Simon Yu

Intro: (00:00:00) Hey, guys, welcome to Asian Hustle Network Podcast! My name is Bryan. And my name is Maggie and we interview Asian entrepreneurs around the world to amplify their voices and empower Asians to pursue their dreams and goals. We believe that each person has a message and a unique story from their entrepreneurial journey that they can share with all of us.

Maggie: (00:00:23) Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Asian Hustle Network podcast. Today, we have a very special guest with us. His name is Simon. Simon is the CEO and co-founder of StormX. StormX allows users to earn cashback and crypto when they shot some stores like eBay, Nike, and 1000 plus stores. At the age of 19, Simon was forced to drop out of college, when his parents declared bankruptcy and sold Korean tacos to students around his college campus to start his first business. StormX has raised 45, a million-plus dollars to users across 187 plus countries. And it’s also the first blockchain company to be a Jersey patch in the NBA with a partnership with the Portland Trail Blazers. Simon has also been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, NASDAQ, and has spoken at numerous conferences. Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon: (00:01:16)  Hey, thanks for having me, Maggie.

Bryan: (00:01:18)   Thank you so much for being on the podcast. We’ve been following along your journey and we read your Forbes article, your Deep Wire article and your story is an inspiration. We really want to deep dive into that and ask, how your childhood was like? How did your parents raise you? Where did you grow up? And how did you learn your entrepreneurship nature?

Simon: (00:01:41)  I was born in Korea, but I moved to the States when I was five. And then we moved to Portland for the first better half of my life. My parents always ran a small business, a typical immigrant kind of family. They had a Korean restaurant at one point. And lastly, they had a frozen yogurt shop. Which didn’t do too well, and sort of forced me down to this entrepreneurial path. It’s been interesting because I’ve seen my parents always working really hard. But then it also made me question oftentimes, because I would see them working like 12, 16 hour days, every day non-stop for 365 days maybe except Christmas and New Year’s, and we still don’t have a lot of money. How are all these guys who live across our street able to go to Disneyland and just go to Florida for a vacation? My parents are working every day, I thought there has to be more or there’s something that we’re missing. I just started asking a lot of questions. When my parents declared bankruptcy, I didn’t have any money. So I had a minimum wage job and I had to try to earn more money to try to survive and start my business, which failed but I just kept doing better, and improved as I gain more experience. 

Bryan: (00:03:06)  That’s strong of you to take it upon yourself to make the best of a bad situation. And, honestly, I follow your story a lot, because it’s very similar to mine. My parents also went bankrupt when I was 19 and that’s the first time I’ve ever seen my mom and dad really depressed and then cry because this is their lifelong business, seeing them fail that hard and start over again, I thought, holy moly, where is my life going, where’s my parents’ life going. I would be homeless, and stuff like that. That’s why I really appreciate the hustle and I want to dive deep into when you dropped out, what was your mindset like at that point? And I know money, money, money was always on probably both of our minds, but how did you materialize all that emotion into action and really made the right next logical step?

