Episode 05: Laura D’Asaro
Laura D’Asaro is the Co-Founder of Chirps (as seen on Shark Tank!), a food company seeking to transform Americans’ dietary impact on the environment. She’s also the co-author of Project Startup #1: Eat Bugs. In this episode, she talks about reinventing social entrepreneurship, attempting to break world records for cancer research, and the early influences that shaped her as an entrepreneur. She also shares tips and tricks that she uses to generate new start-up ideas an an almost-daily basis!
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The Paint & Pipette Podcast Episode 04: Laura D'Asaro
Redefining Social Entrepreneurship with Laura D’Asaro
Episode 5: Show Notes [Transcript Below]
As an African Studies major at Harvard, today’s guest studied abroad in Tanzania. In the markets of Arusha, she purchased a caterpillar from a street vendor. Tossing caution to the wind and eschewing her vegetarian diet, Laura D’Asaro bit into her future and Chirps, a revolutionary food company seeking to transform Americans’ dietary impact on the environment, was born! Laura D’Asaro is the Co-Founder of Chirps (as seen on Shark Tank), and the co-author of Project Startup #1: Eat Bugs. While at Chirps, Laura has collected a number of accolades, including Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur, Shark Tank entrepreneur, Cupid's Cup winner, Echoing Green climate fellow, and Mass Challenge winner. In this episode, she talks about redefining social entrepreneurship, attempting to break world records for cancer research, and the early influences that shaped her as an entrepreneur. She also shares some of her tips and tricks for generating new start-up ideas on an almost-daily basis, including what she calls the add, subtract, multiply, divide method. Tune in today to learn more!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Get to know Laura D’Asaro and how she ended up at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
• Hear about her early foray into social entrepreneurship at just 15 years old.
• Find out how Laura came to be the world record holder for the fastest time to crawl a mile.
• The genesis of Chirps and how Laura discovered the sustainable power of eating insects.
• Why she believes that success alone can’t make you happy; it’s all about the people.
• Laura shares why she is so passionate about redefining social entrepreneurship.
• What it might look like to build social enterprise into existing businesses.
• Why it is important to Laura to be proud of the person she is while she makes a difference.
• Laura’s tips for how she generates new start-up ideas, starting with finding the problem.
• Learn the add, subtract, divide, or multiply method for generating business ideas.
• How Laura knows when she has what Jeremy calls an idea problem.
• The power, beauty, magic, and confidence that Laura believes comes with making something of your own.
Tweetables:
“The news asked me if I knew what a social entrepreneur was. I had no clue. It was the first time I heard the world. When they explained that it meant doing business for good, I just [knew] that was it. I was like, ‘This is what I want to do. This is the thing that makes me feel alive.’” — Laura D’Asaro [0:03:40]
“Trying to figure out what [it takes] to introduce this ingredient and bring it mainstream was always our mission.” — Laura D’Asaro [0:15:32]
“People matter more than anything. Success by itself doesn’t make us happy.” — Laura D’Asaro [0:19:21]
“I only want to have great success if I am proud of the person I am while I am having [success].” — Laura D’Asaro [0:25:26]
“There’s an amazing power, and beauty, and magic, and self-confidence-building in making something of your own.” — Laura D’Asaro [0:36:32]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
EPISODE 5 [TRANSCRIPT]
[00:00:00] JU: Tell us about how you ended up at the GSB, because you had a successful business, you had an interesting, surprising business. Tell us a little bit about that and then how did you end up deciding to come into GSB?
[00:00:12] LD: Sure. I can start there. Well yeah, I started my company straight out of college. I wanted to do something with entrepreneurship for a really long time. I feel like I actually need to like start a little bit further back.
[00:00:23] JU: By all means, question the question.
[00:00:25] LD: Yeah. In my family, everyone has an interest or something they really like to do. My dad is a physicist/oceanographer. He basically studies ocean currents, oceanic mixing, hurricanes, all of that stuff and he loves it. My whole childhood, every day, and my dad would go down to his office and study physics because that’s what he wants to do. I have an older brother and he’s on the autism spectrum. With that, came an intense interest in fixing things. Like he could fix – by the time he was like four, he could fix pretty much anything, dishwashers, computers and that’s what he would do.
My brother would come home from school every day and he would go into his room and fix things. Then there is me, I was the normal one in my family and I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. I knew I didn’t want to do physics. I knew I didn’t want to fix things like my brother. I think a lot of my life has been about finding things that make me feel the way that they look when they work on the things that they do. I think, I realized from an early age that that’s – I know, like you hear all these graduation speeches, and usually these graduation speeches talk about, find what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. I like that. That sounds good, but I think that – what I was also missing was that, I didn’t quite connect that, until I looked at my dad and my brother, that you really have to love what you do in order to be really good at, be really successful.
