In this episode, I share the announcement of my new podcast, Influence FM (Apple + Spotify), and also riff on the hero(ine)'s journey, why it's an allegory for our transformation to soul-led living, and how manifestation can reinforce our egoic structures while co-creation with divine intelligence can unleash our true potential.

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The feminine principle of being in presence, intuition, and alignment isn't any less productive than the masculine principle of doing, forcing, hustle. It can even achieve the same or more results with less effort & more ease if you know how to navigate from your soul energetically & practically. Here are the key principles you need to know to get shit done while staying in your "feminine" mode.

Books mentioned:

Living In The Light by Shakti Gawain

The Intuitive Way by Penney Pierce

Rich Antoniello is the founder and former CEO of Complex Networks, a youth culture brand and media company that was founded in 2002 and sold in 2015 to Hearst and Verizon and later in 2021 to BuzzFeed.

Find Rich on Twitter and LinkedIn

Mentioned in the episode:

• Collect'd
• XSET
• Popchew
• ⁠Female Founder World⁠

In this solo episode I share 12 tips for DTC/ecommerce/product brands, including content ideas as well as strategies.

Brands on TikTok referenced:
Cheeky Bonsai
Bonbuz
Truly Beauty
Aura & Mind
Nanu Electrics
National Gallery London
Jones Road (Bobbi Brown's personal page)
Milk Makeup
Olipop
Bond & Seek
Inoki Bathhouse
The Silk Labs
Duolingo
Scrubdaddy
e.l.f. cosmetics
Gucci

In this episode I interview Ju Rhyu, CEO & co-founder of Hero Cosmetics. Ju co-founded Hero Cosmetics in 2017 after working in the corporate world when a trip to South Korea inspired her to bring hydrocolloid acne patches to the U.S. market — and thus Mighty Patch (one of Amazon's bestselling personal care products!) was born, kicking off a dazzling success story that is still just beginning.

We discuss:

• The key lessons she learned from successfully growing Hero Cosmetics to to over $100M in profitable revenue within 7 years
• The contrarian strategies that have unlocked massive growth for Hero Cosmetics
• Why she decided to sell her company (and why now)
• What the M&A process was like from initial outreach to acquirers to due diligence
• The most important things founders need to do in their companies to become "acquisition worthy"
• The essential people you need on your team to help you sell your company successfully
• Regrets other founders often have about their exit experiences
• And more

For more info:

Ju Rhyu's Instagram & Twitter
Ju Rhyu (website)
Hero Cosmetics

This is Part 2 of the TikTok series for anyone looking to get started on the platform.

I cover questions that include:

• My framework for how to go viral
• How I decide what brand sponsors to work with
• My recommendations for how to think about rates to charge & monetization for new creators
• My process
• And much more

In honor of NYE, a reflection on 2022 and the most transformative lessons I took away from this year about finding your path, trusting yourself, and finding ease.

This is Part 1 of a series on TikTok 101.

In this solo episode I cover:

• Common myths about TikTok
• Who it's right for (and who it's not)
• How I would start from scratch if I had to build a following from 0
• Tips I've learned on how to grow your following

My Instagram
My TikTok
Kim Pham's Twitter thread on how she grew to 100K in a year

Sarah Paiji Yoo is the CEO & co-founder of Blueland, a sustainable cleaning & home essentials brand on a mission to eliminate single-use plastics from our homes. She attended Harvard for her undergrad and MBA, worked at McKinsey out of college and then in private equity,  then founded her first startup, a mobile shopping platform called Snapette, after business school. Snapette went on to be featured in NYTimes, Oprah, Today Show, Forbes, TechCrunch, WWD, Glamour and was named one of The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. Snapette was backed by top-tier Silicon Valley VCs including Accel Partners and Forerunner Ventures and was sold after three years.

Sarah went on to become a founding partner of LAUNCH, a venture studio that has incubated leading DTC brands like M. Gemi, Follain, and Rockets of Awesome. While on maternity leave she learned about the microplastics in our water supplies and was inspired to start Blueland in 2019.

Blueland is a sustainability-driven brand that has been featured in NYTimes, WSJ, Vogue, and The Today Show as well as on Shark Tank. They've raised $35M to date from investors including Prelude Growth Partners as well as celebrity investors like Justin Timberlake and Adrien Grenier.

In this conversation we discuss:

• Sarah's background including what she got out of her MBA experience
• Why she decided to start Blueland
• How her cultural upbringing impacted how she thinks about family, motherhood & success
• How she navigates being the face of her brand
• Her top tip for hiring great talent that she's learned from being a serial entrepreneur
• The main advice she'd give to early stage founders

For more info:

Blueland (website)
Blueland TikTok & Instagram
Sarah's Instagram

If you want to pursue a creative passion, become a creator, or start something that requires discipline and consistency but you just haven't been able to make the commitment yet, allow me to introduce to you the 100 day challenge.

