Why Hustle Culture Breaks Community

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos, you know we got it.

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Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech, you know we got it.

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And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I'm thrilled to have on Juanie Romero, CEO of Mothership Coffee. Hey, Wannie, thanks for being on. Hi Neil, it's so good to have you on. And I am so excited to get to know the Mothership story, but really, which is a story of Wani. Do you want to give a quick high level of what Mothership Coffee is?

Sure. So my name is Juan Romero. I'm the CEO and founder of Mothership Coffee Roasters. And I like to say that I am professional at failing forward. My unique ability is that I'm always right above the failure line.

That's the founder journey, right? Don't die, always stay alive. And the only way to do that is to fail forward. So success. Well, I'm excited to get to know you, but also how you got into this vein, which I would imagine many starts and learnings along the way. But take us back, where does a young one grow up and how did you end up into coffee and belonging?

Well, young Wani grew up in Queens, New York. I don't want to date myself, but it was during the Giuliani era. So right as Giuliani came into being mayor and I saw my neighborhood change from a more salacious neighborhood with lots of, you know, drug dealers and funny dressed women walking on the streets at night to a very respectable neighborhood by the time I left when I was 18. And it was one of the most provocative sort of like life experiences that I've ever had. I still remember being approached, you know, by drug dealers, being approached by random people and having a more like a New York experience. And maybe New York is now. So it's hard for me to go back sometimes because it's not the New York I grew up in. And that really set the tone for like what I desired in life. I, I love meeting interesting people. I love connecting with interesting people. I love hearing people's stories. I love being in spaces where people are living idiosyncratic lives. And that brought me out west actually. 911 happened and I realized a couple of things about myself. One, I definitely could have died. My, the community college I was going to, we had to annex right at the the feet of, of the neighborhood. And that was a big realization for 19 year old. And then number two, I realized I really hadn't done anything with my life up to that point apart from hanging out, partying and having a good time because New York is so much fun. And I decided after that to leave because I felt that if I stayed in New York I'd stay in my rent controlled apartment. And I don't think a lot would have happened in my life if, if I stay in my rent controlled apartment. And I was like, I'm going to risk it all. I'm going to go out west. I'm going to go as west as possible without leaving the country. I ended up in la. I hated la. Definitely not, not my cup of tea out there. Sorry guys, I don't know what you guys are doing, but there must be like acid in the water or something.

Addicting that keeps in there. I grew up in la. I can relate.

I'm sorry, I know I always piss people off when I say that I'm.

Not there now, so I, I can relate.

And then I got into rock climbing, skateboarding and I ended up in Vegas. And Vegas was like the best of both worlds, right? Truly out west, so different. Like Vegas 20 years ago was, it's, it was such a character. Everything you see in Fear and Loathing, Las Vegas Casino, all those movies, that's what Vegas was like. So I just had the best time of my life, like just hanging out, partying, going to random events, waitressing, making ends meet, getting fired, rock climbing, traveling the world. And eventually my sisters came calling and they're like, we don't know what you're doing, we don't know why you're in Vegas. We either think you're a drug addict or a lounge singer. And remember, this is Vegas 20 years ago, right? So it's a dusty little town.

And.

They'Re like, you either need to come back to New York and go back to school or you need to figure a life out. And that's when the rubber had to hit the road. And I need to figure out my life. And I stumbled into the business I'm in now.

Amazing. Well, look like people need to find that everyone's on a journey first of all. And so realizing you're on a journey and the point of the journey is to learn and to keep going in a certain direction doesn't have to be the Same. That's a super important how. I mean, how did that lead you to coffee? Because and coffee specifically is everywhere, so. And it's a, you know, commodity in a certain regard. People expect it to be everywhere, but it is not the same thing everywhere. So how did it start to kind of pull you forward, if you will?