There are lots of physicists in the world, but they would go home and, if you don’t love being a physicist, you play video games or watch TV. But my dad would spend like an extra five hours a day doing it or my brother would come home for school and spend extra five hours a day fixing things. They got really, really good at what they did. I think that that was – anyways, I basically grew up being like, “What?” Or this idea that in order to be successful, I need to find something that I love.
I probably should get to the GSB, but I feel like this is good lead up here. I had this pretty crazy experience when I was 15. My parents are kind of hippies. My mom has long, gray hair, like my dad has a big, gray beard, they just love nature. I spent most of my childhood playing outdoors and specifically at a park pretty close to my house. Over the years, the park got pretty run down, especially the playground. There was basically no playground left. I had this idea. This is kind of my first foray into entrepreneurship. My best friend and I were like, “I wonder if we could fix up something at the playground, fix up the basketball hoop or something.” We set up a lemonade stand to do that right by the bike, like along a bike trail.
We went out there every day, sold lemonades, made cookies. We like give them away for free, but people like would give us donations. We raised like $14,000 and we built this playground. That was the first time in my life that I felt the same way as my brother and my dad. It was like, holy cow. I would come home every day, like dump out money onto the carpet. The local news came. I feel like they were doing a story on us. At the end of the summer, we’d raised – with the $14,000 we raised, we built a playground. It’s still there. It’s still in Seattle. When I go back home, I go visit the playground.
I remember that the news asked me if I knew what a social entrepreneur was. I had no clue. It was the first time I heard the world. When they explained that it meant doing business for good, I just like, that was it. I was like, “This is what I want to do. This is the thing that makes me feel alive.” Really, that’s where I got my inspiration to be an entrepreneur and kind of everything, part of my life has come from that inspiration when I was 15. I can keep talking, Jeremy...
[00:04:09] JU: Incredible. I love it.
[00:04:11] M: What a great story. What a great story.
[00:04:14] JU: Unreal, yeah. What happened next? Let’s – I mean, we’ll stay there. Let’s stay in the technologies. You’re 15 –
[00:04:20] LD: Yeah. I mean, if you’re a kid, I feel like the younger element is helpful, so I tried to find other stuff that like made me feel that way, that like brought communities together and made changes. I guess the next thing I did in high school was, I got into breaking world records. The idea was like, so my high school has this program, I think a lot of high schools have. We raise money for cancer research. It’s called the relay for life. You walk around the track for 24 hours and raise money for cancer research. Coming out of a lemonade stand, I was really anxious to try something out.
I didn’t want to just like ask people for money. That’s what everyone was doing. It wasn’t really working, so I was looking through a world record book. There was this record for the fastest time to crawl one mile, which I think you heard. Well, I told Perry at least part of this. Jeremy, you may have like heard part of the story.
[00:05:11] JU: I’ve never heard it, but it’s like the best hook for any store I’ve ever heard.
[00:05:15] M: I love that.
[00:05:18] LD: Going back to my brother, being on the autism spectrum, he was like really uncoordinated as kid. We used to do crawling exercise, like literally crawl around the house and my dad would tell stories in order to help his coordination. I saw this and I was like, I just was like, “I’ve got to do this.” I started training to do this and I – like when my mom was like, “Go walk the dog.” I would crawl around my neighborhood with the dog, I got lots of weird look like, “What are you doing?” I put a sign on my back that said, they had like www.gocrawl.org and people could donate to the cancer research.
Yeah, I trained for like three months and broke the record when I – at the end of high school. I think it was another one of those wild, really defining moments of, by thinking about things differently, I could get people interested in something that before – cancer research isn’t the most sexy thing, but by doing something interesting around it, it could add this extra flare and get people interested. That was kind of the second thing I did.
[00:06:19] JU: Just to be clear. At the end of high school, you're accompanying your mom on walks with the dog around the neighborhood and you’re crawling with a sign on your back?
[00:06:27] LD: It was mostly not my mom. It was mostly just myself. I go with my dog. But yes, sometimes with my mom, or a friend or – my family was great. The must have – it’s weird being adult and thinking back on hoe my family must have viewed me, because they somehow created an environment where I could be so completely myself and I had the confidence to do that. Like I don’t think a lot of 16, 17-year-olds would have. They were just like, “Okay. You want to crawl the mile” and they were there for me. That was a really huge parenting move, I think looking back.
[00:06:59] M: Yeah, like giving permission to your children is like a big gift.
