The FIFA World Cup does something to people.

It brings out a kind of passion that is hard to explain: flags everywhere, faces painted, strangers becoming family in the stands, an entire country holding its breath over a single kick. And watching it all unfold this week, one word kept coming back to me.

Patriotism.

It is a strong word. The true definition, a deep sense of love, devotion, and attachment to one’s country or homeland. Simple enough on paper. But for some of us, it is a lot more complicated than that.

My homeland is India. I am deeply rooted there, my culture, my traditions, my essence, the way I see the world. All of it traces back to India. And yet I have never lived there for more than a year. India is where I am from. It is not where I grew up.

I grew up in Oman. I built my life in the US. Three countries. Three places that have shaped me in completely different ways. I have no legal obligation to Oman or America, no passport, no citizenship, no formal ties. But I have something else. An emotional attachment that is just as real. Just as deep.

So what does patriotism mean for someone like me?

Which country do I wave the flag for?

The World Cup made me sit with that question in a way I hadn’t before. Because everyone around me was so clear about who they were rooting for. So certain. So unambiguous in their loyalty. And I found myself thinking that kind of singular belonging is something I have never quite had.

I think for immigrants, for people who have lived between worlds, who carry more than one place in their chest, patriotism doesn’t fit neatly into one country. It can’t. Because your identity was never just in one place. It was the accumulation of everywhere you have ever called home. Every culture that shaped you. Every country that left its mark on you.

My patriotism is layered. It is Indian at its roots. It is shaped by the warmth of Oman. It is expanded by the opportunity of America. All three live in me simultaneously. And I don’t think I have to choose.

But here is why this actually matters.

Because when you don’t accept it, when you resist the in-between, you live in denial.

And denial is exhausting.

It looks like spending your life waiting to go back. Holding the place you are in at arm’s length because it doesn’t feel like home. Never fully investing in where you are because somewhere in the back of your mind, you are still planning to leave. But the truth is, you chose to be where you are. And that place is giving you something. Something real enough to make you stay.

When you finally accept that when you stop fighting the in-between and start living in it, everything changes.

You stop mourning the place you are not. You start loving the place you are. You stop existing in the gap between two worlds and start owning the fact that you get to carry both. That is not a consolation prize. That is actually a gift.

The in-between is not a waiting room. It is a life. Your life.

And it is worth showing up for fully, not with one foot always pointed toward somewhere else, but with both feet planted exactly where you are.

That is the life of an immigrant. You don’t belong entirely to one place. You belong to all of them and to none of them at the same time.

Accept that. Love that. Because that is you. All of you.

And you carry the world with you. Not everyone gets to say that.

What I’m Reading

My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future- Indra Nooyi (Starting)

A leadership memoir on balancing ambition, purpose, family, and long-term impact.

Start with yourself - Emma Grede (Finishing)

A practical guide to taking ownership, building influence, and creating opportunities.

Note to Self

You are not lost between worlds. You are made of them.

Accept where you are. All of it. Because the life you keep waiting to go back to and the life you are living right now — they are both yours.

Stop waiting. Start living.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

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

Most career advice assumes a ladder. Go to the right school, land at the right company, climb one rung at a time, and eventually, if everything breaks your way, you become CEO.

Fidji Simo’s career completely breaks that model.

She grew up in a small coastal town in France with no obvious route into global tech. Today she runs one of the most consequential parts of OpenAI. In between, she helped rebuild Facebook around mobile, took Instacart public as an outside CEO, and then did something most executives never do: she stepped down from the CEO seat to become an operator again. Each of those moves looked risky in the moment. Together, they trace the outline of a very different kind of career strategy, one built around proximity to what’s next, not distance climbed on a single ladder.

Starting Without a Map

Simo was born in Sète, a fishing town on France’s southern coast, where the local economy ran on boats, not startups. She was the first in her family to finish high school, a fact she’s often returned to, not as a sentimental detail but as the moment her sense of what was possible expanded.

With no built-in path into the tech world, she leaned on curiosity instead. That took her to HEC Paris for a master’s in management, and during that program, a year on exchange at UCLA gave her a first real foothold in the United States. For most students, a semester abroad is a memory. For Simo, it turned out to be the opening move of an entirely different life.

The Unglamorous Years

Her first job out of school was on eBay’s corporate strategy team, not a headline role, but a formative one. Strategy work forces you to understand a business from the inside: incentives, unit economics, customer behavior, the internal politics of how decisions actually get made and unmade.

It’s not the part of a résumé anyone highlights. It’s often the part that matters most later.

Ten Years Inside One Machine

Everything changed in scale after Simo joined Facebook in 2011. She didn’t hop between companies chasing bigger titles; she stayed put and let her responsibilities grow. Over a decade, she moved from building mobile ad products to overseeing Facebook Live and Watch, and eventually to running the entire Facebook app: News Feed, Stories, Marketplace, Groups, Gaming, Dating, Video, and Ads, the daily experience of billions of people.

