Intro

Charlotte Sika, founder and CEO of iamcultured.co, joins Jothy Rosenberg to discuss her entrepreneurial journey and the importance of cultural awareness through curated experiences. Charlotte believes that anyone can achieve their goals if they are open to learning, willing to face failure, and ready to get back up again. She shares her unique perspective on courage as a habit, emphasizing that it grows stronger with each challenge faced. Originally from Nigeria, Charlotte’s diverse background and experiences have shaped her approach to business, allowing her to navigate complexities with confidence. Throughout their conversation, Charlotte reveals the inspiration behind her startup, Cultured, and how her initial struggles with food in the U.S. led to a successful venture that celebrates global diversity.

Show Notes

Charlotte Sika, a Nigerian entrepreneur and founder of iamcultured.co, shares her vibrant journey of cultural exploration and entrepreneurship in this insightful conversation with host Jothy Rosenberg. Having moved to the U.S. in 2019, Charlotte faced the challenge of adapting to a new culture, particularly regarding food, which sparked her desire to create a business that would celebrate global diversity. Her startup, iamcultured.co, focuses on providing curated cultural experiences through unique boxes filled with elements from different countries, including spices, art, recipes, and games. This approach not only allows individuals to explore various cultures but also fosters a deeper understanding of the world around them.

Throughout the episode, Charlotte discusses the importance of courage, resilience, and the willingness to embrace failure as part of the entrepreneurial journey. She reflects on her upbringing in Nigeria, the superstitions surrounding animals, and her educational experiences in engineering and business, which have equipped her with the skills to navigate complex challenges in the startup landscape. Her belief that “paths are made by walking” encapsulates her philosophy that taking action and learning through experience is crucial for success. Charlotte's story illustrates how one's background can influence their entrepreneurial path, as she shares the insights gained from her previous venture in sweet bread, which laid the foundation for her current success with iamcultured.co.

As the conversation progresses, Charlotte provides a glimpse into her innovative approach to business, revealing how she pivoted to include virtual travel experiences in response to customer feedback. This adaptability highlights her commitment to meeting the needs of her audience while expanding her product offerings. The episode serves as an uplifting reminder that the entrepreneurial journey is filled with unexpected turns, and that with determination and an open mind, anyone can forge their own path to success. Charlotte's inspiring narrative encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to embrace their unique stories and cultural backgrounds as they embark on their own journeys.

Takeaways

• Charlotte believes anyone can achieve their dreams if they are willing to learn and adapt.
• Courage is a habit that develops over time, not just an inherent trait.
• The entrepreneurial journey often involves unexpected pivots that can lead to new opportunities.
• Charlotte’s background in engineering helps her tackle complex problems with a systematic approach.
• Her experiences in previous startups provided valuable lessons that accelerated her current venture.
• Embracing failure as part of the journey is crucial for personal and professional growth.

Chapters

• 00:10 - The Journey of Courage and Learning
• 02:59 - Charlotte's Journey from Nigeria to the US
• 07:55 - Exploring Cultural Connections through Food
• 15:19 - Navigating the Journey of Entrepreneurship
• 23:34 - The Journey of Grit and Courage

Hello, I'm Jathy Rosenberg, the host of Designing Successful Startups, where today's guest is Charlotte Sika.

I think anyone can be whatever they choose to be if they're willing to learn and if they're willing to be open, if they're willing to fail, if they're willing to get back up. Some personality types are predisposed to doing all of these things, but I think that courage is actually a habit.

Charlotte Sika is the founder and CEO of I Am Cultured, llc, a venture dedicated to fostering cultural awareness through curated experiences.

Trained as an engineer and holding an MBA with concentrations in data science and international business, Charlotte blends analytical expertise with entrepreneurial vision.

Charlotte is passionate about sharing authentic cultural stories and empowering meaningful cross cultural engagement through immersive products and experiences. And here is Charlotte, and welcome to the show. Charlotte.

I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Oh, I'm thrilled. Hey, I like to start by setting context. And could you tell us all where you're originally from and where you live now?

I am from the wonderful country of Nigeria and I currently live in Dallas, Texas.

