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2025 Specialty Matcha Podcast AMA · Specialty Matcha Podcast

0:05
Hello, and welcome to the Specialty Match Podcast.
0:08
My name is Ryan. This is my Coho Sangjun, who
0:11
also goes by Sam. Hello.
0:12
Hello. And we're the cofounders of
0:14
Sanko Match Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast
0:16
to discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories
0:19
and interview experts. And today we are doing an AMA so
0:24
we put out a feedback form about what everyone likes and dislikes
0:27
about the episode and at the end we added a question of for them
0:31
to submit a question for an ask me anything episode.
0:35
So to keep the Super authentic, Sam is going to be hearing these
0:38
for the first time. I guess it's half authentic.
0:41
So you can get 2 responses, 1 sort of on the fly and one from
0:46
someone said a little more time to digest.
0:48
Really, I just want to look smarter than Sam.
0:51
He's so spoiled. All right, let's go.
0:55
Let's go. But anyway, we're in Bangkok
0:58
right now as we're recording this, sipping on some wonderful
1:00
MTCH drinks, and so we're probably in a pretty good mood
1:06
to do this recording. Liking my Hojicha so far.
1:08
Yeah, my, I don't want to like this Yuzu Frappe as much as I
1:12
do. It is absolutely incredible and
1:15
I honestly I don't think it would really work as well with
1:18
any other match out. This particular matcha that is
1:22
paired with the Shih Tzu Frappe really makes 1 + 1 = 3.
1:26
Yeah, tastes really good. Anyway, into the episode and
1:29
thank you so much for your questions.
1:31
The first question is how can matcha be a trampoline for leaf
1:36
tea consumption? How can it be a gateway product
1:38
to get people into drinking Sanchas, Gokaros, Hojicha or
1:43
maybe even beyond Taiwanese high mountain, Woolong or or old tree
1:48
poor? Well, it's in general a, kind of
1:52
a, a gateway for us to or for people to come back to tea or
1:58
tea flavor consumption in general.
2:00
Because we've been seeing in Korea was kind of miraculous.
2:04
Like Korea being a like 95% coffee consumption country is
2:10
recently like going a full circle back to drinking Mata,
2:14
which is something that, you know, they've been actually
2:16
historically drinking in the past but has stopped for a very
2:20
long time. Especially like for the young
2:23
people, they are not growing up with tea flavors in their life
2:27
at all. And this is like something
2:30
really, really, really interesting to see, to witness
2:33
if it necessarily will be a trampoline for leaf tea
2:36
consumptions. We don't know yet, but at least
2:38
it's getting people back to tea and I think that's super
2:41
important. Yeah, the interesting thing with
2:44
matcha is it's so perfectly substitutable with coffee and
2:47
coffee formats, lattes, frappes, Americano style, because it
2:53
makes it really easy for cafes to add value.
2:56
And you're only doing 1 extraction, you're not really re
3:00
extracting matcha. And with loose leaf tea in
3:03
almost all formats, whether or not sencha dough or various
3:06
forms of Gokhoro brewing or in Kong Fu Cha, Chinese tea
3:10
ceremony and Korean tea ceremony Dade, you're actually doing
3:13
fractional extraction. You're taking fractions off of
3:18
it. So if you let it steep for 30
3:19
seconds and you drink that and then you brew it again and again
3:23
and again, you're experiencing the tea from so many different
3:26
angles as you're extracting different things because
3:29
different flavor compounds and tea have different extraction
3:32
rates. So you're fundamentally
3:34
dimensionalizing the experience for yourself.
3:36
It's actually part of the fun. There's a lot of problems with
3:39
that. The first is it takes a long
3:41
time. It takes, you know, you got to
3:43
commit at least 1/2 hour of your day.
3:45
It adds a lot of mess. You got to clean up the loose
3:47
leaf tea, especially something like sencha.
3:49
Personally for me, even the little bit of friction of
3:52
brewing sencha on Akuso, I hate cleaning up the leaves
3:56
afterwards. It is like a pain.
3:58
And I'm someone who's been like brewing loose leaf tea this way
4:01
for around 12 years now on a regular basis and I still find
4:05
it an unpleasant consumer experience, let alone for
4:08
someone who doesn't even know how to do it well for as much
4:11
that's kind of once and done. You don't need to have any skill
4:14
other than you know, the first preparation steps that you need.
4:17
But in when you're doing multiple infusions, the first
4:20
cup might taste great, but the second cup might taste horrible,
4:23
right because of water temperature?
4:24
You brew too long? Maybe you dosed totally
4:27
incorrect. There's a lot more skill
4:29
involved. And not only skills, utensils
4:32
too. Yeah, a lot of equipment to be
4:34
able to brew tea. Whereas, you know, with matcha,
4:36
it's literally just like coffee. Like you put everything in one
4:40
glass, in One Cup, and you can drink it all the way.
4:44
And it requires a lot of time. It does require a lot of time.
4:47
And it requires a lot of time and energy to learn how to do it
4:50
well. Brewing good loose leaf tea
4:52
takes skill. That's why they call it Gong
4:54
fucha in Chinese, the skill of making tea.
4:57
But on the other hand, you know, we also have formats like tea
4:59
bags. Yes, and there's also the quote
5:02
UN quote grandpa style tea. You can just throw some gokoro
5:05
and a giant mug on and sip on it all day.
5:07
Much easier forms, you know, taste as much.
5:09
No one takes their best tea and brews it this way because you're
5:13
not extracting, you know, the flavors that that are great for
5:17
it. So maybe it will be a
5:18
progression. You know, as you said, tea is
5:20
getting into people's lives and it opens new doors.
5:23
Something that I think might really help open new doors is
5:26
moving these formats that are actually good, that are not much
5:30
a substitute like actually good gokoro, powdered gokoro to put
5:35
in these type of drinks. Actually good high quality
5:39
single origin hojicha, actually good sencha in these types of
5:43
formats might really open people's eyes to these different
5:47
types of T&B. Like the next step on the
5:50
ladder, the next ladder edge, the next step step on the
5:54
staircase for people to really enjoy and appreciate these
5:58
different products. I agree.
6:00
I agree. I think the, I guess the, the,
6:02
the, the most important part or the, the part or that matters
6:06
the most is that people are getting back to tea in general.
6:10
They're getting back to tea flavor, they're getting back to
6:12
tea consumption. They're getting back to being
6:15
used to like tea as a component of their daily beverage choices.
6:20
Yeah absolutely. And actually loose leaf tea is
6:23
fundamentally better for a lot of different use cases,
6:26
especially while socializing. It is really nice having the
6:29
conversation reset every time you do a brew.
6:32
You collect the cups your with your Q Su or with your teapot
6:35
butter with your Daiwan you're brewing again, you redistribute
6:39
and actually this is a big thing in Chinese tea appreciation
6:41
circles as they talk about conversation flow and like the
6:45
the number of people and how that impact conversation, but
6:48
also with each re steeping you have a fundamental reset.
6:52
But also you're doing this over the course of an hour to 45
6:55
minutes. Very more intimate long tea
6:57
gathering than something like matcha where you literally
7:00
finish it in one minute. It's.
7:01
Like smoking a cigarette versus a cigar.
7:05
Interesting analogy. Actually I see a lot of parallel
7:09
between them. You know, cigar is also like
7:11
very sociable kind of moment. Just sit down with with your
7:14
friend and it's a prolonged period of time you can share
7:17
with your, you know, with the people that you care about or
7:21
people that you want to have a conversation with in a very
7:23
relatively enclosed environment. But I would say that that
7:26
probably also confined cigar or loose leaf consumption in a
7:31
certain context of scenario that kind of, I don't know if it will
7:35
necessarily replace the role of coffee or matcha in people's
7:41
beverage choices for now. So if you just want a quick
7:44
caffeine grab and go, you know probably won't necessarily want
7:48
a cup of loose leaf tea. Yeah, yeah.
7:52
But hopefully there's a growing appreciation around sort of the
7:54
culture of socializing and taking your time and having tea.
7:58
I know in Europe this is really growing.
8:00
I was just at the Berlin Tea Festival a few weeks ago and
8:02
like a lot of people say, yeah, you know, we just chill on the
8:05
weekends and, you know, we have a bunch of people over and we
8:08
taste through a bunch of stuff and just chit chat.
8:10
It's it's not a solo enterprise. Yeah, a lot of benefits to it
8:14
too. So all right, next question, if
8:17
you would start a tea farm, what would you do in terms of
8:20
production, working, growing, culture, marketing, import,
8:25
export? What would your three to five
8:27
year plan be? Any tea farm or matcha tea farm?
8:31
That's assume that's assume this is for matcha.
8:33
For tensha. Tensha matcha.
8:35
Wow. What's the five year plan?
8:37
The Chinese are good at five year plan.
8:39
Yes we are. Yes we are.
8:40
Wow, this is hard. Because, you know, to be honest,
8:44
my dream tea farm is not really a farm.
8:47
It's a tea forest. I'm all into biodiversity of in
8:51
terms of tea gardening, much like what people in Yunnan are
8:54
doing for poor. But if it's for tensile, you
8:57
know, like I still think that there's space or room for people
9:01
to experiment that kind of farming ideology in tensile
9:06
farming. And we kind of are seeing, you
9:08
know, a lot of farmers in Japan doing so, like using more
9:11
thyroid cultivars, using more natural fertilizers or natural
9:16
to no fertilizers, which means no pesticides.
9:19
And we are seeing a lot of farmers in Uji, in Wazuka, in
9:22
Yame moving into that direction. And so am I actually making some
9:26
pretty delicious tea. And so I would probably take
9:29
more inspiration from that pathway.
9:32
And at the same time, there's just so much more potential for
9:37
tea to express itself in, in a more natural environment versus,
9:41
you know, dosing with standardized fertilizers and
9:44
using all of these techniques to, to create, you know, like
9:47
also pretty delicious matcha. But at the end of the day, what
9:50
you're really tasting is the fertilizer, not like the tea
9:54
itself or the tawa itself or whatever is making the tea so
9:59
unique from from other areas. What about you, Rye?
10:02
So I'm going to drop an interesting foreshadow.
10:06
I'll give my answer. But actually we've all, we've
10:08
kind of already done this. So we've never talked about this
10:11
publicly. We are.
10:13
No, but we will one day record a podcast episode.
10:16
We were tensha farmers. I feel so embarrassed.
10:20
Spring of 2025. We didn't think we could get
10:23
anyone in Japan to agree, but we had a friend of a friend who had
10:26
an organic tea farm, China, that was willing to do some
10:29
experiments with shaded cultivation.
10:31
We'll share that whole story later.
10:33
And we definitely weren't able to do everything that we wanted
10:35
to do, just given budget and operational constraints.
10:39
But we will talk about that epic failure, which is actually just
10:43
a fantastic learning. Experience or prelude to a giant
10:46
success? We don't know.
10:48
Yeah, we got to start somewhere. Got to start somewhere.
10:51
But what I would do or one of one really cool plan.
10:54
So I, I just had one of Oscar Greckel's awesome senchas that I
10:58
got from Marcel at Unearth Gallery at the Berlin Tea
11:01
Festival. And one of them was from a
11:03
farmer in Cizuoka who took seeds from fragrant cultivars like
11:07
Koshin. So it was xyri, but you knew who
11:10
the parents were. And the parents were these
11:12
highly fragrant sencha cultivars and they took these seeds and
11:16
they planted a new xyri garden of the xyri offspring.
11:19
So you get genetic diversity naturally coming from, from the
11:24
fact that it's sexually reproduced tea.
11:26
So you have DNA mixing, not just cuttings or clones or cultivars,
11:30
but it's coming from a cultivar that already has some unique
11:33
characteristics that people like.
11:35
And this is something that David from Tazumi talked about in a
11:37
previous podcast, how in places like Wazooka, some of the trees,
11:41
it was actually cheaper to buy seeds than it was to buy
11:44
cuttings or for cultivars back in the day.
11:47
So people would buy seeds from Uji and say this feels an Uji
11:51
Zyri lineage and another field is a Shizuoka zyride lineage.
11:56
I think this is super cool. And this huge benefit that you
11:58
get from Zyride is you have taproot structures.
12:01
All the cultivars, especially apparently the very good tasting
12:04
ones Paul has told us from tea nursery, have really big rooting
12:08
problems. The problem when you have very
12:10
shallow roots is that you can't access a lot of nutrients.
12:13
Not to mention the fact that you have basically a monoculture
12:16
when you have genetically identical plants, which makes
12:20
everything much more vulnerable. So what I think would be super
12:23
cool is collecting seeds from some of the coolest cultivars
12:26
for that are known for Macha, Uji, Hakari, Asahi, Harari 31,
12:32
all of these and create a new zyri field in one of really
12:37
anywhere actually. So then you get the benefits of
12:41
the children of these plants which will hopefully carry on
12:44
some of the fantastic properties.
12:46
You get natural genetic diversity and you have fantastic
12:49
taproot structures. And then if you do a very
12:51
natural form of garden management, this would be really
12:54
interesting. For fertilizer, I would use
12:56
exclusively food based fertilizer that a human can eat.
13:01
So a lot of like mackerel, rice shape, seed oil waste, sesame
13:06
oil, waste products, oyster shells, things that we've heard
13:10
are really good. And we've tasted a lot of tea
13:12
from farms that use this type of fertilizer.
13:15
And it's not an umami bomb. It's actually creates an
13:17
incredible complexity. And then after that it would be
13:20
shaded for a really long time. I don't think we would use a
13:24
Hanzu shading for anything other than marketing purposes.
13:27
So I'm not super convinced that it makes a massive difference in
13:30
the taste of the quality of the actual raw material itself.
13:34
So Kandesha triple layered just like Suji san.
13:37
And then everything is tesumi and pick.
13:40
And then I would be interested in doing 2 forms of production
13:44
and tension processing. One very classic.
13:47
I'm trying to preserve as much inherent taste of the tea.
13:51
So really short steaming times, very carefully dried, not too
13:55
much Hika, not too much heat that too many of those roasty,
13:58
toasty notes. And then another one I would
14:01
want to have. What Paul talked about is if
14:04
there was a producer, I forget where he was, the guy with the
14:07
Hoy row, the roasting table. In Miyazaki.
14:10
Maybe that sounds right. So there's a producer that just
14:13
takes this ten shot and roasted on Hoy row.
14:16
So I'd hojicha it's just like lightly toasted matcha that
14:19
bring in an entirely new expression.
14:21
So then it's a mixture of these really cool xyrite plants, or we
14:26
know the lineage that are really well shaded, but we're tasting
14:29
the characteristics of that nature as much as we possibly
14:33
can, along with the really good fertilizer.
14:35
And then one roasty, toasty step, because honestly, I'm
14:39
getting sick of all of these very homogeneous matcha
14:42
profiles, even among cultivars. The diversity, just like
14:46
sometimes it just feels like wow, OK this there is a
14:49
difference, but like I want something else.
14:52
Give me something. Fragrant.
14:54
Give me something roasted, give me something bitter.
14:57
I think we need to see greater flavor diversity.
14:59
So that's that's my very long answer.
15:01
Yeah, well, for me, I will probably go one more step
15:04
further beyond that. Why, why don't we do it outside
15:07
of Japan? Yeah, when I was in Junan last
15:11
year during harvest season, farmer of friend of mine helped
15:15
me try a very interesting poor. Poor is local kind of fermented
15:20
post fermentation green tea, almost like green tea that's
15:26
very local to Yunnan. And so one of the first form of
15:30
tea consumption that happens in human history.
15:33
But he had me try this very interesting pour that just
15:38
tastes so naturally umami. That was my first time actually
15:42
taste the note umami from a Chinese tea.
15:44
And I was so fascinated about it.
15:46
And, and, and, and he was telling me that there's no
15:49
shading called shaded cultivation.
15:51
There's nothing similar to how people grow Tantra in in Japan.
15:55
What ends up happening is that the tea was growing in deep deep
16:02
Yunnan forest that has natural thick canopy.
16:05
Oh, it's just shaded. It's just naturally shaded tea.
16:09
The leaves has huge surface area and super dark, super green.
16:14
And I cannot help but think that, oh, wow, why don't we
16:18
just, you know, use that part of the garden and we implement
16:22
some, you know, tensha cultivation methodology.
16:25
And we just, you know, do it. Natural shading.
16:29
Yeah, natural shading. We can even intensify the
16:32
shading with some, you know, extra blankets, extra coverage.
16:36
And, you know, the, the, the, the soils in inside of forests
16:40
are naturally fertilized with all the fallen leaves from
16:43
different vegetations. And and there's this concept of,
16:48
you know, single tree poor in Yunnan that people like, yeah,
16:53
these big money Lao Bank were commissioned for production.
16:56
Yeah, I probably my dream scenario cultivation for
17:02
attention production will be one single tree 500 year old poor
17:07
cultivar that we use tension methods and use tension
17:11
processing method to turn that into a very delicious matcha.
17:15
I'm ready to sign. All right, next question, what's
17:19
your personal philosophy and practice on matcha with sifting?
17:24
This is a good question. I have an answer.
17:26
Well, if matcha is fresh meal that really doesn't need sifted,
17:29
you can sift and it does help, but we notice that the clumps
17:33
really don't form until after about 24 hours usually.
17:37
It depends on the humidity too. It also depends on the tent job.
17:40
It's really variable. I mean, I think if you sift,
17:43
you're safe. Sifting is generally a safe
17:46
practice. I always.
17:47
Sift because it's even like maybe, maybe it also depends on
17:52
the grinding mechanism. But with our machine, I always
17:56
sift and one time I forgot to sift because like because of the
18:00
high compression of the ceramic plates, you end up like compress
18:05
some powders into small flakes. Yeah, that's true.
18:08
And if we don't sift that, it will come.
18:11
You do hear some people saying our matcha is so finely ground
18:15
and it's such a fine powder that it doesn't need sifting.
18:18
The. The correlation's backwards,
18:21
yeah. Exactly.
18:23
If it's very coarse, you don't need to sift because they don't
18:27
clump together as much. You don't have as much surface
18:30
area, therefore you have less surface to surface interaction,
18:34
which creates this gumminess. So actually, the finer, you
18:37
know, the more gummy it gets and the more likely it is to clump.
18:42
So that's a bit of misinformation that's flooding
18:44
around the tea world. There are some people,
18:46
especially for premixes that add in antique taking agents that
18:49
can help. Actually, honestly, the idea of
18:51
a matcha paste, I don't know what the water is going to do
18:54
from a degradation perspective, but it's it's an interesting
18:58
way. So I've heard some people choose
19:00
not to whisk. And what they do is they make
19:02
like a koi chop paste and they need kind of like kneading
19:06
dough. They incorporate it with the CHA
19:07
send for a few minutes and then they whisk it and they usually
19:11
don't have clump problems. But I've I've done that before
19:14
and I thought I did it well and I didn't and there were a lot of
19:19
clumps. Do they whisk or do do they sis
19:22
before making that? No, no.
19:24
Yeah, no, they skip this step. Oh, they skip it completely.
19:27
Yeah, they skip it completely. Interesting.
19:28
The other thing you can do, one thing I've tried when I've been
19:31
in a pinch, is it's pretty interesting.
19:34
I started doing this actually before I worked in matcha
19:37
professionally in China. You at least in, in a
19:39
multisenke, I don't know about RSNK, but in a multisenke, you
19:42
know, you put in your two scoops of matcha and then you create,
19:45
you use your chassa and you, you sort of disrupt the little
19:50
mountain of matcha that you made.
19:52
You put basically they call it, you put a river through it, so a
19:55
place for the water to flow, but you're basically flattening it
19:59
and do kind of a zig zag motion to create like a Little River
20:02
indentation. Pretty poetic and interesting.
20:05
But what I've noticed is that that recompression actually
20:09
really helps against clumps. So if you have a dry bowl and
20:12
you put in two scoops of tea and you take your scoop and you just
20:15
lightly decompress it, you're actually breaking up some of
20:19
those clumps again. And I've noticed that that
20:22
works. Pretty well, not always, but
20:25
it's better than not doing it at all.
20:27
All right, next question. How do you think we can tackle
20:31
the first harvest demand more effectively in years to come?
20:35
What are your thoughts on what might happen in 2026 and what do
20:39
you think there will be? And do you think there will be
20:42
enough Ichibancha to last until next harvest?
20:46
Are we going to experience a shortage in 2025?
20:49
Everyone's just going to run out of tea.
20:50
I'll say one thing before you enter everywhere.
20:53
Well, we've heard a lot of people express this concern in
20:56
the industry. Yeah, it's.
20:58
Very likely we've. Heard it from enough people but
21:01
we also know a lot of producers are stockpiling and drip drip
21:05
drip slowly releasing it so some of this scarcity is actually man
21:10
made. But the shortage will probably
21:12
be contained. But the price, Oh my God, it's
21:15
going to go up. Yeah, I think the price for next
21:17
year's harvest is going to be crazy.
21:19
Yeah. Now that people have the
21:21
experience of people ordering tea or that the pace of people
21:26
or the time when people are going to order tea, I think, you
21:30
know, the retailers and farmers and distributors will kind of
21:34
design their supply accordingly. Yeah, I hope so.
21:38
It's it's very, very, the whole situation is very concerning.
21:42
And I don't know about managing the demand more effectively.
21:45
I mean, it's a double edged sword because if you don't let
21:47
that tension rest in cold storage for a few months at
21:51
least it tastes worse. And we've experienced that a
21:54
lot. And actually, after we released
21:56
our experience with our Sam's favorite blend that that I
22:02
speculated on the podcast, they were releasing tea too early.
22:06
The tension didn't have enough time to rest.
22:08
And someone deep within the matcha industry who listens to
22:10
our podcast, thank you very much, reached out and confirmed
22:14
my suspicion. He had direct knowledge of of
22:16
that and they had direct knowledge of that, or at least
22:20
had heard through someone that that was indeed the case that
22:23
they basically burned through their reserve tension stocks
22:27
that were aged. I mean, and it just wasn't
22:29
enough to keep the supply flow. And so clearly the big blend
22:33
houses are already doing some pretty major compromises.
22:36
That's crazy. Well, it makes sense because
22:38
like after we opened that can and let us sit for a few days
22:42
actually tastes better. That was not the case last year.
22:46
Pretty rare for that to happen. The iconic olive oil notes came
22:50
back after we opened the can, which was wild.
22:53
Very interesting. It's really bizarre, but I don't
22:56
know, I don't think anyone has the answer to this question
22:58
fully. I think releasing it slowly is
23:00
good practice and I like the producers that do that.
23:03
I think that's smart. So some artificial scarcity to
23:06
just kind of slow down consumption and make sure
23:08
there's enough throughout the year, because that would be a
23:10
horrible outcome. Is that come like February, like
23:14
everyone's out of stock, that's not good for consumers.
23:18
Like it's a it's a whole lot of short term pain for everyone now
23:22
to hold that back. But I think that it might be
23:25
better for everyone in the long term because it's having no
23:28
supply available anywhere for that amount of time or very
23:32
little supply is is really bad for consumers.
23:36
Agree. I might make them panic by when
23:38
it's available and then we go into these boom cycles of
23:42
releasing, selling out, releasing, selling out, but I
23:45
think it's not a very healthy dynamic.
23:47
Yeah. And also at some point, probably
23:49
a lot of consumers would just get tired of it and move.
23:52
On Yeah, it's getting too expensive.
23:54
I'm done. Forget this.
23:56
Yeah, it's too much effort. Yeah.
23:58
So that will be, that will be really terrible.
24:00
Yeah, especially if the prices keep going up, right?
24:03
Next question. Love this question.
24:04
Do Best Buy dates even matter? Well, in a lot of cases, they're
24:11
putting there just to suffice deregulation requirements to me,
24:18
no. That's my dates don't matter.
24:20
A meal day probably matters much more.
24:23
Tea is not a perishable product so long as that tea, as long as
24:26
the 10 is sealed. You could drink 100 year old tea
24:29
like it's it's not going to grow mold assuming it didn't come
24:32
into contact with any moisture. So from a food safety
24:35
perspective it is. It's a non perishable product,
24:39
comes in the Best Buy dates mostly for is mostly for for
24:43
regulations, but there's a huge range of standard.
24:46
The best companies will put it six months after milling.
24:49
The industry standard is 18 months.
24:51
But even after six months, it's honestly, unless it's in the
24:55
freezer or you're keeping it in really cold storage and then you
24:59
put it, take it out, let it come back to room temperature and
25:01
then opening it, you know you're going to suffer from a lot of
25:04
degradation. I mean, a lot of studies have
25:06
shown it's just two months, two months at room storage
25:09
temperature. It can lose up to 30 to 40% of
25:11
the EGCG. From the flavor nutrition
25:14
perspective, I think Best Buy dates are stupid.
25:18
I think everyone should move to mill dates.
25:20
It's very clear why no one's doing it.
25:22
Moving to mill dates. In some cases it's definitely
25:25
because the match of brand owners cannot pull that
25:28
information from their supplier where the supplier doesn't want
25:31
to share that information. So that's one possibility. 2
25:34
it's actually going to be a range.
25:36
So if it's a stone ground product, these stone mills only
25:39
mill 20 to 40 grams an hour. So it's probably a range over
25:43
the course of a week because it's they're actually kind of
25:45
creating one gigantic blend. It's that's a complicated story
25:48
to tell a consumer. Although if I were them, I would
25:51
just pick the oldest date in the range.
25:54
I think would be a good practice.
25:56
But yeah, it's I think and I think for the others, they don't
26:01
want to put it on because they their product is probably older
26:06
than they would like to deliver. In a perfect world, especially
26:10
right now, the every matcha business is buying as much
26:13
matcha as they possibly can while it's available.
26:16
There's so many small businesses around the world that like have
26:20
to purchase matcha to remain a business.
26:23
And it is a good business decision and we would recommend
26:26
all small businesses. If you can buy 200 kilos instead
26:29
of 100 kilos, you absolutely should in this environment, you
26:33
know, put it in the freezer, cold store it, right?
26:35
Like it's still better than completely running out of stock
26:38
and having nothing to sell and having all of these small
26:41
businesses which have created this much of boom by supplying
26:44
it, by educating the market, educating all the people who
26:47
talk about it on social media. This all didn't happen by
26:50
accident. You can't just blame social
26:52
media. These people who are doing these
26:54
reviews have built the preferences are built off of
26:57
people giving them that knowledge in English, giving
27:00
them that knowledge in Spanish and Portuguese and French and
27:03
Arabic and title log and Thai and Vietnamese, right.
27:07
Like it's, it's all the small businesses are the heroes of
27:10
this matcha boom. So it's it'd be tragic.
27:14
So on the we would like to have mill dates, but also at the
27:18
moment the no one has any control over the mill.
27:21
No one has any control over when they get product.
27:24
Every single matcha founder that I've talked to in the last two
27:26
months said that like supply for them, even them who have very
27:29
established businesses is very unreliable.
27:32
So I I think the keeping them solvent is the most important
27:36
thing in the interim. But if you only care about
27:38
consumers, yeah, mill dates are super important.
27:40
Agree Next, what questions should consumers ask their and
27:44
baristas to ensure they're receiving a high quality
27:47
product? For me, actually, just drink the
27:49
tea, taste it yourself. I think that's the most
27:52
straightforward way of understanding the quality of the
27:56
product that you're consuming because like knowledge or
27:58
information doesn't necessarily equal to quality.
28:01
In the past few days we've been sampling a lot of macho shops in
28:04
Bangkok and some of them have like very sophisticated manuals
28:08
with very detailed information about the tala, about the
28:12
origin. But the tea just, it wasn't that
28:14
good. It was pretty bad actually.
28:16
Some, some we we had some exceptional tea.
28:18
Also the bad one is bad by Thai standards.
28:22
It was still miles above anything you can get elsewhere.
28:26
Yeah, yeah. But but you know, like really is
28:28
information doesn't necessarily equal to quality like people are
28:31
probably willing to or sometimes it doesn't necessarily equal to
28:35
preference. We, we, we were sampling this,
28:39
this matcha shop that serve only Shizuoka organic matcha and they
28:44
are, you know, like very has this very tight collaboration
28:49
with the local farmers. They serve everything organic.
28:52
It's like basically farm to cup. Yeah, basically farm to cup and
28:55
the tea tastes very, very organic matcha.
28:58
Some people like it. I actually did end up liking the
29:01
cup that I ordered. They they, it's not a pure
29:04
matcha, it's a specialty drink. They add a some like lime and
29:08
yuzu juice into the matcha without any sugar addition.
29:13
Wow, works out perfectly. It's almost like biting into a
29:17
juicy grapefruit. It was delicious.
29:19
It was delicious. But I can totally see, you know,
29:22
that really organic kind of bitter structure taste profile
29:27
doesn't suffice to someone's taste preference for a matcha.
29:30
So I think there is a discrepancy on that.
29:33
And So what questions can you necessarily ask?
29:36
I guess like just asking some of the standard questions about the
29:40
matcha, like you know what cultivars are what you know
29:43
what, what tawa, you know what, what are the preparation method
29:47
that you're going to use? Like if the barista behind the
29:50
bar counter have some at least basic answers to your questions,
29:53
I think that's a good indicator of them at least knowing you
29:57
know what they are serving. To customers, what is it?
29:59
Where is it from? How are you preparing it?
30:03
And anything like any questions deeper than that, like if you
30:06
can get a answer, fantastic, you jackpot.
30:10
But if not, then you know it doesn't necessarily mean that
30:13
you're going to get a bad product.
30:15
Yeah, for baristas, it's tricky because Chip, typically they
30:18
don't know very much about matcha.
30:19
Even at matcha specialty cafes, you really have to go to
30:22
somewhere with this very good training.
30:24
And actually I think this is a big criticism of the matcha
30:27
industry in general is that they don't make matcha very
30:31
interesting for coffee people. There is nothing interesting
30:35
saying this bag is ceremonial grade.
30:37
We source directly from the farmers.
30:39
This is you know AAA and you know you should.
30:45
It's good with just water and has a lot of natural sweetness.
30:48
Tells you nothing about the product.
30:51
I mean people can smell BS. Imagine someone told you the
30:54
same story about some coffee. Like, it's so different than
30:58
saying this is Kerrari 31 cultivar grown in a place called
31:02
Yama in Fukuoka where they're famous for toasting their tea at
31:07
a little higher temperature, which gives all of these nice
31:09
roasty, toasty notes that when combined with milk, often can
31:13
create these almost like peanut butter or even like chocolate
31:17
like notes in the latte. But you know what?
31:19
If you don't put milk in it, you get like some creaminess from
31:22
that cultivar. But also in the nose, you get
31:24
this wonderful walnut note, for example, right?
31:28
And this was grown, it was shaded for three weeks or 4
31:31
weeks, which is a relatively long time.
31:33
And the longer you shade a tea, the less naturally bitter it
31:37
gets and the more umami it gets because sunlight actually
31:41
creates a reaction, turning sweet and umami amino acids into
31:46
bitter and astringent catechets. And that's what shading does, is
31:49
it totally blocks that. But this is a super interesting
31:52
story. You're giving someone causal
31:54
mechanisms and it's something that they can then pass on to
31:57
their consumers and saying, yes, tea ceremony master and made
32:00
this wonderful blend. It's triple ceremonial grade
32:04
AAA, blah blah blah. Nothing is interesting about
32:06
that product. It's literally just a bunch of
32:08
bullshit all of like, it's just things that people have made-up.
32:12
It doesn't reflect anything about the tea itself.
32:17
It's just all the stories that we tell on top of it.
32:20
All the medals and awards that people given to themselves.
32:24
And labels, it's really crazy. Now, vendors are a different
32:27
story. I think a really good vendor is
32:29
very good at steering people to what they like and what they
32:33
think is good or what is going to be a good fit for them.
32:35
So it's. So I was talking with someone
32:38
recently about the matcha scene here in Bangkok and they were
32:41
saying that, yeah, you know what, if you're a matcha brand
32:43
here and you don't have a wide variety of matcha, people just
32:46
don't trust you. So the consumers are in a state
32:49
where the industry standard is you need to have a wide variety
32:53
of flavor profile outcomes, flavor profile options, and then
32:57
you need to have the labels behind whether or not it's
32:59
cultivar, growing region or processing.
33:01
Well, that that's very unique to Thailand, right?
33:04
Like here, you have a very, very experienced and educated
33:08
consumer cohort that's pulling that information, demanding that
33:12
information from vendors, from brands, and you don't
33:15
necessarily quite see that in, you know, elsewhere.
33:18
Yeah. Not even in Japan.
33:19
Not even in Japan, Yeah. So it's but I think it will
33:22
happen. Oh yeah, eventually we'll have.
33:23
And that's going to be a big change.
33:25
I actually think that Thailand is going to be the new standard
33:28
bearers and they're going to define the rules of this new
33:30
game, this new culture of drinking matcha outside of a
33:34
ceremonial is by far most sophisticated here compared to
33:38
anywhere else we've been seen or heard of.
33:41
And I think they actually have the possibility meeting the rest
33:44
of the world and then it it moving outwards.
33:47
I hope it happens because it's a sophisticated market with
33:50
consumers who have deep preferences who probably know
33:52
way more than the average consumer in Japan, like a lot
33:55
more, like 10 times more probably for the daily matcha
33:59
drinker here in terms of what they no, No 12.
34:02
Times 12 times. Japanese people really don't
34:06
know very much a product, especially the tea ceremony
34:09
practitioners. They get told things about the
34:11
product, but they don't know anything about cultivars.
34:13
Like there's no culture of that that existed.
34:16
This is totally new culture formation.
34:19
So you know, in terms of Western vendors, I hope that's the case
34:22
that they'll be able to guide you.
34:23
So if they don't guide you, I would say I don't buy from them
34:27
if they cannot answer questions around the cultivar was all of
34:30
these things like it's if you can't get like information from
34:34
people or they say they don't know.
34:36
I recently was, you know, the Berlin Tea Festival asking
34:40
around about some matcha. I won't say from which country
34:43
to keep this very vague. And I asked the person who is
34:46
selling, this is one of three products that they sold.
34:49
They're a matcha business. I asked what cultivar is this?
34:51
And she was very nice. She said honestly, I don't know.
34:55
And like a lot of people have asked me today, like what is the
34:58
likelihood that any of those people bought that product?
35:02
Like probably pretty low where the consumers know more about
35:05
the product than the business owner selling it.
35:07
Yeah. But, you know, after that day,
35:09
you know, the owner will definitely go back and figure
35:12
out what are the cultivars. Yeah, of the products that
35:15
they're selling. So, you know, there's a push and
35:18
pull interaction happening and I think that's very healthy.
35:22
Very healthy, this push and pull interaction between consumers
35:25
and these brand owners. But you know, really broad
35:28
strokes to literally answer the question.
35:29
They shade. It definitely matters.
35:31
Fertilizer matters a lot. So organic, non organic.
35:34
If they have the information. Yeah, if they have the
35:36
information knowing exactly where it's from and not
35:39
accepting uji. Like where where is uji?
35:41
Uji can be Yoto Prefecture, Nara, Miga or Shiga, and even
35:46
within the Yamashiro region and what people would call the Uji
35:50
region, there's a huge difference, right?
35:52
Like Wazuka has remarkably different climate than somewhere
35:56
like Uji, that actual city, Uji, which sits in a river basin
36:00
versus in the mountains or in a River Valley versus the
36:03
mountains. So I think it's just a matter of
36:08
poking and prodding and seeing what happens.
36:10
And if you experience some condescension, forget that
36:13
person. If you're asking a reasonable
36:15
question and someones like giving so much pushback, which
36:18
happens all the time, I don't think that these people have a
36:22
great seat at the table. If someone says it's
36:25
proprietary, maybe that makes sense, but otherwise if they're
36:29
just being super cagey, I think there's no room for this lack of
36:32
transparency. Next question, what are our
36:35
experiences with Matcha in the UK or talking with people based
36:39
in the UK? Have you been?
36:41
No, no, I have not. OK, what's your impression from
36:44
afar actually? From afar, there's a
36:46
surprisingly a lot of things happening over there and
36:50
surprisingly a lot and surprisingly little because UK
36:56
being a very large tea consumption countries doesn't
36:59
seem to quite have such a diverse, the specialty kind of
37:05
consumer cohort yet compared to, you know, places like Bangkok or
37:09
even like in the States. It's a kind of surprising that
37:12
the, you know, people are not necessarily using a loose leaf
37:16
tea framework to to to assess matcha, but there are still a
37:19
lot of people doing matcha. And apparently it's on the up
37:22
and coming. So I, I've been to London quite
37:24
a few times in and out since 2017, I believe.
37:28
And I didn't really notice any matcha was there before I worked
37:31
in the industry in 2017, 2018-2019 and you know, just
37:36
after COVID. But the, my last trip there, I
37:38
did a sort of a matcha tour of four different places, most of
37:42
which were very Japanese themed and focused that the quality,
37:45
average quality of the drinks were pretty low.
37:48
Like actually inspired us to record an episode called Back to
37:51
Basics, which is a little self-explanatory of my what,
37:56
what I experienced there at the four different places that I
38:00
went to. So not to be overly critical,
38:02
but I think it is up and coming and growing big trend there.
38:07
And I know that the importation levels of just the volume of
38:11
matcha that enters that market has gone up pretty
38:14
significantly. The CEO of IA Europe, guy named
38:19
Thomas, I forget his last name, presented at the Berlin Tea
38:23
Festival. Him and his entire team recently
38:26
did a big trip in London and he was too shocked.
38:29
He said that this is like the fastest growing place in Europe
38:33
for Macha. And he was commenting that, you
38:36
know, it's part of the trends that start in the US that then
38:40
first get adopted into the UK and then get adopted into the
38:44
rest of Europe. But I don't know if I fully
38:45
agree with that causation, but that's sort of what people in
38:49
the industry that have a lot of context are saying is that the
38:53
UK is going to be leading a lot of this matcha new matcha
38:58
culture that we're seeing. Really, I think it's Germany
39:01
based on my experiences talking to.
39:03
People there, there's so many people in Paris too, like doing
39:07
like issues requiring. Yeah, that's true.
39:09
Even in the past 2-3 months we've have a lot of issues to a
39:12
lot more single cultivar, a lot more advanced conversations than
39:16
had ever existed anywhere. Yeah, hard to say who the market
39:19
leaders there. I do think the US, they only had
39:21
it first, then it's slowly moved and Europe is a huge problem
39:25
because very little high quality matcha can enter into the EU.
39:29
So even just finding a good product is very challenging.
39:32
They should fight for it as the O3 Germany and and the UK was
39:38
gonna be the first. So, yeah, I don't know, I think
39:40
it's up and coming. I know a lot of tea people in in
39:43
the UK and that I chat with that are other, you know, tea
39:46
friends, tea people. And I think there's a lot of
39:48
great work going on there by a lot of brands and that are
39:51
really establishing the category of specialty matcha and treating
39:56
it as something that's way more than just like a commodity
39:58
product and so very optimistic. Agree.
40:01
Agree. Agree.
40:02
Next question, since we are both a large travelers, would we ever
40:06
consider putting together and sharing a Google map some of our
40:10
favorite places in Japan, China, France and other places?
40:14
Oh, we could, I guess. Yeah, we could.
40:16
We actually already have maps for for all the places and
40:20
sometimes some very specific lists, and we're happy to share
40:23
them if anyone who reaches out. Or we can create a separate
40:27
account just for documenting that.
40:29
Although I think it really depends on what your goals are
40:32
for that type of travel, because, you know, if it's very
40:35
food focused or very tea focused, we can kind of curate
40:39
the list. Because even in a city like
40:41
Kyoto, I mean, the list is just enormous.
40:43
And it really depends on what you're looking for.
40:46
Yeah. And we also have our personal
40:48
preference too. Yeah, yeah.
40:50
So we're happy to do it. We've got lots of great
40:52
recommendations and in various parts of the world, but they're
40:56
very much catered towards our preferences, which are generally
40:58
tend towards very local experiences that are extremely
41:03
good value for money. We both hate overpaying for like
41:09
a luxury experience and in our experience travelling at our
41:12
last company where you know, we had a little bit of a larger
41:15
budget, just frequently wasn't worth it.
41:18
Pretty obsessed with value from a traveler perspective.
41:21
I think Sam and I have been to close to 15 countries together
41:26
for either leisure or work over the past seven years and at this
41:30
point we just hate overpaying for things.
41:32
So yeah, happy to. Yeah, happy to.
41:35
I'd say the cities that I know relatively well, that would be
41:38
Paris, NY, Mexico City. Used to travel a lot there.
41:42
I know Milan decently well, London, a little bit Bangkok.
41:46
Yeah, Bangkok. Tokyo, Kyoto, a lot of different
41:49
cities in China. And then the other places I
41:51
visited, you know, it's more like one or two times.
41:54
So wouldn't have any confidence. But if you end up traveling to
41:57
any of those places and want some recommendations, we're
42:00
we're happy to help. One useful framework will be if
42:04
you are a drinker at all, you know, go straight to the best
42:08
bar in the city and just talk with the bartender or the locals
42:11
right next to you and frequently you can get some pretty pretty
42:14
solid recommendation that you know there are not a tourist
42:18
attraction. Yeah, or like ridiculously
42:20
overpriced, but they're usually plugged into the the local scene
42:24
really well. Same thing with baristas,
42:26
actually. You talk to baristas like, hey,
42:29
where do you go eat? Where do your friends?
42:30
What's the good local dish here? Where do you find the best
42:33
version and sort of get a a sense of the landscape of the
42:36
option? All right.
42:38
Next question, What is your vision for building a team?
42:41
That's a great question. Wow, huge question to I'd say.
42:44
So we at our last company, we were at a sort of a scaled
42:48
startup. We went from basically three
42:50
people to 30 in about 2 1/2 years, which felt like really
42:57
fast grows at the time and learned a lot of very hard won
43:02
lessons going through that experience.
43:04
I was the second most senior person, Sam was the 3rd in terms
43:08
of our our tenure at the company.
43:10
And so we've been through this before and really the wrong
43:13
person. Can do a lot of damage.
43:15
Lot of damage, Oh my God. And also just working with
43:18
people that you enjoy spending time with.
43:20
A life is too short to tolerate people that you just can't
43:23
stand. Yeah, my I guess my first
43:26
advice, trust your gut. Feeling someone doesn't like
43:30
you, you don't feel right. Frequently they turns out to be
43:33
not right. I think that there there's
43:36
something to to learn from your first instinct and we we have
43:41
ran into a lot of situations like that.
43:43
There's a lot of the classic Silicon Valley advice of
43:46
missionary versus mercenary, and mercenaries are just after money
43:50
and status for themselves. Missionaries actually believe in
43:52
the mission and sort of like spread the gospel, so to speak.
43:57
So having someone that's like highly ideologically and quote,
44:00
UN quote, but not not exactly not quote, UN quote, spiritually
44:04
aligned with the mission where it's really their work.
44:07
And they're like actually truly tea people that they deeply care
44:11
about the mission and the business and making people happy
44:14
and customers happy, super important to us.
44:17
And people who are very hard workers too and that are willing
44:20
to do any job. I mean, within the case of our
44:23
company, there is no job that is too low for anyone to do.
44:27
So really we can't can't stand pretension.
44:30
That's actually like our biggest complaint about a lot of the
44:35
matcha industry just in general, just how much judgment and
44:38
pretension is floated around And you know, we'd something we
44:42
really don't want to bring onto the team as we scale.
44:45
There's a lot of that in the tea world sometimes.
44:47
Any other non negotiables for vision for building a team Sam?
44:51
I guess not necessarily non negotiable, but you know, we
44:54
talked about hiring people with like minded people, people with
44:58
like minded minds, but we shouldn't really necessarily
45:02
find people or surround yourself with people with identical
45:06
thoughts remained a healthy diversity of values.
45:10
I think it's super important in, you know, making business
45:13
decision or in making product development decisions.
45:17
You want this like pushbacks from your partners, from your
45:22
colleagues. Healthy tension.
45:24
Yeah, healthy tension. We have that all the time, every
45:26
day. I think we irritate irritate
45:29
each other for about 15 minutes every day.
45:31
But it's usually over some topic that there is no right answer.
45:35
It just stress tests the ideas. Yeah, I think that's super
45:39
important. Frequently, I think it's such a
45:42
dilemma for solo founders is, you know, they don't necessarily
45:46
have the environment to foster or create such culture.
45:50
If you're it's hard to escape living in your own head if you
45:54
don't have a intellectual thought partners to really
45:57
stressed ideas with the ideas need to breathe.
46:00
That's actually half the reason why we do this podcast.
46:02
Like we come up with some ideas, some hypothesis, and we just
46:05
want to let the idea breathe a little bit and get some feedback
46:08
from people who message us all the time about what resonated
46:12
with what they disagree with too.
46:14
Even Sometimes a Park has really turned into a very healthy
46:19
argument between Ryan and I, and we sometimes even didn't end up
46:22
releasing those episodes, which they're pretty interesting to
46:26
listen. Yeah, maybe we should in.
46:27
Retrospect, but yeah, like this kind of dynamic, I think it's
46:31
super healthy and super important.
46:33
Yeah, To answer this question very literally, we want to
46:36
remain as small a company as possible for as long as
46:39
possible. We don't want to outgrow
46:41
ourselves too fast. So and we really would love to
46:44
partner with people. We would love to have a large
46:48
network of people who understand our mill, understand the
46:51
technology and the company that we're looking to build.
46:54
And we can turn this into an incredibly local movement with
46:57
many different people all over the world involved, which we
47:00
have represented in our beta program for our our mill that
47:03
can mill much afresh anywhere and everywhere.
47:05
That's right. And we'd love to foster that
47:08
community as well. We'd like to see ourselves as as
47:11
collaborative and helpful as possible to as many people as
47:14
possible. And and to benefit as many
47:17
consumers as possible as well. And there's no way you can do
47:20
that on your own. And creating this community is
47:22
like creating a team. Yeah, we're.
47:26
All part of this team. The same team for special team
47:28
match on the next question I feel a little under qualified to
47:32
talk about considering we are not a runaway success yet.
47:35
We've had some experience growing and scaling companies
47:37
before that have gone on to I think we raised over $10 million
47:42
at the last company. So decently well scaled from a
47:45
venture perspective, but does so that's some context.
47:48
But the last question Sam, how do you know what the right
47:51
person to build a business with and was there a defining moment
47:56
where you clicked and that you realize that you would make
48:00
great Co founders? Wow.
48:02
Very hard question all based on vibes.
48:04
Live check. I don't know, Ryan.
48:06
We spent the past more than 10 years with each other doing all
48:10
sorts of things. It's I don't think there's a
48:14
single moment of realizing or having that vibe kind of
48:19
clicked. It's it was, it was many
48:23
moments. There's many moments.
48:25
So we basically have 3 chapters. The first was at the T Institute
48:28
at Penn State, where I was the second executive director of
48:31
that research group that it had ever had, and Sam was the 3rd.
48:35
So we got to know each other super well as I was
48:38
transitioning that rollover to Sam.
48:41
So that was sort of the first phase and then?
48:44
Yeah, it was actually a very interesting first phase cuz it
48:47
was in a academic setting. It's much more quote, UN quote,
48:52
pure non commercial, non commercial.
48:54
But it was also complicated enough that we had to we had the
48:59
chance to see each other under stress, facing different
49:04
challenges. It's really like executive
49:06
training boot camp to take over the Tea Institute.
49:09
So for those of you who don't know, there was an organization,
49:11
it doesn't exist anymore called the Tea Institute at Penn State,
49:14
which was an interdisciplinary Research Institute dedicated to
49:17
the study and preservation of all tea ceremony, studying
49:20
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tea ceremony.
49:22
And there's an international component where we would invite
49:25
speakers to do week long lecture cycles to the university.
49:28
They would typically then invite the students back to their
49:31
country, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, the mainland China to come and
49:35
then experience that we get funding for students to go learn
49:39
at origin. And then there was also a
49:41
research arm to the to the to the organization as well as a
49:46
student on tea house. But collectively between Sam and
49:49
I, we got very good at fundraising for this
49:51
modernization. Cumulatively, together in about
49:54
three, 3 1/2 years, we raised about a quarter $1,000,000 from
49:57
the university and from donations and to fund this
50:00
research and to fund the institute that taught students
50:05
Kung Fu Cha and Chanoyu, Japanese tea ceremony and the
50:09
Korean tea ceremony, and was able to support all of these
50:12
activities, all of this travel and all of these international
50:16
events that got quite a bit of recognition from an
50:18
international audience. There's a very difficult thing
50:21
to hand over. We got to know each other very
50:24
well and some pretty tense moments in emails because it's
50:27
pretty sensitive because, you know, when you run this
50:29
organization, you develop a pretty close personal
50:32
relationship with all of these contacts and that you're
50:34
basically relying on to learn from.
50:37
This was back in, you know, 2014, 2015 and 16.
50:40
Information about tea on the Internet is very limited.
50:44
You had a handful of bloggers. There's hardly any presence on
50:48
YouTube. You just couldn't learn unless
50:50
you knew someone. Or you know the local language
50:53
that you are trying to extract information.
50:55
From very tricky. So it was a very sensitive thing
50:58
to hand over those contacts. So it's a lot of trust building
51:01
who can take over this research group and who can we trust to
51:04
maintain this network of friendships basically so that
51:08
these people will keep saying yes to coming to coming back to
51:11
the university and to keep all this research going to keep all
51:14
the teaching between students going and making sure that it
51:18
stays focused and concentrated and mission driven.
51:22
And you have to also have to learn how to fundraise and how
51:24
to pitch the ideas. And it was almost like running a
51:27
company, except it was a volunteer organization.
51:29
It also had its fair share of like, understanding, OK, how do
51:33
we motivate everyone to swim all in the this direction at once?
51:37
Honestly, I would say it's probably more difficult in the
51:40
sense that you're not paying anyone to do it.
51:43
Yeah, and there's a lot of drama and we both made a lot of
51:46
mistakes. We lost friends, we met new
51:49
friends, new friends. And anytime you have a group of,
51:52
you know, dirty students doing, trying to do very ambitious
51:56
things, and when you don't know yourself what you're doing,
51:59
there's still a lot of mistakes. And the academic, the faculties
52:03
were involved too, which adds another layer of politics.
52:06
Various levels of help, helpfulness.
52:09
Yeah, in retrospect. Or unhelpfulness, Yeah, but that
52:13
was all fun. And then then one of the first
52:16
pieces of research that came out of the D Institute was using AI
52:20
to look at sensory data to start making predictions about what
52:22
people would taste and what people would like.
52:24
That got spun out of the company.
52:26
And then I got recruited out to go join.
52:28
I actually dropped out university to go join, actually
52:31
never finished college. And then we dragged Sam the
52:35
moment he graduated and we entered that roller coaster and
52:39
worked together for years. And we got to travel to over a
52:42
dozen countries at that point to collect consumer preference data
52:45
all over the world and to have people come taste things and
52:49
places like Colombia, places like Italy, Germany.
52:54
We did Spain, Philippines, Singapore Maintenance II
53:01
Thailand. Vietnam.
53:03
So it was quite the adventure roller coaster ride and we
53:06
learned a lot as we scaled that from just a handful of people
53:09
that we all knew to 1/3 / a thirty person organization
53:12
probably at its largest. And so a lot of hard learned
53:15
lessons there and a lot of experience working together.
53:18
Yeah, there were a lot of very complex systems and problems.
53:22
Yep, a lot of bounding moments and battle scars, scar tissues
53:27
and traumas. This actually feels the easiest
53:29
was founding this company, but we have a pretty good predictive
53:33
model for how we react in different situations and we have
53:36
very, very different personalities that I think at
53:40
face value or not that highly complementary, but it actually
53:43
works pretty well. And then we communicate.
53:45
There's not a lot of festering that goes on.
53:47
So I feel a little bit of imposter syndrome answering this
53:50
question because we're we're a three person organization that
53:54
hasn't figured had to be profitable yet.
53:56
But if we end up being successful, then maybe this is
53:59
there's some Nuggets of wisdom. I hope so.
54:02
People who are already successful that talk about this
54:05
type of thing, I hope so. In terms of our decision making
54:08
framework, it was ended up being pretty easy.
54:10
But I don't know, it's also super unique and we are just, I
54:14
guess so lucky to wow, this sounds like a confession, Ryan,
54:19
but it's honestly so lucky to have you in the past 10 years.
54:23
And we we had the opportunity to actually go through all of these
54:27
and still remain, you know, as very close to each other.
54:31
I think that's something that's you.
54:33
I would call it pure luck. Yeah, good luck.
54:36
And we're both very long term oriented and it's also really
54:40
helps. Yeah, we, we are not short term
54:42
optimization people and we genuinely like each other.
54:46
End time with you. Still, it's helpful.
54:48
Anyway, thanks for all the questions and if you enjoyed
54:51
this, please share it with friend.
54:53
If you like this format and want us to answer more questions like
54:56
this in the future, let us know and we'll see you on the next
54:59
one. See you in the future.