How this Seattle entrepreneur went from running a food truck to leading a fast-growing crypto startup

Some of the StormX team members in Mexico, from left: Calvin Hsieh Co-Founder and CTO; Alex Hidalgo, Product Manager; Simon Yu, Co-Founder and CEO; Ollie Brown, UX designer. (StormX photo)

More than a year after the closure of his popular Korean-Mexican food truck and catering company, Bomba Fusion, Seattle entrepreneur Simon Yu checked in, Mexico, where he works remotely, and the topic revolved around food.

“I had tacos here yesterday. I love Mexican food, ”said Yu. “I still think our tacos are really good. The combination of Mexican and Korean food – it just goes so well together. “

Yu may be done making tacos for tech in Seattle, but he’s busy writing another success story with his current startup StormX, a cryptocurrency platform he co-founded in 2015 while he was a student at the University of Washington struggled to make ends meet.

Earlier this month, Yu and StormX signed a coveted sponsorship deal with the Portland Trail Blazers, the NBA team he grew up for. We met to learn more about Yu’s startup journey.

From going bankrupt to dropping out of college and starting a Korean taco truck to part of a $ 200 million company and sponsoring my favorite basketball team.

What a wild ten years it was.

– Simon Yu (@SimonYuSEA) July 1, 2021

The early days

The Bomba Fusion Truck on the T-Mobile campus in Bellevue, Washington, in 2016. (Twitter Photo @BombaFusion)

Yu grew up near Portland in Lake Oswego, Oregon. When he moved to Seattle to visit UW, his parents were still running a small frozen yogurt shop near Portland. But they got into trouble and declared bankruptcy when Yu was in her sophomore year.

“I paid extra-state tuition fees,” said Yu. “And I said to my father, ‘There’s a lot of pressure right now. So I just drop out, just work, and try to save enough money so I can go back to college. ‘”

My mom took pride in the fact that she could feed half of Seattle’s tech population on her recipe.

He ended up working as a bank clerk, but the tight minimum wage wasn’t enough to pay rent, student loans, food, etc. He ate peanut butter and jam sandwiches for months.

“Either find a second job or start your own business,” said Yu. “I wanted to sell these Korean tacos to kids on campus for extra income.”

Following his mother’s Korean barbecue recipe, Yu put together simple tacos in his apartment and sold them for $ 3 to students who worked late at UW Odegaard’s library. Starting with $ 100 borrowed from his father when he was 19, and with no experience in the food industry, let alone starting his own business, Yu eventually made the Bomba Fusion taco truck a reality.

“I learn quickly. I think that’s the only thing I’ve learned from being an entrepreneur for 10 years, ”said Yu. “We were just able to figure out problems, find better spots, and business started to run right.”

Simon Yu presented at 9Mile Labs Demo Day in 2016. (GeekWire File Photo / Taylor Soper)

New partner, new ideas

Yu was still working in banking while running the truck around 2014, and he developed an interest in Bitcoin. It was then that he met Calvin Hsieh, a UW computer science graduate who was also interested in the burgeoning cryptocurrency. Hsieh was looking for a sideline.

“He was working on a bitcoin application, just a simple consumer app that paid users as much as two tenths of a penny to watch a video ad,” said Yu. “He wanted to do the startup full-time after college and needed some money to make a living and applied to be a food truck manager.”

Calvin Hsieh. (LinkedIn photo)

After about a year and a half, Yu quit his banking job to focus on Bomba Fusion when the truck picked up while at the same time investing money in the survival of CakeCodes, the bitcoin startup Hsieh founded and which Yu has joined. Yu said it was difficult to get money in Seattle because “everyone thought Bitcoin was money laundering or some form of drug smuggling.”

The startup was bootstrapping for a few years, and Yu drove for Uber and Lyft while he worked on paying off his student loans. But in 2016 they were accepted into the 9Miles Labs Startup Accelerator and presented CakeCodes on Demo Day as a fun way to help companies acquire new customers.

