make sure that this is a legitimate real business. That's not charity. That means that there's going to be significant revenue stream and break even and all that, a business discipline. So I'm in that process, also investing in women's health and women's performance, all that. So all the different aspects. And I really, I'm doing that also because there are just so many female successful people with lots of money and resources. I want them to all join.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I think that's one of the things that I'm hoping to achieve while I'm investing that if you look at actually even women's sports right now, especially in the US, quite a few women have come in.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My recommendation to everyone is don't wait until it looks like it's going to take off because it's too late, right? So you need to go in. You need to have faith in something that you believe in when no one else is believing in it. And that's the time to go in. I suppose when everyone else says this is a greatest thing since sliced spread.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I said, I bought the cleats, the boots, the female design specifically for female media company, covering only media company. Right now I'm working on actually data. So all the tools for the coaches and the technical staff and all that. So using, of course, AI. But so data, which is also my background. So I'm investing in some of those type of things. But ecosystem has to go in together. So I'm investing in that as well”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you could argue it's a preference, but I think women's game, I think people will tell you they're very different. One could argue there is a lot more actually technical, in my opinion, sophistication as opposed to just pure physical strength, and also the environment in which you play men versus women, especially if you've been to a game in Europe. There's just clear contrast between Men's game and women's game.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I first arrived in England and France, everyone felt very badly for me and they thought I was going to fail miserably. How can you do this when you don't have sort of the brand equity to leverage from men's team or in communities like Leon and so forth? But now I can tell you that some of these premier league teams and some of the top division teams, they're not necessarily spinning off the team like what I've done in Lyon. We totally spun off the women's team from men's team. But now some of the teams are spinning up women's teams inside their mothership and they're actually recruiting investors separately. So Chelsea is another example. They actually separated women's team and they have separate investor group. Some of the teams are now following.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's probably a little different. But yes, I'm enjoying it, although I have to say every weekend I have to watch just about, even though seasons are not quite the same and they're not quite aligned, but every weekend when all three teams watch, I don't think I'm going to live up my natural lifespan because every weekend I have to watch three games and just like nail biting.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The medals were awarded not to the racers, but to the owners of the horses. and had them compete and she won two gold medals.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's the globally first multi-club organization that includes only women's soccer team or football teams. There are a lot of examples on the men's side, city football group, Red Bull, Redbird, all that. But this is the first on women's side. And as we've been talking about, I own multiple teams. And I wanted to kind of create that synergy and economies of scale and scope. So it's the first in the world. And it's named after Spartan princess who lived in BC 300 plus years. She was a princess very much into horseback riding and she wanted to compete in the Olympics. And the chariot racing was an Olympic game, but women were not allowed to compete. Instead of complaining, she found out a loophole, which was at that time chariot racing.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, it reduced the cost and improved the care and so forth, but using technology. Every doctor you visit, if you want to get a second opinion, you have to go get your MRIs on x-rays all over again for various reasons because it's different hospital systems, insurance purposes and all that. But if you can have actually interoperable IT system where all this, whether it's a picture or doctor's notes, could be shared in real time or in electronic form, you don't have to take another MRI. So it's a really efficient flow electronic flow of medical records, pictures, prescriptions and all that. So interoperability.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I certainly had offers, but I've been saying this to a lot of people as well, that I did not take any external capital. I literally bootstrapped. I think if I took external capital, if I were them, I would not have let me take the kind of risks that I took. So I knew that. So I didn't want to do that to them.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was hard, but it was easy at that time. President Bush 43 declared that every American who wants to have an electronic medical record will have one by 2014. So he put his stakes in the ground and start investing in all the doctors and hospitals implementing electronic medical records. So the boom was kind of happening. The IT investment. And when you're in the middle of that, you get that bug and you can see like how the dots could be connected.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Healthcare business By then, they kind of gave up on me and they probably had no idea what I was doing. And, you know, at that time, especially in Asia or even in the US at that time, women go into the business world or get an advanced degree. You're either a lawyer or accountant. I was none of those, right? So they kind of gave up.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I joined as a strategy officer, but then I really wanted to go run something. My goal was to learn how to build an organization, how you build leadership. So I asked to give me a P&L organization. So they gave me this health business, which they thought was so bad that I couldn't screw up, right? She asked for it, we're going to give it to her. If she doesn't do a good job, no harm done because it's already very bad anyway. And that's how I ended up.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that time, actually, I had three 10 year plan for my future career. First 10 years, I was going to go into consulting strategy consulting because that's the fastest way to learn every aspect of business. So I thought the strategy consulting was the fastest way. But then second half was going to be if you want to be a leader and CEO of any organization like Fortune 500 company, it's not about whether you can build a most sophisticated Excel spreadsheet and pricing strategy, but rather how do you manage and how do you lead organizations, especially how do you move people sideways to get them to do what you want them to do, people who work for you, people who you work for, and that you can do only in a Fortune 500 environment, which invite you really like it. So I decided to spend the next decade in a Fortune 500 company focusing on organizational kind of leadership. And then the third decade was I was going to”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, at that time, Yale actually was about 10 years old, and their mission and vision was not to create another Harvard Business School, but rather very different and unique educational institution. And that was mixed both public and private management. And the best part to me was it was a very small class, about 170 or so. At that time, if I'm not mistaken, Harvard had about 800 students. And of course, it was drawing upon the incredible faculty members of Yale University. And I just really thought that that was the best program for me.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really not a big problem. I mean, I just really enjoyed it being on my own. My parents were not really rich or famous, but still the environment or the circle that I grew up, I was always so-and-so's daughter, so-and-so's granddaughter so-and-so's sister. I absolutely hated that. I wanted to go where no one knew who I was. So it was like free at last and I just enjoyed every minute of it.