An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Pace yourself! You can only lead effectively if your cup is full. Leading from a place of emptiness, burnout or stress behooves no one.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sachi Singh, Rootless Founder and CEO.

With a decade of experience in international climate change solutions across non-profits, academia, and philanthropy, Sachi is well aware of what we’re collectively up against. In seaweed, she found a rare bright spot: a timeless ingredient with transformative potential for health, climate, and local economies. After a year of experimenting with different recipes, she became the founder and CEO of Rootless with the Daily Bite.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

Absolutely! I grew up in Bangalore, India and moved to the US for college when I was 18. I continue to be very close with my parents (who live in Bangalore) and my younger brother (who recently moved to San Francisco, where I currently live). I recently realized that my mom and grandma have influenced the way I think about food and health. Growing up, I never paid much attention to Ayurveda, but I’ve started to think more deeply about it these days. I love and subscribe to the philosophy of food as medicine, consistency, and doing a little bit of good for your body every day.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I’m inspired by this quote by Helen Keller — ‘A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.’

This quote reminds me to disentangle the “pursuit of happiness” from “pursuing a life without adversity” and build the muscle of resilience.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I read Overstory by Richard Powers as I was quitting my job to start Rootless: that book could not have come at a more serendipitous time in my life. Centered around nine human stories, the book gives you a unique insight into the expansive lives and secrets of trees. As I embarked on this journey to reimagine the future of food, this book injected me with deep inspiration — about the resilience of nature and the kindness of the human spirit. Most of all, it made me feel hopeful. After a decade of working in the doom and gloom of climate change, Powers made me realize that stories could inspire people to think and behave differently — maybe even unselfishly.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

Reflecting back, I think naivety and passion were the two most powerful tools in my toolkit when I started to build Rootless. I spent a decade of my professional life in the climate and oceans space, so my startup-CPG-food-regulatory learning curve was terribly steep. But when I quit my job, I knew I wanted to get more people to eat and grow sustainably sourced seaweed — with the belief that if we do this right, seaweed could be the future of food and farming. So I just built.

I started with consumer research and mapped out the landscape. Seaweed is such a potent source of nutrition, I wondered why more people don’t eat it in the US. This led me to a few design principles for our first product, The Daily Bite; I actually stumbled upon the base recipe for the bite pretty quickly. I then worked with a product team to commercialize the recipe.

The second big unlock was brand. I knew early on that I wanted to use the power of brand and digital marketing to reorient the customer from thinking about seaweed as only a snack or in sushi, to a real potent source of nutrition. In month 2, I wrote a cold love letter to Emily Heyward at Red Antler, which is arguably the best branding agency in the world. Soon after, we started to work together and built a compelling and coherent brand that I’m very proud of.

With the two brand and product foundations in place, I spent the next few months commercializing the product and working on a go-to-market strategy. After just one year, we launched to the market in January 2022.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

• Step 1: Find a starting point. I would argue that more often than not, entrepreneurs solve for problems they face themselves. This gives them a unique vantage point as they can be “their own first customer.” I would also encourage budding entrepreneurs to try to solve real problems instead of starting a company for the sake of it. It is a hard, fraught journey, and being deeply committed to your starting point will help you weather the storms.
• Step 2: Talk to google, talk to people. I think diligent and extensive market research is critical. Define the pain point sharply; who else is experiencing this pain point? What is the profile of this person? Where do they live? What would make their lives easier etc.
• Step 3: find your unique POV. This is where step 1 comes in handy. If you do enough market research, and you are solving for a problem you experience yourself, you will likely have a unique perspective on how to solve it. Successful innovation is about the idea of course, but it is equally if not more in the execution. Even if someone has “had the idea” you have, you can still be successful if you bring the idea to market and/or scale innovatively.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

Launching a physical product, especially food, is understandably more complex and takes more time than a tech product. Here are a few broad buckets:

• Legal: First off, ensure you incorporate your company, register in the state you plan to do business, file a trademark for your brand name and wordmark.
• Product: once you have a base recipe, you might have to work with food scientists to commercialize the recipe if you’re selling a consumer-packaged-good product that needs to be shelf stable.
• Feedback and more feedback: highly highly recommend force feeding friends, family, anyone who is willing to try your product to get feedback while you’re in product development. Fun fact: if you’re successful, you will always be in product development!
• Commercialize: once you feel good and ready with your product, you will likely need a manufacturing facility where you can either make the product yourself or one that will make the product for you. Finding the right co-man is key, as they are ultimately responsible for the product you launch with.
• Packaging: this has the longest lead times, and always takes more time than you think it will. Ensure you run your final packaging by a lawyer to ensure you’re FDA compliant.
• Go-to-market: All the while, you will need to think about how you want to sell your product. We decided to sell direct-to-consumer, so put a lot of time and energy into building our brand and website. Shopify is a great plug-and-play option for entrepreneurs looking to launch a digitally native brand. There is a lot that goes into a go-to-market strategy, but primarily, I would recommend: mapping out your customer persona (who are they, where can you find them, who do they trust), deciding the marketing channels you’re going to launch with (Instagram? Tiktok? Influencer marketing? Referrals? Facebook ads) and set aside a budget to test and learn.
• Launch! Easy peasy. And this is just the beginning…

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

1. Treat your naivety as an asset and not as a liability. I’m actually grateful for the naivety I went into this Rootless with; if I had known how difficult it would be, I would’ve thought long and hard before taking the leap into entrepreneurship.
2. Physical packaging and product take a LOT more time than you think they will take.
3. Feedback — especially the critical feedback — is a gift. As a founder, you need to take time to learn what your customers like and do not like about your product and brand.
4. Nothing will be easy, but nothing will be more fulfilling. When you decide to start a company, you are running from one fire to the next. Get comfortable putting out the fires with the least amount of damage done.
5. Pace yourself! You can only lead effectively if your cup is full. Leading from a place of emptiness, burnout or stress behooves no one.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

I think I’ve answered this question above.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

An early piece of advice I got when I was trying to commercialize my own recipe was: you don’t know what you don’t know. I think it is critical to surround yourself with the appropriate expertise when you’re starting to build a company or product. This can be in the form of paid consultants or mentors and advisors, but it is incredibly important to ensure you’re designing and deploying with technical experts.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

Ah this is a tough question but it is entirely dependent on who the entrepreneur is, what kind of business they’re building, and what kind of access to capital they have. IF you have access to personal or family financial resources, bootstrapping is one way to build a prototype of the product and find product market fit. You can build what and how you want because you’re building with your own money. Early stage venture capital allows you to hire the right people to help bring your idea to life — but the expectations around growth can be shaped by your investor.

I think there’s no right or wrong way to do it, however the real issue is that not ALL people can access either form of capital to get their business off the ground. Women, and especially women of color, are notoriously underfunded by venture capitalists. Bootstrapping presumes some level of financial comfort.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

It’s only been seven months since we’ve launched, so I can’t claim to have had huge success or impact just quite yet. That being said, I am extremely proud of the company we’ve built. We are hearing real feedback about how the Daily Bites are impacting peoples’ health — from improved energy levels and digestion to better thyroid health. Despite our size and stage, I believe we are a key player in the hyperlocal seaweed economy in the United States, and have the opportunity to shape the future of the industry. This is incredibly exciting to me.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

We are trying to inspire people to think differently about food, their health, and planetary health, all through seaweed. Seaweed is a uniquely abundant and nutritious crop that actively regenerates the environment in which its grown — making the ocean healthier for marine flora and fauna while potentially mitigating the impacts of climate change. However, less than 2% of the seaweed we eat in the US comes from within the country. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grow and shape this burgeoning blue economy and avoid the mistakes we made with land-based agriculture. We hope anyone reading will join us in this movement to make seaweed the future of food and farming!

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I’d love to have lunch with and learn from Kirsten Green, Founder and MD of Forerunner Ventures. I have been following her career and forecasts for a few years now — she has always been on the cutting edge of next-generation consumer concepts. I would love to pick her brain about how to build a brand that can inspire a true food systems transformation.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

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Making Something From Nothing: Sachi Singh Of Rootless On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.