[00:07:06] LD: Yeah, and supporting them in like what they do. Yeah, I mean, I can – I don’t know. Do you want to see like a photo? I’ll show you a 17-year-old me doing this. There I am.
[00:07:15] M: Oh my God! That is so funny. I love that.
[00:07:19] JU: That is incredible. You’ve got like bubble wrap on your knees and hands.
[00:07:24] LD: Yeah, that’s what I like, because you get blisters right away.
[00:07:27] M: I love your homemade outfit.
[00:07:30] LD: Yeah. The slightly longer version of the story, I think it’s worth talking about because when you talk about failure a lot is that, this record – so I broke the record, but it actually didn’t count. I wrote my Harvard essay about this. I like – this was like a big – people like knew me as the world record breaker. But when I submitted it to Guinness, I was not an athlete. I was a nerd. I crawled four times around the inside of a track, which is actually only 99% of a mile. So, I would have had to crawl like another ten feet and Guinness actually rejected the record. I was devastated. For like 10 years, I had a New Year’s resolution to rebreak the record, because people would introduce me as this world record holder and I was like, “Do I correct them?” It was just really awkward and I felt really ashamed about it.
Actually, speaking of business school, Jeremy, the summer before I came to GSB, I trained – I like finally did it. I like retrained to break the world record during the pandemic.
[00:08:29] M: Oh my gosh!
[00:08:31] LD: I finished it. This is as of summer, before the GSB, so like six months ago.
[00:08:35] M: I love that.
[00:08:36] LD: Yeah.
[00:08:38] JU: What was the biggest –
[00:08:39] M: 21 minutes, It’s pretty fast.
[00:08:41] LD: Yeah, just 21 minutes, 36 seconds. I don’t know. It’s hard to get in the frame, but yeah.
[00:08:47] JU: Did you notice any differences training as an adult versus as a teenager?
[00:08:51] LD: It was harder. I’m like 30 now, so [inaudible 00:08:55], but I actually did break my previous time and I appreciated the adult mindset of – I think it’s just much better at like sticking to my plan, that like my equipment was better, it was just all round, the second time around, more thought out. I appreciate that I had felt like I learned some things operationally since 17.
[00:09:15] JU: Incredible. You break the world record, maybe it’s looming in your mind that whether the Guinness is going to reject it or not. But keep walking us through your life story. What happens after you become the world record breaker?
[00:09:29] LD: Yeah. I was really focused in the social entrepreneurship part. Like I don’t know, as a kid, I used to – maybe this is [inaudible 00:09:36] same thing again, but like, I used to read all these magazines that were like girl’s magazine that – it wasn’t so much the magazines that – it wasn’t so much like Seventeen Magazines or ones that were about fashion. This was about arts and crafts, and projects, and there was always a section in these magazines that was about girls who made a difference. They would talk about kids raising money for a pet shelter, or starting businesses that did something good. That along with the playground made me really convinced I want to be a social entrepreneur.
When I got to Harvard, I decided to be an African Studies major. You know, you want to help the world, you know that Africa could do some help, just going in completely not having any idea what that meant, but wanted to do something good. Yeah. I learned Swahili. I spent a lot of time in East Africa, but I still like – I think through all of this, I still – I got pretty jaded with nonprofits, I guess was my mostly under God experience was, I had all of these ideas about ways that we could help and I saw a lot of the organizations that I really admired fail pretty spectacularly.
If you’d asked me what I want to do when I was 20, I would have talked about this organization called Playpumps, which, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this one, Jeremy. But it’s like [inaudible 00:10:52] what not to do.
[00:10:53] JU: Exactly. It’s like human uncentered design. That’s great.
[00:10:57] LD: it’s like horrible, yeah. But like that – so I lived – when I was at Harvard, that was the golden age of designing for the developing world. It was all of the – soccer had, there was Socket that came out of Harvard, which was the soccer ball that would also charge your phones. Toms was there. But basically, this idea – I like graduated with this idea of basically dumping freestyle in Africa that’s supposed to solve their problems isn’t a good idea and I kind of wanted out of that. But I still want to do social enterprise, I still like wanted to do something. After I graduated, I was like kind of lost. I was like, I don’t know what to do. I took out this internship after college.
I was living in Portland, Oregon, and I came across this article about eating insects. I think a friend sent it to me, like how you want to start a business is a joke. I don’t really remember, but I was just mind blown, like basically the idea of being in this article that talked about how sustainable insects were, how good they were for the planet, how many people all around the world ate them. I had eaten insects as an African Studies major. In Uganda, they are really common snack. They have termites in parts of Kenya. I just connected the dots and I was like, “This is crazy.” I’ve eaten them and a lot of them are delicious. It was a snack that I legitimately liked eating when I was abroad. I was like, “This is something that could make a difference in the world if we can just show people how tasty it is.”