Simon: (00:03:54)   Yeah. And it’s sort of what you said about your parents as well.  I think when you fail in your twenties or thirties, it’s fine, cause you can get back up on your feet. But my parents they’re in their late fifties and just how many more opportunities do you have? So they’re really sad and it was a hard time for them. And I, at that time I was going to the University of Washington, the tuition bill is pretty high. So I just told my dad,  Hey I know there’s a lot of pressure, so I’m just going to drop out. I’m going to try and save money and try to work my way, so I can go back to college.  I made that bold statement and then I got a bank teller job that barely paid above minimum wage. I realized: I can’t pay for rent, I can’t pay for food, I can’t pay for my college loans which just started activating cause I stopped going to school and it was $600 a month. Holy crap, I can’t do this. So I had to either find a second job or I had to try to start my own business. I say, Hey, dad, in Seattle, it rains a lot. People study pretty late here and it’s kind of sketchy. So I think there’s a need for people to have some sort of delivery service for people in libraries, frats, and all that stuff. Can you let me borrow a hundred dollars? And it was kind of a big ask right now because things are tough and given that he just failed his business as well. Being a very traditional Asian parent, I was trying to get an accounting degree. He said, no, just go to school and focus on it. Don’t start a business like this, get a safe job and do that. He was really against it. And I eventually convinced him to let me borrow that hundred dollars. I had no marketing budget cause that’s all I had. I drew this sort of shitty-looking penguin and then did a little bit of Photoshop. I put it on Facebook and I just made a Facebook page. Then, I just posted every day from 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM saying that this Korean taco is available for delivery. It’s $3 per taco, and you can order any time you want. I ran out of money cause no one ordered it and I just kept making ingredients. So I got to the point where I can’t even eat food. I had to eat peanut butter, jelly sandwiches, almost every meal. And during like lunchtime, our coworkers would go out to eat at a restaurant or something like that. I’d make an excuse and say, I can’t, I have to do homework or something like that cause I was taking online classes, it was tough. Eventually like several months later, there where two people that had I never talked to before, they both ordered on the same day, one guy ordered two tacos. So I got $6 total and another guy ordered one taco and I got $3, but one of the guys texted back and he was like dude, this is the best taco I’ve ever had in my life. Wow, this is really awesome. I said, can you post that on Facebook? This is like around 2011. So Facebook had no algorithms, once you posted something, every single one of your friends could see it. There was no filtering, there was no advertising or anything like that between Facebook. He posted that on Facebook, and all of a sudden, all of his friends said, what the hell is a Korean taco? This seems pretty awesome. And then I started getting a ton of likes. I started seeing that happening. So I texted the other guy immediately. Hey, can you post if this experience was good and he does the same thing, and all of his friends started liking it as well. The business started really picking up. The first day I had like $9 of revenue, and then the second day it was around $27. Then the week after, it was like 80 or a hundred dollars. And then it just kept growing. And I was thinking like all the driving, all the cleaning, all the like cooking everything by myself. To a point where I contemplated, okay, I could drop out of school. This is a real business. Or try to go to school and graduate with a degree. I thought going back to school and finishing up my degree in finance would be more helpful. So I decided to put that business on pause. I went to Amazon for an internship, got to work at some banks. And then when I graduated, got a couple of my Amazon buddies and my former manager at Amazon to also invest in a taco truck. So we bought a truck and then while I got a job in banking as an underwriter, I was also running the truck on the side as well when I graduated.

Bryan: (00:08:31)   Oh. Wow, that’s an amazing muscle, just making something happen out of nothing. And your mom was proud of it because you ended up using her creamy recipe of all your tacos. She’s smiling right now for sure.

Simon: (00:08:45)    Yeah. In the beginning, they’re against it. But then they think about the hundred dollars, my dad got $500 back. And that’s when he realized that’s a pretty good return, there’s something there.

Bryan: (00:08:56)   How did you come up with the name “Bomba Fusion” for the taco truck?

Simon: (00:09:07)    Bomba means bomb in Spanish, the fusion part is like Korean and Mexican. So decided Bomba Fusion is a pretty good name. And also when coming up with names, always ask, is if the domain name available? Cause you always want the.com. And that was one of the ones that stuck and also the trademark and everything. For me, a business’s name isn’t as important as the core structure. Cause you can name it like Amazon or Zillow or whatever. And there’s no word about it, like Google, there’s no word before. The most important part is that you own the.com domain. 

Maggie: (00:09:48)  That’s such a crazy story and yeah. I love the hustle and the fact that you leverage, Facebook’s algorithm or as a matter of fact, not the algorithm because I remember when Facebook just did like the most recent posts on top and everyone saw it. And then you use that strategy to push the taco delivery to virality and turned your a hundred dollars or whatever to $10,000 I read, right? And then you learned how to trade stock options and turn that $10,000 into $30,000 to launch your Korean food truck. And you were doing that while you were being an underwriter. Can you talk about how you were managing your time about that time?  Was it difficult? How were you feeling at that time?

