Vanessa Pham Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe magazine, and each week I talk to the most interesting culinary folks around.
Joining me in the studio today is Vanessa Pham, the CEO of Omsom, the brand known for its Asian flavor packets and sauce starters. Omsom launched in 2020 and was founded by Vanessa and her sister Kim [Pham]. I'm sure a lot of you are following and continue to follow the Silicon Valley Bank collapse story. Well, Omsom was a customer of Silicon Valley Bank and saw all of their funds disappear. In typical Omsom fashion, the sisters leaned into the community, entrepreneurial thinking, and transparency they are known for and shared the situation and evolving story on Instagram. Before you listen to my interview with Vanessa, you should check out those Instagram posts to get a sense of what they were going through real time. I'm grateful to Vanessa for coming by at this very busy time and telling us more. Stay tuned for our chat.
I'll keep this week's housekeeping quick. I know many of you have been asking when Cherry Bombe's magazine subscriptions would be coming back. Well, they are back. Head to cherrybombe.com to snag your subscription. We also have some options that combine a subscription plus the Cherry Bombe membership, and there's also a special option for you CEOs and founders out there. Don't miss a single issue of our beautiful quarterly magazine. Each issue celebrates women in and around the world of food, drink, and hospitality. Enjoy lush photos and illustrations, thoughtful stories and essays, and great recipes all printed on beautiful paper. Fun fact, our printing is done in Rhode Island by a family-owned printer known for their work with world famous artists and photographers. So in other words, our magazine is very special. Don't miss a single issue. Learn more at cherrybombe.com.
Now, here's today's guest. Vanessa Pham, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Vanessa Pham:
Incredibly excited to be here. So honored.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, the honor is all mine, especially given what your life has been like for the past week that you agreed to come here and talk to us. How are you feeling?
Vanessa Pham:
I am in high spirits, but I am fully running on adrenaline the past seven days, truly.
Kerry Diamond:
I just can't even imagine. I had no idea you were involved in Silicon Valley Bank in any capacity until I saw the Instagram post about what was going on. I know a lot of you know the story at this point if you consume media on any level, you couldn't have avoided this story, but it started for you a little earlier than for the rest of us. Do you want to tell us the timeline and when you got the sense that something was wrong?
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah. I was actually at Expo West, which is the largest food industry expo like CPG Expo, consumer packaged goods. It's already madness when you're there, you're running between meetings, you're on the floor seeing all your friends, seeing all your competitors. But Thursday morning I was having breakfast with a fellow founder and I found out because one of his investors reached out to him and said, "Hey, you should pull your funds from SVB." It honestly was such a shock to me. I was very confused, and at the time, I wasn't sure if it was something that was perhaps alarmist or it had some real grounds for action, and that's when the whole journey began.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow, so that's how a bank run starts?
Vanessa Pham:
A hundred percent. I got a front row seat to it.
Kerry Diamond:
What Vanessa is talking about is a lot of the venture capitalists who had invested in companies that had their money in Silicon Valley Bank told them to take their money out because of a whole series of things that were going on. If you want to know more about it, there's a really great episode of The Daily that you can listen to, and there are about 1 million articles that you can read as well, but basically the VCs are saying, "Get your money out and get it out now." So everyone initiated wires to get their money out. Silicon Valley Bank did not have enough money to give everyone. Did you decide to leave your money in or did you immediately try to get your money out?
Vanessa Pham:
I would say that it's hard to process this rapid change in real time, right? Literally hours before I'd been having a relationship with Silicon Valley Bank for over a year, had a great relationship with them. Their reputation was really strong. So to hear that, I was like, "Okay, that's really helpful to know." I'm learning what a bank run is in real time. First thing I did was sent emails out to a couple of our bigger investors, major investors, and asked them for their input because I rely on those folks to really understand the financial landscape. And then I said, "I'll take a couple of hours, take in more inputs, and then make a call." And that's what I did. In the next couple of hours, things certainly ramped up, and that's when I made the call to start moving, and so I immediately opened two bank accounts to move the funds.
