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IS āSUCCESSā REALLY WHAT YOU THINK IT IS?
Why Do You Want to Be Successful?
Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.
āWINSTON CHURCHILL
Miami, FloridaāApril 8, 2011, 11:55 a.m.
The instructions were very clear on the invitation: the cruise ship would set sail at noon on Friday. If I missed it . . . well, I would miss the whole trip.
I was determined to beat my internal time clock. Iām half Indian (from India), and for those who donāt know, following āIndian standard timeā means showing up a minimum of an hour late, sometimes two. Thankfully my other half is Japanese, and āJapanese standard timeā means you show up ten minutes early, following the old Marine Corps adage that if youāre not ten minutes early, youāre ten minutes late.
As I sprinted through the streets of downtown Miami toward the docks, smoke could have been coming off the wheels of my luggage. I needed to make this ship. If I had to, I would take a running start, Mission: Impossible style, and plummet headfirst into the freezing water to catch that vessel. No stuntman; just me. In a sundress.
I had traveled all around the world. My passport held stamps from India, Japan, Africa, Australia, all over South America and Europe. But up to this point, I had never been on a cruise, and I had certainly never been on any trip that put me in the same place as one thousand of the top entrepreneurs in the world.
In other words, this was a trip of a lifetime and there was no f-ing way I was going to miss it.
Off in the distance, I could see the faint outline of this massive ship that looked about to set sail. A horn blared. I had already been sprinting for fifteen minutes, with my bags scratching my legs and the straps cutting through the skin on my shoulders.
I got closer . . . I was so out of breath . . . closer . . . thereās the ramp! Get on the ramp! Another horn. Theyāre leaving? Wait!
I made it with just enough time for me to hurdle the rope and land on the boat safely before the walkway was removed.
Why did I have to make this so hard for myself? Every time I go anywhere, my life turns into an action movie where Iām sprinting around, when it could very easily be a nice, slow-paced romantic French film. If only Iād leave one hour earlier.
I wiped the sweat off my brow, readjusted my bags, and casually strolled onto the deck.
As I stepped onto the first level of the ship after checking in, I couldnāt believe who I saw.
It was Richard Branson, my entrepreneurial hero. He was sitting at the bar, sipping a drink and regaling eager young entrepreneurs with a story. His white-blond hair blew gently in the wind. This scene was the perfect first mental snapshotāone that Iād remember for years to come. I was so excited to see him; I tripped over my heel, caught myself just in time, and kept walking. I decided I was too flustered by my harried arrival to meet him yet (and I was still sweating my ass off from running).
The boat was magnificent. There were five floors and two gorgeous outdoor levels where everyone could enjoy the waves and the sun during the day and the stars at night. There was a big DJ station and dance floor on the second level, and I knew immediately thatās where I would end up every night. People were milling about with their luggage, finding their cabins and exploring just like I was.
I spotted Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos.com), Blake Mycoskie (founder of TOMS), Gary Vaynerchuk (founder of Wine Library), and a slew of other founders of leading nonprofits like Charity: Water, Pencils of Promise, and Invisible Children. It was incredible!
I grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket to call Radha (my twin sister) to give her the play-by-play, but as I tried to dial, I realized my phone didnāt work. One of the ship workers saw me fussing with my phone, so he approached me and told me that cell phones didnāt work on the boat.
Really? So nobody would be able to make any calls? That meant that we would actually have one less distraction while we were communicating (and hopefully collaborating) with one another for four straight days. I loved that idea! What better way for fresh entrepreneurial ideas to be shared than without any technological aid, just through words, eye contact, and smiles?
I pulled out my four-day itinerary and saw that I had to be in the auditorium for the opening session at 4:00 p.m., during which Richard Branson would be speaking. Wow, Summit Series, who put together this cruise, didnāt waste any time bringing out their superstars!
I was also pumped to read that the Roots were the cruiseās house band and would be playing every single night along with big-name DJs like Pretty Lights and Axwell from Swedish House Mafia! Unreal.
I could attend morning yoga sessions, as well as large and small talks on everything from environmental and social innovation to personal empowermentāthere was just so much to do! I was so impressed with the execution of this event.
Summit at Sea was an invite-only event, so I felt grateful to be invited. I had started a successful small business at age twenty-six, and the point of the summit was to bring together up-and-coming entrepreneurs and young talent with established industry leaders.
I played back in my mind the events that led me to be on this boat. My entrepreneurial adventure began with a frustrating recurring stomachache that sparked the idea to open the first lactose-intolerant-friendly farm-to-table pizza and local craft beer restaurant in New York City. We called it SLICE (now called WILD) and it serves farm-fresh pizzas with no hormones, additives, or other crap in it, and supports local farms and businesses.