Simon: (00:10:31)     Yeah, difficult in the sense that my day job was pretty boring.  just the XL monkey it just was finance jobs uses it. It doesn’t take many brain cells. So just get the job done. You work 40 hours or 60 hours a week. And then after that, most people will go out and drink beer with their friends, or do some extracurricular activity. I was so heavily in debt.  I have like 40 K coming from student loans and then that turned into 60 K with interest. So the monthly payments were pretty high and I just had to get that paid off as soon as possible. And so I just kept working as hard as I could spend daytime I eventually convinced my parents to manage the truck day to day operation. I imagine everything from behind the scenes. In the beginning, I had no idea what I was doing. This is all like trial and error, trying to figure out how do we make operations better, smoother. And the first two years, the strategy that I thought was trying to focus on the lunchtime crowd. Let’s make the pricing as low as possible. And then that’ll attract people to come. And they’re like good value, good food. And it’ll start getting viral and get people to start coming. But clearly, that’s the wrong approach because our cash flow is really low. We always also had a lot of issues with the truck because the truck caught on fire twice. We didn’t have that much capital, to begin with. So we brought a shitty truck. The truck caught on fire and maxed out all my credit cards. And there are so many times where you just kind of it trying to figure out how to solve problems and that’s a unique thing. When an employee calls me while I’m at work and then they’re, “Hey, the truck caught on fire. I’m like, okay. I use data to my advantage. And I do a pretty good job in terms of data analytics. Originally so there’s two things. One pricing for the 2 menu options. So with our first launch, we had a very traditional Mexican style like tacos and burritos, with cheese, cilantro, and all that stuff like lettuce. We also had a bibimbap style. W had two different things and it took more time to prep all the different vegetables required, all the different rice, and all that stuff. And oftentimes the orders would take a long time because there were so many ingredients that the line cooks would have to go all the way here and go all the way here to prepare and this is a very tight space. So the turnaround time, especially for lunches, how many orders can you get out? It’s like a very long time. And then when we looked at the data, more than 80% of our sales were bibimbap, which is the Korean rice dish. So, okay. The data is telling us, we should just get rid of the other. And then we got rid of that. All of a sudden, our prep time, even for the kitchen, was much faster. And then in that, within the truck too we were able to pump out orders from like five minutes to less than a minute for each order. And then it just became like much, much faster. And then from a pricing perspective as well, too, because we had honored price ourselves so much like we didn’t have much profit leftover to cover machinery and all that stuff too. And it was breaking down, but also. There’s a psychological thing where people thought if it was too cheap and that the ingredients must be bad. Even though we were sourcing high ingredients like food quality, it was like our number one focus. And then we were capped out at a certain amount of orders. I think it was 60 to 80 or something. But then when we increased the price about 30%. We started getting more orders was like a hundred to 140. And then we also have more profit margin because people thought okay, wow, this is good. The quality is really good. And so there’s weird psychology around food. People think expensive is better, even though we were using the same ingredients. And so that helped too. Then eventually, I started reading a lot about Bitcoin and blockchain because I was in banking and I thought this is going to disrupt banks. That’s my thought because transaction fees are so low to send money halfway across anywhere you want to in the world. And then it just started getting into the crypto world and started that journey and quit my banking job. I ended up driving for Uber and Lyft to try and pay off my student loans faster. There’s a story behind that too.

Bryan: (00:15:13)   That’s incredible! Shout out to you, shout out to your team as well. I also saw an article that your current CEO was your former food truck manager. Is that true?

Simon: (00:15:26)   Yeah. So we both went to the same school. He was a computer science major.  never met him in school because usually IT, Business and CS majors in our school had no chance of meeting because it’s so far away. But then he was building a very simple Bitcoin app where you can earn like two-tenths of a penny for watching a short video. And he was interested in Bitcoin. It was like 2014, there were very few of us who geek out about it.  But he was building and he just needed some income to support his rent and stuff. So he applied to be my manager in the food truck and then that’s when we first met and then I eventually joined and then we started making it an official company and started scaling and had really hard times trying to fundraise because back in the early days of crypto, every investor thought it was some sort of like money laundering or drug smuggling kind of thing, because of Mt. Gox and that was the only thing that was on the news. And it’s so sad to put the money I earned from the food truck and when I drove for Lyft and Uber,  and put that all into this startup, trying to bootstrap and survive. I had one point, I think I had like four chops or something. It’s pretty crazy.   

