[00:00:01] Eliana, what's up?  [00:00:02][0.8]

Keith: [00:00:03] Hey, I'm excited to be here. How are you?  [00:00:05][1.7]

Eliana: [00:00:05] I'm great. Glad to have you. And this is really fun to finally connect in person. So I think I'm going to leave it up to you to explain all the different things that you do. This, you know, I started to kind of do the prep work and think about how I was going to introduce feels like she's doing like 50 different things at once. So explain a little bit about Eliment and Co. and then also all the other things that you do.  [00:00:27][22.1]

Keith: [00:00:28] Absolutely. So Eliment and Co. is a company, I started when I left Google. I left Google last year after 10 years there and decided to go on my own and do a bunch of different things. Eliment and Co. For me is the umbrella to many different things I do at the core of it, though. The thing I always like to say is we create cultural chemistry. So I really believe in working with people, with amazing people, working on amazing things we actually care about and then seeing how do we complement each other, how do are elements come together and make some magic happen. And my background in multicultural marketing and culturaly relevant design and strategy. And so to tell you what I actually do day to day spending. So I work with some corporate clients, different ones. I approach me wanting to learn about doing multicultural marketing, inclusive design from a cultural standpoint, or even how to build out their employer resource group strategy and communities. So the Latin Black and, you know, all communities of color and underrepresented groups Native American, Asian American, the different communities that they have within companies. Because a lot of what I did at Google involved creating the Latin group for community there and the multicultural marketing team. People bring a lot of questions my way and know my background in that. So that's one bucket. So that's really about making sure that we consider cultural diversity. When you think about advocating marketing, building tech on the other side. I also work with startup founders, so I consult and coach startup founders and sometimes invest as well. Thinking about who are the diverse founders out there who find me, approach me and we explore, how are they bringing their product or service to market? So in that sense, it's not necessarily doing it to reach a multicultural audience. But I can empathize a lot as an entrepreneur, and I really support diverse business owners because as a small business or as a startup founder, you have so much skin in the game. So much and so much banking on your success and what you learn is a different experience than a conventional entrepreneur. And the reason I like both is because when I was at Google, a lot of what I did was around supporting diverse communities and that included consumer marketing. But I love supporting entrepreneurs with Google tools, so learning how to grow their business, online analytics, you know, Google Maps for your business, all those things. So that had me collaborating with a lot of different either organizations or networks of small business owners of startup founders, and that just resonated so much as a small business owner. Third bucket, my family and I have our own organic tequila company, so our small business really taught me a lot, and that's what helps me empathize with these business owners. These startup founders and I can go through a list of more things I do. But I like to say I'm a serial side hustler, and ultimately I left the corporate world because I was ready to be able to do not only work that I can be good at or successful at, but work that brings me joy, brings me life, collaborate with people who excite me. And so even if it's sort of confusing for people to know exactly what I do day to day like, I taught a cooking class resume for a client last night. Like, I just, you know, I mix it up. I keep it interesting. And so that's kind of the fun part for me now is that I feel like I'm not in a place where I'm defining success for myself, not necessarily with one title or even just one definition, one line of a company. It's I get to do a bunch of stuff and that that autonomy is what I worked really hard to finally get to.  [00:03:37][189.0]

Eliana: [00:03:38] You're kind of living the improv comedy ethos of, Yes, And with everything.  [00:03:42][4.1]

Keith: [00:03:42] Oh, completely. You're speaking my language. I always tell people that's a Yes, And strategy is an approach. I love that. Yes.  [00:03:48][5.8]

Eliana: [00:03:49] Yeah. So let's oh man, there's so many, so many things there to start with. Let's start with the Google experience and deciding that it was time to leave, right? Because it sounds like you still love and have a passion for the Google products and the Google team. Totally. What about last year made you decide, OK, this is the time. This is the moment now. Is it money saved? Was it a reckoning of some sort that kind of propelled you to go, OK, now it's time to start my own thing?  [00:04:10][21.9]

Keith: [00:04:12] Yeah. I mean, candidly, I had thought about it for some time because I've always had a side hustle, the main one being Alquimia our organic tequila company. So from the onset of joining Google, everyone at the company knew I had a small business with my family. We were in this industry since before I started at Google, so I always had you know, two hats on that I switched back and forth, and so one factor was with the pandemic affecting everyone's businesses in different ways. I realized, you know, it's time for me to give it more love and attention. My entire family involved my mom, my dad, my sister. We've all done this as a side hustle. All of us like this, an actual, real company. And, you know, people often look at it and think they ask us, Where do we find it? What do we buy it? And we are excited. We are sold in from places that were distributed, but we're like, this is also a side hustle. It was a family project turned business, so we're growing with it. And I realized that there were so many challenges the pandemic posed from difficulties importing our products, getting stuck at the border, limited production capacities. So we were, you know, at one point we had run out of one. We have five different types of tequilas. We ran out of one and we had to tell our customers, Hey, give us a couple of weeks, a couple of months, our productions on hold at the factory where we make that the tequila. And so, you know, I needed more love and attention more than ever, especially in this pandemic. And I can empathize with all these business owners who had to change the way they do business. That was one factor. The other right around the same time 2020 was insane was Black Lives Matter thinking about. The amount of work that still needs to be done, you know, I Google, I did dedicate my entire career there. I think the first eight months I was just figuring things out, what am I doing there? It was not a diversity-oriented role. I'd got a job in sales after having interned there the summer prior in advertising, learning that business. And so when I came into the environment, I didn't realize that what I was going to do was about aligning my professional life with my sense of purpose around the impact on supporting community so we can dive into that more bit. The quick part of it, there was that I had really worked with amazing people doing amazing things, not always easy, but definitely, mission-driven to advocate for diverse communities and their access to technology. And so for me, when I see a big moment happen where we're all violently aware, more than ever, that this is not just a moment, it's not just one March. It's so much systemic not only challenge and hurt and pain, but in many ways I think opportunity like we still have so much work to do. We have an opportunity to be a part of the solution. And, you know, a lot of the work we did to support Black-owned businesses, Latino-owned businesses, etcetera. I thought, this is the moment when this matters when half of Black owned businesses are closing or the restaurants especially are closing during a pandemic. And we're in this black lives matter moment. What more can I do? So to the point of what made me want to leave, it was really about thinking, how can I make the impact that I truly want? Can I keep doing that? I Google. Absolutely. There were great people. I worked with a lot of resources, definitely resources that are at a different scale than working as entrepreneur. But I had done 10 years, and one of the things that I knew I wanted to do before ever leaving was make sure that the work I did was embedded in the business, even if I was no longer there, that there were other people taking the charge and running with it. And so I felt like, OK, we have people in place. By the time I left, we had 15 full-time roles created dedicated to multicultural and diversity efforts across the company, not just on the diversity team but in the business. And so I knew they're going to keep the lights on even if I'm out there. That was a good feeling. I felt kind of complete. And then the other is I knew that I had learned a lot there, but it was time to learn in a different capacity. As an entrepreneur working hands-on with startup founders, with my own family business. And so all those factors at once, it was months of thinking about it, but it finally that clarity just clicked where it's like, I want to do more. And you know, candidly, working in a system has a lot of benefits, a lot of resources, all of that. The comfort of a corporate job is really nice in many ways. But, you know, it was time for me to have that autonomy that I wanted to move a little bit more quickly and be a little bit more nimble and test things out that hadn't been done before. And now, I mean, one of the other things I do is I do have a design studio where we develop apps and things for clients and to be able to create technology for people who have an idea, have a vision and they don't know how to build an app, but they have a great concept that excites me so much. Right now, we're building an app for an Afro Latino entrepreneur who is developing this concept that we're building out that's going to support small businesses. And I'm like, I couldn't have done that on the inside. I get to do that now on my own. And so, you know, yeah, I had to make sure I had saved up and prepared for life without a corporate income. But it was the moment and I felt called to just make that move.  [00:08:46][274.4]

Eliana: [00:08:46] Was there a client right away or did you have time to kind of incubate and go into stealth mode?  [00:08:51][5.1]