I had opened my first restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at the end of 2005 on a shoestring budget, and I called on every favor I could to make it happen. I was twenty-six years old and had never worked in the restaurant business, but I was convinced that a farm-fresh healthy pizza concept was going to change the way people thought about their favorite guilty pleasure. At the time, it was still early in the game for local and organic to be mainstream terms, and it was a struggle at first to convince people that healthy pizza actually didnāt taste like cardboard. We were one of the first alternative pizzerias in New York to offer gluten-free and vegan options, and being a pioneer in this industry certainly didnāt make the journey an easy one.
During the cruise, I was excited to learn as much as I could and meet as many people as I could, especially the great leaders who I had admired from afar for so long!
One of the greats on the cruise was Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos
.com. I figured since he was a guy who started two successful businesses and sold them by the time he was thirty-six for a collective $1.4 billion, he probably had some good stories to tell and some even better advice for a young entrepreneur like me.
Around sundown, I saw that he was sitting at the bar on the second floor of the boat and quite a few people were milling around him, trying to speak with him. Iām not usually the shyest person in a room, but it took me a few circles around the bar to muster up the courage to walk over to him.
Why was I so nervous? Why couldnāt I just go up to him and say something? He was a human being just like me. But the fact that he had achieved so much at such a young age was incredibly intimidating to me.
As I passed by him on my laps and watched him make small talk with a bunch of people, I made a call: I decided not to say anything to him at all. I could tell from his interactions with other people that he was shy. He liked to talk to people for sure, but he had a lovable awkwardness about him and you could tell that he preferred to listen more than talk. He seemed like the kind of guy who would be more open in a one-on-one setting, so instead of adding my small talk to the rest he would endure that night, I decided to stand across the bar from him, stare at him until he made eye contact with me (who cares if I looked like a complete stalker?), smile, and wave. He smiled back.
And that was it. It didnāt matter that he didnāt remember me at allāI had the smile, which meant I had the in! I knew that I would get in touch with him when I was back in New York. (He had put his e-mail address down at the end of one of his presentations on the boat, and I had it securely in my notebook.) Mission accomplished.
The rest of the trip was a dream. It was one of the first times I had met so many like-minded people, all wanting the same thing: to create new businesses that had cultural and social relevance, and with real societal impact.
I tagged sharks for science; had in-depth conversations with artists, poets, top entrepreneurs, and change makers; and I danced every night with my new friends on the boatās main deck, with the Roots jamming away.
The day after I got back from the cruise, I sent Tony an e-mail with the subject heading: āGreat meeting you on the boat at Summit!ā (though we technically hadnāt met and he probably had zero recollection of who I was).
In the body of the e-mail, I wrote a few sentences about me and briefly described my farm-to-table pizza concept, and then I mentioned my new social enterprise called THINX, a technologically advanced pair of beautiful, leak- and stain-resistant underwear for girls to wear during their periods. THINX also solves a global menstruation management problem for girls in the developing world (clearly unrelated to pizza). I told him that I would love to speak with him about the new idea and see if a partnership with Zappos.com could be formed.
He responded within minutes. (Heās good like that, even though he sometimes receives more than two thousand e-mails every day, as I later found out. Thatās what happens when you generously put your e-mail address at the end of every presentation.) He said that he would be in New York in mid-May and that heād like to come to my restaurant.
Wait. Really?! I had to read his e-mail twice to be sure I wasnāt dreaming it. I wrote him back and set up our meeting.
It had taken me a couple of years of messing up and figuring stuff out before I was able to make enough money to open up my second location in the West Village. I had always dreamed of opening a place in this beautiful part of the city, and I am incredibly proud of it, so it was quite special to arrange for Tony to meet me there.
I remember reading Tonyās book, Delivering Happiness, in which he mentions that pizza was one of his favorite businesses as it brought back great memories from his Harvard days. It was something we had in common, and it would be a great icebreaker to begin our conversation.
The day Tony was planning to come by, I brought my partners in the THINX venture: Radha (my twin sister) and Antonia (our other partner). Just like when he was on the boat, Tony started off by observing in the corner of my restaurant, quietly listening to the three of us excitedly talk about our new business. I was so glad I brought Rads and Antonia because their presence immediately made me more comfortable and confident.
What happened at this meeting was quite special. Antonia, Rads, and I always get really excited when we talk about pretty much everything, so in this instance, the excitement caught on. We told Tony our idea for THINX; we talked about our other concept Super Sprowtz, and we talked about the restaurant, and then we talked about the Downtown Project, which was the big project that Tony was working on. By the end of our conversation, Tony had come out of his quiet shell and we were having one of those really great conversationsāyou know, the ones where you end up interrupting each other and going off on tangents as you get more excited. I couldnāt believe how energetic Tony wasāit was a much different side of him than Iād witnessed on the boat, and it was wonderful to watch.
Tony said that he was interested in supporting our new project, THINX, and connected us to his merchandising and sales team.
Hooray!
But, to my amazement, that wasnāt even what he had come in to talk about.
Rather, he wanted to partner with me to open my pizza concept in Las Vegas!
His latest endeavor, the Downtown Project, is to revitalize downtown Las Vegas, and he knew ...