I found true liberation when I stopped caring what people think.

And I don’t say that lightly. It changed everything about how I live, how I speak, how I react, how I show up. There is a freedom in it that I cannot fully put into words, but once you feel it, you cannot unfeel it.

We spend so much of our lives consumed by it. What will they think? Will they misunderstand me? Will they think I am rude? Too much? Not enough? And all of that noise, all of that second-guessing quietly shrinks you. It keeps you performing a version of yourself for an audience that isn’t even paying as much attention as you think.

Here is what I know now. If you know your intentions, if you know who you are at your core, and you are not guilty of doing anything wrong, there is nothing to defend. Nothing to explain. Nothing to shrink for.

I won’t pretend it is easy. It took me 36 years to get here. And sometimes I think if I had realised this earlier, how much I would have done differently? But then I remember the journey is what got me here. Every part of it.

This life is yours to create. Yours to build into exactly what you want it to be. Yes, circumstance matters. Access matters. The birth lottery is real. But don’t start by looking at what others have. Start with what you have. And from there climb. It might take longer. But your days will be happier. I truly believe that.

I have been happiest building what I love and spending my days with the people I actually want to be around.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

How did I get to not caring?

These are the things that actually moved the needle for me

Reading more

Reading truly changed my life. The more I read, the more I understood myself. The more I understood the world. The more I stopped needing external validation to feel grounded in who I am.

The book Let Them by Mel Robbins

This one was crucial. The first time I read it, it liberated me. It validated something I had been feeling but didn’t have the words for yet. If you haven’t read it, read it.

Changing my circle

As I started creating distance from people who were bringing me down, people who made me question myself, people who drained my energy without adding anything back, everything shifted. You don’t realise how much weight you are carrying until you put it down.

Discipline and working out

When you commit to something hard, when you show up for yourself physically, consistently, it changes what you believe you are capable of. That belief bleeds into everything else. You stop doubting yourself as much. You start trusting yourself more.

And one more thing — this one might surprise you.

I used AI to generate an image of the future I am building. The life I am working toward. And seeing myself there visually, concretely, became one of the biggest sources of motivation I have ever had. Everything else starts to become noise when you can actually see where you are going.

What I’m Reading

The Cold Start Problem - Andrew Chen(Currently Reading)

Explores why platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, and Facebook struggled in their earliest days and how they overcame the challenge of building network effects from zero. The book offers a practical framework for entrepreneurs on how to create momentum, reach critical mass, and turn a small community into a thriving network.

Crush It - Gary Vee (Reading)

I want to use this as a guide for building.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

Identity, Nuance, and Building the Media Company South Asians Deserve | Hiba Irshad

The Startup Lawyer Breaking Every Rule, and Writing Better Ones - Aravinda Seshadri

Under the Hood

How Three Startups Broke Three Different Monopolies

Note to Self

You are not performing for anyone.

You know your intentions. You know who you are at your core. That is enough. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for how you live, what you choose, or who you are becoming.

Stop shrinking for rooms that were never built for the fullest version of you.

The people who are meant to understand you will.

The ones who don’t — let them.

This life is yours. Build it accordingly.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Three companies did exactly that.

• Warby Parker attacked an economic monopoly built on vertical integration.

• Uber dismantled a government-protected monopoly propped up by artificial scarcity.

• Spotify survived a platform monopoly enforced by a 30% tax on its own existence.

Each fight was different. Each win was instructive.

The Economic Monopoly: Luxottica and Warby Parker

Before Warby Parker existed, the eyewear industry was one of the most quietly predatory monopolies in American consumer goods. Starting in 1961 as a small workshop in Agordo, Italy, Luxottica grew from a parts manufacturer into a vertically integrated empire, designing, making, distributing, and selling glasses all under one roof. Over decades, it executed a simple but devastating playbook: buy everything. It acquired Ray-Ban in 1999, Oakley in 2007, and built a portfolio that let it dictate industry trends and set pricing standards across both luxury and sports eyewear. Then it bought the stores. After acquiring Sunglass Hut and LensCrafters, Luxottica controlled an estimated 80% of luxury eyewear manufacturing and roughly 50–60% of global retail optical. You didn’t choose to work with Luxottica. You realized you had to.

The result for consumers was brutal. Frames were being sold at prices 20 to 25 times their manufacturing cost. A $13 frame hitting shelves at $300 or more wasn’t a pricing quirk; it was the system working exactly as designed.

The four Wharton students who founded Warby Parker in 2010 stumbled into this while researching why glasses were so expensive. The answer kept coming back to one company. Luxottica had a near-monopoly on the eyeglass and sunglasses market; prices were too high, products weren’t great, and the shopping experience was poor.

Their insight wasn’t just that the prices were wrong; it was why they were wrong. Luxottica’s power came from owning every link in the chain. So Warby Parker built their own chain. They created a vertically integrated model that bypassed retailers and middlemen, transferring the cost savings directly to consumers. Glasses started at $95. The Home Try-On program ships five frames to your door, solving the one genuine objection to buying glasses online: you can’t see how they look on your face.

As co-founder Neil Blumenthal put it, “The market charges too much for glasses, and that was due to a consolidation of power within the industry that had been built up over decades,” which was exactly what allowed Warby to come in and charge $95 for a $500 product.

By 2025, Warby Parker had reached $872 million in annual revenue with 323 retail stores across North America. They didn’t beat Luxottica at its own game. They changed the game entirely.

The Government Monopoly: Taxi Medallions and Uber

Luxottica’s monopoly was built through acquisition. The taxi industry was built through legislation, which made it, in some ways, even harder to crack.

The medallion system was a masterpiece of artificial scarcity. Cities required taxi companies to purchase government-issued medallions to operate legally. The supply was capped. The cap meant prices stayed high. In New York City, medallion prices peaked at over $1 million each. The system benefited medallion holders enormously and consumers almost not at all. No competition meant no incentive to improve service, invest in technology, or lower prices.

Uber’s origin story is almost too clean: Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn’t get a cab in Paris in 2008. That frustration became a company. But the real strategic insight wasn’t the app; it was the classification. Uber entered as a technology company, not a taxi company. Drivers weren’t taxi drivers. They were independent contractors using personal vehicles. That framing put Uber outside the regulatory framework that the medallion system depended on. You can’t require a software platform to buy a taxi medallion.

From there, Uber’s expansion followed a deliberate sequence: target young, affluent, tech-comfortable early adopters in dense urban markets; build supply and demand simultaneously on both sides of the marketplace; deliver an experience so obviously superior to taxis that switching became reflexive. GPS tracking, cashless payment, upfront pricing, and two-way ratings were each a direct attack on a specific failure of the incumbent.

The medallion system collapsed not because regulators dismantled it, but because consumers stopped caring about it. By the time cities fought back with new regulations, Uber was already embedded in daily life. The monopoly didn’t lose a regulatory battle. It lost the consumer.

The Platform Monopoly: Apple and Spotify

Warby Parker’s enemy owned the supply chain. Uber’s enemy owned the permits. Spotify’s enemy owned the device.

When Spotify launched in 2008 and expanded to the US in 2011, the company faced two simultaneous existential threats. The first was the music industry itself, alarmed by the sudden erosion of their business, the major record labels finally signed licensing deals with Spotify and quietly took an estimated 14% combined stake in the company. The second threat was Apple, which controlled the platform through which most people would actually discover and use Spotify.

The mechanics of Apple’s leverage were precise. Apple took a 30% cut of any Spotify subscription paid through the App Store. One of Spotify’s main competitors was Apple Music, which paid no such toll. Apple also prohibited Spotify from telling its own users that cheaper subscription options existed outside the app. In many cases, getting app approvals required sharing proprietary strategies with Apple, Spotify’s biggest competitor, with no restrictions on what Apple could do with that information.

The competitive math was simple and ugly: Spotify either absorbed the 30% tax and made its premium tier more expensive than Apple Music, or it removed in-app purchases entirely and accepted a worse user experience. Either way, Apple won.

Spotify’s response was to fight on three fronts simultaneously. It scaled aggressively to build the kind of user base that made it impossible to ignore — Spotify not only had to build its own brand, but it also had to educate an entire customer base about the benefits of streaming. It was the icebreaker that cut the path through which Apple, Amazon, YouTube, and others could follow. It diversified its revenue base, pouring resources into podcasts to reduce dependence on music royalties. And in 2019, it went nuclear: CEO Daniel Ek filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission, accusing Apple of abusing its control over the App Store to stifle competition and restrict consumer choice.

The regulatory campaign took five years. In March 2024, the European Commission fined Apple nearly $2 billion — the first-ever antitrust penalty levied by the EU against Apple, and four times higher than insiders had predicted. The ruling forced Apple to allow Spotify to show pricing information to EU users and link directly to external purchase pages. The 30% tax on music streaming was effectively over in Europe.

Spotify finally reached profitability in 2024. It took sixteen years. The platform monopoly didn’t fall to a clever product feature or a better user experience. It fell to a sustained regulatory campaign backed by the weight of Spotify’s 600 million users.

The Pattern Underneath

The pattern underneath is clear: the companies that break monopolies do not fight the incumbent’s surface; they attack the mechanism that makes the incumbent powerful. Warby Parker did not try to become a fancier Luxottica; it built a new supply chain and a new way to buy glasses. Uber did not ask for a better place inside the taxi system; it made the taxi system itself feel outdated. Spotify could not go around Apple, so it moved fast enough, scaled hard enough, and changed listening behavior enough to make the old gatekeeping less effective.

That is the real founder lesson. We are often trained to optimize for caution, for narrow niches, for staying out of the incumbent’s line of fire. But the companies that matter most are the ones that see the structure clearly and build something that makes that structure irrelevant. The monopoly is never the full story. The mechanism is. And once you see the mechanism, disruption stops looking like rebellion and starts looking like strategy.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Episode Description

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Hiba joins me for a conversation about identity, belonging, entrepreneurship, and what it truly means to bet on yourself before the path is clear.

Hiba is the founder of Twenty5% — a hybrid agency, studio, and media company for the South Asian and Muslim community. Her path to get here was anything but conventional: pre-med, cancer research at Northwestern, a pivot into the music industry, and eventually building the company she always knew the world needed — even when the world hadn’t asked for it yet.

But this conversation goes far beyond business.

We talk about:

• Growing up Indian and Muslim in the Midwest — and owning every part of that identity

• Leaving behind three high-paying pharmaceutical job offers to chase something she couldn’t fully name

• What the music industry taught her about creativity, community, and herself

• Cold outreach, cold starts, and why relationships are everything

• Bootstrapping Twenty5% and why she’s never had a scarcity mindset

• What real representation looks like — and why nuance is the only way forward

• The daily battle with self-doubt, and the gratitude practice that pulls her back

Hiba’s story is a reminder that the world doesn’t always have a blueprint for what you’re building. Sometimes you have to be the one to draw it.

🎧 Listen to the episode

Youtube | Spotify | Apple

Favorite Quote

"If you focus on what you've left behind, you'll never see what lies ahead." — From Ratatouille

But she puts her own spin on it: don't ignore your past, learn from it. That's where resilience lives.

Favorite Books

No Rules Rules — the Netflix culture book. Learnings that stuck.

In This Episode

(00:00)Why Hiba leads with where she's from, not what she's done
(04:00) Growing up Indian and Muslim post-9/11
(08:00) How her parents raised her to be unapologetically herself
(12:00) Pre-med to cancer research, the path that taught her discipline
(17:00) The Shah Rukh Khan tour that changed everything
(22:00) What the music industry revealed about her creative side
(27:00) Mumbai vs. New York: the work cultures
(31:00) The origin of Twenty5% identity, community
(36:00) Why representation without nuance isn't enough
(41:00) How Twenty5% found its first clients
(46:00) The daily battle with self-doubt
(50:00) Vanity metrics, cold outreach
(54:00) Why are more people building their version of Twenty5% is the win
(57:00) Where she wants to take Twenty5% — a Hello Sunshine, an A24, for us

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Are you feeling consumed by the pace of everything around you?

