Women on the Move Podcast

Agua Bonita CEO and co-founder on her vision to be a leader in better-for-you beverages

Kayla Castañeda turned a favorite childhood treat into a successful and fast-growing good-for-you beverage company. In this episode of Women on the Move, the CEO and co-founder of Agua Bonita sits down with host Sam Saperstein to talk about her family, company, thoughts on ambition, and advice for other founders.

 

Journey from California’s Central Valley

 

Kayla tells Sam that she grew up in a family of migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley. Her grandfather would bring home fruit from the fields and make aguas frescas for the family. She also grew up with a dream of owning her own business—and although she didn’t realize it then, producing good-for-you versions of those refreshing fruit-based beverages would become her business plan.

 

First she cut her teeth in the food and beverage industry from the inside. Growing up in a small town made her crave something entirely different, so after high school she moved to New York City and started working in food and beverage, eventually moving into a sales and marketing position with Major League Baseball. She then took a role with Coca-Cola that bought her back to her roots in California.

It was during the pandemic, while working as a consultant for food and beverage companies, that she had the inspiration for Agua Bonita. “Oh, this is something that has been around in my family and in our culture forever,” she recalls thinking. “So why am I not doing something like this and why is this not commercially available?” Within a week she had fleshed out a business plan and embarked on a learning curve with venture capitalism. Agua Bonita’s product of a “modern” agua fresca—they use 80 percent less sugar than traditional recipes—was a hit. They first found a place on shelves in small California retailers and recently landed their first national retailer with Whole Foods Market.

Kayla attributes their success to their healthy approach as well as their commitment to corporate responsibility. Their sustainability efforts include a reliance on using imperfect fruit and recyclable aluminum containers, and they work with nonprofit partners like Justice for Migrant Women to help current migrant farm workers. But she says she believes their defining characteristic is their flavor profiles. “Right now our current offerings range from some more traditional ones like hibiscus and pineapple and sweet melon to some more fun and modern takes on these drinks like mango habanero and watermelon chili and some really cool new innovations coming soon. And then our packaging, we use a lot of fun packaging that's inspired by our culture and put it on shelf as a work of art. It's the Bonita part of Agua Bonita.”

Ambition and helping others

In keeping with this season’s theme of ambition, Kayla also talks with Sam about her perceptions of her own ambition. “I do consider myself ambitious,” she says. “I asked my mom, have I always been this ambitious? And her answer was yes. And there's been teachers along the way that have helped you with that. So I think I've just always been ambitious and that ambition really stems from my family. No one has ever capped my dreams or told me that I could not do something internally. . . . It gave me the mindset of if not me, it's gonna be someone else, so why not me?”

In terms of advice, what Kayla most wants to convey to others is that everything is going to be okay. “I think sometimes we can get really tunnel vision, and there's a lot of things that you're juggling when you're trying to get a company off the ground, and the wins are really high, but sometimes the losses can be really low,” she says. “And I think just having people around me to remind me that it's all gonna be okay, whether it works out or whether it doesn't, it's all gonna be okay, is sometimes just like that humbling thing that I need to hear to just be able to get on with my day.”

She adds that she tries to encourage others by making sure that they're feeling fulfilled in other areas of their life. “Because I don't think that you can pour from an empty cup,” she says. “And so that is how I encourage people to keep going with things is that there are other things that you find joy in than just this one thing. So don't let this one thing eclipse everything else.”

 

Ful transcript here 

Mentor Moment: Creating a culture of belonging in the workplace

As a manager, I want to make sure I'm creating an environment of belonging with a strong culture. What are the best ways you've seen this done?

 

Live from the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, Women on The Move Podcast host, Sam Saperstein, welcomes Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse to discuss building workplace culture with intention.

 

Full transcript here 

Carving their own path: DEI leaders talk the power of storytelling and redefining ambition

In this episode, Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein sits down with two leaders in the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) space. They discuss the experience women of color have at work and how, through storytelling, they illustrate this experience for others who don’t look like them. Deepa Purushothaman is the author of The First, the Few, the Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America, and the co-founder of nFormation, an exclusive community for high achieving women of color. Ryland McClendon is the Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion for Corporate & Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan. Both women had early career success and followed slightly circuitous paths toward their current roles where they focus on driving the conversation on DEI and optimizing the work experience for everyone.

Find a home in the DE&I space

Deepa attended Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the London School of Economics while planning for a career in policy and politics. She landed as a consultant at Deloitte, where she stayed for 21 years, leaving during the early stages of the pandemic to focus on women of color research and topics. She tells Sam that “not quite fitting in” has been a part of her experiences her whole life. Growing up as one of only a few families of color in her hometown, she later found herself the only woman of color in many professional spaces throughout her career, especially her decades of consulting in the tech and telecom sector.

