🍜 Kevin Lee: Co-Founder at immi
🍜 Kevin Lee: Co-Founder at immi
How to disrupt a 60 year old industry, create a vibrant remote culture and the power of async communications
☎️ Hello, Hello. Thank you for dialing into this edition of The Switchboard. I’m Julia, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. I strive to share stories of the ways we communicate and connect at work and beyond through interviews and best practices. This newsletter is a side project passion and your support helps it grow. If you enjoy this article, consider forwarding it to a friend or sharing it on your favorite social network.
In This Edition
📝 The power of async communications and documentation
🍜 The importance of creative team-building experiences
📚Why you should authentically tell your story
About Kevin
Kevin Lee is a co-founder of immi, which invented the world's first low carb, high protein, and 100% plant based instant ramen. He previously led better-for-you food & beverage investing at Pear VC and is an angel investor in 40+ companies. He grew up working alongside his grandparents on their produce farms in Taiwan.
What inspired you to start your company?
My co-founder and I grew up in Asian food families. My Grandparents are farmers in Taiwan where they grow Rose Apples. My co-founder’s Grandmother runs a popular egg noodle stall in Thailand. When his dad immigrated to the US, he ran a Thai supermarket for a few years and later a Thai restaurant. We joke that it was in our DNA to be founders of a food startup, but our parents immigrated here hoping we wouldn't be in the food industry.
Both of us spent the past 10 years in the tech industry, but one thing that just kept nagging at us is how we saw both of our families struggling with diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. Those are chronic health conditions that can be improved with better diets. We looked at what our families were eating and came together to reinvent the childhood foods that we grew up with that were authentic to us as Asian Americans. We didn’t want to make another protein bar or cereal.
When we looked at Instant Ramen, which is one of the world's most popular foods, we realized that it hasn't been reinvented in 60 years. So we asked ourselves — can we make a low-carb, high protein and plant-based version that is delicious, authentic to us, and better than what the traditional alternatives are? That’s how immi started.
Ironically, it was hard to convince my Asian immigrant parents to try a better version of a food they love. But, my Dad texted me three months ago that he finally tried my noodles and he has grown to really like them. He said that he eats them for breakfast now because they don't make him feel sluggish. It was one of those full-circle moments.
How do you approach communicating with your employees?
From day one, we’ve had a self-serve model that indoctrinates our team with an async approach. We do this because we want to preserve deep work. It begins with a very extensive onboarding guide with our culture, mission, vision, values and operations. This can be seen throughout our employee’s experience where everyone's meeting notes are public to everyone else, no matter your level. We also maintain a memos table that documents every critical decision.
In our culture, there’s a lot of emphasis on our one-on-ones with managers and direct reports. We have a very extensive document that team members prepare before these meetings. It includes a career development roadmap for each person where they can look back to the beginning of the quarter and see tangible progress.
We also have a practice called HPMs — highlights, progress, and me. It's a great way to keep everyone fully aware of each other's work cross-functionally. In addition, there’s a weekly team meeting for everyone to share moments from their weekends and talk about their priorities.
As a founder, how do you develop culture with your team?
Every month we host a session on a tool called Gatheround — it's like having people huddle around a digital fireplace. There are cards with questions that people can answer. I invest quite a bit of time into asking the right deep questions for us to get to know each other, School of Life style.
In addition, employees are encouraged to host programs. Our senior food scientist hosted an event called Ramen 360 where everyone received a budget to go to a local ramen restaurant of their choosing. They had to document the entire experience end-to-end including what the interior design of the restaurant looked like, the cutlery and bowls and the different types of ramen that were on the menu. It was a fun experience to compare and share.
Programs like this are fun and they also involve everyone in the customer journey and help influence flavor ideas in the product pipeline.
Have you been assigned a "basic task" that you transformed into something great by tapping into your creativity?
For the first 9 months of immi, we had a subpar version of our product. We weren't super happy with it. Since we launched during Covid, our original manufacturer couldn’t support the product. The business basically almost failed in that first year. I decided we should write and create an ad video that told the story about what happened. We did it all ourselves, from storyboarding to filming to the stock images.
We shared our family backgrounds and decided to be honest about how much everyone hated our first version. Then, we shared how we took that feedback and spent another year revamping the product from the ground up. The video went viral — it basically saved our business today and is still the strongest ad because it’s a genuine story. We heard from customers and other CEOs who shared they had been in our shoes and encouraged us to keep going. It taught us to remember to always be honest even if we're failing.
Editor’s Note: Very proud to share that Kevin liked this question so much, that he is incorporating it into immi’s hiring and culture!
What do you think communications and culture can learn from the CPG industry?
The CPG industry is extremely saturated and unlike technology, it's really hard to have defensible intellectual property. You have to emphasize your unique story. People gravitate towards the story behind the brand, particularly the founding story being truly authentic. That’s the same for communications, it should be true to who you are as a person and brand.
Sharing our failure story taught us that you don’t have to be perfect as long as you own your mistakes. Communications often tries to present the best possible message, but it’s important to be honest and sincere. With our culture in our onboarding guide we tell our team what it’s really like to work here. We treat our company like it's a product — everyone has the ability to shape the flavors and the culture.
☎️ Thank you for reading The Switchboard. I interview every leader and write each article. To help others discover the stories I write, consider sharing on LinkedIn, Threads or Twitter (tag The Switchboard so I can reply), giving this post a heart or commenting with your thoughts.
It makes me happy to hear from readers — reply with what resonated from this edition. Here’s why I write and the Index of past posts. I hope you enjoy exploring the ways we communicate and connect at work and beyond via this newsletter.