The Exchanges

Q Let's just round it up. Yeah. Um, uh, which is a monster exit. It's a monster exit. Um, and, and you said Pepsi wanted Poppy in part for the team, obviously the product and the branding, et cetera. Um, did that include the two of you?

A I did not. What a lot of people don't realize is we sold 100% of the company. A lot of times you'll do a two-step deal where if it was probably, I would say if it was that situation, we would have stayed in our roles and kept going. But you don't sell your company for two billion dollars and then say, hey, here's your Pepsi employee badge. It's just not the way those things work. And we were very aware of that going in and had lots of conversations. Now, the thing that I will say is, they've kept us on as, on advisory roles. You know, I'm still the face of the company. I still do a lot of ads. I was in the office two weeks ago. We were filming a Super Bowl commercial with Charlie XCX. I was at set. Like, I'm, I'm still very involved in those things, but I can't have a team reporting into me, and I can't, like, meddle like I used to, right? Like, you have to have boundaries, and you have to have respect. And there was mourning that came with that, I would say. Um, that I think is very normal. Uh, we're in a really great place now. I'm like so happy. Everybody at Poppy got jobs that wanted to stay. They hired on a hundred percent of anybody that wants to stay. Some people did leave because, you know, they, they saw what happened at Poppy. They're going to go get another job and get equity and hopefully do it again.

AI assessment note: “I did not. What a lot of people don't realize is we sold 100%”

Q And so what, what happens that you then decide it's worth it for us to go do Shark Tank rather than continuing to build sort of step by step in a more traditional manner?

A Yeah, I think we were finally ready to have help, right? Um, I think we had maybe gotten it to a really good business for us, but it wasn't, you know, 500,000. It's good, but it's not, like, gonna change our lives. And we had someone reach out. They were wanting to invest in us. I think they were gonna give us, like, 200,000 dollars, but they had zero connections. They had zero knowledge and beverage. And we've always heard of the old saying, like, don't take dumb money, right? Like, any entrepreneur knows that, and as we were, like, discussing if we needed it, because we needed the money, um, I literally opened Instagram, and Mark Cuban posted that Shark Tank was coming to town that weekend, and there was tryouts to be on the show. I was three months pregnant, so it was 2017, and We went and stood in line for eight hours. I think it was like the first time we got a real babysitter with our first, and we just pitched our hearts out, and they're like, this is gonna make it all the way.

AI assessment note: “I think we were finally ready to have help, right?”

Q time. Um, you now, by my count, are working on a 172 different brands. Um, that may be a little bit of an over, over, uh, estimate, but, uh, but, but it does seem like there's almost an announcement every, you know, every few months that you're doing something else. Um, how are you approaching this phase of the career and the different brands that you're, you're building and developing?

A Yeah. So I, I shifted to this more of an incubator model, which is why I've been involved with so many things. So kind of going back to that, where I was within, within my family story, um, I felt, I realized I can still work really, really hard, but I needed flexibility in my life. And so I can be there for every school drop off, pick up, which I just absolutely love. And, um, being, you know, we're, we're very active, active family. Um, And so I just wanted flexibility, but I still wanted to keep working, working hard and always will. And so I've tried this incubator model where I create the concept going back to like, that's what I really love is building concepts, putting together the, the, and then trying to put together the team and, you know, the talent and the capital, and then, um, take a co-founder role, be very, very hands-on, but not be the CEO. And I found I've had really limited success in that, in that model. Um, Welly is one of the success stories that, that came out of it, but, um, Um, we turned that into a joint venture with Unilever very, very early, and the team there was a team I was able to promote up. Like, my head of sales at Ollie became our CEO. At, uh, Welly, he was with me also, uh, at Method. So, um, I've had the model, uh, work, but I've had two, two areas where I've tried the model that did not work. I did a, uh, a startup with Serena Williams and…

AI assessment note: “I shifted to this more of an incubator model, which is why I've been involved”

Q Why method? Why, why this category and why this company as your first step into this world?

A So I was spending a lot of time in grocery stores and I just started looking at the cleaning aisle because it was like this giant sea of sameness. So that was the clue dig here. And then going back to my planning skillset, trying to figure out like, okay, what is the big category insight or what I would call like a culture shift that the category was missing? And then I realized the, it was lifestyleing of the home. That you look at these products more than you actually use them. Like a, you know, a dish soap, it like has prime, prime real estate in your kitchen as like this little, you know, when I was like, why can't those be objects of desire versus it's like really designed to buy, to be bought, but not to live with. So, um, and I was really into home design and decor, and so it was kind of connecting the passion of that, of like, okay, well, what if we reframe this category as really, um, part of lifestyling of the home? And then Adam was my roommate. We lived with, like, six guys, this dirty flat in San Francisco. Like, this is not the Martha Stewart story by any means. And, uh, my roommates called me Marvin because I didn't like to clean. I think when I told my mom I was going to do this, she's like, I've never seen you make your bed. Are you really the right person to start a cleaning products business? And then as Adam and I started formulating the products, he had a d…

AI assessment note: “I just started looking at the cleaning aisle because it was like this giant sea of sameness.”