And when you were born and growing up, were you in one of the big cities or out in one of the villages?

I grew up in a relatively small city, but it wasn't a village. No.

What was the city?

Poharcot.

Okay, you're in a country that is filled with some of the most amazing animals. Did you get a chance to see a lot of them as you were growing up?

Yes, yes, actually, very.

The neighborhood that I grew up in just had lots of cats, of which in my culture, cats are not well liked because there is a whole thing about, at least at the time, about cats being witches that actually turned into, oh my goodness, superstition around that. So people generally did not like cats, but now you can actually have people in my country that have cats for. For pets. But growing up, that was.

That was very, very, very, very rare. That did not happen. And then we also had lots of goats and chickens just wandering around.

So obviously there's a story. And maybe you can just tell us really briefly how you made your way from Nigeria to Dallas, Texas.

Oh, now that was a longer journey. My first stop when I got to the US was Tulsa, Oklahoma, of which many people don't know where that is on the map. But I went there for my master's.

I got an MBA with concentrations in data science and international business. And then after that I got a full time job in Red Oak, Texas. And that was the first, that was my first foray into the great country of Texas.

They do think of themselves as a separate country, don't they?

We think very highly of our state. And now I claim it.

Now you claim it well, as you should probably along the way. You speak English beautifully. So did you study it in school when you were back in Nigeria? Did you just travel a lot and learn it?

How did you get such a very smooth English, become a smooth English speaker?

Whenever people ask me that, the first thought that comes to my mind is, hey, I better speak it well, because that's the only language I actually really speak. And so it, it would be helpful if, if I can speak one language.

Right?

So English is my primary language. That's basically. Yeah.

Oh, okay. So then it. Then essentially you're being very kind. You could have said that's a stupid question since I grew up speaking English.

We're going to get into your startup.

But one of the things that you said to me in our first conversation was that there's a quote, or maybe it's a philosophy that reflects your worldview. What is that?

So my favorite quote, I think for the past probably 10 years that might have been the first time that I heard it, is by Antonio Mado. And he says that paths are made by walking.

And what that tells me is many times the really great things that we do in life are things that may have never been done, or the journeys that mean so much to us or make us who we are at the end of the day are probably journeys that we have never taken by ourselves or have a concept for. But we figure things out along the way. So as we go, things become clear.

When we sit back and want to know the steps 1 through 10 of how things are going to play out before we make any move, we just stay stuck.

And I think needing clarity, like complete clarity for every single stage of something, that of a journey that we want to go on could just be a sign of fear. So there is a place of planning, but there is nothing like stepping out and figuring things out along the way. So that is my favorite quote.

Paths are made by walking.

I feel like you're describing your journey into the startup, which now I think is a perfect time for you to tell us what it is. Hi. The podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book, Tech Startup Toolkit, how to Launch Strong and Exit Big.

This is the Book I wish I'd had. As I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years, I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong.

It's for the founder, the CEO and wannabe founders of tech and non tech startups. You could get it from all the usual booksellers. Now back to the show.

So at Cultured, we help people to engage, to experience cultures from all around the world. The main way that we do that is through our country boxes.

And each of these boxes are based on a specific country and they have different touch points of the culture. So like spices, art, recipes, games, the. The whole aim is to give you a slice of this culture and an invitation to actually learn more.

And so if you get one of our Cultured boxes and all you want to do is just to have a taste of something from some other part of the world, if that's as deep as she wants to go, that's all well and good, but if you want to dive deeper, we give you that platform to do so. I started on this journey because I really wanted to create. What actually started me out on this journey was my love for food.

When I first moved here to the US I really struggled with the food.

And so I decided, like, hey, if I am having this problem, there is a very great chance that there is several other people from my country who are also having the problem. So why not fix this for all of us?

And I just noticed in hindsight really, that my preoccupation in wanting to start that wasn't even on the food in itself. But I found myself thinking more and planning more around the state space that I would make in this food place.

I was thinking more about the sounds that people would hear when they come in. I was thinking more about the clothing that the serving staff would put on, the drinks that would be served.

