Shizu Okusa: Founder & CEO of Apothékary

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. All right, here we go. Hi, this is Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show. And I’m so thrilled to have my next guest here. I am so excited to have her here. What she is doing is just absolutely incredible and so, so hard in many, many ways, because she is taking on an entirely new category within the health and wellness industry that I think is definitely needed. There are other people who are doing things kind of around what she’s doing. But really creating supplements and disrupting synthetic supplements, I should say, is sort of the core of what they’re doing. I’m talking about. Shizu Okusa, the founder and CEO of Apothékary, and rooted in East Meets West wisdom. So after exiting her first business in 2019, Shih Tzu set out to disrupt synthetic supplements by launching a platform that makes plant medicine fun and accessible and combining ancient ritual and modern science. apothecary was born so they do blends that are just absolutely incredible herbal alternatives, clean herbal alternatives, I should say. And by the way, she is just a force I absolutely loved listening to a couple of her other interviews, and, you know, definitely leads with the heart. But there’s a lot ahead in here. And she’s you can just tell being educated along the way and curious and all of the great aspects that I think every founder, entrepreneur, startup leader needs to have. So very thrilled to have you here on the show she Sue.

Shizu Okusa 2:35
You speak way too highly of me. And it’s it’s really a mutual, I’m so happy to be here. And thank you so much for having me. And I’m so excited to kind of just have this conversation with you and share the stories. Awesome.

Kara Goldin 2:51
We’re very, very cool. So give us the backstory. This is your second startup. Can you talk about your journey? You don’t have to take us all the way back to being a kid. But I mean, what the heck, if you want to go back that far. But what sort of led you I always feel like the journey overall sort of leads you to where you are today. And Steve Jobs famously said the dots eventually connect. But I feel like Yeah, it’s crazy how, how they really do but tell me a little bit about your backstory. Absolutely.

Shizu Okusa 3:30
So my parents were Japanese immigrants. And they moved to Vancouver, Canada. So I was actually born and raised in Canada. And I grew up on a farm, my dad was a cow farmer. So I grew up around a lot of nature animals. I had, I didn’t have dogs as pets, I had ducks as pets. And it was just like, such an absurd way of living at least competing comparison quote, unquote, to others at the time. Because I think when you’re young, you do a lot of this relative comparison when you’re young. And I think that really gave me so much skin, a thick, like just thick skin. Growing up as an immigrant growing up as a second generation, not speaking quite, you know, clear English at the time. And then I left Vancouver My first job was actually working in Wall Street. So I think what I tend to do with my life is like throw myself in situations that are completely out of, like, out of my understanding of the world at the time and but when I when I moved from Vancouver, I really wanted to be in finance. I really wanted to be in New York and if I was going to do all of that I wanted to work for the best bank possible. So I flew myself to New York without a job or an offer to come visit. But I knew one person that Goldman Sachs who I cold emailed and that changed the trajectory of my entire life. I feel like having worked and someone believing you that first belief in you is is really the the one chain Since I think that opened up so many doors for me, and I’m so so grateful for that, and I keep in touch with him and my boss, his name was Ted goldthorpe To this day. But really, I think the the journey from Wall Street to Wall Street which I call wellness, was really this like journey of, I think self discovery truly, and, and bringing to light a lot of the the rituals and routines of Eastern and how I was raised and my culture and ancestors and plant medicine and nature truly being as medicine. And so I think it really started on like growing up in a farm working in Wall Street, then living in Mozambique on a Banana Farm. So kind of like always being in nature, and then move back to the US and started my first company, which was a cold pressed juice brand. And then now Apothékary today, which is rooted in nature as medicine. So

Kara Goldin 5:55
was there a moment when you were working on Wall Street? I always say like, there’s never any regrets, right? You learned a ton and probably that really helped you to be able to do what you’re doing today. But was there a moment when you just said, I’m gonna go and go into wellness? And really, this is what I’m passionate about? I’m always so curious, like, what was the tipping point for you?

