Lessons from Silicon Valley: a product manager turned founder

Executive overview

Most first-time founders carry assumptions from their corporate career that don't fit their new company. Sisun Lee spent years at Facebook, Uber, and Tesla before founding Morelabs — and had to unlearn his tech-first instincts to save the business.

COVID stripped 90% of revenue and forced a clarity that growth hadn't. The real lesson wasn't resilience; it was knowing when you're the wrong person for the next phase.

The best CEO is whoever is intrinsically motivated to do what the company actually needs — not what it used to need.

From PM to founder: the core PM mindset

• A PM's job is to identify the most impactful thing to do, then execute it — repeatedly.
• You will be wrong more often than right; success comes from iteration volume, not individual accuracy.
• At Facebook, a mentor pushed Lee to fly to Kenya with no itinerary — the insight: you can't understand a market from HQ.
• At Tesla, the challenge was extending growth beyond flagship stores via e-commerce and a referral model built on the owner app.

How Morelabs started

• Discovered South Korea's hangover recovery market as an adult — a multi-billion-dollar category absent in the West.
• Started as a side project while still at Tesla; hit $200k/month in revenue before quitting.
• Early investors put in ~$400–500k; the upside was clear, downside felt manageable.
• First two years: rapid revenue growth, constant hiring, fundraising momentum.

The pivot that almost came too late

• Lee assumed Morelabs should be a tech-driven e-commerce business — wrong for the category.
• Red Bull's model (offline, impulse-driven) is the right template for a hangover drink: customers don't plan to need it.
• Year three: restructured around sales and marketing, deprioritised the digital-native identity.
• Realised the success model wasn't Facebook — it was Red Bull.

Surviving COVID

• Revenue dropped 90% in 2020; fundraising plans collapsed overnight.
• Chose not to lay off staff after a recent org restructure — a second restructure would have destroyed culture.
• Forced ruthless prioritisation: cancelled every non-essential product launch to conserve cash.
• Revenue partially recovered by May–June 2020; a supportive investor provided a cash injection.

Stepping down as CEO

• Closing Series B prompted a clear-eyed question: am I the right person to lead a sales-and-marketing organisation?
• Lee realised he had no intrinsic motivation for that work — he was reading tech books in his spare time, not sales books.
• The retail leader already inside the company was the natural successor; the transition took six months.
• No one left the company when the new CEO was appointed — a sign the transition was handled well.
• After stepping down, Lee spent a year travelling and rebuilding identity before starting Ramper (blockchain infrastructure).