Walking Away (Reflections on Yishi)
(Thursday, March 27, 2025)
I’ve really gotten to know my host, Valérie, over the past week and a half. She’s a beautiful woman in her fifties—tall, with a model-like figure, shiny, flowing brown hair, and an ever-elegant smile.
Every morning and evening, we spend a couple of hours chatting at the dining table while we eat.
Unlike Louis’s mother, who turns her home into a Michelin-worthy experience, Valérie doesn’t care much about organic ingredients or culinary perfection. She’s a casual home cook—raising three children on her own may have been her culinary and life training. Her food is simple but cozy, homey, warm, and relaxed.
Over breakfast and dinner, we talk about everything—starting with Lyon, the news, our work and travels, and expanding into our families, our pasts and future plans, even politics. (Thankfully, we’re aligned—and we’re both very open-minded.) I enjoy being around Valérie more and more. I feel like we’re on the same emotional wavelength.
This morning, she started a training course to become a leadership coach—someone who helps leaders grow not just in tactics, but in emotional intelligence. Before she left, we talked about leadership—the disconnects between feeling and thinking, between capabilities and EQ—and how those gaps often lie at the root of ineffective leadership. EQ, we agreed, can be developed endlessly. IQ? Not so much, but it doesn’t matter.
I took a spoonful of cereal, and my mind drifted to my experience building Yishi—my Asian-inspired oatmeal and pancake mix brand that, at its peak, was trending in 5,000 grocery stores nationwide, including Walmart and Whole Foods.
Until last July, when we shut down—right in the middle of rapid growth.
The mistakes we made. The mistakes I made.
Yes, we were deeply unlucky:
Endless supply chain delays and price hikes from COVID
Labor shortages that caused our co-packer to cancel production without notice
Oat prices skyrocketing in 2021, just as we launched nationally
Two major manufacturing accidents, each resulting in six-figure losses and PR nightmares
An unreasonable co-packer contract locking us into dangerously high volumes and frequencies
Sky-high costs from all sides—sometimes just to make a basic improvement (the final UPC change killed us)
But the mistakes I made as a leader—those may have mattered more:
Hiring the wrong people, believing hard work and eagerness could substitute for readiness
Paying team salaries we couldn’t afford, while I took just enough to survive
Saying yes to ideas I didn’t believe in, just to support the team
Letting tension with my co-founder get to me
Being too optimistic. Too bold. Then, crashing into doubt and losing confidence completely
Just to name a few.
Of course, we did many things right. And whenever someone made a mistake, we’d say, “This is education. We paid to learn. We won’t make that mistake again.”
But those lessons came with real, lasting costs. And I couldn’t raise the funding we needed in 2022 or 2023.
What followed was a string of layoffs, painful cost-cutting, and a daily grind of trying to raise money while inventing new, creative ways to grow profitable revenue.
Every day, I was at war. I didn’t allow myself to feel, or reflect. No yesterday. No tomorrow. Just execution. Do. Don’t think.
The last three team members—including me—worked without salaries. We built the most efficient model we could. Our bank accounts dipped below zero weekly. Still, we clawed our way to real progress.
In our final 12 months, we doubled sales while cutting costs in half. We were almost profitable—a rare feat for a tiny 7-figure business in national retail.
But it was just a little too late.
The early mistakes had already pushed away investors. The co-packer contract penalized us for not producing. And we had no inventory left.
Products, money, time—we ran out of all three.
In the final few months, my family sent money to help pay vendors. I got cast for a food entrepreneurship TV show—to win funding—but had to drop out because of debt collections. I nearly begged the investors who never liked us. (Side note: begging rarely works. FOMO works better, even for the exact same business.)
Some people were on the phone with me every day, trying to help.
But after countless sleepless nights, I decided: it was time to throw in the towel.
You have to know when to walk away.
After five years building Yishi, I missed my family. I couldn’t stand seeing my boyfriend stressed anymore. I wanted to relax on a Friday night. And embarrassingly, I was broke. After never paying myself a meaningful salary and only pouring more and more money into the business.
Practically, I told myself: We had no product left, only a mountain of co-packing liabilities. It’s time to walk away.
And honestly, it might be the best decision I’ve ever made.
Because in choosing to walk away, I finally began to ask: What do I want in life?
Not—how do I prove them all wrong?
Not—how do I fight to the bitter end?
For the first time, I realized:
Maybe this isn’t what I want anymore.
Maybe I don’t have to be the “oatmeal girl.”