The $100M Food Truck That Survived a Corporate Coup

"Don't believe in people, believe in the system." These words from CUPBOP's founder Jung Song carry the weight of betrayal, resilience, and hard-won wisdom from building a $100 million Korean rice bowl empire.

What started as a single food truck has exploded into a national franchise phenomenon, but the journey to success came with a devastating cost: the loss of partnerships that once felt unbreakable. Behind CUPBOP's explosive growth lies a story of corporate coup, family sacrifice, and the brutal reality that business partnerships can end friendships forever.

In this raw and emotional interview, Jung Song and COO Leighton Park reveal the untold story of how they survived a hostile takeover attempt, rebuilt their company from the ashes of broken trust, and discovered that sometimes losing everything is the only way to find what truly matters.

Leighton: So I came to the States when I was 11. I'm born and raised in Korea, a bit of a crazy story. So my family came on a vacation to the States when I was 11 back in 1999. We toured the West Coast, did all the national parks and everything. We were all supposed to go back actually. My parents sat me and my brother down. Oh, by the way, we're leaving tomorrow. You guys are not coming back with us. So that's how I got to the US and just started living here.

I didn't really know what was going on. I remember the day before my parents flew back, they also bought me a game. Even when my parents were leaving, I didn't quite comprehend what was going on at the time, so I was just like, hey, see you. I'm gonna go back to playing my game.

Prior to CUPBOP, I was in finance for a number of years. I started off at Goldman Sachs as an equity research analyst where I spent about 2.5 years. After that, I became an investor at a hedge fund called Citadel. At Goldman, they'll say, hey, we need to do this. We wanna research this, we need to write research reports we have a deadline. We gotta get this done by next week. Let's go. Whereas Citadel, here's $300 million go make money. So your base salary is anywhere from $150 to $250. Bonus ranges zero into the millions.

Leighton: A lot of people were very surprised when I said I was leaving and especially more surprised when I said I was gonna join a restaurant brand. Between Goldman's Citadel, I was coming up on 7 to 8 years on Wall Street. I just had this feeling that man, there's so many things I wanna try. I always felt that if I hit that 10 year mark in only finance, am I gonna be able to try something new? Not that I can't try, but I also knew that even myself, would I want to try at that point. That's why I decided to leave Citadel.

I got to know CUPBOP as one of their first customers, loved the product, always thought that with the good team. This could be a brand that could go national. So that's why I decided to leave Citadel.

Jung: Before he joined our company, it was a disaster that time. We don't have any organizations at all. We're just finding some people, putting the trucks, putting in the stores, working so hard. I thought that's the system. But when Doug joined it, he tried to build up the structures. We run right about 13 right now. Right, like at 13, our model is so efficient, we can run under 20%. Like that's I've never seen him looking at the numbers.

I once told my husband, like as a CEO of this company, you also need to understand the cash flow and financial status of the company, and he said, like, you know, that is not my gift. That is something managed by a person who's professional for numbers and finance, but I'm not the person, so I'll do things I can do well.

Leighton: At that time it was very much still a local business, if not any planning at the time. What's our goal? Short term, medium term, and long term goal. Those didn't exist at the time, so I worked on a 5 year plan for the company, fairly aggressive plan, but something that was possible to achieve.

Jung: The first week I didn't see his face at all. He just put in the computer. He did something. I thought he's crazy. After one week, he brought some big kind of a paper. Here we go. What is it? All the numbers. He actually making a 5 year plan. That first week he didn't even know how to make the cuppa. He doesn't have any idea about the cuppa culture. Some other people don't like Doug in our company. The reason why he's super young, he's super smart, but he doesn't have any experience at the restaurant.

Leighton: This was another big kind of red flag that I saw when I joined. It's a very common issue that happens among startups with multiple co-founders and or partners. As you start growing, there needs to be a natural separation of roles within the company and the ownership of the company because there's two different things. I may be an Apple shareholder. But that doesn't mean I have a role at Apple, right? I don't work there and I can still be owner.

People have a very tough time separating the two because, hey, I have 30% ownership. Like I need to be the decision maker on everything. No, you can be on the board, but the day to day operating decisions are made by the people who have the respective roles. We had a weekly kind of owners meeting or shareholders meeting, you know, you don't have weekly shareholders meeting, right? You'll have maybe quarterly or something, shareholders don't make everyday decisions and that was the practice at the time and that will create a lot of bad decision making and a lot of inefficiencies.

I started addressing and said we need to really start separating this or there's really no way we're going to be able to grow.