This is my secret weapon for overcoming creative and personal growth blocks. These challenges are not as crazy as they sound and one just might change your life like it did mine.

In this solo episode I break down what these challenges are, how to do them, WHY to do them, and my own experience with 3 of them so far and now a fourth to give you some pointers.

Find me on Instagram & TikTok

Jill & Carlene are the co-hosts of Breaking Beauty, a hit podcast on all things—you guessed it—beauty.

They're two longtime beauty editors who have seen it all and are dedicated to using their podcast to curate the industry's best for their listeners. With past guests like Kate Hudson, Matilda Djerf, Tracee Ellis Ross, Danessa Myricks, Charlotte Palermino and Violette (just to name a few from this year alone) they interview the who's who in the beauty & celebrity worlds about their favorite brands, products, and tips. 

Breaking Beauty Podcast
Breaking Beauty (website)

Also, if you like this podcast check out Female Founder World to listen to their podcast, attend their IRL events, and check out their newsletter for women in business. 

While I've contributed my fair share of "entrepreneurship p0rn" to the internet over the years, I think it's time we collectively acknowledge how much we have come to glamorize entrepreneurship and what some of the consequences are. 

Here's my take on what has contributed to this trend, its potential downsides, and why we need to talk about it.

If there is such a thing as an "OG girlboss", Candace Nelson would be it. 

Her entrepreneurial journey began when she left investment banking to cofound the cult favorite cupcake brand Sprinkles which has sold over 200M+ cupcakes since it was founded in 2005 & has been beloved by Hollywood celebrities from Jessica Alba to Blake Lively to Oprah. She sold the company in 2012 and went on to become executive producer of Netflix's Sugar Rush, a judge on Food Network's Cupcake Wars, and executive producer of Hulu's upcoming Best In Dough. Most recently she is known for cofounding the award-winning pizzeria chain Pizzana. She is an active angel investor, the NYTimes bestselling author of The Sprinkles Baking Book and now the author of the new manual for aspiring entrepreneurs, Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe to Turn Your Passion into Profit.

In this episode we discuss:

• How Candace went from investment banking in Silicon Valley to pastry school
• Why she's passionate about food & the food business
• The sacrifices she made in the early days of Sprinkles 
• How Candace uses competition to fuel her innovation
• Why she decided to eventually sell Sprinkles in 2012 
• How she balances being an entrepreneur with being an online personality AKA "creator"
• What the process of writing a book was like

Sweet Success (book)
Pizzana (restaurant)
Sprinkles Cupcakes
Candace's personal website
Candace's Instagram & TikTok

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Ahad Khan is the CEO of Kajabi, the leading knowledge commerce platform for creators to monetize their expertise.

Check out Kajabi

There's no ONE single playbook for starting a successful brand (no matter what anyone tells you—including me!). But there are some reliable patterns that surface once you analyze enough case studies, and these are some of the commonalities I've observed as being instrumental to the early success of noteworthy brands today.

So if I were just starting out in my career and I knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur eventually but not yet, these are the six steps I'd follow to set myself up for success.

Questions/feedback/comments? Find me on Instagram or TikTok. 

In our first interview ever (!) we interview Kim Pham, the cofounder of Omsom, a cult favorite loud & proud CPG brand bringing Asian flavors into your pantry.

We discuss:

• How Kim's background as a first-gen daughter of Vietnamese refugees inspired her to start Omsom
• What it was like for her to raise venture capital
• Her journey into kink & becoming a BDSM creator online
• Why everyone should learn the essentials of BDSM (and some mythbusting)
• And how Kim has navigated being unapologetically herself online & IRL 

Kim's personal website, Instagram, and TikTok
Omsom's website & Instagram

Get a free trial with Lyvecom to incorporate video commerce into your ecommerce strategy

And we're back. 

In this brief episode I discuss how 100 day challenges have changed my life, why I'm doing one for podcasting, and why you should consider doing your own—even if you have zero intentions of becoming a creator.

I also share what you can expect from this (resurrected) podcast including what interviews we have coming up in which we will cover topics ranging from BDSM to raising venture capital to how to sell your company for 100s of millions. The good stuff.

Have thoughts, questions, feedback? Slide into the DMs or drop a comment on one of my socials.

Instagram
TikTok

Welcome to the first episode of Due Diligence. This season of the podcast is all about "Girlboss downfalls"—AKA the stories of the iconic female-founded brands we know and (used to) love. What are their stories? What were their success strategies? What can we learn from the challenges they eventually faced so publicly? And how can we approach this analysis in a way that's critical, curious, and kind? We're dissecting each company, case by case, in multiple parts so we can dissect them strategically, culturally, and sometimes even politically.

