Knot Your Average Investor: Manica Blain on Partnership, Community, and Founder Superpowers

Raising the Bar: Griffin Spolansky on Scaling Mezcla

In this episode of There Is No Alternative, Tina Bou-Saba, founder of CXT Investments, sits down with Griffin Spolansky, co-founder and CEO of Mezcla, to talk about building a protein treat brand from a UVA lacrosse locker room into a fast-growing presence in over 10,000 doors nationwide. Griffin started Mezcla in college after a chance hallway conversation with a guest speaker turned into a year of nightly recipe sessions in her kitchen. What followed was a year and a half of trial and error to commercialize a product, a launch funded by friends and family, and a fundraising philosophy built on never juicing the numbers, even when other founders told him it was the easier path. Griffin brings the discipline of a Division I athlete to building a company, and this conversation is full of concrete, hard-won lessons on team culture, capital efficiency, and what it takes to scale in one of the most crowded categories in consumer. In This Episode: The four months he spent pitching a manufacturer in person before they would take a chance on a 25,000-unit minimum run Why he refused to juice his numbers for investors, and how that decision turned a $50,000 first check into $3 million reinvested by the same investor over time The "team, not family" culture he built directly from his lacrosse locker room, including two-way accountability and a depth chart mentality Why athletes make some of his best hires, and what competitive sports taught him about taking criticism and pushing through rejection His framework for the growth-versus-profitability tradeoff: margin has to be right before you ever pull the growth lever How Mezcla has stayed lean at around 12 people while scaling into 10,000+ doors Chapters: [00:00] Do What You Say, Say What You Do [01:00] Welcome: Meet Griffin Spolansky of Mezcla [02:52] What Is Mezcla: The Space Between Protein Bars and Empty-Calorie Snacks [04:24] The Social Entrepreneurship Class That Started Everything [06:09] Walking Onto UVA Lacrosse: From Unranked to Number One in the Nation [09:10] Team, Not Family: Building Culture Without Coddling [11:29] Resilience, Rejection, and Why He Looks to Hire Athletes [14:00] Nightly Kitchen Sessions: Testing Recipes for Five Months Straight [15:19] When the Bars Went Moldy in Week Three and Rock Hard in Week Six [16:15] Four Months Pitching a Manufacturer With a 50,000-Unit Minimum [18:05] Two Years Living at His Grandmother's Apartment, Working Sixteen-Hour Days [19:46] The Over-Roasted Chickpea Batch and What It Taught Him About Product Feedback [20:40] The Real Sign of Product-Market Fit: Friends Actually Eating the Bars [21:29] The Fundraising Arc: From $400K Pre-Seed to a $10 Million Round [22:47] Why He Refused to Juice His Numbers — and What It Earned Him [24:35] Building an Advisor Bench Always Two or Three Steps Ahead [27:37] Standing Out in a Category With 500 Different Kinds of Bars [29:04] Why People, Not Product, Are the True Moat in CPG [36:10] Growth Versus Profitability: Why Margin Has to Come First 🎧 Listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube 🌐 Full-length episodes at CXTInvestments.com 📍 Follow Tina on LinkedIn for founder stories, investor insights, and candid conversations. 🎙 There Is No Alternative: Lessons in Entrepreneurial Leadership with Tina Bou-Saba