Jung: So back on November 9th, 2020 in front of me, my husband, my husband, a father of five children, got fired from those people who asserted that they own the majority of the company, which is not true though.

So briefly to explain, the reason why this happened was because we hired a third party consulting company to make a structure objectively because we paid a lot of money. When I asked my husband, hey, we can make a company structure, why should we hire paying this expensive money and my husband said, we're trying to grow a company, not a mom and pop store anymore. We like to make a company, we can compete with each other fairly so employees can expect, OK, if I do better in this company, I can be promoted. So we have to make a fair enough company that everybody can agree.

So that was the reason why we hired this third party company for consulting to build up a fair company structure, but during the process, one of those people said like, why should I compete with employees? I'm an owner of this company. I don't want to compete with people I train.

Leighton: It is critical to have all of your major shareholders sharing the same vision. If the vision and goal is not aligned, people have very different incentives in their actions. For example, if I'm interested in creating a national brand, I want to make sure I invest every dollar we have back into the company versus if I'm not as interested in becoming a national brand, I'm OK not growing as much, but making pretty good money right now, then you would say why do we have to invest everything back into the company? I'd rather dividend our profits out every year, even every quarter for that matter, which creates a very tough environment to work with.

Jung: The hardest part of that moment that day was that we never knew that was coming. That party was preparing the coup behind the scenes for maybe about 2 months. I don't even know how long they were preparing. They were taking confidential information from an owners' meeting to the attorney they were talking to to take over the company and then on the day we're waiting for one of those people to talk about repurchasing her equity, but she didn't show up. Instead this lawyer showed up at the meeting.

I was very surprised and then I called our attorney saying like, she never showed up, but instead, these attorneys here and then our attorney said, don't say anything. So I told these people like, hey, our attorney says don't do not talk anything to this attorney, it's not beneficial. I still remember one of them telling me that, oh, don't worry about it, 5 minutes before the meeting started and 5 minutes later they started meeting by themselves without looking at me. In 30 minutes, they released me from prison for no reason. They fired my husband. They call because of a harassment, which is a total lie. They just needed a reason.

I almost passed out, our partner, he was in shock too, and my husband was very calm. And after the meeting, my husband told them, like, hey, Hen, let's talk about it. Let's talk about this. And they said, OK, OK, OK, wait, and they just ran away just like that.

Jung: And later that day, we came home, and as soon as I entered into the house from the garage, my daughter asked like, how's it going, mom? What happened? First son, he was just like, he looked very worried but couldn't ask any question, and my husband couldn't say a word, but rather he hugged all of our children and he started crying.

Later that night we're in bed, we're in bed and couldn't sleep. Around 2 or 3 a.m. my husband asked me a question, very first sentence he told me. That day, he said, What do you think I did wrong? Instead of son of B or any swearing word, the very first question he said, like, what do you think I did wrong?

And I told my husband. If you knew this was coming, would you change your plan not to build up a company? And then he said, maybe not, because he always wanted to make a company, strong enough company, to stay for long, even after he leaves the position as a CEO. And I said, then you didn't do anything wrong. Don't stop thinking about things you feel like you did wrong. But rather just focus on resolving this issue because there are people who trust in you.

Jung: I still remember. It was a busy day cos truck schedules, morning to dinner. Saturday got rained in Utah. So we canceled all the event, but after a couple of hours, the rain stopped, cos I already canceled all the events, right? So I got some time. I took my 5 kids with my wife. We're riding a bicycle, just riding a bicycle, not a specialty or anything. They are super happy. They're laughing so hard because they've never done before.

I actually went to the corner and I cried. I look at my wife, she also cried on the corner. We worked so hard and those kids are waiting for this time so much, and they never complained. Just little riding a bicycle with the 5 kids was hard at that time. I just give you a full excuse myself because of you, I have to work so hard, just waiting for it. They're waiting for me. There's a little happiness, riding the bicycle, but all 5 kids were happy. And those after those experiences, I need to focus on my family more. Just simple thing. It's riding bicycle regularly and they're happy.

Jung: So right after that happened, even if those three people betrayed us, many more people supported our company, including our employees, like our crews, managers, district managers, all those people supported to sustain our company, the bank we're working with. And the parent company we're working with and our partners like in our Indonesian partners and our store partners, our investor group, they all supported, they were all on my husband's side to protect our company together.

And after a lot of drama, this and that, we ended up with 3 of the partners selling their shares and leaving the company. So now it's just Young and Jung and me just rock and rolling every day.

Don't believe in people, believe in the system. If you want to trust people, you have to have a great system.