Well, those are two great questions. So, number one, I stumbled into coffee. So when I wasn't working, rock climbing or skateboarding, I like to hang out in coffee shops. And I remember some of the cool cafes. I hung out in New York, traveling in San Francisco, and I really wanted to bring that to Vegas. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to open a coffee shop. And that was literally my business plan, nothing else. I just said, I'm going to do it. And I did it. And I learned so much along the way. I think one, one fun fact that really culminates. I don't know if I'm, if I'm saying the word right. How I sort of think about the world is when I was able to get a lease for this, we were the third iteration to go in. It had failed multiple times. And I found the handbook, the employee handbook in the manual for this prior coffee brand. And I picked it up and I remember looking, going, looking at disgusting, going, who needs rules? And I, like, threw it in the trash. And I've spent like, literally the past, like 15 years and tens of thousands of dollars recreating this manual.

Yeah, that's the unfair way as well. I mean, we love to break rules only to realize we need to write some things down and hand them off to people so that we can keep breaking other rules. Systems get built and processes. Yes, 100%. Okay, so, but what were some of the. Okay, so what's the difference between sitting in a coffee shop and enjoying it as a customer versus just working in it that people don't know and see?

Oh, God. Well, they're both, they're both like parallel to each other, right? You have the customer experience of coming in and you have different types of customers, right? You have the one customer who wants like, oh, the most amazing, you know, Ethiopian that has blueberry notes and comes out of some monkey's butt or something, right? And the, the really, like, knows everything. The foremost expert in coffee, right? So those are the customers we ignore. And then we have the customers who are trepidatious, right? Because they're, they've. They've gone to Starbucks, they've gone to Dutch Bros. They've had these experiences. Maybe Duncan and it hasn't been what was calling to them. They. It's not explicit, right? It's, it's something internal that's driving them just to be curious. And they come into our, our cafes and they're like, oh, you know, what is it going to be like? I'm a little concerned. Is it going to be like Starbucks? Is it going to be like something else? Are they going to welcome me? And it's like almost like the first day of school. Like the same experience a lot of our customers have. And we've really trained our employees to treat our customers like we're at the first day of school too. And they come in and all of a sudden it makes sense. That's it. It just makes sense. Like, this is it. This is my spot. For me, I have my favorite drink, I have my favorite baristas, I have my favorite area, I sit in. I. We hear a lot of feedback where customers or our, what we like to call our mother shippers say, oh, I feel like I can talk to anybody. Like, I. It's welcoming. And even though there's no sign on the wall that says please talk to each other, people feel very comfortable just engaging and making friends. And it's, it's truly a once in a lifetime experience that we're not getting as much anywhere else.

Oh, go ahead.

It's so important. And then in terms of your second question from the barista side, baristas are unique. I, I feel for them. I love them. They work really hard and it's overlooked as to the reason why they work so hard. It's not because they love making the best latte or the best latte art. Truly. Baristas see that they're the architects of meaning making in these spaces and they really get to feel that they are purpose driven and providing this to the community, to the mothershippers. So the two really work hand in hand very well.

I love that, I love that you said it could be on the wall, but it's not, you know, kind of like a little bit of the employee handbook. Like it's infused to a certain regard. You know, like, you didn't need that handbook as an employee back in the day, apparently, because you knew the things that you needed to do.

Obviously, I was not a good employee. I can say that on the record. I've been fired from many jobs.

That sounds like entrepreneurs would, we would never be good employees whatsoever. So, so take me through that journey. Being an employee of a coffee shop and making the leap, ripping the band aid off and saying I'm doing it myself. Like, what was that like? And how did you know? Because there's no right time. It's always too early, never polished. What, what was it that pushed you to said now doing it.

You know, I really have to thank my sisters. They put, they really outlined. Okay, either, oh, you're going to hear my baby in the background. I'm also a mom of three kids.

Great. Hey kids.

