Gotham Gal

Mouthfoods.com

Mouthfoods.com.  The brilliance of this company is the curated products ( as well as other things ) but everything is fantastic.  They have searched high and low for the best products.  Many of these companies might have websites but the chance that you might find them are slim to none.  When you can go to Mouth and spend time seeing each individual product that appeals to you and just popping it into your box is a dream. 

I went over to visit the office of Mouth.com on Friday.  Friday is key because it is tasting day.  I got to taste a variety of products.  I seriously love this stuff. 

I was telling my brother about the site and he went on it while we were on the phone.  He did what we have seen most customers do, hang out.  The products are amazing.  You can not help oohing and aahing and buying.  They have aggregated the most incredible chocolate, jerky, pickles, jellies, etc on the web.  There is a lot more coming in the next year too.  Shipments on the way out.

Great for gifts, great for yourself.  I am absolutely sending out the Valentines Gifts in the next week from Mouthfoods.com

 

Homemade Chipolte Dinner

Josh and his friends are huge fans of Chipotle.  They probably eat there a few times a week.  I admit I had not had a bite of the burritos until last week when Josh brought one home.  Pretty good. 

So the week while we were out skiing I decided to attempt to make one of those burritos.  Certainly not light in calories but pretty damn good.

Chicken, corn salsa, guacamole, lime rice, black beans and a little sour cream rolled up into a big soft tortilla.

 

Corn salsa:

5 cups of frozen corn ( that’s what I had )

2 large green jalapenos chopped

½ cup cilantro chopped

2 Tbsp. lime juice ( more if you want )

1 red onion chopped

kosher salt

Mix together

 

Hot Sauce:

I only had a 28 ounce can of whole tomatoes so I used that.  ½ tsp. chili powder

3 Tbsp. chopped cilantro

½ red onion chopped

juice of a lime and a fresh lemon

kosher salt

Puree in a blender and put in a refrigerator until ready to use.  The flavors will get better.

 

Guacamole:

8 soft avocados

1 red onion chopped

½ cup chopped cilantro

2 fresh squeezed limes

I only had a 28 ounce can of tomatoes so I took out the whole tomatoes, chopped them up and put them in.  It worked.

 

Chicken Marinade:

I used 6 whole boneless skinless chicken breasts for this.

This should sit for a few hours if not overnight.

2 ounces of big dried chilis (I set them in hot water to get soft first)

1 – 7 ounce can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce

4 tsp. cumin ( I only had seeds so that it what I used)

4 Tbsp. dried oregano

2 red onions chopped

½ cup of vegetable oil ( I only had olive oil so that is what I used)

4 tsp. kosher salt

2 tsp. black pepper

Put all the ingredients in a blender and puree. I stabbed the chicken breasts and then poured the marinade over them.

Refrigerate.  Take out of the fridge and grill before serving.

Cut into small pieces and serve.

 

Rice:

I used brown rice but I would have preferred white but again that was all I had.  Once the rice is done take a few limes and squeeze in the rice and mix.  Makes a nice touch.

 

Black Beans:

2 cans of black beans drained

1 – 7 ounce can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce

lots of salt

I put this into a deep frying pan and brought to a boil and then down to low.  I realized that the chipolte peppers were insanely hot and I started to take them out obviously leaving in the sauce.  Then I let the beans just hang out on the stove for an hour or so until the flavors melded. 

 

Take a look bit of everything and put into a big soft tortilla.  Wrap it up and dig in.  I don’t see making this often in the future but Josh seriously gave it the nod.

 

 

 

 

Women are just different

Thanks to Jessica's smarts, all three of us have moved to a woman internist who specializes in women.  She is an impressive human being.  I had sent her all my medical docs over the past umpteen years and so needless to say our first appointment was an overview discussion about me.  Not only my medical history but also my career history.  After all this is why we chose her as our primary care doctor.

I talked to her about my connection to promoting women, investing in women and the Womens Entrepreneur Festival.  We began to talk about how women are different.  Is it learned or is it innate? What she said was beyond interesting.  Her belief is that women are fundamentally different from men from the get go because womens bodies are meant to have children.  That makes us very pliable and that physiology shows itself to the outside world in other forms.  We are multi-taskers, we are right brain/left brain thinkers, we tend to be more emotional, we look at things differently, etc.

I asked her if she had written on this very topic because I am fascinated with what she said.  She has been doing this research for a long time.  She had written a book called Our Health, Our Lives in 1996 which is really like the second edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves that came out in 1973.  I went home and bought it on Amazon.  I am looking forward to reading her research.