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at that time, actually, I was studying economics in Korea, which was also kind of unheard of for girls to study economics. I said, I have to go there. I have to learn economics where the real economics is taught. So that was why I picked US of Chicago.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tuition and living expenses, and after that, I'll figure it out. And when I start making money, I'll pay back every penny. And when I get married, you don't have to spend the dime. I'll figure it out and I pay everything back and some more.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so especially at that time, unmarried young women going to America alone was just unheard of and not acceptable, right? No parents in the right mind would send an unmarried young woman to a foreign country. So I had to negotiate. So at that time, Korea was going through a lot of political turmoil, sort of a democracy movement driven by a lot of college students and college campuses. So the colleges were shut down. So I kind of said, well, you know, I want to go study, but the schools are shut down. I can't study. And if you don't let me go, then I may participate in these demonstrations and my career, my future could be ruined. Who knows? And I kind of use a little bit of a thread, but also a little bit of a negotiation. And I said, give me just for one year's worth of.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father was a professor. My mom was an elementary school teacher, turned politician later. My father was educated in the United States. He got his graduate degree. So he had relatively open-minded about gender issues. Korea clearly at that time was a very traditional society where girls were supposed to do certain things, study certain things, and when you graduate from college, then you get married and you have children and all that. So there's sort of a norm, the social norm that you're supposed to follow. But my father, who had three girls, had little different ideas because he was exposed college in Japan and graduate school in the US that girls can do whatever they want to do in the future. And he instilled that idea in us. And I don't think my sisters really took up that idea, but it just had a lot of impact on me.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I do think there's sort of a multi-step. I want to professionalize women's sports, right? I don't want people to think that somehow women's sports is a charity or a corporate DEI project. This is a legitimate entertainment product, and it is a business that is going to be profitable, breakeven, profitable, and enterprise values and so forth. So I want people to take women's sports seriously. So I'm on a mission to prove that women's sports is a good business, right? And that comes from professionalizing it.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invest in teams, build training centers and stadiums, and you think that actually going to advance the women's football, for example, the cleats, the boots. So they basically take men's shoes, men's boots, and then make it a little narrower and a little shorter and pink it. Well, apparently I'm told I'm not a scientist. The weight distribution when women run is very different than men. The arches, our arches are a little different than the men. So the boots are one of the contributing factors for female injury. So you need to invest in that. We don't get enough media attention, right? Women's sports, there is a media company that specializes that covers only women's sports. So I'm investing in those things because the entire ecosystem has to move together, not just the teams.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Performance is dedicated to men. And the other six percent is not dedicated to women, it includes women, right? So there's just absolute lack of investment. So that has to be done. Now, I am crazy and ambitious, but I can't invest if I have only one team. You talk about profitability and the size of the revenue. You cannot afford that level of investment, which is absolutely necessary. You can't do it if you own just one team. But if you have multi-teams, then you can centralize the resources and do it once and make it available to everyone. If you think about global scouting capabilities, each team doesn't have to build global scouting everywhere. You just go watch one game and you don't need to send five people to watch the same thing. So there are some things that you can build centrally that you can actually put the necessary level of scale investment. You can't just buy teams and”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are reasons why women's football or women's sports have been somewhat behind than men's sports. There are a lot of key elements that would make any sport successful were not present. So for example, if you look at women's teams as team sports, they're training manuals are borrowed from men's training manuals. There's no independent training manuals designed and developed for women. While women's body is not the same as men, there's hormone, nutrition, sleep. They all work differently. And women are seven, eight times more likely to get an ACL injury than men. But we train exactly the same way. We train men. So there has to be investment in understanding female body and especially with the hormone, the period. How do they impact female athlete performance? 94% of all science and medical research on athlete”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Olympic Leodemin is actually the best women's team in the history of women's football in terms of how many trophies the team has won. They are the eight times champions of the European pan-European league, and I can't even count how many times they won the French domestic league, the most successful team.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I bought a team called London City Linuses, and that is the only one of the two teams in the entire potentially Great Britain that are independent. 99% of the teams in Europe are part of the men's team, but this is one of the only two teams that was independ”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It used to be because in the US especially we had a draft system, so the typical path would be you play high school, local academy or clubs, and then you go to college and scholarships hopefully, and then you get drafted from the college system. But now it's booming everywhere, clearly in Europe. It's pretty significant. So there are a lot more player movements. So we now have pretty significant international players, but every team is limited to seven international players.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we play at the stadium called Audi Stadium. The sellout is $19,215. Last two games, which were quarterfinal and semi-final of the playoffs, we sold out. And then exceeded the sellout because we had standing remotely.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. But I mean, to be fair, if you look at a lot of men's teams, if you actually take their media deals, there aren't that many companies that are profitable from just game day operations. So we as an emerging league, our media deal is not as big as some of this more mature league. So we're getting there because we're building teams. We're building attendance. But even game day operations, we're on our way, at least break even in a couple of years.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was a good athlete, but not soccer. I have to say it was by accident coincidence. I really did not even know there was a professional women's soccer league in the United States, let alone there was a professional team in D.C. And it was 2019 when the U.S. Women's National Team won the World Cup. There was sort of a celebration party on the Capitol. And I was invited. And I got to learn about it. And since then, I was sort of convinced that I should join initially as just a minority investor and be a mentor to a lot of young, incredible women. And when I started, I never had an intention that I was going to go run multi-teams around the globe.”
2025-10-16 · The David Rubenstein Show · Michele Kang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source