Shizu Okusa 6:23
Ah, you know, I think from you know, Apothékary both so both both my first company, which is called drink cold pressed juice, business, and then and beverages very hard, as you know, so so. And it took much longer than I ever had expected to grow the business to where I where I did. And then with Apothékary, it was always wellness. And I think before wellness became an industry before wellness, and supplementation has become this massive category now, you know, 12 years ago, when I started my entrepreneurial journey, I just really wasn’t there. And, you know, I was just very focused on how do I bring some of these solutions that worked for me and my mental health and physical health issues to the mass market. And so that’s what really I focused on. And I actually think with drink my first company, you know, it was a very regional business versus Apothékary and what I believe what we want to do with this company now is is create real impact and real scale. So we’re opening up global shipping in q1 and kind of just thinking about, like, how do we bring more impact to the world? And we’re starting to actually take HSA FSA funds and, and really start to bridge that Western healthcare with Eastern natural medicine, and be one of the larger players and names that people trust to do that.

Kara Goldin 7:44
So I’m so curious, like, how did you know how to do that? Because you weren’t actually dealing with FSA, for example? And yeah, in your juice company, right, like, how did you run across that? I mean, obviously, you cold called somebody at Goldman Sachs in order to ultimately get that first big break. So you’re not afraid to do the cold calling. But you know, is it? Do you just sort of keep talking to people along the way, and keep asking questions and let your curiosity guide you? It seems like that’s kind of the case. Yeah,

Shizu Okusa 8:24
you I think you nailed it, I actually, you know, I think we’re a lot of people that want to start their own company and founders or that want to be a, quote unquote, founder. Where they miss it is I think that it’s actually just about trusting your curiosity, and learning and moving forward and taking the next best step and following that curiosity. And it leads and opens up so many doors, because entrepreneurship, at the end of the day is all just about action. It’s the people that take action, that people that like continue to move forward when other people are scared to move forward. And that’s really what I think makes or breaks a founder and entrepreneur, and getting to that next stage of growth. And so I certainly am still learning to this day, because you know, as the company grows, you hit new milestones, you hit new challenges, you hit New negotiation styles, and as a minority woman that looks perpetually like she’s 15 until she’s 50. Like, I constantly struggle with being underestimated. And I actually I use that to my advantage now in many ways where, you know, if people assume certain things, you just you surprise them and it’s one of the biggest joys of my career actually has been proving people both wrong and right you know, both about their investment thesis in us and then right and wrong in that like, we have made so much impact over the years through multiple companies and but yeah, to your to your question, in short, follow your curiosity. So Yes, so the next best thing that you know, is going to make a move and impact. But some things, you also just, you don’t make any moves. And that’s okay, too. I don’t think everyday is about just moving the deal and doing busy work. It’s actually just being really thoughtful about it.

Kara Goldin 10:15
So you had success with your first company, the juice company, can you share sort of ultimately, what was the exit? And then how did that really lead to Apothékary?

Shizu Okusa 10:31
Such a great question that I wish we had five hours to answer. So drink started in 2013, when I was working at the World Bank on the side, and I originally had a business partner, and we met at Goldman together, and we were both in our analysts class, we were best friends. And to be honest, I learned so much about this whole process of also having a co founder because she eventually left the business. And I was very ill prepared to operate the company alone. And I think there were probably two to three years. And we kind of talked a little bit about this before the show of, I think I had, and was doing this business a little bit longer than I probably should have, because I was just lost, I was going sideways. And I was dealing with so much mental health problems of not waking up to like 10am, as a founder is like crazy. You know, like I just was stuck in bed, I didn’t want to do it, I couldn’t get up. But what ended up getting me up was just employees calling me or someone didn’t show up at a store. And it just, I had to just do it. And it was such a long, eight to nine years. And looking back though I learned so much, you know, we opened 14 stores, we had a partnership with whole foods, we bootstrapped for most of it actually through the business. And we use lines of credit and loans instead of raising a ton of equity. So we never raised institutional money, and allowed me to have full control on when we wanted to exit and how we wanted to use the free cash flow. And ultimately, what happened was, apothecary was kind of started on the side as I was going through a lot of these mental health journeys. And I just knew that I wasn’t doing a service to this business anymore having one foot out and my brain was completely out. And I was so focused on using herbal medicine to help my sleep, because that was probably one of the biggest things is I was just taking too much way too much melatonin way too much. And then taking way too much coffee in the morning to then get me up. So it’s like the world that we live in. Now we’re just we’re stimulating, and then we’re pushing ourselves down to lower the cortisol, there’s no natural rhythm in our circadian rhythm anymore in our bodies. And it’s like, that’s not a way to live. And I was really, I was also drinking a lot, you know, I was drinking a lot of wine and going to happy hour and going out dancing. And I would feel horrible the next day. And so it’s that perpetual cycle that you just realize is not sustainable. And I just knew that drink was not at all kind of where I want to focus my time. And so I felt like it was the best choice to sell the company, and then go full time and apothecary. So I was able to exit with no money in my pocket to start apothecary and Bootstrap that, and then return on investment and return to our investors at the time for drinks or angel investors. But they actually just invested right back into apothecary as well. And so Oh, that’s great. We’re very, very fortunate to have Yeah, such supportive investors and then ultimately move on from the first company to a natural herbal medicine pharmacy.