That was that same feeling I guess of something that I had no doubt about. I quit my internship, I like convinced my college roommate to turn down her Microsoft job offer and join me. Then we just started testing stuff. We literally went to the pet store and got every kind of insect we could get that you’d normally feed to snakes or lizards. We fried them up in our kitchen and tried to feed them people. I don’t know, maybe this where the scientific mindset comes in. I definitely grew up in like a sciencey family. But when people inevitably were like, “I am not eating that.” My first reaction to that was, “Oh! Interesting. Why? What is it about this?” Then we’d get people to explain that they don’t like that it’s ooey-gooey or they didn’t like the legs or whatever it was that freaked them out.
[00:13:11] JU: Hypothetically.
[00:13:13] LD: Yeah, you know. But like, we were literally making it and we were trying to feed people worms. I was just like so convinced this was a good idea. Like again, it’s like a little hard to get into my mindset of [inaudible 00:13:25]. It sounds totally insane. We realized pretty early on that Americans don’t eat whole animals. We don’t eat whole cows, or whole pigs, or whole fish, even whole shrimp.
[00:13:36] M: Whole shrimp. This is a big deal for me.
[00:13:38] LD: What?
[00:13:39] M: Whole shrimp. I was, you know, it’s like you eat it in Spain, but you can’t eat it here.
[00:13:44] LD: Yeah. We’re like weird about it, right? Exactly. That was our first breakthrough was, “Okay. If we make this not look like insects, people are more likely to eat it.” We went from whole insects to making insect tacos. My first idea was, I wanted to have an insect food truck.
[00:14:00] M: Oh my gosh!
[00:14:01] LD: But with the ground up, you couldn’t tell. It was quite delicious. When we did blind taste tests, people liked it. But again, people were not – like it was just, it freaked people out to have it be wet in any kind of way. Then we eventually ended up with cricket powder. It just looks like a – what Americans do, we all sorts of powders in everything we eat. We put like whey protein shakes full of flax seed powder and who knows what all. That’s kind of where we ended up, as we ended up in cricket powder.
Then we basically did a Kickstarter for cricket chips back in 2014, raised $70,000. Again, it kind of, I don’t know. I tend to have like a knack for what media is going to like or what people find interesting. That was – we were one of the first – probably the second insect startup in the United States, so we had a lot of publicity around just this idea that one could eat insects. Let me show you real quick.
[00:14:56] M: I’m going to buy some.
[00:14:57] JU: Amazing, huh? Laura, do you know Exo?
[00:15:01] LD: Yeah.
[00:15:01] JU: I used to get an Exo bars.
[00:15:03] LD: Gabby and Greg, yeah. Sorry. I have been eating the bars, I know the founders. Yes. They sold to a cricket farm in the U.S. and they are now making breakfast cereal. But the cricket bars are still popping. But yeah, we made cricket chips, and cricket protein powder, and cricket cookie mix, and just different ways of introducing the ingredient, as well as – especially towards the end of my time at Chirps, we were doing more with wholesale. So, getting dinning halls incorporated into muffins. Getting bakeries to use the ingredient. Trying to figure out what does it take to introduce this ingredient and bring it mainstream was always our mission. Then, with the potential of even moving beyond just powder.
[00:15:41] M: Is it something you protect? I’m just wondering, like I’m sure they do it, but can you protect the – I don’t even know, even the process of turning insects into powder or something?
[00:15:51] LD: Yes and no. Food is a weird thing, and that most of food is a trade secret. So most of like Doritos, can you protect them? No, but you have a specific process. For example, one thing that we did was we had a defatted cricket powder, which just was higher protein that had a lighter taste and we had a process around that. People didn’t know how we did it. They might be able to figure it out, but they’re at least behind it and we had an advantage there because people liked our cricket powder. Yeah.
[00:16:20] JU: Laura, one of the reasons that – Mar and I had been doing this for several weeks now. The moment that I thought Laura would be an interesting person to bring. I don’t know if you know when this is.
[00:16:30] LD: No. No idea.
[00:16:31] JU: I haven’t told Mar the story either, but in the context of LaunchPad Office Hours, we host office hours for anybody who’s curious about building a business. We’ll chat with them in a public or now private but public forum via Zoom. One young man was frantically scrambling to build kind of a high-tech business. He was asking – he had four or five ideas that he was trying to evaluate. All of them were reasonable – they demonstrated kind of reasonable traction and he didn’t know which one to choose. He asked the question, “How do you know which of your ideas you should go with?”