They landed Angel funding in early 2017, and when crypto hit and the product was doing well, Yu said they raised a ton of money towards the end of 2017.

At the same time, Hsieh became a manager, web developer and eventually co-owner of Bomba Fusion. And CakeCodes evolved into StormX.

StormX success

StormX is primarily a cashback application. So when users shop at Nike or eBay or Adidas or one of the hundreds of stores that StormX offers, they earn cashback in the form of cryptocurrencies known as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or StormX’s own STMX tokens. Users can also do a few micro-tasks – play games or try different apps – to make money as well.

“Overall, at StormX, we’re trying to build a single marketplace where people can just come and find different ways to make money online,” said Yu. “And that’s really coming from Calvin and me, who are always desperate for ways to make money off of all these different jobs and things. We’re trying to create a simple platform where anyone, anywhere in the world, can just come and use our app to get a side or main income or whatever it is. “

StormX has attracted a global audience in more than 150 countries. The app has more than 3 million downloads and has paid out more than $ 4 million in rewards to date. Total funding for the startup is now $ 38.7 million.

Survive a storm

Yu recently called from Mexico because StormX went 100% remotely. The startup used to have a large Seattle office and at its peak employed 53 people, including contractors.

But they came across a crypto bear market in 2018-19 and Yu said they didn’t have a good product market passport.

“Our burn was just too high. We always tried to compete with Amazon and Microsoft [for talent] and you had to pay a lot of money for developers and it just got too unsustainable to survive, ”he said. “We had to massively downsize.”

StormX went to a skeleton crew and downsized to eight employees. But they come back and find bright minds in Asia and Europe whose cost of living is not as high as in Seattle, and the team has grown to 23.

“It worked really well for us,” Yu said of teleworkers. “I think the plan is to continue to do so.”

Trail Blazers offer

The Portland Trail Blazers’ StormX jersey patch. (Courtesy photo by Bruce Ely / Trail Blazers)

StormX landed its logo on an NBA jersey, thanks in part to a tweet in which Yu announced that his company would one day grab the coveted marketing spot. A StormX partner saw it and connected the startup founders to an NBA team.

After speaking to a few teams, the Trail Blazers finally grabbed it and the conversation changed.

“Their attitude was just completely different,” said Yu. “The organization, from the CEO to the sales force, was so enthusiastic.”

The company views partnering with the team as a way to gain more mainstream exposure and show people that cryptocurrency and blockchain are more than speculation and trading.

“There are many good use cases and we are one of them,” said Yu. “Our product is there, we know how to turn the knobs. Now is the time for us to be really aggressive in marketing. The Blazers were our first partnership, so to speak, but we have a few more in the pipeline. We’ll start to cause quite a stir. “

No more taco truck

Bomba Fusion did well when Yu turned the business over to his parents for a source of income. It was mostly about a catering company serving tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft and others like Nordstrom and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In March 2020, COVID-19 arrived and companies did not need food for workers who were out of offices. And around the same time, Yu’s mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and could no longer run the business. Yu told his parents to just retire. His mother returned to Korea for successful brain surgery, and now he sends money to his parents every month.

“We looked after 200 companies or something like that. It was very popular, ”said Yu. “My mom took pride in being able to feed half of Seattle’s tech population on her recipe.”

Startup lessons

Yu said speaking to good consultants when starting a business with little experience in his 20s is of great help. Consultants who ran successful companies coached Yu and Hsieh on problems that seemed insurmountable.

He also credits his parents’ work ethic, who have always guided him on his own path. Whenever he and Hsieh got into financial hardship, they thought they had seen worse and could survive if they could eat.

“We just don’t take things for granted. We just keep going, ”said Yu. “And that’s definitely one thing that really helped us get rid of some other companies. We’ve definitely been through a lot. There were definitely a lot of points in our career where we thought we wouldn’t make it. “