Bryan: (00:16:45)   That is insane to manage that much, but what’s common among your story is your level of ambition. You want to do a lot of things. You want to create a lot of things in the office, a lot of values to the world and that’s a huge commonality that we see. A lot of people on our podcast have that hunger and desire to learn more. So the first two years, you guys are bootstrapping, you guys manage to like hit 500 chains, for two years, which is pretty insane. But the one that I wanted to learn more about was when the market hit sort of bearish back in 2018, 2019. How were you guys able to know whether that’s the warning and continue convincing people that this is the product feature, because when everything’s great. And when those would be  Hey, Simon and great job, how’d you do it? You’re a genius, those bad. That’s when your true expertise and nature come up. Right. How were you able to weather that StormX back to during the down period?

Simon: (00:17:45)   If you want to start a company, you have to sort of deal with all this. When I first started the food or just the delivery part back in college too, the hardest part was  I’m Korean American and went to church. And then like a lot of the church kids are talking behind the back. I heard this one kid call me names and the Korean translation means peasant. He didn’t think I would hear, but I heard it. And that just completely turned me off from the church. There is a lot of gossiping going around, especially in the Asian culture, so you have to withstand that. Now it doesn’t phase me. When I’m in my early college days, I could barely eat. My mental situation is pretty weak, but then I was able to thrive from the challenges and make that into strength when 2018, 19 happened for crypto. I started shitting on crypto again because prices went down, a lot of the companies were folding. It’s a lot of regulation on certainties and stuff too. And for us, we had raised a lot of money towards the end of 2017. We didn’t have a good product-market fit, but then we hired a ton of people from Seattle and it’s a very expensive burn rate. So we got to the point where we had to lay off, like most like 80% of our staff. And we had a skeleton crew left and we had other problems as well, too on top of that. And you know I think most people would’ve given up at that point, cause you’d be running out of money fast. The product doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere. Like pretty much like everyone talking shit about you again. Got my head down and just kept focusing. And another part, I think that helped us survive too, is Kevin and I have good chemistry, I think a lot of founders typically fight and have breakup issues and that makes it hard to run a company, but even through thick and thin he’s like, I believe in you. I think we’ll get through this and then we’ll be able to survive. We just kept grinding. Honestly, just eventually we got to a point where we started doing ain, and then all the investors wanted to invest and we recently raised like $50 million. But outside of that, we didn’t have to invest because our company was also doing very well. It’s a cycle. When you are doing well they will be like, you guys are awesome and then they’ll ignore you. And when shit goes bad and they will be on your back. And then when things are good, they’ll start reaching out to you again. But you just have to ignore all the noise.

Bryan: (00:20:29)   No worries. I mean, we’ll always be your best friend. Also, congratulations on being able to sponsor the Portland trailblazers as well. That’s our hometown team. What was that feeling when you’re like, oh my God, I was able to sponsor this team that I grew up watching and that’s crazy. I love it.

Maggie: (00:20:50)    I think it’s their first time sporting crypto at a patch. Right. And then it’s the first partnership with a support organization. So it’s a really special partnership. It’s a really big deal.

Simon: (00:21:04)   Thank you. Yeah, I still, I mean, the season hasn’t started yet, so it still doesn’t feel like it’s happening. The summer league just started. It’s pretty awesome to be able to see my favorite players hanging our logo and stuff like that. It’s just like sometimes I have to take a step back and I remind myself, okay, I came from like a hundred dollars to like where we’re at right now, you know? But it’s hard to sort of grasp it cause I’m always just working and just trying to think of what can we do next to continue making it bigger and to continually grow. 

Bryan: (00:21:51)      Taking a giant step back. I think we accidentally skipped this part already, but for our listeners, what is StormX?