Things are moving fast. Everyone is running toward the next big win, the next big bet, the next big thing. There is a constant hum of urgency that follows you everywhere on your feed, in your conversations, in the back of your mind at 2 am when you should be sleeping.

And if you are feeling behind, overwhelmed, like you are scrambling to catch up to everyone and everything, I want you to know something.

You are not alone. I feel it too.

But here is the truth that nobody says out loud. Everyone is trying to catch up to something that nobody really knows. We are all chasing so we are not left behind. But left behind from what exactly? Nobody has a clear answer. We are all just running because everyone else is running. And somewhere along the way, the running became the point.

It isn’t a race.

Or if it is, nobody told us where the finish line is. Nobody agreed on what winning looks like. And yet here we all are, breathless, comparing our pace to everyone else’s, wondering why we can’t keep up.

So take a breath.

Just stop for a moment. Because the world will keep moving whether you sprint or whether you pause. And the pause is not falling behind. It is the only way to remember why you started running in the first place.

You are not behind. You are exactly where you are.

And that is enough to work from.

Let’s do something today. Together.

Write it down. Right now. With me.

Because if we are going to run, and we will run, that is just who we are, we should at least know what we are running toward.

And we should know how far we have already come.

What is your finish line?

Not someone else’s, or not the one you feed, is selling you. Yours. What does winning actually look like for you in your life, on your terms? Get specific. Write it down. Because a finish line you cannot see is just exhaustion with no reward at the end.

What are you chasing?

Be honest with yourself here. Is what you are chasing something you actually want, or is it something you feel you are supposed to want? Is it yours, or did you inherit it from the noise around you? Write it down. The answer might surprise you.

How far have you come?

This is the one we skip the most. We are so focused on how far we have to go that we never stop to look back at the ground we have already covered. The things you have figured out. The hard seasons you have survived. The version of yourself you have already left behind. Write it down. You have come further than you are giving yourself credit for.

Take the time today. Not tomorrow. Today.

Because you cannot run well toward something you have never clearly defined. And you cannot appreciate the journey if you never stop to look at how far you have already travelled.

You are not behind. You are building. And you have been building all along.

Now write it down.

What I’m Reading

Start with Yourself - Emma Grede (Finished)

This is an easy, engaging read. If you admire Emma or consider yourself ambitious, it's well worth your time.

The Cold Start Problem - Andrew Chen(Currently Reading)

Explores why platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, and Facebook struggled in their earliest days and how they overcame the challenge of building network effects from zero. The book offers a practical framework for entrepreneurs on how to create momentum, reach critical mass, and turn a small community into a thriving network.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

From Bartender to Co-Founder: How Helen Diaz Built a National Brand Without Losing Herself

The Startup Lawyer Breaking Every Rule, and Writing Better Ones - Aravinda Seshadri

Under the Hood

The Scarcity-to-Scale Paradox: How an 11-Table Restaurant Built a $2.7 Billion Brand

Note to Self

Stop running for a moment.

You cannot win a race you never defined. So before you take another step, get clear on what you are actually chasing and why.

And while you are at it, look back. You have come further than you think.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

In this episode of Be Anomalous, I sit down with Aravinda Seshadri, founding partner of Venturous Counsel, a boutique law firm dedicated to serving underrepresented founders and diverse teams in tech. Aravinda’s story weaves together law, entrepreneurship, motherhood, and a mission to equalize access in Silicon Valley.

We talk about her unlikely path into law, leaving big firms where she never saw herself reflected, and starting her own practice while pregnant — a leap she says she made “too late, but just in time.” Aravinda opens up about battling imposter syndrome, learning to set boundaries, and why she built a firm that prioritizes humanity as much as transactions.

This episode is about courage, conviction, and carving out systems that don’t just profit a few — but empower the many.

If you’ve ever wrestled with self-doubt, considered a career pivot, or wondered whether kindness has a place in cutthroat industries, Aravinda’s journey proves it does.

🎧 Listen to the episode
Youtube | Spotify | Apple

What You’ll Learn

• How Aravinda stumbled into law school and found her way to startup practice

• The difference between litigation and transactional law (and why she chose the latter)

• Why representation in law firms and startup ecosystems matters

• How growing up in Salt Lake City shaped her awareness of majority vs. minority dynamics

• The challenges of leaving a big firm (and why she waited longer than she should have)

• What it was like to launch a firm while pregnant — and hire her first associate who was also expecting

• How she built a fully remote, diverse team that thrives without an office

• Practical legal advice for founders on formation, fundraising, and avoiding costly mistakes

• Her philosophy on saying “no,” preserving team wellbeing, and choosing the right clients

Favorite Quote

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

Favorite Books

📖 Venture Deals by Brad Feld
📖 Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

In This Episode, We Cover:

• (00:00) Life updates and the hidden struggles behind the highlight reel

• (05:00) Why Aravinda chose law and why she pivoted from litigation to startups

• (08:00) Leaving firms that didn’t reflect her and starting her own practice

• (10:00) Growing up South Asian in Salt Lake City and formative experiences with bias

• (14:00) The peer court convention story that cemented her passion for equity

• (17:00) Starting Venturous Counsel while pregnant — and what she learned from it

• (20:00) Hiring, trust, and building a culture that values humans first

• (23:00) Why pedigree matters less than skills (and how she tests for them)

• (26:00) On leaving too late, fear of uncertainty, and listening to yourself

• (29:00) The rise of remote work and what it means for law firms and startups

• (32:00) Boundaries, bad clients, and learning by doing it wrong first

• (37:00) Rethinking imposter syndrome and learning from bad managers

• (42:00) Advice for aspiring lawyers: explore, shadow, and choose deliberately

• (45:00) Advice for founders: start small, test your ideas, and listen to yourself

• (49:00) The legacy she hopes to leave with Venturous Counsel

• (50:00) When to get legal counsel, how much to budget, and why “legal debt” is real

• (56:00) Her favorite quotes and books

Where to Find Aravinda Seshadri

• Venturous Counsel

• LinkedIn

Referenced in This Episode

• Clerky (startup formation platform)

• Venturous Counsel Events

• Hustle Fund (Elizabeth Yin)

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

There is a restaurant in East Harlem that has been impossible to get into for over a century.

No reservations or walk-ins. The 11 tables inside are effectively “owned” by a rotating cast of regulars - politicians, mob bosses, celebrities, and New York lifers who have been coming so long the restaurant just holds their table. Everyone else gets turned away at the door. If you somehow land a seat, you’re eating some of the most revered Southern Italian food in the country, in a room that hasn’t changed much since 1896.

That restaurant is Rao’s. And the reason a jar of marinara sauce sitting in your grocery store costs $9 while the jar next to it costs $3 traces directly back to that door that stays closed.

This is the story of how a brand built on exclusion became one of the most acquired products in American grocery history. And how the same scarcity that made it valuable almost made it impossible to scale.

1896: The Original Asset

Charles Rao, an Italian immigrant, opens a small tavern on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem, a neighborhood then known as Italian Harlem, packed with Southern Italian families who brought their food traditions across the Atlantic. The food is simple, the recipes are tight, and the room is small by design.

Over the next several decades, Rao’s becomes a neighborhood institution. The kind of place where regulars don’t just have a table, they have their table, and it’s understood. Frank Sinatra. Robert De Niro. Politicians who shouldn’t be seen together but are. The room operates on a social currency that money can’t quite buy, and that’s precisely the point.

By the time Frank Pellegrino Sr. takes over, Rao's has become the kind of place people talk about the way they talk about a speakeasy, not as somewhere to eat, but as somewhere you either get in, or you don't. There's no waitlist or PR strategy. The room is just small, and the relationships are just old, and somehow that turned into one of the most powerful brand assets in American food history. Nobody planned it. That's what makes it hard to copy.

1992: The Sauce Leaves the Building

In 1992, the Pellegrino family made a decision that would look, in hindsight, like one of the most consequential CPG moves of the past thirty years: they started bottling the sauce.

It wasn’t a business decision. It was just because people kept asking.

The product that hits retail shelves is functionally identical to what comes out of the Rao’s kitchen: Italian tomatoes, olive oil, fresh onions, fresh basil, and garlic. No water or tomato paste, added sugar, fillers, starches, or colors. In a category where the standard formulation is built around cost efficiency, water-heavy, paste-forward, loaded with stabilizers, Rao’s is doing something that most food manufacturers would call irrational: it’s making the expensive version and charging accordingly.

For years, it has sold quietly. The brand has no real marketing budget, no national distribution, and no growth strategy. It doesn’t need one. The brand equity from the restaurant does the work. People who know Rao’s know Rao’s. Everyone else walks past it.

That’s the paradox starting to form: the scarcity that makes the brand desirable is the same thing capping its ceiling.

2017: Private Equity Sees What the Restaurant Couldn’t

Enter Sovos Brands, a food company freshly formed by Advent International, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Sovos is built with a specific thesis: find brands with disproportionate consumer love and underdeveloped commercial infrastructure, then pour fuel on them.

Rao’s fits the profile almost perfectly.

Sovos acquired Rao’s Specialty Foods for $415 million in 2017, at a moment when the brand had just $65 million in net sales and household penetration of roughly 1%, compared to the category leaders sitting at over 30%. On paper, that’s an aggressive price for a brand most of the country has never heard of.

But Sovos isn’t buying the sales number. They’re buying the myth.

The operational moves that follow are textbook PE-backed brand scaling, but executed with unusual discipline:

Distribution, sequentially. Rao’s had been a Northeast and West Coast product, available in specialty retailers and some natural grocery chains. Sovos pushes it into Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, Safeway, and Sprouts, driving double-digit distribution growth every quarter post-acquisition. This isn’t an unplanned expansion to every retailer at once; it’s a controlled, thought-out strategy that protects the premium shelf positioning.

Marketing budget, dramatically. Sovos takes the marketing budget from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to $20 million, with a primary focus on digital, paid media, influencer seeding, and content that lets the brand story do the selling. The narrative writes itself: a 125-year-old New York institution, the impossible restaurant, the sauce that tastes like a place you’ve never been able to get into.

Retailer economics as a sales argument. This is the move that doesn’t get talked about enough. The average profit per jar of Rao’s sits at $2.22, versus $0.40 for the category average, more than five times the margin contribution per facing. When the Sovos sales team walks into a retailer conversation, they’re not asking for shelf space. They’re offering a math problem with an obvious answer.

The scarcity paradox starts to resolve. The brand keeps its premium positioning not by staying small, but by pricing, ingredient integrity, and retailer economics that make mass distribution feel like an upgrade, not a compromise.

2019–2021: COVID Pours Gasoline

The pandemic is a before-and-after moment for Rao’s that no amount of planning could have engineered.

Restaurants close. People are home, cooking every night, and suddenly willing to spend $9 on a jar of sauce because it’s still a fraction of what delivery costs. The consumer who had never bought Rao’s picks it up, maybe because it’s the last jar on the shelf, maybe because they saw it on social media, and then they buy it again. And again.

Rao’s household penetration climbs significantly through this period, converting a trial driven by circumstance into a habitual purchase driven by preference. The product earns that loyalty because it delivers. This is where ingredient integrity stops being a brand story and becomes a retention mechanism.

By the time Sovos prices its IPO in September 2021, Rao’s household penetration has nearly doubled to 9.6% since the 2017 acquisition, still well below category leaders, but moving fast. Rao’s market share in the sauce category reaches an all-time high of 13.2% that same quarter.

Sovos lists on Nasdaq at $12/share. The IPO values the company at around $1.3 billion. Rao’s is the headline asset.

2022–2023: The Growth Becomes Undeniable

In Q2 2022, Rao’s posts 34% dollar sales growth and 28% unit growth versus the prior year. That distinction matters more than it sounds. In CPG, it’s easy to manufacture a good quarter, raise prices, watch revenue climb, and hope nobody notices volume is quietly bleeding out.