Ryland, meanwhile, wanted to be a singer when she was young. She also wanted to move away from her hometown of Atlanta, so she went to Duke University where she majored in economics and public policy. Ryland started her career in corporate banking at a regional bank and, frustrated by a lack of opportunity, moved to J.P. Morgan about 12 years ago. She had an opportunity to explore the human resources space a few years into her career and then knew that supporting the firms talent was the right place for her. That ultimately led to her current role as head of diversity and inclusion.

Stories and storytelling

Both women agree that listening to stories and encouraging others in their own storytelling is critical to growth in the equity and diversity realm. “Unless you tell stories to really impress upon people what different experiences you can have—depending on your dimension of diversity, whether that's race, whether that's gender, whether that's having a disability—the storytelling is the most powerful tool we can use,” Ryland says.

In the process of founding and running nFormation, and writing The First, The Few, the Only, Deepa listened to the stories of hundreds of women of color. She said she often hears women say that they hadn’t realized how much they would be representing their race at work. They describe the pressure of feeling that everything they do—what they eat, how they speak, even what objects they keep in the workspace—is under a microscope because sometimes they are the only people of color their colleagues know.

“You take on a lot outside of the job you were hired to,” she says. “I think that's kind of the dialogue that we need to get to, and those are the stories we need to tell, and that's how I have the conversation.”

The role of ambition

The conversation also veers into the territory of ambition, a top theme for the Women on the Move podcast in 2023.

Deepa describes how her own definition of ambition changed over the course of her career. “I think it started probably when I was a teenager. I was highly ambitious. I would say more competitive. I think I'm more comfortable with that word than ambitious, because I think ambitious is a little bit more vaguely defined, but I was always competitive, and always really good at everything I did.” Then, after leaving her career in consulting, her perspective shifted. “It's less about ambition. That word doesn't even mean anything to me anymore. It's success. I have really stepped back and defined success really differently.”

Ryland also describes herself as ambitious and says she wants to change the negative perception that’s often attached to the idea of an ambitious woman. “Last year a senior person used that word to describe me in the minute as a compliment and I was taken aback by it, but I'm gonna say yes, I am ambitious,” she says. “I want to reclaim that word. I want to make it a positive word.”

 

Full transcript here

Mentor Moment: Building an impactful business

For entrepreneurs who are building a business to drive impact, what advice would you give them?

 

Live from Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, Women on the Move Podcast Host, Sam Saperstein, talks to Dr. Anino Emuwa about finding your tribe and building a business with impact.

 

Full transcript here 

Championing diversity in funding with JPMorgan’s Leyonna Barba and Techstars’ Monica Wheat

Leyonna Barba and Monica Wheat are committed to advocating for diverse founders. Leyonna, managing director of Technology and Disruptive Commerce at JPMorgan Chase, and Monica Wheat, managing director of Techstars Detroit, have embraced diversity in funding throughout their careers. In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, they sit down with Host Sam Saperstein to talk about their passion for that cause, and how they encourage investors to get more proximate to a diverse group of founders.

Ecosystems and networks

Monica discusses how, after spending time working with start-ups and investing on her own internationally and in San Francisco, she ended up in Detroit and being drawn to Techstars’ mission. She initially tried to “copy and paste everything that was in San Francisco and bring it back to Detroit.” But she soon realized that didn’t work—there simply wasn’t the ecosystem in Detroit to replicate the Silicon Valley/San Francisco model. Founders didn’t have a network of other founders to rely on for encouragement or resources. “And that's where Techstars came in,” she recalls. “They not only came in and said, ‘here's a check and here's some support and some resources,’ but they kept coming back and they kept asking the questions like, ‘what do you need?’ And it gave us the courage to really think about Detroit and some of these other emerging markets shaping themselves versus trying to copy and paste what was in Silicon Valley.”

Leyonna agrees that an established ecosystem is critical for start-up success. “To be successful in venture and within the tech ecosystem, you have to have a strong network, which is why for many founders, diverse founders, female founders, they've traditionally been locked out of those markets, locked out of those rooms,” she says. She’s proud of the work her team does at JPMorgan Chase in terms of being intentional around ensuring that diverse and female founders and veteran-owned business founders all have a voice at the table.

“We have a lot of emerging diverse managers,” Leyonna says. “We've seen an increase in the number of those diverse focused funds over the last couple of years, making sure that they're in a room with potential opportunities for investment, bringing those networks together. I know that I sit in a very special place in intersection at JPMorgan Chase where the power of our network can be amplified if we use it to bring those parties together. And it's part of the reason that I love the work that we're doing with Techstars.”  