Simon: (00:22:03)    StormX is the easiest way you can earn crypto by just the cashback you can shop from stores like Nike, eBay, or the Banana Republic. We have about a thousand schools we’re building overall. The company is trying to create a marketplace where people can just come and find different ways to earn money online. And that’s our goal. So we started with, we started with microtasks. You can answer survey questions, try different games, services, and stuff like that, and earn some money through crypto and then recently launched the shopping cashback platform. And then a few years down the line, we’re trying to create a sort of like a task rabbit, a Fiverr, Upwork kind of service on top of it. The reason we’re using blockchain is we had scaled a lot of users in the first few years, for example, to send a hundred dollars to someone in China or India, it will cost you to like almost the transaction fee itself because there are foreign wire transfers, foreign transaction spreads, and it’s just so expensive to send money abroad, but we develop the patent to technology that allows you to send it for like a couple of cents. So like our user base is the entire world. So it just allows us to scale a lot faster. It’s really exciting and what we’re trying to build and why we’re trying to build this product is because it does come from always trying to hustle, trying to find ways to earn money online, but there’s no easy platform right now where you can just come and find ways to do so, we’re trying to, but all of the different ways into like one marketplace where you can just come and find the different jobs and stuff. So that’s our ultimate goal.

Bryan: (00:23:50)    I like that a lot, it falls into why I feel the belief in its fully decentralized system in the world. And I fully believe that blockchain is taking on that task well because we’re moving away from institutional companies and people controlling everything to the everyday person. Appreciate it.

Simon: (00:24:11)    Yeah. One of the cool things we’re doing too is governance. So we have a lot of very passionate users. If you look at our Twitter feeds and stuff is sort of like cult-like behaviors. We’re letting our users make certain product decisions, which is something that we’re focusing on doing more of. Yeah, it looks like who knows the product better than the users, not all of that decision making, but it’s just certain things that’s like having that decentralized aspect, like more traditional companies haven’t done. So you don’t see Amazon or Twitter or Facebook asking for “Hey, what should we build next kind of thing.” But I think that’s one of the best aspects of blockchain. The people can get to make the choice.

Maggie: (00:24:55)    That’s amazing. I read online that the platform will also support skilled work like coding, writing, blog posts, adding video, QA testing, translating content, and then the users will get paid instantly via the app by these plans currently in action?.

Simon: (00:25:14)    This is probably still a few years down the line in terms of usability. Blockchain, crypto products are still pretty difficult. I still think we’re too early. It’s like trying to explain like email back in like 1991. No one’s going to use this kind of thing. We’re still in that phase. And onboarding and offboarding for Fiat to crypto is still pretty tough. Even today, I mean, we still only had about 3 million people that downloaded our product. Once we reach tens of millions to hundreds of millions, and then we have enough of our users, they can create their tasks, and then there’ll be enough of a marketplace where people can find each other through that sort of like a dating service. But our  archeplaces are the toughest to build because you need two sides of the market, but if you don’t have one side and the other side, it’s going to be tough. So that’s why we’re waiting just a few years because the user experience for a Fiat on Rambo, Fram is still pretty bad, but there’s a lot of really great companies that are working on stuff. We expect in a few years that’ll be a lot better and then we can roll that out. And then you got people, like do Upwork, except, like not get charged 60% of the fees and have to pay that they get to keep most of it.

Bryan: (00:26:44)    That’s awesome. I mean, I love your sense of awareness too, and that’s a huge part at once from their ships, understanding your market and your needs well to determine which product goes on first because if you release a feature too early for its time that won’t do well. Although the adoption rate, from blockchain is very rapid compared to any other started technology before you guy. Anyway, in a couple of years is definitely be something that we’re just like, oh yeah, this is everyday terminology.  Especially watching the NFT stuff right now. So out of curiosity, I know you do a lot of things and you hustle a lot, but the one thing that we like to focus on our podcast too, is how do you take care of your mental health? What do you do? The attached the stress and sorta clear yourself to make better business decisions because I’m sure as you mentioned before, you’re like, oh, my God, my taco truck burned down. I’m pretty sure things are even worse now because you raised over $40 million, right. A lot more fires are heading your way. So how do you manage like separate work from personal life to taking care of your mental health?   