That decade helped her lead to the next chapters. Speed gets celebrated in tech narratives, but Simo’s advantage came from the opposite instinct: staying long enough inside one complex system to actually understand how it worked, rather than skimming the surface of several.

Running a Company You Didn’t Build

In 2021, Simo took the harder version of the CEO job, stepping in to lead Instacart, a company she hadn’t founded, replacing Apoorva Mehta. That kind of transition comes with built-in friction: employees measure you against the founder, customers measure you against the founder, and you’re expected to protect the culture while also changing the business.

She leaned into what she’d spent a decade building: product instinct and the ability to scale. Under her leadership, Instacart grew its advertising business, pushed into AI-driven shopping tools, reached profitability, and completed its IPO. It was proof of a specific kind of leadership, the discipline of the operator who writes the next chapter.

Trading a CEO Title for a Bigger Bet

In 2025, Simo made the move that surprised the most people: she left the CEO seat at Instacart to join OpenAI. On paper, it read as a step down in title. In practice, it may have been the most deliberate decision of her career, a bet on proximity to the technology reshaping every industry, over the comfort of a title already earned.

She wasn’t arriving cold. Simo had previously served on OpenAI’s board, giving her a working understanding of the company’s strategy before she ever took an operating role there. Now, as CEO of AGI Deployment, reporting directly to Sam Altman, she oversees most of the company’s product and business machinery engineering, sales, finance, marketing, communications, policy, legal, and people. Since joining, she’s helped steer the launch of ChatGPT Health and the push to unify ChatGPT, Codex, and OpenAI’s broader tools into one coherent experience.

The easy read is that she swapped one prestigious job for another. The more accurate read: she moved toward where the next decade of technology is actually being built.

A Pause, Not an Ending

In April 2026, Simo took medical leave from OpenAI to deal with a relapse of a chronic neuroimmune condition, POTS, that she has managed for years. In July, she shared that the road to recovery was proving longer than expected and that she would not be returning to the role full-time, instead transitioning into a part-time advisory position at the company. Her responsibilities have since been distributed among other OpenAI leaders, including President Greg Brockman and CFO Sarah Friar.

What stood out in how she announced it was the candor. Simo pointed to an earlier moment in her career when Facebook offered her a full year of medical leave, and she turned it down without a second thought and said, in effect, that she’d learned the lesson too late the first time. This time, she made a different choice.

It’s a reminder that even a career built on relentless forward motion eventually has to reckon with limits that have nothing to do with ambition. Stepping back from a role of that scope, publicly and on her own terms, is its own kind of decision-making, the same instinct for knowing when to move that shaped every earlier chapter of her career, just pointed inward instead of outward.

A Career Measured Beyond the P&L

Simo’s footprint doesn’t stop at the org chart. She co-founded Women in Product, built to open up one of tech’s most influential career tracks to more women. She’s also put real weight behind biomedical research work shaped in part by her own experience with a chronic health condition and holds leadership roles supporting research into neuroimmune disorders. She also serves on Shopify’s board.

What Actually Compounds

Look past the job titles, and a clearer pattern emerges. Simo spent years going deep before she ever went broad.

That’s the real lesson underneath the résumé: titles, companies, and even entire industries shift underneath you. The thing that doesn’t depreciate is the ability to learn faster than the world around you is changing.

That’s the asset Fidji Simo has been quietly compounding the whole way through.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

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

There’s a stretch in Mira Kulkarni’s life that doesn’t show up in the headlines about her billion-dollar company. It’s not the Estée Lauder deal, not the London store, not the wedding in Jodhpur that changed everything. It’s two years, sometime after 2000, when she was working out of her home in Delhi, reformulating the same soaps and oils over and over, with no product on a single shelf and no guarantee any of it would ever leave her kitchen.

If you’re in the middle of building something right now, the version where you’ve put in real time and still have nothing to show for it, where the thing you’re making only exists in your head and a few notebooks, that’s the part of her story worth sitting with the longest. Not the acquisition. The two years before anyone had a reason to believe in her.

Starting Late, Starting Small

Kulkarni married at twenty. She’s described herself at that age as completely unaware and unexposed, a young wife who moved from Delhi to Chennai, then came back years later with two small children to raise. There was no five-year plan sitting underneath any of it. Looking back, she’s said something easy to feel but hard to say out loud: that so much of her early life passed by before she understood what she was actually capable of. “You’re in this little pond,” she said, “and you don’t know what to do.”

She didn’t leave the pond at twenty-five, or thirty, or even forty. She left it in her mid-forties, an age the startup world still quietly treats as too late, as if ambition comes with an expiration date. In 2000, with ₹2 lakh, roughly $4,500 at the time, and no outside money or safety net beyond her own conviction, she started making soaps and candles at home using coconut oil, almond oil, and ghee.

Ayurveda hadn’t been given a real chance at luxury. It had only ever been sold as medicine or sold cheaply.