That was Thursday afternoon on the floor of Expo with my laptop. And then I took a red eye home that night, landed in New York, got locked out of my apartment for two hours in the cold, but that's a separate thing. And as soon as I got in, I had Wi-Fi, I wired the funds. And then I went to bed. Later that day around 11:45 a.m., that's when the FDIC [federal deposit insurance corporation] released their statement that they had seized SVB, and that's really when it became clear that we were at risk for not having access to our funds on a clear timeline.
Kerry Diamond:
So, you initiated the wire not knowing if you would get any of this money except for the $250,000 that's federally insured. Hopefully, a lot of you know this because there are so many entrepreneurs and business people out there listening to this, but if you are in a legit bank, your money is insured up to $250,000 by the government. However, if you are running a thriving small business like Omsom has been for the past few years, you probably have more money than that, and if you've raised capital, you've got to put that money somewhere, and for a lot of small businesses, that money was sitting in Silicon Valley Bank. They've really made a name for themselves over the years working with entrepreneurs, small business people, venture capitalists. So, you initiate this wire not knowing if you'll get this money.
Vanessa Pham:
Exactly. We didn't know, but when the FDIC released a statement after we wired, that's when it became a lot more concerning. When I wired it, I was like, "Oh, it'll probably get through today." But when that statement came out and it didn't have a resolution and it was more like, "It's been seized. We'll get back to you." It didn't give any signal. It was just extremely uncertain what would happen next. Of course, what you have to do as a responsible business owner is start planning for every scenario, including the worst case scenario, and the worst case scenario in this situation is just extremely hard to be planning around. There were some worse worst case scenarios that I couldn't even start planning around because I was like, "Well, I don't really know if there's a path forward there candidly." It's the type of experience where you have to differentiate between what you have to plan around and what you're allowing yourself to feel in your body.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm still going back to you being at Expo West sitting there and someone saying, "Take all your money out now." I'm just thinking if I was at lunch with a friend and they said, "You have to take all your money out of your bank account right now," you would be like, "What?" You wouldn't even be able to process it.
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah. We were out to breakfast. It was like my one restful meal. We reserved this one pocket of time to just be together, and instead it got hijacked and we even took a photo together to commemorate this. We were like, "This is crazy, right? This is crazy this is happening?" But we didn't know it was going to get crazier. That's why the levity of it was like, "Let's take a photo," and then it became like, "Let's not remember this."
Kerry Diamond:
But just to have the presence of mind and especially as you are not a seasoned entrepreneur. I mean, you've done a beautiful job building your company to date, but we're talking a few years, not a few decades like some of these folks.
Vanessa Pham:
A hundred percent. Yeah. First time founder. I was 24 when I started Omsom. I had two years under my belt in management consulting at Bain, but I was more of a number cruncher. I touched strategy work, but I'm learning every day. I'm on a vertical learning curve, and this was probably the steepest of them all.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, you and Kim did though have the presence of mind to start sharing this with your community. I think that's very reflective of the brand that you've built where you kind of share everything with your community, so it wasn't so weird that you would share this, but that you knew what to share and how to share in the middle of this crisis.
Vanessa Pham:
We were feeling it out in real time, and what that actually looked like was us struggling together, feeling the uncertainty, the fear, and making the hard choice of leaning into our values, returning to our values in a time of crisis because what else can you do? It's kind of the only thing to be true. I mean, we didn't know how people were going to respond. Being vulnerable when it's like, "Oh, our supply chain's rough," is very different than being vulnerable like, "We're not sure what's going to happen on Monday, come Tuesday, whatever, and beyond." We were clear that it had a real potential threat to our business if things didn't work out. What we could communicate is all that we could seek at the moment.
So yeah, with those values in mind, that's why we decided to pen our first post in this whole kind of what became eventually a series, which was an open letter about the collapse of SVB. It was a really hard piece to write. Kim is my sister. She is incredibly talented with her words and with her creative ideas. I think she's a visionary. I feel like I enable her to do what she does best as her supportive CEO. Her and I really put our heads together on this. And a lot of our core beliefs, our vision for the company, it's all imbued in there, but really it's coming from a place of vulnerability and community.