Simon: (00:28:10) Mental health is something that’s not talked about as much and it really should. It’s a great thing that you brought this up because back in 2018, 19, all hell was going it was tough. Luckily for us, we had really good advisors that are successful founders of companies. And we were able to talk to those guys cause even internally within our teams, we had executives who are a lot older and said we should give up kind of thing. And everyone is telling you to give up, but the guys who are company founders said this is normal. It happens to everyone. If you survive this then you know you’re going to make it. And I also just have a lot of friends at this point that run their own companies and so we talk about all the bad stuff and all the good stuff that happened and like just need a place to vent. I think that’s helpful, I think like a lot of people use psychiatrists but for me, what I’ve found the most helpful was finding like-minded people and being able to talk through like what you’re stressed about or what kind of problems you’re having, and being able to vent out. It was always good because you get helpful advice or a different opinion than you weren’t also thinking about as well. 

Bryan: (00:30:02)     I want to point out one thing to note is that as a founder too, a lot of advice in all different directions comes, how do you filter out which advice you want to listen to? Because sometimes you entered into a new industry. And you assume this person knows what they’re talking about because they have apparently 25, 30 years of experience, right?. How do you filter that out? Because that’s a challenge that most entrepreneurs face.

Simon: (00:30:34)       Yeah. I had a meeting on this just a little bit earlier today. It just comes with experience. You have to just deal with as many people as possible and then you start smelling. More and more, especially in Seattle. I mean, you would think Seattle is like a great startup city. It’s terrible. Bay area is you have to go to Barry if you want to do a startup kind of thing. If you want to be a banker do you go to Texas? No, you go to Wall Street. Right? But Seattle, a lot of people will claim they’re experts in like startups or whatever. But a lot of those guys that go flaunt around, offering people advice, are usually guys that have never built anything. They just like to have the spotlight attention to them. They don’t have money to invest or they call themselves investors, or they’re just mid-level managers on Amazon and Microsoft and they’re smart, but they’ve never built a company. So it’s a very different kind of thing and offers really bad advice. And so it took us a few years to learn that, okay, we should not spend time trying to meet people in Seattle. We started meeting more people from the barrier, like our first investment round, it took us like three years because we were trying to pitch investors in Seattle and there were just not that many. And there’s just a lot of really bad investors. And so eventually, we got to a point where we spent like our last summer remaining funds to pitch a conference in Vegas. And then all these people are waiting, how are we never heard of you before? And then it was very easy to raise around. I think it’s just experience, it’s just talking to as many people as possible, and the BS radar just sharpens more from that.

Bryan: (00:32:16)     You face a lot of these in battle.

Maggie: (00:32:21)    That’s so true when you start a company, everyone has a say in how you should operate or manage or run your business, but you’re the only person and your co-founders are the only people who are in it every single day and know how it works the best. So, the main point is to listen to people, but don’t be overly influenced by them. I know in April you disclosed that StormX had new strategic investors. What do you typically look for when you’re bringing on investors to StormX?

Simon: (00:32:55)   Yeah. So luckily for us, we raised money on the last few rounds this year, we had a lot more leverage because we didn’t have to raise, it’s not every day where you’re in that situation. First, understand what we’re trying to do from a vision perspective and everything.  So does our model makes sense or are they trying to hassle you too much or make it look like they’re trying to control your business or have really bad terms? We were very lucky in terms of finding really good investors just because we didn’t have to raise. I think first-time founders make the mistake of accepting any investors just to have money. But investors can screw you badly because they can take over. They can force you to sell. They can force you to go a certain path that they don’t want. So make sure when you do your paperwork, don’t have crazy clauses on there that only benefit investors or a certain investor, even if you have a good exit. The liquidity will only go to the VCs and the founders will get nothing but recognition for selling your company for 50 million, but you ended up getting $0 of that. I had friends that ran into those similar situations as well. It’s tough. But luckily right now it’s definitely a founder’s market. It’s definitely a lot easier to raise than in the past. So if there are more investors as you keep looking, I think, and if you have the right idea and some traction that you continue building, it’s definitely there.