Common Scents: Sergio Tache on Democratizing Luxury Fragrance

In this episode of There Is No Alternative, Tina Bou-Saba, founder of CXT Investments, talks to Sergio Tache, founder and CEO of Dossier Perfume, about building one of the fastest-growing and most innovative brands in beauty: a fragrance house that has made luxury-quality perfume accessible to everyone. Sergio attended business school and trained as an investment banker. He founded two previous entrepreneurial ventures before landing on the idea that would change everything. The insight was deceptively simple: why is fragrance so expensive? What followed was a masterclass in unit economics, influencer-led growth, and relentless execution. Sergio went from filling perfume bottles by hand with a funnel in a windowless Brooklyn basement to becoming the number one perfume brand at Walmart and selling a majority stake to PE, all on less than $4 million raised. In This Episode: How Sergio launched Dossier with 20 dupe fragrances and the simple but brilliant idea of telling online customers exactly what each one smells like Why he filled the first batch of bottles by hand with a funnel in a Brooklyn basement and walked the orders to USPS himself How a help@dossier.co email that the customer care team almost deleted turned into a Walmart partnership now spanning 4,000 stores Why Dossier raised less than $4 million total, had $33 in the bank at one point, and still built a business that just closed a private equity deal with American Pacific Group How the influencer strategy evolved from reaching out to thousands of small creators in Excel to co-creating Machine Gun Kelly's own perfume line The unit economics framework Sergio has applied across three companies: if you cannot cover your COGS, marketing, and fixed costs at your current AOV, you do not have a real business (yet) Sergio's take on raising large venture capital rounds in beauty: know what you are signing up for, and what you are giving up Chapters: [00:00] The Almost Deleted Email That Became a $50 Million Walmart Deal [01:30] Welcome: Meet Sergio Tache, Founder of Dossier Perfume [02:00] Romania, Venezuela, South Africa, New Zealand, Belgium, Wharton: The Origin Story [03:00] From Investment Banking to Beauty Entrepreneurship [04:00] The North Star: Making Great Perfume Affordable for the 99% [06:30] Launching With Impressions: How Dossier Solved the Problem of Selling Perfume Online [08:30] Building the Supply Chain: 50 Supplier Calls and a Perfumer in Grasse [11:30] Filling Bottles by Hand With a Funnel in a Brooklyn Basement [13:00] The Early Days: Doing Everything Yourself When There Are Two of You [15:00] Influencer Marketing From Day One: Small Creators, Video, and a Very Large Excel Sheet [17:00] Price Points, Unit Economics, and Knowing You Have Something in Month One [24:00] Dupes, the Dupe Economy, and What Dossier Actually Wants to Be [27:00] The Walmart Email: How a Customer Care Team Almost Deleted a Partnership [29:00] DTC to Wholesale: A Completely Different Ballgame [32:00] Raising Less Than $4 Million and Having $33 in the Bank [34:00] What Sergio Actually Thinks About Brands Raising Tens of Millions [36:00] The American Pacific Group Deal: What Attracted Institutional Interest [38:00] How to Get Your House in Order Before a Fundraise [40:00] How the CEO Role Changes as the Company Grows [42:00] Execution Is Everything: The Difference Between Acceptable and Unacceptable Failure 🎧 Listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube 🌐 Full-length episodes at CXTInvestments.com 📍 Follow Tina on LinkedIn for founder stories, investor insights, and candid conversations. 🎙 There Is No Alternative: Lessons in Entrepreneurial Leadership with Tina Bou-Saba

Invisible to Unmissable: Executive Coach Maharukh Dalal’s Expert Advice for Women Leaders

In this episode of There Is No Alternative, Tina Bou-Saba, founder of CXT Investments, speaks with Maharukh Dalal, founder and head coach of The Career Accelerator for Women, a coaching company that helps ambitious mid-to-senior level women rise to the next level of their careers with measurable outcomes. Maharukh spent two decades building a corporate career across four industries and four countries, finance on Wall Street, hospitality, consulting, and global leadership at a Fortune 500 company. When she was passed over for a VP role she was certain she had earned, she didn't just process the disappointment. She found the language for what had gone wrong, and eventually built a coaching practice around it. The insight at the center of everything she does: being the most reliable expert in the room and being seen as the obvious choice for leadership are two entirely different things. In this episode, Maharukh and Tina get into the real mechanics of career advancement — the frameworks, the blind spots, the internal work, and the advocacy architecture that most high performers never think to build. In This Episode: Why the Expert Trap keeps high performers stuck, and what it actually takes to be seen as leadership material The Name It and Claim It framework: how to articulate your ambition to the people who can help you get there What the CLAIM framework is and how it guides clients from clarity to mastery in six letters Why coaching is not about giving advice, and why advice doesn't stick even when it's right How to design your identity as someone who does hard things, so your actions follow automatically Why you cannot scale a service business one-to-one, and the cohort model that changed everything for Maharukh's practice What a great executive coach actually does, and the questions to ask before you hire one Chapters: [02:09] Hype Song: A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman [02:33] Maharukh's Background: Four Industries, Four Countries, Two Decades [03:16] The Inflection Point: Ikigai, an HBS Coach, and a New Direction [04:17] The Mistake: Leading With Skills Instead of Thinking Like an Entrepreneur [06:00] The Story That Started It All: The VP Role She Didn't Get [07:43] The Expert Trap: What Holds High Performers Back From Promotion [08:18] What Is an Executive Coach? The Best Description Maharukh Has [10:04] How She Works With Clients: Group vs. One-to-One Coaching [11:30] The Right Cadence: Why Bi-Weekly Sessions Work [12:42] The Patterns She Sees: What High Performers Are Missing [13:23] Name It and Claim It: The Two-Step Most Ambitious Women Skip [15:05] What Makes a Great Executive Coach [17:00] Why Coaching Is Not Advice — and Why Advice Doesn't Stick [17:49] The Whole Person: Why Personal and Professional Are Never Separate [20:00] Maintaining Energy and Resilience as a Coach and Entrepreneur [22:30] What Actually Moves the Needle: How Maharukh Runs Her Business [24:21] Why One-to-One Doesn't Scale — and the Cohort Model That Changed Everything [25:16] The CLAIM Framework: Clarity, Liberation, Authority, Influence, Mastery [29:16] Who the Career Accelerator Is For [29:45] The Next Five Years: Corporate Workshops, Keynotes, and a TEDx Talk [30:57] Designing Your Identity as Someone Who Does Hard Things [32:09] Why Coaching Is a Secret Weapon, and Why Maharukh Has a Team of Coaches Herself [33:15] Desert Island Product: Smith's Rose Lip Balm 🎧 Listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube 🌐 Full-length episodes at CXTInvestments.com 📍 Follow Tina on LinkedIn for founder stories, investor insights, and candid conversations. 🎙 There Is No Alternative: Lessons in Entrepreneurial Leadership with Tina Bou-Saba