She left me with these thoughts and a big smile on her face.  When women hit their pre-teens around 13 they begin to shrink into themselves.  I actually knew that as I had read a slew of sociology books about this years ago.  Then women start to come back into themselves in their mid-30's and really hit their stride when they turn 50.  What is interesting is that I could easily fall into this category. 

There are so many conversations about women and my guess is there always will be.  Women aren't on enough boards, women aren't getting as much funding as men, women who go to the best schools in the country opt to stay home and be a mom, women always say I'm sorry, etc., etc., etc.  I could go on forever. 

I remembered that Emily McKhann from the Motherhood send me a note after the festival congratulating us on the success and linked to something my husband had written on his blog in March of 2007.  It was titled:  The Sex Question.  He wrote about this particular comment on one of his posts around that time.  It was this:

I am a first time entrepreneur, I am a mother in my 40s and I have four children. My business partner, whom I have known and worked with for 20 years is also a mother in her 40s. We are as young, and new and open to ideas as anyone, without ANYTHING holding us back. We came to be “founding mothers” of our internet company after years of a combination of high level corporate America and the motherhood place of infinite possibility where we are now. I feel like my business partner and I operate on an exciting, healthy, smart, fresh slate. There is nothing that will get in our way, except, maybe - from what it sounds like - the fact that we aren’t guys in our 20s and everyone thinks we should be.

That certainly sums up what my doctor is talking about.  Yet Fred summed up his post with this and I believe that is what make women truly different. 

But sex has nothing to do with how good an entrepreneur is, what kind of entrepreneur they'll be, and whether they'll get funded. It certainly also has to do with the life decisions women are forced to make. Stop working and raise a family versus give it all to the career and find another way to raise a family, or possibly don't raise a family at all. These are agonizing choices and I've watched the Gotham Gal go through them, a number of times. She's going through this family and lifestyle versus career thing again right now. I think it's just one of many burdens a woman must bear. It's frankly a lot easier to be a man in the business world.

It might be easier to be a man in the business world but I do believe that is getting much easier.  Remember this post was written in 2007 and alot has changed since then.  I saw the excitement, the conversations, the mentorship, the connections about women and business and women and balance being made this past week at the Womens Entrepreneur Festival. 

Yet, as my doctor pointed out, women are just different because we are physically made of a different cloth.  You know what I say to that, thank god. 

 

Lauren Gropper, Repurpose Compostables, Woman Entrepreneur

I was introduced to Lauren through a mutual friend.  She sent me her products and I wrote about the company because I think it is very smart what she has built.  Fast forward we speak again and we speak again and I am working on investing in Laurens company.  Consumer products are tough but to me, this is the future, renewable products made from plants that compose in an industrial composite in 90 days. 

Lauren grew up in Vancouver, Canada.  Two entrepreneurial parents.  Her father is an orthopedic surgeon and her mother is a comedienne who did TV, radio, etc.  She graduated from high school and stayed in Canada going to McGill in Montreal.  During her time junior year Lauren spent a semester in Jerusalem.  That is when she was bit by the travel bug. 

After graduating college she applied to a program that was like an Internet Peacecorps.  It was 1999 and the Y2K era was in place.  This group was working with a variety of Governments around the world to bring internet technology to areas that did not have access.  She knew how to built HTML products and through this program she was deployed around the world.  The program was really strict.  You were there to work and live with a family.  Although she was 22 they treated the group like they were 14.  She lived with a family, 3 kids and a rooster.  After eight months the program ended and then she went off traveling on her own for two months.

Lauren came back to Vancouver and got a job doing IT as a webmaster in a Government agency.  The pay was great but the work was boring.  She decided to save money, live at home, apply to graduate school and defer it if she got in and travel first for a year.  The story almost went according to plan.  She spent time in India, Nepal and Thailand.  The next stop was going to be in the East.  Wearing no helmet and driving a motorcycle Lauren has a head on collision with a bus while she was in Thailand.  She broke her jaw, lost all her teeth and broke ribs.  This happened six months into her trip.

The idea was when her traveling was over she was going to go to the London School of Economics.  Her parents brought her home from Thailand and prepared Lauren that she was going to go through about 2 1/2 years of surgery including bone graft from her hip.  Her parents were adamant that she stayed in North America.  I don't blame them.  Lauren wanted to move on her with life in between surgeries so she applied to Pratt thinking that if she got in there she would be in North America and perhaps if she played her cards right they would give her a full scholarship.  She got in, she got the full ride and she went. She majored in urban and environmental design.  It was a two year program. 