Q I'd love to spend a minute on Anthropic. Um, could you tell the story of how you all made the decision to invest there?

A Yes. So, uh, we were very close to cloud wave one, uh, saw the hyperscaler market play out, which really wasn't a venture capital game. Obviously, um, the winners, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, there could have been a case that one of the independent challengers emerged there, but, um, there was no one that's willing to fund the capital for those on the private markets, and we all missed it. Um, we didn't want to miss that again. Our belief is that the foundation models are going to be the new hyperscalers. And we don't do competitive investments, so we could only make one bet. And so we were very much looking for, um, who do we think was going to pull ahead several years out? But, uh, the better in Anthropic was that they would be one of those companies and that they had the chance to compete at the one slot, which we very much still think they do. And credit to, to co-investors there, uh, Matt Murphy at Menlo and Ravi at Lightspeed and some folks that, um, We're coming into the same round, and we're great collaborators and thought partners, and, and there's less of that venture these days, but, um, we would not have gotten there and, and without the ability to actually, you know, lock arms with a syndicate there and, and have real discussions, and, um, and thrilled we did, and very appreciative of Dario and Daniella and that team for being so bold to go all in and do it the righ…

AI assessment note: “Our belief is that the foundation models are going to be the new hyperscalers.”

Q And got them talking about their problems, and five, six, seven minutes in, he's completely adjusted the conversation to speak to what their needs are. And so that tension is often you walk in the room and you don't know your audience as well as you should. Right. So how do you get them in conversation so you can learn what you're actually want to be speaking to?

A I think you ask questions. You, you, you do your homework. You do your cyber stalking. You're checking out their LinkedIn profiles. You're, you're looking at their blog posts and, and sub stacks, but you, you come in inquisitive. I think curiosity is the best place to come in, in most communication, especially in pitching situations. You reflect what you're hearing. That's where paraphrasing comes in and you're watching for non-verbals and you're trying to see how are they responding, reacting. Non-verbals are not always the most accurate, but But paying attention can be very helpful. And then start down a path and test and check and see if, if this is a value to them. One of the things you said that I really want to emphasize is setting expectations at the beginning of the meeting when you said, Hey, if we're not connecting in 10 minutes, we don't do, most people don't do a good job of expectation setting leading up to meetings and events. I'll give you an example. I think the single best expectation setting tool for communication that we seldom use Is the calendar invite. We all send invites out with URLs. You can do so much in a calendar invite to set expectations. I challenge you the next time you schedule a meeting, don't put the word meeting in the title. It forces you to make it something that's more active and engaging. Put your expectations, your goals, maybe even your…

AI assessment note: “I think you ask questions. You, you, you do your homework.”

Q Let's talk about blanking out. Cause I just blanked out. I just, I had exactly where I wanted to go with my next question. I lost it. What do we do in those moments?

A When you blank out, a great thing to do is to do what you do when you lose your phone or your keys, go back to go forward, repeat yourself, say what you just said before. Most of us can remember that. And that often gives us enough to get on track. If not, find a way in conversation to distract your audience. So I teach the same class very often. I can't remember. Did I say this in this class? Did I say that yesterday? So I'll, I'll lose my train of thought. So what I'll do is I'll just pause. And if you ever hear me say this, it means I've forgotten what I need to say. I will say, let's pause and think about how, what we've just discussed impacts your life. And what my students do is they think about that. And that gives me that fraction of a second. So can you leverage a question? Can you get somebody responding or doing something to buy that time for yourself? I call it a back pocket question. You should have something you can pull out. So when you blank out, repeat yourself. If that doesn't get you back on track, ask some other peripheral question that you've thought about, um, you know, in your role right now, just like you asked me earlier, you could simply say, what's something I should be asking you.

AI assessment note: “When you blank out, a great thing to do is... repeat yourself”

Q If you were counseling a group of entrepreneurs, um, of, of aspiring business leaders, What would you be saying to them about how to use boredom, downtime, blank space to, to grow in their professional?