Keith: [00:08:53] Sort of both. The blessing that I've experienced is that I haven't had to pitch a single client. Everyone has come to me, and I think mostly because one of the things that helps me feel anchored in what I'm doing is that even though people are like, what is she up to and what is she doing? I know that people may not know what I'm doing or maybe even how I'm doing it, but they're very clear on my way. They know the mission. For me, it's always about being at the intersection of culture and tech in whatever capacity. If that's working with corporate players still thinking about how they advocate for diverse communities on the inside, if it's working with these tech entrepreneurs to support their startups, or if it's building tech as a studio for clients. So I was intentionally sort of in stealth mode knowing I'm going to give myself about a year to incubate didn't share a lot publicly. Not that I didn't want to share, but I believe in show. Don't tell, I believe in showing someone something things. So then you get it rather than me trying to explain it in a kind of nebulous way. And so now, more recently, I've started sharing more about what I've been up to because I wanted to know this is an app that's going to be out in the wild soon. I want people to play with it and use it and touch it. You know all that. So the first few clients I had, there were people I knew who knew that my sense of purpose was really being activated it last year. But you know, they're asking, how is my business doing? I was getting hit up by so many people asking, What do we do right now? A lot of allies, a lot of people who are other people of color who aren't black but want to support asking, What do we do in this moment of Black Lives Matter? All these different factors. Then the conversation started going to and what are you doing about it? Well, you know, I'm going to make sure I walk the walk and have to walk away from something that was great. Not always. You know, it's every job has its challenges. I don't I don't mean to sugarcoat anything, but it was a great run that I knew there was more to do and so develop the strategy. The branding, the name for an out for a. Black celebrity who wanted to build an app for the Latino community with Latino partners, and so that was really cool, something that I couldn't be public about because I wanted to make sure, you know, it's their vision, it's their mission for what they want to create. But I got to bring it on my homegirls into focus groups and, you know, full diverse backgrounds. And we tested the app beta test the day before anyone else did. And so some of that I'm now ready to share a lot more of it because it was all incubation period prototyping, and I wasn't sure where things would land. I just knew if I'm doing good things as good people, good things will come of it.  [00:11:10][136.9]

Eliana: [00:11:11] So the litmus test is called the intersection of culture and technology. Are there times where you have had to say, no, we're just didn't make sense for you to be jumping in on the project?  [00:11:19][8.0]

Keith: [00:11:20] Yeah, I mean, I try to be honest with people about what they need or what I can offer. Is it a good match or not? And beyond just culture, I mean, there's some things from a value standpoint that mattered to me a lot. You know, there's folks out there who want to create something, a business venture, an opportunity that isn't necessarily predatory, but it's maybe selling something in a way that isn't necessarily going to drive impact or not that everything I do is necessarily social impact. I think at the end of the day, there's a lot of good that comes out of it. But now there's been some opportunities where I'm like, you know, I know someone who's probably a better fit either. They're more aligned with that goal or this one just doesn't quite do it for me in terms of the support I want to bring to the kind of products I want to see exist. I can find those, and I've tried to really maintain a high bar for what I'm working on, what the impact is going to be. Are the values of the founders in alignment with mine? That's an  [00:12:11][50.8]

Eliana: [00:12:11] important one.  [00:12:11][0.4]

Keith: [00:12:11] Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, you know, I like to say it's not always a no. It's a managed yes, maybe I'm not the one to do it, but I might know someone who can or is just a better opportunity for somebody else. And I'll be honest, sometimes I'll tell them maybe like this stage isn't quite in alignment with where I'm at or what I can offer. But when you're ready to develop this part, I'm here. Let me know. So I try to, you know, be open and transparent about expectations on their end and also how we do the work. Often they'll approach me and they want a full agency and I let them know that's not me. I have agency partners, but I design strategy, the product or the process, and I'll pull in people. I'll pull in the people that they need to have actually manage the process. But I realized only a few years ago when I was diagnosed formally that I have ADHD and I was like, Oh, this is why I love the start and the incubation and the ideas because I can't stand managing things. And part of being an entrepreneur is like, you kind of have to do every part of the work at any moment, but you can carve out the work you want. So I try all the time to make sure I'm not working on things that don't bring me joy or that, you know, it's not always you sometimes you have to get work done, but I at least try to make sure my clients know I can prototype and incubate. But management, that's somebody else, and it's helped me make sure that there's no expectations. And then I'm working with people who can actually appreciate what I'm uniquely bringing to the table.  [00:13:28][76.8]

Eliana: [00:13:29] It's very good awareness, right? Because I think of so many people as you go up in your career, look at successes, how many people my managing, how many people are, quote unquote under me. But I've talked to more and more people who go, No, I've realized that's not success for me is success for me is being able to have the ability to work on the projects that I actually want to work on.  [00:13:48][19.2]

Keith: [00:13:49] Yes. Yeah. And you know, there's agencies out there that want a retainer, want a legacy client that stays with them for five, 10 years or even just a year-long contract. And usually I talk to clients and I'm letting them know, Hey, I'd love to work with you or probably going to aim for three months. But really, every month we're going to check-in and it's a 1-3 month sprint. And then if we really it's sort of like dating, like if we're really invested in, if it really makes sense and if we find the good flow and that chemistry, then we can explore a longer-term commitment. Sometimes I have stayed on with some longer. But I like to make it easy to walk away so you want to choose to keep staying, you know? Yeah.  [00:14:23][34.1]

Eliana: [00:14:23] And that's another great point, because I think again, as I've started to talk to people who have built their own companies and they take on this problem child clients, and they go, Well, I can't give them up because they're 80 percent of my revenue. And they signed a year-long contract with them, but they're destroying me. What would you say to somebody that, you know, as they're starting to build this thing and, you know, the hard nosed, right, the oh man? I know this is going to take more out of me than it should.  [00:14:46][22.4]

Keith: [00:14:48] I think there's always a threshold or a tipping point of what you're willing to handle if there's some incentive, but eventually if there's diminishing returns, even if they pay you, you're just dreading going to meetings and it's stressing you out at the end of the day. I do think that even for entrepreneurs, when you know your finances, your livelihood is on the line for you and others. It is hard sometimes to still prioritize making sure this brings you joy. And this makes me happier. I suppose he's got to pay the bills. Yeah, but I do think that, like I said, the diminishing returns component, if someone is costing you more time and energy than it's worth. And sometimes the customers that pay the least are the ones that become the most demanding. So then that's not even justified. It's like, how do you justify giving this much time and attention to a customer or client that's not really worth it? And so taking a step back if someone's at the beginning at the onset of their business, I try to remind people, make sure you really do save up for this or you fundraise appropriately, whatever it is. Because as an entrepreneur, even though the objective is to build a business and even a social enterprise business, ultimately you're doing some kind of service or you're creating a product that you're selling, you're creating value that you hope someone else values enough right to pay you what you think it's worth. But one of the lessons I learned, actually, I crystallized it this week, so think about it a lot. We as entrepreneurs really can't be attached to money because it can change overnight, and so if you don't have those savings or the capital to fundraise to make sure you're in a stable place financially, not only for yourself but for the people around you, it can really change things for you, for example. I'll be candid. Like I said, there was a client I was working with where we scoped out the work and a couple of things changed that were beyond our control. And then I looked at the numbers and I realized this is going to cost me more time and I'm going to hire more people to finish this. So now I probably won't profit from this project. Now is the work. Amazing. Yes. Is the experience great? Yes. Can anyone take the story from me after we do this? No, this is mine. This is a real experience. I take it, as you know, I'm putting this in my case, study bucket. I'm still going to kill it because I need the next client to see what we did. And like I said, I get to be one of the few Latinas that says we can build technology right that I'm now a senior designer doing this with my design and engineer team. That's pretty historic stuff. That's awesome. Do I want to make money from this? Of course. But on the other hand, with a number of days a different client, I realized it was time to up my prices. And I think that's important to know when you're ready to level up. And I did. I doubled my prices. I felt like it was very fair because the last time I realized I gave so much more. They got so much out of this. I know I'm going to overdeliver. So I feel good about it. And they didn't even blink. They said, Absolutely, yes. So it was like, Oh, that sometimes it feels uncomfortable to raise your prices on your worth, but you have to because you never know when the day's end to come along where you're not going to make a profit from something or, you know, not make the revenue. The outcome of the profit that you antted. And so like I said, you can't really be attached to the money up front. In some ways, that may seem very naive to some who think this is the business. The point of a business is to make money. But to me, something I bought you a lot. The way I do business is make smart short term moves to have a very smart, long term vision and actually build for the future because that client where it's going to cost me more money to finish that out, I don't want to ruin that relationship. We have so much great synergy and I know there's more we're going to do together. It is beyond obvious that we want to just like Merge. We're like extensions of each other's teams. So to that end, I'd much rather keep that relationship intact and honor that then nickel and dime them for something that I'm like, you know, I'll cover this time because there's there's a bigger picture I'm looking forward to.  [00:18:20][212.5]