Lauren spent the second year working with a variety of organizations around green.  She learned the tax incentives for buildings and how to build a green building so after graduating she was hired by a consulting group to work on these unique projects.  She loved being in NYC and after a few years she wasn't sure she wanted to stay and starting to think about moving back to Cananda.  A friend sent her a tree hugging poster from the television company in Toronto who was looking for an expert in the green space to be on a show about green communities.  She applied for the job and became the host and producer of a show on HGTV.  The show was super cheesy.  They would go out to womens shelters, schools and other places and turn them into green spaces.  Although she transformed these peoples places the production quality was terrible.  While doing the show she continued to work as a consultant in the green space.  The entire time Lauren is thinking what is next, where does this go.

She has been working with Adrien Grenier volunteering at an organization that was helping apartment buildings get greener.  He got a call from Los Angeles to do a channel called Planet Green through the Discovery Channel.  Since Lauren had been in TV, he asked her to come along.  The channel launched in 2008.  It is hard to do green content so even in Los Angeles she continued to work as a consultant with architecture firms around green. 

She began to see friends start businesses and thought I want to do that.  She started to take some business classes and begun to look into recomposable products.  She started to dig into the marketplace and realized that there was an opportunity.  She met a guy who runs a manufacturing group in Taiwan where they only make plant based products.  Taiwan is a global leader in this area.  He helped her import the products and with that she created a brand and began to sell the product. 

The ball began to start rolling and Lauren put the consulting hat away.  Her second year she began to build out the team.  She realized that there might be a few others in the wholesale area selling these products but nobody was bringing these products directly to the consumer.  The key was getting the price point down to the place where it is competitive with other products that are not green.

Repurpose Compostables is still at the early stage but they are currently in Bed, Bath and Beyond and a few regional grocery stores.  Things are just starting to take off and she is talks with many different chains.  Lauren just got married and is about to have a baby too.  I am pretty sure when she went to McGrill she did not think she would be living in Los Angeles with a consumer products company but she followed an interesting path as most entrepreneurs do. 

The Other Place, Manhattan Theater Club

We are definitely not seeing as much theater as we used to see.  We have basically wound down to having a subscription with the Manhattan Theater Club and that is it.  I might ramp up again in a few years or just pick them individually.  My friend is going with the latter and I think she might be on to something.  The only thing is that you have to pay attention, be organized and hope you pick the winners.  Not that easy but then again theater never is.

We went to a matinee of The Other Place starrring Laurie Metcalf who plays a brilliant neurologist who is slowly losing her mind.  The story unfolds over this one act play.  Metcalf is tremendous.  She must be absolutely exhausted at the end of each performance. 

One thing to note (that I really liked )is that of the four actors, one of them happens to be Metcalfs real life daughter.  That must be pretty cool to be able to perform together on the Broadway stage.

 

I do love my New York Times

I admit it, I love sitting down every morning with my New York Times.  I am not a happy camper when I do not get my paper. 

So wherever I am, I want my paper.  Yes I know I can get it online but it just isn’t the same thing.  I like turning the pages.  I particularly like my crossword. 

I attempted to get the paper delivered this week while we were out of town skiing.  We have an account out there.  I called and asked them to start/stop.  I would take 3 full days to start and even though I called on Tuesday morning they could not deliver a paper until Saturday.  The computer was not capable of putting in a stop until I got the paper on Saturday so I have to call back on Sunday to stop which takes another 3 days. 

Here is the thing.  I know there are 21^st Century pains happening over at the NY Times but I am happy to have my paper delivered just like the old times.  Why is it so difficult to make their customer happy?

Question of the week #17

The restaurant world is a very different type of an investment than the start-up world.  First and foremost it is much riskier, at least I think so and the returns will rarely be as large.  We invest in restaurants for a few reasons.  We want to support the community as much as we want to support smart entrepreneurs.  It is also a bonus being part of a restaurant if it is a place that you can personally frequent and enjoy the success.  So this is why I chose this question for the week.

You mentioned some restaurant you were an investor. Could you share some info about the typical funding structure of restaurants (preferred/debt etc ) ?  

All restaurants are structured a little differently.  Many accelerate payment back to investors first and then begin to pay themselves afterward.  You tend to give up a little upside that way but it makes investors feel safer.  There are 3 factors (none are surprising); amount of seats, amount raised and rent.  Obviously those numbers change based on location and city but those are the 3 things that I look at in regards to being a worthwhile investment.  There are investments that I have passed on just because of the huge number they were raising because I did not believe they would be able to pay us back based on the number of seats that they were covering every night.  I could end up being totally wrong and I hope so for them but that is how I look at it.

