View From The Middle: Recent Episodes
Ziv Shafir
Most press on companies lacks depth on business strategy. View from the Middle was started to remedy this, interviewing intriguing companies to tease out their strategic plans.
The name is inspired by talks given at the Stanford Graduate School of Business: "View From The Top" and "View From The Bottom", where individuals who've achieved widely-recognized professional success, and lowly students (as was your host) aspiring to the same, reflect upon their careers and backgrounds.
Here we explore the middle: the journey of individuals and their companies, and the intentions that drive them.
I gave the inaugural talk for a Business of Psychedelics series at Stanford Graduate School of Business on February 17, 2022.
This will give you a solid overview of the entire industry, the main players, where the money is flowing and the biggest roadblocks in the industry. The talk was inspired from a similar talk I gave at Stanford back in January 2020, and it's cool to see how things have updated, and how much stayed the same.
One of my biggest frustrations about the material out there about psychedelics is that on the business side it's very fluffy and surface-level. There's good coverage about the science and personal side of it (there is just confirmatory data and studies coming out about what we knew). This remedies that!
Abbot Kinney has two anchor points: Erewhon, and the subject of our podcast today: The Butcher's Daughter. It feels as if it is spilling onto the street; an airy, light interior flows to a cute alcove which then ends with a white-fenced parklet.
Starting in NYC and quickly spreading across LA, this is as much a hangout as it is a restaurant, cafe and juice bar. We speak with Meghan Keane and Kari Hendrick - the big bosses of the Abbot Kinney location - about what drew us all to Butcher's Daughter, what keeps us here and where the fairy dust will land next.
You'll notice something peculiar as you amble along the Santa Monica boardwalk: a coordinated group of weary individuals, commiserating over the joys of a HIIT workout (i.e. short bursts of a punishing amount of squats, burpees and resistance training), all orchestrated by an encouraging trainer over the sounds of the latest in EDM.
We speak with Eddy Roche, the founder and Chief Dreamer of DMN8 about how he concocted this special formula that is not only bringing out an ever-larger group of individuals, but also an inclusive sense of community.
For the inaugural episode of View From The Middle, we welcome Clara Chow, Chief Product Officer, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder of Piñata, a fast-growing startup that has created the first platform to reward and empower renters.
We discuss:
- ...Clara's background as the founder and chair of Generation Enterprise, as well as her previous role as an executive at Jackson Hewitt, inspired and informed the products she is creating at Piñata...
- ...How renters would be celebrated in almost every other consumer sector for the amount of money they are handing over...
- ...Piñata's features and benefits for renters...
- ...Lack of consumer trust in the financial services industry, and how Piñata will earn back that trust...
- ...Different cohorts of renters, and they mirror the growing wealth gap in the U.S...
- ...Benefits from the service accruing to landlords of all sizes, from individuals to large management companies...
- ...Bringing a level of enticing treatment more akin to the hospitality industry to the rental experience...
- ...A surprise announcement from the company...
(Clara earned her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which we happily note since this podcast was inspired to connect Stanford MBA alumni)