Eliana: [00:18:21] So what is the math that you look at to raise rates? Is it time spent? Is it money out of pocket to get other creators to work with you? Brass tacks. Like, what are you doing to kind of make sure that you're covering the bills and and raising? I love the right term tactical questions.  [00:18:34][12.6]

Keith: [00:18:34] So it depends. It depends on the kind of business I'm doing. So from a product standpoint, general rule of thumb, if I'm selling a product, I never want that to go below one point three times cost. That's like bare minimum. I aim for minimum, I mean, that's like, that's the worst-case scenario. I aim for at least 1.5 of again minimum. And then beyond that, it's whatever value want to give it right. If you want to be an expensive premium product, you charge a premium product price and hope someone agrees enough to buy it right. So there's some kind of general rules of thumb that I look at to make sure I'm not going in the red beyond just because cost of goods and what we perceive as time is always gonna be so much more than that, right? Even just I'm sitting in an office building right now with lights on that had to be paid for. So, you know, I don't quantify the number of minutes under these lights, but the  [00:19:20][45.3]

Eliana: [00:19:20] fact with the AC going on at any point here?  [00:19:22][1.7]

Keith: [00:19:22] Exactly. If at any point the AC goes on, I paid for that. So I make sure we're covering that. Everyone has their own numbers, right? Somebody might say that doesn't even make sense financially. But for me, in the way that I'm doing things right now, I'm looking at, I want high value customers who bring a lot of brand equity to the table, who bring opportunities for bigger opportunities. So could I charge 5x my cost? Yeah, we can make up any number we want. These, again, are just kind of my personal benchmarks for things to make sure that I don't go below what I'm comfortable with. That's from a product standpoint, from a speaking events and workshops and training standpoint. Early on, I priced it around where I saw other people charging for, you know, their level of experience and so forth. And I think that's generally fair as an approach like do your research, you can google it. You know, speaking fees and workshop fees, things like that. But then as we're getting clients approaching me and saying, Hey, here's our budget, and it was way more than I was charging and I thought, Wow, I didn't know people wanted to pay me that. So then that became the new bar for me. And then, you know, I let people know, here's my range, and then they let me know. And more often than not, and because that future clients then see, Oh, she's worked with Verizon. She's worked with all these other companies. I've done talks with Netflix, I've done talks with Foot Locker, et cetera. Then they see the caliber of the clients I'm working with. So I think it really affirms them that, oh, she's worth paying. Other brands are already paid her. So it kind of helps make that credible case that, yes, this is time worth paying for. And then, you know, I use that as a reference point, and every now and then I'll make adjustments or I'll be flexible. For example, I'm working with a startup now. I'm doing a talk for them tomorrow, and it's a Series D start up. They're on their way. They're growing in amazing ways. They have budget, but they're not at a corporate level yet. So I try to play with that right or my OK, well, where are they? So I give them a frame of reference of here's what I typically charge. A friend introduced us and I knew I want to make sure she looked good because she's on her way up there, too. So, you know, I factored in. It's more of an art than a science. I have some formulas for some things I do, but it just depends on the opportunity. And I think that goes for a lot of what it means to be an entrepreneur is finding that intersection where you know your costs are covered, you feel you're honoring your value. And are you making sure that this is a sustainable business model, either bringing the right customers, because if I get only one customer that was only one customer was willing to pay a certain amount, then that's not going to help me in the long term either.  [00:21:37][134.9]

Eliana: [00:21:38] Absolutely not. Thank you so much for sharing that and being specific there, because I talked to so many black and Latino Latina founders or solopreneurs who go out there and I said, Well, what are your rates? What are you going to go for? And they go, Well, I'm going to divide the hours in the day, and that's what I'll do, which, you know, I made X. at my prior company. And so I'm just going to divide that up and I go, Wait, wait, wait, you're forgetting about health care, you're forgetting about office space, you're forgetting about all the other freelancers that are going to have to help you with the project. And, you know, the pitch work that you're going to do downtime. And so it's really important, like I think it's really important to be able to share those things and let people know it's not just your salary plus a little bit so. So thank you for that.  [00:22:18][40.0]

Keith: [00:22:19] Forgive me for jumping in, but only because people listening don't have full context. And I realize I forgot to mention one piece of it, which is one of the things I consider a lot is I have a multi multiple stream income business with different types, right? There's products there, services, different things. And so one thing I do is think about what is the amount of money I want to make to cover myself. Well, as I say, entrepreneurs e last write my team, my expenses and then make sure my rent is covered and stuff like that. So then I do divide a month to month and I find an average amount of like, OK, ideally this is what I want to make for a month, but some months that I don't make that exact target. But there's other months where I over exceed it, and I try to make sure that in the end, I'm reaching the goals I want over quarter by quarter, half year, and it almost becomes kind of fun at someone who is not excited by the finances of things. I don't love the ops of things. I made it almost like a game. We're looking at the spreadsheet. I'm like, OK, what can I play with? Can I do this type of workshop? How many sessions do I need to do with a client for this? How many start ups? So I need to console and playing with that and then thinking, OK, how many hours in the week do I actually have to allocate to these things? Because my schedule, I mean, the time and energy I put into everything is everything. So I can say I want to do x every single day of the week. But if that is so draining that I really can't, I'm going to burnout. That doesn't make sense. So I try to find some balance in what I'm working on. What kind of money that's bringing me in and how is that reaching the goals I need to make sure I'm growing at the rates that I want.  [00:23:43][84.4]

Eliana: [00:23:44] It's so smart. I love that and practical too, because you can look month over month and see the gains there. So I do want to talk tequila if it's cool, can we move there a little bit? Because, you know, especially especially now there's a lot of these celebrity endorsed brands, you know, it's the Casamigos and all this stuff that have come out where they're sourcing, right? Like, you're actually farming and doing everything. I talk to me a little bit about how that came about. Yeah, all of it. Let's start right back at the beginning there and how your family started getting into this. Like, you know, for me, when my family gets together, maybe we will watch a baseball game or have a dinner, maybe before we're done with each other. You're like, No, let's go. Let's let's build this tequila company together.  [00:24:26][42.3]

Keith: [00:24:27] Yeah, you know, we didn't think it'd be dinnertime conversation years ago. We didn't think we'd be now reaching our 25th year in the industry at large. We haven't had the product for 25 years, but what happened? Twenty five, a little bit over twenty five years because we didn't do a research phase. So what happened is that when my dad's dad, my abuelito, he was nearing the end of his life, we knew it was coming. And so he said he was already in California. You said, prepare to sell the land, the ranch in Mexico. So my dad's side is from Jalisco Mexico, where he was born. Everyone before my dad was born in this tiny little town and my great grandparents had bought land where the next generations were born and all that. And so my great grandfather, one grew a lot of corn and different crops, but always did everything organically. And then on my grandmother's side, the other great grandfather of mine, he owned a bodega in the town, and he ultimately was a social entrepreneur. He did a lot of practically micro-lending with goods and different things. So both of them were really important leaders in the community. And in fact, like one grandfather contributed the limestone to build the church and the other one paid for it. So not knowing that their children are going to get together. Yeah, it just kind of, you know, it was a small enough town, so my grandfather's letting my dad know it's time. You know, we all come to the US by now, at least my dad's side and his siblings and then now my generation, we're all here. And he said, You know, I don't think any of us are going back. The intention was always to go back. They came here to work and provide for their families, and nobody leaves Mexico because they want to necessarily have to leave. They usually look for a better life where they can find that opportunity. And it was through working here in the poultry industry from my dad's side. So anyway, so. My mom had become really close to my dad's grandmother and my mom told my dad, you have to convince them to keep the land, but your great grandparents worked way too hard and after your great grandfather passed away, your great grandmother is the one who still held it down, taking care of this land. So that was the family. You know, this little turning point for us where my dad asked my abuelito, and he said yes. He said the condition was If you can find a way to make the land productive, you can keep it. He didn't want us to just have land there. No one's doing anything with it. So this is pre-Google. My dad couldn't just google it. He researched everything from agave where we landed in the end. But you know it was alpacas and tomatoes. All types of things. We could have ended up in a lot of way less interesting industries than the tequila. You know, it wouldn't have been like, how are celebrities influencing the tomato industry? That would have been a totally different conversation. But anyway, so my dad's background is in biology. That's his undergrad degrees in biology. He's an optometrist. So he went to Mexico and took a bio kit with him and tested the soil.  [00:26:57][150.9]

