The former Tesla engineer swears by his hangover cure. Photo / Morning Recovery
Meet Sisun Lee. He is probably your new hero, capable of revolutionising your nights out (and the dreaded subsequent mornings).
Lee left his job as an engineer at Tesla after accidentally stumbling what was to be his very own startup.
During a trip home to South Korea, Lee partied a little too hard with his friends. However, instead of suffering with terrible hangovers, they all seemed to bounce back quickly.
They shared with him the hangover drinks they'd have and they worked for Lee as well.
Upon returning to the US, where he lived, he tried to become an importer and distributor of the miracle drinks he'd found but his attempt at started that business were unsuccessful so, instead, he decided to look into what went into them and create his own version.
Lee used his nanotechnology and biotech engineering background to create his new product.
Lee's investigations led him to find the secret ingredient in those South Korean drinks: an herbal compound called dihydromyricetin (DHM) found in the Oriental raisin tree and the rattan tree.
It turns out herbal drinks made from those trees have been used to cure hangovers in Asia for thousands of years.
Lee realised that the drink had to be a combination of that herbal compound and some other vitamins the body desperately needs to break down the toxins from alcohol. You can click here for a more detailed explanation of how the drink works.
To test the formula, he had to get drunk a lot.
"I was basically getting drunk every single night," he told Business Insider.
With the help of other experts, Lee came up with his own formula for a hangover recovery drink.
"It wasn't healthy," he said. "I gained 15 pounds." But he persevered, in the name of science.
Despite waking up feeling fine every time he'd had the drink, he remained skeptical so enlisted friends at first and then strangers to test the drink for him.
The drink quickly became a hit, with thousands of people joining waitlists wanting to test it.
Lee started his company, "Morning Recovery", last July and made US$1 million in revenue in the first three months.
The business venture wasn't without hiccups as Lee was almost kicked out of the US by the Trump administration.
Canada-born Lee, as it turns out, was allowed to stay in the US after leaving Tesla and launch his own company, under a ruling from the Obama administration that allowed non-US citizens to build businesses in the US if they raised a US$250,000 minimum from an institutional US venture capital firm.
Lee raised the money by June and the ruling was meant to take effect in July. That's when Trump did an about-face on it and announced he would not issue the visas to those eligible non-US citizens.
Lee had to temporarily leave the US and go back to Canada.
Meanwhile, luckily, his crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo was going well so Lee could prove his business had revenue.
A week later, he managed to return to the US on an entrepreneur visa and has now been trying to meet the insane demand for his miraculous hangover drink.
For the holiday season, Lee is now deep into a 500,000 bottle production run, more than double the biggest batch of the drink the company has done to date.
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