Rao’s isn’t doing that. It’s selling more jars, at a higher price, to more households. By 2023, net sales hit $774.7 million, up 33.5% from the year before. Revenue is up 400% since 2019 alone. The brand Sovos bought for $415 million when it had $65 million in revenue is now closing in on $800 million.

The scarcity paradox is fully resolved. The brand that built its identity on being impossible to access is now in every Walmart in America, and somehow it still feels premium. That's the real magic trick: Rao's expanded distribution without expanding its identity. The restaurant stayed closed. The sauce stayed expensive. The ingredients stayed the same.

August 2023: Campbell’s Pays $2.7 Billion

Campbell Soup announces the acquisition of Sovos Brands for $23 per share, for a total enterprise value of approximately $2.7 billion. The purchase price represents a 92% return for Sovos shareholders from the September 2021 IPO price of $12.

The strategic rationale for Campbell’s is clear: they own Prego, a mainstream sauce brand priced at roughly $4 per jar, and they need a premium play. Rao’s is the most compelling premium play in the entire category.

What follows the announcement is a case study in brand anxiety. Fans flood social media with concern that Campbell’s will change the recipe, dilute the ingredients, or do what big food companies historically do to beloved cult brands: optimize them to death. The scarcity paradox resurfaces in a new form. The same consumers who made the brand worth $2.7 billion are now worried that being worth $2.7 billion will ruin it.

Campbell’s CEO Mark Clouse addresses it directly:

“We will not touch the sauce. We have not fundamentally touched the chicken-noodle soup in 125 years.”

The framing is smart. It’s also a strategic commitment that constrains every future decision Campbell’s makes about the brand.

2024 and Beyond: The New Paradox

Under Campbell’s, the scarcity-to-scale paradox takes its final form.

Rao’s becomes the number one sauce brand in all regions of the United States. The brand crosses $1 billion in portfolio sales of sauces, soups, pasta, and frozen meals. Half of all U.S. households purchased Rao’s in the past year.

But the new challenge is hiding in plain sight: even at this scale, brand awareness sits at only 65–67% among consumers walking down the pasta sauce aisle. Campbell’s is running NFL ads, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats, Real Housewives partnerships, and the full big-brand media playbook, trying to close that gap.

Rao’s SKU count is still only 60% of what Prego offers, which means there’s significant shelf space still uncaptured. Frozen pizza, frozen entrees, and soup represent growth categories where Rao’s currently has minimal presence.

The brand that started as an 11-table restaurant that nobody could get into is now being pushed by one of the largest food companies in the world to reach the 33% of pasta sauce buyers who still haven’t heard of it.

That tension, between the myth that made the brand and the machinery required to grow it, is the defining challenge of Rao’s next chapter.

What Founders Should Take From This

The Rao’s story is often told as a feel-good narrative about an authentic brand that got discovered, but that’s not the case.

The real story is about sequence. The restaurant built brand equity for 96 years before the sauce hit shelves. The sauce built regional loyalty for 25 years before Sovos unlocked distribution. Sovos built the commercial infrastructure, margin story, retailer economics, and marketing investment before selling to Campbell’s. Every stage was built on the credibility established by the stage before it.

Scarcity wasn’t a strategy Rao chose. It was a reality they inherited. But the companies that scaled the brand understood something critical: the scarcity didn’t need to be maintained. It needed to be transferred. The impossibility of the restaurant became the premium of the product. The price point and the ingredients held that premium in place as distribution expanded.

You can scale a brand without diluting it. But you have to decide, from the beginning, what you are and what you will never compromise. For Rao’s, that line was the recipe. Everything else was negotiable.

The door at the restaurant is still closed. The sauce is in 40,000 stores. Both things are true. And that’s the whole playbook.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Episode Description

What does success really look like when you’re building a company, raising a child, and navigating an industry that wasn’t designed for you?

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Helen Diaz joins me for a powerful conversation about entrepreneurship, hospitality, motherhood, and redefining success on your own terms.

Helen is the co-founder of Chareau, the world’s first aloe plant-based spirit, and has helped grow the brand from a startup sold out of the trunk of a car into a nationally distributed company carried by Whole Foods Market, Total Wine & More, Marriott Hotels, and more.

Before Chareau, Helen spent over two decades in hospitality, co-owned Fifty Fifty Cocktail Co., developed bar programs from the Bay Area to Tokyo, became the first Latina to win Miss Speed Rack California, placed in the Top 8 nationally, and now serves as a judge for the prestigious San Francisco World Spirits Competition.

But this conversation goes far beyond business.

We talk about:
• Taking risks before you’re ready
• Building a company through uncertainty and the pandemic
• The realities of fundraising and scaling a brand
• Breaking barriers as a Latina woman in hospitality
• Motherhood, ambition, and work-life balance
• Why success means something completely different today than it did 10 years ago.

Helen’s story is a reminder that the biggest opportunities often begin with a leap of faith and that success isn’t about following someone else’s blueprint. It’s about creating your own.

If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s too late to start, too risky to pivot, or too ambitious to chase the life you really want, this episode is for you.

Favorite Quote

"Todo lo que siembre, cosecharás."

(Everything you put out into the world, you will receive.) — Helen's grandmother

Favorite Books

📖 Kitchen Confidential — Anthony Bourdain

📖 The Power of Now — Eckhart Tolle

In This Episode

(00:00) “I Am a Mama First” — Why Helen leads with motherhood
(04:00) Moving to SF at 19 with no plan
(07:00) How she got behind the bar — and why she loved it
(12:00) What hospitality taught her about resilience and emotional regulation
(18:00) Meeting Kurt at 5 am in New Orleans — and saying yes to Chareaux
(23:00) What makes Chareaux different: aloe, 80 calories, and half the sugar
(31:00) Bootstrapping, distributors, and knocking on every door in SF
(38:00) The pandemic wiped out 90% of their business overnight
(42:00) When your investor goes bankrupt — the real lessons in fundraising
(47:00) What motherhood taught her about burnout and leadership
(51:00) Success redefined: presence over performance
(53:00) Being the first Latina in the room — and why she never flinched
(57:00) What’s next: new line extensions and a coffee mountain in El Salvador

Referenced in This Episode

• Bourbon & Branch, Beretta, and Lolinda — SF cocktail bars where Helen honed her craft

• Total Beverage Solution Chareau’s current portfolio partner

• Whole Foods, the 2024 retail milestone that changed its visibility

• Eckhart Tolle, spiritual author and one of Helen’s go-to reads.

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

I was at an amusement park the other day, and I noticed something.

The kids around me, all different ages, all raised in the US, were still gravitating toward each other by community. By culture. Children of immigrants, American in every way they speak and carry themselves, and yet still finding their way back to what felt familiar. Still clustering together.

And I found myself thinking why?

Because we as humans are always looking for commonality. It is one of the most fundamental things about us. We scan every room, every situation, every new face for the answer to one quiet question: Do you understand me? And when we find even a thread of it, a shared culture, a shared language, a shared experience, a shared interest, we hold onto it. Because being understood is not a luxury. It is a basic human need.

This is why Indians find Indians. Mexicans find Mexicans. Why do people in the same profession gravitate toward each other? Why do people who share a passion find their way into the same rooms? It is not exclusion. It is the search for belonging. The search for a place where you don’t have to explain yourself from the beginning.

We all want to be seen. We all want to be understood. And we move toward the people and spaces that make us feel that way naturally, instinctively, often without even realising we are doing it.

And this is exactly why representation matters. In every form.

When you see yourself reflected in the stories being told, in the people in positions of power, in the faces on screen, in the voices in the room, something shifts. You stop feeling like an exception. You start feeling like you belong. Like, your experience is valid. Like, there is a place for you here.

Representation is not just about visibility. It is about the fundamental human need to be seen and understood. To know that you are not alone in your experience.

You start feeling like you belong. Like, there is a place for you here.

But here is the other side of it.

There is safety in sameness. But there is growth in difference.

When you only surround yourself with people who look like you, think like you, and live like you, your world stays small. You stop being challenged. Empathy becomes harder to build because you never have to stretch beyond what is familiar. Your circle becomes a comfort zone dressed up as a community.

And some of the most profound connections happen across cultures, across backgrounds, across every line you thought divided you. When you find someone from a completely different world who just gets you, that expands something in you. It changes how you see yourself. It changes how you see the world.

There is also something unique about growing up between two worlds. Being raised in one culture while living inside another. Never feeling fully one thing or the other. That in-between space is its own kind of identity. And it is one that more people carry than will ever admit it.

The most interesting people are the ones who can do both.

They are rooted in where they come from. They know who they are and where they belong. But they are also curious enough, open enough to step into rooms that look nothing like them. To build bridges, not just circles. To find their people and then go beyond them.

Finding your community is the beginning. But expanding beyond it is where the real growth lives.

We are all just looking for our people. And everyone deserves to find them.

But don’t stop there.

What I’m Reading

Start with Yourself - Emma Grede

There’s so much conversation around Emma Grede’s book Start With Yourself, and I’m excited to dive into it finally. My review of the book will be coming shortly.

Think Faster, Talk Smarter — Matt Abrahams

A practical guide to improving spontaneous speaking and clear communication under pressure. I want to improve how I think and speak, so I am trying this highly rated book.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

I Got Laid Off… And It Completely Changed My Life

Under the Hood

The $3 Billion Playbook: Poppi and Grüns

Note to Self

Listen more than you speak.

Go beyond your circle. The people who look like you, think like you, live like you, they are your comfort. But they are not your only teacher.

The most important lessons will come from the rooms you almost didn’t walk into. From the people whose lives look nothing like yours. From the conversations that stretched you in ways you didn’t expect.

So go there. Deliberately. Curiously. Without needing to have all the answers before you arrive.

Listen. Really listen. Not to respond. Not to compare. But to understand.

That is how empathy is built. That is how your world gets bigger. That is how you grow beyond the version of yourself you already know.

Your circle is your roots. But curiosity is your wings.

Use both.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

The real story of what Poppi and Grüns actually pulled off is more interesting, more replicable, and more instructive, but only if you’re willing to look past the headline numbers and into the mechanics underneath.

So let’s go under the hood.

Two Brands, One Insight

Poppi started in a Texas kitchen. Allison Ellsworth was dealing with chronic health issues and discovered that apple cider vinegar was helping her gut. She started mixing it with fruit juice to make it drinkable, then sellable, then pitchable. In 2018, she and her husband, Stephen, walked onto Shark Tank and landed Rohan Oza, the man who helped build Vitaminwater and Smartwater, as their investor and brand architect. By May 2025, PepsiCo had closed a $1.95 billion acquisition.

Grüns started at Stanford. Chad Janis, a 30-year-old graduate student with a toddler, was drinking powdered greens one morning and had a simple, almost obvious thought: there is no way I’m keeping this habit past 30 days. The powder was chalky. The cleanup was annoying. The ritual felt like punishment. So he asked a different question than most supplement founders ask. Not “how do I make a better greens powder?” but “how do I make this habit actually stick?” The answer was a gummy bear. Packed with 60 ingredients. Launched in August 2023. Acquired by Unilever for $1.2 billion less than three years later.

Different categories. Different founders. Different investors. No shared institutional backers to speak of. And yet both companies ran what is essentially the same playbook because they both diagnosed the same root problem hiding inside two very different product categories.

The problem wasn’t the product. It was the habit.

The Habit Trap Most Founders Walk Into

Here’s the conventional wisdom in consumer wellness: make something that works, prove the science, get distribution, win.

It sounds right. It’s mostly wrong or at least incomplete.

The brands that get acquired for ten figures aren’t the ones with the best formulas. They’re the ones with the best retention. And retention isn’t a marketing metric. It’s a product metric. It’s the answer to a brutally simple question: Will someone actually do this again tomorrow?