A Oh, for them. Don't let tech steal your boredom. Don't let tech steal your blank space. And that means you have to do it on purpose. And so one of the things that I strongly recommend, remember that your best ideas come in the shower and that's because your phone isn't in there. So I have a set of protocols of tech free times and zones that I recommend, especially to entrepreneurs That need the default mode network more than they understand. I recommend the Brahma Mahurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator's time. Get up at least a half an hour before dawn and an hour long walk without devices. It's a good protocol to reprogram your brain for 30 days. It's a really good thing to do. And for entrepreneurs, if you're finding that your creativity is taking a nosedive and you don't know why, this is your reboot.

AI assessment note: “Don't let tech steal your boredom. Don't let tech steal your blank space.”

Q Amy, we, you know, past this prologue, we look to history for examples of, of, Lessons both what to do and not to do. Is there an example from corporate history of where a company either saw convergence, ah, coming and, and evolved its business as a consequence or didn't that is a good lesson here?

A I've got a great example for you, and, um, it is a news organization in Norway called Shibsted. Uh, so it's okay if you've never heard of it. It is like one of the largest and most profitable to this day news organizations, and it is because they saw a convergence coming and were able to take action on it in the right amount of time. So this was back in the nineties. Newspapers up until that point, pre-internet, were, uh, the business model was subscriptions and advertisements. Ads overwhelmingly were what funded those news organizations, not the subscriptions. So they see the internet starting to launch. They see commercial applications. And Shibsad did the one thing that every other news organization did not. And they said, we think this ad model is probably not going to survive. Let's start, uh, figuring out what business models, what distribution, what a world looks like, where we Don't just rely on print ads, and we figure out a way to make what we're doing work in this new internet age. Um, and it's not a story that most people outside of Scandinavia have ever heard of, um, but inside of Scandinavia, it's kind of a, it's a famous story, and in fact, Harvard was interested and published a whole case study about it, uh, which anybody can access online. So that's an example of Again, where is the world going? Right. In that case, the world was going towards this new converge…

AI assessment note: “I've got a great example for you, and, um, it is a news organization in Norway”

Q The, the court issued the ruling it did in 2018. What did it unleash?

A That was the moment where real money wagering sports betting and iGaming was now legal, and it was up to the states to decide, right? There was no longer a federal ban on online sports betting, so state by state, you could decide if you wanted to legalize sports betting and iGaming, and, you know, there were, ah, early advocates, ah, like, like Governor Christie, but there were, you know, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and, you know, Michigan and a number of states that legalized quite quickly. And what we found is that there was just phenomenal demand. And, you know, for us, we had a huge advantage because we had a, a very engaged set of users who were already using our daily fantasy sports product. So we were able to migrate them over beautifully to our online sports betting product. Now fast forward to. 2026. We're sitting here, uh, Super Bowl weekend. There are 25 states. 50% of the U.S. can bet legally online, but 50% can't.

AI assessment note: “That was the moment where real money wagering sports betting and iGaming was now legal”

Q What was it about the team that made you so excited to work with them?

A When I met the top team, when I met Christian and Matt and so many of the other folks, the Andy Gencamelli, who was COO at the time, I could see myself working with them day in and day out, right? And when you think about it, we spend more time with our colleagues than we do at times, our family and friends, and you really have to like, trust, and respect that team. But the other thing that really drew me, this company lives their principles and the values in a way that I've Literally never seen any other company, right? And, you know, most people can recite them. We talk about being humble and hungry, which is hugely relevant in today's world where things are changing so quickly, right? We are one team. We're going to win with integrity. We say thank you. So these principles are not just in a, a nice placard that are on the wall, but they literally drive the behavior of the top team and the entire organization. And that was meaningful to me.

AI assessment note: “these principles are not just in a, a nice placard that are on the wall”

Q We're having this conversation in the great state of California. Um, I cannot use your core product in California. Why not?

A So, California is a very ripe topic, and let me just to, to contextualize the question, think about this. There is easily a ten billion dollar illegal market in California. The demand is there, right? You've got 13% of the population, and that's probably a conservative number. The reason you can't is because it needs to be We tried to get it on the ballot in 22, and we weren't successful. Um, we are working very successfully right now with and through the tribes. At the end of the day, um, you know, the, what, the most important driver of legalizing sports betting in California will be working with the tribes to make sure that we can protect tribal sovereignty. There are well over a hundred tribes in the state of California, and we learned our lesson in the 22 election. Um, you know, we tried to align with them, and we weren't successful. Coming out of that, we completely rebooted our strategy. Uh, I hired, um, folks who came from the tribes, and so they're working alongside and, um, but we know we need to, we, you know, spend a lot of time listening. Uh, we were on an extended apology tour. Uh, we definitely licked our chops, um, and we're working with them, uh, right now to figure out how do we safely open up California in a way that works for them. And ultimately, um, you know, cautiously optimistic that we'll get there, but we'll do it on their timeline.

