This ex-Tesla engineer has the cure to your hangover

Vaughn Highfield June 26, 2017

Former Tesla engineer Sisun Lee believes he has the cure to your hangovers. This week he left Tesla to found Morning Recovery, a company that makes an FDA-compliant hangover cure created off the back of his experiences with Korean hangover cures.

This ex-Tesla engineer has the cure to your hangover

The drink’s key ingredient is dihydromyricetin (DHM), a compound found in the Oriental raisin tree and rattan tea. Lee discovered that DHM has been a key component in herbal hangover cure drinks in Asia for thousands of years. It’s believed that DHM works so well as a cure for a hangover because it breaks down the dangerous acids that build up in your liver from drinking.

Sisun Lee – Morning Recovery CEO and founder

Morning Recovery isn’t pseudoscience. Along with a more detailed explanation on the Morning Recovery website, Lee discovered that DHM isn’t enough on its own to help your hangover. To really recover from a heavy night of drinking, your body needs Vitamin B and C, along with minerals and salts. According to Lee, these things aren’t present in the Korean hangover cure drinks so popular in his home country.

Amusingly, after trying to simply import these popular Korean drinks into the US to no avail – importers didn’t trust a man with no background in beverage sales – Lee thought it best to just make one himself. Lee may have been an engineer at Tesla, but he also had three years of nanotechnology/biotech engineering skills from college before he made the switch to computer science. Convenient.

Morning Recovery launches as a proper company on 5 July. Don’t expect to waltz into your local Tesco and snap up this miracle hangover cure from then, though. It appears as though the company will begin shipping via funding rounds on Indiegogo, and it’s likely this is purely a US-only product for the time being.

In other words, you need to be really sure you’re going to have a hangover in the weeks and months it could take to ship the product via Indiegogo. If you’re going to that level of preparation, perhaps don’t drink as much in the first place.

Lee’s journey from computer engineer to a body and food “hacker” has echoes of Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart’s journey. Rhinehart’s meal-replacement company Soylent has gone on to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and sparked a wave of similar products around the globe – including the UK-made Huel. Perhaps Lee’s Morning Recovery can spark a similar global food revolution.

Whatever happens, I imagine plenty of people will be more happy to crack open a cold one with the boys if they can simply drink their hangover away afterwards.