Staying Engaged at Every Level

How does your passion for what you do shine through in your actions every day?

You know, I love people, so I think my passion is people. So when I'm in stores—I still am in stores probably 20 hours a week. Right after this interview, I’m probably going to go to one of my LA stores. So, I love making drinks, serving it, you know?

Do you still make the drinks?

Oh, yeah, oh yeah! I mean, I do look up to, and some people have said this in the news, so, I mean, I do look up to Howard Schultz from Starbucks. And he was known to go around all the different Starbucks, and make drinks along his team. Especially in this day and age, I think you can't really have leaders be out of touch with what's happening on the front lines, you really can't, and there’s a lot of things going on with inequality and everything, and so I try to stay pretty in touch with my team.

I think that’s where my immigrant roots come back to your other question. My parents were really, really hardworking, and really, really…I don’t want to say humble, but I mean, there are a lot of immigrants that just put their head down and work really hard. And I think that never changed for me. And so, true story— my mom, actually, my parents just texted me two days ago. I might put this on the internet. And my mom’s like, “Hey, I visited your San Ramon store,” and I’m like, “What are you doing there?” And one thing my mom and dad like to do is, they travel around all the different stores I have. And then explore whatever the development or complex it is in.

They’re your silent boba tea critics.

They do are. Yeah, my mom said—she said in a different time, she said my drink had too much ice. So, I was like, very Asian mom, but she's like, “I didn't get enough value, there's too much ice in this drink.” And I'm like, “Wow, our protocol is pretty good, where we know like, you know, amongst the other cafes that put too much ice.” But even then, my mom was like… Maybe she caught us at a bad day.