It prompted a spirited discussion but Laura’s perspective I thought – Laura, I found your perspective particularly, because Laura basically said, “Well, what kind of life do you want? Do you want to be doing this all the time for the next ten years? Do you have a minimum threshold for your income that you’re trying to meet?” You could tell like – there was actually steam that came out of his ears, because I think a circuit broke. He just like, he had so clearly been fixated on right or wrong. I’m not making a value judgment. But in his mind, the idea of lifestyle criteria or lifestyle considerations wasn’t even in his – he didn’t know where to put it in his spreadsheet.
At that moment, Laura, I thought “Wow! What an interesting” – because we probably over indexed on folks who are raising venture capital, because that ends up being more of the kind of person we interact with. Not always. In fact, our last interview is another bootstrap founder as well. Talk to me about how you came to or why you feel the convictions you feel regarding your flavor of – no pun intended – of entrepreneurship.
[00:18:16] LD: I mean, I think it brings us back to, you asked why I came to the GSB. I mean, I spent seven years of my life just so immersed in this, with all of the ideas of, it had to be the biggest thing. I wanted to replace protein with insect protein. I mean, it was all consuming. I don’t think I was always the best person, best friend, best daughter. This was completely my life. I honesty – what?
[00:18:44] M: Beefed you up to be a founder.
[00:18:48] LD: I like to find my success. I remember like we had to do this assignment in college. I think that was like – what is – talking about like the meaning of life. My answer to this paper, what the meaning of life was: your value on earth is the world when you die minus the world when you were born. As in, if you didn’t do anything, then what were you doing on planet earth? I think, seven years later, I would write that essay very differently. I really think that those things matter, those things meaning people. I think people matter more than anything. I think that success by itself doesn’t make us happy, I think that there have been moments that I have won all sorts of things, but have felt lonely in it. I think that creating things with people and putting people first is something that I really want the next stage of my life.
Going back to your question, when I think about businesses right now, I mean, basically think a few things. I just like needed a break from Chirps. Some things were working. Some things weren’t and I want to take a step back and think about what I want in life, as well as for the business. I still love building things, like I cannot stop. I have the same problem, where I go to Office Hours to Jeremy and I’m like, “I’m working on three different things. They’re actually all showing traction.”
[00:20:00] JU: It’s great. That’s to me, that’s part of the allure. It’s part of the magic of your perspective is, you’re no less entrepreneurial. You’re no less an idea machine. But you have – there are different variables that you’re considering, which I think is a really important part of the conversation.
[00:20:16] LD: Yeah, exactly.
[00:20:17] M: Also, I wonder how you define social entrepreneurship, right?
[00:20:21] LD: Oh, yeah.
[00:20:22] M: I feel like it’s very – I don’t know. People have this definition of it, but I mean, I’m not talking about myself. You probably don’t think as a venture person as a social entrepreneur, but all my investors are nonprofits. Everything we do is actually to go and impact those people. We have pictures of the project that we’re funding eventually. I think that really motivates everybody at our firm. Am I a social entrepreneur? Not in the strict definition, but it depends also how you approach what you do and [inaudible 00:20:58]. Anyways, it’s just my – again, we’re going to be very controversial if it was a public conversation.
[00:21:05] LD: I think the definition of social entrepreneurship has changed a lot since I was 15 when I heard that word, social entrepreneur. I went and Googled it and, you know, what does that mean and started following obsessively every company that I considered a social enterprise at the time. When I was 15, I thought a social enterprise was a company that donated a portion of their profit to a good cause. I followed places like Newman’s Own that was doing that and then there was like the Tom’s model, the one-for-one model that really took off.
Then I remember my first idea for a startup was, I had this – I figured out how to make this ice cream, this fizzy ice cream. It’s carbonated. Anyway, it’s just a different kind of ice cream. My idea was, I was going to call it 100 percent ice cream and we were going to give away all the profits. It was a really nice idea, but I very quickly realized that this is not going to be successful because you need to reinvest the profits. There was like a direct relationship with being able to do that and being able to have a big company that had impact.
What was really different about Chirps that changed my definition was, when we did Chirps, what was cool was that we felt like very dollar that people bought was actually, exactly towards our cause because, if people are buying million dollars in cricket protein, that meant that a million dollars was going towards this alternative protein source. I think that, what’s interesting is the definition of social enterprise has opened up so much, exactly what you’re saying to like – Impossible burger. A lot of the companies nowadays are just trying to do that same thing of like, how do we just make all of our money be aligned in what we’re doing.