Eliana: [00:26:58] So it all comes down to the soil.  [00:26:59][1.5]

Keith: [00:27:00] Always. Yeah, because and not only is it important, but it's because everyone told him you'll never be able to grow agave there because our soil looks brown like normal dirt or normal soil, where agave typically is cultivated in Mexico, there's three areas of Mexico where you can produce it in. The soil was like a brick red, so just no brainer. You look, that's not the soil for growing agave to make tequila. So my dad did these bio tests realized it was actually not that far off. It was a couple of things we could adjust to make sure it was productive and healthy. And it turns out that we actually have very limited like super thin layer of topsoil on a lot of limestone. So this is like some of the worst conditions for growing agave. And ours have been incredibly healthy because my dad, following the sort of guidance without them being here of my great grandfather's example of doing everything organically. My dad applied the more modern approach of the science of organics now. We've been growing some of the healthiest agave in all of Mexico. We used to sell to brands. We subscribe to brands like Don Julio, Herradura, Casa Flores years ago. Some of these brands have changed how they produce the product now, but at the time we were really excited to get attention from these brands that were coming out to our tiny little area of Mexico, where no one else was growing. And through that it actually got attention of other people. My dad taught a lot of local landowners how to grow agave, so they could also be part of this. And he thought people across Mexico in other crop industries how to do organics. He's met with people who grow avocados, tomatoes, and for us, it was always the goal, the mission was to create a product that is of high quality so that we can have a proof point to show that using organic methods actually produces a better product for the environment and the consumer in the end.  [00:28:37][96.9]

Eliana: [00:28:38] That's so cool. And so what was the turning point to go? OK, we're going to sell to Don Julio Haddow and now we're going to do this on our own. We've got this test that we think is delicious, but we now think it needs to go out to the rest of the world.  [00:28:52][13.7]

Keith: [00:28:52] Yeah. Well, the big change for us was what happened is that there was a massive freeze and a lot of people lost their crops. All the agave froze over because they just no one's prepared for it. It's a very dry area. It doesn't rain a lot. So you definitely don't expect snow freeze and our plants actually survived because they were so healthy because we were all organic. They survive these like superpower plants. And so the supply of agave just was shot overnight. Now, tequila companies, at a time when the demand for tequila started to increase in the U.S., it's becoming popular. They need to keep production up. And so they're trying to find agave anywhere. So the price per kilo of agave skyrocketed overnight. So that was great. We were very happy about that. But because everyone saw that, then a lot of people started growing agave to take advantage of that opportunity. Now there was oversupply, so the demand was still high. But now you can get agave from a lot of people. And so we could have continued selling it. It was still worthwhile, but we realized our plants are going to go in the same vats with everyone else's plants and ours are so special. We have broken records. So normally in agave, when you weigh it, it's between 60 to 80 pounds more or less. When you shave off all the leaves and have it ready to take to the factory to ferment and all that to bake it and ferment at 60 to 80 pounds on average, hours are rarely under 100 pounds and our record breaker was over 300 pounds. And the sugar content is insanely high. It's not just full of water weight, right? So, you know, our sugar content levels are almost twice as high as everybody else's. So we know this something really special here. What if we made our own product? And my mom is always the what if person in the family, And I think at first my dad probably thought she was crazy, but she's like, You know, you never know. She always told me, You never know unless you try. So credit to my dad, he figured out how to actually produce the tequila itself and then how to not only bottle it, but also import it. So we had to learn all of that on our own. A lot of people think that that was passed on from my ancestors, and they taught us a lot of the values and the principles of what we do and in a lot of the sense of purpose. But my dad figured out all the science of how to do this. And then meanwhile, my mom and I designed the bottle. My sister figured out how to design the kinda the logo, like the font for the logo. Fully not only bootstraped, but family made product, and what's interesting is that there's actually very few Mexican owned companies that are Mexican owned and operated tequila companies, period. Most tequila companies, if they're small, they tend to be acquired or they just close after some time because it's a hard industry, It's driven by a lot of marketing budgets. So we're proud to be some of the few with the product that you can only make in Mexico. It's like the Champagne de France, you know, you can only make it in my dad's country of origin. And so it's really special to us to know that we're carrying on this tradition that's so unique to Mexico and that it's something that's doing good. It's a social impact brand. We contribute a lot in the community. We've created jobs, but also, for example, we bought a bus so that girls can go to school because they couldn't. They didnt have school in the local town. Now we see these girls becoming not only high school graduates, college graduates, even teachers back in the same town. So there's a one small example, but we've always thought of this as a vehicle for doing social impact through something that we believe in a lot.  [00:32:01][188.5]

Eliana: [00:32:01] It's so cool and you know, you talk about the jobs, there's the direct jobs right of working with your company. But then there's also the indirect jobs, right, the supply chain stuff like the bottles. How do you source these things?  [00:32:14][12.4]

Keith: [00:32:14] This is one of my favorite questions to answer. So we actually source them from a family-owned small business. This family of artisanal glassblowers in Tonala, Jalisco. And they're made out of recycled glass. So we very intentionally made sure that all of our production is sustainable and eco friendly. So we compost our waste. We buy recycled glass bottles. My dad did a lot of research and having fortunately having a couple of contacts in Mexico, still, you know, some of his cousins, our foremen on the ranch to make sure we're vetting and doing our business with good vendors. But we've gone to see how they make them, and we've taken people to see how we grow the agave and everything. And we wanted to make sure that all aspects of what we're doing are really doing right by the environment. And so it's been really cool to do that and then see the family who's so proud that they get to bottle this award winning tequila in their bottles and they make all kinds of glass things. But this is a really special product for all of us.  [00:33:03][48.6]

Eliana: [00:33:03] Oh, that's so cool. And then how did you learn about distribution, right? Because there's the country by country, distribution laws are probably, you know, enough to make one lawyer go crazy. How did you figure this out as somebody that's new to the product, new to the thing?  [00:33:18][14.9]

Keith: [00:33:18] And yeah, again, I give my dad always credit for doing a lot of this research on his own, his this brilliant scientist turned businessman optometrist in the mix, too. So he did a lot of the research of how to handle that. But it's not only country-by-country, it's also state by state so we can distribute our product in California. We have our license for California. And then we find other distributors in other states. So for example, we're in Colorado and a couple of different states and always looking to expand. And so if anyone listening knows of a good distributor in Florida, New York, my dad would probably tell me not to say it because that's like the behind the scenes stuff. And I'm like, I want to get out there. You know, we tag team and our approach to business. It's a little different. I'm used to doing a lot in the digital world. My dad's the one who knows how to figure these things out with our liquor lawyer, the lawyer who specializes in the liquor industry. My dad's own research figuring this all out. We didn't have to hire any external. You know, there's a lot of people that benefit from getting paid to handle trademarking and finding supply chains like for trucking and all that and one piece at a time and figured it out as we went.  [00:34:19][60.8]

Eliana: [00:34:20] That's amazing. So do you want this to be a global brand, something that anybody can access at any point? Or do you like the rich now making it hard to find the aspect of it right now?  [00:34:29][9.3]