Kara Goldin 13:37
That’s awesome. So you were obviously through drink, you were learning so much about, you know, elements in in herbs, but also just in in health and wellness, that were really going to be helpful to make you feel better other people feel better, too. And so it was like this natural progression. I feel like that really helped you to, you know, come up with this idea. I would imagine you had no idea how hard it was going to be, though, to sort of do what what you were going to do in different ways. But you’re also learning a ton. What would you say were sort of the big surprises and kind of building the company that maybe you didn’t sort of think like, oh, wow, I had no idea. Um,

Shizu Okusa 14:28
there were so many, you know, so we’ve launched with apothecary right before COVID happened. And we were very unprepared for this. And we had our own facility. And so we were doing all the shipments from this facility. And when COVID happened, obviously we had to go into social distancing. I was in New York and our facility was in Virginia, and I couldn’t go and so for about three or four months it was like all virtual and learning how to like scale up or production from what was like 10 orders a day when we started to like Doing 500 orders a day in like a week. And it was insane. So like there was that piece of growth and just supply chain that happened in 2020, when we couldn’t get enough product, and then you know, and then and then the rise of startup and money was like its own whole other kind of thing of 2020 and 21. One of the biggest stories that I think still sticks with me to this day is when we got hacked by Russians in the middle of 20, in the summer of 2020. And I can laugh about it now it’s so, so painful for me, but we got hacked through Instagram, some, you know, we two factor authentication, frankly, in my opinion, was not a huge thing until 2020, when COVID happened, everyone was starting to work remotely. I don’t even know what two factor was until 2020. So we didn’t have it on and that’s completely our fault. We bully certainly got hacked, Instagram didn’t do anything about it. And we got held for ransom. And we had to pay some bitcoin, which I did. And, and, and this was a course of 24 hours because they’re like, you know, if you don’t wire this money, by Sunday morning, because this happened on a Saturday, then or the Bitcoin through Coinbase, then we’re gonna just delete everything. And you know, we had it was it was insane. And like, I, I didn’t know what to do except say, Okay, well, this may be just the cost of doing business. And, and when I talked to friends that worked in dark web, they were saying that, you know, historically speaking, like, if you don’t do that, then there’s no such thing as a dark web industry. So by nature by paying them, they will return it to you, otherwise, no one would ever pay them. And so I kind of follow that instruction and ended up paying them. And I waited, we never got it back ever. I feel like an idiot to this day, kind of like having done that. But I had to make a choice. And I you know, I had to just trust where my gut instinct was. And clearly, maybe that wasn’t right at the time. But we ended up you know, moving forward. And you know, now we have to under 12,000 followers, who knows, maybe would have been 300,000. But it’s it’s numbers at the end of the day. And we learned a lot. We’re very, very secure now. We’ve got like six people in the crime, you know, and sharing Instagram accounts and handles and we had no idea. But waking up at 5am, you know, to saying to having a Russian email saying you’ve been hacked and Instagram was completely gone. It was just like, it was mind blowing for me.

Kara Goldin 17:38
Oh my gosh, what a crazy crazy learning. For sure. I mean, that was a big wake up call. But again, you learn from kind of the hardest lessons and challenges.