Poppi understood that people weren’t quitting soda because they wanted to. They were quitting because the alternatives, flat water, bitter kombucha, and sad sparkling water didn’t scratch the same itch. The ritual of cracking open a cold can, the sweetness, the carbonation, the moment of it, that’s what people were grieving. Poppi gave it back to them with a functional wrapper.

Grüns understood that the greens supplement category was full of products that worked on paper and failed in the bathroom cabinet. People bought them with good intentions and abandoned them within weeks. The category’s dirty secret was that its unit economics depended on repurchase, and its repurchase rates were terrible because nobody actually enjoys drinking green sludge every morning. Janis didn’t make a better sludge. He eliminated the sludge.

By the time Unilever came calling, Grüns had 95% of its customers using the product four to six times a week. That number is almost offensively good for a supplement brand. It’s the kind of retention that makes acquirers do math in their heads and start clearing calendar time.

The lesson here isn’t to make a gummy or a soda. The lesson is to ask: what is the real reason people quit this category, and what would it look like to solve that instead of ignoring it?

Brand Is Not a Vibe. It’s a Strategy.

Both companies invested heavily in brand, and both got criticized for it at various points: too flashy, too influencer-heavy, not enough substance. Both got acquired for over a billion dollars, so let’s set that criticism aside and understand what they were actually doing.

Rohan Oza, CAVU’s co-founder and Poppi’s first real backer, has a theory about brand that he’s applied across Vitaminwater, Smartwater, BODYARMOR, and now Poppi. The theory is simple: in a commodity category, the brand is the moat. The liquid inside a can is fungible. The feeling of belonging to a brand is not.

Poppi’s packaging, the bright, almost absurdly cheerful cans with their chunky flavor names, wasn’t just pretty. It was a signal. It said: This is not medicine. This is not a compromise. This is what fun looks like now. They put it on the shelves next to Coca-Cola and made Coca-Cola look tired by comparison.

Grüns did the same thing with a category that looked even worse. Supplement branding has historically been a war of clinical seriousness, lots of green gradients, molecular diagrams, and bold claims about bioavailability. Grüns launched with gummy bears and called their kids’ line “Cubs.” It was disarming by design. It told potential customers that this brand wasn’t going to lecture them about their health. It was going to make health feel like a treat.

What both brands understood and what most operators miss is that brand is not about aesthetics. It’s about reducing the psychological friction of purchase and repurchase. When a brand feels culturally alive and personally relevant, people don’t just buy it. They talk about it. They post it. They give it to their friends. That word-of-mouth engine is what makes a $40 million raise go as far as it does.

Speaking of which.

The Celebrity Investor Strategy, Decoded

Both companies brought in celebrity investors, and it’s tempting to read that as vanity founders wanting famous friends on their cap table. That’s not what was happening.

Poppi brought in Russell Westbrook, The Chainsmokers, Kygo, Halsey, Ellie Goulding, and a roster of top-tier social media personalities. Grüns brought in Joe Burrow, Shaun White, and Anna Kendrick, among others.

Look at who these people are, and the dynamic becomes clear. These aren’t passive check-writers. They’re distribution channels with personal brands. When Halsey posts about Poppi, she’s not doing an ad; she’s vouching. Her audience has a relationship with her, not with the brand. The first time they see Poppi is through someone they trust, which is worth more than any amount of targeted advertising.

What both companies figured out is that the cost of celebrity equity is often far lower than the cost of the media impressions that the celebrity generates. You’re not paying for endorsement. You’re paying for authentic integration into a cultural conversation you couldn’t buy your way into otherwise.

This is replicable at a smaller scale than most founders think. You don’t need Joe Burrow. You need whoever commands trust and attention in the specific community you’re trying to enter. A mid-tier food blogger with a genuinely loyal audience of 80,000 people in your target demographic is often more valuable than a macro-influencer with 2 million passive followers. The principle is the same: find people whose endorsement means something, and make them part of the story.

The TikTok Moment Is a Symptom, Not the Strategy

Every piece of Poppi coverage mentions the viral TikTok. Allison Ellsworth posted an organic video early in the brand’s life that pulled 26 million views and sent their Amazon ranking through the roof. It’s a great story. It’s also not the reason Poppi sold for $1.95 billion.

The TikTok worked because the brand was already ready. The packaging photographed well. The founder was authentic and compelling on camera. The product had a story, gut health, apple cider vinegar, and a woman who made something in her kitchen to fix her own health problems that people could grasp and share in thirty seconds. The virality was downstream of a dozen other decisions that had nothing to do with TikTok.

This matters because a lot of founders absorb the wrong lesson from these stories. They think: I need to go viral. What they should be thinking is: if I went viral tomorrow, would my brand hold up? Would the story be shareable? Would someone watching a thirty-second video understand immediately what this is and why it matters?

Grüns never had a single viral moment on the scale of Poppi’s early TikTok. What they had was a product so visually distinctive, gummy bears in a supplement aisle, that every piece of content naturally invited curiosity. The format itself did the work. Someone seeing a bag of Grüns for the first time had an immediate question: wait, those are vitamins? That question is the beginning of a conversation.

Build something that generates questions. The algorithm will take care of the rest.

Retail as Signal, Not Just Revenue

Neither brand treated retail expansion as a sales play. They treated it as a credibility play.

This is a crucial distinction. When Grüns launched in Target and immediately became the number-one supplement brand on their shelves, prompting the retailer to accelerate their timeline for stocking additional SKUs, it wasn’t just driving revenue. It was creating a data point that investors and eventual acquirers could point to. Shelf velocity at a major retailer is one of the most legible metrics in the consumer space. It tells a strategic buyer: real people, not just online loyalists, are choosing this over everything else on offer.

Poppi used the same logic. Every new retail door wasn’t just a sales channel; it was evidence of mainstream appeal. By the time PepsiCo was doing due diligence, Poppi was in over 30,000 retail locations. That’s not a DTC brand playing at brick-and-mortar. That’s a brand that has proven it can win in the most competitive shelf space in the world.

The lesson for earlier-stage operators: treat your first retail partnerships like auditions, not opportunities. Get into fewer doors and win big in each one before expanding. A category captain story at one retailer is worth more than thin distribution across ten.

The Number That Ties It Together

Both brands crossed $300 million in annualized revenue before their exits. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a threshold.

At that scale, the unit economics are proven. The retention data is real. The retail relationships are established. The management team has been tested. An acquirer paying $1 billion or more needs to be able to model a path to returning that investment, and $300 million in ARR is the kind of foundation that makes that modeling believable.

Below that threshold, you’re asking an acquirer to take a bet on your trajectory. Above it, you’re showing them a business. The difference in valuation multiple between those two conversations is enormous.

This is the unsexy truth underneath both of these glamorous exits: they were built on operational excellence. Extraordinary retention. Real unit economics. Supply chains that could actually support national retail. Grüns founder Chad Janis reportedly talked to 20 co-manufacturers before finding one capable of producing a dense, multi-ingredient gummy at scale. That is not a fun process. It is also what separates a brand that exists for $1.2 billion from one that exists for $40 million or doesn’t exist at all.

What You Should Actually Take Away

Strip away the TikToks, the celebrity investors, the colorful packaging, and the billion-dollar headlines, and what Poppi and Grüns actually did is remarkably teachable.

They each found a category where the real consumer problem wasn’t being solved, not the stated problem (I want a healthy drink, I want better nutrition), but the behavioral one (I can’t make this a real habit). They built products that made the habit frictionless and genuinely enjoyable. They wrapped those products in brands that gave people a way to signal something about themselves. They brought in partners, investors, celebrities, and retailers who added more than capital. They scaled operations seriously enough to be credible at the moment a major acquirer needed exactly what they had.

It requires being honest about what problem you’re actually solving, and then being relentless about solving it better than anyone else.

The billion dollars is the outcome. The habit is the product.

Everything else is just packaging.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Episode Description

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Steph opens up about the fear of judgment, self-doubt, motherhood, content creation, and the moment she finally stopped waiting for permission to pursue the life she actually wanted.

For years, she wrestled with the same fear so many people quietly carry:
What will people think of me?

But over time, she realized something deeper — the opinions of others matter far less than the regret of never trying.

This conversation explores the emotional reality of putting yourself online, building confidence before you fully feel ready, and learning how to trust yourself even when validation hasn’t arrived yet.

Steph shares how landing her first major brand deal became more than just a financial milestone. It became proof that her voice, creativity, and perspective had value. But more importantly, it gave her permission to stop shrinking herself.

We also talk about identity, motherhood, leading by example for your children, and why the most powerful thing you can do is show people what’s possible by living authentically.

This episode is about letting go of perfection.
Letting go of fear. And realizing your life is too important to be controlled by other people’s opinions.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• Why fear of judgment keeps so many people stuck

• The mindset shift that helped Steph stop caring what others think

• How regret can become a stronger motivator than fear

• Why the first “proof of success” changes your confidence

• The emotional reality of becoming a content creator online

• How motherhood shaped the way Steph approaches risk and growth

• Why authenticity matters more than perfection online

• The connection between self-trust and creative freedom

• How to build confidence before you fully feel ready

• Why your children learn more from your actions than your advice

Favorite Quote

“ Be the change you wanna see in the world."”

Favorite Book

📖 Mindset — Carol S. Dweck

📖 The Miracle Morning — Hal Elrod

In This Episode

(00:00) Letting go of the fear of judgment

(03:00) Why regret became a bigger fear than failure

(07:00) The emotional reality of putting yourself online

(11:00) Learning to trust yourself before validation arrives

(16:00) The first major brand deal and what it changed internally

(21:00) Confidence, content creation, and self-worth

(27:00) Motherhood and becoming an example for your children

(33:00) Why authenticity resonates more than perfection

(38:00) Navigating criticism and public opinions online

(44:00) Building a life aligned with who you really are

(50:00) Advice for anyone afraid to start

Referenced in This Episode

• Steph’s course

• Content creation and personal branding

• Motherhood and identity

• Confidence and self-trust

• Authenticity online

• Creative entrepreneurship

• Personal growth and reinvention

• Overcoming fear of failure

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Do you evaluate the relationships in your life? Really evaluate them?

Not just the ones that are obviously broken, but all of them. The ones you’ve had for years. The ones that feel comfortable. The ones you keep out of habit, out of history, out of loyalty to a version of yourself that may no longer exist.

Here is a way I have been thinking about it.

There are anchors, and there are sailboats.

Some people in your life help you sail. They push you forward, they believe in you, and they make you feel expansive. And some people are anchors. They hold you in place. They keep you small. They weigh on you in ways you don’t always notice until you realise how long you’ve been stuck in the same spot.

But here is the part that is harder to sit with.

Someone who helped you sail at one point in your life can become an anchor later. People change. You change. And what a relationship once was does not guarantee what it is now. That friendship that lit you up at 25 may be quietly draining you at 35. That person who once pushed you forward may now be the reason you are holding back.

Relationships are an emotional rollercoaster throughout our lives.

But the question is, do we evaluate them as we grow? Or do we just move ahead, carrying everything and everyone with us, never stopping to ask whether it still makes sense?

The Five People Theory

Jim Rohn said,

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

I truly believe this. The people closest to you are shaping you, whether you are aware of it or not. They are influencing how you think, what you believe is possible, how ambitious you allow yourself to be, and how you see yourself. You absorb their energy, their habits, their ceiling, or their limitlessness.

So here is an exercise to analyze:

Write down the five people you spend the most time with. Not who you wish you spent time with. Who you actually are. And then ask yourself honestly

Who are they becoming? Because that is likely who you are becoming, too.

Are they growing or are they staying still? Are they building something, or are they just talking about it? Do you leave their company feeling energised or drained? Do they challenge you, or do they keep you comfortable? Do they celebrate your growth, or does your growth make them uncomfortable?