When we shared it on Saturday, we were scared. I was really nervous. We went back and forth on it for hours, and then when we posted it, immediately it started spreading so quickly. It's our most shared and liked post, commented post to date in the lifetime of Omsom, and we've had a number of really relevant cultural commentary that's also taken off, but this one really meant a lot to people. I stayed up so late that night reading every re-share because, one, it gave me fuel to move forward, but two, I just also found it heartening to see what we meant to people as a brand. Then lastly, I also thought it was just a fascinating commentary on a broader institution and how its demise, driven by many factors, but ultimately people and positions of power also making bad decisions. How that flowed down to companies like us, the mission-driven companies that you know about and hopefully you support can be impacted too, and that was what a lot of the commentary was around.
Kerry Diamond:
One of the things that interested me was that some other food and beverage brands that were affected just stayed silent through the whole thing.
Vanessa Pham:
Honestly, I think most companies did. There's probably many things you can attribute that to. Most companies don't have a brand voice, to your point, where they're used to speaking to the customer in a way or their community in a way where it's day-to-day storytelling. That's pretty rare, but I think beyond that, most leadership teams were just troubleshooting, putting out fires, dealing with their own meltdown internally, and that was full capacity for them, which I've kind of felt that at times. When we were writing this post, I was like, "I don't think I have this in me to tap into this emotional well of work that you have to do to write something like this." It was emotional labor, but we are really committed to that and we found that it's the way forward, but I can totally understand why it's not right for everybody, nor do you have the resources or time.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, I mean, it's not just brand survival. How big is your team now?
Vanessa Pham:
We are nine people and we're nationally distributed, so we're in it. We're working hard. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. You're in Whole Foods. You're in Target. I'm so proud of you two.
Vanessa Pham:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
You're all over the place now. I'm sure you were thinking, "Do I have to lay these people off next week?"
Vanessa Pham:
Absolutely you're thinking right away, "What does this mean for my business plan and my daily operations?" What it meant for us was that most of it would just have to cease until we saw the funds and the solves that we were putting in place were like, "Well, what if people could extend us payment terms?" Things like that. When it came to team, we sent an email out on Friday saying payroll will not be affected immediately. That is our number one priority because I want to take care of our people and the $250K, I would just make sure that's where that was going towards. That's how we decided to approach it, but everything else just felt like it was completely on the line.
Kerry Diamond:
That's amazing that your first communication to your team was to tell them that payroll was going to happen that week because I was listening to a lot of podcasts, probably more podcasts than was healthy last week, and there were so many talks of people just laying off their whole teams until they figured out what the cash situation was and if their accounts would be made whole or not. It was so interesting to me that the first place they went was layoffs.
Vanessa Pham:
For me, the team is the biggest asset. I feel that is the most hard-earned victory we have is the team, and I say that internally and now I'm saying it externally because I really feel that way. So, in terms of the mission and the culture we want to create, but also completely independent of that. We worked hard to find the right people. So yeah, I value them deeply.
Kerry Diamond:
At the same time, you're thinking about all of this, there's the very real fear of bigger financial collapse. No one as of Friday really knew what this meant for the national economy.
Vanessa Pham:
Yes. And that's this whole other layer of, okay, a media term, my deposits, my cash flow, what I'm going to do on Monday, solutions I'm putting in place. That's more than enough, right? And then there's this other existential kind of fear of, well, will any of that matter if everything crumbles around me for me as a human independent of my company? So you're grappling with the anxiety on multiple levels. I was doing everything I could to just show up in a way that I felt was aligned with my values. On a couple of phone calls with my boyfriend, I was certainly crumbling.
Kerry Diamond:
I commend you for not just climbing into bed and pulling the covers over your head 100%. I did appreciate the moment of levity when you had your dad weigh in on Instagram. Tell us about Papa Pham.
Vanessa Pham:
Oh my gosh, yes. My dad is a very unique just spirit in general. He is full of childlike joy. He's deeply affectionate, and he is a progressive parent. I have so many stories about him, but that is his role in the world and in my life. He is an incredible supporter of Omsom and a person that I lean on when things get hard throughout the years. It turned from a whole childhood teenage years of feeling this immense self-imposed duty to do right by him as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, him working with me to turn that narrative around and for him to be a source of comfort and safety in my journey to achieve and make an impact on culture and beyond in America. This whole journey was really, really hard, but there was a point I would say around Monday where things were really looking up because we had access to the funds by Monday night, but once the news came out on Sunday, I breathed my first sigh of relief once the funds hit Monday night. That was my real second exhale.