AI assessment note: “The reason you can't is because... We tried to get it on the ballot in 22”

Q on them, makes you more copyable, et cetera, you know, Business attributes. So one of the things that the people who listen to our podcast a lot are entrepreneurs. You're navigating a business challenge that they need to learn from. So how do you think about that? What are the things that you're doing to build unique and enduring business? What are the kinds of considerations that go into that?

A First thing I would say is user obsession. There's a massive platform called LMS, right? That platform is useful on its own. People can use it directly, but for you to build a very valuable business on top of what kind of value you're creating, One is, if you're really obsessive over certain types of users, OpenAI can't build for every type of user in the world, so pick a user that you know very well, hopefully it's you. You've had that experience, you're, you're a salesperson, you were gonna build the best L.M. for salespeople, right? That goes into UI, UX, all of that. Now, second, and this, this might comment, I'll go a little deeper on the comment about the environment around it. So, You know, I said that people in, uh, using Replit should feel like they're in safe environment. Uh, it, it should feel like anything is reversible. Now that turns out to be a huge technical challenge. Now you could easily kind of hack around it or say, you know, we'll just, you know, restart the app or do whatever. But what we did is we built a transactional file system that allows undo. Like we have proprietary file system that we spent two years building that every action is like an immutable Part of a ledger that anything can be rolled back and roll forward. That ends up being like a time travel system. And now we're finding more use cases for it. For example, one way to make, um, models bet…

AI assessment note: “what we did is we built a transactional file system that allows undo”

Q So now we're moving to our rapid fire. That doesn't mean you have to answer rapid fire. There's this questions we, we ask all of our guests. Um, is there a movie song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

A You know, a book that I think is, is, is amazing that it pulls together everything that I love. I really love learning about theory of consciousness, theory of mind, the philosophy of that. I like computers and math and physics and all of that. I like the human aspect of human stories. Um, I am a strange loop by Douglas, uh, Hoff Satter is, is an amazing book. It's partly about his, a book about his wife dying and their kids and, and how, how, His personal story in that. There's also a book about him struggling with the concept of soul, and kind of trying to understand it in a, like, more secular way, in a, like, mathematical way. It, it goes through vignettes about, like, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, or what that says about, um, about how consciousness is potentially, like, a loop, and it's, it's, it's an amazing book that tells you that, like, really everything is interconnected, and we can't be, Technical or innovators without actually caring about all the other things that happens in our world.

AI assessment note: “I am a strange loop by Douglas, uh, Hoff Satter is, is an amazing book.”

Q Right. That they then pivot into something else that there's, Singularly focused on. Was that an impulse of yours?

A I didn't think at the time there could be a replacement. And I think many of us probably experienced that when you really are in something like that laser focused blinders on from the time you're six. You don't even have a full understanding of what the world has to offer. And it was actually my dad who helped unlock my next step for me. So he gave me really good advice the summer before my freshman year of college. He said, Maya, you have been wearing these blinders for about a decade. Your job this summer is to enter exploration mode. I want you to read as much as you can possibly read. I want you to watch as much as you can possibly watch. Talk to people from all walks of life. Just figure out what people are doing and what kinds of things they can do. Um, but importantly, do this whole thing without an end goal in mind, because the minute you try to figure out like, okay, what's my major gonna be? You're gonna pre prematurely limit yourself, right? And it was during that period of exploration that I stumbled upon the first book I ever read about the science of the human mind.

AI assessment note: “I didn't think at the time there could be a replacement.”

Q What, what did you learn from that experience that folks who are at big companies, or even mid-sized companies, and are struggling to, to be entrepreneurial in environments that are inherently not, um, that, that can help them be better at their jobs where, where they are today?

