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From $30,000 of Stranded Earphones to Urban EDC

The Story

After graduating in 2009 — “one of the worst times to graduate from college” — Yong-Soo started his career on Wall Street, did internships at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, then traded at a hedge fund in Midtown for a couple of years (Source 1). He bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco in 2012, “crashed with him on the floor on an air mattress for three months,” and “basically needed to go see a chiropractor after those three months for my back pain” (Source 1). After a startup role and a 13-week, 72-hour-a-week engineering bootcamp at Hack Reactor — “the most intensive learning experience I’ve ever had, including high school, college, everything” — he landed at Ripple, the blockchain company, in March 2014 (Source 1, Source 2).

The pivot was financial, then logistical. “I was at a startup for a while and then I actually got let go from that startup two years in” (Source 2). At Ripple, “all of a sudden it was this brick wall that we just hit… we all went as a team to go watch a Pixar movie. I think it was Inside Out. It was so weird because we were on a roll and then all of a sudden we were watching a Pixar movie together as a team” (Source 2). Regulators were closing in on crypto and the team was frozen on compliance review.

“I actually bought a bunch of these really well machined earphones. They’re made out of titanium. And I thought that I would sell these things on Amazon just to make some side income. But then when I got them and tried selling them, no one was buying” (Source 1). He bought roughly 100 pairs at around $300 each — “so, $30,000 worth of commit” (Source 1). “I had so much of these headphones that were just not moving” (Source 1). “I decided, you know what, I’ve got to create my own channel” (Source 1). Urban EDC — Every Day Carry — launched in October 2015. He’d already quit Ripple in September: “So I actually left a full-time job and launched the company without a job. So actually, it was never a side hustle, which is kind of crazy now that I think about it” (Source 2).

The cushion was six months of personal runway (Source 1). The mindset was deliberate: “I knew that I was a pretty good operationally and I kind of doubled down on myself, ‘Okay, I can do this. I have all the tools’… it’s all a matter of just putting the pieces together and executing on it” (Source 2). The lesson he names from the headphone debacle: “definitely start small. Like I shot way over what I should have. And so that was a really good first lesson for me” (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

The Urban EDC origin isn’t about courage — it’s about choosing the right kind of risk. Yong-Soo’s reasoning was unromantic: blockchain had regulatory risk and market risk he couldn’t control; e-commerce had only execution risk, which he believed he was good at. That’s not “follow your passion” advice. It’s “audit which risks you’re actually equipped to handle.” Most pivots are dressed up as conviction; this one was a clear-eyed comparison of variables. The $30K of stranded headphones turned out to be the forcing function — when the original sales channel failed, the only path forward was building the channel itself. That’s a common pattern: the side project becomes the real business once the original plan dies.

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