Wonjae Kim

Questioner
DISC Type : c

Lead Research Scientist at TwelveLabs

Seongnam, Gyeonggi, South Korea

Overview

Wonjae Kim is a Lead Research Scientist at TwelveLabs, specializing in multimodal foundation models for video understanding. A graduate of Seoul National University, his career includes impactful research roles at Naver AI Lab and Kakao. He authored ViLT, a foundational work in efficient vision-language architectures.

He is deeply engaged with the scientific community and finds being an outstanding reviewer for prestigious conferences as fulfilling as having his own work accepted. He also contemplates how AI agents will fundamentally change human writing styles, advocating for more verbose content to be created for machine readers.

An interesting fact is that he takes great pride in serving the academic community, enjoying the process of reading high-quality papers as a reviewer.

Personality Overview

Price-Sensitive

Not Easily Convinced

Value Seeker

They generally do not appreciate an overfriendly approach and prefer to stay to-the-point.  While they don't hesitate to ask questions, they are generally risk-averse and tend to be late adopters. It is quite likely of them to ask for pricing or other concessions.

Topics They Care About

Vision-Language Models
He is a key researcher in this field, authoring influential papers on probabilistic pre-training and shaping efficient vision-language architectures with his work on ViLT.
Multimodal AI
His current work at TwelveLabs involves building foundation models that understand video, audio, and text to perform true semantic understanding of video structure.
AI and Communication
He has publicly shared his thoughts on how agent-native workflows should change writing, suggesting humans write verbosely for AI readers who can then summarize for humans.

Media Appearances

Why I Joined TwelveLabs. Featured in Twelve Labs Blog

See Now

Work History

2-2025
Lead Research Scientist at TwelveLabs
1-2023 - 2-2025
Research Scientist at 네이버클라우드(NAVER Cloud)
4-2021 - 12-2022
Research Scientist at NAVER Corp
3-2021 - 4-2021
Research Scientist at 카카오엔터프라이즈 (Kakao Enterprise)
2-2018 - 3-2021
Research Scientist at Kakao Corp

Education

2016 - 2018
Master of Science - MS from Seoul National University
2012 - 2016
Bachelor's degree from Seoul National University

More Information

Social Presence :

Prographics :

Exp : 8 Location : Seongnam, Gyeonggi, South Korea Job Level : Middle Designation : Lead Research Scientist at TwelveLabs
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Insights For Selling To Wonjae

During A Call Or A Meeting

DO's

  • Tell them that you will come back if you don’t have a good answer for a question
  • Share as much information as possible regarding your product
  • Emphasize on objective proof of ROI, help them do a thorough evaluation

DONT's

  • Don’t try to be too friendly or informal with them
  • Avoid phrases like ‘do not worry about’, ‘no one compares to’ etc.
  • Don’t depend too much on anecdotal evidence, it reduces their confidence

When Cold Calling

When Writing An Email

While Negotiating & Closing

    The secret to closing fast with Wonjae is

  • Ensuring that the product delivers ROI, cost-effective pricing and process compliance are very important for them.
  • Will you ever get a clear answer from Wonjae

  • It doesn’t come naturally to them but they can say no if they are not convinced.

Insights For Deal Planning

    How fast (or slow) will Wonjae move?

  • If they have the information that they need, they can move fast at making their decisions.
  • Can Wonjae take some risk or not?

  • They can take some risk if they are confident that they have analyzed the circumstances well.


You And Wonjae

Personality Compatibility


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