Shizu Okusa 17:51
You had crazy stories like this, too.

Kara Goldin 17:54
Oh, so many. I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s absolutely not. So I mean, part of the reason I was telling you, I wrote a book three years ago, that it’s called undaunted, that it’s probably the most honest account of an entrepreneurs life. There’s so many stories and and along the way, and dealing with CO packers deal dealing with the early days of not actually knowing how to make an unsweetened flavored water with no preservatives in it. You know, lots of things that, that, you know, I had no idea that I would know a ton about I know a lot more about water, and about water quality than I ever in a million years thought that I would write and certification processes. I mean, you know, this is a long time ago, 2005 When we started so and I came from tech I did. I did not come from the food and beverage industry never worked. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it was a whole new learning, but it was also a lot of fun. Like, I would wake up every single day and, you know, super passionate about learning, but there were definitely hard days where, you know, I always talk about it as you know, the the curve, right, where it’s like a super high and then the lows, and you never know when the lows are coming. It seems. There’s not this.

Shizu Okusa 19:24
Yeah. You’ve never done such a great point. You never know. Yeah, you never know.

Kara Goldin 19:29
Yeah. And then you know, you have to deal with it. And I think it’s that’s probably the hardest thing that I think I hear so many entrepreneurs say is that you know, the spikes, the ups and downs, I think are real right? And you have to be you have to and oftentimes it’s not totally low, you’ve got some good stuff going on in the company, but your your brain is focused Just on the terrible, right, you’ve gotten hacked, what do you do? And so how can we let the good stuff go that’s going on in the company. Right? And yeah, I think that’s, I get it, essentially, per se.

Shizu Okusa 20:13
Yeah. Yeah. And I think as CEOs, you there were we are tasked to deal with the hardest problem first and the most. And that 10 tends to be one of the most complicated and longer problems. So we deal with the same big, big problem for a long, long time. So both the frequency and the intensity is really high. And so, you know, it’s something that it’s certainly I think a lot of people have have talked about, and the velocity of ups and downs. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 20:41
yeah, no, definitely. So you are, first of all, I sort of skipped over the most important part. But how would you just describe what you’re doing at apothecary, and you have for six skews? Or ish? Right around there. So incredible blends, but what do you why do people come to apothecary? Let’s start there. Yeah.

Shizu Okusa 21:10
I think it’s this realization that, you know, so first and foremost, I guess, to take a step back, when apothecary was started, I was walking through CVS and Walgreens and I had my aha moment when I was walking through those aisles, because I was looking to buy my parents a gift from the US. And like, they love health stuff, because they’re in their 80s. And as you give to your loved ones, something, you really look at the labels, and you really, especially your parents that are aging, and I was looking over every single supplement bottle in the pharmacy, and I was like, This is gross, this is old, this is on sale, I don’t trust it. And I realized there was nothing good in the pharmacy, CVS, Walgreens, these billion dollar companies. And that shift to better for you ingredients that has happened in grocery has not yet happened in pharmacy. And I looked back at to how I was raised. And when I got sick, or even frankly, in the in Asia, before you get sick, you take a lot of these herbs and dark medicine, all kinds of brews and mushrooms, and it’s standard out there. And so that aha moment, combined with my my lifelong passion for using nature, and whether that’s like, the more philosophical being in the forest, and like that absorbing, you know, your your your mental fatigue, and, you know, just walking through nature can be so healing. That combined with opportunity, combined with this timing of COVID, where people were so focused on preventative health and their immunity has led to this huge rise of how do we bring preventative health care to the world? And how do we do it in a way that is both, you know, accessible from a price point. And so hence the HSA FSA stuff, because we feel like we really want to be available for people to use on their their medical plans. And then secondly, this understanding that plant medicine doesn’t need to be like psilocybin or mushrooms in order for it to be effective. It can be herbs, and frankly, there has been a ton of herbal companies, but they are very fragmented. It’s mom and pop shops. And they’ve never had had the scale to do a lot of the education that apothecary has had and has really done over the last four years. And it’s not easy to build a brand that people can really actually trust. We actually are hosting a class today on herbal bitters. So in every month, we do these classes during COVID, we were having community groups. And so I think it’s an it was a timing and opportunity. And then just I think our team that like was very, very passionate about it. But in short plant medicine as alternatives to over the counter supplements that make you not just treat the symptom, but really get to the root cause of illness.