Goat to Market: Brent Ridge, MD on Building Beekman 1802 with Kindness and Wisdom

In this episode of There Is No Alternative, Tina Bou-Saba, founder of CXT Investments, speaks with Dr. Brent Ridge, co-founder of Beekman 1802, bestselling author of Goat Wisdom, and champion of kindness and community, to talk about building one of the most distinctive and purpose-driven brands in beauty over the past 18 years. Brent and his partner Josh did not set out to build a beauty company. They bought a farm in upstate New York, said yes to a neighbor who needed somewhere to graze his goats, and when the 2008 recession wiped out both their incomes simultaneously, Googled what they could make with goat milk. What followed is an journey from soap bars wrapped at the dining room table to a nationally distributed brand with a Harvard Business School case study, a landmark deal with Ulta Beauty, and a private equity partnership with Eurazeo. In This Episode: * How a note in a mailbox from a neighbor with 100 goats became the founding act of kindness that started Beekman 1802 * Why Brent drove three and a half hours every day for eight weeks to sell soap at Henri Bendel: and what he learned from watching master saleswomen work the floor * How one Instagram post asking "Ulta vs Sephora" got the CEO of Ulta to fly to Albany and drive an hour to the farm * The midnight phone call that changed everything: firing their CEO the night before a major deal closed * How they navigated the pandemic after investing millions to launch in Ulta, then watching every store close * Why Brent believes the world does not need another beauty product, and what brands actually need to offer instead * What the convergence of beauty, health, and wellness means for the next generation of consumer brands Chapters: [01:30] Welcome: Meet Dr. Brent Ridge of Beekman 1802 [02:45] From Longevity Medicine at Harvard to Martha Stewart Living [04:00] Apple Picking, Sharon Springs, and a Million Dollar Mortgage [05:40] The Note in the Mailbox: Farmer John and 100 Goats [06:28] The Recession Hits: Googling What to Make With Goat Milk [08:13] OG Content Creators: Facebook, Blogging, and Telling the Story [11:19] You Can Make Us the Butt of Every Joke — But Everyone Else Is the Hero [13:16] How the Docuseries Documented the Founding of Beekman 1802 [15:00] Henri Bendel, a Three-by-Three Table, and Eight Weeks of Driving [17:00] The Sales Lesson That Changed Everything: Get It in Their Hand First [18:19] Vanity Fair, Anthropologie, and Their First National Retailer [21:10] You Are the Salesperson — Until Your Customer Does It for You [22:26] The Skin Science: Goat Milk, pH, and the Microbiome [27:32] Better Aging: Why Beekman Thinks Differently About the Skin [28:00] Kindness as an Official INCI Ingredient: The Science Behind the Glow [30:38] Harvard Longevity Research: The Only Thing That Predicts a Long Life [33:12] The Instagram Post That Got the Ulta CEO to Fly to the Farm [34:21] Pandemic Hits the Week of the Ulta Launch [37:31] William Hood, Moelis, and Shepherding the Fundraise [39:02] The CEO Question: Mitch Hera and the Harvard Business School Case Study [42:00] Eurazeo, Jill Scalamandre, and the Next Chapter of Leadership [43:41] Omni-Channel Is the Future: What the Past Decade Got Wrong [46:08] The Beauty Reset: Going Back to Pre-Pandemic Growth Expectations [48:45] Advice for Early-Stage Founders: Play the Long Game, Find Your Purpose 🎧 Listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube 🌐 Full-length episodes at CXTInvestments.com 📍 Follow Tina on LinkedIn for founder stories, investor insights, and candid conversations. 🎙 There Is No Alternative: Lessons in Entrepreneurial Leadership with Tina Bou-Saba

