Power of Following Your Passion

What I love about your story, is it says so much about the power of passion. You've worked in marketing and in management for big companies like Target and Walmart. You have an MBA from a prestigious school, and yet, you chose in 2011 to leave all of that, leave corporate life, and start making Boba, why?

Wow! Start off with a life pondering question. I think…

Absolutely. I don’t do soft ones.

You know, I think passion is really important for any entrepreneur. I think most people who start something will tell you, it's because, they’ll explain it as, there's this innate passion, or innate drive that's in them that kind of—It's almost like a voice, that tells you to do something. And so, I think I did have that myself. I will say I technically didn't even quit my full-time job until three years in, actually, 2014.

Oh, okay.

And I did Boba Guys as part-time 2011, 2014. And so, when I tell people that, I will tell you, there's passion, but there's a lot of also reservations, because it took me three years to realize, hey, I might actually want to do this full time. So, a lot of people are like, “Oh, Andrew, I don't have like that gung-ho drive, and I want to drop everything.” I'm the first to tell you, I was super scared, because it took me 3 years to kind of drop everything.

True story was, it absolutely was both my wife and one of my best friends who said, “You look like crap.” And I was like, “Wait, what do you mean?” He was like…I used to look really tired, I was not taking care of my health. And so that was really what caused me to kind of like say, hey, I’ve got to do one of these things full-time, I’ve got to drop Boba Guys, which I didn't want to do quit. And that's actually how it started, and there's a lot of things that people say, like, “Oh, you have all the…You pedigree, or you have great jobs.”

I can tell you, it's almost like love. When you know, you know. I really do. It's not like oh, I dropped my great jobs at Clorox and Walmart for Boba Guys, it was more of like, hey, they were great, but I think this is so much better, and I feel like this is my calling.