She tested the idea small, low-stakes, low-cost: a home exhibition she called Candlemania, beeswax candles infused with herbs and pressed flowers, made from scratch in her own house. It sold out. That was the whole go-to-market plan: make something honest, put it in front of people, see if it lands.

The Part That Doesn’t Make It Into the Success Story

It took nearly two years of testing after that before the first real products shipped. Two years of a business that, from the outside, looked like nothing was happening. No funding round to announce. No press. No proof it was working, other than her own sense that the ghee, the sandalwood, the saffron needed to actually do what centuries of use said they could do, and that shortcutting that process would show up eventually, in a product that didn’t hold up.

This is the stretch that gets skipped over in most versions of a founder’s story, because it isn’t dramatic; it’s just quiet, uncertain, unglamorous work with no external validation. But it’s also the reason nobody could easily copy what came next. A competitor could copy an ingredient list off a label in an afternoon. Nobody could compress two years of getting the formulation right into a shortcut. If you’re in that stretch right now the invisible part, the part where you’re not sure it’s going anywhere it’s worth remembering that this is usually the part that becomes the moat later, even though it doesn’t feel like one while you’re in it.

The Hotel Order That Changed the Trajectory

The Delhi Hyatt Regency began ordering the soaps for its rooms after the property’s general manager personally requested bath essentials for the hotel. One relationship did something no advertising budget could have: it put Forest Essentials into the hands of exactly the people who could afford to buy the full-size version later, in a setting where trust already came built in.

By the time the first standalone store opened at Khan Market in Delhi in 2003, Forest Essentials wasn’t introducing itself to strangers. It had already quietly earned a reputation with the people who mattered most.

Growth from there was slow, on purpose. In 2005–2006, the company posted sales of around Rs. 6 crore, but nowhere near explosive built one category at a time: body oils, then bath essentials, then body polishes, then hair care. Kulkarni has described the model plainly: profits went back into the business, growth was slower for it, and there was no external target to hit and no funding to chase. No burn rate. No runway anxiety. Just a founder deciding the pace of her own credibility, even when slow, probably didn’t feel like a strategy; it probably just felt like reality.

A Meeting That Was Supposed to Last Thirty Minutes

In 2007, Leonard Lauder, chairman of Estée Lauder, whose mother had built the company from nothing, traveled to India for a wedding in Jodhpur and was gifted some Forest Essentials products. He was curious enough to ask his Indian country manager to look into the company. A meeting was scheduled in Delhi, meant to last thirty minutes. It ran two hours because Kulkarni and Lauder realized their founding stories rhymed two people who’d each built something out of very little, decades and an ocean apart.

A few months later, Estée Lauder took a 20% stake in Forest Essentials, its first investment in an Indian brand. It would have been easy, at that point, for Kulkarni to oversell, to dilute faster than made sense, to hand over more control than the moment required just because the offer was finally there. She didn’t. She treated the investment as fuel, not rescue. The board met twice a year to talk about long-term strategy. Estée Lauder stayed out of day-to-day operations. And the stake didn’t move again for twelve years; it stayed at 20% until 2020, when it rose to 49%. Not because anyone was hedging, but because two parties who already trusted each other felt no urgency to renegotiate something that was working.

What Nearly Three Decades of Patience Bought Her

By the time Forest Essentials was competing in India’s crowded 2020s beauty market, a landscape Kulkarni has described watching with something close to bewilderment, as thousands of new, VC-backed beauty brands appeared almost overnight, most indistinguishable from one another, the slowness had quietly become the advantage. Nearly 200 stores across India. Exports to 120 countries. A first international store in London’s Covent Garden in 2022 opened only after the brand had already proven itself online to the UK’s Indian diaspora, rather than betting everything on an untested physical launch.

And in March 2026, Estée Lauder Companies agreed to buy the remaining stake outright — the company’s first-ever full acquisition of an Indian brand, coming after eighteen years of partnership. Estée Lauder isn’t describing this as a rescue of a plateaued asset. Forest Essentials is currently ranked as the country’s top prestige skin care brand, with net sales projected to keep growing at a low double-digit rate. The acquirer’s own leadership has said the name, the pricing, the product strategy, and Kulkarni’s leadership will stay exactly as they are, with her son Samrath Bedi continuing alongside her. The brand keeps its Himalayan manufacturing base, its Ayurvedic R&D, its Indian identity intact — the things a faster-scaling, more anxious version of this company might have traded away for distribution a decade earlier.

If You’re in the Middle of the Hard Part

Here’s the thing worth carrying out of this story, if you’re in your own version of those invisible years right now: Kulkarni wasn’t rewarded for being fast. She was rewarded for being right, slowly, in a way that couldn’t be rushed or faked. She didn’t refuse help when it came; she took Estée Lauder’s investment the moment it was genuinely offered, on terms that let her keep building. The discipline was never about refusing capital or staying small out of principle. It was about not needing anything badly enough to accept it on terms that would have cost her the thing that made the whole effort worth doing.

If you’re sitting on something the world currently treats as ordinary, or cheap, or unglamorous, the question isn’t how to change to fit in. It’s what it would actually take to make the highest-quality version of it, the kind of quality that takes real time and can’t be shortcut by someone with more funding and less patience than you.

Kulkarni spent years with nothing to show anyone. Then twelve more years letting a single investor stake sit untouched, because the relationship didn’t need fixing. She was in her mid-forties when she started. She was sixty-nine when the company she built from a kitchen counter became worth a billion dollars to the people who’d once needed convincing.

The work you put in will be rewarded.

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, Rebecca Bartlett joins me for an honest conversation about entrepreneurship, creativity, motherhood, and what it really means to build a business on your own terms.

Rebecca is the Founder and Creative Director of Bartlett Brands, the agency behind some of the beauty and wellness industry’s most recognizable startups. After beginning her career inside one of beauty’s fastest-growing companies, she left corporate life to help founders build brands from the ground up—partnering with visionary entrepreneurs from day zero.

But this conversation goes far beyond branding.

We talk about:

• Why leaving corporate wasn’t the hardest part—learning to sell herself was

• The confidence gap women are taught to live with

• Negotiating your worth and unlearning the need to stay small

• Why startup founders need courage more than certainty

• Building brands that take risks instead of playing it safe

• The importance of trusting your intuition when choosing clients and making decisions

• Motherhood, ambition, and the impossible expectations placed on women

• The myths around postpartum, work-life balance, and “having it all”

• Why slowing down can actually make you a better leader

• What separates brands that survive from those that disappear

Rebecca’s story is a reminder that success isn’t about chasing someone else’s definition of achievement. It’s about building a life, a career, and a business that aligns with who you are—and having the courage to trust your own path.

🎧 Listen to the episode

YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Favorite Quote

“You don’t have to burn it down. Sometimes you just need to slow down a little.”

Favorite Book

Out in the Woods by Gregg Olsen

In This Episode

(00:00) Meet Rebecca Bartlett and the story behind Bartlett Brands

(02:00) From corporate beauty to building brands from scratch

(05:00) Why women struggle to sell themselves and own their expertise

(08:00) Negotiating your worth and overcoming imposter syndrome

(12:00) Why startups succeed by taking risks, not avoiding them

(16:00) Choosing the right clients and trusting your gut

(21:00) Entrepreneurship, motherhood, and the pressure to do it all

(24:00) The reality of postpartum and breaking impossible expectations

(30:00) Why ambitious women need permission to slow down

(36:00) Building resilient brands that last beyond the hype

(42:00) Raising confident children and redefining success

(46:00) What it truly means to build an extraordinary life on your own terms

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

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

The person who fears losing the most is not the person who has nothing.

It is the person who has everything.

Think about that for a second.

When you are at the bottom, trying to climb, you are not afraid of falling. You are just focused on the next step—the next rung. The only direction that exists is up, and so that is where all your energy goes. There is a clarity in that—a kind of freedom in having nothing to protect yet.

But then you start climbing. And something shifts.

The higher you get, the more you have to lose. The more you have to lose, the more afraid you become of going back down. And suddenly, the climb that once felt like pure momentum starts to feel like something heavier. You are no longer just climbing toward something. You are also running from the thought of losing what you have already gained.

And here is the other thing.

Once you get what you were chasing, you want the next thing. The finish line moves. It always moves. So you are never really arriving anywhere. You are just chasing, gaining, fearing, chasing again. On a loop. Indefinitely.

I saw a video that made me think about how much of our lives we spend in this cycle chasing, gaining, protecting, chasing again. And I realized something sitting with it.

That is not the point.

The point is to enjoy the climb itself. To find something you love doing so much that everything else — the wins, the recognition, the results — becomes a bonus. Because if you are already happy while you are climbing, if the climb itself is the reward, then the fear of losing loosens its grip. What you gain along the way is wonderful. But it is not the source.

You are.

So ask yourself whether you are enjoying the climb? Or are you just chasing the top?

Because the top will always become the bottom of the next thing.

The climb is all there is. You might as well love it.

What I’m Reading

Crush It - Gary Vee (Reading)

I want to use this as a guide for building.

Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss(Reading)

I have been told this is a must-read for negotiating.

What Else Dropped This Week

Off Script

Why This Founder Refused VC Money & Built a Thriving Business | Susanne Mitschke

Under the Hood

The Attention Arbitrage Engine

Note to Self

Keep your blinders on.

Not because the destination is everything, but because the journey is. The climbing, the building, the figuring it out as you go. That is the achievement. Not the moment you arrive. The whole beautiful, messy, uncertain journey getting there.

Do what you love. Enjoy the climb. Let everything else be the bonus.

And when the fear of losing creeps in — and it will — remind yourself that you didn’t start this to protect what you have. You started this because something in you had to.

Keep going.

The journey is the point. It always was.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

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

Every durable consumer business is, underneath the product story, a bet on attention. Somebody spotted a place where eyeballs were gathering faster than the market had priced in, planted a flag there. At the same time, it was still cheap, and converted that audience into revenue before the competition woke up. The product gets the credit in the press release. The channel did the work.

There’s a name worth borrowing for the mechanism: attention arbitrage. Buy distribution while it’s underpriced, build an audience you actually own, convert that audience into a business, then reinvest the audience into the next bet. It’s the same logic as financial arbitrage, exploiting a gap between price and value before the gap closes, except the asset is human attention and the window is always closing. Most founders fall in love with the product and treat distribution as an afterthought. The arbitrageur inverts it, because a mediocre product on an underpriced channel beats a great product on a saturated one almost every time.

The cleanest way to see the engine is to watch one operator run it four separate times, in four unrelated categories, over twenty-five years. Gary Vaynerchuk is the obvious specimen, not because he’s a marketing personality, but because he’s the rare case where the same play is documented end to end, including the run where it broke.

Run one: the proof of concept

Vaynerchuk took over his father’s New Jersey liquor store, Shopper’s Discount Liquors, in the late nineties, fresh out of Mount Ida College. The conventional growth path for a $3-to-4-million regional retailer was to open a second location, then a third. He did something stranger. He renamed it Wine Library, launched winelibrary.com as one of the first alcohol e-commerce sites in the country, and then went hunting for cheap attention to point at it.

The tactical details are where the arbitrage lives. He built an aggressive email operation back when email was free and nobody respected. And in the most instructive move of his career, he became one of the first advertisers to buy the keyword “wine” on Google, paying ten cents a click while everyone else ignored search entirely. Ten-cent attention, converting to bottle sales. That’s the whole thesis in one line item. In roughly five years, the business went from about $3 million a year to $60 million. He didn’t outsell his competitors on the floor; he found a distribution channel they hadn’t noticed and bought it.

Run two: turning himself into the asset

In February 2006, barely a year after YouTube existed, he pointed a camera at himself. He started Wine Library TV, a near-daily wine-review show he ran for 1,000 episodes before retiring it in 2011. On paper, it sold wine. What it actually did was far more valuable: it converted the most underpriced channel of that moment, online video, into a personal audience that belonged to him rather than to the store.

That audience compounded into assets the liquor business never could have produced. A keynote at the Web 2.0 conference became the spine of a roughly $1-million, ten-book deal with HarperCollins, and the first of those books, Crush It!, became his first New York Times bestseller. The realization underneath this run is the one most founders miss: his own attention was a reusable asset, and unlike inventory, it didn’t deplete when he spent it. He’s since stacked six bestsellers and an audience of 45 million followers on top of that single insight.

Run three: selling the engine to everyone else

By 2009, the move was obvious enough to productize. He and his brother, AJ, founded VaynerMedia on a simple pitch: we did this for a liquor store, we can do it for your brand, and, true to the arbitrage mindset, never raised a funding round, starting in a borrowed conference room. The agency’s job was to run attention arbitrage as a service for companies that couldn’t run it themselves.

It scaled the way an engine scales when you sell it as infrastructure rather than a product. Revenue hit roughly $100 million by 2016, and by 2023, the agency was managing over a billion dollars in ad spend a year, with its consultancy arm growing revenue 46 percent in a single year. It now sits inside the VaynerX holding company alongside media properties like PureWow and ONE37pm, runs around 2,000 employees, and carries third-party revenue estimates near $288 million. The figures are estimates, it’s privately held, but the shape is unmistakable: he turned a personal skill into a recurring-revenue machine by renting it out.

Run four: the same bet, made with money

His angel portfolio is the purest distillation of the thesis, because it’s the identical trade executed with capital instead of content. His first three checks went into Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, followed by Venmo, Snapchat, Coinbase, and Uber. Read that list again, everyone is a company building a new surface for consumer attention before the mainstream understands it. He wasn’t running discounted cash-flow models. He was betting on where attention would migrate next, which is the only question he’s ever really asked. The portfolio now runs past 170 investments with 37 documented exits, and the two cleanest operator wins, Resy to American Express in 2019 and Empathy Wines to Constellation Brands in 2020, came from the same instinct applied to building rather than buying. For the record, he passed on Uber’s first round and calls it one of his biggest misses. The arbitrageur doesn’t catch every window.

What founders can actually take from this

The honest read for anyone trying to copy this is that the engine is learnable, but two of its advantages aren’t available on demand. One is timing, a liquor store hitting e-commerce in 1998, a creator hitting YouTube in 2006, and an angel hitting the social wave in 2009. You can’t summo

n a once-a-decade channel into existence because you’re ready for it. The other is the flywheel itself: by his second run, he was launching every new bet to an audience of millions, which is the exact asset most founders are still trying to build and the reason his fifth idea travels further than your first.

But the part you can steal is the part that matters. Stop optimizing the product in a vacuum and start asking the only question the engine has ever asked: where is attention gathering right now that the market hasn’t priced yet, and how do I plant a flag there before it does? Build the audience before you need it, on a channel you own, and convert it into something with real value underneath so that when the channel cools, as every channel eventually does, you’re standing on a business and not on a floor price. The operators who win aren’t the most talented in the room. They’re the ones who showed up to the right channel early and stayed long enough to own the audience.

That’s the whole game. Find the gap. Buy it cheap. Own what you build.

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, Susanne Mitschke joins me for a conversation about entrepreneurship, clinical research, women’s health, and what it really takes to build a company that lasts.

Susanne is the co-founder and CEO of Citruslabs, a company helping consumer brands validate their products through decentralized clinical studies. Before building Citruslabs, she studied biostatistics and epidemiology, conducted research at Harvard, and founded a digital health startup focused on cognitive health.

But this conversation goes far beyond clinical trials.

We talk about:

• Why Susanne chose to build Citruslabs without venture capital

• The lessons she learned from her first startup and why revenue matters from day one

• What founders misunderstand about fundraising and investor incentives

• How Citruslabs grew organically through customer demand

• Hiring, leadership, and building a low-hierarchy culture

• Why women’s health has historically been underrepresented in research

• The role social media has played in pushing women’s health conversations forward

• Founder health, sleep, exercise, and sustainable performance

• Failure, resilience, and why unconventional paths require unconventional thinking

Susanne’s story is a reminder that success doesn’t always look like headlines, funding rounds, or hypergrowth. Sometimes it’s building something valuable, profitable, and resilient enough to still be here decades from now.

🎧 Listen to the episode

Youtube | Spotify | Apple

Favorite Quote

“If you want to do something unconventional, you have to be unconventional and you shouldn’t follow conventional advice.”

Favorite Books

Extraterrestrial by Avi Loeb

A fascinating exploration of ʻOumuamua and the possibility of extraterrestrial life through the lens of one of Harvard’s leading astrophysicists.

Starter Villain

A humorous novel about an ordinary man who unexpectedly inherits a fortune—and a lot of cats.

In This Episode

(00:00) Meet Susanne Mitschke and the mission behind Citruslabs

(03:00) Growing up in Germany and choosing a career path at 17

(06:00) The first startup: MindMate and lessons from failure

(10:00) Why Citruslabs never raised venture capital

(16:00) Clinical research, transparency, and consumer health brands

(20:00) Why women’s health research has historically lagged behind

(23:00) The role of advocacy and social media in changing healthcare

(24:00) Founder health, sleep, and sustainable performance

(27:00) Building a team and hiring for culture fit

(30:00) What does success mean after building multiple companies

(33:00) Leadership, delegation, and letting people fail

(36:00) Why failure is necessary for growth

(37:00) Unconventional advice for unconventional founders

(38:00) Books, curiosity, and the search for bigger questions

New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

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We are social animals.

We need people around us. Community. Connection. The feeling of being needed, liked, and understood. That is not a weakness; that is just human. But here is where it gets complicated. When we constantly look outside ourselves for validation, when who we are becomes a reflection of what others expect, we slowly lose the thread that connects us to ourselves.

And most of us don’t even notice it happening.

I talk to a lot of people. And one of the things I hear more than almost anything else is some version of this: I used to be really good at drawing or painting or writing or music. Or something. Some outlet, some gift, some part of themselves that got quietly buried under the years of becoming what they were expected to become.

I understand that more than I can say.

In high school, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I used to draw sketches. I was cultivating something, a skill, a vision, a version of myself I was curious about. But I didn’t have access to that world. I couldn’t see what you could actually do with those skills. My dad is an engineer. My mom is an accountant. They were building a business, doing what worked, doing what made sense. And so I followed what I could see. I was good at problem-solving, and that part of computer science made sense to me. So I went there and, in doing so, quietly buried the creative, designing side of who I was.

I am not saying I would have become a fashion designer. That is not the point.

The point is that who we are today is shaped far more by our surroundings than by what was actually inside us. The access we had. The examples we could see. The expectations that were spoken and unspoken. We became what was visible to us. And everything else, the gifts, the curiosities, the quiet passions got left behind.

So stop for a second.

Is there something in you that got buried? Something you were once good at, once drawn to, once lit up by that you haven’t touched in years?

One of the reasons I love talking to people from so many different industries and walks of life is that I want people to see the opportunities that lie ahead. The ones I couldn’t see when I was a kid, standing at the edge of a world I didn’t have a map for.

I was always a dreamer. I didn’t always have the window to see what was possible.

Maybe this is your window.

How do you find it again?

If you are confused about how to even get started, the following might help, but I do have to say it is an effort, and you have to take the time.

Go back to childhood.

What did you love before the world told you what to love? Before the pressure of practicality, before the expectations, before you knew what was realistic. Think back to what you did purely for the joy of it.

Notice what you admire in others.

Sometimes what we admire most in other people is a reflection of something dormant in ourselves. The artist you follow obsessively. The writer whose work stops you cold. Ask yourself what it is about them that pulls me? The answer is usually closer to home than you think.

Try things without the pressure of being good at them.

We stopped exploring because we became afraid of being beginners. Permit yourself to be terrible at something new. Take the class. Pick up the instrument. Open the sketchbook. You are not auditioning. You are excavating.

Sit in the quiet and ask yourself honestly.

If nobody was watching. If money weren’t a factor. If you had nothing to prove, what would you spend your days doing? Write that answer down. However impractical it sounds.

What I’m Reading

The Cold Start Problem - Andrew Chen(Finished)

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. This is a must-read for anyone who is starting a marketplace or using network effects.

Crush It - Gary Vee (Reading)

I want to use this as a guide for building.

Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss(Reading)

I have been told this is a must-read for negotiating.

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

The New Media Moguls Nobody Saw Coming

Note to Self

Somewhere along the way, you buried a part of yourself to become what made sense to everyone else.

You are the only person who will be there for yourself till the very end. So enjoy your own company. Get curious about yourself again. The way you were before the world had opinions about who you should be.

That person never left. She just got quiet.

It is time to listen.

Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.

— Sai Menon

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

A 13-year-old kid in North Carolina uploads a gaming video to YouTube from a secondhand laptop. A 24-year-old graduate in New York records a podcast about her dating life with her roommate from their Lower East Side apartment. A university dropout in Manchester builds a social media agency out of his bedroom and starts talking into a microphone because he has no one else to tell his ideas to.

None of this looked like the future of media. All of it was.

While television executives were protecting their ad rates and radio programmers were cutting staff and magazine publishers were asking why nobody was reading anymore, a different kind of media company was being built in bedrooms and apartments. Just a camera, a microphone, and an audience that kept getting bigger.

The creator economy, the industry built around individuals who produce and monetize content independently, is now worth an estimated $250 billion globally, and is projected to reach $500 billion by 2030. YouTube’s daily usage passed Netflix worldwide in 2026. Podcasts converted 67% of their listeners into buyers of something. Netflix is now cutting deals to put podcasts on its platform because daytime television is in freefall. The old guard didn’t see the disruption coming because it didn’t come from Silicon Valley or Hollywood. It came from people who just refused to stop posting.

Three of those people, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, Alex Cooper, and Steven Bartlett, are now building what traditional media always claimed it was: a genuine connection with a massive audience that translates into real money. Here’s how they actually got there.

Jimmy Donaldson Started With Nothing. He Still Acts Like It.

In 2012, a 13-year-old from Greenville, North Carolina, started posting gaming videos. His channel was called MrBeast6000, a name that came from a randomly generated Xbox gamertag. His production quality was terrible. His thumbnails were an afterthought. He spent close to five years posting consistently before he hit a million subscribers.

What he was doing in those early years, though, wasn’t just posting. He was studying the platform obsessively, analyzing what made videos spread, what kept viewers watching, and what the algorithm rewarded. He made videos counting numbers for hours. He ranked other YouTubers’ subscriber counts. He reacted to bad content to attract people who made bad content. None of it was glamorous, but all of it was data. He dropped out of East Carolina University after two weeks because he was editing videos in the parking lot instead of going to class.

The breakthrough came when he stopped trying to optimize the algorithm and started trying to break it. In 2017, he posted a video of himself reading out loud for 24 hours. Then he started giving money away, $10,000 to a stranger, $100,000 buried in a field, and a Lamborghini to someone who kept their hand on it longest. Spectacle as content. Generosity as strategy. The thesis was simple: if the video was worth more to the viewer than anything else competing for their time, they’d watch. They’d share. They’d come back.

It worked. By 2022, he had surpassed PewDiePie to become the most-subscribed individual creator in YouTube history.

How does he make money? Every possible way. YouTube ad revenue from hundreds of millions of views per video. Feastables, the chocolate bar brand he launched in 2022, now sits in over 80,000 retail locations across North America, including Walmart, Target, and 7-Eleven, pulling an estimated $200 million in annual revenue. Beast Industries, the holding company behind all of it, raised at a $5 billion valuation. And then there’s Beast Games, the Amazon Prime Video reality competition where he put up a $10 million prize pool and nearly 5,000 contestants. Amazon made over $100 million in profit from Season 1 within its first four weeks. Season 2 aired in January 2026. Season 3 is in negotiation, with Donaldson reportedly asking $150 million per season, and last week, he reached 500 million subscribers on YouTube.

He is, by every measure, the largest individual media operation in the world. And he still talks about it like a kid who might wake up and find out it wasn’t real.

Alex Cooper Was Told No. She Found a Different Door.

Alex Cooper grew up in Newtown, Pennsylvania, played Division I soccer at Boston University, and had her athletic career ended by a knee injury. She graduated in 2016 and moved to New York to work entry-level media jobs, navigating a dating life in Manhattan she later described as “chaotic in the best and worst ways.”

In 2018, she and her roommate, Sofia Franklyn, started recording a podcast from their apartment. The idea was simple: say the things women actually talk about among themselves but never out loud in public, sex, relationships, ambition, and dating disasters. They called it Call Her Daddy. They uploaded it to Barstool Sports, which gave them distribution and a small salary in exchange for owning the show.

Within two years, Call Her Daddy had become one of the most listened-to podcasts in the country. Then everything almost fell apart. In 2020, a contract dispute with Barstool founder Dave Portnoy became public. Franklyn left. Cooper was left holding a podcast she didn’t fully own, with an audience who’d watched her fight publicly for control of her own work. Instead of waiting for the situation to resolve itself, she negotiated hard, won sole ownership of the show, and kept going alone this time.

In 2021, Spotify signed her to an exclusive deal worth $60 million over three years. In 2024, SiriusXM came with a bigger offer: up to $125 million over three years, with advertising and distribution rights not just for Call Her Daddy but for the entire Unwell Network, the podcast collective she’d been quietly building around herself, backing voices she thought could command the same kind of loyalty she had built. Kamala Harris came on the show during the 2024 election campaign, the same week Donald Trump appeared on Joe Rogan’s. That parallel told you everything about where political press tours had moved.

How does she make money? The $125 million SiriusXM deal is the anchor, but the business underneath it keeps expanding. Unwell Hydration, her electrolyte drink brand, launched in partnership with the National Women’s Soccer League. Unwell Creative Agency launched with Google as its first client, helping brands reach Gen Z through original productions. She directs the creative, earns the ad revenue, owns the IP, and, unlike every radio host or television personality who came before her, keeps the upside from everything she builds on top of it.

Steven Bartlett Dropped Out After One Lecture.

Steven Bartlett was born in Botswana, moved to England at two years old, grew up in Plymouth, and lasted exactly one month at Manchester Metropolitan University before he decided a classroom wasn’t going to teach him what he needed to know.

In 2014, he co-founded Social Chain, a social media marketing agency that understood something most traditional agencies didn’t: that internet communities were the new media channels, and the brands that learned to speak their language would win. Social Chain grew to over 200 employees, landed clients including Apple, McDonald’s, and the BBC, and went public through a merger in 2019. Bartlett, at 27, became one of the youngest people to take a company public in Europe.

He stepped down as co-CEO in 2020. And instead of retiring or starting another agency, he did something most people coming off a nine-figure business exit don’t do: he started a podcast because he wanted to figure out what he’d actually learned.

The Diary of a CEO launched in 2017 while he was still running Social Chain, initially as a personal audio diary, something to organize his own thinking. Over time, it became something else. He started interviewing entrepreneurs, scientists, psychologists, athletes, world leaders, and anyone who’d done something worth understanding. By 2025, Spotify Wrapped ranked it as the second-most-popular podcast globally. It now has over 15 million YouTube subscribers, 70 million monthly downloads, and has passed one billion YouTube views in late 2025.

In October 2025, Bartlett raised a major eight-figure investment for Steven.com, his holding company, at a $425 million valuation, retaining over 90% ownership. The structure underneath it: FlightStory, a media production arm; FlightCast, a podcast hosting platform built natively for video; FlightFund, a venture arm with investments in SpaceX, Whoop, Groq, Replit, and MrBeast. He has backed more than 40 companies. His stated ambition is to build the Disney of the creator economy. This machine takes creator IP and compounds it the way Disney compounded Mickey Mouse into a century-long entertainment empire.

How does he make money? The Diary of a CEO generates an estimated $20 million a year in advertising alone. FlightStory produces content for other creators and brands. FlightFund invests. FlightCast monetizes the infrastructure. And as the youngest-ever Dragon on BBC’s Dragons’ Den, he’s gained equity stakes in businesses that have nothing to do with content at all.

What This All Actually Means

The numbers are one thing. The shift underneath them is something bigger.

Traditional media, television, radio, and publishing were built on a model where the institution owned the audience. A network had viewers. A station had listeners. A magazine had subscribers. The individual on camera or behind the microphone was the hired talent. The distribution was the asset, and the institution held it.

What MrBeast, Cooper, and Bartlett built is the opposite of that. The individual is the distribution. The audience follows the person, not the platform, which is why Cooper can move from Spotify to SiriusXM and take her listeners with her, why MrBeast can launch a chocolate bar and have it in 80,000 stores within three years without a single traditional marketing campaign, and why Bartlett can raise $425 million at 33 and still own 90% of the company. None of them is an employee of the medium they work in. They own the relationship.

This is what “replacing traditional media” actually looks like. Not a dramatic collapse, but a quiet migration of audience trust from institutions to individuals, and with it, a migration of the economics. The ad money that used to flow to television networks and radio stations is now flowing directly to the people audiences chose to spend their time with. YouTube’s daily usage passing Netflix isn’t a quirk. It’s a verdict.

The three people above didn’t plan to build media empires. They started with a camera, a microphone, and something they wanted to say. The audiences found them and then stayed. In a world overflowing with content, that sustained attention turned out to be worth more than anything the old model ever produced.

New article every Tuesday.

Be Bold. Be Real. Be Anomalous.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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