Well-Suited: Sali Christeson on Building Argent and Dressing Women to Win

In this episode of There Is No Alternative, Tina Bou-Saba, founder of CXT Investments, sits down with Sali Christeson, founder and CEO of Argent, to talk about building the workwear brand that is redefining what professional women wear, and what they deserve. Sali spent a decade in banking, grad school, and tech before leaving her job cold turkey in 2015 to build the brand she could never find. Ten years later, Argent has grown from a pop-up at a women's conference to a multi-city retail presence with a devoted community of professional women. This episode is candid, tactical, and full of hard-won lessons on brand-building, fundraising, COVID survival, and what it actually means to be a mission-driven business. In This Episode: How Sali launched Argent by popping up at a women's conference and selling $30,000 in one day Why female-founded, female-focused, and apparel are three strikes against you in fundraising, and how she overcame these major hurdles Sali’s approach to fundraising her own way: family offices, values-aligned investors, and no check minimums What it means to “not hear no,” and where that powerful conviction comes from How Sali survived COVID at eight-and-a-half months pregnant by going lean overnight and pivoting a hot pink suit into a viral voting campaign Howard Schultz’s crucial hiring advice that she ignored and then learned the hard way Why brand-building cannot be shortcut with paid advertising — and why this is finally paying off for Argent Argent's all-time bestselling product (hint: it is not a blazer!) Sali’s advice for female founders: do not give up your power Chapters: [00:00] Ambition Suits You: Meet Sali Christeson of Argent [01:45] Hype Song: Unstoppable by Sia [02:00] The White Space That Became Argent [02:53] A Decade Across Banking, Grad School, and Tech [03:30] The 2015 Study That Changed Everything [05:22] Born to Build: Sali's Entrepreneurial Roots [05:34] How She Structured Her First Six Months Before Launch [07:26] The Conference Pop-Up That Became Day One of Business [09:28] Why Men Running Fashion Explains Everything About the Gap Argent Fills [10:38] Fundraising With Three Strikes Against You [11:46] From Convertible Note to Series B: How Sali Built Her Capital Stack [13:32] Doing It Her Own Way: Throwing Out the Fundraising Playbook [15:51] The Clear End Goal That Drives Every Fundraising Conversation [17:09] I Don't Hear No: Where Sali's Conviction Comes From [20:12] How She Psyches Herself Up: The Women Argent Dresses [24:18] Never Above Customer Service: How Sali Still Shows Up [25:27] The Art of Brand Building: Why It Takes Ten Years [27:37] The DTC Era: What She Got Right and What She Missed [30:20] Allbirds and the Cautionary Tale of Growth at All Costs [34:21] COVID: Going Lean Overnight Eight and a Half Months Pregnant [36:26] The Hot Pink Suit That Went Viral and Made Their Year [37:31] Team Building: The Howard Schultz Advice She Had to Learn the Hard Way [40:25] Building in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York [42:54] Argent Today: Distribution, Scaling, and Converting Awareness [44:50] Where She Wants to Open Next: Secondary Cities and London [45:47] The All-Time Bestselling Product (It Is the Straight Leg Trouser) [47:32] Quality, Pricing, and Why Fashion Gets a Bad Rap [48:24] What She Would Do If She Were Not Running Argent [49:21] The Reluctant Face of the Brand [50:33] Advice for Female Founders: Do Not Give Up Your Power 🎧 Listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube🌐 Full-length episodes at https://www.cxtinvestments.com CXTInvestments.com [https://www.cxtinvestments.com] 📍 Follow me on LinkedIn for more founder stories, investor insights, and candid conversations. 🎙️ There Is No Alternative: Lessons in Entrepreneurial Leadership with Tina Bou-Saba