So many children. There's just a gaggle them running around. I realized that my life was happening to me and I didn't like that sensation. I didn't like it as a child. I didn't like it in school, I didn't like it in college. I didn't like it when I lived in New York. You know, I felt like the city was happening to me and I was just sort of this reaction to things that were happening to me. There was a lack of agency. And when my sisters put it in front of me, it felt like, like I was going to be shackled, you know, and put in like handcuffs and brought back to New York to become like a little robot, right. And get my degree and live my little robot life in my rent controlled apartment. And that put the literal fear inside of me. I was like, I am not going back, but I do need to figure something out, right? I come from a family where education is important. Both of my sisters are Ivy League educated, very smart women. You know, one of them is a polygon, the other one is in law. And I knew that I needed to do something where they could look favorably on the decisions I was making with my life. So coffee was sort of like, I guess you can call it my beard. It was respectable, but I could still get away with a lot of the shenanigans and the typical, you know, misfit behaviors I was into when I was younger.

Okay, so what was the very first, what was the very first spot? How did it, how did it come to be?

It's still open. It's, it's the oldest running independent cafe in Las Vegas and it's literally surviving by the hair of its chinny chin chin. So much of the city has changed. The neighborhood has changed, where it's at and the relevance and the trends in the community has changed. So mothership has done really well. But this is actually called Sunrise. We're actually, we're going to bring it back into family fold somehow. That's our goal. And it was the only location that a landlord would say yes to a 24 year old woman.

Yep. Not Easy.

That was it. That was all the investigation and foresight and planning that was done.

What. What was the risk that they. Why did they take the risk on you?

Because I think they don't know better. But it's still bad for that. It's still there. Yeah.

Okay. So what was. Everything was hard with the first one?

Everything was hard. I opened on. On, like, the second day of the Great Recession in 2008. Of course it was. I, I. It took two years for us to actually turn a profit.

What was the original. What did the business plan say you would do it in?

There was no business plan.

That's the answer I was expecting.

It took two years. And I learned a couple of things about myself. I learned one man, it felt. Actually felt really good to do something so risky, like the things I was doing when I was climbing or when I was trying to do little tricks on my skateboard. Nowhere encompasses the level of adrenaline rush that a business can provide. And I love that. Like, I'm so thankful. I. I opened during the Great Recession. I. And number two, I loved how the confidence was being built inside of me as I was taking, like, all these risks and thinking outside the box and, and putting disparate notions together and trying to come up with really cool ideas and watching it happen and sometimes failing, but also, like, succeeding. And I think number three was the first day I. I decided it was. We had been open a month and a half. It was my birthday, and I was like, you know what? I want to make $200 today in my cafe. And I went out there. I built a sign by myself. I drew on it. I went out on the street, and I did the sign, and I was waving at people, and I was making eye contact, and people were honking at me. And then people were coming into the cafe, and I was talking to them, and I had so much fun. I was like, I love people. I love connecting with people. I love. I was like, these people are my people. They just don't know it yet. And that day, we made $217, and I was so proud of myself. I was like. I was like, yes, this is like, that money was like. It was like my money, you know, Like, I felt, like, a sense of pride and ownership, and I've never felt that once in my life. And I was like, yes, sign me up. This is what I want to do for the rest life.

And you're doing it.

I'm doing it. It's still here. Many iterations still here.

Oh, man. That feeling never dies. I Love that. But what got harder after that? Once you make. Once you make the first day, you got to keep opening. You got to keep the product up. Consistency. What else? What learned over time? Like what. What became easy and what became hard?