This is not about cutting people off or being ruthless with the people you love. It is about being conscious. It is about understanding that your circle is not neutral. It is either pushing you forward or pulling you back. And once you see that clearly, you can make better choices about who you invest in, who you protect your time with, and who you need to slowly create distance from.

You don’t have to announce it or be dramatic about it. You start being intentional about who gets your time and your energy.

Because those five people? They are not just your friends. They are co-authoring the person you are becoming.

Choose them carefully.

Growth requires honesty, and sometimes the most honest thing you can do is look at the relationships in your life and ask, " Is this helping me sail or is this keeping me anchored?” You are allowed to ask that question. About anyone. Even the ones you love. Even the ones who have been there the longest.

Because the life you are building deserves the people who belong in it.

What I’m Reading

Start with Yourself - Emma Grede

There’s so much conversation around Emma Grede’s book Start With Yourself, and I’m excited to dive into it finally. My review of the book will be coming shortly.

Think Faster, Talk Smarter — Matt Abrahams

A practical guide to improving spontaneous speaking and clear communication under pressure. I want to improve how I think and speak, so I am trying this highly rated book.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

How Alix Peabody Built Bev After 200 Rejections

Under the Hood

Selling Out: The Rise, Drift, and Humiliating End of Everlane

Note to Self

It is okay to move on from people.

It is okay to outgrow a friendship, a relationship, a version of your circle that no longer fits who you are becoming. It doesn’t make you disloyal. It doesn’t make you cold. It just means you are growing. And growth sometimes means your paths no longer run in the same direction.

It is also okay if someone moves on from you.

That one is harder to sit with. But it is just as true. Not everyone is meant to stay for every chapter. And when someone drifts away, resist the urge to make it mean something about your worth. It isn’t personal. It never was.

It just means you are going in different directions now.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Not everyone who starts the journey with you is meant to finish it with you. And that is okay. That is just life moving the way life moves.

Let people go with grace. Let yourself go with grace, too.

And trust that the people who are meant to be in your life, the ones who belong in this chapter, will be there.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

There’s a line Michael Preysman once gave to The New Yorker that captures the early Everlane perfectly: “You do not get laid in Everlane.” He meant it as a boast. The clothes were clean, unfussy, almost aggressively unpretentious, the fashion equivalent of showing your work on a math test. No markup mystery. Just a well-made T-shirt and a breakdown of exactly what it costs to produce.

That was the pitch. And for a remarkable window of time in the 2010s, it worked.

Now, in May 2026, Everlane is being sold to Shein, the Chinese ultra-fast-fashion platform that Yale researchers have labeled the biggest polluter in the fast fashion industry, a company that has faced credible accusations of forced labor in its supply chain, fines in Italy for misleading environmental claims, legal challenges in Germany, and a lawsuit from the Texas Attorney General. The deal values Everlane at approximately $100 million. Common stockholders will receive nothing. The $90 million in liabilities that majority owner L Catterton carried on the company’s behalf will be retired by the sale price, meaning the brand effectively traded for the cost of its own debt.

The irony of this acquisition is too obvious.

The Origin Story

Michael Preysman was 25 years old and working in private equity when he noticed something that struck him as a form of consumer fraud hiding in plain sight. Fashion brands were marking up garments five to ten times their production cost, and nobody was saying so. Shoppers paid $80 for a T-shirt that cost $8 to make, and the gap in between the labor, the fabric, the duties, the transport, and the profit margin was invisible by design.

Preysman’s response, in 2010, was Everlane. He and co-founder Jesse Farmer, a developer who built the technical backbone, launched the company from San Francisco with a single product: a $15 cotton T-shirt. But rather than just selling the shirt, Preysman did something fashion had long considered unthinkable. He published a full cost breakdown alongside it: the total cost to make the shirt was $6.70, covering cotton, cutting, sewing, dyeing, finishing, and transport against a retail price of $15, meaning Everlane’s markup was $8.30. There, it was not just the garment, but the logic behind the garment.

The company was launched by invitation only. With an inventory of just 1,500 T-shirts, it started a waitlist that gained 60,000 sign-ups in days. It felt less like a clothing brand than a correction. For a generation of millennial shoppers who had grown up watching corporations sell them stories while hiding the machinery behind the stories, Everlane offered something genuinely novel: trust with receipts.

Early funding came from Kleiner Perkins, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, SV Angel, and Maveron, among others. By 2015, annual sales had reached roughly $35 million. By 2016, they were approaching $100 million, and a Series D round led by Light Street Capital at a reported valuation of around $250 million signaled that investors were fully bought in. The company expanded beyond T-shirts into cashmere, denim, footwear, and outerwear, all presented with the same cost-breakdown transparency. In 2017, it opened its first physical retail store in New York’s SoHo. In 2018, San Francisco followed. The stores were beautiful, minimal, light-filled, very on-brand.

The brand was also genuinely cool. It fit in with the normcore aesthetic, the Kinfolk-magazine minimalism, the aspirational-but-understated lifestyle that defined a particular strain of millennial urban culture. It slid into fashion editorial and Instagram feeds without trying. It attracted loyalty that most fashion brands spend decades and hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to achieve.

And crucially, Everlane seemed to actually believe what it was saying. In 2019, a reporter visited the San Francisco headquarters and found a company kitchen stocked with food in minimal packaging, a team that regularly visited overseas factories and planted community gardens, and a sustainability director who walked through the specific challenges of moving garments through the supply chain without sealing each one in a separate plastic bag. The people running Everlane weren’t just marketing ethics; they appeared to be practicing them.

The Seeds of Drift

But even in the good years, something more complicated was developing beneath the surface.

The “radical transparency” that Everlane trademarked turned out to be selective by design. The company was meticulous about price transparency, showing you the production cost of a sweater but far less forthcoming about wages, working conditions, and raw material sourcing. Watchdogs and sustainability researchers began to notice the gap between what Everlane disclosed and what it didn’t. Disclosing a factory’s location tells you almost nothing about how the workers there are being paid. Showing a production cost breakdown tells you nothing about whether the people behind that cost are thriving or just surviving.

Nonprofit organizations that audit fashion brands began flagging Everlane for what they called greenwashing: the practice of marketing yourself as ethical and eco-friendly without fully living up to the claims. One organization placed Everlane among fashion’s worst greenwashers in December 2020, pointing to undisclosed factory conditions, absence of worker pay data, and limited third-party verification of the supply chain.

There was also the structural contradiction at the heart of the model: ethical supply chains are expensive to maintain. Organic cotton costs more than conventional cotton. Responsibly certified mills charge more than uncertified ones. Keeping those standards while also satisfying investors who paid escalating valuations for the company required either raising prices (which eroded the “honest value” positioning) or cutting corners on the standards (which eroded the ethical positioning). Neither option was good.

The Growth Trap

The more insidious problem was what growth itself did to the company’s identity.

Preysman had famously told reporters that he would rather shut Everlane down than open physical retail stores. The DTC model was the product, not just a distribution channel, but the whole premise of the brand. No middlemen or no markups and no fixed costs bleeding the margins that the company had positioned as honest and clean. When Everlane reversed course and opened stores in New York in 2017 and San Francisco in 2018, it wasn’t just a strategic pivot but a business repositioning.

The stores were signed as leases, staffed with employees, built out with capital, and maintained with fixed costs at exactly the moment when the economics of small-format physical retail were becoming difficult for brands without enormous wholesale distribution to support them. The company had adopted the overhead of a conventional retailer while retaining the margin structure of an ethical brand and the revenue base of a DTC startup. That combination was quietly ruinous.

The expansion of the product line compounded the problem. What began as a tight edit of high-quality essentials, the T-shirts, cashmere, and denim that had defined Everlane’s identity, grew into activewear, swimwear, shoes, bags, outerwear, celebrity collaborations, and limited capsule collections. Each new category required new supplier relationships to audit, new factories to vet, and new material certifications to maintain. The transparency promise that was entirely manageable for five products became increasingly unmanageable for fifty. The brand that had made its name by showing its work couldn’t show all of it anymore; there was simply too much of it.

Customers noticed it. The quality perception that had been central to Everlane’s value proposition, a product so well-made it justified the honest markup, started to erode. Longtime loyalists who had paid $15 for a T-shirt that lasted five years found themselves paying $35 for something that didn’t feel as carefully considered. The products were still good, often quite good. But the magic of the early years, the sense that each item had been chosen with exceptional care and presented with exceptional honesty, was harder to find in a catalog of hundreds of SKUs.

The Private Equity Ratchet

When L Catterton led an $85 million investment in 2020, announced at the time as a minority stake but one that would give the PE firm effective majority control, investing at a $550 million valuation, the structural pressures on the company shifted into a different register entirely.

Private equity operates on a simple logic: you acquire a company at a valuation, you grow it beyond that valuation, and you exit. The gap between entry and exit is the return. L Catterton had put in $85 million at $550 million, which meant Everlane now needed to become worth considerably more than $550 million within a defined window to make the investment worthwhile. That kind of expectation doesn’t coexist easily with the patient, careful approach that ethical sourcing demands. It creates pressure to pursue premium repositioning, expand margins, and grow faster than the supply chain can responsibly absorb.

At around the same time, Preysman stepped back from day-to-day leadership, transitioning to an executive chairman role focused on climate. Andrea O’Donnell, formerly of Deckers Brands, was brought in as CEO to run operations. Preysman would be the last of Everlane’s leaders to have the institutional knowledge of what the brand had been built to be. What followed was a succession of CEOs, O’Donnell, then Alfred Chang from streetwear brand Fear of God, each attempting to steady a company that kept losing altitude.

2020: The Year Everything Cracked Open

The pandemic arrived not as the cause of Everlane’s troubles but as the moment that made them impossible to ignore.

In December 2019, Everlane’s Customer Experience team announced its intention to unionize. The workers who answered customer emails and calls were classified as part-time contractors, with hours capped at 29 per week to keep them just below the threshold that would require the company to provide health benefits organized under the banner of a brand whose mission statement was built on doing right by people.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020 and Everlane’s retail stores closed overnight, the company laid off hundreds of those workers. The timing was catastrophic for the brand’s reputation. Senator Bernie Sanders publicly condemned the move. “Using this health and economic crisis to union-bust is morally unacceptable,” he wrote. Workers who said they had been told in the days beforehand that the company was “in this together” found themselves let go in a mass termination.

Everlane maintained that the layoffs were about survival, not union suppression. But the optics were devastating for a brand whose entire identity rested on the claim that it treated its workers differently from everyone else in fashion.

Months later, a group of former Black employees who called themselves the “Everlane Ex-Wives Club” published a public letter alleging a culture of systemic racism inside the company, accusing leadership of “convenient transparency,” a phrase that cut straight to the heart of what critics had been saying for years. The brand had built enormous goodwill among customers who associated ethical consumption with social justice broadly defined. The letter torched that credibility from the inside.

Following an apology and internal investigation, Everlane changed leadership and began publishing annual impact reports. But the damage to the brand’s foundational mythology, the sense that Everlane was genuinely different, that it wasn’t just marketing ethics but practicing them, proved very difficult to repair.

The Slow Bleed

What followed was a long, grinding slide that unfolded in stages over the next five years.

Gross margins improved when O’Donnell and Preysman nudged up prices and worked on sourcing efficiencies, rising from 60 to 70 percent. But revenue flatlined. Online sales accounted for roughly 80 percent of the business, and they were volatile month to month. Physical retail provided some growth, but not enough to offset the fixed costs it introduced. The company cut 17 percent of its corporate workforce in January 2023, citing inflation and recession fears.

By late 2022, Everlane had taken on $90 million in new debt financing: a $65 million revolving credit facility from CIT Northbridge and a $25 million loan from Gordon Brothers. That debt would become the defining fact of the company’s final years, a number that appeared in every conversation about the brand’s future and eventually determined the terms of its sale.