[00:22:36] M: We have many companies in the portfolio that are social impact, but not in the definition of 2010, whenever your work is seen. I don’t know. We have, like you said, we have companies that are growing milk protein and the founder is driven by, I want to say, reduced carbon emissions. That’s really important to her. Anyway, that’s interesting. I sort of feel also that folks right now, that’s really important in our companies. No matter what they are doing, more and more people care about having some form of social impact. [Inaudible 00:23:09], they’re better companies because they can attract better people more easily. Anyways, it’s a good thing.
[00:23:16] LD: I hope, we’re kind of all – like if that becomes an important thing, I have also been really attracted by the fact that if you can get Walmart to even put a 10 percent, just like make small changes, that also makes a huge different. What does it look like to build social enterprise into most businesses?
[00:23:33] M: Yeah. I think the definition needs to be updated. Maybe you need to do that, Laura.
[00:23:38] LD: Me?
[00:23:40] M: Yes, you need to write something about it.
[00:23:41] LD: All right. I’m on it. I’m on it.
[00:23:44] JU: I wanted to come back to this. You said that you would update your essay seven years later. Your essay seven years ago was, world after you and minus world before you equals the difference you made. How do you think about that now? What would be different in your essay?
[00:23:59] LD: I feel like I actually need to rewrite this. It’s like, the second part is harder. Well, I don’t know. I guess I’ve been reading a lot about people at the end of their life and like what they regret most. It’s usually the way they treated people. Every single day, we have these micro actions. We interact with people, we put our time towards things. It might be true that, when you look back, it’s maybe the things that you accomplished, but I feel like those seconds are what counts. It’s not that one thing that maybe you accomplished. I don’t know, some of these amazing accomplishments were done at some point and they were like a terrible person the rest of the time.
I think that it all counts and – I don’t know. Unless you’re looking for role models, because I feel like it’s really hard. It’s not that simple. When I find people who I think have been really successful, very often, they aren’t great parents. Haven’t like been a role model in society. I struggle to find people who I feel like have checked all of those boxes. But I guess, at the end of the day, you see like – those are like old people who have like all those smile lines because they have been – they just lived a good life. They don’t have regrets. They like – I mean, everyone maybe have some. But like, they’ve lived their life well.
I don’t have an exact answer, but I guess my main takeaway is like, it’s more complicated and I don’t think that just doing something big in the world makes up for the person that maybe you weren’t doing it. I only want to have great success if I am proud of the person I am while I am having that.
[00:25:32] JU: Right.
[00:25:33] LD: I think it’s about doing with other people too. Crossing the stage alone to pick up an award, to look over at an audience where none of your friends and family are there because you haven’t invested in those relationships, sound like just about the worst life I could imagine.
[00:25:52] M: I think these micro decisions are so important. Every day you’re deciding.
[00:25:56] LD: Yeah.
[00:25:57] JU: Yeah.
[00:25:58] M: [Inaudible 00:25:58]
[00:26:00] JU: I wanted to get to the every day for a second. One of the things I remember, maybe in the beginning of Key Leadership, Laura that stood out to me as, you said – we were talking about the tactic, Mar. One of the tactics that we espouse in the ideation world is this thing we call a wonder wander, which is basically taking a problem in mind and forcing yourself away from your computer, away from your workspace and just wandering, but wondering about it while you wander. Specifically allowing different environmental cues to try them on for new combinations. What does an Amazon truck – what does a basketball court have to do with this? What does a playground – just trying on different combinations.
Anyway, Laura, early on in the class, you made a comment something to the effect of, this has become one of my favorite tools. My question is, I think many people probably don’t even have an appreciation for what their tools are. For someone to say, comment like it’s become one of my favorite tools, I wanted to ask you, what are your go-to tools? What do you think about when it comes to breaking through, thinking about problems, what are the go-to ways that you find yourself leaning on to get fresh inspiration and fresh thinking?
[00:27:12] LD: Yes. I was thinking a lot about this, especially last year. I did this thing where I did 365 days of ideas, so I tried to come up with a different idea every day last year and figure out, like how do you – like creativity sounds like something that is like you have, or you don’t and people are often like, “Laura, you’re really creative,” but what does that mean? What are the tools? Kind of like Jeremy is saying here. There are few things. One is I’m like hyper aware of problems. Like every time I’m annoyed, every time you feel that little like, “Oh! This is annoying.” I’m like, “Oh!” So, that I like note down the problems I have. Like there’s lots of silly ones, like I don’t know.
One that I’m like excited about was, I remember this Halloween, I was noticing that, in California, all the pumpkins rot like right away. You get a pumpkin, you carve it, and two days later, it’s a – it was like so sad. I like carved this pumpkin. I was like, “Wow! If I’m having this problem, other people are probably having this problem.” This year, I plan to get a hundred pumpkins and figure out how to make a pumpkin preserver. Is it salt? Is it some kind of plastic spray? What is it? Like we have to solve this problem. It’s little stupid things, but I think that we all have problems in our lives. I think that’s probably the biggest driver, is find problems and then figure out how to solve them.