A couple of things. I realized that to run a successful business, numbers have to make sense. And I was, you know, now we have diagnosis for adhd, right? You know, when I was growing up, especially in the, you know, immigrant community, you were just spanked. You know, it was just misbehavior. And now we have those diagnosis. But at the time, I was just a misbehaving child, and I didn't do well in school. I tested really well, but I could never sit down and pay attention. I can never complete my homework. But if something caught my fancy, then I'd really get into it. And I realized that my math skills were really inadequate. They're poor. And in order for me to run successful business, I need to understand bookkeeping in order to understand my numbers. So I sat my butt down and I bought fifth grade math books, textbooks, and I started studying from there. I studied for about four months straight. I did fifth grade math, I did sixth grade math, seventh, eighth. And I went all the way to pre calculus. And come to find out, I really enjoy. And I love pre calculus because it's a language. It's a beautiful language that makes sense, it's logical. And I was like, this is so amazing. Why didn't I like this before? And then I hired an accountant to teach me bookkeeping. So I learned how to do my own chart of accounts. I learned how to use QuickBooks online. And I was like, okay, if I can do this here, and I see what happens here, and if I make everything match up, it'll tell me a story that I'm feeling intuitively inside of me that doesn't have words. And once the story, the data, matches my intuition, it built even more confidence within me to know, oh, I can trust myself. I can trust what I'm feeling. Let me have numbers to back it up, because the numbers speak the truth regardless of what's happening. And then let me make decisions from there. Wow.

I mean, who knew that this would be a story of learning math? No, but I love. I mean, it's so true. Founders do feel. I mean, it's 100%. You feel you're going in the right direction, but the data tells you and stops you. Because founders will run through a wall in the wrong direction at times. Right? All the way through zero into the negative into negative.

Numbers and you suck.

Which you know, can obviously tank a business and. And really get you in trouble. That's super cool to. To hear that story. Do you still do your books?

I don't thankfully because I have a very inventive mind. I should have worked in Enron.

Yeah. Learn enough to be dangerous but then outsource so that you can manage. But if you don't know what you're. What you're outsourcing, it can also be dangerous. Right. Because it could be compile a ton of money into outsource stuff on projects that you have really clue.

Oh my goodness. Social media, performance, marketing technology, AI. Everyone has the next new AI tool that I should be using in my company.

Of course, of course. Okay, so take us through, you know, coffee shop one. You learned coffee, but really you learn business and you learn math. What was next on the horizon to go learn? Because this is journey is about learning about yourself and what are the next curious things that you want to go conquer. Where'd you go from there?

100 Neil I think for me it was realizing business number one became hugely successful. At one point we had lines out the door. People were showing up from across town. They love being part of the community they felt belonging to what was created. And I was so bored. I was so miserable. I felt once again like I was trapped inside of a box and I couldn't breathe. And the box was the cafe. I felt, oh my God, I didn't want to show up to work. It's the same old, same old conversation. Like I had all these stories going in my head and I didn't know what to do. I mean, it got so bad to the point where I went to someone I knew who was really successful in the real estate industry. They were a developer. And I said, I'm thinking about leaving. I'm thinking about selling the cafe and doing something else. And he asked why? And I was like, well, I hate it. You know, it's so boring. I show up and, you know, serving the same coffee, the same conversations, and I don't want to do it anymore. I want to do something new. And he was like, well, you can do whatever you want, but I'm going to give you one piece of advice. Every successful person I know doubles down on what they do best and they become the masters of their craft is like, so you can either choose to find a way to love what you do and become the master of it, or you can do something else and try your chances there. And it was words said at the most Right time. And I decided, you know what? I need to find a way to love this because the problem isn't the business. The problem is me. The problem is my constant desire for something new. Now it's like, well, how can I find ways to make this new? How can I find ways to make this business new? And I started drilling into it and I said, you know what, There are ways I can find ways to, to love what I'm doing. Just like I learned math, I was like, let me learn more about the business side of things. And I started learning, you know, I was like, let's learn how to roast. Let's bring roasting in. Let's, let's teach our employees to roast. Let's give them a way to, to build a new skill set. Let's find ways to do business and actually let me open more businesses. And that really became a way for me to quench my thirst in terms of like, feeling like I needed to do more and, and find ways to keep myself busy. Because when I'm not busy, I'm very dangerous.

Interesting. Do you want. Well, let's talk a little about the cost of that, though. I mean, the cost. There's always sacrifice, right? There's a lot that people romanticize about starting, growing, building a business, but there are a lot of things that you had to sacrifice. And now as a parent, I'm sure you're seeing, you know, pieces of that too. What do you think that people like, what are the trade offs that you've had to do that people don't see?

