Due Diligence

Sarah Paiji Yoo is the CEO & co-founder of Blueland, a sustainable cleaning & home essentials brand on a mission to eliminate single-use plastics from our homes. She attended Harvard for her undergrad and MBA, worked at McKinsey out of college and then in private equity,  then founded her first startup, a mobile shopping platform called Snapette, after business school. Snapette went on to be featured in NYTimes, Oprah, Today Show, Forbes, TechCrunch, WWD, Glamour and was named one of The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. Snapette was backed by top-tier Silicon Valley VCs including Accel Partners and Forerunner Ventures and was sold after three years.

Sarah went on to become a founding partner of LAUNCH, a venture studio that has incubated leading DTC brands like M. Gemi, Follain, and Rockets of Awesome. While on maternity leave she learned about the microplastics in our water supplies and was inspired to start Blueland in 2019.

Blueland is a sustainability-driven brand that has been featured in NYTimes, WSJ, Vogue, and The Today Show as well as on Shark Tank. They've raised $35M to date from investors including Prelude Growth Partners as well as celebrity investors like Justin Timberlake and Adrien Grenier.

In this conversation we discuss:

For more info:

Blueland (website)

If you want to pursue a creative passion, become a creator, or start something that requires discipline and consistency but you just haven't been able to make the commitment yet, allow me to introduce to you the 100 day challenge.

This is my secret weapon for overcoming creative and personal growth blocks. These challenges are not as crazy as they sound and one just might change your life like it did mine.

In this solo episode I break down what these challenges are, how to do them, WHY to do them, and my own experience with 3 of them so far and now a fourth to give you some pointers.

Find me on Instagram & TikTok

Jill & Carlene are the co-hosts of Breaking Beauty, a hit podcast on all things—you guessed it—beauty.

They're two longtime beauty editors who have seen it all and are dedicated to using their podcast to curate the industry's best for their listeners. With past guests like Kate Hudson, Matilda Djerf, Tracee Ellis Ross, Danessa Myricks, Charlotte Palermino and Violette (just to name a few from this year alone) they interview the who's who in the beauty & celebrity worlds about their favorite brands, products, and tips. 

Breaking Beauty Podcast

Also, if you like this podcast check out Female Founder World to listen to their podcast, attend their IRL events, and check out their newsletter for women in business. 

While I've contributed my fair share of "entrepreneurship p0rn" to the internet over the years, I think it's time we collectively acknowledge how much we have come to glamorize entrepreneurship and what some of the consequences are. 

Here's my take on what has contributed to this trend, its potential downsides, and why we need to talk about it.

There's no ONE single playbook for starting a successful brand (no matter what anyone tells you—including me!). But there are some reliable patterns that surface once you analyze enough case studies, and these are some of the commonalities I've observed as being instrumental to the early success of noteworthy brands today.

So if I were just starting out in my career and I knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur eventually but not yet, these are the six steps I'd follow to set myself up for success.

Questions/feedback/comments? Find me on Instagram or TikTok. 

In our first interview ever (!) we interview Kim Pham, the cofounder of Omsom, a cult favorite loud & proud CPG brand bringing Asian flavors into your pantry.

We discuss:

Kim's personal website, Instagram, and TikTok

Get a free trial with Lyvecom to incorporate video commerce into your ecommerce strategy

And we're back. 

In this brief episode I discuss how 100 day challenges have changed my life, why I'm doing one for podcasting, and why you should consider doing your own—even if you have zero intentions of becoming a creator.

I also share what you can expect from this (resurrected) podcast including what interviews we have coming up in which we will cover topics ranging from BDSM to raising venture capital to how to sell your company for 100s of millions. The good stuff.

Have thoughts, questions, feedback? Slide into the DMs or drop a comment on one of my socials.

Instagram

Welcome to the first episode of Due Diligence. This season of the podcast is all about "Girlboss downfalls"—AKA the stories of the iconic female-founded brands we know and (used to) love. What are their stories? What were their success strategies? What can we learn from the challenges they eventually faced so publicly? And how can we approach this analysis in a way that's critical, curious, and kind? We're dissecting each company, case by case, in multiple parts so we can dissect them strategically, culturally, and sometimes even politically.

This first episode is Part 1 of 3 about a company that has—perhaps more than any other—defined the Girlboss era. We're diving into the full backstory of the Glossier—from Emily Weiss's stint at Teen Vogue and later Vogue Magazine to the Into The Gloss days and, finally, to the spectacular rise of Glossier, a beauty brand that would come to define a category and transform multiple industries spanning beauty, ecommerce, and DTC.

To get updates on new episodes of the podcast, join the Substack here.

Find Dulma on TikTok here.

Tag her with your favorite part of this episode on Instagram here.

And stay tuned for the next episode, Part 2, where we are analyzing the playbook Glossier used to become a $1.8B beauty behemoth.

An introduction to Due Diligence: what you can expect from this podcast, the theme of the first season, and the "why" behind it all.