Jungsoo Song CEO
Rewriting the kitchen standard — in five years, it will start from the standard we built
Rewriting the kitchen standard — in five years, it will start from the standard we built
“Will Korean kitchens look the same in five years? They won't. And being at the heart of that change is a rare experience.”
The person who started Li.fizz and draws the biggest picture. A kitchen where not a single self-employed owner has to grind through the small hours of the morning — that is the picture CEO Jungsoo Song is drawing.
Q. Could you introduce yourself?
Hello, I'm Jungsoo Song, CEO of Li.fizz. I studied Convergence Electronic Engineering at Hanyang University, then worked at InBody's Future Research Lab, served as CTO at LuaLab, and led product development at Rabino before founding Li.fizz. I had three years of experience as an R&D and product PM. One fun fact — I also hold a Korean bartender's license. I believe an engineer who doesn't know how to make a drink can't build a real beverage automation robot, so I got the license first. (laughs)
Q. What do you do at Li.fizz?
I set the direction and pace of the whole company. Which products to launch and when, which markets to enter first, who to partner with. We're currently collaborating with Toss Place, and we started with Pulmuone by supplying their SkyHub Lounge at Incheon Airport, and now we're expanding into premium resorts and golf courses. These large decisions all start at my desk.
The second is resource allocation. We're still a startup, so resources are limited. Where to spend money, who to hire, where to spend our time — getting these right is critical. One wrong move and a startup can disappear in six months. The third is external communication — investors, partners, franchises, government agencies, academia. Speaking to every stakeholder outside the company is part of my work.
Q. I'm curious how you came to found Li.fizz.
Honestly, it didn't start as "kitchen automation." While developing products at InBody and LuaLab, I kept seeing Korean self-employed owners trapped in a really hard structure. 51.5% of their operating costs go to labor. Over half. Yet existing kitchen automation robots cost over 80 million won, took a full minute to make a single drink, and broke down often. So adoption rates sat at 0.2%.
It started from one question: "This is clearly a problem worth solving — why has no one really solved it?" When we worked it out, the answer was cloud robotics. Not jamming one expensive, big robot into each store, but connecting cheap, small robots through the cloud so they can collaborate. That's the direction we're going.
Q. Stores grew explosively in just one year. What moment stands out the most?
When Pulmuone deployed our bartender robot at the SkyHub Lounge in Incheon Airport. At the first meeting it still felt like "a startup product, in *the lounge*?" Then they saw the demo and immediately said, "let's go to the next step."
That deployment mattered because Pulmuone — a proven operator — was running our robots 24/7 in a no-downtime environment, and we proved stability there. After that, inquiries from resorts, golf courses, and hotels haven't stopped. Our cumulative deployment is now over 1,400 venues.
Q. There must be real hardships in being CEO.
My job is solving problems with no answer, every day. You can't Google them. They're not in any book. We make them ourselves. Every decision lands on me, and the weight that a single decision can save or kill the company is always there.
That's why colleagues to think alongside are so precious. COO Suhyun Kwon takes the hardest decisions on operations and food R&D with me. Head of Engineering Minsu Kang covers the technical detail of the product with me. Strategy manager Junsang Lim watches both the field and our strategy at once, filling in the missing links in between. And our external technical advisor Professor Dongjin Lee (former director of Samsung Electronics' research lab) sits with me on the deep technical decisions. Each of them has gone one step further from their own seat, so every day runs with the feeling, "I'm not alone."
Q. Who would you like to work with?
Three things.
People who think in numbers. Not "I think it will work out," but "If this hypothesis is right, this metric will move like this in three months." We're a company that validates hypotheses every week.
People who can fail fast. We grew stores 1,700% in a year. That means we run new experiments every week. Rather than delaying decisions out of fear of failure, those who can fail small and fast, then move to the next hypothesis, fit well here.
People with real empathy for self-employed owners. Our customers are the ones working into the early hours, supporting their families. We're not selling them "cool technology." We're handing them a tool that makes life a little less hard. People who understand this tone are who we want.
Q. Finally, a word to those considering applying.
Will Korean kitchens look the same in five years? They won't. And being at the heart of that change is a rare experience. Li.fizz is the company at the start of that change, and we're hiring right now. Let's build it together.