Well, you know, sacrifice is a funny word because I don't think it's accurate. I think a lot of founders are addicted. We're addicts, and we sacrifice, right, for, for the, for the better of our future, for family's sake. But honestly, it's just an addiction. And addictions come. All addictions are the same. They're a way to cover up having to think the hard truths, facing the hard truths, digging deeper with our, you know, our feelings and our emotions. And there is a way to do business. I only work in my business about 12 hours a week. And we're, we're an eight figure business and we're moving towards being a nine figure business. That's our goal. And it's really important for me to protect my time and be able to allocate it to my unique ability. And my unique ability is having new ideas, being allowed to meet people and make friends and spread the good word of mothership and to connect and to share love. And joy with other people and spread the message and all of that is what provides Mothership with a vision and a guide. But I'm not in the day to day and there are other people in my organization, my executive team, they're so much better at it than I am and they've taken it and really run with it, but I don't believe it's really a sacrifice. I, I, I'll go back to assertion it is, it is an addiction. 100.

Yeah, well, we, we didn't really tell the Mothership founding story. So you started Sunrise. What, what did you do, want to do differently or what happened differently to, to start and grow and build the empire that is Mothership.

Well, I need to grow or die. As simple as that. I wasn't happy I was born and I wanted to challenge myself in a way that I had never challenged myself. And I was like, you know what, let's scale. Because as we know in business, scaling apart from the initial startup stage is one of the most riskiest parts of a business growth phase. And I wanted to see what the challenges were. I wanted to take the risk. And I lost, you know, I almost lost my shirt a couple of times. You know, I wanted to name my, one of my LLCs, skip plate, you know, like a, like a plane as it like hits the ground and it may take off, it might not. Like that was business for me when it, when it came to scaling. And I had so much fun. And that's where the birth of mothership came in. I was like, you know what? I, I don't see myself growing with Sunrise. I see mothership growing and what's my value and what's my reason why? And at the time I wanted to do, I wanted to buy a warehouse and start a, an artist commune. And on the first floor was going to be the cafe and that was going to be the mothership. And all the artists would live and work there and they would work in the cafe as a part of giving back to the commune. And as I was thinking this through and I was going to do all these things, it sounded so fun, right? It was like my squirrel, right? Like squirrel, something new. I realized that whereas I love art, I do not like artists. They are not good at keeping time, keeping schedule, calling, calling anyone back in a timely manner. And I was like, I don't want to run after like a group of 10 to 20 artists. Like this is not fun, but the cafe sounds fun. So I actually that's how I started Mothership and from their mothership has grown into multiple cafes now.

Amazing. That's really funny about artists. Different than entrepreneurs a little bit, but they're often compared to a lot. But, you know, everyone's on their own path, like we've talked about. Okay with mothership, though. I mean, first of all, I know Covid is going to get brought up, but you've been through many, many periods like we've talked about in the past, whether it's recessions or 9 11. So you've been built for hard times. But take us through. Was Covet a different kind of hard time? And, like, where are you guys? What do you look back on now that was, you know, the positives or the silver lining, if you will, about it.

You know, Neil, I wonder if I should start tell the Truth or if I should be PC.

This is a, this is a truthful podcast here. Safe space.

You and your, like, 30,000 subscribers or.

Something, who want to hear from people. You know, I want to hear, hear how it really is. And that's what we're getting always from you.

I, I, I love chaos. I thrive in chaos. I, I didn't view Covid as a hard time. I had a blast. It was so much fun. I was like, yes, we're all gonna die, so let's spend all our money. I was like, yes, I'm free from the restraints of society. And I literally picked up my whole family and I moved them to the beach. And I try to spend my money as much as possible because I assumed that, you know, everything was going to end in six months. We ate ice cream twice a day. I served. We walked everywhere, you know, so. And we ate on the streets because we couldn't eat inside, and we had a blast. I, I had the best time with my kids. It was amazing.

That's amazing. And then six months came around. You're like, does this merry go around stop or no?