[00:28:27] JU: Yeah. This is brilliant. This is incredibly interesting to me. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there’s a legendary product design professor who basically – he’s the grandfather of the d.school. His name is Bob McKim. One of the assignments that he would give students is they had to keep a bug list, just a list of things that bug them.
[00:28:48] LD: Cool. Yeah.
[00:28:50] JU: In their life. That was the source for a lot of the design, for the early design work. Was, basically, it came from students’ list of things that bugged them. You’re doing that just intuitively. That’s one. You’re hyperaware of problems. What else?
[00:29:02] LD: That’s fun. I mean, I’ve tried using other tools and I’ve probably used these less to be honest. I think, I can’t remember. I’ve taken so many classes. I can’t remember if we covered this in our class specifically. But like, sometimes when I want to make something better in particular, I will go through a little bit more of the, okay. You have a restaurant, you can do the whole add, subtract, multiply, divide thing. You don’t know about this? Really? Oh my gosh!
Basically, anything you want to improve, you can add, subtract, multiply, or divide. Let’s say you’ve got a restaurant, like how do you make a better restaurant? Restaurants are kind of old school. Let’s make a better one. Subtracting means that you list out every part of a restaurant. This is like the first step no matter what. You got a restaurant, you list out every part. You say, restaurant have tables, they’ve got chairs, they’ve got forks, they’ve got doors, they’ve got air. They’ve got gravity. Literally, anything you can possibly think of.
Then you say, “Okay. What can you take away? What would a restaurant without walls be?” That would be cool. That’d be an outdoor restaurant. What would a restaurant without waiters be? That could be like –
[00:30:07] M: An airport.
[00:30:08] LD: Yeah, there we go. You can go through and sometimes you can take out a bunch of them and it makes something really simple or really interesting. What’s cool about it is that, it’s very hard to see things for what they are, because everything is made up of so many parts. By breaking it down and figuring out what you can remove, that’s a really interesting tool.
You can also – adding is kind of boring. But it’s like adding – with complicated things, you generally subtract, like restaurants or something really simple. You’re like, “Oh, interesting.” Like a pencil, what could I add to this? Or, when I think of add and I often think of combine as well. What would a pencil plus a ruler be? Often, I’ll just walk around and be like, just play this game. Like, huh? Like I just said pencil and ruler because they’re both at my desk. But like, that would be cool. For very cheap, probably add lines on a pencil and then, whenever you need to measure things, your pencils would have lines, like how cool would that be. That’s kind of the add.
Then multiply just means making more of something. I guess an example they generally use for this is like razor blades, like shavers. You have one and then the company has realized that they could make Schick 5 or whatever it’s called, where they have like five blades, multiplying something. Then dividing means making something – bringing something into two pieces. Instead of having – oh, what is a good example? Like instead of having like an all-inclusive speaker system, you can have the speakers be removed or like – I don’t know.
[00:31:30] M: Take-out restaurant or something.
[00:31:32] LD: Yeah, exactly. Just like, sometimes something can be made into multiple products that actually makes it better. It’s kind of like taking it out and making it separate. But yeah, that basically –
[00:31:42] M: We should play this game at LaunchPad, Jeremy.
[00:31:44] JU: That’s great. No, that’s like a great – it’s like a new idea generator. Wait, when you say you do it, like walk us through, get really boring with me. The daily practice. You said, “Sometimes, I’ll just do it.” What prompts that? Is it just like you’re bored, or you know you need mental exercise? What gets Laura in the, “You know what? It’s time to add, subtract, multiply, divide."
[00:32:08] LD: I mean, at first, I think I did it really intentionally. I like ideas and I want to like come up with new ideas. It was like, “Okay. How can I do that?” Often, it would be like with a – I thought we’ll just like play a game. I would be like, “Okay. How do I make this pencil better?” I would like go for a walk and think about that, think about what I could combine it with, what I could subtract, what I could add. I would just like – sometimes,I’d even let go for a walk with the pencil or whatever it was I was working on and like wander around and be like, “What would a pencil plus a tree be? What would be a pencil plus a rock be?” Most of them make no sense and don’t work, but pretty consistently if you do that, you’ll come up with something.
That was that, but then, I don’t know. Now that I’ve done it enough, I’m really interested in the idea that what you think about is who you are. We are what we think about, so now, I just kind of do it. Now I’m like, whenever I kind of feel frustrated about something, I write down a problem. Or if I’m bored during class, I’ll start combining objects on my desk. That kind of thing. You can do it either intentionally or just kind of like as a mind wondering thing.
