Hannah Mendoza

And science backs it up. And that for me was important because I'm realizing I'm coming in with a certain relationship to these ingredients, but most people are not.

And to be able to say to someone, you know, this is our lived experience that these ingredients are very powerful, but also please look at the study where we're showing there's a, you know, 35% drop in serum cortisol levels in someone's blood after taking ashwagandha. That's like... That's incredible. There's pharmaceuticals that can't do that.

So I started also diving into that and feeling like, yeah, we are on the brink of something here becoming more in the cultural zeitgeist. And I want to be part of disseminating that because it feels like a perfect antidote to the increasingly high stress world that we're in.

I mean, what we did with that was we designed this crazy coffee shop menu where we would take these traditional coffee shop drinks, but we would infuse them with all these different beneficial ingredients. And sell them where? Well, at the time, you know, we didn't have a budget to open a coffee shop. Yeah. So we hand welded this bar, put it in the back of a van and drove all around the country.

We even drove down to Guatemala as we went to different countries. And... just popped up and would serve these crazy drinks to people who, like you said, asked us, why are you putting mushrooms in my coffee? And people fell in love with the way the drinks made them feel. And they wanted to make them at home.

which was basically impossible unless you had an Erewhon-style pantry and, you know, an hour of free time each morning, which, who has that? And that was when we realized, okay, people really want this, and this is a completely unrealistic ritual. So Rod challenged me, if you can make the drinks we're serving in this bar that people are loving,

into a powder format, an instant drink, which is the least sexy product, most antiquated product of all time, with the same quality as a bar. Let's put this out there in the world. Let's build something.

Tell me. She was in her kitchen.

In her actual kitchen. And there was this basket with matcha and I think a chai and a golden milk, a turmeric.

golden super latte she was wearing this white shirt and she live made a turmeric latte and i was just looking at her shirt and saying oh my god i hope it doesn't spill all over and she made one live and took a sip and just was the most organic wonderful reaction when she just said it's delicious

I think I fell on the floor. I think I fell on the floor. And you know what? I was, God, I was live editing our website when this happened. I was in there. You should never do this. I was in there tinkering again with stuff live. And there's a little count of how many people are on your website.

It's like, oh, three people are looking at your website, which for me at the time, I was like, gosh, who are these three people? Wow. And then it just started climbing and climbing and climbing. And there was 5,000, 10,000 people on our website within a matter of 30 seconds. And I called Raj. I said... What's going on? And I see the tag. I see the Instagram tag. Oprah tagged you in a post.

And I just, I did. I fell off my chair. And Raj at the time was in our commercial kitchen and he was sweeping after we were making all the product ourselves. He had a hairnet on and we FaceTimed each other and he's got his little hairnet on and we were just screaming.

Every founder's dream. Every founder's dream to be on Oprah's favorite things list. I'll remember it till the end of my days.

I mean, I remember even calling you in May of last year and we chatted and I was having a bit of a wobbly moment. And you said to me, well, what did you expect? This is part of it. This is part of the journey.

Yeah, there's so many. One of the first insights that took me too long to learn, I think, that I wish someone had put me into was... I used to take my thoughts and the things that came up in my brain very seriously. And what I mean by that is with building something comes extreme emotion at extreme frequency. It's erratic. You'll wake up in the night, you'll be obsessing about a problem.

And it's all you can think about for days and it just consumes you. And then what I found is out of nowhere... You can wake up with a completely new perspective. It fades in importance. And although nothing tangible has changed, it dissipates. And learning the waves and the cycles... And learning to give problems space. Because mostly as an entrepreneur, you're solving problems.

You're putting out fires. Yeah. And I've learned to have this attitude of, oh, I'm having a little breakdown about something today. I wonder how it's going to feel tomorrow. As opposed to, this feels like a problem. Let me pull out all the stops to try and fix it. And... Gosh, especially nighttime thoughts. I don't know if you've experienced this.

But it feels like this kind of cerebral off-gassing that's disguised as insight. I used to stay awake and I would be up at 3 and I thought these thoughts were revelatory. And then I'd write them down and the next day I'd look at it and say, what a load of rubbish.

And I think just knowing that your brain is going to go through these cycles of obsessing about things and then giving them space for them to process subconsciously often is where the insights come. In the shower, if you take yourself for a walk, that's been such a huge help to not take my brain so seriously because you're putting it under a lot of stress. And so it's not always...

It's not always going to react in a way that's logical.