A Yeah. My boss, Um, called each of his teammates policy entrepreneurs from day one. He wanted us to have that innovative mindset within a very rigid system. And when we saw barriers to actually try to figure out creative workarounds, I have a few answers to your question. I think in part, actually, I benefited from some naivete. I had never worked in government before. I was not disenchanted. And so when I ran up against barriers, I was like, okay, we'll find another way forward. And I don't know if I would meet those challenges with the same result today. The other thing was the importance of aligning incentives. So when I would talk to my government agency colleagues, I knew that there was actually very little incentive for them to partner with me because what's the benefit of taking a risk? I mean, they work with me. Maybe it's revealed that their program's not working as effectively as they thought it did. They might get in trouble with their boss. And so what I had to do was approach the conversation in a way where I made it clear that I was actually going to be helping them achieve their goal more effectively and efficiently. So I'd ask them, okay, you work in the Department of Education. What are, what are your goals for this year? As a behavioral scientist, I'm going to help you get to that goal using tools that represent our best understanding of human behavior. Now you…

AI assessment note: “framed what you're doing as actually complementary to their efforts rather than sitting as like”

Q was your husband who suggested that you, um, Name five things that you're grateful for, um, uh, which is a, uh, a Hoffman Institute practice, which, which, um, we can have a whole other conversation about. Um, and then, and then also the concept of, of awe. Um, could you, could you just share a little bit about both of those as practices to navigate through, through grief and change?

A So as you said, on the night of the second miscarriage, when we found out about the twins, um, my husband came into the room, and he's a software engineer, so he unknowingly engaged me in what's called a self-affirmation exercise. So what's a self-affirmation exercise? You just take five or 10 minutes, and you write down all the identities, all the things you really value in your life that give your life great meaning, but that importantly are not threatened by the change you're going through. So for example, if you're having, if you're in a rough patch in your work life, you might emphasize your spiritual life. If you're having a rough go at it in your relationship, you might emphasize that you, um, are so grateful for your friendships or for the community and the PTA that you're part of. So Jimmy comes into our bedroom, and I'm like under the covers feeling very sorry for myself, and he's like, Mai, Mai's his pet name for me, he's like, Mai, just, let's just name a couple things we're grateful for, and I was like, hell no, ok? I do not want to do this right now. You take your toxic positivity nonsense and like go into the corner, you do the gratitude exercise. Um, but I was not having it. It was such a jarring Day, Jeff. Like, we had seen healthy heartbeats earlier in the day, and then we found out this devastating news, so I just felt like it was a rollercoaster of emotions,…

AI assessment note: “he unknowingly engaged me in what's called a self-affirmation exercise.”

Q Um, if they want to think about making a massive career change, not trading Ford for Chevy, but, but really going in a, in a whole other direction, um, how should someone begin approaching that process?

A That's a great question. Um, One of the things I talk about and I write about in The Other Side of Change is around how we can realize the possible selves that we envision for us. And I tap into the science of motivation in this space. The biggest thing that I would recommend Is to not let perfect be the enemy of good, and to start really small. The difference between writing zero minutes a day, and one minute a day, is that in one world, you're not, you're not anything. Sorry, you're not something, you're not anything, sorry. The difference between writing zero minutes a day, and writing one minute a day, is that in the one minute world, you're a writer. And when you prime that identity, it's self-reinforcing. It leads to a virtuous cycle. And so, I'm thinking about one of the people that I interviewed, Duane, who was sentenced to nine years in prison after a carjacking he committed when he was 16, and Through a series of events, he actually decides to become a poet in prison, and he just commits to writing poems every single day. That's how he gets started, and soon it starts to add up, and all of a sudden he's written a thousand poems by the end of the year, and then he gets his first poem published while he's in prison, and then he goes on to become a Yale Law School graduate and MacArthur Genius Fellow, and, um, today is writing some of the most stirring poetry I've ever r…

AI assessment note: “recommend Is to not let perfect be the enemy of good, and to start really small.”

Q the same time, holy that this is a big hill to climb. This is not easy. You've got a legacy institution in a, In a sector that's in decline and, and all of it, um, when the opportunity presented itself, when you, when you were sitting there deciding, am I going to do this? Um, I'm sure you're excited about it for so many reasons, but how daunting was it?

A You know, it's, it's funny to go back to that. So this was twenty-twenty. I took the job. It was announced in December of twenty-twenty, right? In the middle of COVID. And there were two really salient facts. One, I knew The economics of the Atlantic were terrible, right? And they'd been reported that they were losing 20, thirty million dollars a year. They laid off 20% of their staff. They shut down the whole live team. They fired the whole video team, right? David Bradley had written this effusive memo. It was very complicated. You know, this is the time of George Floyd. It's the time of COVID. So I knew it was in deep financial trouble, right? I knew it was incredibly important. I grew up in Boston, where the Atlantic was founded, where it was based when I was a child. Like this has, it's a real cultural touch Tone for me. Um, but the other salient fact was that the journalism was amazing, right? And I knew that because I'd been competing with it, right? And I'd been running the newsroom at Wired while we were competing with the Atlantic on stories on COVID. And when I thought, you know, if the journalism wasn't amazing, not a fixable situation, but journalism is amazing. I know how to run a playbook where the New Yorker, we built a digital subscription model. We built Thriving website, advertising business, all kinds of naturally business that, like, really worked. We did t…

AI assessment note: “I knew The economics of the Atlantic were terrible, right? And they'd been reported”

Q And cumin on top of it. Um, when, when you got there, what did you see? What did you learn where you were either like, holy I can't believe we have to deal with this too. Or we were like, oh my gosh, this opportunity, I didn't realize how big this opportunity here was.

