Edrea Lee always dreamt of being a full-time entrepreneur. But she never expected it would happen in her 20s.
“I didn’t think it would be at this moment, right now,” she admits. “Nonetheless, I think the world is changing very quickly today. With AI, there’s a lot of disruption, so we shouldn’t be shocked that opportunities show up and disappear very quickly.”
Not wanting that opportunity to pass her by, Lee took the bull by its reins. Now, she’s two months into running her startup, Vespid, full time.
Vespid, now dubbed the “Duolingo for personal finance,” actually got its start five years ago when Lee was still a student at the University of Michigan.
Here’s how her startup — as well as Lee herself — grew over the years.
Humble beginnings as a student project
Inspired by the book “Freakonomics,” Lee pursued economics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from 2017 to 2020.
Interestingly, the University of Michigan is very supportive of student entrepreneurship, and hosts numerous student accelerators.
Along with other Malaysians, Lee decided to join one such accelerator — the optiMize Social Innovation Challenge.
With her team, Lee created a simplistic stock investing platform, much like Robinhood in the US, but catered to Malaysian users.
“In 2020, most of the stock investing platforms were very chunky in Malaysia,” she explains.
At the end of the accelerator, they were given a starting fund of some US$10,000 — a sizable amount for students trying to get a start in the world.
Two years down the road, though, they realised how difficult creating a stock trading platform was. It wasn’t just technically challenging, but also regulations-wise, as the Securities Commission in Malaysia requires the platforms to have a certain amount of capital that the then-23-year-old founders did not have.
Plus, trading platforms such as Moo Moo were popping up and banks were redesigning their own platforms. Having a nice interface was no longer something to shout about.
“But we discovered something — people really liked our bite-sized content that we had in our beta app, teaching people how to start stock investing,” she says. “So, we got this idea that, why isn’t there a Duolingo-like financial learning platform in the region yet?”
In 2023, Vespid made the pivot. After two years of building, the app finally launches in May 2025.
Taking the leap into entrepreneurship
Today, Lee is a full-time founder, having taken the leap in August 2025 to quit her job and pursue the startup full-time.
“It takes a lot of guts, but to be honest, I’ve been working for five years,” Lee says. “I wouldn’t say I’m the most financially literate person, but I will say, I’m slightly stingy. I love to save a lot of money.”
Being able to work abroad for some time helped, too, as she was able to earn in USD.
Beyond having a healthy financial cushion, Lee was further emboldened to give up her stable income due to the Malaysian government’s current push for entrepreneurship.
“I feel that, if you don’t do it now, your opportunity cost will just go up,” she says about making the leap. “You’ll advance in your career, and they’ll pay you more. It just gets more expensive to leave. So, you may as well do it right now.”
“Why not me?”
Lee still takes some of her entrepreneurial cues from lessons learnt in university. The student accelerator she joined, in particular, had a lasting impact.
“They had this tagline back then, which is ‘why not me?’ And I find those three words to be very powerful,” Lee recalls.
As humans, we often point fingers at others and complain about the lack of change in the world, but the truth is, how often do we consider the role we play?
As Lee puts it, “Why not us, why not you, and why not me?”
What does it take to be an entrepreneur
For many, being serious about entrepreneurship is all about fundraising, finding a co-founder, and quitting your day job. Lee, having taken a different path, believes that isn’t necessary.
“It’s more of starting small. You want to roll out a prototype or minimum viable product and see if people bite on it,” she says. “Most times, your first is probably not going to be the one. The good news is that you still have your job.”
That “slow and steady” route is the one that Lee took. After five years of saving up and building traction for Vespid, the risk of full-time entrepreneurship is finally one she can take.
That said, jumping into entrepreneurship is always going to be difficult, no matter how prepared you are.
“Despite the anxiety, uncertainty, self-doubt, fear, and all the stories you hear about what entrepreneurs go through, you get the feeling that this is what you’re meant to do right now,” she says. “The feeling that this is what I’m meant to do and potentially what I could be good at gets me up every morning.”