This first episode is Part 1 of 3 about a company that has—perhaps more than any other—defined the Girlboss era. We're diving into the full backstory of the Glossier—from Emily Weiss's stint at Teen Vogue and later Vogue Magazine to the Into The Gloss days and, finally, to the spectacular rise of Glossier, a beauty brand that would come to define a category and transform multiple industries spanning beauty, ecommerce, and DTC.

To get updates on new episodes of the podcast, join the Substack here.

Find Dulma on TikTok here.

Tag her with your favorite part of this episode on Instagram here.

And stay tuned for the next episode, Part 2, where we are analyzing the playbook Glossier used to become a $1.8B beauty behemoth.

An introduction to Due Diligence: what you can expect from this podcast, the theme of the first season, and the "why" behind it all.

Rachel Woods is an AI-focused creator with 130K+ on TikTok and the founder of The AI Exchange, a subscription-based hub for AI education. Previously she was the founder of Vinebase, an AI-enabled ecommerce platform, and a data scientist at Meta.

In this episode we discuss:

• What is AI?
• What is machine learning?
• What are LLMs?
• Why AI is exploding now
• The big players in the AI landscape
• What is AutoGPT?
• Current limitations of AI chatbots
• Tips on prompt engineering
• Chatbot recommendations
• How creators & entrepreneurs can start using AI
• Some of the biggest risks of AI
• And more

Join The AI Exchange here to get 20% off on your first payment

Amanda Bucci is a life coach, content creator, and author of Followed: The Content Creator's Guide to Being Seen, Facing Judgment, and Building An Authentic Personal Brand.

In this conversation we discuss:

• How to stay aligned as a creator
• How to pivot & reinvent yourself
• Getting over the fear of being seen
• Tips for navigating being "cancelled" or called out
• Setting boundaries as a creator
• Practices to stay inspired & creative
• And more.

Pre-order her book

Find her on Instagram

Work with Amanda

Valeria Lipovetsky is a content creator in lifestyle & fashion from Russia & Israel and now based in Miami. She has over 5M+ followers across channels including YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. She is also the host of the Not Alone Podcast.

Reflecting on the past 100 days and what's ahead.

Brian Rappaport is the founder & CEO of Quan Media Group, a leading out-of-home advertising agency that has worked with brands like Skims, Daily Harvest, Public, Away, Truff, Recess, Casper, Ouai, Billie, Justworks, and Coterie.

Adrian Alfieri is the founder & CEO of Verbatim, a B2B content studio that has helped 100+ startups like OpenStore, Polywork, Goody, Tydo, Parker, Disco and Settle launch & scale their content functions. He is also the creator of The Proof as well as an advisor and angel investor in early-stage startups and venture funds.

This is the edited recording of a 1-hour live workshop I did on TikTok for Startups 101. Here is the presentation to accompany the workshop.

Jason Yeh is a former VC and startup founder who now helps startups navigate the fundraising process through his coaching, content and programs. Previously Jason was Director of New Media for Major League Baseball, an investor at Greycroft, and cofounder and CEO of the LA-based startup Tape.

Learn more:

Jason on Twitter

Adamant Ventures

Funded (podcast)

Fundraise with Confidence (course)

We have discipline all wrong. Most of us have been conditioned to believe that lacking discipline means we need to push or force ourselves with more willpower, and that if we stop forcing we stop producing.

This is one way to do it (and the most common way). But it's also a way that reinforces a subtle violence against the self and potentially leads to burnout. There's another way, and that way can be more effortless, easeful, and even pleasurable.

In this solo episode I share three keys to uncover your authentic discipline so that your consistency around your goals arises as a byproduct of alignment and not force.

Here are 7 resources for learning about business plus 3 bonus tips for how to accelerate this process of understanding a field/industry/vertical.

Here are my 10 principles for living based on an exercise I did to distill how I make life decisions. Sharing in case they're helpful or inspire you to do this exercise for yourself!

Ankur Nagpal is the founder of Teachable which he started in 2013 and sold for a reported $250M to HotMart in 2020. He is also the founder of Vibe Capital, an early-stage venture fund, and most recently Ocho, a fintech startup on a mission to help business owners and creators build wealth.

Here are three mindset strategies I think are even MORE important than specific tactics for becoming a successful creator on any platform.

Andrea Campos is an artist and illustrator who went full-time after a 100 day challenge led her to pivoting from her career in tech where she worked at startups like The Wing to an artist who has worked with major brands and also celebrities like Jimmy Fallon and Jennifer Lopez.