Kara Goldin 24:00
So how do people know what they need?

Shizu Okusa 24:06
Yeah, yeah, it’s a really, really, really good question. So we actually do consultations for folks mainly for that reason. So we do about 50 consultations a day across the country and in Canada, where people can just book these 15 minute free consultations, so you can take them on Zoom or on phone, we kind of just hear what your background is and what you’re looking to take or what you’re currently taking and what you’re looking to swap out for. And we can make like a custom bundle or herbal regimen for you based on those results or based on those those facts. But, you know, that is what I would call something that doesn’t scale. Right? You know, when when Airbnb founder, Brian would talk about, you know, do things that don’t scale originally, this is exactly that. And we’re actually taking a lot of what we’re learning with this consultation program investing in our tech sides. We have three full time developers on our team, and we’re building a roadmap for folks to be able to use traditional herbal medicine practices like showing your pulse rates, your integrated data on how many hours you sleep, how many steps you walk, what your cortisol levels are throughout the day, and your glucose levels and your blood sugar. And on top of that, be able to layer on more visual parts of like your eye shapes, your tongue color, because those are all very important from an herbal medicine practice, and kind of be able to then actually make personalized recommendations in real time based on the data of the segments that we have. And so that is an investment that we’re making now for, like probably launched in like 12 to 18 months from now. But I always believe that as a business owner, you have to be thinking five years in advance, not just where you are today. And products are all really easy to be to be really honest and clear. Coming out with herbal products, anybody can do that. That’s not my competition, what we’re really, really focused on is making bigger and bigger steps to really open up this world of preventative health and using technology and people’s data that they already have to actually get to like real personalization. We’re not talking about a quiz, and we have that but the end of the day a quiz is it’s just it’s just input output. But real personalization is kind of where my head is and focuses right now. So

Kara Goldin 26:17
you’re 100% online, the company is DTC. So why did you make that decision from the get go? Yeah,

Shizu Okusa 26:28
um, well, part of it was because we launched right before COVID. And we didn’t really have a choice at the time. But and then I think another reason was before that with drink, I was all brick and mortar. And I really didn’t want to do brick and mortar again, because it’s so hard as you know, beverage and brick and mortar in a cold chain, it was so hard and I needed a break. So I we just kind of started on ecommerce and and for the last four years have really focused there. But in the summer, we actually launched in retail for the first time out in London. And so we actually are in Selfridges out in London as a as a nice sort of pilot and test because we eventually want to be serving customers in Asia, I want to bring apothecary back to Middle East Asia, London, Europe, and really be able to serve the world in terms of herbal medicine. And that’s always been the goal. And so I don’t think retail is actually going to be a huge part of what we do, at least in the next one to two years, it will be much more focused on building a household name a category disrupting brand in the world of natural pharmacy.

Kara Goldin 27:36
So what are your most popular excuse that you have?

Shizu Okusa 27:39
Oh, you know, the, the the category of sober curiosity and non alcoholic has exploded, and also probably part of COVID is we were all drinking probably way too much. You know, wanting an adult beverage after 20 zooms a day. And we quickly, you know, became sort of what I would call a stress pharmacy. And so while non alcoholic tinctures and products that we have are sort of like our best sellers, at the end of the day, I don’t think of them as necessarily just not all if I think of it as a stress, getting to the root cause of your stress, and making it socially acceptable to do that. Because still to this day, even though you can buy like a you know, a can you Forex or recess or something like that. You can’t necessarily buy that at the bar yet. And so when you go to happy hour, you feel socially isolated. And we wanted to bring out products that people can actually take with them to the bar. And so like our tincture drops are great examples of something that people slip into their purse, bring it to happy hour or drop it into your soda water, you get very similar feelings of bliss and Strad less stress. But you don’t get the sugar and you don’t get the hangover and you don’t get the alcohol. And you feel still like you’re kind of part of your community without feeling totally isolated from that. So definitely non alcoholic is one of our main categories in the portfolio right now.