Making change

Leyonna and Monica agree that increasing the very small percentage of VC money that goes to diverse women—Sam currently notes that it stands at about 3 percent of all funding—will require funders to be deliberate in their attempts at inclusion. Monica says she doubts that any current funders are trying to purposefully divert money away from women- or black-owned businesses. “But you also have to be very intentional about the fact that you are including them. You have to be very intentional about the fact that you're making an environment that's not just for gamers and 18 to 22-year-olds, that it is for folks who are different ages and coming from different backgrounds,” she says. “The space of investing in women and investing in underrepresented founders is the biggest opportunity in investment to date because these are untapped markets that folks just really haven't had access to and the folks that are building in these spaces haven't had access to these markets.”

Leyonna agrees and emphasizes that it can’t just be diverse fund managers who fund diverse owners—it needs to be all investors. “Not all investments and all the people you're investing in should look exactly like you or only solve problems for certain types of people,” she says. That’s one reason, she notes, that it’s critical to have women and other diverse people on boards and investment committees. She describes it as following the money trail. “And I think the beauty of what Techstars is doing with this $80 million that is powered by JPMorgan Chase is they are using the fund structure to show and to amplify that investing in diversity is not charity,” she says. “It is real dollars, it is good returns. And hopefully by continuing to see that performance, it will create a fear of missing out from others.”

 

Full transcript here

 

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of February 2, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Mentor Moment: Confidence vs Ambition

What is the relationship between confidence and ambition? And if so, how does it contribute to success?"

 

Women on the Move Podcast Host, Sam Saperstein, welcomes Kat Zacharia, Head of Organizational Effectiveness at JPMorgan Chase & Co., to share her thoughts on what confidence means and how when coupled with ambition it can lead to success.

 

Full transcript here 

On a mission to build a clean-eating lifestyle community, with Base Culture founder and CEO

Jordann Windschauer believes everybody deserves to have quality food made from pure, nutrient-dense ingredients. Here, the CEO and Founder of Base Culture sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about her journey from making paleo-friendly baked goods in her apartment to running a 44,000 square foot facility producing items for national distribution.

Beginning with a gym challenge

Jordann was just out of college when she joined a CrossFit gym that was running a paleo challenge. Looking for ways to clean up her young adult lifestyle a bit, she signed up for the challenge. She recalls that she didn’t know one thing about paleo eating at the time, but she soon found that she was attracted to the simplicity of the ingredients—and she was a huge fan of the way it made her feel.

Soon she was experimenting in her kitchen, trying to bake the perfect paleo banana bread and brownie. Her motivation was that she wanted to treat herself to something that was good for her and not just okay-tasting, but delicious. “It took me six months, because it's extremely different baking with seeds and nuts as opposed to flour and yeast and sugar and all of these traditional baking elements,” she recalls. “I was just doing it for my selfish wants and desires. I never really had a business in mind at this stage.”

After those six months of experimenting and perfecting, her gym began its next biennial paleo challenge, and Jordann started bringing in her baked goods to share with friends. She still wasn’t thinking of a business, but the reaction from her gym friends helped her along that journey. They loved the baked goods and they really loved the idea that they didn’t have to bake them themselves—they could pay Jordann to bake extra for them. "I started a business on Facebook and would post online when I was going to make something and the people would place their orders and I would make everything at night and deliver it on the weekend,” she tells Sam.

After her small business took off, scaling up seemed only natural. She began by naming her brand Paleo Box but after less than a year she landed on Base Culture. “We are trying to lead this global revolution around nutrition culture, to honor that and do it so that we're creating the best for you baked goods, that are held to our mammoth standards,” she says. “And how we describe our mammoth standards are essentially a bar that you cannot rise above. It's the highest bar possible. And we did that by creating our own manufacturing plant. We built a 44,000-square-foot plant to bring these products to life. We weren't just adding a product to a category that already existed, but doing it a little bit differently.”

Ambition and embracing challenges

While Sam notes that ambition is not always perceived as an admirable quality in women, Jordann embraces the label. “I would say that sometimes I'm blissfully ambitious and keep away those dark voices that come up,” she says. “We are in a stage of the business where those scary voices come in saying, ‘What if this isn't going to work?’ Or, ‘What if I let everyone down and what if I lose everyone's money who's invested in this? And what if I fail?’”

Her advice for staying on track while also heeding your ambition is to stay true to your purpose. She notes that there is an “insane” amount of pressure on entrepreneurs to build an empire and do the impossible. Recognizing that so many decisions involve uncertainties and unknowns, Jordann says that knowing that you won’t always have the answers is critical. When you do need to make a decision, she says you should be able to say a full-bodied, unqualified yes.