The company tried pivots. It shifted its messaging from “radical transparency” to “clean luxury,” an attempt to reposition toward premium consumers and rebuild trust after the scandals. It partnered with Nordstrom in 2024 for shop-in-shop arrangements, taking the brand into wholesale channels it had once rejected on principle. It brought in Alfred Chang and began experimenting with designer collaborations and celebrity partnerships to generate cultural heat.

None of it worked well enough, or quickly enough. By early 2026, Everlane was being sued to vacate its San Francisco headquarters after failing to pay $51,000 in overdue rent. In March, L Catterton began shopping the brand. They were looking for a new co-investor to help retire the debt load, or a buyer willing to take the whole thing off their hands. Along came Shein.

The Sale

The board approved the deal on Saturday, May 16, 2026. The price was $100 million. With $90 million in debt to retire, the equity value was essentially zero for common stockholders, who were told Sunday morning that they would receive no payout.

Everlane had been valued at $550 million in 2020. It had once floated projections of $550 million in annual revenue. Instead, it sold for less than half a year’s sales, at a multiple of roughly 0.5x revenue.

Why did Shein want it? The logic is strategic rather than sentimental. Shein has spent years navigating serious regulatory and political headwinds in Western markets. It has been fined in Italy, challenged in Germany, sued in Texas, and scrutinized by the UK Parliament over its supply chain’s links to forced labor and toxic chemicals. Its IPO ambitions have been complicated at every turn by the ethical questions its core business model generates. Acquiring an American brand with a loyal customer base, a domestic DTC infrastructure, and a decade-long history of ethical positioning gives Shein something it cannot produce in-house: a story about its portfolio that is more palatable than the one its core business tells.

“Ultimately, the deal likely saves Everlane,” said Neil Saunders of GlobalData. “But that salvation comes at a price.”

What It All Means

The reaction has been swift and sharp. Former CTO Nan Yu posted on X: “I haven’t worked at Everlane in almost 10 years, but it’s a pretty sad day for the people that built it.” Customers who had shopped the brand for a decade described the association with Shein as a betrayal.

But the Everlane story is not, at its core, a simple story about hypocrisy. The early team genuinely believed in what they were building. The transparency was real, even if imperfect. The factory relationships, the plastic commitments, the kitchen without packaging, these were not fabrications. Everlane was trying to do something harder than most fashion companies attempt.

It made the same mistakes as every other growth-stage company, just with more public commitments to not making those mistakes.

The same period brought the collapse of nearly every peer in the “millennial DTC” cohort. Allbirds sold its footwear business for $39 million and pivoted to AI infrastructure. Casper, Outdoor Voices, SmileDirectClub, and Winc are all gone or radically diminished.

Even the survivors, like Warby Parker and Glossier, have had to confront the gap between the DTC premium that investors once paid and the margins the businesses can actually generate.

The Everlane sale is the settlement notice for that entire era. It turns out that “sustainable” is not a strategy unless the business itself is built to sustain.

And the company that trademarked “radical transparency” will now be owned by one that has been fined for concealing it.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

I was listening to a podcast this week, an interview with Ramit Sethi, and he was talking about the compounding effect of money. If you haven’t come across Ramit, I highly recommend him. He is the person to go to when it comes to understanding money.

But what he said got me thinking beyond money.

The compound effect applies to everything.

Hit the gym every day, and your body will eventually show it. It takes time, but the results show up. Keep eating junk every day, and that shows up too. The lessons you are learning right now, the habits you are building, the work you are quietly putting in, all of it is compounding. Slowly. Invisibly. Until one day it isn’t invisible anymore.

And here is what struck me.

We give up so easily. We stop before the compound effect has a chance to show itself. We put in the work for a few weeks, don’t see the result, and decide it isn’t working. But we never question whether the bad habits are working; we just keep those going without demanding proof.

Why can’t we believe in ourselves the same way?

I want you to think about the effort you are putting in, like laying bricks. Every workout. Every lesson. Every hour you put into your side hustle. Every time you choose the harder, better thing. That is a brick. And you are building a house.

The house will not be a house in one day. You have to lay one brick at a time every single day and trust that they are adding up. The only way the house stays incomplete is if you stop laying the bricks.

And here is the other thing.

Some houses are built faster than others. Some people will seem further along than you. But you don’t know what kind of house they are building, and they don’t know what kind of house you are building. The comparison is meaningless. You have your own blueprint. Your own timeline. Your own house.

Stay in your lane. Keep laying the bricks.

The house will come together. Trust the process.

What I’m Reading

Start with Yourself - Emma Grede ( Starting)

There’s so much conversation around Emma Grede’s book Start With Yourself, and I’m excited to dive into it finally. My review of the book will be coming shortly.

Think Faster, Talk Smarter — Matt Abrahams (Still Reading)

A practical guide to improving spontaneous speaking and clear communication under pressure. I want to improve how I think and speak, so I am trying this highly rated book.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

Why Rama Afullo Walked Away From SpaceX to Build Something Bigger

How Alix Peabody Built Bev After 200 Rejections

Under the Hood

The Dubai Chocolate - FIX Dessert Chocolatier Story

Note To Yourself

You won’t see it today. Maybe not even this month.

But every time you showed up — every workout, every late night, every moment you chose the harder thing — it counted. It is all in there. Quietly compounding and building on itself in ways you cannot yet see.

That is how it works.

You don’t plant a seed and dig it up the next day to check if it is growing. You water it. You trust it. You come back tomorrow and do it again.

So keep going. Not because the results are visible. But because you know the work is real.

One brick. Every day. That is all it takes.

The house is coming.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Episode Description

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Alix Peabody joins me for a raw conversation about entrepreneurship, burnout, identity, and what it really takes to build a category-defining brand from nothing.

Before Bev became one of the most recognizable canned wine brands in the country, Alix was hearing “no” over and over again. More than 200 investors passed on the idea. She was building in a male-dominated industry, navigating constant rejection, and trying to create a brand that didn’t fit the traditional rules of alcohol culture.

But this conversation goes far beyond startup success.

We talk about growing up between cultures, studying abroad as a teenager, building confidence through discomfort, and why entrepreneurship forces you to confront every version of yourself. Alix opens up about the emotional reality of scaling a company, the loneliness that comes with being a founder, and the identity shift that happens after an exit.

This episode is about resilience. About learning how to trust your instincts before the world validates you.
And about building something bold enough to change the culture around it.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• Why 200 investor rejections didn’t stop Alix from building Bev

• The mindset shift founders need when fundraising

• How studying abroad shaped her confidence and adaptability

• What it’s really like building in a male-dominated industry

• Why branding is more about authenticity than expensive agencies

• The hidden emotional cost of entrepreneurship and burnout

• How the founder's identity becomes deeply tied to the company

• Why do second-time founders approach business differently

• The importance of routines, health, and mental resilience while building

• What founders misunderstand about success, scaling, and exits.

Favorite Quote

“Luck falls on the shoulders of those prepared to receive it.”

— Alix Peabody’s Grandfather

Favorite Book

📖 The Surrender Experiment — Michael Singer

In This Episode

(00:00) Who Alix Peabody is beyond Bev

(03:00) Growing up in New York with five siblings and studying abroad

(08:00) Why discomfort and movement shaped her entrepreneurial mindset

(12:00) From Bridgewater to Silicon Valley: building the foundation before Bev

(17:00) The origin story behind Bev and creating a brand with cultural impact

(23:00) Raising money after 200 investor rejections

(28:00) Building confidence as a woman in a male-dominated industry

(34:00) Hiring, leadership, and learning how to build the right team

(40:00) Burnout, sacrifice, and the emotional weight of entrepreneurship

(46:00) The reality of exits and losing your identity after building a company

(51:00) Founder loneliness, pressure, and mental health

(56:00) Why routines and self-care matter more than founders admit

(01:00:00) Advice for unconventional founders building something different

Referenced in This Episode

• Startup fundraising and venture capital

• Founder psychology and burnout

• Branding and consumer storytelling

• Women in entrepreneurship and leadership

• Identity, ambition, and resilience

• Building culture-driven consumer brands

• The emotional realities of startup exits

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

A Craving No Store Could Satisfy

Every great product begins somewhere unexpected. For Sarah Hamouda, it began in a Dubai kitchen in 2021, during her pregnancy, with a craving she simply could not shake. The British-Egyptian entrepreneur, who had been living in Dubai since around 2015, wanted something that did not exist: a chocolate bar that tasted of home, of the warm, layered, syrup-soaked Middle Eastern desserts she had grown up loving.

What she craved, specifically, was knafeh, the beloved Levantine sweet of shredded phyllo dough, soft cheese, and rosewater syrup. What was available to her was, frankly, not that. So she did what any resourceful person with deep food nostalgia and nowhere else to turn would do: she invented it herself.

Working with her husband, Yezen Alani, in their living room, Hamouda began experimenting. She combined pistachio cream and toasted kataifi, fine shredded phyllo pastry, the key ingredient in knafeh, with a touch of tahini, then encased the whole thing in a thick shell of premium Belgian chocolate. The result was extraordinary: a bar that cracked with the authority of fine chocolate, then gave way to a lush, crunchy, nutty, and deeply aromatic interior unlike anything the confectionery world had produced before. She called it “Can’t Get Knafeh of It.”

FIX Dessert Chocolatier, with FIX standing for Freaking Incredible Experience, was born.

The Quiet Years

When FIX officially launched in 2022, selling handmade bars online and through a small Dubai shop, the response was modest. Each bar was priced at £16 (roughly $19.72 USD). At first, the couple was barely selling one bar a week. The bars were extraordinary, the packaging beautiful, the concept genuinely novel. And yet, the world was not listening.

This is the part of the story that is rarely unseen: every founder goes through a phase of anonymity. A product that its founders believed in completely, sitting largely unseen. For most people, this period ends the dream. They conclude the market has spoken. They move on.

Hamouda and Alani did not move on. They kept perfecting. They kept making bars by hand, kept tuning the pistachio cream-to-kataifi ratio, kept insisting that every bar was worth the price they charged. The product remained exactly what it was: exceptional.

What they could not manufacture was the moment that would change everything.

The Video That Broke the Internet

In late 2023, TikTok food influencer Maria Vehera filmed herself doing something simple: biting into a FIX bar. The video was shot in an ASMR-style, unhurried, close-up, and exquisitely attentive to sound. The camera lingered on the crack of the chocolate shell. On the audible crunch of kataifi. On the slow, molten pull of pistachio cream catching the light as the bar split open.

The comments filled almost immediately with a single word: want.

The video surpassed 127 million views. Food journalists picked up the story. Travel content creators began flying to Dubai specifically for the bar. Overnight, orders at FIX skyrocketed from single digits to thousands. Hamouda and Alani had to scale their tiny, handmade operation at emergency speed, eventually growing to a team of around 50 people. The $30 artisanal bars began selling out in minutes.

By 2024, “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” had become Deliveroo’s most ordered item worldwide. The global appetite for pistachios surged so sharply that wholesale prices in Turkey, the world’s third-largest pistachio producer, nearly doubled. A chocolate bar had triggered a supply-chain crisis across an entire agricultural sector.

Why It Actually Worked

It would be easy to credit TikTok and stop there. But viral moments do not come from mediocre products. Maria Vehera’s video worked because the bar was genuinely worth filming. The visual drama that split-second crack, that green ribbon of cream existed because FIX had engineered it precisely. The cream was made to a consistency that stays luscious and pulls dramatically on camera. The kataifi was toasted for texture. The tahini, as one food writer noted, is the “secret weapon that most people don’t notice consciously but would immediately miss.”

FIX was also culturally authentic in a way that resonated globally. This was not a multinational food company applying a “Middle Eastern trend” as a seasonal flavour. This was a British-Egyptian woman, rooted in Dubai, drawing on a dessert she had loved her whole life, and making it better than it had ever been made in chocolate form. The product carried a story that felt real because it was real.

And critically, FIX never chased scale before quality. Every bar is still made in Dubai. The recipe has not been diluted. The experience Hamouda promised in 2021 is the same one a customer receives today, shipped directly from the original kitchen. That integrity is what turned buyers into believers, and believers into the unpaid marketing army that sustains the brand.