Kara Goldin 29:01
I’d love that. And some of you have 46 skews, as we talked about earlier, like give or take. How do you decide to launch new ones? I feel like it’s always really hard, especially in the health and wellness space, maybe in the beauty space as well, where you’re always hearing, there’s this new trend and we’ve got to you know, follow it versus staying focused on, you know, what is really working? I mean, how do you manage that, like I always view it as, as, you know, a real challenge. And I’m so curious what you think?

Shizu Okusa 29:45
Yeah, you know, I think what tends to happen when things aren’t going right, I think for for many folks is that you start to just launch new products and you just layer it on top of each other and on top of each other and on top of each other because it’s a way to get like short term revenue, but long Longer term is not necessarily like what drives lifetime value. And I think real profitability for us, you know, from apothecary standpoint we need from a pharmacy also both breadth and depth. And then there’s multiple formats that we also have. So whether it’s single serving powders or tinctures, and soon to come new formats as well, there’s, there’s a, at least an herbal medicine, there’s an A potency part and then a treatment gap part. So in from what I mean from potency, outers are, again, ground up, herbs are not, it’s not super potent, but you can use it really easily into your coffee, your smoothies, and you get all of those benefits. But you’re not gonna have to see take your powders with you to work or on the go. And so that’s where tinctures kind of come in. tinctures are something you can take right under your tongue, and it goes right into your bloodstream. And they’re extracts. And what’s really interesting about our tinctures is at their full spectrum, meaning that they don’t have alcohol in them. And typical teachers do have alcohol in terms of how they distill it. But we we actually evaporate all the alcohol, and then we preserve it using glitter in allowing it to be a little bit sweet. So that also covers the thing that the powders don’t have. They’re not sweet at all. And so it’s really important for us at least, that we cover different use cases at different times of the day, different potency levels, and you know, hitting on hormones, but energy and stress and sleep. And so again, that’s kind of why we have 45 different skews. But to my earlier point, we’re also learning, you know, we’re coming out with different skews. But we realized that lifetime value wise, maybe our single herbs don’t really have a ton of benefits, we’re actually cutting out like 15 of them. By the end of the year, we won’t really be offering things like chlorella, or Moringa. And they’re valuable, and we include them in our signature formulas. But it doesn’t mean we have to sell them by itself. So it’s a lot of like testing and learning, trial and error. And then looking at the numbers, because the numbers are the only things that don’t really lie. I think our emotions can lie to us. I think our desire and hope that something would work can lie to us. It can be blinding, but the numbers will never lie.

Kara Goldin 32:08
Yeah, and SKU rationalization for sure. I think is is so is so key, but I love that you’re actually launching and trying and and you know, then going back and looking at the data, too, we actually did that, you know, with hints. And we were actually just trying and trying to figure out flavors, especially when we couldn’t get it into stores, we would launch smash UPS online, we call them. And it was interesting, because you would learn whether or not it was so interesting to compare one smash up to the other smash up, because you would be able to see exactly whether or not it was going to be a best seller that we should launch into stores to Yeah, yeah, it was super, super interesting. So can you share any great stories from your journey with apothecary that has had a significant impact on you personally, or the brand? I I feel like, you know, those are the stories from consumers, in particular, where they’re telling you that it’s like changed their life in some way. That that definitely has helped me that with, during those harder times and challenging times dark days with growing can were like, you know, knowing that you’re actually helping people and I would imagine you would definitely have some of those encounters.