Bryan: (00:34:29)     Yeah. That’s good advice. And you have a lot of money that you raised as a clear-cut example of doing that. So I appreciate that. So out of curiosity, what’s next? What are your company goals and what are your personal goals for the rest of the year? I know we’re pretty much halfway or almost done with 2021 already.  We just want to understand where your mindset is at right now. Not only for yourself but StormX as well?

Simon: (00:34:58)   Yeah. So from a company perspective, our next product that we’re launching is a debit card. So crypto card, I was, yeah, one of the things I mentioned is like onboarding off boarding with Fiat, such a terrible experience that that should help a lot. And we’re not just launching it, debit cards are everyone else ties into our token and our token economics and stuff like that. Our loyal users will be able to get much higher cashback than anything that’s in the market. If you like Sapphire Reserve or like American Express or some of those cards, it’s going to be competitive. And so it should be pretty interesting. We’re starting to get more into FinTech, but then from like a personal goal, like we’re finally sort of heading positive momentum again. So for me, we just have to keep this momentum going strong. I think we have a pretty good advantage right now. It’s sort of the blazers announcement and like the NBA season coming along and to take the users from like 3 million to 10 million users pretty soon. Next, how do we take that timeline to like a hundred million soon? Yeah. Usually, it’s just where it calls for me.

Bryan: (00:36:02)    There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re always combining work and fun and it just depends on the person, on how they operate, and we appreciate that.

Maggie: (00:36:11)    Awesome. So, Simon, we have one last question for you, and that is if you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring entrepreneur, what would that advice be?

Simon: (00:36:21)   Yeah. And I think because it’s sort of the Asian podcast too, right? I think especially with like Korean cultures or like other Asian cultures that have a very strong hierarchy, ageism is a very bad handicap for boundaries to try and start stuff. Just because if someone’s one year older, they’ll try to talk you out of it and say  I know much more than you because I’m older than you. Ignore all the noise. I think Bryan, you said earlier too, you got a lot of bad advice, but just focus on why you want to do this, and is this something that you want to give up everything on, and is this something that you’re okay with. Not having a good lifestyle for a while because you’re gonna be poor for a while, but if this is then just do it, ignore all the haters, and just, yeah, you got to do it and learn from failures and just keep improving because those guys that give you bad advice will ultimately try to suck up to you when you’re doing well. And then if you start doing badly again, they’ll talk badly about you too. So just ignore it. Ignoring noise is my number one piece of advice.

Bryan: (00:37:25)     Yeah, that’s really good advice too. And I think. What do you guys say earlier too? It’s this, you’re the expert in your industry. You see a day in the hour and for a fact that sometimes you just have to trust yourself and your gut and the only time you seek advice is when you don’t know something highly technical and highly repeatable. Being with boundaries dictates your vision. Only you can see what you see. That’s a cool part of being a founder. So, Simon, how can our listeners find out more about you and look up more about StormX.

Simon: (00:38:06)    Yeah, you can go to StormX.io, or you could download the app StormX on apple or iOS, Android, or Chrome extension. I’m pretty vocal on Twitter. So follow me there. But yeah, I mean, it’s just we’re trying to do all the work. Work with all these companies to offer you better cashback. So there’s no downside of using our product because it’s just free cash or crypto coming your way. And then, so I hope you use it.

Bryan: (00:38:36)   Yeah we’re excited and then we’ll check out StormX after this podcast while I was included on the show notes as well. So, Simon, thank you so much for being in the podcast today. We had a lot, a lot of fun today.   

Simon: (00:38:47)     Yeah, Bryan, Maggie, thanks so much for having me.

Maggie: (00:38:49)   Thank you, Simon. 

Outro: [00:38:50] Hey guys, we hope you enjoy this episode! Please subscribe to the show. We would like to get to the top 10 on iTunes so be sure to leave us a five-star review. We release an episode every single Wednesday. So, stay tuned! Thank you, guys, so much