After the Flood

Going viral is not a finish line. For FIX, it was the beginning of a gauntlet. The bar’s production capacity at the time of the viral explosion was just 500 bars per day, each one handcrafted, the interiors piped by a team working six to eight hours a shift. Now the world wanted millions. Rather than abandon the handmade process and chase volume, FIX made a choice that would define its future: it would protect the product, even if that meant refusing to meet demand.

The bars continued to drop exclusively on Deliveroo in Dubai, twice a day at 2 pm and 5 pm, routinely selling out in minutes. The scarcity was not manufactured; it was real, but it had the effect of manufactured scarcity: it made every bar feel like an event. Resellers began importing bars and marking them up sharply on third-party sites. People flew to Dubai, some specifically to bring bars home. Hamouda watched this happen and, by most accounts, chose not to exploit it.

Then the corporate giants moved in. Lindt launched a limited-edition Dubai-style bar in December 2024. It became the Swiss company’s top-selling travel retail product, shifting over 2.2 million tablets and expanding to more than 100 airports worldwide. Trader Joe’s launched a $3.99 version, made in Turkey, that created its own social media wave. Walmart, Shake Shack, Crumbl, Starbucks, Baskin-Robbins, and Dunkin’ all released Dubai chocolate-inspired products. The hashtag #dubaichocolate accumulated 13.8 billion TikTok views by early 2025. Chocolate-pistachio flavour combinations on restaurant menus rose 22% year-over-year. FIX had not just made a bar; it had invented a category.

Where FIX Stands Today

By late 2025, FIX was no longer just a Dubai delivery phenomenon. The brand expanded into Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest international airport, first with a single pop-up that proved so popular it had to extend its stay multiple times, then growing to permanent stands in both Terminal 1 Concourse D and Terminal 3 Concourse B. Dubai Duty Free reported that over 1.2 million FIX bars were sold in a single month, generating $22 million in sales.

In October 2025, FIX made its first territorial expansion beyond Dubai, landing in Abu Dhabi exclusively through Deliveroo, a milestone Hamouda described as a major step in the brand’s journey. The bar also began shipping to over 100 countries worldwide, delivering directly from the Dubai kitchen to international customers. FIX had grown from a team of two in a living room to a staff of around 50, building what has become one of the standout small-brand success stories in modern travel retail.

In September 2024, Dubai’s Crown Prince, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, publicly endorsed the bar, a moment of cultural legitimacy that few artisan food brands ever receive. FIX created an exclusive flavour for him in response. The bar had become, in the words of one commentator, a form of gastrodiplomacy, an accidental ambassador for Middle Eastern culture, one crack of chocolate at a time.

As for the market FIX created, the brand’s own analysis places “Dubai chocolate” in a transition from viral trend to permanent category somewhere between the croissant (eternally beloved) and the cronut (fondly remembered). New flavours have joined the lineup, from “Catch Me If You Pecan” to “Baklawa 2 The Future” and “Pick Up a Pretzel,” each a witty, punny extension of the FIX universe. The recipe is still secret. Every bar is still made by hand. And the bars still sell out in minutes.

A pregnancy craving that began in a Dubai living room in 2021 had, within four years, reshaped global chocolate consumption, triggered a worldwide pistachio shortage, sparked legal battles across three countries, and placed a boutique confectioner from the UAE at the centre of one of the most genuinely interesting business stories of the decade.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

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Episode Description:

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Rama Afullo joins me for a conversation about identity, ambition, and what it really takes to build something the world doesn’t yet understand.

Rama isn’t just a founder.
He’s an engineer, systems thinker, and global citizen who has spent his life moving between countries, cultures, industries, and ideas.

Before founding Satlyt, a company building the future of orbital networking and AI infrastructure in space, Rama worked at Tesla, Google, and SpaceX. But this conversation isn’t about prestige.

It’s about conviction.

About what happens when you trust your vision before the market validates it.
When you walk away from stability to build something bigger than yourself.
And when your identity becomes the foundation, not the obstacle, to your ambition.

We talk about growing up across Africa and Europe, navigating race and belonging, surviving systems not built for you, and learning how power actually works inside some of the world’s biggest technology companies.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• Why identity can become your greatest advantage as a founder

• What working inside Tesla, Google, and SpaceX actually taught Rama

• The hidden realities of venture capital and startup ecosystems

• Why many “prestigious” systems are far less innovative than they appear

• How moving across countries shaped his resilience and worldview

• Why confidence matters when building unconventional ideas

• The difference between hype and real innovation

• What founders misunderstand about fundraising and growth

• Why relationships matter more than credentials in business

• How Rama is building the future of orbital AI infrastructure through Satlyt

  ---

Favorite Quote

“Nothing is forever. Things fall apart.”

—Inspired by Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Favorite Book

📖 Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

In This Episode

(00:00) Who Rama is beyond the résumé

(04:00) Growing up across Kenya, Botswana, South Africa, Europe, and the U.S.

(08:00) How movement and adversity shaped his mindset

(12:00) Early entrepreneurship and learning hard lessons about venture capital

(18:00) Working at Tesla Africa and building telecommunications infrastructure

(22:00) The reality of Google culture and leadership

(28:00) Why he joined — and left — SpaceX

(34:00) The origin story behind Satlight

(40:00) Orbital data centers, AI, and the future of space infrastructure

(46:00) Fundraising, startup pressure, and founder psychology

(50:00) Identity, race, and building confidence from within

(54:00) Leadership, ambition, and defining success on your own terms

Referenced in This Episode

• Venture capital and startup ecosystems

• Orbital computing and AI infrastructure

• Identity, race, and cultural belonging

• Founder psychology and resilience

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

I saw a post today that stopped me.

“You want a better life? Go build it. Don’t tell me what you want. Tell me what you are willing to give up.”

And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

We spend so much time looking at what we want. The career. The body. The relationship. The life. We see it on social media, we see it in the people we admire, and we think I want that. But we rarely stop to look at the full picture.

When you admire someone’s life, you are only seeing part of it.

Along with everything they have, you also get everything they gave up. Or don’t have. Maybe it was a painful divorce. Maybe a public scandal. Maybe years of loneliness. Maybe a parent lost along the way. The highlight reel never shows you the cost. But the cost was always there.

And it is real for all of us.

If you decide to pour everything into your career, you might miss moments with your kids that you can never get back. If you step back from your career to be present for your children, you might miss the promotion, the opportunity, the momentum. If you decide to build something of your own, a brand, a business, a vision, you might get married later. Or not at all.

These are not wrong choices. But they are choices. And every single one comes with a price.

Some prices are easier to pay. You want to be fit, so you give up unhealthy food and show up for the workout when you don’t feel like it. You want to build your side hustle, you give up the social events, the lazy weekends, the path of least resistance. Those trade-offs, when you see what they’re building toward, feel worth it.

But then there are the harder questions.

Do I want to be the most successful version of myself, and am I willing to give everything for that? Do I want to build an empire, and what does that cost the people I love? Those questions don’t have easy answers. They require you to sit with yourself honestly and think it all the way through. Not just what you want but what you are willing to lose to have it. And whether you can live with that.

Because here is the thing we forget.

The cost shows up whether you thought about it or not. The difference is whether you walked in with your eyes open. The choices you make have consequences, good and bad, and those consequences are yours to live with. Nobody else’s.

So think deeply. About everything you have. Everything you want. And everything you are willing to give up to get there.

There is always a price.

The only question is whether you have decided consciously, honestly, that it is worth paying.

It is not all or nothing.

This is not about choosing between your career and your child. Your marriage and your ambition. Your business and your life. That framing is too binary and too heavy.

What it is really about is consciousness. When you are aware of the cost, you can make conscious choices. And conscious choices give you something powerful,

Your non-negotiables.

The things you decide, in advance, that you will not compromise on. Not because someone told you to, but because you know yourself well enough to know what you cannot lose.

Maybe it is every Friday evening that is for your spouse. No matter what. Maybe it is not to miss a single one of my son’s performances. Not one. Maybe it is Sunday mornings belong to me. Maybe it is something else entirely. Only you know what those things are.

But when you name them, when you actually decide them, they stop being things that slip through the cracks of a busy life.

They become protected. Intentional. Yours.

You get to choose your battles. You get to decide what you are building toward and what you are holding onto along the way. The key is that you are deciding. Consciously. Deliberately. Not just letting life make the choices for you and wondering later how you got here.

What I’m Reading

South to Freedom - Alice L Baumgartner ( Finished)

A historical account of enslaved people fleeing south to Mexico and how this challenged U.S. slavery laws. This was very research-oriented, and I have to say I didn’t know a lot about that period. It gave me an insight into those times and people’s mindset.

Think Faster, Talk Smarter — Matt Abrahams (Still Reading)

A practical guide to improving spontaneous speaking and clear communication under pressure. I want to improve how I think and speak, so I am trying this highly rated book.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

Julie Castro Abrams on Power, Privilege & Funding Women’s Future

Under the Hood

The Art of Starting Over: How Bobbi Brown built 2 empire

Note to Self

Everything you want has a price. Know it before you pay it.

And as you chase your dreams remember that life happens along the way. Things you didn’t anticipate. People you didn’t expect. Priorities that shift. Dreams that change. And that is okay.

Just don’t forget to check in.

Reevaluate what matters to you. The things you are building toward and the things you are holding onto. Because sometimes what you wanted at the start is not what you want anymore. And sometimes the things you took for granted became the most important things of all.

Are you still willing to pay the price for the life you want? And is what you are giving up still something you can live without?

Only you can answer that.

Choose consciously. Protect what matters. And keep checking in with yourself along the way.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

In 1990, a young makeup artist in New York City walked into a drugstore chemist with a single, stubborn idea: she wanted a lipstick the color of her own lips. Not the waxy reds of the decade before. Not the frosted pinks that still clung to the shelves. Just a natural, flattering nude, a lip color that looked like you, only better. That conversation with a chemist changed the beauty industry forever.

Her name, of course, was Bobbi Brown. And what began as a personal frustration became a philosophy, then a product line, then a global brand, then a $74.5 million acquisition, and eventually, the most remarkable second act in modern beauty history.

Chicago Roots, New York Dreams

Born in Chicago on April 14, 1957, Barbara “Bobbi” Brown grew up drawn to the transformative power of cosmetics from an early age. As a self-described insecure teenager, “the teeniest of all my friends,” she once recalled, makeup gave her a sense of agency over how she presented herself to the world. The style she gravitated toward was instinctively her own: soft, natural, the opposite of her mother’s Twiggy-era glamour.

After stints at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Arizona, she told her mother she wanted to drop out. Her mother’s advice was characteristically wise: pretend it’s your birthday and do whatever you want. Brown went straight to Marshall Field’s to play with makeup. She enrolled at Emerson College in Boston, graduating with a degree in theatrical makeup and photography. “When I found Emerson, I found myself,” she has said.

In 1980, she moved to New York with an amateur portfolio and no contacts, just a phone book and what she describes as blissful naïveté. She looked up “makeup” and “models” in the Yellow Pages and started making calls. It is a detail that says everything about who she is: relentlessly curious, unafraid to ask, and constitutionally incapable of waiting to be discovered.

Ten Lipsticks That Changed Everything

Through the 1980s, Brown built a reputation as a magazine makeup artist celebrated for her naturalistic touch, a radical stance in a decade defined by Studio 54 drama, Liza Minnelli glamour, and the kind of look-at-me colors that seemed to shout from every cosmetics counter. Brown kept her palette quiet. She emphasized skin. She made women look like themselves.

“I want to make a lipstick that isn’t greasy, isn’t dry, doesn’t smell like my mother’s lipstick, and actually looks like the color of my lips.”