[00:33:13] JU: Where did you learn this or when did you notice that you were employing this as a tactic, either a distraction or – at what point did you come across this in your life?
[00:33:24] LD: I think it first started – the problems thing first started when I was frustrated that I wanted to have a social enterprise and didn’t have one. My journals from high school, college are like, “I’m now 18 years old and still haven’t made an enterprise yet. I’m a failure in life.”
[00:33:42] M: Oh my God!
[00:33:44] LD: They’re really cute.
[00:34:14] JU: This is fascinating. I mean to me the question of habits of mind is something that I’m endlessly fascinated with. Especially how one – maybe the last question I’ll ask you in terms of our formal interview. How do you know when you have an idea problem?
[00:34:30] LD: What’s an idea problem? What do you mean?
[00:34:33] JU: When you need ideas. There are times like – sometimes the problem is ‘I need to execute’. ‘I need to implement’. ‘I need to fix or do’. But then there are other times where you go, “I need ideas.” How do you know when you have an idea problem?
[00:34:50] LD: Well, okay. I started out saying that, I come up with ideas whenever I have a problem mostly, whenever I’m like, “Oh! This isn’t working.” But I feel like that is pretty much the indicator even when I started something. At Chirps, when something wasn’t working, that was usually when we would stop and say, “Okay. We need ideas about how to fix this.” Like with the – I don’t know. I’m trying to think of an example. It’s been a day. Probably even right now with like what’s going on with our company. It’s like, we have got this problem which is that there’s all these Amazon sellers coming in and making knockoffs, right? It’s a moment to say, “Let’s stop, let’s idea generate, and then trying some of those out and see what happens.”
Yeah, I think that’s – I don’t know. There’s a more complicated answer, but it’s just like for me, it’s mostly when I come up with a blocker or a problem.
[00:35:42] JU: Right. I’ll just tell you this. I can send you a link to it, but I was watching an interview, an old interview of Paul Simon where he was talking about how he wrote Bridge Over Troubled Water.
[00:35:49] LD: Interesting.
[00:35:51] JU: He’s kind of telling the interviewer, “Then I got here and I kind of got stuck.” The interviewer said, “How do you know you’re stuck?” He said, “Well, everywhere I went, it led me where I didn’t want to be.”
[00:36:03] LD: Oh, that’s so good.
[00:36:04] JU: It’s like something like that. Everywhere I’m going, it wasn’t where I want to be. Then there’s that awareness: I need new ideas. I really admire your mindset, and your attitude and your approach to life and problem solving. I really appreciate you taking the time just to educate me. Thanks.
[00:36:25] LD: Yeah, definitely. No, it’s cool. I think maybe one other thing is, one of my missions while I’m here at the GSB is, I think that there’s an amazing power, and beauty, and magic, and self-confidence building in making something of your own. I’ve been really trying to encourage GSB classmates and really – if they want to listen to me to like figure out what they want to make and put something out there in the world with also the idea that it doesn’t have to be the next Microsoft.
It really can be something that you do for a few hours in the side and I think a lot of the benefits come from that. I don’t know. I don’t know who’s going to watch this, but it’s like, I guess, I wanted to just kind of leave it with that of – I still want to make my mark in the world. If you think about that equation, but I think that sometimes it’s not – what matters is it’s something that you’re excited about and not necessarily the outside metric of what the world thinks.
[00:37:17] JU: Right. That’s great. If people want to find what you’re up to these days, where could they look you up?
[00:37:23] LD: Oh man! I need to actually build – what do people do? I need to like build my own website or something. I guess you could follow me on LinkedIn. I feel like it’s a really boring answer. Yeah, I don’t know. I just don’t know I could answer that. I probably should. I would love to like – the thing is I love talking to people about ideas, so maybe I need a place for that to happen.
[00:37:41] JU: We’re working on that. I’ll let you know soon.
[00:37:44] LD: It sounds good.
[00:37:45] JU: I’m teasing. Thank you for your time today, Laura. You’re the best.
[00:37:48] LD: Oh! Thanks so much, Jeremy. I really appreciate it.
[00:37:50] JU: I can’t wait to share these ideas with my girls and hopefully with others who are interested as well.
[00:37:55] LD: Thinkertoys is a really – if you’re addressing the like add, subtract, divide, like a much better like explanation that I gave, there’s like – it’s called Thinkertoys and there’s like a card deck that you can pull cards in order to ideate on anything.
[00:38:08] JU: I’ll look it up. That’s awesome.
[00:38:10] LD: Sounds good.