Young Song

Co-Founder & CEO NComputing

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Young Song co-founded NComputing in 2003 and runs it as chief executive. The company sells thin and zero clients — small endpoint devices that let many users share a single operating system instance rather than each needing a full PC — which is an unglamorous product with a large market wherever cost per seat matters more than per-seat performance: schools, clinics, government offices, developing-market deployments. By IDC’s 2014 count it was the number one thin-client vendor in Asia-Pacific and number three worldwide, with over 70,000 customers and around 20 million daily users across more than 140 countries. Song’s career sits in the same tradition: he was part of the founding of eMachines in 1998, the company that pushed sub-$500 PCs into American retail. The defining episode of his career came in 2015, when he bought NComputing’s assets back from the creditor and investor who had steered it into a strategy he had argued against, and restarted it with half the staff.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and chief executive of NComputing since 2003, alongside co-founders Richard Sah, now CTO, and Owen Lee, now VP of supply chain and operations.
• Built the company to number one thin-client vendor in Asia-Pacific and number three worldwide by IDC’s 2014 count: 70,000-plus customers, around 20 million daily users in over 140 countries, more than five million units sold.
• Bought all of NComputing’s assets out from its creditor and investor in 2015, returned as chief executive, and rebuilt it to roughly $25 million of revenue with healthy earnings and about 110 staff by mid-2016.
• Co-founded eMachines in 1998, which reached a billion dollars of revenue within eighteen months and was later acquired by Gateway.
• Founded Booga Ventures in 2009 for seed investment and advisory work with early-stage computing companies in Asia and the US, and ZeroDesktop, Inc. in 2011 for cloud, mobile and big-data work.
• Founded DoubleSight Displays, a dual-display business, earlier in his career.
• Co-founded Primer, described as Korea’s leading startup accelerator, and is a venture partner at Big Basin Capital.

Professional Journey

Song read electronics engineering at Yonsei University in Seoul before moving into the American PC industry. In 1998 he was part of the founding of eMachines, the company that took low-cost desktops into US retail at price points the incumbents would not touch; it reached a billion dollars of revenue within eighteen months and was eventually acquired by Gateway. The lesson of that business — that an enormous market exists below the price floor the industry believes in — is the one he has applied ever since.

NComputing was founded in 2003. Song assembled an unusually distributed team from the start: hardware developed in Korea, software written in Poland and Russia, and the company headquartered in Silicon Valley once the product was working and revenue had reached $10 million in two years. The product proposition was the same shape as eMachines’ but applied to the desktop as a whole: rather than making a cheaper PC, eliminate most of the PCs entirely by letting a dozen users share one machine through cheap endpoint devices. Stephen Dukker, eMachines’ former chairman, joined in August 2006 to co-lead. Venture funding followed — $8 million from Scale Venture Partners in October 2006, a $28 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures in January 2008, and $21.8 million from Questmark Partners in April 2012.

That capital came with a strategy Song did not agree with. Investors pushed the company up-market into enterprise thin clients, where it faced Dell, HP, Lenovo and IGEL directly, and into a tablet venture. Neither worked. The company retreated from both, lost money for six years, and cut back hard from 200 employees through two rounds of layoffs.

In 2015 Song did something founders rarely get the chance to do: he bought all of the company’s assets from the creditor and the investor, taking ownership outright, and restarted it with roughly half the previous staff. By July 2016 NComputing was profitable on about $25 million of revenue with over 110 employees, carried by the L300 series — a device launched back in 2009 that ran at around 70% gross margin — and by the education and emerging-market customers the enterprise push had distracted it from. The company has since extended into Raspberry Pi-based clients and continues to ship vSpace server software alongside its hardware.

Alongside NComputing he has stayed active as an investor and company-builder in both Korea and the United States: Booga Ventures from 2009 for seed investment and advisory work, ZeroDesktop from 2011, co-founding the Korean accelerator Primer, and a venture partner role at Big Basin Capital. He lives in Palo Alto and volunteers with Bay Area nonprofits.

Education

Yonsei University

Bachelor of Science, Electronics Engineering