ME (Imi)

Kevin Lee spent his twenties optimizing his mind—working in education tech, then venture capital—until his body revolted. Repetitive strain injury left him wearing hand braces for two years, convinced his knowledge-work career was over. Simultaneously, his parents developed high blood pressure, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and his grandmother suffered a stroke from diabetes and hypertension. These compounding health crises made Kevin realize that the tech mindset of "optimizing software" had blinded him to a more fundamental problem: most people—especially in Asian immigrant families—didn't know how to eat properly. "My dad was like, have you walked into an Asian grocery? There are literally hundreds of other brands like why would you do this?" His parents had immigrated to escape the food industry; Kevin was about to jump back in.

Kevin met his co-founder K-Chan at a noodle shop in Vancouver while they were both working at mobile gaming company Kabam. K-Chan had recently left Facebook as a lead product manager on the social video team. Both men came from food families—Kevin's grandparents were produce farmers in Taiwan; K-Chan's grandmother sold noodles from a hawker stall in Thailand. They started by asking a simple question: could you make a low-carb, high-protein noodle that actually tasted good?

With zero food science credentials, they applied the tech playbook. They built an unbalanced landing page (design cost: $20), used Celery to collect pre-orders, and leveraged K-Chan's leftover Facebook ad credits to test demand. The results shocked them: 50% of people who gave their credit card information kept their pre-orders even when told "we don't have the product yet." Kevin calls this "clear demand."

Then came 200 iterations in their kitchen. Early food scientists told them flat-out: "This is an idiotic product." Low-carb, high-protein noodles violated conventional wisdom about hydrocolloids and protein ratios. Kevin and K-Chan had no choice but to learn from first principles. They watched YouTube videos of homemade pasta makers, downloaded research papers from Chinese and Japanese food scientists (running them through Google Translate), and replicated formulas. When a food science PhD and chef advisor joined them, they revealed Kevin and K-Chan's fatal inefficiency: they were making one formulation per hour while isolating two variables at a time. The advisor cut ingredients down to four core ones and ran them in parallel—throughput jumped to four-to-five formulations per hour. A second breakthrough came by accident: when they ran out of sunflower protein in Seattle, K-Chan grabbed pumpkin seed protein from a supermarket shelf. It formed perfectly and tasted great. "That's how it felt at the time—like we invented penicillin."

The hard part wasn't the chemistry; it was manufacturing. Food manufacturers have zero incentive to operate in a transparent marketplace. They hold information asymmetry—you can't find them on Craigslist, you can't compare their pricing, and they have zero reason to take a risk on an unknown startup when their production lines are already booked. Kevin and K-Chan spent three months brute-force cold calling every noodle manufacturer in North America and Asia. One VP of sales rejected them twice. Then, six months later, something shifted.

The podcast ends before we learn how they finally landed their manufacturer, but the pattern is clear: Kevin applied tech-world patience (iterating through dozens of rejections) and tech-world mindset ("fake it till you make it") to a centuries-old industry where nobody expects innovation from outsiders.

Naivety was Kevin's secret weapon. Every expert in food manufacturing told him why low-carb ramen was impossible. But he had no ego invested in being right—he was willing to ask dumb questions, learn from first principles, and steal from adjacent fields (Chinese food research, YouTube pasta makers, random supermarket shelves). What didn't work: being too slow in the kitchen, not knowing where to source ingredients, and trying to convince skeptical manufacturers to take a chance on them.

Kevin also learned that the food industry hides behind jargon the way tech does. When he asked a food scientist for help, she said, "That's like asking a backend programmer to do frontend work." Everyone specializes. So Kevin decided not to find a specialist—he'd become one himself by staying curious and refusing to accept "it's impossible" as an answer.

The podcast cuts off mid-conversation, but Kevin has clearly moved from demand validation (landing page, 50% email conversion) into the manufacturing phase. He's now dealing with the messy reality of scaling food production—a world that rewards relationships, persistence, and the willingness to call the same VP of sales three times until they say yes. This is the opposite of software scaling, and Kevin seems to relish that challenge.