Brian Sugar is the co-founder and former CEO of PopSugar, a women's media company acquired by Group Nine (which was later acquired by Vox Media). He is now the Managing Partner of Sugar Capital where he invests in DTC brands like Feastables, Kinship, Caraway, Brightland, Omsom, Starface, and Kinship as well as tech companies enabling commerce like Archive, Bounty, EcoCart, Tydo, Fondue, and Cogsy.

Brian's Twitter

Sugar Capital website

Here is my perspective on the industry, key learnings from observing major celebrity brands over the last year especially, and some predictions. See also my most recent Substack newsletter.

Sari Azout is the founder and CEO of Sublime. Prior to Sublime she was a VC at Level Ventures, Head of Strategy at the Miami-based startup studio Rokk3r Labs, and CEO & co-founder of Bib + Tuck.

This solo episode is about the keys to consistency for anyone looking to work on a new project/business/endeavor with more follow-through & discipline.

Kiva Dickinson is the co-founder & Managing Partner of Selva Ventures, an early-stage CPG venture firm. Prior to founding Selva, Kiva was a partner at CircleUp Growth Partners, worked in private equity at TPG Global, and worked in investment banking at Barclays.

Kiva's investments through Selva Ventures include Mud/Wtr, Mid-Day Squares, Cake, Arrae, House of Wise, Three Wishes, and Kinship.

For more info on Selva Ventures: https://www.selvaventures.com/

To follow Kiva on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KivaDickinson

If you're in a transition and experiencing a time of great fear & uncertainty, you may be on the brink of a rebirth cycle in which a truer version of you and your life is on the brink of emergence. This process is anything but easy when you're in the thick of it, so in this episode we explore tools & principles for navigating this rebirth with more ease, flow, and intuition so we can uncover the hidden opportunity in these times of great upheaval.

Just a little recap on my first SXSW!

Rebecca Minkoff is a designer and the founder of the iconic fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff. Ali Koplar Wyatt is an executive & operator with a background in media from Elle to Refinery29 to Goop and Girlboss. Together they are cofounders of The Female Founder Collective, a community & platform for women entrepreneurs.

Join Female Founder's Day on March 23rd in Los Angeles

Peter Brack is a Managing Partner at Hypothesis Ventures, an early-stage VC fund investing in mission-driven companies outside of Silicon Valley. Peter was previously a Venture Partner at Mucker Capital in Los Angeles and before that started & exited two media companies on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange after starting his career in media at Time Warner and Time Inc. building the Asia operations. Peter is also a startup coach in addition to being an investor and advisor in startups.

This is a recording of my SXSW panel titled "The Future of Search: The Rise of Social Search Among Gen Z".

This is a recording of my SXSW panel titled "Money In The Mission: How 4 Entrepreneurs Turned Personal Pain Into Multi-Million Dollar Passion Projects" with Amy Liu (Tower28), Mason Spector (Madhappy), and Allison Evans (Branch Basics).

Michelle Miller is the SVP of Global Marketing at K18, one of the fastest-growing beauty brands to launch in the last few years. Prior to that she served as VP of Marketing at Kosas, VP of Global Marketing at IGK Hair, and Senior Marketing Manager at Too Faced Cosmetics.

Here are some of my key insights from the research & moderation I did for my SXSW panel titled, "The Future of Search: The Rise of Social Search Among Gen Z".

Greg Fleishman is a preeminent CPG founder & operator in food & beverage focused on starting, funding, and advising impact-driven brands. He co-founded Foodstirs with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Modern Alkeme with Real Housewife Jules Wainstein, and is on the board of companies like nuun hydration, Lily’s Sweets, and Once Upon A Farm (co-founded by Jennifer Garner). He has invested in leading CPG brands like MrBeast's Feastables and is the co-founder and general partner of Good Alpha Industries, a VC firm focused on CPG brands, consumer tech, and experiences that do good.

This is an impassioned rant about the media coverage of female founders in recent years: why it's a problem, the true costs, and what we can each do to play our part. It's inspired by this Fast Company article written by Leslie Feinzaig and is a solo episode in honor of International Women's Day.

Allie Egan is the CEO and founder of Veracity Selfcare, a hormonal wellness platform that helps you personalize your skincare based on your hormonal health. Prior to starting Veracity, Allie was the CEO of the iconic fashion brand Cynthia Rowley. She also led marketing at the Estée Lauder brands La Mer, Clinique and Origins after starting her career out in finance.

Today we explore a radically different approach to thinking about "purpose"—what it is, what it isn't, and how to discover yours. I also share my own (tortuous) journey to uncovering my own purpose, messy career pivots and all, and what helped me finally develop a deeper understanding of purpose that is different than any of the ideas that have been sold to me by society or self-help gurus. Enjoy.