— Bobbi Brown

In 1990, she brought that idea to a drugstore chemist who agreed to develop ten natural-toned shades — and to become her business partner. He would make the lipsticks; they’d split the $15 price point fifty-fifty. Brown told a friend about her new project. That friend happened to be an editor at Glamour magazine. She offered to write about it. Brown, not yet understanding what public relations was, said: “Why would you want to do that?”

The Glamour article ran with Brown’s home phone number. Orders flooded in. The “no makeup makeup” revolution had begun.

Bergdorf Goodman and an Empire in a Day

In 1991, Brown and her husband, Steven Plofker, partnered with another couple to formally launch Bobbi Brown Essentials. The debut took place at Bergdorf Goodman, the iconic New York luxury department store. Brown set a humble goal: sell 100 lipsticks in a month. She sold 100 in a single day.

The debut in numbers: Ten shades of lipstick. One department store. A goal of 100 units in a month. Sold out in a day. By 1995, the brand was beating Estée Lauder in every store where they competed side by side.

Word spread quickly. Brown’s instinct that women wanted to enhance rather than mask their natural features turned out to be a cultural hunger that the industry had entirely missed. The following year, she expanded into yellow-toned foundation sticks, tackling the other great frustration of the era: foundations that turned ashy or orange on real skin. The brand grew into a full cosmetics line, then into department stores across the country.

Selling to Estée Lauder — On Her Own Terms

By the mid-1990s, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics was beating Estée Lauder in department stores across the board. Leonard Lauder, the company’s then-CEO, noticed. He invited Brown and her husband to dinner at his apartment overlooking Central Park. She told him the brand wasn’t for sale.

He kept asking. Eventually, he made an argument that broke through. “What if I can promise you that we can grow your business and you could do what you love,” he told her, “and you keep doing all of the creative, we do everything else — and you can be a really good mom and have your family and not spend your life traveling?” Brown said yes.

In 1995, Estée Lauder acquired Bobbi Brown Cosmetics for a reported $74.5 million. Brown stayed on as Chief Creative Officer, retaining creative control of the brand. Under the Lauder umbrella, the company expanded globally. By 2006, the brand was reportedly generating half a billion dollars in annual revenue. A freestanding retail store with a makeup artistry school opened in Auckland in 2011.

Brown became more than a brand; she became a public figure. She appeared for fourteen years as a regular beauty contributor on NBC’s Today show. She wrote nine bestselling books on beauty and wellness. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo Beauty. Presidents noticed: Barack Obama appointed her to the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiation.

The Exit She Didn’t Expect to Regret

When she sold the company, Brown had signed a non-compete agreement that would prevent her from launching a competing beauty brand for 25 years. At the time, it seemed like a formality. She had no plans to leave.

But the nature of the brand gradually shifted under corporate ownership. By the end of her tenure, she found herself being asked to approve products she hadn’t developed and didn’t believe in. “I’ve always only put my name on things I believe in,” she said later. “At the end of my tenure, I was forced into approving things that I never had a chance to approve. I refused.” In December 2016, she stepped down from the company that bore her name.

“I never put my name on something that I don’t believe in.”

— Bobbi Brown, on leaving her namesake brand

There were still four years remaining on the non-compete. For the first time in her adult life, Brown had time to think. She went back to school simply because it was the first time she could. She became a certified health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. She explored wellness products, fragrances, and an eyewear collection. She co-designed a boutique hotel, The George, in her hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. She waited.

Jones Road: The Brand She Actually Wanted to Build

On October 26, 2020, the precise day her non-compete agreement expired, Bobbi Brown launched Jones Road Beauty. The timing was not subtle, and it was entirely intentional.

The name came from Jones Road in Montclair, a street near her home. The philosophy was an evolution of everything she’d believed since those first ten lipsticks: the world doesn’t need more beauty products. It needs better ones. Jones Road launched as a “clean beauty” brand, formulated without parabens, phthalates, sulfates, and other potentially harmful ingredients. The original lineup included balms, moisturizing cream colors, mascaras, glosses, washes, and eye pencils, many designed to be multifunctional, used on cheeks, lips, and lids alike.

Jones Road’s founding principle:

“The world doesn’t need more beauty products, it just needs better beauty products.” Clean formulations. Multifunctional products. A curated range that doesn’t overwhelm. Launched during the pandemic, the day Brown’s non-compete ran out.

The launch coincided with Brown joining TikTok, where she began posting straightforward, no-nonsense tutorials aimed at women over 50. It was an unconventional move. TikTok had been largely understood as a Gen Z platform, but Brown’s videos found a hungry audience that had rarely been spoken to directly by the beauty industry. In one characteristic video, she challenged contouring trends directly: “Why would you want to contour your nose?” she asked, explaining how she’d learned to embrace her own features instead.

What Her Story Means

Bobbi Brown’s career is, at its core, a story about conviction. The conviction that women deserve makeup that makes them look like themselves. The conviction that a product is only worth putting your name on if you believe in it. The conviction that starting over, even at 63, during a global pandemic, in a saturated market, is always possible if you have something genuine to say.

She has become, as Allure magazine once put it, the world’s patron saint of natural makeup. But the more instructive part of her story isn’t the first brand, the lipsticks, the acquisition, the empire. It’s what came after.

It’s the woman who walked away from a $500-million business because they asked her to approve things she didn’t believe in. It’s the woman who spent four years in the wilderness, took health coaching classes, renovated a hotel, and then launched a cleaner, leaner, more honest brand on the exact day she was legally allowed to.

The world, she has always believed, doesn’t need more beauty products. It just needs better ones. And Bobbi Brown has spent her entire career proving, twice over, that she knows exactly what better looks like.

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Episode Description

In this episode of Be Anomalous, Julie Castro Abrams joins me for a conversation about power, identity, and what it actually means to build a life rooted in values, not validation.

Julie isn’t just a venture capitalist.
She’s a social worker at her core. A systems thinker. A builder of ecosystems that weren’t designed for women and definitely not for women who don’t play by the rules.

But the most important thing about Julie isn’t what she’s built.
It’s why she built it.

She grew up believing her life should be in service of others, not in theory, but in action. That belief shaped everything: her career in social impact, her decision to study inequality, and the way she’s navigated power in rooms that weren’t built for her voice.

But this conversation goes deeper than credentials.

We talk about identity not as a label, but as something you constantly shed and rebuild.
We talk about privilege, not as guilt, but as responsibility.
And we talk about what it means to lead without losing your humanity.

Julie also shares what she’s seen behind closed doors — in boardrooms, in fundraising conversations, and inside the systems that quietly decide who gets funded… and who gets overlooked.

And then we get real about the things no one teaches you:

How power actually works
Why women are still playing a game that wasn’t designed for them
And what it takes to build something when the odds — and the system — aren’t in your favor

This episode isn’t just about business.
It’s about self-awareness. Courage. And choosing to lead differently.

If you’ve ever felt like you don’t belong in the rooms you’re trying to enter…
This conversation will challenge you to stop asking for permission — and start redefining the room itself.

🎧 Listen to the Episode

[Spotify] | [Apple] | [YouTube]

What You’ll Learn

• Why identity isn’t fixed and how to consciously redefine it

• The difference between power, privilege, and responsibility

• What’s really happening in fundraising rooms (that no one says out loud)

• Why are women asked different questions than men, and how does it impact outcomes

• The hidden risks of choosing the wrong co-founder

• Why emotional resilience matters more than intelligence in building a company

• How to build a team when you can’t compete on salary

• The truth about imposter syndrome, even at the highest levels

• Why success without alignment leads to burnout

Favorite Quote

“When you let your light shine, you unwittingly give others permission to do the same.”— Marianne Williamson

Favorite Book

📖 Forces for Good — Leslie Crutchfield & Heather McLeod Grant

📖 The Founder’s Dilemmas— Noam Wasserman & Mark Mosely

In This Episode

(00:00) Who Julie is beyond her resume

(04:00) Growing up with purpose and choosing a life of service

(08:00) Power, privilege, and what most people misunderstand

(12:00) Living between identities — culture, race, and belonging

(18:00) Women, power, and surviving in male-dominated spaces

(24:00) The reality of bias in fundraising

(30:00) Why many founders fail before they even start

(36:00) Co-founder mistakes that can destroy companies

(42:00) What actually makes a successful founder

(48:00) Hiring, firing, and leading with clarity

(52:00) Redefining success at different stages of life

(54:00) Why women need to be investing, not just building

(56:00) Final reflections on leadership, visibility, and impact

Referenced in This Episode

• Venture capital and funding bias

• Women in leadership and boardrooms

• Identity, code-switching, and cultural navigation

• Startup building and founder dynamics

• Power structures and systemic inequality

• Mental health and high-performance environments

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

Follow for more Be Anomalous stories, conversations, and behind-the-scenes.

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube | @iamsaimenon

This week was an emotional rollercoaster. And I heard every bit of it.

It started with gratitude. A man almost as old as my father came to install our dishwasher. It was a hot day. He was running around, sweating, working. And something hit me quietly. The comfort I live in, the safety, the small luxuries I move through without thinking so much of that came down to where and to whom I was born. The birth lottery. I watched him, and I heard that feeling clearly. Gratitude. Deep, humbling gratitude. The kind that makes you realise you have no business complaining.

And then by the end of the same week, I was feeling detached. Questioning my worth. A completely different emotional place.

I heard that too.

Both of those were me in the same week. And instead of pushing either feeling away, I sat with them. That’s the practice, not managing your emotions, but actually hearing them and letting them tell you something.

You can be grateful and sad at the same time. You can feel full and empty in the same breath. You can count your blessings in the morning and question everything by evening. That is not a contradiction. That is just life. And life only makes sense when you’re honest enough with yourself to hear what you’re actually feeling, not what you think you should be feeling.

That’s where your voice lives.

The voice that only you can hear. The one that speaks in the quiet, in the in-between, in the middle of an emotional week when everything feels like too much. It was there when I watched that man and felt grateful. It was there when I felt lost by Friday. It’s always there. Telling you what you need, what you want, what comes next.

But you have to be attuned to yourself to hear it.

And the more you listen consistently, honestly, without judgment, the stronger that voice gets. That is how you build intuition. Not from a book, not from advice, not from anyone outside of you. From the practice of hearing yourself over and over again until you learn to trust what you hear. Until that voice becomes your compass.

Your friends will show up. Your kids, your husband, and your parents will be there. But none of them can hear your voice the way you can. None of them can feel your needs the way you feel them. That responsibility belongs to you alone.

So don’t lose your voice for anyone.

Build that relationship with yourself. Protect it. Because you are the only constant in the life you are building. And that voice, the one only you can hear, is not just self-awareness. It is your intuition. And your intuition is the truest guide you will ever have.

Don’t stop listening to it.

What I’m Reading

Think Faster, Talk Smarter — Matt Abrahams

A practical guide to improving spontaneous speaking and clear communication under pressure. I want to improve how I think and speak, so I am trying this highly rated book.

South to Freedom - Alice L Baumgartner

A historical account of enslaved people fleeing south to Mexico and how this challenged U.S. slavery laws. This is for my book club, and I’m truly enjoying it.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

Engineering Her Own Lane: Mitali Saxena on Reinventing Fashion, Tech & Herself

Under the Hood

The Bankruptcy Test: What Retail’s 2026 Wave Is Really Revealing

Note to Self

Life goes by quickly.

You don’t want to look up one day and realise you moved through it without really knowing yourself. Without knowing what you felt, what you wanted, what mattered to you in each moment.

Don’t wake up ten years from now asking what I actually wanted back then?

Every phase of your life is still you. The you who was figuring it out. The one who was hurting. The you who was hopeful. The you who didn’t have the words yet but felt everything deeply.

Know her.

Know the you in every season, not just the polished, put-together version. All of her. Because each version of you is building the next one. And if you’re not paying attention, life will pass, and you will have missed yourself entirely.

So listen. Feel. Write it down. Sit with it.

Know who you are right now in this season, in this moment.

Because this version of you deserves to be known, too.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

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