Well, you know, my executive team team came knocking, and they're like, all right, you need to come back to the real world. Things are happening, and you need to make decisions. And I was like, oh, man. And we packed up, we moved back to Vegas, and I started being, you know, started being an executive again and making decisions. Okay, we should open this cafe. And this is what it needs to look like. And this is the collaboration we wanted to do. And some of it was, like, really cool stuff that I got to do in Covet that I, you know, we even got on national news. I decided, well, you know, money isn't real. That's what Covet Showed us. So let's go back to the bartering era. So we started bartering for stuff. It was so much fun because what was important to me was belonging. And I wanted to stay connected to my community. I was so heartbroken. And it was true during COVID during the pandemic, because I lost my people. I lost hanging out with them, I lost connecting with them. I lost my sense of belonging. So bartering was a way for me to, I guess in a way to entice people. Like, I'll give you coffee if you give me something in return. And while you're here, let's connect, let's do a video shoot. Let's talk about your story. Why did you decide to bake bread for mothership? Why did you decide to make vegan cookies for mothership? You know, why did you make your jewelry? What does it represent to you? What's your meaning behind it? We had people who made stickers for us, we made people who made clothes for us. And it got to the point where it was so catchy that we got a national news for it. Because I was like, and I was able to tell people all over the country, like, hey, like, belonging still matters. Just because everything's been stripped away doesn't mean that we need to sit at home lonely. We can still find ways to connect safely. Right? That was very important. My PR people said, say the word safe and still feel like we matter to each other.

It's true. The belonging, the community piece, that changed a lot. And I want to kind of know, has it ever gone back or is it totally different now? Like, what do you view community and belonging pre Covid, during and after? Is it just a reset or how do you define it now?

The landscape has completely changed. More people, there's an epidemic of loneliness. Suicide rates are up disproportionately. Men are affected by loneliness. Women are doing a lot better. Luckily, more women are graduating from college than men are. More women are holding professional degrees. Women are deciding to delay marriage, and if they do get married, they're deciding not to have children. So the landscape's completely changed. And, and then you look at what Big Box has done, right? Like, everything was to go. Everything became about optimizing efficiency. Get your food in a box, get your drinks in a box. Go, go, go, go, go. No connection, no meaning. And what it meant for me was, oh, we really need to double down on this community. And belonging is even more sorely needed. I, I, we are a for profit business, but revenues isn't my, my Number one goal, it's connecting. And revenue is just a byproduct of that. As long as I do what I do well, which is to connect and turn people into mothershippers, the revenue comes along. Like I, I tell my team all the time, we could be selling water and people would still come in and we'd still be eight figure business.

I love that. Oh, I was going to ask, like, what's one behavior you like, you wouldn't compromise on, but maybe more like, how do you know it's working? You know, like, is there. How do you know when belonging. How do you know? Like, what's the. Is there a metric on mothershipper that you can tell?

Yes. Yes. A mothershipper is someone who'll come up and give someone a hug. Wow. A high five. Hey, I like you. You know what? You're awesome. Thanks for making my day. Really good. Little things that we took for granted before the pandemic that happens in, in our community all the time.

Wow. As customers, like that is just people belonging to others.

Yes.

They feel just empowered in their community, as the leader of that community, as.

Agents of change, as people who have a sense of knowingness of their tribe. Where they matter, who they matter to, those little things is. At the end of the day, we're in the business of being human. That's all we are.

Wow, that's really special. How do you see yourself now? Like, who are you now that you weren't when you started this at 24, do you think?

I don't, I don't feel like I have a so much of a chip on my shoulder anymore. I really felt like I had to prove myself for a long time because, you know, I never had the college degree. I didn't go to the best, you know, the best schools or, or being, you know, play golf, you know, and be in the right spaces. And for a long time I was like, well, if I'm not going to be in the boardroom, I'm going to be the coffee in the boardroom. And what I realized is that actually people want me in the boardroom. They feel like what I have to say matters.