Why I left Microsoft to Start My Own Company at 23

“But for me, off-roading is where I belong. And I don't think this will change any time soon.”

Though I knew that off-roading was in my DNA, I didn’t expect it to manifest again in less than a year. And yet it did — just 7 months into Microsoft, I decided to start my own company in Korea. Let me tell you what happened.

I was thoroughly enjoying my day-to-day in Singapore working as a Product Marketing Manager of the Office suite. I got in the hang of getting to work just shy of 9AM (my favorite time of the day was when I got in the silent office right before everyone came in to enjoy my alone time) and going home at 5PM. I met a lot of wonderful, smart colleagues, who were always encouraging and insightful. But little did they know that after I got home, I was secretly up until 11pm working on my passion project. It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy my day job, I just happen to have a passion for a project that was personal — wellness.

So what was this passion project? Right before I graduated, I visited New York during spring break to see my high school friends. I knew 100% that I did not belong in New York as a resident but wanted to join the hustle and bustle with my friends for my last spring break. Tritia, my good friend from the third grade who lived in New York, was an art student who from the outside looked fragile but was one of the most independent and strong woman I knew. Both only children, we were raised with the understanding that we had to rely on ourselves, prompting us to develop innate mental and emotional mechanism to navigate the world independently. But as I said she looked fragile from the outside — she never really had an inkling for sports and was one of the slimmest among our friends. So I was more than shocked when she wanted to introduce me to her newfound hobbies — boxing.

“Boxing? You’ve got to be kidding me. Was New York that hard on you? Did you get mugged?”

With more than a thousand questions left in head, I followed her to her boxing studio — Shadowbox. And I was immediately in shock. It wasn’t a grungy, sweat-smelling underground boxing studio but a sophisticated boutique fitness studio very much resembling Soul Cycle.

Eyes wide open, I rented one of the boxing gloves and entered the studio. Yes, I had experienced Soul Cycle multiple times to know that cult-fitness was a thing but the image of heavy bags hanging in a darkly lit room with pounding music hit me hard. The last KO punch was the class itself. The coach was spitting out words of wisdom and motivation while I moved my body fully focused on breath and movement. I caught myself crying in the middle as I hit the heavy bag — not because of the pain but because of the feeling of overwhelming confidence, liberty and euphoria. Looking back, I think the whole experience hit me hard because it was the first time I meditated with movement.

I came out of the studio literally feeling like I had the whole universe in my hands. After having gone through years of mental fights from bulimia to anxiety, years of therapy, I never experienced this much happiness and elation in a mere 45 minutes.

And then a simple thought hit me: “Why hadn’t I experienced this in Korea? Is there a gap in the market?” Tritia and I chatted about this on the way home, even daydreaming about the day we'd pull off something like this and end up gracing the front cover of Forbes as the "baddest Korean female leaders." We laughed it off and my New York trip ended just like that.

But the wild thought of launching a boutique studio in Korea — the land of “dieting”, forced and exaggerated standards of beauty — didn’t leave my mind. The reality was, I had already accepted my job at Microsoft and I was still jaded by the idea of a startup. Yet, that was when I realized real businesses built on passion didn’t start with the thought of ‘starting a business’ but with ‘making a change that lasted.’

After graduation, I returned home to my motherland and contemplated on how best to spend my last 3 months leading up to ‘true adulthood’. That’s when I thought “Why not try a proof of concept (POC) of this boxing boutique gym?” I needed to know whether this was something that would never work in Korea. Only then would I move on from this thought. And the only way to do so was to try it out. (Better to regret what you tried than to regret not doing anything, right?)

So I did it.

I pitched my idea to a friend from high school who told me he saw “my eyes light up” as I talked about my idea. I pitched my idea to his boss who was a partner at the VC he worked for. I pitched up idea to my mom. I pitched my idea to my mentors. And at the end I bootstrapped 20,000,000 KRW to test this concept out at a music festival booth. (If I were to do it again, I would never EVER use this money on a physical POC that I had to build up from scratch at a music festival that, let alone, happened outside of Seoul. But cut me some slack, it was my first time.)

And it worked.

It worked in the sense that people enjoyed the experience and over 100 people signed up on the landing page showing interest for opening of a gym. In hindsight, this may not have been the most accurate measure of demand but at that moment I saw it as a chance to build something that would change the skewed landscape of a beauty and wellness in Korea.

But as you know, I had promised myself to start my career in the corporate world. I didn’t want to let that go because of a small opportunity I saw. With that passion still burning in my heart, I left for Singapore to build a ‘stable’ career. And I continued with both. Every night I was retouching my IR deck while reaching out to potential partners in Korea whom I could work with to start building an experience. One of the most unique opportunities came a couple months after when Lululemon accepted my pitch to host a class for ‘the next generation of female leaders’ in their community alley (Thank you Eunbee for taking the chance). At that point, I became even more determined to manifest this idea. A global brand working with a nobody like me? There must be something there.

Ultimately my logical brain pushing for a stable, conventional career could not beat my passion. I knew I had to choose one or the other for the sake of my health and peace of mind. At the end, I was left with one question:

Will you have the guts to start something from scratch at 30?

A risk-averse person at heart, my answer was no. It had to be now, when I was young. And if I failed, I wanted to fail fast and learn.

So in March of 2017 I left Singapore to start something from scratch, in a country that — in my mind — needed a wellness makeover. And though the journey from that point forward was unfathomably hard, I have zero regrets. I learned about life, people and business that no class can teach. I grew as a person and leader. And ultimately succeeded to fail fast and build the experience as an asset that no one else could replicate.