Before 31

Again starting with some therapy takeaways: lack of structure in entrepreneurship also means the lack of feedback (something I need to learn to live with), hole the emotions when something happens (ie. someone doesn’t respond, plans change) but don’t build the narrative around it (ie. he/she must have done it because of xyz), asking for help is not that scary (and I should try it more often). I’ve found that the progress of Producycle had too much of an influence on my moods - I was excited and elated when I got responses from cold emails and potential opportunities to do a paid pilot project. I was very disappointed and unproductive when events turn the other way. Yes, this meant that I had strong convictions to make it work, but I also needed to take my learnings from therapy that a non-response could be coming from a million different reasons that the other person is going through, and not close to any sort of reflection on me as a person.

Everyday is and should be a fresh start. If yesterday was great, let’s do it again. If yesterday wasn’t, then let’s make today better than yesterday. The spiral of I feel like I’m not getting anything down -> getting more frustrated with myself -> finding it more difficult to focus/concentrate is a cycle that needs some self-compassion magic. It’s so much easier to spot this with my partner, but a lesson I’m still learning to live out myself.

Why is it that I’ve spend a couple months learning about this industry and still feel unqualified to talk about what I’m building(which I should know best)? I never felt this way in my previous professional careers, and another thing I’m learning to overcome. I realized this when I was interviewing two of my classmates on a podcast, and when they asked me what I was doing, I couldn’t articulate confidently.

On another occasion - I failed to properly frame a meeting at the beginning. This led to the conversation shifting from a partnership conversation to one that was geared as “how can I be helped.”

Excited to go into later this week for some relaxing time looking at the ocean, eating some delicious food, and learning how to do makeup for the wedding!

By the numbers

1 rejection for a Female Founders Circle

1 acceptance as Semi-finalist in the NBA All-star pitch competition - gonna be pitching live in the Chase Center in 2 weeks :)

2 engaged unified school districts in the Bay Area

many more calls with people in the food system and community

Interesting Nuggets

1. AI is so hot, but when can AI introduced into enterprises actually work?

   We did an Azure Podcast episode and learned that companies that have a clear objective to exactly what they want to use AI for are much more likely to succeed. (Note to self: think about the specific use cases we’d want to introduce AI for Producycle). Using the oldest model of LLM that works actually yields faster and cheaper results, as opposed to trying to always use the latest one (more $$ and latency.

2. True cost of food is beyond what we pay at the grocery store

   Americans spent $1.1 trillion on food in 2019, but this is not the full picture. The amount of highly-processed, industrialized, unhealthy food that we ingest, it comes with an additional bill of $2.1 trillion in healthcare costs due to diet-related disease. This Rockefeller Foundation Report goes into more details. But the bottom line with institution procurement is that the cheapest option right now actually comes with a huge bill that comes later down the line. I see this as a parallel to the preventive care vs. treatment approach where if we just spent a little more upfront, we could eradicate a lot of the future costs that is usually borne by underprivileged populations.

3. Calm the angst and the what next will make sense when looking back in a longer timeframe. The values and the non-negotiables are the most important to figure out for a company/product, everything else can change.

4. Schools have separate budget for cafeteria, classroom nutrition education, and kitchen education

5. Staff shortage is a huge problem reported by school nutrition programs (43.4% districts with less than 1,000 students and 79.1% districts with 25,000 or more students). While a lot of resources are poured into improving the school food system in California, the teams required to deliver these results are constantly short staffed.

   This could be seen as another driving force for Producycle, where the time freed up from the school nutrition staff can be dedicated to other activities like recipe development, training, and spending more time with the kids.

6. From the chat of Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson

   • hope is longing for the status quo to have a different result when it might be that what we’re doing (in the status quo) is the problem.
   • one can only get at most 2 out of being truthful, useful, or hopeful
   • books are the only medium that allows readers to co-create with the author

7. When pitching, it’s impactful to lead the audience to think of the solution to match what I am proposing. This triggers the “ah-ha” where the audience thinks what we proposed totally make sense, and feel part of the ownership.

8. Some sales-y things

   • Sell the problem, not the solution. Highlight the cost of inaction (if maintaining in status quo) vs. what it could be with the solution provided.
   • don’t make core assumptions without the customer
   • prospects seek insights for their business and don’t need me telling them about their problems
   • it’s much lower effort to react to something (say this is right/wrong) then for someone to come up with what are my challenges, problems

So what?

The latest of Producycle is that we will be focusing on the procurement of K-12 schools and developing a platform that has order, discovery, and collaboration capabilities. I’m currently at the point where I’m trying to recruit more pilot customers to build out the initial prototype. This is also an area that I go back and forth where we should have some running prototype for people to react upon, or we should be conveying the ideas and building with specifications coming directly from customers.

Heartwarming moments

Nothing specific coming from others, but very grateful for the support my partner has given me along the way. Cheering me up on a bad day and reminding me that I was indeed making progress even when it’s difficult to see sometimes has been essential. We are also planning remotely for our 2 overseas wedding/reception and coordinating details with our friends and family. Proud that we have been able to handle this with ease and making steady progress (this one is measurable with the growing and shrinking to-do list).