Shizu Okusa 33:44
Oh, yes, one first and foremost, I think there I’ve actually learned to reframe what gives me the most gratitude I think in the day and I tried to seek goodness and every single day instead of the one big thing and mainly because we kind of talked about this to the highs and the lows. And I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but my whole mentality and where I am 12 years later in this journey has been staying immune to praise and staying immune to criticism. And so there’s there’s almost like this, like mellowness to or still weakness or Buddhism. I’m not sure what it is. But I’m just like day to day feeling just grateful and fortunate to be alive. So I can’t say there’s there was one big moment that like, is blissful. But actually think of the really hard moments that make me feel really fortunate to be where I am today. And I think one of the stories I will never forget is being trapped in a hotel for 10 days, because I was filming for Shark Tank. And we filmed and we never aired and that was one of the most really hard things for me because I moved across the country to take a bet this was during COVID I left New York to move to San Francisco at the time. California, and I lived in I was in Vegas for two weeks for Shark Tank. Because everything was on shutdown. So they couldn’t do it in LA. And I left everything to take this bet. But I felt like would take this business to where it should be. And I want it to be on air and I want it My ego is like so in it. And we never aired, you know, we got cut, and but it process of being on film on a Sunday morning at 5am crying on air for an hour and a half. You know, for an hour and a half the remote, there was moments where I was crying because Mark Cuban will be just like grilling me on stage. And it was all entertainment. But we got two offers. And but I’ll never forget, like Barbara Corcoran, who was like, you have two things going for you. One is you and one is luck. And again, like I’ll never forget this moment and opportunity that I had, even if it never manifested in any kind of PR or TV, mainly because like we had the opportunity and yeah, timing didn’t work out. We lucked didn’t work out either for us to air. But we got we took a chance and we keep taking chances. And yes, while we never aired to have a million dollar day of sales, you know, we are still so far along much more farther along than I ever would have envisioned. And so I think it is those hard moments that actually made me feel so much more grounded to what I do every day. Absolutely.

Kara Goldin 36:23
And opportunities to write if you you know, wouldn’t have put yourself out there. I mean, just these experiences that you’ve been able to have are just enormous. So we all make mistakes along the way. If you could go back, when would you do anything differently? Oh, maybe the Russian hacker story, right? I mean, that is, you know that? Well, of the 400 Something episodes that I’ve done, you’re episode 469 Now that we’ve never had anyone who has had a Russian hacker that they’ve admitted, has been on so yeah, yeah, you win on that one, for sure. I

Shizu Okusa 37:06
appreciate that. Uh, you know, I think one of the thing mistakes, for me has always been hiring, I think that I’ve made mistakes on the people front. And some of that is I think how we hire and how we choose people in our lives is relationships, whether it’s people that work for you, or partners in life. So much of that has to do with our historical traumas, and previous experiences. And I always have to like make sure that I am not being held back by my blind spots, and or my impatience, which tends to happen a lot, I think for second time founders blind spots and impatience in how I hire, but I’ve made so many mistakes, I think in the last four years on like hiring someone because of their resume, hiring someone because they asked for money. So I thought maybe they deserve that, and hence that they had more experience, none of that has worked out great for me. Not firing fast enough, because it impacts culture. Not doing proper reference checks the right way, you know, not just asking them for the three people that they know, you know, so it really has to do a lot with the people front, I think from a learning mistakes. But look, at the end of the day, I’ll probably continue to make hiring mistakes, because that’s just the nature of the game is like you have to just make a choice. And you’ll never give up giving people a chance. But if it doesn’t work, you can’t you you continue to give feedback, I think in a really loving way doesn’t need to be rude. But I tend to be much more authentic and how I give feedback and much more fast and how I give feedback. So they are never surprised if they have to ever go from the company, or if they ever go into performance review not getting a bonus. And so I think learning into being very comfortable with discomfort has been one of the best blessings of my life.

Kara Goldin 38:58
I love that that is incredible learnings for sure. I feel like you know, when we take the time to really look back on those times. I mean, even in the last five years, what you’ve learned about you know, through managing people through the Russian hacker through you know, building your business, whatever I mean, there’s so much there that just makes you a better founder, a better CEO, a better leader. You know, all of these encounters, they all add up and I think you’re such a force. And I’m so excited every so thank you well for everybody to try apothecary because it’s really, really terrific. They go on line. We’ll have all the info in the show notes too. But best of luck to you. And I know you’re not going to need me saying that to you because you you’re already off to an incredible Start but really, really excited to see where you go. And, and congratulations with everything that you’re doing right now.

Shizu Okusa 40:11
Oh, and likewise, you are such an inspiration for me and so many people and I am so thrilled to be talking to you today and to share stories and wars. Thank you.

Kara Goldin 40:22
Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would, please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my book undaunted, which I share my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of the week, and 2023 and good bye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening