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I've lived in 4 countries and 9 cities. Corporate. Academia. Founder. Fractional COO. The leap that changed everything was leaving academia to start The Radiant Rhino. I had a PhD. A research career. A perfectly stable path forward. And I walked away from it to build a wellness product brand from scratch. No playbook. No industry contacts. No idea what I was doing. I just did it anyway. What followed was five years of figuring it out in real time. Supply chains. Retail buyers

In February 2021, my business went dark. No emails. No tracking numbers. Zero samples. Missing Chinese New Year cost me weeks of launch time, and the worst part? I didn’t even know it was coming. I was deep in launch mode, running on adrenaline and a spreadsheet, sourcing samples from a manufacturer in China. Then, everything went quiet. I thought I’d been ghosted. Turns out, factories in China shut down for 15 days to a month every Chinese New Year. No production. No shippin

The hardest decision of my career was also the right one. In 2020, I started working on a business idea. I had no idea what I was doing. By 2021, I had launched a wellness product brand. By year three, it was operating in three countries, the US, Canada, and Taiwan, with a team of 5 to 15 people at any given time. Here's what I learned along the way, completely from scratch: The Build: Taking a concept to a physical, packaged product. The Hustle: From mom-and-pop stores and t

I jumped on the trend and asked ChatGPT to create a caricature of me based on what it knows about me. Apparently my personality is charts, systems and ideas. Clearly, I need more hobbies in life.

A lot of people ask me why I ran a product company after years in tech. Short answer: I saw an opportunity and took it. Long answer: It accidentally turned into one of my biggest career assets. Fast forward to last week. I was advising a med-tech company trying to integrate their software into a hardware product. The conversation quickly went from “Should we build hardware or license the tech?” to “Who is handling manufacturing, logistics, warehouses, customs, and internat

In my 20s, I packed my bags and moved to Utah for a job, knowing absolutely no one. I barely knew how to drive, let alone snow-drive, and I was one of very few people of color at the time. It was intimidating. Also, slightly unhinged. It turned out to be one of the most transformative decisions of my life. That move taught me how to push past my comfort zone. Over time, it gave me the confidence to take calculated risks and trust myself in unfamiliar territory. Now, I have li