From Korean taco truck to crypto coin entrepreneur, Simon Yu is making his mark with StormX. (Source: Bittrex Global podcast)

Simon Yu’s Wild Ride

A recent geekwire.com post tells about the drive and character of Simon Yu in a feel-good news story about a successful outcome.

Yu grew up in Portland but went to school in Seattle at the University of Washington. Lots of people that go to school in that area seem to hit the jackpot. But not after going through so many trials as Yu did. His parents filed for bankruptcy and he had to figure out a way to fund his education. He began making Korean tacos in his room to sell at the library, then became a bank teller, a Lyft driver, and more. But on the side, he was working on far more lucrative ideas.

Kurt Schlosser has written a wonderfully positive piece about Yu and he started it this way:

“More than a year after shutting down his popular Korean-Mexican food truck and catering business Bomba Fusion, Seattle entrepreneur Simon Yu checked in from Mexico, where he’s working remotely, and the subject turned to food.”

“I had tacos here yesterday. I love Mexican food,” Yu said. “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 workers in Seattle, but he’s plenty busy cooking up another success story with his current startup, StormX, a cryptocurrency platform he co-founded in 2015. And he’s still feasting on the lessons of persistence he learned along the way while struggling to make ends meet as a University of Washington student.

Earlier this month, Yu and StormX landed  a sponsorship deal with the Portland Trail Blazers, the NBA team he grew up with.

There is so much more in this 10-year saga on Simon Yu, and shared how he got StormX off the ground.

StormX

After about a year and a half, Yu quit his banking job to focus on Bomba Fusion as the truck picked up, while also pouring money into the survival of CakeCodes, the bitcoin startup Hsieh founded and that Yu joined. Yu said it was tough to get funding in Seattle because “everyone thought bitcoin was money laundering or a drug smuggling kind of operation.”

To keep the startup afloat, Yu drove for Uber and Lyft as he worked to pay down his student loans. But by 2016 they were accepted into the 9Miles Labs startup accelerator, pitching CakeCodes on Demo Day as a gamified way to help businesses acquire new customers.

They landed angel funding toward the beginning of 2017 and as crypto picked up and the product was doing well, Yu said they ended up raising a ton of money toward the end of 2017.

At the same time, Hsieh went on to become manager, web developer, and eventually co-owner of Bomba Fusion. And CakeCodes evolved into StormX.

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

The link below will tell the entire story of Simon Yu’s wild ride to the top.

read more at geekwire.com