Louis Kim ’98

There are questions that have straightforward solutions—for example, what product or service will solve this problem? Louis Kim ’98 spent decades answering those questions as he launched and scaled AI, services, and hardware businesses for HP.

But there are also questions that don’t have a simple answer: How do I live a life of service? What does it take to be a whole person? Kim has spent years living with those questions, too.

After a decades-long corporate career, Kim is currently pursuing a master of divinity degree. Yet, he notes, “I have a hard time answering the question, ‘Are you religious?’” He reads meditative and religious texts daily but is “deeply suspicious of pedestalized faith.” Engaging fundamental questions repeatedly, reflecting on how others have grappled with them and offering his own provisional answers, “there’s a natural process of discernment,” Kim says.

Kim studied mechanical engineering at Brown. He attended Yale SOM because he was “idealistic about business being a force for good at scale.” Both degrees offered practical tools for solving tough but concrete problems. His corporate work drew on those skills and operated in the knowable realm.

At the same time, Kim also felt an affinity for aspects of life that are more easily gestured toward than explained—matters of faith, not fact. When he travels, he uses the MassTimes app to find an early-morning Catholic mass. “At each church,” he says, “I take a picture of the sixth station of the cross.” Displayed in most Catholic churches, the 14 images that make up the stations of the cross depict Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion. In the sixth image, a woman emerges from the onlookers to wipe Jesus’ face with a cloth. “I like that someone stepped forward from the crowd to tend to Jesus,” Kim says.

Kim has found that unusual opportunities arise from persisting in two seemingly incompatible modes of living—managing P&L statements and attending to the existential and unknowable. He was invited to participate in a series of conferences associated with the Vatican as the church sought to understand the implications of AI. “Most of the attendees were theologians and academics. I was there to offer an industry perspective,” Kim says. “It’s a long way from Silicon Valley to Rome. In Silicon Valley, the focus is on solving specific challenges. You have people who have to make practical decisions; they really feel the momentum of capital return, while the Catholic Church has perennially been vocal on issues of human relationality and dignity.”

Rather than setting out toward a fixed destination, Kim has long operated with the faith that curiosity and engagement will get him where he needs to be. Growing up in a Korean-American family in the suburbs of San Antonio, “I felt like I was on the edge of the world,” he says. “There weren’t a lot of people who looked like me.”

During high school, Kim attended a summer program at Harvard. “It was like an explosion,” he says—the sudden exposure to a wider world and different ways of being. “It was kind of dramatic. I told myself, never again am I going to think that my current reality is reality.”

At the same time, the all-male Catholic high school he attended had a deep impact, too. Beyond academics, community work was expected. “There were no janitors,” Kim recalls. “We cleaned our own school. The priests were teachers, coaches, and counselors. They led through a quiet kind of example. They wanted to develop the whole person.”

That example forged a tight community. Most of the 23 members of his graduating class are still in touch. “We text each other every week on a group thread.” Kim adds, “As I get older, I can see the experience had an indelible influence. It marked my leadership.”

After graduating from Brown, Kim returned to San Antonio, where he co-founded and directed a nonprofit focused on STEM education for several years. Curious about what else might be done with education and technology, he began exploring business school.

“I still remember the big white brochure from Yale SOM saying, ‘Educating leaders for business and society,’” Kim says. “I liked that it was a small, young school under the auspices of Yale. When I visited, I knew right away, ‘This is my tribe.’”

The foundational business skills acquired at Yale SOM and his experiences on the rest of the campus both shaped his thinking. A class on the history of education and a computer science class taught by the statistician and data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte especially stuck with him, he says. And because of his background in technology and education, two Yale physics professors recruited Kim to help develop and eventually serve as a teaching assistant in an IT for managers class at SOM.

“I came to Yale SOM mindful that it represented a unique opportunity in a really ambiguous world,” he notes. “The people I got to know at the school were infused with a sense of service.”

After graduating, Kim again returned to Texas, taking a role with the computer company Compaq’s education technology team. He stayed on when the company was acquired by HP. “I remember being told, as your career develops, you really want to pursue broad competence, not just an impressive title,” Kim says. Following that advice, he actively sought opportunities to learn. “Over my 27 years with the company, I worked in 12 different divisions and eight product categories. Every few years, I would either look for or accept a radically different role,” he says. “I went from strategy and planning to product to R&D to sales.”

That approach eventually led Kim to general management roles as a vice president at the company. “I’d experienced every function at the ground level. I’d worked in different industries—consumer, industrial, healthcare, and retail,” Kim says. “While I couldn’t leverage years of experience in one role, I had pattern recognition. I was able to lead a business with end-to-end responsibilities for all functions and a billion-dollar P&L.”