But during that time, the feeling of loss and fear started to turn into feeling heartened and then pride. Oh my gosh. We did that. Our team navigated that in the face of existential threat. I am so proud of us. So I decided to share with him some of the communications we sent out to our community, to the team, to investors, and he wrote back this incredible note, which he'll do that often, but he said something to the tune of, "In my 30 plus years in corporate world, I've never seen something like this. This makes me so proud." What did he say? "You're miles and miles higher." Something in his really adorable translation that implied that he was just deeply proud of us and thought that we were on a trajectory that made him deeply proud, and those are the things that give me this feeling of a really full heart.
Kerry Diamond:
One of the silver linings for me in following this was how the community rallied around you, like you said. The shares, the comments, the likes, everyone saying, "Buy Omsom now. Help them out." And I remember even thinking, "You know what? Even if they get their money back by Monday, these women have been put through hell." I was like, "Buy some damn product. They deserve it." I was happy to hear that people did that.
Vanessa Pham:
Yes, people supported us by buying, by re-sharing. I would say perhaps some of the most meaningful ones were from some of our partners who saw it who follow us, and I think an example that might be particularly relevant is the Red Boat fish sauce sisters who are also two sisters with the last name Pham, who supply all our fish sauce for our products, obviously an incredible product. What they did, I'll never forget. First they worked over the weekend to launch a marketing campaign of their own on their social and email where they said, "Hey, Red Boat community, please go support Omsom. This is what's going on. Send us your receipts and we're going to randomly select 50 winners. We'll Venmo you a reimbursement." And they did this on multiple channels. And then secondly, they emailed us personally and proactively offered us extended payment terms, which went from 30 to 120 days, and the most wonderful part is they responded part of it in Vietnamese, which brought tears to my eyes because that type of solidarity is... Yeah, it just hits different.
Kerry Diamond:
I have goosebumps. I mean, they're an amazing company, but they're not a giant company.
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah, exactly. We're all merging brands making a difference. They've just been such incredible partners. Yeah, we absolutely adore them.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about this beautiful brand that you and Kim have created. Hopefully, most of our listeners know about Omsom at this point. Your sister wrote a fantastic story for us in the entrepreneur issue. I forget the exact word she used, but talked about the company being founded in a sense of pain essentially, which I'll let you explain in a minute, but knowing how and why this company was founded and then knowing what you were just put through by these institutional systems, they're very connected.
Vanessa Pham:
Absolutely. Omsom was started by myself and my sister Kim. We started working on it in 2019. We launched in May of 2020, which was at the start of the pandemic. The entrepreneurial journey is defined by the rollercoaster ride, but I feel like ours has been the craziest rollercoaster out there. Omsom, the seed of it was basically personally Kim and I really wanting to influence narratives and culture and hopefully one day structures and institutions to educate on the multitudes of Asian America and make this country a better place to be an Asian American. It's the company that we wanted to see out in the world. We were like, "Why don't we just build that?" We ran for that. We also felt like the products in the world that were representing Asian American culture was not honoring us, and so we wanted to first and foremost make the Asian American community proud through our products, through our storytelling, and that is a core value of ours.
Omsom is actually based on a Vietnamese word "om sòm" which means "rowdy, rambunctious, riotous" and it's a negative term actually used by Vietnamese parents to scold their children most often. We kind of wanted to reclaim it and tell a story of being proud and loud because that felt true to us and we felt it might resonate with other Asian Americans who historically have felt boxed in by a stereotype of Asian Americans being docile or submissive, this model minority myth that never resonated with us. That's where this was born out of and some of the pain that you mentioned was the times where we did feel silenced or erased. Even when we were children, we grew up in a town that was 98.5% white, so not a very open and welcoming place to be us. I think that proud and loud was sometimes a response to that.
Kerry Diamond:
Where did you grow up?
Vanessa Pham:
I grew up in Pembroke, Massachusetts, so 30 minutes south of Boston. I won't be moving back. I wouldn't change my life story. I think it's created the person that I am today, who I'm proud to be, and I found my way to New York. No regrets.
Kerry Diamond:
How did your parents wind up in that area? I don't remember that historically being where many Vietnamese refugees landed.
