Lack of self-awareness caps more careers than a lack of intelligence. Most people understand their job. A lot fewer understand how they come across in a room, or why people react to them the way they do. When that’s a blind spot, building trust is hard. Getting anyone to genuinely follow your lead becomes an uphill battle. Yes, focus on the path ahead. But you gotta turn around every once in a while and make sure the wake you’re leaving behind is one people wanna surf on.

Most employees have a low tolerance for risk because they don't want to get fired for taking one. In emerging brands, taking calculated risks are one of few real advantages you have over incumbents. So you need your team bringing bold ideas to the table. They'll only do that if you remove the personal downside. Make it clear that when the team takes a risk, leadership owns the outcome. If it works, give them the credit. If it fails, you take the hit. Otherwise you end up with a whiteboard full of low-risk, low-return ideas.

Few people are good at distilling business conversations down to the real question being asked / problem to be solved. Get good at that and your leadership trajectory goes vertical. Add the ability to determine the next most important step and it goes parabolic.

A+ stuff @JaiDolwani

Most CPG brands die because they're looking for the breakthrough moment instead of stacking 200 unremarkable weeks in a row.

Kill products faster. Even the ones that get retail distribution. And the ones that do 'ok'. The obvious cuts are easy. You know what to do with the product that straight up flops. But the 'ok' ones will wreck you. They get in some doors. They move units. They never quite break through, but they never fully die either. So they just... sit there. And while they sit, they're pulling from everything. Broker attention. Retailer conversations. Marketing budget. Your ops team's bandwidth. Your own headspace. At MALK, we've had to make these calls. A SKU that had placement, had some velocity, but wasn't the one. A formulation for an entire category that was good, but not great. The decision to cut them was hard. They were working, kind of. But 'kind of working' is the most expensive thing in a growing brand. Because every hour spent managing a mediocre SKU is an hour not spent making your best products undeniable.

At Factor_, I responded to every fire like it was the only thing that mattered. Missed dinner. Skipped workouts. Answered Slack at midnight like it was normal. I didn't decide to become that person. I just made the same small choice 500 days in a row until it wasn't a choice anymore. First you form your habits. Then your habits form you. People love talking about freedom of choice. Nobody talks about the fact that consequences aren't optional. You don't wake up one morning as a burned-out founder. You get there one "just tonight" at a time. Each one so small it doesn't register. Until the compound effect shows up in your marriage, your health, your ability to think clearly. I didn't lose those years to one bad decision. I lost them to a thousand invisible ones. Now I treat small choices like what they are: bets on who I'm becoming. Some days I still lose that bet. But at least I know I'm making one.

Your reaction to bad news IS your culture. I've run teams where people hid problems from me. Not because they were lazy or dishonest. Because they'd seen what happened to the last person who brought bad news. That was my fault. I wasn't abusive. I didn't yell. But my energy shifted. The disappointment was loud. And people read that like a threat. So they stopped telling me things. Thankfully, I've changed. If your team hides problems from you, that's not a people problem. That's a mirror. The best cultures I've seen aren't the ones where nothing goes wrong. They're the ones where bad news travels fast because people trust that the response will be "okay, how do we fix it" instead of "how did you let this happen." Your reaction to bad news sets the ceiling for your entire organization's speed.

I've seen every type of leader. Been every type at one point as well. The fear-based one who thought intensity was the same as accountability. The numbers-obsessed one who burned through people to hit plan. The "systems guy" who built playbooks but never built people. All of them felt like leadership at the time. They weren't. Real leadership is watching someone on your team do something they didn't think they were capable of. And knowing you had a small part in rewiring that belief. That's the hardest jump. Because it means your ego takes a backseat permanently. It's not about your results anymore. It's about theirs. The scoreboard eventually resets. Revenue targets get replaced. But your impact on how they see themselves lasts forever. For better or worse. Still working on this. Probably always will be.

I watched a founder nearly kill a good strategy over one soft week of data. We were three months into a launch. The thesis was solid. The team had done the work. Then one early signal came in soft and suddenly everything was wrong. The product sucked. We needed to pivot. Full panic. But the decision was made months ago. The thesis was sound. One bad signal doesn't change that. I've seen this pattern in every company I've been part of. Smart people spiraling over a single bad data point. It keeps happening because detachment is hard. Especially when you're the one who made the call. But detachment means you did the work upfront, made the call with conviction, and then actually let it breathe. You stop refreshing the scoreboard every five minutes. You stop treating early noise like a verdict. The people who consistently make good calls aren't the ones white-knuckling every outcome. They're the ones who trust their process enough to stay calm while everyone else is spiraling. Do the work. Make the call. Then get out of your own way. Give it the runway you promised it.

Talent is everywhere. What's rare is someone who knows how to lose, recover, and still perform at a high level. I've hired people with perfect resumes who crumbled the first time something went sideways. And I've watched people with no pedigree eat shit for 6 months straight and come back stronger than before. Resilience isn't a line on a resume. You can't interview for it. You only see it when things go wrong. And things always go wrong. If I'm building a team, give me the person who's been punched in the face and kept walking. Every single time.

Watching MALK move beyond "alt-milk" is one of the most rewarding parts of this job. Not because of the press hits or the partnerships. But because it means we're building something that actually matters to people outside of a grocery aisle. A year ago, these conversations weren't happening. Now they're happening weekly. Brand building in CPG isn't just about shelf space. It's about showing up in the places where people actually live their lives. Cafes. Events. Experiences. Discovery happens on shelf and in real life. Both matter. But when someone tries you for the first time while they're fully immersed in an experience they love, it sticks. In a way they can't even fully explain. And that's where loyalty comes from. We're building a brand people want to be around. That's the whole point.

