One night I snapped at my three year-old daughter because she was trying to get my attention while I was on a Zoom call with my boss. It was after work hours. The call was about a technical bug that didn't matter. My kid wanted to show me something and I shushed her so I could troubleshoot a system I didn't build, for a product I didn't believe in, at a company that would replace me in two weeks if I dropped dead.
That's when I knew.
I'd spent 15 years in banking and another decade in media. I was good at the work. I made myself into a subject matter expert in every role I held. I took every recruiter call, meandered around the country for whatever the next best job was in front of me, scrimped and scraped my way into a good MBA program. I showed up when it mattered. I watched Janet Jackson's nipple reveal while scraping data from PDF reports for a critical Monday meeting. Super Bowl Sunday and I was working. I did the things you're supposed to do.
But I also spent years counting down the minutes until I could leave. At 3:21 PM you enter double digits in minutes remaining until 5:00. I did that math every day. Every single day.
So I quit. Not without a direction. I'd had an idea for years, a cacao beverage I couldn't stop thinking about, that I could never pursue while sucking at the corporate teat. I quit because staying was a threat to my mental health and the relationships I value most. My daughter will never remember the night I shushed her. But I’ll never forget.
Here's what nobody tells you about starting a business: you are going to suck at it for a long time.
I bought a bakery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I walked in with assumptions about what I could fix right away. I had hypotheses for what would work so much better than what the previous owner was doing. I got caught up in my own bullshit of thinking that I knew better and I've gotten the humbling that was coming to me.
You don't want to see the impressionist art I made of raw baguette dough that one time no actual bakers could work New Year's Eve. I wish I'd never seen it. We owners can't do all the jobs. I know I sure can't. What keeps me up at night is knowing that a baker might not show up for a scheduled shift. It happens. Frequently. Whether it's getting mugged on the subway, going to the emergency room with a roommate, or dealing with a car accident, bakers miss shifts. Shit happens, and at midnight in Brooklyn, it happens more than I ever imagined. The business I'm in, really all businesses, rely on people to do the things. And people are not reliable. Not always for individual faults, but because we all share the human curse of frailty.
Every day I show up and do the work anyway. The bakery was never the whole plan. The bakery is the trojan horse.
The whole plan is cacao.
My nickname as a kid was Chocolate. Not because my skin is dark or because I ate a lot of candy bars, but because I was obsessed with the stuff. Nestle Quick every day, powder sandwich once (don't recommend). But before Nestle Quick entered our life in the US, my mom used to make a hot chocolate drink with Chocolate Embajador bars her family smuggled in from the Dominican Republic. She grew up drinking chocolate on her family's farm. Her grandmother, Mama Vira, drank cacao every day of her life and lived to 99 on that farm.
There's an undeniable draw to cacao that's been with me my whole life and more accurately, for multiple generations of my family. When my brother mentioned that cacao innovation had pretty much stopped once Europeans invented the chocolate bar, I knew I had to do something about that.
So I built cacovu. cacao cold brew. Not hot chocolate. Not a candy bar. Not a supplement. A drink, the way cacao existed for 5,000 years before someone decided to add sugar and milk and market it as dessert.
This is Dark & Pure.
I'm writing about what's actually happening. The money we're making and the money we're losing. The decisions that work and the ones that don't. The days I want to quit and the days I remember why I can't.
Dark is the cacao. It's also the parts of entrepreneurship nobody posts about. The gut-check calls, the unreliable staff, the nights when the math doesn't work.
Pure is the product. It's also the intent. Build something real. Tell the truth about it.
I'm writing 30 minutes a day, every day, for a year. I'm publishing every week. You'll get the numbers. You'll get the mistakes. You'll see me do the work on me and the business.
Maybe the bet I've made on cacao is foolish. 90% of me is sure that's true. The other 10% though...
That part thinks there's still untapped magic in those beans.
Wanna see if I'm right?
Disclosure: I write these posts. AI helps me edit them.