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah. My dad's story is probably one of the biggest drivers of it. So he came from the south and Vietnam. He tried to escape Vietnam seven times, so he went to communist jail seven times, six times, I should say, and the seventh time he got out successfully. In his journey to America, he had heard that Boston was the city of education. That's all he knew, and he equated education to the path to financial freedom, stability and safety, and so he flew into Memphis, Tennessee, got $300 from Catholic Charities USA and spent half of it on a plane ticket to Boston.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow.
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Was there much of a Vietnamese community there?
Vanessa Pham:
There is a small ethnic enclave, to use a sociological term, called Dorchester, right outside of Boston. That is where there's a lot of kind of racial strife, like a history of it between Irish Catholics and Black Americans, and then Vietnamese Americans were the last group to kind of settle there. So, it is and can be still sometimes a dicey place for racial relations.
Kerry Diamond:
How about your mom? What's her story?
Vanessa Pham:
She's been less open about it over the years, but I've connected the dots. She came to America with her aunt who helped sponsor her in exchange for her helping taking care of the three kids during that journey to America. She first landed in, I believe, Vermont where an American family took her in to help get her on her feet, and then they met at a Japanese restaurant where my mom was a waitress.
Kerry Diamond:
Your parents did?
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh. How awesome.
Vanessa Pham:
My mom was a waitress and my dad said she looked incredible in a kimono. He shot his shot.
Kerry Diamond:
Isn't that amazing? All the things that had to conspire for this to happen.
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah, truly.
Kerry Diamond:
For your parents to meet in this Japanese restaurant for the world to now have you and your sister and Omsom.
Vanessa Pham:
That's such a beautiful way of thinking about it.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Well, anyway, we're happy that it did. What were you and your sister like as kids?
Vanessa Pham:
Oh my gosh. We were opposites and we still are, and many people would say that about us. The differences in our personalities can be highlighted by our response to being othered as children. I mean, those are such formative years and social relations are the biggest inputs into your sense of safety and stability, and so when we had the experience of being made to feel different and not fully accepted, where I went was I will find safety in trying to be perfect and trying to achieve the best on every dimension, and she went in the direction of I will find safety by rejecting you first. So she is a hyper individualist, which is how she's kind of this visionary, right? Because she's different in every way and she celebrates it.
Kerry Diamond:
That's a great way to describe your sister as a hyper individualist. I like that term.
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah. I've watched her journey with it and I think it's a hard earned and hard fought one. I went in that other direction. I'm just going to get straight As. I'm going to play sports every season. I'm so glad I'm past that point because it was a very exhausting way of being and defining my self-worth. It didn't give me a real sense of self because I was constantly responding to inputs of external validation, and I think I've moved past that hopefully meaningfully, but of course it's still a big part of what I'm working through.
Kerry Diamond:
Were you two close?
Vanessa Pham:
We were very close as kids. When we had the classic teenage years of we're too close in age and we were very different, like I said, where we were friends, but we still had that kind of sister weirdness and it wasn't until college that we came back to having this really deep friendship that was kind of the start of building Omsom together.
Kerry Diamond:
So no one was surprised that you built a company together.
Vanessa Pham:
People were shocked and amazed in terms of taking the risk, but in terms of us being co-founders, not as much. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Who had the original idea?
Vanessa Pham:
How it happened is we were on a hike in Bolivia. Again, in her journey of creating a unique life, she was backpacking through Central and South America for seven months working remotely, which was before the pandemic, so this was when working remotely was pretty revolutionary, and I came for two weeks of it and it was on one of the hikes that I said, "I'm at Bain. I want to do something more. I want to do something where I can make an impact. This might be crazy, but what if we started a company?" And she said, "I've been waiting for this day." Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
So did you know what that company would be or did that set off a series of conversations?
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah, the latter. So from there, we basically just answered two questions, and I still have photos of the giant Post-it notes on the wall, but the first was what mission do we feel called to impact? That is the very first starting point for us, and the next was what industry would best help us hit that mission? There was the two by two on market opportunity did not come to much later or hair on fire problem that entrepreneur can solve and create value in the market. That didn't come until we started with the mission because frankly, that was the only thing worth taking this much risk for, and the mission was to educate on the multitudes within Asian America and to create something that would honor and celebrate Asian American community and make the world a friendlier place to be Asian American, and then the industry was without a doubt food.