I expect the restaurant owner to take 50% of the investment off the bat unless it isn't their first place.  The investors cover the other 50%.  The amount you put in of the 50% is your piece of the place.  For instance, if they raise $400k then $400K is 50% of the business.  If you put up $50K then you own 8%.  You will get paid back 8% of the profits.  Sometimes, as I said earlier, the deal is that the owner will pay out an accelerated amount to the investors until they get their original money out and perhaps a 10% overage and then will return to paying out the investors annually based on their investment.  

Each deal is different but the ones that I have seen basically follow this thread.  

 

 

 

 

Womens Entrepreneur Festival 2013

I have not had time to write a post reflecting on the event but will.  I need a few days to reflect.  I do know that there is nothing else like it. 

If you were not able to attend please watch the live stream.  There is some great content in the conversations that took place all day and on the panels.  Liz Neumarks opening remarks are moving and really insightful for any entrepreneur.  Nancy Hechinger (my co-founder of the festival) also gave a great talk on Tuesday night.

Here is my opening remarks that in many ways set the tone for the day. 

 

 

 

Eggplant and Chicken Parm

This is not something I ever make but when you are at 9000 feet with a hungry crew, it just seemed the right thing to do. 

Lots of steps but worth it.  The key is getting one of those tin pans that they sell at the grocery store so when it is over, it is literally over.  I made the eggplant and the chicken at the same time.  Just using different pans for browning so everything was separate.  One of these feeds 10 easily.

2 28 ounce cans of whole tomatoes

4 Tblsp olive oil

Kosher salt

4 eggplants sliced across

6 whole boneless skinless chicken breasts split

4 cups panko (mix with paprika, salt, pepper, oregano to season)

10 eggs

3 cups flour

2 lbs. fresh mozzarella

8 ounces grated parm cheese

Basil leaves - a handful cut into thin slices

Take the cans of tomatoes, olive oil and ample kosher salt and puree in a blender.  Set aside.

Set oven to 350.

Cover two separate (if you are doing both at once) non-stick pans with olive oil.  I actually used one that was not non-stick.  Just easier for cleaning when it is non-stick. Heat the oil.

Dip the pieces of eggplant or chicken in the flour, then the egg batter and then the panko mix.  Put in the olive and brown on both sides.  When each piece is done put on a rack over paper towels to drip. 

When all the pieces are browned put together the pans.  Cover the bottom with eggplant or chicken, douse with 1/4 of the tomato sauce ( if you are making both at the same time) then cover with pieces of mozzarella and shake some parm over the top and a few basil leaves.  Do it again and if you have eggplant left over cover that on top with some tomato sauce.  Same goes for the chicken.  It really doesn't matter.

Bake for an hour and then set aside for about 10 minutes to cool.  Slice and serve.  Perfect for the next day on a roll. 

 

 

Neva McIntosh and the beauty of the Internet

I spent a semester abroad in London my junior year of college.  One weekend (a long one) I journeyed up to Scotland.  On the Great Mile I found a small store owned by a woman named Neva McIntosh.  She hand knit beautiful sweaters.  The price was right and I wanted to bring one home with me. 

I picked the colors.  God knows why I picked grey and rose but I did.  The sweater showed up at my doorstep in London a few weeks later.  I wore the sweater to death.  Then it went into the world where all old clothes go to die that you can’t get rid of, the so called attic. 

Fast forward about 20 years, Freds parent go to Edinburgh and find the store.  They get me another sweater, a beautiful classic white button down sweater with brown wooden buttons.  I loved it.  Apparently so did the dry cleaner because they lost it.  I still mourn for that sweater.  It isn’t something I would buy myself but I loved it and wore it often.  I tried to replace it but it just wasn't the same.

I believe Neva has moved on because when I was in Scotland a few years back I could not find her store.  I looked everywhere including the world wide yellow pages called the Internet. 

Last week I got an email from a woman in Canada who had looked up Neva and found my blog post about looking for her in Scotland.  She had bought a sweater roughly around the same time I did when we were in college.  She too had kept her beloved sweater in the attic and had not touched it for years.  She reached out to me to see if I was interested in the sweater before selling it on eBay.  I figured why not.

She sent it to me as a gift.  I am not so sure that I will wear it but the story is great.  You have to love the internet.  Maybe one of my nieces will cuddle up in this sweater when we go skiing next year.