I've never had a problem being vulnerable as a person, at least not since I moved to California and was just kind of surrounded by, you know, a lot more emotional openness than I had grown up with. And I do want to admit, I've really had to play with... the boundaries and how much I do lean into vulnerability and sharing with the team. It's a messy process. Stoicism is so much simpler.

It's so much easier, but it's not the way, especially as female leaders. This is a superpower, but learning when to turn it on and off and by how much is a messy process. I've been in meetings where, you know, I was feeling hormonal and one of our team was leaving and I just started crying in the meeting. And then I watched everyone else look a bit freaked out.

And I thought, oh, that was a bit much. Maybe just turn it down a little bit.

And sometimes if you're drawn to someone because they're quite similar, that actually very much might not be what your business needs because we need to diversify skill set and perspective. And so having a bunch of people around you that think like you can actually be a bit of a trap.

I saw through the fact that I came to our first meeting practically barefoot and still believed that I could run a successful company.

As I said, I do feel like I had a period where I was leaning more into vulnerability as a superpower, but with no filter, than I think was wise. And I got the reflection from Raj, bless him. He was like, you know, I know you're trying to be real with the team, but... And I really, it was a little hard to take in the moment, but I did really appreciate that perspective because what I found is...

By knowing that I did have to play the role of the cheerleader to a certain degree, you're also talking yourself into that attitude. And your job as CEO is cheerleader. It's to hold the vision. It's to, of course, be real and soft about the challenges on the way there. But being tasked with showing up with vision, with drive...

And with kind of unfaltering conviction in what you're building, even if there are moments where you feel like you'll fake it till you make it with that, changes your internal landscape. And so I've loved the transition from, I need to share with my team, you know, all the spectrum of emotions that I'm feeling to, for my sake and for their sake, I am going to be the fearless leader at the front.

And it's been helpful for me too.

This feels very minor in the face of all of these things, but one of the more helpful strategies that I found for having a place where you can be real as a counterbalance to needing to be, you It's a very kind of feminine strategy, but having a completely unhinged text thread with other people who are doing similar things.

I have founder friends, other women who are at similar stages with their business. Becca from Fishwife is a very close friend of mine.

It's very impressive to me. Please tell her that I'm a big fan. What she's done is amazing. But we have a text thread where all caps, you know, partial sentences, three-week delays in replying are completely accepted because sometimes you get off a call and you just need to write an all-caps text to someone that says... What on earth is going on? Yeah. And you need to ramble.

You need to send a five-minute voice note. And having that kind of, that expression in an appropriate way has been very cathartic.

Even, I mean, when you think about also being a female leader and you think about building something around the schedule of hormones on a monthly basis, biological clock, and even kind of on a daily basis, I find I'm very utopian until 3 p.m. And then I'm a complete nihilist from 3 p.m. until bedtime. So I just organize my schedule around that. But you don't always get to choose.

Or what if you have an incredibly important meeting at, you know, a time of the month where you have raging PMS and you just have to push through. And I think even as a woman, it's very amplified in terms of, you know, we are cyclical beings in a way that men are not.

I know with all my certainty that... having that, I guess, maybe switch in traditional role, if we are even thinking about the statistics surrounding, you know, 90% of Fortune 500 companies are run by men. I know that he feels like having a female leader is an appropriate step forward for creating the world we want to see in business.

And he has been so gracious about, you know, playing the role that he plays, which is intrinsic and critical. I couldn't do this without him. And we also have got to both play to our strengths. He is very entrenched in finance and operations. It's not my world. And I think that He also has, frankly, loved being in a company of basically all women.

Yeah, and a lot of co-founders don't stay together. You know, we also know the statistics around that, that it can be a very strained relationship. And I think power dynamic is a large part of what can tear people apart.

Something Raj and I have had to be really careful around is making sure that we're not pedestalizing one person over the other and that we feel like a team and we have each other's backs. And I think that would be the same for any co-founders.

Well, I am just loving being in the creation process right now. I, I run all of our product development. We do that in house. That's my area, mixing up different blends, tasting them a hundred different iterations. And, you know, that's my, that's my happy place. And so there's going to be a lot more fun, innovative products that we're going to be bringing out.

Of course. Of course I remember. I mean, it was probably the biggest thing I'd done at that point, coming to a house and meeting with you. I remember being... Kind of in a disbelief at the situation I was in. It felt like only yesterday that I was working on our website during the day and working at a pizza restaurant in Oakland at nighttime and doing events on the weekend.

Well, it's I mean, it's so lovely also to to relive the crazy story of the last five years, because it's been such a testament to women supporting women in such a real way. And I felt kind of the wind beneath my wings from you and all the other incredible women that you've helped bring around me every day and on the hard days, especially.

Thank you. Thanks for making that so enjoyable and so easeful. It truly did feel just like a fun chat.

Honestly, we were still actually very much in that very early phase when we met. And I'm really grateful that you were actually able to... you know, see the potential in something that, frankly, at the time was, it was still very much in its infancy.

It's all going to be good. I just have to say, you reminded me of the Birkenstock moment. And my first thought was, what on earth was I thinking? I think I wore Birkenstocks and a linen jumpsuit in the morning and being like, well, this is the least wrinkled thing that I have. This is going to be very impressive.

So you basically saw through the fact that I came to our first meeting practically barefoot and still believed that I could run a successful company.

I mean, all this really started with me moving to California, which was the biggest and most transformative decision of my life. From? I grew up just outside of London. I never really found my people there. I had a bit of a rough time in high school. I was a strange child.

Um... I wasn't very good at picking up on societal norms and conforming to them in a way that made it easier to fit in. It was very, very quirky. And I think it's hard when you're a teenager, when you're a young child, to have that before people value those traits in people.

I was so close to fitting in and I would just say something really bizarre or do something strange and then you kind of go back to the bottom of the social ladder.

Oh my gosh. I had so many schemes. The first one, which couldn't be further from what I'm doing now is I would buy cookies from Costco and I would buy whipped cream and I would, this was all for charity, but I would set up a table at lunchtime and resell these cookies from Costco with whipped cream on top of them for a, you know, for a bit of a margin.

18.

Well, I'd never actually really been here before. I had no friends, no family here, but I had watched, I think, maybe one or two episodes of The O.C. at the time. And that was absolutely enough to take me over the edge. Oh, my gosh. It was honestly completely on a whim.

It was that kind of, you know, 18-year-old decision that I'm actually very grateful, you know, brain hemispheres aren't completely fused yet at that age. If I tell you, when my plane touched down in LAX, I listened to Party in the USA by Miley Cyrus in my headphones.

california coming home every single time in my head and i would just go i'm home okay so you come here you're 18 you get here california dreaming party in the usa yes it changed me very in a very massive way very very quickly when i got here i mean i've never been on a single hike i'd never pitched a tent i was frankly i was smoking marlboro reds and would casually put back like a bottle of tequila on the weekend that was just when i was in london we started going clubbing when i was 14. it

It was just a very, very different lifestyle. And I thought that was it.

I mean, within a year of being here, I'd moved into a house of 11 women who all had their armpit hair intact. The house was strewn with these kombucha scobies growing from jars. And we were doing plant meditations. We were making herbal tinctures. I started surfing. And my idea of a big night out after a year in California was a potluck that ended in a sing-along. It was nothing.

No one will make up. Everyone worship nature. And God, you know, it's such a trope, but it did change my life. And I felt what it felt like to actually feel good in my body and my mind. And I'm sure, you know, it can be a little eye rolling, but I did feel like a different person. As an agnostic atheist, you know, we're all desperately searching for meaning.

And in that community that I found, I'd never experienced what community felt like. And it was, you know, it was transformational for me.

Yeah.

Well, I was still very ambitious, loaded word as we know, but I always have been. And even through the more kind of earthy phase, I started my first kind of proper job while I was still in college. It was at a regenerative agriculture-based superfood company. So again, could it be any more stereotypical, but it was hard work. I was their first employee. And the role was, hey, grow the company.

What's going on?

I also started drinking coffee when I was there. I've always had a more anxious disposition and I actually think it can be a superpower when used correctly. But I started drinking coffee to kind of deal with the additional load of having a proper job and it made me feel awful.

It activated my anxiety and every day was this kind of coin toss, whether I felt like a superhuman or I was questioning everything in my life. And I hated the variability. And that's where I started experimenting with alternatives. So matcha, teas, I'd make these ridiculous 10 ingredient potions with herbs and superfoods and mushrooms that I was learning about at this job.

And at the same time, Raj, who's my now co-founder, was going through a really hard time after he lost his mom unexpectedly to cancer. And that obviously had a huge impact on everything in his life. And I started making him these reishi cappuccinos as a coffee alternative, which is this mushroom that's really calming for the nervous system.