Those two inputs set us off on a journey of then interviewing tons of operators, founders, investors in the space, and basically the takeaway was like, "Run away. Margins are trash. This is not for the faint of heart." We still did it.
Kerry Diamond:
You ignored all that. I just knew from the beginning that the rip and tear sauces, and you've expanded a little bit beyond that, I had the sense that this was just the beginning of what could be an empire.
Vanessa Pham:
Thank you. That's the vision.
Kerry Diamond:
Were you two thinking the same?
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. We certainly want to build something that can achieve at the highest level this kind of impact, which I think the best way to achieve that is to touch consumers and be in people's lives in more ways than one. We've been working on something for a while now, so much heart and hard work going into it. It's been a long time coming, but we will have more to share in the next couple of weeks.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, I can't wait. Okay. This is great. So tell us what the line is right now.
Vanessa Pham:
Our first line of products, we call them starters, they're Asian pantry shortcuts that allow you to make your favorite Asian dishes in 15 minutes, so think really luxe, rustic, concentrated cooking sauces that you just pair with one pound of could be protein, could be vegetables, and they make just restaurant quality Asian dishes. The way that that's possible is not because Kim and I are incredible chefs. We're not. We're home cooks. But we partner with iconic Asian chefs that have built their careers in that respective cuisine and are either from that country or their parents are. Because I'm not going to purport to be an expert on Japanese food and Korean food and Filipino food. It honestly baffles me that some people do that in the world, but I certainly can't purport to be that.
Kerry Diamond:
Some of the names will be familiar to our listeners. Want to tell us a few folks you're working with?
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah, absolutely. Oh my gosh. We've had the opportunity to work with Nicole Ponseca of Jeepney that was in New York and now she's got a location in Miami. She is a trailblazer when it comes to Filipino cuisine. Some other amazing folks, Pepper Teigen, who did a Thai product with us that where we broached a really important conversation around MSG and how it needs to be destigmatized.
Kerry Diamond:
You have fully embraced MSG.
Vanessa Pham:
We have fully embraced it, and that led to Whole 30 removing it from their banned ingredients list, which that's what I mean when I say institutional change that I set out to when I quit my job, and I thought that would be many years later, but to see that happen, that was one of the things I'm most proud of. We've worked with Mokyo who ran Beso, which was in New York. The brothers-
Kerry Diamond:
I'm so happy to see they're coming back.
Vanessa Pham:
Yes, so excited about that.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah, we love her.
Vanessa Pham:
She's amazing. The brothers behind Fish Cheeks, Chaht and Ohm [Suansilphong], and Jimmy Ly of Madame Vo, Chef Deuki Hong who wrote Koreatown.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, I love Deuki.
Vanessa Pham:
He's incredible. So yeah, those are some of the folks we worked with and more to come.
Kerry Diamond:
All stars. Since we started this conversation talking about money, let's talk about it again. How did you raise money for Omsom?
Vanessa Pham:
Oh my gosh. Yeah. The journey has been one of great challenge. I mean, fundraising is really hard for so many reasons. I would say fundraising for a food company is really hard. Fundraising as a woman of color, just statistically, it shows less than 2% of venture funding goes to women, nevermind women of color. That's even much smaller, right? First what happened was Kim and I bootstrapped for a year, but we were 24 and 26 and our parents are refugees, so we did not have generational wealth or deep connections to tap into. Kim luckily though, had worked in venture, but on the B2B [business to business] software side, so we talked to her network and they were like, "Sauces?" Truly some people made us cry by actually saying, "Why are you here?" I will never forget that meeting, and we took our samples of sauces and left that high rise in Midtown or whatever, and I cried to her after. It wasn't until we got connected with some of the folks at Mars.
Kerry Diamond:
Mars, the big food company?
Vanessa Pham:
Yeah. And we ended up being in their accelerator program. We were the only pre-launch brand and we had to do a live pitch day and we somehow sold them on just an idea. They gave us our first check. It was $50k equity free, which was incredible. And then from there we met a bunch of other folks that actually were prepared to put their funds in an industry like food, which is very unique. That was kind of the start of our journey.