A Um, well, it's interesting because when I came in, I saw a couple opportunities that didn't matter, right? I was like, wow, right? Like, they haven't digitized their archives, right? That's crazy. Like, go back to 1857, like, the archives aren't readily accessible. Like, let's just do that. It'll cost two million dollars to do it, and then we'll generate, like, tons of traffic, Google SEO, right? Like, we'll be able to run, like, an archival playbook like we did at The New Yorker where, you know, and we digitized the archives. It's a great project. So glad we did it. Does it generate Millions of dollars? No, it does not, right? Um, second thing, I was like, well, you know, Wired, we build this incredible affiliate business model, right? We review gadgets and people buy, we get an Amazon commission. I was like, we'll do that through books at the Atlantic. We'll figure out, we build that. It generates like 7000 dollars a year, right? It doesn't matter. What did matter, right, was, okay, wait, we have this paywall. And we have this great journalism. Let's figure out the math. And then we'll just do hundreds of tests. I think we ran 230 tests last year on different variables involving essentially the paywall. And so we just start this kind of, this is actually comes from covering the tech industry, right? Where you watch and like, how does, you cover Amazon and like, A, they have t…

AI assessment note: “What did matter, right, was, okay, wait, we have this paywall.”

Q Tell us about your father and, and specifically, what did you learn about your father in the process of researching and writing the book?

A Big question. My father, remarkable guy, grows up in tricky circumstances in Oklahoma, and then it's like the world's fastest rise up the American meritocracy, right? Andover scholarship, Stanford scholarship, Rhodes scholarship, Stanford marries into Paul Nitz's family. My mother comes from this prominent DC family and like Scott Thompson's on top of the world, right? And then, um, it doesn't work, right? Like everyone's, this guy's gonna be president, he's gonna be secretary of state, he's gonna be president of the university, and it's kind of, you know, it's, life's hard, right? You can be a really promising kid and a really promising student, and you can have what it takes to succeed at Stanford and not what it takes to succeed in Washington. And, uh, he starts to drink too much, gets a little depressed, you know, it's not really working, and then he comes to this realization that he's gay, um, after I'm born. Then by the end of his life, he's running something kind of like a brothel in Bali as this ridiculous sex addiction. He's bankrupt. So, you know, watching his rise and then the downward trajectory of his later years, during which he's also a loving father and an interesting guy, um, it was hard to live through and it was hard to process as a writer. And so your question is like what I learned while writing the book and I think my view of him matured while I was writin…

AI assessment note: “I think my view of him matured while I was writing the book.”

Q It's one thing to have this insight to change your diet, to have the experience It's another thing to say, I want to help other people make this change in their life. It's yet another thing to, to start doing it. How, how did you actually start? What was the first thing you did?

A Probably the very first thing that I did was start working on recipes, and I didn't know exactly where I was going just yet. I was thinking about how to use the simplest ingredients possible to create nutrient-dense, easy-to-eat solutions. I was thinking about maybe it's meal kits, maybe it's an easier way of Um, you know, being able to cook salmon for yourself in the evening and a sauce that goes alongside that, or, or maybe it's a, um, a recipe for a bread or a bread mix, uh, that can go alongside your dinner. And, and so as I started experimenting more in the mixes and playing with different ingredients, then that's really where I started going down this vein of developing baking mixes that are made out of really, at the time, extremely unconventional ingredients. Uh, so, so, uh, if anyone knows anything about our brand, we make a lot of things out of almond flour, so these mixes are made out of almond flour, um, and this is a time where nothing in the grocery store is made out of almond flour. Uh, I think it had just shown up as an ingredient on shelves, and then I'm thinking about, okay, what do I sweeten it with, and my mom finds coconut sugar on the internet, and I'm like, oh, cool, this is a, this is a much better sweetener, And so, and so start developing these products in my kitchen. Mixing things together. Seeing how they react. And, um, yeah. Until I get a recipe th…

AI assessment note: “Probably the very first thing that I did was start working on recipes”

Q Did you have a vision of, of what that would be for you?

A Well, if you had asked me in sixth grade, What I saw as my future. I thought I would practice law in Washington state, and at some point move into the public sector, and I was determined that I would eventually be the first female president of the United States. And I was so earnest as a twelve-year-old that I remember I actually sat down and made a list of who my cabinet would be. And I remember very distinctly that one of my best friends at that time, I decided She just wasn't there for vice president, and I gave her secretary of interior, and I remember she kind of went, I broke the news to her, and she went skipping off, and when she went skipping off, I thought, I knew she didn't have president, she wasn't vice presidential material. What I didn't anticipate is that my career would take me to Salesforce, to being a CFO, and then now to being CEO of Director Life.

AI assessment note: “I thought I would practice law in Washington state, and at some point move”

Q I have been so looking forward to this chat. Um, uh, before we, we dive in to mentorship and the company you built and, um, uh, what you're up to now, um, I, I'd love to just start with where, where did you first get the entrepreneurial bug? Where, where did it come from for you?

A Being a proud daughter of immigrants, my parents always taught us to think about how we could amplify our lives and live as big as possible. While my parents did face hardships, they always instilled the importance of education and problem solving and how you can continue to work to improve yourself. And so, one of the games we grew up with, um, to answer your question around entrepreneurship, around the dinner table, my Dad would ask myself and my two siblings, ah, to play this game of what was a problem that either you or your peers encountered at school, or you saw, you know, on the bus home, wherever, that you would want to build a business around. What problem would it solve? Who would you sell it to? I mean, he would ask questions around, not realizing what it was, but just what would be the go to market strategy? How big do you think the TAM actually is and things. And Out of myself and my two siblings, they definitely were kind of rolling their eyes at it and weren't as enthused, but eleven-year-old Janice was locked in. That was my favorite time of the day because I've always thought in an entrepreneurial space. I've always come from a space of empathy and wanting to help others. And the way that my brain would light up in solving those problems and getting that sort of dopamine response of, okay, there's a, I'm I might be 11, but my contributions to the world could be…

AI assessment note: “around the dinner table, my Dad would ask myself and my two siblings”

Q busy people, so can we just spend a minute on how did, how you persuaded them? You don't have a product yet, you have an idea, you're, Super compelling. You're energized. You're fired up. But, but, but to persuade people to come be an advisor to a company that doesn't really have a product yet and help you shape it, like how, how did you get them to do that?

A In 2018, I got accepted into the MassChallenge Accelerator. I made a very specific MassChallenge list, looking at previous sponsors, looking at partners, and looking at those who were in the mentor registry of where they were working, cross-referenced that with HR leaders within those organizations, made a spreadsheet in my Google Doc so that I could go to specific Mentors. I also cross-referenced with things like best places to work and wanted to make sure from a values perspective that I was only speaking to companies where they either in the press or in some way, shape or form has, have indicated an interest in an enjoyable work experience. So by having that list, um, anytime I was meeting with a mentor or there was some energy around like, oh, how can we help? And otherwise I knew exactly who I wanted to meet from that first conversation. You know, I, I sequenced a lot of my mentor conversations based on the companies that I saw were hiring pretty aggressively at that point and thinking, okay, well, there's a use case there around new hire onboarding. So five of the 10 people I want to meet, I'll pitch that concept and see what they think. I never came in thinking that I was going to save an entire company's problems. I always approach these leaders as Can I have 15 minutes of your time? I am too early for you to purchase this. So I'm just, just so you know, I'm not selling…

AI assessment note: “I'm not selling you yet... if you can just give me some advice”

Q So Janice, you, you've, you've got your first paying customer, you get into the accelerator program, you, you move to Austin, you're building and you're scaling, and then you've got a curve ball, the pretty big one that comes in your personal life. Can you, can you tell us what, what happened there and, and how that changed your, your trajectory and your, your path?

A Yeah. So at the end of 2017, my mom grew gravely ill. Then top of 2018, ah, January third, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer stage four. So we'd anticipated about four months based on what the surgeon said, but we, um, were very fortunate and grateful to have had eight months, um, with her before her, before her passing. And that was I, I always try to find some type of movie analogy when I talk about this, but there isn't one. Someone who has loved and lost a core piece of themselves through a parent knows that there's, there isn't an equivalent to it. You know, I used to call it my sort of Christian Bale, Dark Knight sort of origin story. And in a way, yeah, it is. But It was really a strong motivator in reflecting on the power of what I was building, and what it could do for an individual. So, I get into MassChallenge. I called my mom, asked for her blessing, and she said, absolutely, this is what I immigrated for. Like, you have to go. And so, I was going back and forth between DC and Austin during that four month period of the program, making sure I could go to chemo appointments and I, I was still getting that quality time. Um, at the same time, you know, pitching the business, continuing to grow, it was a, I, I don't have an explanation for the way it felt to see my star rising and my business starting to grow. As my mother and the nexus and the reason I even was …

AI assessment note: “at the end of 2017, my mom grew gravely ill.”

Q What big decisions have you made differently because of this significantly evolved perspective on the world?

A Yeah, that's a great question. Um, you know, you can make the same decision from fear or love, like the exact same one. You can fire someone from a place of fear or from a place of love. I would say, you know, it, it enabled me to make some pretty bold choices against resistance when before this happened, I had caved in to, to criticism. Um, it inspired me when I came back from this to change the business being from Being focused on celebrities to focused on prizes. That was a huge change for us. We got a lot of resistance from our board and the team, but I was not scared of what people thought of me in that decision. Um, I felt like I was making it from a place of expansion rather from a place of fear. We made the decision to focus just on the UK, stop operations in the US. Cause we didn't feel like we had enough money to do both markets. That was a very unpopular decision. Like, I don't think I would have been able to do either of those decisions before this happened.

AI assessment note: “change the business being from Being focused on celebrities to focused on prizes.”

Q Fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so, so you had best ball at draft, and was that the kernel of what you were gonna launch Underdog with?

A So best ball was a game that people really, really fell in love with. And as draft got forced to merge in a fan duel, fan duel was going to shut down draft. And when that ultimately happened, um, it was a really bittersweet day on the internet for me. I mean, there were over a thousand tweets of people just saying, just devastated, like this sucks. People were really bummed. And that day we were in a, we were in a text thread with a bunch of the early folks from the draft team. Um, And, and Brandon, my, my co-founder at Draft, or sorry, at Underdog was just like, hey, let's, let's go build this. Let's do it again. Um, and I knew that best ball itself wasn't big enough. On its own, but there were these other forms of fantasy that we knew of that we had built in the past that we could add in. And now sports betting is here. So the market just got way bigger.

AI assessment note: “and I knew that best ball itself wasn't big enough. On its own, but”

Q subjects of conversation in our audience and community is, um, uh, the challenge of leading a largely hybrid or remote workforce. Um, how you create and maintain culture and connection and all of it, and That's a form of a design challenge. Um, are there creative acts or curious people that are particularly helpful for, for teams that are working this way and leaders who are leading teams this way?

A Yeah, one of the activities that's in the book is actually inspired exactly by the context that you're describing. So, um, Glenn Fajardo, who's been teaching at the d.school for a long time, created this amazing assignment called the wordless conversation, in which you simply, the goal is to have a rich, um, empathy-building interaction with a colleague or a, or someone else in your class, uh, without using words. Because often language barriers hold up That process of developing a real connection. And so, in this process, you, ah, like, set a timer, and on the hour, every hour, you send a photo to your partner, and then that person responds. And maybe it's a photo exactly from their, you know, environment at that moment, or maybe it's a, it's a conversation. So, if I send you, you know, a picture of the bowl of oatmeal I ate for breakfast, you might say, ooh, like, that's food. Like, let me, let me respond in kind. And we start to build You know, uh, uh, uh, uh, interaction and a connection through something that doesn't require us to already have met or to be on the same page or to have, uh, even a language in common.

AI assessment note: “created this amazing assignment called the wordless conversation”

Q I've been super excited about this conversation, and, um, I wanna, I wanna go back and get some of the history from you, but before we do, I'm not sure that people realize how big Shark Ninja is. Can you just kind of set the stage for us and tell us how big the company is today?

A Yeah, sure. Uh, you know, our guidance, our full year guidance puts us at over six billion dollars of revenue this year. We're in 37 different product categories, which I think surprised most people, as they might say, I have a Ninja air fryer or a shark vacuum. I mean, we sell 37 different categories of products. We built two multi-billion dollar brands. I mean, in fact, you know, we've never acquired a dollar of revenue in the company's history, and we built these two brands this year that will each be over three billion dollars in revenue from scratch. And, um, we're in 26 countries around the world, and so, you know, scale, diversification, um, But, you know, still innovating. I mean, we still feel like there's a lot more places for us to go inside and outside the home.

AI assessment note: “our full year guidance puts us at over six billion dollars of revenue this year.”