Keith: [00:34:30] You know, it's less about what we want and really the reality of what we're doing because we have 125 acres. We don't intend to buy massive amounts of land and create a brand that is accessible just anywhere. I mean, we also know we love when people really appreciate it, right? It's like, I'm not going to say I don't want to be in just all liquor stores across the country. We are available in New Zealand, Australia, a couple of places where we have some really cool distribution partnerships there. But at the end of the day, we all have our professions and we decided to do something to signal what's possible. And so for us, it's less about taking over the world of Tequila and hopefully being an example of what's possible when we see these celebrities that are launching their own brands. And, you know, almost anyone thinks they can go create a tequila company tomorrow. Right? We hope that what we're doing is like, heard in my story. A lot of what I do is to prototype, to incubate and do things that align with my values. So for us, you know, if someone offered us to just take over a ton of land and produce tequila in a way that is not organic does not honor the Earth. All these different things. Diminishing returns are real for us, too, in terms of the quality, what we're doing for sure. So we try to make sure that we're doing right by the environment. What's amazing is the way we do things actually improves the quality of the soil every single year so our agave gets better and better. So we love that. We love knowing we're doing something right that we can use this almost like our own little petri dish to test things. And it's our outdoor laboratory. And my dad is credited as the pioneer in organic tequila by industry experts, and he has taught many other companies that have gone organic. He taught them he had to convince people that this was pursuing. So I'm here like his own, like a PR woman hype woman here, because I think these stories really matter. You know, for us, it's about doing something that honors family traditions and our culture, and we've won more gold medals and any other tequila company in the world. So to your point of what a success look like earlier, for us, success doesn't mean massive production and that we do this for the rest of our lives and in every country ever. You know, all the most things for us, it's let's do something really, really well. We know we have the world's best tequila. Business Insider gave us that title Best Tequila in the world. GQ magazine has done that as well, and in the two biggest international spirits competitions, they judge tequila name line or the judge all the spirits, actually. But in our category, tequila, they judge them name blind and we won best of show multiple times Gold Platinum Awards, and that just is something that it doesn't convince us that the product is good. People convince us that it's because they like it, but it is helpful to know that in the industry, people recognize it that way. And every time someone asks us these questions like, Thank you for having me. It gives us an opportunity to share what we're doing and to share not only how we do the product in a sustainable way, but that you can do good business, right? You can create jobs and especially in areas where our people are overlooked and no one thought of this before. And so we get to do something that's changing lives.  [00:37:30][179.5]

Eliana: [00:37:30] So let's do a quick tequila 101 because I think it's one of the spirits that is the most underappreciated. And I love that it's had a renaissance and a resurgence. So last, I would say five to 10 years as a sipping cocktail, sipping spirits. What would you say to somebody whose last experience with it was junior year in college and they never want to touch it again? Right? Because I think there's a lot of people because I've tried to turn people on to tequila and mescal as well, and they go, Oh no, that's tough. That's the devil that that was my worst experience ever. What would you say to that?  [00:38:01][30.6]

Keith: [00:38:02] I hear this often, I'd say. You're not alone. Let's try to level with them. I'm not delusional about these experiences. I understand this has happened to people. I know some people who have experienced this and I know people who we've successfully converted. What I typically tell them is if you have a poor quality experience with any product, it will probably leave you with nightmares. It's going to scar you. You probably may not have had the best quality tequila and the ones that made a name for the product weren't really of high-quality period. So what I like to think is that I'm reintroducing people to tequila, not only to higher quality but also how to enjoy it, how to consume it in a way that you actually enjoy. For example, a lot of people think that drinking tequila with a lime and salt is the proper way to drink a shot. Right? It's actually not. That actually is remnants of when there was a massive epidemic in Mexico and people started doing that to really try to heal from this virus. And so my dad actually loves telling that story about how it actually has to do with like a sort of conspiracy theory. But in many ways it does make sense of, you know, when you gargle with salt, when you're sick, that helps you with your sore throat, right? Or when you put lemon to things, that is helpful. It's healthy, so. And the tequila washes down the bacteria in the virus into your stomach. So there is some science to that, but a lot of companies really jumped on that bandwagon and marketed that practice, let's say, of, you know, icing it and the salt and lime in order to mask the flavor of what is typically a poor quality tequila. Right? So if you have a good tequila, you would never drink it with salt and lime, and typically you drink it neat. You don't drink it on ice, you don't drink it chilled because you want to be able to appreciate it. If you put tap water that doesn't taste good in the fridge, it's going to taste better. Most people prefer chilled water. When it's not chilled, it doesn't taste as good. So kind of similar with tequila. If you put it on ice and you chill it and it's not high quality, you're probably going to make it taste a little bit better. We love that you can drink ours completely neat, straight, and we encourage people to sip it. Because, like I said, part of their introduction is letting people know that this is a really special, crafted spirit. So knowing that and the back story of it all? Why would you want to sip something that took us so much time years to produce when you can sip it and enjoy it and it's not knocking it back and hope you forget that without even felt or taste like because ours don't burn your throat. It's a totally different experience. When you taste ours and maybe haven't had them before, and maybe not even know the tequila, some of them the ones that are more aged. Most people wouldn't even assume that their tequilas because it tastes more like on the spectrum of a cognac or a scotch. And that's not the typical experience. And so I don't feel discouraged when people say that they've had a bad experience or bad memories because that was in our product. So now they have any plans to try something that's going to reset those memories and hopefully create some new ones.  [00:40:51][169.0]

Eliana: [00:40:51] Well said. So you had the tequila family tequila company. You just graduated from Harvard and you chose Google by Google. What brought you over there and to start your career?  [00:41:01][9.8]

Keith: [00:41:03] Well, I definitely didn't think I grew up in tech and for a number of reasons, actually. One, because in high school I wanted to go to culinary school. That was my 100 percent focus. I happened to do AP classes and honors classes just because my friends were my parents assumed, you know, it was the expectation I was an honors my whole life, and so I was doing that path. But I was actually a competitive cake decorating and I but I was actually the state champion in cake decorating when I was 17.  [00:41:30][27.4]

Eliana: [00:41:31] There was competitive cake decorating. OK, so like, who are you up against? I love this  [00:41:36][4.9]

Keith: [00:41:37] other kids in high school who are baking in their programs. I did a vocational program to do. I learned how to do all the knife cuts and mother sauces, and I could essentially go be a line cook. Or I ended up in bread companies and bakeries working. After these programs, I did. I did cake decorating classes at Michael's and I was 12. My mom was always supportive of all my, all my activities. And so I chose to do competitive cooking. And at one point I was even on the team where we cooked a gourmet meal all together and it was hard core. We had practice. I did that. I quit track to do cooking competitively. But there are actual companies. It's almost like mathletes where you're like, Is that a real sport? But ours is cooking.  [00:42:14][37.0]

Eliana: [00:42:15] I was thinking, like, Bring it on. You remember the movie? Bring it on cheerleaders. Yeah, like there's like the schools competing was so yeah. So you had a team and you had.  [00:42:23][8.3]

Keith: [00:42:25] Yeah, we had. You know, we have like an hour to make a gourmet meal with no running water, two burners. Our judges were master chefs. There's only 60 master chefs in the world and we had three as our judges. Guy Fieri is one of my judges one year. You're like, this is super legit. So in my mind, there's no question I'm going to culinary school. But, you know, Senior came around and my parents had a real conversation with me saying, You know, the reality that it's an industry, we respect a lot. Of course, I have a lot of family in the food industry, but knowing it's challenging and I think they saw potential in me that I didn't, and they saw I could go to a normal four year university, so we made a deal. They said if you go get your degree and whatever you want, just have something to fall back on. Just do that and then you can go cook, do whatever you like. And so I try to focus on programs at schools that had business. I could get a business degree so that I thought, maybe I'll own a catering company, a restaurant, something like that. Things worked out. My mom convinced me to apply to Harvard. I didn't think that those were to go at all. I, in fact, I told her, You can't tell anyone I'm applying. I was embarrassed for anyone to know that I thought I could get in.  [00:43:28][63.2]

Eliana: [00:43:28] Why were you embarrassed?  [00:43:29][0.8]

Keith: [00:43:30] I told her mom, Kids from Oxnard don't go to schools like Harvard. And that felt like very matter of fact, and I felt like the reasonable one thinking, Who are we kidding ourselves? We don't do this. People from our area don't do those people who look like us, don't do this. And it was my own limited exposure and my mom's dreamer energy of her saying, Well, you never know unless you try. And I thought, Mom's nagging me. I can't believe she's making me do this, and I got in. In fact, they called my school to confirm my principal called me out of the classroom. He said, Did you apply to Harvard? And I was like, what? So they just called to confirm that you actually took this many AP classes. I had taken 11 AP classes, and that was more than most private schools even offered at the time. And I'm in a public school, and I thought I was in trouble like, is it okay? Fine, because it was so foreign, right? Like, who does that? So I even got in and told my parents, I'm not going like, I'm in California. Why would I leave California? I'm from just north of L.A. Have a nice, comfortable life and beautiful weather. And they said, you don't say no to Harvard. And so they kind of ruined my plans to go become a professional cake decorator. But I went to college, and that's a long story long about getting into Google because when I got there, I thought, Well, what am I going to study here? There's no business degrees. It's a liberal arts school, so I'm like, This isn't working out for my game plan. I have some goals I need to accomplish. And then friends told me, Just go join the business clubs get internships. But I didn't know what an internship was. I came home after my freshman year and told my parents, Who do we know at companies? Because my friends have parents, they just called and their friends, you know, the dad's friend got them a job. Do we know anyone? So my dad said, Well, I have a cousin who runs a cheese factory in Mexico. And I said, OK, can I just go follow him around and like, shadow him? I ended up creating my own internship program, invited a friend, so we were the two first international interns. And it was Schreiber USA. I didn't know it's the biggest cheese manufacturer in all of Latin America, a US based company. Anyway, they make cheese for McDonald's and Burger King and Costco and all those brands like that. So while I was there, I realized I get to now be exposed to this industry because I have a second. My dad's cousin, I'll call Tio and in Latino families you know they're all my uncles. So I now know what it's like to work in a corporate office, and I know my friends have never had that. I brought a friend along and he wouldn't have had this. So I thought, What if I create an organization, a student group similar to women in business that I was a part of? I was in these groups, but I was always one of the only Latinos there. And all these companies are trying to tell us that diversity matters to them and that come work with us and be a leader. And I was like, But there's not more diversity, as women were still considered minority in all these industries are underrepresented, but I have a lot of friends who are not here who need jobs too, and they don't have anyone in their families that has pursued this before. I'm the first in my family not to go to college, but the first to leave the state to go to school, first to go to an Ivy League. And in the end, first to be at a tech company, ever corporate. So a lot of this, I mean, I resonate with people's stories around being the first in different ways. First gen is a massive milestone. My parents are first gen and I respect it so much, but in other sense is the first in these different spaces. It's still challenging. So I emailed, I called, emailed a bunch of brands and said, I have a group of Latino students interested in working for companies like yours and have like 60 students involved. Can we just talk to someone at your company or can we visit your office? I just made a list of my friends that I hoped would join my club, made my own demand and went back to school and told them, Hey, guys, have all these brands that want to hire us, like, join my club, pay me ten bucks to join. And I was one of the only student groups to charge dues because I was like, We're going to invest this into paying for hotels one day so we can all go to New York and visit these companies. And I'd never done a business trip to New York. So long story long. Through that process of connecting with recruiters just emailing out of the blue, finding an email googling it. Ironically, I did connect with the Google recruiter, so I helped my friends get jobs there. So I nudged that along, made sure that they met the recruiter. And then two of them said after doing their internship, they said, When are you going to apply to Google? And I was like, Why would I do that? I don't code. I don't even know how technology works. Not realizing that, you know, I'm all over. Social media was one of the first to be super addicted to my BlackBerry at the time. I was using a lot of tech and thinking digital first, but didn't see myself as someone who would pursue a career in tech and my mom's voice again kicked in of You never know unless you try. And so I applied. I got into do digital advertising on the small business sale side, and it was through that experience that it exposed me. And then that's when I realized, Oh, there's a lot of tools that serve some businesses to grow them to help them grow. And it seems like anyone can use them. But none of the small businesses we're talking to are diverse, and I'm from a community with a lot of small businesses. My family, we have one, and that's what really made me think. Is there an opportunity here to do something with impact and sort of be the representative, the advocate on the inside. That internship is what shaped the trajectory of my entire career, not just a Google, but my work now realizing that often the tools, the solutions are out there. Some business owners, communities just don't know about them. So it's always like, what? I mean, we know our communities have hustle. What if they have the tools that's unstoppable? Like, the potential is limitless. And so that's how I got to Google. But that's also why I stayed at Google for so long because there was just so many products I could market. Did not think I do 10 years there, but it felt good to know I did it. I dedicated a decade of my life to that work. The legacy of work, not just mind the people I worked with, it continues. I started the Latino employee research group Hola. It was six of us and now it's in over 30 different offices around the world. And there's, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of outcome of it that I'm really proud of. But yeah, just I'm really grateful to my parents for so many things that you've heard me share about. But one of those being that they saw the potential in me beyond just cake decorating. When I graduated from Harvard, my mom did give me a Harvard apron and said, You can go to your end of the day. I did burnout about five years in and I went and finally pursued a program at the Cordon Blue in France, which was my childhood dream. And last night I taught a cooking class to a paying client through Zoom. Did not think I'd be doing that and margarita master classes through video chats and the Tequila tasting. So the convergence of it all has been really awesome.  [00:49:24][353.3]

Eliana: [00:49:25] You decided to make the sleep and leave Google pretty well known company to go out on your own. Your family's been so supportive to this point. Were they super supportive and excited about this next move?  [00:49:35][10.1]

Keith: [00:49:37] I think they're ultimately supportive of me in general. That's what they'd like for me to believe. I think that's true on a deep level, but I think my dad was visibly uncomfortable and maybe a little bit terrified every single time I brought it up. And I wanted their input. You know, my parents are my parents, but my also friends and mentors, and I really thought, this is a family decision, not a family decision, but a family conversation. And there was a phase when I just couldn't talk to them about it because it made them really nervous. My mom just figured I'd probably figure it out, but wasn't super enthusiastic, which, you know, I wanted that. It's a scary decision. I wanted that support. I wanted to hear her say, You get it, you know, go get it girl or whatever. You've got this. And it wasn't quite hearing that, although I had to learn between that and my dad just looking terrified that ultimately they wanted me to be safe. My dad came when he was four years old. My mom was raised here with, you know, she's one of nine kids. They all work really, really hard to make it. And so for me to say I worked really hard to get here, they had to work hard to afford me the life that I was able to live the opportunities. And then here I'm like, I made it in the tech world and they're so excited telling people that their daughter works like Google. And then all of a sudden to tell them, I'm ready to walk away. I think it was less for them about what they would tell people they didn't really care about, as much as, you know, this financial security, the benefits. There's something about Latino parents and their obsession with health care. Yeah. You don't have health insurance. You're going to die like overnight, you're just going to die. And so a little bit of that got in my head or the fear of what am I going to do? How do have benefits? What happens? A lot of those black box stuff that no one really tells you is manageable, that people have done it before. No one in my family had, but it has happened and I could be the first in my family to do it, or at least to have this right. If I'm the first of my family to get a job in tech, I'm also the first in my family to leave a corporate tech job as well. But eventually, I think my dad warmed up to the idea. But eventually, I just had to do it. It was just like, I can't keep spiraling on this overthinking overthinking, but being drawn to what I feel like I'm supposed to be doing. And my dad, at least, was the big one who I felt like I really had to convince, and I don't know that he was entirely convinced when I left. And I just said I'd do it anyway. I went for it. It was hard. I had anxiety attacks about this. I mean, I sound very happy and sure, but know it was very hard, right? Like, these are people not only who I care about, but also my dad's a very smart person. I'm like if he doesn't think this is a good idea, what am I doing? You know? And I'm privileged to have parents so I can talk to about these things, so I realize that. So not having their 100 percent blessing in some sense was hard, but I just had to believe that what I was doing made sense. I had tested things. I had people who wanted to hire me to consult or to help them with different things. I had enough proof points and savings. I felt I did the math. I looked at how long could I go? Making zero income at all. Like, let's not think best-case scenario. I thought worst-case scenario. If I make no money whatsoever, what's my run rate look like? And then if I fail, what's the worst-case scenario? And I had to tell them that I told them, Poppy, if I fail, I just go get a job and I'm right where I am now. So there's no real loss here. I mean, of course, the savings, but savings in time. But I think that's worth making a bet. And one of the things I told them was, at Google I know he was proud of me, that I created all these roles. Four out of five of my roles are created from these projects that started these pilots. And I'd convinced someone to invest in me. And I told him I couldn't have done this without their investment because I needed that level of support. But now I'm ready to invest in myself. So I want to take the risk they once took, and they always made a smart bet betting on me. I'm the smartest bet I can make. And he didn't say much back to that. I think he thought I dropped the bar. I think I did drop the mic a little bit, but they get it now and they see the way I'm moving. Switching gears, I think they see that I'm operating in the work dimension of my life the way that I am as a person because the corporate setting I learned a lot. A lot of good opportunities. Great, but it was like being a fish out of water in some ways. I was in a very operational focus ops heavy department, and I'm a creative and I didn't realize that because I didn't consider myself a creative because I don't do Photoshop and some of these conventional creator tools. And so I was always trying to fit the mold. And after a while, you know, I did that and I did it successfully, and I could keep doing that. But then I realized, Is it worth it? When I can move a lot faster, I can pivot more quickly and do more of what I love. I can do it here, but I'm not owning my own company. I'm not making this happen for myself. And if I do too many things, it makes people uncomfortable. Now it just makes people who ask too many questions uncomfortable or cool people like you who ask good questions. But I'm like, Now I get to do whatever I want. And you know, I have my formulas and my art and science approach to how I make the numbers work to pay the bills and everything else. But they had to see me do it to believe it.  [00:54:25][288.0]