Kerry Diamond:
What else did you get out of that Mars program?
Vanessa Pham:
Well, we met so many incredible founders like Chitra [Agrawal] of Brooklyn Delhi. That was the first time we met her was on that pitch day and now we're great friends and she's obviously incredible. And then some mentors that are still friends and supporters of Omsom and then our earliest investors.
Kerry Diamond:
So you did not have venture capitalists calling you last week saying, "Get your money out quick."
Vanessa Pham:
We didn't. We did speak with our investors and they were pretty thoughtful about it, which was like, "Let's take a beat and take in inputs." But that's not how a bank run works, unfortunately. So I don't blame the people that moved quickly. You have to. But also I want to know who was the first person to start that domino effect.
Kerry Diamond:
What did you learn about yourself as a CEO?
Vanessa Pham:
Oh my goodness. I've learned so much. I feel like I can't even talk about the journey of building Omsom without talking about the personal journey because it's at least half of it for me because I've learned that leadership largely is the work of looking inward, seeing where you're not resourced to show up in the best way to create psychological safety and make decisions clearly and to feel the courage to tackle those things. That has literally been at least a quarter of my energy for the past three, four years. It has been a journey of self-discovery. I've learned a lot. I've learned that I am a person that defines myself as heart forward. I think I have a massive capacity to feel, to be sensitive, to connect with others and to be vulnerable, which is at times a great strength and at other times something I really have learned to work with and also have to learn not to feel shame around because oftentimes that just looks like sensitivity, which can sometimes be stigmatized.
Then I've learned that the best part of this whole journey for me is the people, the culture, the stories. That's really what I'm fueled by and a lot of what we build is in service of all of that, which you can probably feel just by following along for the journey. That is really what it feels like for me.
Kerry Diamond:
And then there's the food.
Vanessa Pham:
Oh, of course. The food is the culture piece, right?
Kerry Diamond:
Yes, yes.
Vanessa Pham:
It just represents so much more than sustenance to us. It is a reflection of culture and stories. Absolutely.
Kerry Diamond:
I mean, so many of those people that you mentioned are just really thoughtful, beautiful folks.
Vanessa Pham:
That's exactly why we wanted to work with them. We specifically looked for people that dreamed of more for the way their food and culture was being represented in the states. We wanted to work with people that had that same desire and burning fire to change the conversation and who were relentless about making sure their flavors were represented well, not that there's one way, but just thoughtfully with heart. Those are the people we wanted to work with and that's why our products are damn delicious, but it's also why our R&D [research and development] costs are not negligible because they push us in our R&D process.
We specifically chose people that don't have a ton of experience doing commercial product development because those people, broad strokes here, but oftentimes those people have been trained to understand the limitations of manufacturing and are proactively designing around that. Our chefs are restaurant chefs and they're like, "This better taste like it just made it in Fish Cheek's kitchen." And that's when we have to get very creative and say, "Where can we do something different in the process of making this a product that can sell into every Whole Foods and Target?"
Kerry Diamond:
Have the events of the past week reinforced that you're on the right path?
Vanessa Pham:
They have in a weird roundabout way. It felt like no before it felt like yes, but the sole reason that it did is because when you see that what you're building matters to people, that is the most powerful reinforcement. Of course, buying. Yes, actually that might be probably paramount because it's critical to the health of your company and its existence into the future, but seeing that you matter to people is a very, very viscerally enlivening. So yeah, I'm very grateful.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, that is a great place to leave this. Thank you so much. I know how busy you are. You've got so much you're still dealing with and I appreciate you taking the time and coming to tell us more about Omsom.
Vanessa Pham:
Oh my gosh. It's a dream come true to be here, to be in this space with you and to have an opportunity to share my story with this community. I can't wait for the other ways that I'll be a part of it.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love for you to subscribe to our podcast. If you're already a subscriber to Radio Cherry Bombe, leave us a rating and review. Let me know about a potential topic or guest you'd like featured on a future show. Also, sign up for the Cherry Bombe newsletter over at cherrybombe.com so you can stay on top of all Cherry Bombe happenings, podcast episodes, and events. Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Thank you to Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios. Our producer is Catherine Baker, and our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu. And thanks to you for listening. You are the Bombe.