My first thought was no sweet tea, because we have all of that everywhere here in Texas.

So what I really wanted to create was a space such that if people step in here, they feel like for a hot second they are not in the US anymore and they were in my country. And that that was what I was trying to, to create.

And then one fateful summer when I was in the heat of all of this planning, I dedicated a whole week and I went downtown Dallas. At the time, I didn't even have a car. And so I, I, I got a hotel down downtown Dallas. And for that week, I spoke to between 50 to 60 people.

Um, I averaged like 20 miles each day. Just walking and just speaking to whoever would speak to me. Um, needless to say, I had very interesting ex. Experiences.

Um, but that was what brought me into what I am doing now because I, I went out asking people. The, the, the main question I was trying to answer was, hey, what do you think about eating foods from other parts of the world?

Like, how would you feel about eating foods from other cultures? And then somehow everyplate and hellofresh came up in, in conversation.

But since that wasn't what I was going for, I tried to, you know, push it to the side, but it just kept coming back up and so I decided to, you know, lean into to it and that's how I came up with the whole box thing. Um, and yeah, here we are today.

You don't like the food, but you've. You said you don't like the food that you have found in the US.

Mostly I said when I first moved here, I struggled with the food. I'm adjusted now.

Texas is famous for their Tex Mex. I mean, there's so many people from Mexico that probably some of the best Mexican food you can get in the United States is this Tex Mex.

Do you, do you enjoy that?

Honestly, I did at first, when, when I first moved here, but now not as much and I'm not sure why. Something has changed in my taste palette and I don't know what it is. I, I love spicy food though.

I try to make Mexican myself. You have a. Originally, your, your background was. Your educational background was in engineering, right?

Yeah.

I think it's always interesting to talk to people who come. Come out of an engineering background, whether or not they got an mba. How has that shaped the way you think about entrepreneurship?

The first thing that comes to mind is when I was doing my bachelor's, it was very common to have problems that were like a page long and then we would have to work through, through it.

Now what that really taught me was how to look at something that was very complex and very big and not be scared and how to just think through the, the units of what, what I am looking at. Let me put it this, this way. My background really helped me to not get scared when things are not clear or when things are complicated.

And so for my business, many of the things that I'm doing are things that are new to me.

But the technical background that I have has helped me to look at a very big problem and just narrow that down to the different components of that problem and tackle it in that way. Something else too is the process Mindset that it has given me through think in terms of steps.

And so people tend to be stuck just in, in, in the conversations that I have with people, they see something big and then they, they just stop in in their tracks. But for me, it's just more like, okay, so this is where I am at.

What are the steps between here and my, my, my goal and how do we get on that journey? So I would say those are the two biggest takeaways from the five years that I spent doing that degree.

What about the, the master's in. And the master's in business?

How did that affect that you added that on top of your engineering background, then how did that help on your entrepreneurial journey? In addition to what you just said about engineering and enabling you to deal with complexity?

The master's that I had in business gave me a technical framework to, to work with, which is super helpful. Prior to now, I led a group several years back and we did some fundraisers and I just love things to be as excellent as I can have it.

And so one of the people that I led, I had him give the, the, the records that we had to his cousin who, who was an accountant. And then she put everything in the P, P and L, the balance sheet and all of that, and she gave it back to us.

And when he brought it to me and I looked at it, I was like, okay, what does this mean? Did we lose money? Did we make money? I am more con. I'm confused now than when we started.

And it was at that moment I knew that I was going to study business because this is something that I have a passion for. And I think that if there's anything that is worth doing, then it's worth doing well.

And one of the ways that we make that happen is by equipping ourselves with the knowledge that we need to, to make it happen.

Neither of those fundamental educational steps that you took prepare you for dealing with failure. But we all know that in, in the startup world, failure isn't really, that's not actually even a good word for it.

When something doesn't work out, including a company that isn't failure, that one didn't work for a number of reasons. That, and so how, how has your view of failure changed or evolved?

I used to want to be perfect at my first try. Um, I was an all A's kid for as long as I knew myself from a very young age. But now I see failure as a part of the journey.

