Giving a Damn

You and your co-founder, Bin Chen, started out with just a pop-up store in San Francisco’s mission district. You’ve both worked in tech, and you’ve both worked in the startup culture of the bag maker, Timbuk2. What are some of the creative and innovative elements from those experiences that you now apply to your current business at Boba Guys?

All over. I mean, Timbuk2, one of the missions of Timbuk2, people don’t know this, is “giving a damn.” It’s on one of the labels on their bag. I think it was like giving a damn since 1982 or something like that—or 89. We say giving a damn as one of our core values as well, that’s when you mentioned passion, it’s actually our passion value.

We have five values. We have quality, radical candor, giving a damn, resilience, and mindfulness. And so, when I built the company that way, a lot of those values were taken from the companies that I worked at. And I think about—especially nowadays, as a bigger company, I have a whole headquarters team, I actually have to be a CEO, which I don’t consider myself that great of a CEO. But I think my Clorox days, my Walmart days were these massive companies with really big processes and infrastructures.

That, I know it’s not innovative, and it’s not super startup-y, but it’s actually super useful now. And so, people who are watching, that are like, “Hey, I’m going to, like, I’m at big companies like Google, or Cisco.” Those skills that you learn in these companies are very valuable. I had decades worth of those, that training. And it really helped me become who I am.

The part about start-up culture, I do think being constantly able to change and evolve was something that I picked up from the startup companies, where you always are on your feet, and that allowed me to be a little bit more nimble. A lot of people who are corporate trained could be a little bit-- I would say dogmatic, and like, “oh, I’ve seen it done before.” Because everyone’s super smart. But I think that actually is a disadvantage in startups, because I think you always got to be learning. And I don’t consider myself smart at all. I consider myself hardworking, and smart enough.

But you always hear about agility now, right? That’s important in today’s modern workplace, yeah.

And that’s my favorite word. I use agility…I just said it like in my touch base three times yesterday with my team. It’s about agility, because I think I said, at our size, these smaller coffee Boba shops and tea shops are chasing Boba Guys, because we’re this massive chain now. And so I said, “We’re going to get beat, because we’re not nimble enough, so what we need is agility.”