“When I look back at some of the things where we took a misstep here or there, I really know in my gut that there was something telling me at that point that something's not right and I ignored it for one reason or another,” she says. “So when you're making a decision, have the full body yes. And if you have any inkling of doubt, lean into that and explore it and either that doubt will subside or it will get bigger, and then listen to it even if it's not the easy choice.”

 

Full transcript here 

Mentorship Moments: Defining ambition and why it’s important

How has the discussion on ambition and the perception of ambitious women evolved over time? Why is it important that Women on the Move at JPMorgan Chase’s mission is to fuel female ambition?

 

Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein breaks down why it’s important for women to be ambitious and why JPMorgan Chase has made it their mission to fuel female ambition.

 

Full transcript here 

The Women’s Network founder Jamie Vinick talks networking and why ambition should be celebrated

Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein kicks off the podcast’s fourth year with a focus on the nuanced role that ambition plays in women’s lives. Here she sits down with Jamie Vinick, founder and president of the Women's Network, the largest collegiate women's networking organization in North America. With a mission to connect women to each other, to industry leaders, to resources and to mentorship, the Women’s Network grew from a pandemic-era launch at Syracuse University to a network including chapters on more than 120 college campuses in the United States and Canada with 45,000 members.

 

Filling a need on college campus

Jamie tells Sam that her inspiration for starting the Women’s Network actually grew from an uninspiring event. After arriving at Syracuse University for her freshman year, feeling like she was “behind” her peers in terms of career focus, Jamie threw herself into attending campus speaker events, looking for inspiration. “There was one event in particular that really changed my college experience and has impacted my life,” she says. “I left that event feeling very uninspired and I took that lack of inspiration to heart and thought a lot about it and launched the Women's Network as a club on campus eight months later.”

Jamie was dissatisfied with this particular event because of what she thought was a missed opportunity. “Here was this incredibly powerful accomplished woman who came in to speak about her career, and there really were no topics or conversations that centered around gender or in particular gender in the workplace,” she recalls. “And I felt like it was this tremendous missed opportunity to have nuanced, real, raw conversation on the challenges, the biases, the barriers that disproportionately often affect women more so than perhaps our male counterparts.”

She also says she recognized a lack of community around women’s ambition and being able to celebrate having career interests and meeting people in a non-competitive environment. “And it was a culmination of the lack of conversation, the lack of community, the lack of true mentorship regardless of what industry you were interested in pursuing a career in that culminated into this idea.” By her sophomore year, Jamie was going dorm to dorm, knocking on more than a thousand freshman dorms to hand out flyers about the brand-new Women’s Network. 

 

Expanding and building confidence

Throughout her time at Syracuse, Jamie remained committed to building the Women’s Network. In the fall of her senior year, she turned down a full-time job opportunity, realizing that she wanted to focus on growing the network. In February, she chose five “random” college locations to launch proof of concepts. “We launched, and hundreds of people were coming out to these meetings, and then the next month Covid hits and everything was moved online,” she says. “No one knew what Zoom was. My professors didn't quite know how to lead a virtual classroom, and so I just put my head down, decided I wanted to see where this could go, and I doubled down on the work and we just kept launching. So we went from one school to about five additional universities to 16 to 22 to almost a hundred, in a little under two and a half years.”

Celebratory of ambition

Jamie explains how the Women’s Network functions: “The chapters operate in the sense of hosting their own events,” she says. “And then we also have national events open to members in the entire network. We host experiences such as speaker events, alumni receptions, networking trips, financial literacy workshops. Then we also host more social events as well.” She says the goal is to ensure members have access to the right networks, the right resources, and the right community.

Today, Jamie says, she’s looking ahead to moving the Women’s Network beyond college campuses to reach women as they’re entering and advancing in the workplace. She notes that the mission really speaks to a broad range of women. “The concept of being very celebratory of ambition, which we talk all the time about in the Women's Network, has struck a deep nerve with a lot of people,” she says. “A lot of people initially join to either meet ambitious individuals or to explore their own career interests, and then they often stay because they want to develop leadership skills, build more confidence, access better mentorship or resources specific to their career or industry, and to have vulnerable conversation.”

Full transcript here 

Mentor Moment: Joining a board of directors

As I continue to grow in my career, I've become more and more interested in joining a board of directors. Do you have advice on joining a non-profit board to build your skillset and round out your portfolio? If I'm thinking of being on a corporate board one day is being on a non-profit board a step stone to that?"

 

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, welcomes her colleague, Rebecca Thorton of the Director Advisory Services to give advice on how to join a board of directors

 

Full transcript here