It, it's a part of the learnings. I even Learn more from the times that I failed versus when things just weren't the, the way that I thought.

Um, also what I actually think is we are not, we don't know our journeys or our paths as much as we think that we do. We set out on, on a journey and we think that the destination is point B.

But along the way something happens when we try something out and it doesn't work the way that, that we think it, it should have.

But what has actually happened is regardless of where we end up, we are not at the place place that we started and that that pivot could actually lead us to the place that we should be in the first place. And I don't know if that makes sense.

Well, can I interrupt?

So I, what I, I, I think I understand where you're going with this, but maybe you could actually put some specifics on it with your journey to where you are now uncultured because I'm pretty sure it wasn't a straight line from where you started to where you are now. And tell us about some of those pivots along the way where you had to make a change from what you were doing.

A previous startup that I worked on with another friend of mine was a sweet bread startup and we sold to coffee shops and at farmers markets.

It, it didn't exactly end the way that I wanted or, or chose but everything that I learned and all of the effort that I put put into getting that off off the ground was very helpful for me in starting cultured. Many of the systems that I built for, for that.

Even if the, the startup that I'm doing right now is wildly different from from, from that I didn't have to learn as much or like go go through that learning. The learning curve was not as steep in starting this out because this is something that I had done prior and so it, it was a much smoother sailing.

Even the, the systems I used in the previous one were the same ones that I used now. And everything just happened much more quicker than if I had not done anything prior and was just going to start everything from, from scratch.

And so I actually thought that was going to be the thing that I would have done for several, several, several years. But now here I am running cultured. We we started this year within six months. We had our first product out in less than a year.

We have the second level of product out with a much better, much better packaging. Like everything is just happening at a much faster rate.

But it's because there was a depth that I got from Another season of my life that did not end in the way that I thought it should have.

And are you shipping these all over the country? Yes, but like are you shipping them to, you know, Massachusetts for example?

Not yet, but we do have people that have purchased from New York, Washington. Yeah. So the, the Northeast is on our radar.

And are, are you marketing pretty heavily? How, how are people finding out about it?

For the most part it has been word of mouth. I go to different events and I meet with people and that has been the main part of how people have found us.

But now we are currently building out our digital strategy so that people would not have had to have met me to come in contact with our product.

Talk to me a little bit about again how your entrepreneurial journey has gone. But, but, but how has it affected your personal growth? How has it changed you?

This journey has really helped me to know myself in a much deeper way. It has also helped me to face my fears. So I will tell you and I don't know if I can actually show this to you.

So there, there is this do doomsday ceiling when you have put all of your savings in, in your. In getting stuck and you feel like this is it and if this doesn't work out, my life is, is over. I, I had pre, pre sold a bunch of boxes.

My reputation was on, on, on the line. People had purchased for the holidays and they, they were going to gift it to C T CEOs and so it actually did matter that this came out right.

The first, the first packaging that I, I tried to do, I spent all night working on it and it just kept ripping through the, the. The box. Nothing was working. And the shipping time was also like closing in. I just kept like this, this huge dread was just hanging over me.

But through the night I kept trying and I kept working through, through it. And by the morning I got the chance to talk to someone else and I was able to figure it out.

What that actually like showed me or what that helped me see is what I often see as the end of the road or what I often see as, as you know, kind of like catastrophic is not always so.

Just that learning how to, how to keep going even when it looks like failure is the only option or failure is the, the only thing that is going to happen. Um, so it, it has definitely changed my DNA as a person. Um, it has also changed out the outlook that I have to life.

Prior to now I used to think of things mainly through my own lens. But now like when you have to market your business or sell to someone else.

It is using you to step out, out of your own shoes and see things from their own own lens. And so the way that I root, relate with people is even very different.

And then now like I even lean into wanting to work with other people because I know that I cannot get every single thing done by myself. And so there's all these little traits and values and qualities that I have come to adopt.

Great.

That leads perfectly into my next question, which is do you think anybody can be an, an entrepreneur or that there's a certain personality type that you have to have in order to be an entrepreneur?