Eliana: [00:54:25] So was there a turning point? Did you see was there a day or a week or a month where you saw like, OK, cool, they're getting at their stop, they're they're slowing down with the text message questions or worried. Because my mom, when I first started out, she was like, I just worry about you. I just worry. And the exact same thing. I'll get a job. If this doesn't work out like my degree doesn't go away, my experience doesn't go away. Totally.  [00:54:48][22.4]

Keith: [00:54:49] Yeah. I mean, and to be honest, the low point when I was like, Am I crazy? Is this worth doing? I thought I'm employable, right? Like, Yeah, right now I can still get a job. I was like, I went to Harvard and went to Google. I'm pretty sure someone will hire me. You know, like you go to the worst-case scenario. Like, I was like, And there's nothing against this. I would do this, not above it. I thought at one point, I'm like, Should I just be an artist and work at Marshall's like, Is that what I should just do to shift my whole life around? And just thinking, is there a worst case scenario? It's like, No, you just go get a job like, I think there's jobs that pay the bills and I can do that. There's jobs that align with my sense of purpose and my passion, and I would love to do that. So if I land somewhere in between, I'm going to be OK, or if anything on the higher end of the spectrum of being purpose-driven. Because the reality is, I still have to make sure the bills are paid. Sometimes I have to do part of the work that I don't love, but I love the output. I love the overall experience, you know. So I think that when I saw the tipping point for them or that shift was when I actually pulled my dad into the work a little bit when I started doing these virtual tastings for paying customers who wanted our tequila experience online, and I told my dad I was booking him for Zoom tequila tastings. Then he was like, Why would people want to hear me talk on Zoom? It was such a foreign concept, so I try to bring my family along for the ride. I can't always actually plug them in. But when I told them, Hey, we're doing a tasting for a team at T-Mobile, he was like, Wait, what? So, you know, I think it helped that it was a brand that they knew and could understand, but just something to anchor in right that it's something real. Or I could show them a website of a startup I had worked with. Look, we designed this website or look, we helped build this app and so that I think convinced them I'm doing something real. I'm working with people. I'm not just by myself, not doing much at all. And I am still bringing home good stories to tell, you know, I'm not just twiddling my thumbs at home.  [00:56:27][97.8]

Eliana: [00:56:28] Awesome. There's a thread that I'm hearing through all of this, which is you're creating opportunity, right? You didn't have an internship, so you created this one with the cheese company. Yeah, you didn't have the student group that you wanted. So you created that. And it sounds like didn't really have that role yet at Google when you started to create it there.  [00:56:45][17.5]

Keith: [00:56:46] I created it from scratch. The multicultural marketing not only team, but the practice hadn't been developed yet, and I just thought they're doing programs for small businesses. I can help connect the dots to bring it to diverse communities, mine and others like it that could benefit. And so I'm just grateful to the people around me who said yes to my vision. When I proposed ideas, everything started as a pilot with an early pitch. I had five roles at Google over the course of 10 years and I created four from scratch from these projects and it was just about pitching and opportunity. And you know, honestly, a lot of people have different approaches to this work. This, you know, advocating within a system type work. But I always thought if I see a gap or a missed opportunity, don't get mad, get strategic, and this is an opportunity for me. Need to lean in to being the one with people I would pull in, I didn't do it alone. I'm so grateful for their help, but collectively turning that into an opportunity to do something different.  [00:57:37][51.1]

Eliana: [00:57:37] Was there a process at Google that you had? It sounds like there is a pitch a pilot before they gave you the budget. Did that help you out in the entrepreneurship world? Yeah.  [00:57:46][8.1]

Keith: [00:57:46] Well, definitely. That was my own practice of doing it. I had a lot of supporters. I just I had to create my own blueprint. I didn't have one before me. I'm so grateful to the sponsors and mentors who helped me along the way because I was just kind of taking one step at a time with the bigger picture vision. Some of the vision was bigger than I even anticipated. I'm like, Oh, I did think of that, but I had to start here, you know, from A to B, how do we get there? So I developed that as sort of a practice that I just applied to everything I did. It was like, All right, find a problem. Think of some solutions. Find people who can help me deliver on that solution. See what they think. Yes. And the whole process. Let's build together and then train them, either working with the partner groups or how to do a culturally relevant research study or creative campaign, whatever that was, whatever we had to do. And then I would tell people we had 20 percent time at Google or projects outside of your control. You can pursue passion projects. So I would tell either the manager of the team or the executive sponsor I'd say, look at what we did with 20 percent of our time measured, Everything packaged up made the presentation of the results and then said, Imagine what we could do if we had 100 percent of our time and resources. So it was like, You already see, this is good and we're delivering results. But this is on late night weekends, extra out of our nine to five job time and with either no budget at all or very little. So imagine what would happen if this was really funded. And so that's my approach to everything, especially when you ask if it's applied outside of Google. Definitely. I've had clients who I helped in a small capacity before I left Google some coaching with people, and now they're entrepreneurs. Like, for example, I just saw a past kind of mine who was at Square and he knew what I was doing at Google, so he asked me to consult him, essentially consulting, coaching him on some strategy. So when he left to be a full-time entrepreneur, I was the first person he called to help marketing. And he's like, I liked working with you before and I'm on my own. And so it almost felt like we piloted even our client consulting relationship to know we can trust each other and we can do a lot of good things together,  [00:59:40][113.3]

Eliana: [00:59:40] On the multicultural side of things. I go back and forth on this right. I've talked to a lot of clients, and a lot of people were kind of stressing like, Listen, Latinos, Latinas, we're going to be the majority in 2040, right? Like, we need to flip the budget and we need to be talking about it in different ways. But then I also see the value in the power of what's happening right now. Talk to me a little bit about that. And in terms of, you know, still for Latino Latinas, Black-owned businesses, we're still seeing, as you know, there's this thing in the media world where it's like, we're gonna give two percent of the budget to Black-owned business that is so small, right for the 17 percent of the country. Right, right. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, I think the duality of multicultural like the importance and power that it has, but also how far it still needs to go.  [01:00:27][46.9]

Keith: [01:00:29] It's a great question that I love talking about, because to me, there's the passion I have and a sense of purpose around it to advocate for communities that are underserved. But I also know that this is make smart business sense. Yeah. So what I love is that I get to not only tell stories and find these beautiful anecdotes of people who have a small business and they're doing amazing things and we should support more businesses like that, etc. But I also love having the data and letting people know. The fact of the matter is that one in four kids born every day in America today is of Latin descent. The fact of the matter is that we are three times more smartphone-dependent than any other demographic. The fact of the matter is we watch more YouTube content, we do more social media engagement, we over-index and all use of digital platforms. And we are younger. We're 10 years younger than the average American. So, ah, so we're a younger demographic. Our consumer life cycle is longer. If you removed the label Latin, Latino, Latino, what are we want to call us? And you just saw our profile as a consumer of what we do as a hyper super connected. You know, we're big families are network effect is insane. We call that chisme in spanish. You know, we spread information that means very intelligent and, you know, we're so connected and we're doing so much online and we're young and all these things like, that's a marketer's dream, right? We watch, we engage with ads more than the average consumer. And you're paying for advertising. You should want to reach us. So in many ways, I try to remind people like this isn't just smart Hispanic strategy, smart Latin strategy that do good. This is just smart strategy, period. If you're not thinking about us now, you will be irrelevant. When we continue to grow in size and influence, you know, the most streamed artists of all time is by money. And if you don't know who that is, then you're missing out on general mainstream culture because we're shaping up. Now that's just looking at our community. But others like it, right? Minorities at large underrepresented groups. I think that people still think it's risky. And when leadership doesn't reflect us true, they think, am I going to put my reputation and my resources on the line? That's the vetting bar for me. If a leader is willing to put their resources and reputation on the line, even just as an ally, then we can do smart business together because a lot of people are too afraid, like they'll do a small, cute little activation, or we didn't really have a lot of results. Well, did you build a relationship with this consumer base, right? If you show up in another country and you do one little pop up event, you put a one billboard, you don't expect that country to love your brand. So the expectations of how the consumer is going to react to any effort are completely warped. None of that makes sense. And what I think is fascinating is, you know, Latinos as one piece of this massive, beautiful multicultural pie. We represent the second largest spanish-speaking country in the world after Mexico. So if you put us all on an island and just called it Latinlandia, the whatever and somebody discover this island, they would think, Well, we need to go after this market. It's incredible. But we're in America. So when I started this practice at Google. Google had never done any segments in marketing before in any market. But a lot of the work I ended up developing with teams, not just for our community, but other different groups. Those became examples, and I always told everyone around me, if you pay attention to what you do on a multicultural level, you are actually incubating prototyping a very smart global strategy because some of the results, I'll give one example I was marketing an app we launched to support small businesses and kind of helping them learn about marketing and so forth. The general market team got 12000 impressions on social media. That's awesome. Great job. In the same week. Marketing it in community, bilingually with ads. You know, the whole full strategy being culturally relevant and sometimes in language where 12 million impressions.  [01:04:01][212.1]

