We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sophia Cheng a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Sophia, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, let’s take a stroll on memory lane, back to when you were an apprentice or intern. What’s a memorable story from that time that you can share with us?
I have always been one of those people that was more eager to work than to be a student. So I took my internships/work experiences really seriously. I actually grew up wanting to be an investigative journalist. I loved to write, but I loved interviewing and investigating even more. I spent So I had many journalism internships — including at the Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, Week in China etc., and I would say those internships played a vital role in shaping who I am and how I think.
When I was 16 I worked as a factory girl at a Chinese factory. I had leveraged that experience, wrote an article about it, and sold it to a publication for $1,000 USD, and gotten an internship out of it. But my experience at the factory wasn’t an internship, it was a pure manual labor job. The factory I worked at made computer monitors, and I was one of the thousands factory workers, working 15 hour shifts everyday, stuffing microchips into computer parts. I slept in the dormitory, I made friends — all of whom were migrant workers from rural parts of China, who had left their families in order to earn money. It was a mentally brutal job — we were essentially machines, robots, except for the fact that it was probably cheaper to hire us than to build machines to replace us. It was also during the time of all the Apple/Foxconn scandals, when countless factory workers were committing suicide from the grueling environment and mental torture.
This was a very important lesson for 16-year-old-me. It reminded me that getting to work at a job that requires critical thinking is a privilege. It also made me realize how important it is to build and develop skills that can never be replaceable by any form of machine.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Sophia and I’m the founder of Oddball Snacks! I grew up in Singapore and Hong Kong, and aspired to go into investigative journalism. I did all my internships at publications such as Associated Press, and even worked at the WSJ my senior year of college. Fun fact – when I was 16 I went undercover and worked as an assembly line factory worker in China, and published an article documenting my experience! Alas, due to visa reasons I was put on a very different path instead. After college, I started my career in management consulting, then joined the world’s largest hedge fund – Bridgewater Associates. Most recently, I was a Strategy Director at Estee Lauder Companies. And now? I’m a traveling jelly saleswoman.
Oddball is a snack brand looking to change the way we fundamentally eat by returning to basics, following an era of catfished foods: e.g. frankenfoods that taste terrible, heavily processed alternatives and manipulative health claims. We believe consumers are tired of being catfished by their foods. Clean, true better-for-you eating should be delicious and easily accessible. It shouldn’t be this difficult, or a chore, to make healthier choices for yourself and your family. Our first product lines of jiggly fruit snacks are chef-crafted, real-food based, with no sugar or preservatives.
I started Oddball, although it sounds like a cliche, because my needs were not met. I loved junk food a little too much, and it was starting to impact my body as I grew older. I wasn’t willing to compromise on taste, and derived no satisfaction from all the alternatives out there, which I call “catfish foods” – e.g. protein bars pretending to be cookies, chips and sodas promising me beauty and eternal happiness etc. So, I created something I wanted to eat, and found out that many others wanted it too.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Summer of 2023 was one of the most challenging times. I was fundraising for Oddball during one of the hardest raise environment since 2008, as a women of color. I was so stressed that I developed terrible back problems, including a severely herniated disc causing me terrible sciatica, which is when my disc is pinching the nerve that runs down my leg. I had never experienced pain at this level, every single day, that prohibited me from doing the most basic of all things. For 6 months, I wasn’t able to sit, and I woke up every day with terrible back spasms where I couldn’t straighten my back for hours in the morning. I went to the emergency room twice for back spams, and finally got back surgery 6 months later to shave off part of my disc pinching my nerve.
There were so many moments where I was in disbelief by how challenging things were everyday — both from a mental perspective of fundraising as a woman (less than 1% of VC money goes to women) during a bad environment, going through hundreds of rejections, questioning my business, myself, and from a physical perspective of grueling nerve pain everyday, and not being able to do most basic activities such as sit, lie, fly on a plane, go out to dinner etc.
But alas, resiliency paid off. I might have
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
As a management consultant by training I am used to being very structured, process oriented and organized. As an entrepreneur, I have had to learn to embrace the permanent state of fluidity and change in order to stay sane.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.oddball.world
- Instagram: https://oddball.world
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scheng15/
Image Credits
Ian Loring Shiver