Founder Stories: Mike and Albert Lee of MyFitnessPal
How two Korean American brothers from upstate New York built one of America's most iconic companies
Time Magazine recently named MyFitnessPal as one of America’s Top 25 Most Iconic Companies.
Mike and Albert Lee were Korean American brothers who grew up in upstate New York in Schenectady where there were few Asian families. Their father was a metallurgist who worked at General Electric. Their mother went back to school to get a computer science degree at SUNY Albany when Mike was in middle school. He audited to her classes for fun and help her with her homework. He played baseball and volleyball in high school and went to Princeton where he could continue playing volleyball. Albert would go on to UC Berkeley. Both of them graduated with degrees in economics.
Mike would start his career in consulting at Mercer Management Consulting. Instead of applying to business school, he decided to work at the NIH for a year to do medical research. He applied to medical school and was accepted to UCLA. But after speaking to doctors who deterred him, he realized he wasn’t that passionate about it and turned them down. This was during the time of the tech boom in Silicon Valley, and decided to move from DC to San Francisco without a job and slept in a friend’s closet for six months. He finally found a job in marketing consulting for tech companies before joining a startup called Software.net which became Beyond.com (the Amazon for software). Mike would eventually join Handspring to run the e-commerce team before it was acquired by Palm.
After leaving Palm, Mike started working on a free dating site with a friend. On the side he was trying to lose weight for his wedding and was told to count calories. He didn’t want to use pen and paper, so he looked for an app or website, but they were all terrible, so he decided to build it himself. He got back into coding and MyFitnessPal was born.
Albert began his career in finance as an analyst at GE Capital before joining Yahoo in 1999. I was a product manager at Yahoo! for Yahoo! Finance and Albert was one of my fellow product managers, working on Yahoo! Shopping. Eventually we both went to business school at Stanford and Berkeley, before ending up at eBay after we got our MBAs. Albert would eventually leave eBay and return to Yahoo and work at some startups. Mike had been managing MyFitnessPal by himself and the website traffic continued to grow to the point where it exceeded the dating site, so he quit to work on it full-time. He called Albert and pulled the big brother card, telling him to quit his job and help him work on MyFitnessPal.
Mike and Al bootstrapped MyFitnessPal for eight years and never raised outside capital. They stayed lean and did everything themselves for the longest time. They had four employees when they had 30 million users visiting the website. When they launched their mobile app, they became a top fifty app in the entire app store.
VCs were literally knocking on their office door trying to give them money. They were afraid of taking outside money, because they didn’t want to have a boss again. Mike and Al hadn’t taken a salary for three years, but now the company was very profitable, so they finally paid themselves. They didn’t need the money, so they didn’t want to take on any investors.
As they talked to investors, they realized that there was value in having some of these investors help them. With the right firms, it would be more like having a partnership than having a boss. They also had heard that a lot of the big tech gorillas like Google and Apple were moving into the health space, so raising some capital would give them ammunition to defend their position.
In 2013, they decided to raise $18 million in venture capital in a a Series A from Andrew Braccia at Accel and John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins along with a $20 million secondary to take care of their families. It would be their only institutional funding round. Andrew and John were pivotal in making introductions and open doors.
MyFitnessPal had grown to the largest nutrition database in the world with more than 5 million foods. In its nine years of existence the firm has amassed more than 80 million registered users for its website and app.
In 2015, the Lee brothers agreed to be acquired by Under Armour for $475 million. They felt like it was a good cultural fit, because they had a very entrepreneurial culture driven by their founder, Kevin Plank. Mike became the only Asian on the executive team. He only cared about doing what was best for the company, and because he wasn’t trying to be political, he was promoted.
The best part of building MyFitnessPal for Mike and Al was hearing the personal stories and testimonies from their grateful users. Their product was literally changing and saving lives.