The broad skill set proved especially valuable when Kim stepped up to lead internal startups within HP. “Taking something from zero to one in a big company is very difficult. But it’s something I was recruited to do multiple times,” Kim says. Working with a handful of people, he’d turn a concept into a scaled business with a marketable product.

In his longest and most turbulent internal startup role, Kim worked with the inventor of Sprout, a “mixed-reality” desktop computer that integrated a 3D scanner, projector, and a tabletop touchpad. Sprout aimed to seamlessly blend the physical and digital; users could scan objects, redesign them, then output the changes to a 3D printer. A review in Inc. magazine described it as a “designer’s dream” and “something out of Star Trek.”

To turn Sprout’s prototype into a product, Kim assembled a team of 60 people. Then HP’s board canceled the project. It was a chaotic time at the company, marked by layoffs and repeated leadership changes. Kim wasn’t willing to let Sprout die. “Nothing ever gets uncanceled. But miraculously we were given permission to pitch it to other groups in the company. I pitched it to 160 people across four divisions and three different cities. We even pitched it to Intel. It was a Sisyphean effort.”

But persistence and luck accomplished the impossible. “Intel pledged some money to bring it back. Then an executive who liked Sprout got elevated and agreed to sponsor it. We relaunched in New York City in the fall of 2014.”

Kim worked on Sprout for nine years. “That process was a psychological crucible,” he says. Championing and resuscitating a quirky, innovative technology “made an impact on HP’s culture.”

The diligent effort that led Kim to build competence in many different roles, the persistence that got Sprout a new home, the rigorous analysis used to evaluate potential AI venture investments—these qualities served him outside work as well.

“If you’re working hard and you’re talented enough to get into schools like Yale, the world will present you with a mixture of opportunity and praise that could keep you forever doing things that you may, in the long term, not want to do,” Kim says. “The awareness and knowledge that comes with real self-assessment is so important.”

Because of his persistent curiosity about profound questions, Kim made time for conversations with people outside his network. If he enjoyed an article, he contacted the author. He asked his friends to suggest people with interesting perspectives on the intersection of faith and work. “A half hour every other week talking to someone insightful—you owe it to yourself,” Kim says. “It’s a vocational 401(k) that’s continually compounding.”

Many conversations were one-offs. But some turned into new paths forward. One led to an assignment to write an essay for Comment, a public theology magazine, where he eventually became a contributing editor. While in New Haven for his Yale SOM reunion, Kim talked with the principals at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture (housed within Yale Divinity School) and subsequently joined the center’s board. “Having made an effort to insert myself into different communities, I found people I just gel with—a whole family outside my work ecosystem.”

The pragmatic and the ineffable continued to walk side by side. Kim’s work responsibilities expanded, he and his wife raised two children, and painful pieces of life intruded again and again. “My parents died when I was relatively young,” Kim says. “Then, in the last five years, I witnessed hospice experiences. I was with my aunt when she took her last breath. Being with her, I knew I was in the right place in the universe.”

Those experiences made him want to understand more about the end-of-life field. Following his curiosity, he volunteered for hospice and enrolled in a theology and medicine graduate program at Duke Divinity School, which then extended to starting a master of divinity at Duke. “Talking with doctors about end-of-life care, not quarterly earnings, I just felt a different home. Moving on was inevitable.” Kim left HP in 2025.

“I’m responding to a calling,” he says. “I don’t mean God told me that I should do this. That’s not my experience. It was more a matter of thinking, over time, about who I am.” After completing his degree, he is planning to work in hospice, possibly as a chaplain. “I met chaplains whose work is to be with someone on their worst day. The end of life is a kind of hidden domain of justice that will affect us all. Once I saw how people are warehoused, shoved aside, treated without dignity, I couldn’t unsee it. In the end, what matters is what we do for each other, especially in suffering.”

Kim continues to speak on AI and which roles will be enduringly human, particularly in end-of-life contexts. “My focus now is to be of service in ways that draw on everything in my past experience,” he says. “Some of that will be hospice. But understanding the dynamics and politics of large corporations, how to move forward under pressure, recognizing the perspectives of multiple stakeholders—what I do going forward may also involve addressing these social justice issues at the level of policy and systemic change.”

He doesn’t see that new focus as a radical change from the last three decades of his career.

“People might look at what I’ve done and say it seems like a lot of bouncing around, but I will say what has remained very consistent is my focus on curiosity, meaning, purpose, and impact.”