Hannah Mendoza
speaker
65 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Hannah Mendoza’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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.
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.
Showing 21–40 of 65 · page 2 of 4
← Previous
Next →