Eliana: [01:04:02] Oh my goodness,  [01:04:02][0.3]

Keith: [01:04:04] I don't care what background you are. I don't care what kind of do good thing you say. That comparison is insane. So I don't need to feel like this is some charity thing. It's a cute thing. No if people want to do smart business, they need to get with the program because we're doing it now.  [01:04:19][14.7]

Eliana: [01:04:20] So I love that so much.  [01:04:22][1.5]

Keith: [01:04:23] Right? I was like, you can't tell me nothing. I got 12 million impressions in the same week controlling for all variables because I was trained to be skeptical of it, right? Oh, maybe, maybe it's because x y z, we doubt everything. Oh, and the point I was actually making the last point of it was people were so shocked by those results and they knew it was apples to apples, apples to Manzanar because sometimes it was in Spanish, but it was still apples to apples. One was a little bit different flavor, but same, you know, same strategy. But then that helped them think, Oh, this will actually help us as a strategy for multiple languages in India, for bilingual French Canadian users. So again, this is smart global strategy. There's multiculturalism in every country in the world. And if we pretend that this is a U.S. experience, it's not the Africa diaspora. The Latin diaspora is phenomenal. And so I mean, I have friends who are Chinese but raised in the Dominican Republic, right? Like the world is such a melting pot. And it's not just such a catchy Little America phrase. Our people are everywhere of all different backgrounds. So ultimately, to me, multicultural marketing, if you are good at it and think about it as a practice, not just this thing we need to do to check off the box. That means you just better as a marketer because you know how to not market to yourself. You know how to put yourself in the shoes of someone else. And maybe you can empathize, but you can at least either sympathize or have the consumer you aim to reach reflect that in the people developing the creative, the strategy, all of it. And at the end of the day, you're reaching people on a values level because Latinos in America, we are not defined by language anymore. I have cousins who don't speak Spanish and they're just as Latinos and Latinos as I am. So our community is shifting. It's evolving. We are not a race, you know, we have so many different demographics within it. And I try to remind people diverse communities are not the same. You can't just cookie cutter approach, Oh, we did this for the black community and it will work for the Latino community. That's not necessarily the case, but more often than not, we have similar challenges. More often than not, there's similar opportunities. And the system of oppression and, you know, whatever kind of language you both want to describe it, it affects a lot of these communities in different ways, but the symptoms come from the same source. So if you're going to do something, be mindful of doing it authentically. You know, you're not going to tell one story to reach us all. But if you tell a good story, you're going to reach a lot of us because we can connect right? Like my parents grew up on music that English-speaking minorities made. That was not like what their parents grew up listening to that I now love. And I got to college when my friends were like, How do you even know this music that my parents grew up with this? You know, a lot of like if you look at the history of Hip-Hop in the Latino community or how there's, you know, Snoop Dogg is on a ranchera song in Spanish. So like, there's so much beautiful merging and the remixing of culture. But anyway, I think all that just it's fun and exciting, and it's really cool to do the work. But when people are just even afraid to start, it's like you're missing out on smart strategy, on really cool opportunities. And on the future of what this big, massive country's going to look like. And do you want to stay relevant?  [01:07:16][172.8]

Eliana: [01:07:17] Yeah, that relevance point is so critical, right? Because I think so many agencies, so many clients are worried about staying relevant to the experiment with different platforms, but they're not experiment with different messages. So that's such a strong point.  [01:07:29][11.6]

Keith: [01:07:29] Absolutely. And they want the results overnight without investing for the long term, you don't you can't expect someone that knows it to put a ring on it overnight. You have to earn the trust of the community and it keeps showing up. And if you don't nail it, you keep trying because you can't just give up once it's still worth it, even if you didn't get it right the first time.  [01:07:45][16.0]

Eliana: [01:07:45] So true. So ideal world. What does your world look like in a year from now? Are you moving to Paris and building?  [01:07:51][5.8]

Keith: [01:07:52] Well, I hope I can move anywhere. I hope the pandemic is past us in a real, meaningful way and that everyone is healthy. So first of all, my biggest hope for anything that we experience as a country, as a community and for myself, health and happiness tied for number one. First and foremost, if I've learned anything, it's that nothing matters without health and happiness, no matter what kind of entrepreneurial dreams you have, that's really matters to me. So a year from now, I hope to be very happy and very healthy. I hope to have done more interesting angel investing in startups because that's been fun to dove into and support people as they build their dreams and do great things with that. I want my dad to retire at some point, so I'm not sure what that looks like. You know and specific yet. I don't know that that selling necessarily. But if it's looking at as I have become an angel investor and I've now brought him into that world with me, I'm helping him ease some of the doubts I guess he had before about having investments. So we're exploring that soon as  [01:08:48][55.7]

Eliana: [01:08:48] well, saying, Okay, so he's always bootstrapped. It was always something that you are simply taking the revenue from the company and putting it right back in.  [01:08:54][6.1]

Keith: [01:08:55] And yes, in fact, my dad's optometry practice, my own job, all of it was what supported this what we thought was a project. Now that's not the case. The business is thank goodness the business is in a different place now, but completely bootstrapped. And the thought of getting investment is an intimidating one. I think for many my family included, but there's so much data that shows that minority owned businesses that do take external capital just grow that much faster. Think it's like there's a Stanford said. I believe it's like three. Times the growth when they have that capital, but, you know, learning about what it looks like, what are you giving up, what does equity look like and so forth? So the next year will be really interesting because. One of the also interesting aspects of the pandemic is that a lot of other tequila companies had their production impacted. So accounts are reaching out to us. Are our customers saying this brand is out? We're recommending you guys instead. So in some ways, sales went down when bars and restaurants were closed. But then when many reopened or they were doing beverages included in deliveries and so forth, and other brands also had a difficult time bringing over product. We have our warehouse here locally so we can manage it all. It became an opportunity for new customers to learn about us and to experience the product differently. Ordering an entire bottle delivered is not something that was done in the past. The laws changed a bit during COVID. So between the way the business is running and you know, the impact of social media always is shifting things for us because people in places we've never been to or hearing about the brand, which is exciting and you know, the longevity of making sure the costs are covered for distribution operations and all that. I'm hopeful that the openness I'm seeing in him about investors. I'm hoping that we can make that happen. And yeah, we'll see. But I'm really excited about the things I'm doing with clients and I'm starting to build some of my own platforms as well. And so Venture Studio is essentially what I'm doing is right now we're prototyping some ideas for different apps and putting them in the cloud. So just I hope that in a year from now, I'm not tired of juggling a lot of balls and knowing that someone probably will still ask me, What do you even do? And that I still have a very long way to answer.  [01:10:50][115.8]

Eliana: [01:10:51] That's great, though. If people want to get in touch with you, how do they do it?  [01:10:54][2.7]

Keith: [01:10:55] You can google me. Eliana Murillo dot com is my website, all my social accounts are linked there. On Instagram I'm @inmyEliment, on Twitter, My full name Eliana_ Murillo and I'm on LinkedIn as well so people can feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to hear from you.  [01:11:10][15.9]

Eliana: [01:11:11] Awesome. Eliana, thank you so much. This is such a fun conversation.  [01:11:13][2.3]

Keith: [01:11:14] Thank you. Really appreciate it.  [01:11:14][0.0]

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