I think anyone can be whatever they choose to be if they're willing to learn and if they're willing to be open, if they're willing to fail, if they're willing to get back up. Some personality types are predisposed to doing all of these things. But I think that courage is actually a habit. Courage is not just a trait.

I think it is a habit when once you stand up to your fears, once that first time is the hardest time and as you go it gets easier. So like courage is, is a habit. So I, I do think anyone, anyone can go on this journey if they're willing to learn and stick it out.

A related concept to courage is grit.

You've probably heard people say that it takes a lot of grit to do a startup company besides the things you've already told us, but maybe even going back in your, in your life, further back, where do you think your grit comes from?

I can trace it back to being a child and being bored.

And the only books that my dad had were books on, um, so the books that I read growing up in high school where books like who Moved My, My Cheese, the Enemy Called Average, the Billionaire Next Door, those, those were the books that I grew, grew up reading. Also my, my father, my parents were very involved in my life and so from a very young age I had the perspective of older people.

They wouldn't just tell me what to, to do, but it would actually like walk with me and tell me exactly why this is happening in like, exactly why they were asking me to do, do the things in the way that they were asking me to. And so that was, that was very, very helpful. And so from that early age I learned how to dig my, my heels in.

Um, they would always look at me and tell me that I was made for great things. And so I rose up to the, to the level of, of expectations that they had of, of me. And when once I learned how to do, do that.

It, it was just something that I could not unlearn. As I grew older, math was a subject that everyone saw as hard for my father would never let me say math is hard.

He will just always ask me, what is hard here? What is the, what is the specific line that you do not know?

And then he would sit with me for hours and explain it over and over and over till I get it or till I sleep off. But every time that I would say something was hard, my dad would not let those words go cross my, my lids will tell me, no, it is not hard.

You just don't know how to do it yet. And you can learn it.

He sounds like a great dad.

He's amazing.

Yeah. I have this saying, who says I can't?

For me, it's, it came from how I, I sort of had to fight back when I had lost my leg and a lung to cancer as a teenager and people were telling me all the things I, I, I can't do and I sort of rebelled and it led directly, you know, after years, it led directly to why I've done nine startups. You're, you've done two. Correct. You've got seven to go.

So I reached out to people on LinkedIn just to say, like, hey, you are part of my target market and I think I would like to sit with you and just hear what you have to say about the product that I have. And one of them reached out to me. He is a director and he has a team across the US and Costa Rica.

And at first he wanted me to ship him boxes that he could give to his team that they could, you know, like, have, have a thing at, at the end of the year, just to say thank you to each of them.

And then I was also going to have a local from the country host an unboxing session of the boxes, but I have not yet figured out how to ship out of the country in a way that is not as expensive. And so that just kept dragging on for a very long time and that just didn't happen.

So I thought that that door had closed and it wasn't going to happen and everything was done out of the blues. He reaches back out to me and he's like, is there anything else that you can offer me before the end of this year?

And my first thought is, are you asking me if there is a way that I can take your money? Absolutely, yes. But just give me one moment, I will come up with something. And so I go back to my team.

And very, very long story short, in less than a week, we created a virtual travel experience where we had a cultural expert from the country actually host this session. She went to different places and took some footage, and we did just a lot of work in making that happen.

But that is something that we offer to, to his team.

And it was just very nice to see, you know, people saying, like, hey, like, they actually never knew that about this, this country, or people trying to learn the, like, how, how to say different words in, in the, in the language of the country that we put out. And so that was pretty fun.

And just out of that, we now have kind of like a new product line where we can now offer virtual travel experiences to teams based on different destinations around the world.

So that sounds great.

Fun and exciting.

That sounds great. Charlotte, this has been great. Thank you very much.

I think people will get a lot out of this episode and you'll probably motivate some people to try creating a company themselves.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. Jodi.

That's a wrap. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of the Designing Successful Startups podcast. Check out the show notes for resources and links.

Please follow and rate us at podchaser.com/designing successful startups. And also please share and like us on your social media channels. This is Joffrey Rosenberg saying TTFN Tata for now.