I helped build a company that sold for $277M. I didn't get rich. No life-changing payday. No "I'm set forever" moment. No champagne on a yacht. I got experience. Scars. And a very clear picture of what I'd do differently. People assume acquisition = payday. It doesn't always. Your cap table matters. Your position matters. Your choices leading up that day matter. Here's what I learned: Not everyone who helps build a $277M company walks away rich. Some of us just walk away smarter. And honestly? That's been worth more than any check.

I've sat through thousands of meetings across three companies. Most of them sucked. And yeah, a lot could've been emails. Everyone knows that. But the meeting format gets all the blame when really it's the person presenting. Two things kill every bad meeting: The presenter never asked themselves why anyone else on the call should care. So they ramble for 30 minutes when they needed 5. Cover everything instead of the one thing that matters. And the delivery is brutal. Monotone. No energy. Reading slides like a hostage video. Want better meetings? Know your one point. Tighten your talk time around it. Leave the context in a doc for people to read later. And for the love of god, bring some energy. If eyes are glazing over, adjust. Meetings don't need to die. The people running them just need to get better.

I used to think alignment meant everyone agreeing with me. At my first business I'd walk out of a meeting thinking we were all on the same page. Two weeks later nothing moved. Or worse, people moved in completely different directions. The problem wasn't them. It was me. I was confusing compliance with alignment. People nodding in a room isn't agreement. It's just people not wanting to argue with the founder. Real alignment is uncomfortable. It means someone says "I don't think that's right" and you actually sit with it instead of steamrolling them because you're stressed and behind on everything. Took me years to learn that the quiet room is the dangerous room.

When raising money, your tendency will be to self filter. You shouldn’t. Speaking from experience. At Factor_, we were raising a friends and family round. I was making my calls, skipping names, telling myself stories about why certain people weren't worth reaching out to. A former colleague from Merrill Lynch called me out of the blue. Just catching up. Asked how Factor_ was going. Came up that we were raising. 10 days later he wired $250,000. A quarter million. From a call I was never going to make. I see this all the time. Founders put filters on who they'll call. "He won't be interested." "She won't get it." "That's awkward." But that's not real logic. You're just protecting yourself from hearing no. Most CPG categories need some capital upfront. The social discourse on this topic all too often defaults to "VC or no VC" like those are the only options. They're not. Raise from people. Friends, family, former colleagues. But you have to actually call all of them. Make a list of every single person you know. Don't filter. Don't assume. Don't decide for them. Tell them the truth about your business. Let adults make adult decisions. I almost left $250K on the table because I was too proud to pick up the phone. Don't be me.

Someone told me before I launched Factor_: don't let your personal finances go to shit while you're building. I didn't listen. Before Factor_ I was making high six figures. No kids. Life was comfortable. Four years later: hadn't taken a dollar in salary. Put a ton of my own money into the business to keep it alive. Had three kids in under four years. First daughter born the month we relaunched. Second daughter 20 months later. Son 30 months after that. You're already in fight-or-flight running a startup. Every day is a new fire, a new learning curve, not enough hours. That's the baseline stress. Now layer on: how am I going to put food on the table? That straw broke me. I literally couldn't think straight anymore. Every decision ran through a filter of personal financial panic and I stopped seeing clearly. If you're starting something, figure out your personal runway first. Not the business runway. Yours. Because the business will be under duress no matter what. You can survive that. What you can't survive is both at the same time.

5 things founders get wrong about employee motivation: (From someone who got all 5 wrong) 1. Expecting owner-level commitment from employee-level equity. You own 40% of the company. They own 0.1%. You'll make millions if it works. They'll make rent. Stop acting surprised when they work less hours. 2. Thinking your sacrifice is their baseline. I worked for no salary for three years. Maxed out credit cards. Emptied my 401k. That was my choice. Not theirs. Your personal bet doesn't become their obligation. 3. Using guilt instead of respect. I used to send passive-aggressive Slack messages when people left on time. "Must be nice to have work-life balance." Real asshole moves. Then one of my best employees quit. In his exit interview, he said: "Ryan, you chose to mortgage your house for this company. I didn't." He was right. 4. Believing more equity will change how people work. I once gave someone more equity expecting it to change their output. It didn't. That's because everyone has a "work MO." A default gear. If they're a killer, they'll be a killer. If they do the bare minimum, they'll do the bare minimum. Equity won't flip that switch. (It will help retain the killers, tho.) 5. Confusing presence with productivity. The person cranking until 9pm isn't always your best performer. Sometimes they're just slow. Or inefficient. Or avoiding something at home. Judge output, not hours. The fix isn't complicated. Find people who give a shit about doing good work. Pay them well. Respect their time. They won't work until 10pm unless it's truly necessary. But when it is necessary, they'll be there. Because you hired people who are wired for it. And earned their trust.

Your mood is not private. It's broadcasting to everyone around you. Show up to a meeting stressed, and watch what happens. People tense up. Conversations get shorter. Ideas stop flowing. Show up calm and upbeat, and the opposite happens. People relax. They think clearer. They bring solutions instead of panic. I used to think emotions were personal. Something I could feel without affecting anyone else. I was wrong. Every time I showed up frustrated, my team got quieter. Every time I showed up anxious, my team got nervous. Every time I showed up scattered, my team got confused. They weren't reading my words. They were reading my energy. And matching it. As a leader, your emotional state isn't just yours. It spreads. Like a cold. Like a yawn. Like panic in a crowded room. The question isn't whether your emotions are contagious. They are. The question is: which ones are you spreading? Because your team is catching whatever you're carrying.