Neuro & Beyond: Kent Yoshimura on Creativity, Entrepreneurship, & Balance
Transcript:
Lauren Stenger: Today I'm joined by entrepreneur, illustrator, martial artist, and adventurer from Los Angeles, California- Kent Yoshimura. He is the co-founder and CEO of Neuro, a gum and mint brand that made an appearance on Shark Tank in 2020. Neuro governments contain ingredients like natural caffeine, L theanine, B vitamins and more to enhance mental focus, concentration and cognitive function. The company has sold over 50 million pieces, and you can find Neuro in over 12,000 stores including national favorites like CVS, Walmart, Whole Foods, and Amazon. Additionally, Kent is an acclaimed muralist, creating large scale public art pieces around the world. He has painted the largest mural in Shanghai, and he has recently completed a 6,200 square foot mural in California. Kent is also a very skilled martial artist training in judo with the Japanese Olympic team and fighting and Muay Thai in Thailand. Tune into today's episode to hear how the intersection between creativity and entrepreneurship has created an uber successful, multifaceted career for Kent.
Lauren Stenger: Today, I want to chat with you about your company, Neuro, and your various investments and startups, I think that's really cool. Also in regards yo your creative side, I went down this whole rabbit hole of all your accomplishments, like your murals and children's books illustrations, just so many cool things. So I'm super excited to get the chance to chat with you.
Kent Yoshimura: Where should we start?
Lauren Stenger: Well, I actually want to start from the very beginning.
What were you like as a child and a teenager? Did you have like an entrepreneurial mindset? Or is this something you developed?
“I always loved exploring just the edges of my mind in many ways. And it’s funny, because entrepreneurship is creativity where it meets finances and money.”
Kent Yoshimura: I think I always had a creative mindset. Since I was a child. I always loved doing art. I always loved exploring just the edges of my mind in many ways. And it's funny, because entrepreneurship is creativity where it meets finances and money, right? So for me, I had zero financial background whatsoever. But over time, as I started working on bigger projects that I started working with, obviously Neuro and the business side of things, you realize that, one, money is somewhat essential to live in a capitalistic society, but two, working with a team, especially a very good team allows you to create better things than doing something by yourself.
Lauren Stenger: Like synergy.
Kent Yoshimura: Yeah, the synergy and the teamwork. Growing up as an artist, I would be drawing, doing sculpture, by myself, in all my studio art classes. I always saw myself going down somewhat of a path like that. Even with my martial arts career, it's always very singular. In martial arts and fighting and in judo, and Muay Thai, when you're in the ring and you're competing with someone, everything that you feel at the end of the day always falls back on you. You have your coaches, your team, everyone else that supports you, your nutritionist, but at the end of the day, the pressure and performance all depend on you as an individual. I think as the years went by what I started to appreciate more about business and doing bigger things, even in the art world was the camaraderie, the synergy, depending on people and being able to build something that's so beyond an individual.
“As the years went by what I started to appreciate more about business and even in the art world was the camaraderie, the synergy, depending on people and being able to build something that’s so beyond an individual.”
When you're in college, you studied neuroscience. So did you want to be like a neurologist or was it just an interest?
Kent Yoshimura: I think I was always just captivated by the mind. You know, there's the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system. And the brain controls everything, technically, beyond the nerves and obviously the body movements and everything, and there was just this fascination. I was undeclared going into college, I didn't know what to do. I was actually initially imagining going into something more the creative side of things. But I took a series of cognitive science classes and got so fascinated by more of the biology of the brain, the physiology, the different abnormal psychology, that I went down this rabbit hole in many ways of what the brain is capable of doing as it relates to everything I'm interested in. Whether that's moving my body, or the art and the creativity; where does creativity even come from? How do you define that? The brain is insane. It's crazy. We have this supercomputer in our heads.
Lauren Stenger: I feel like a lot of people go into college, not really knowing what to major in. So that’s cool that you followed what you're passionate in, and then that led to a career.
Kent Yoshimura: Yeah, I mean, I did see myself going down a path of, you know, whether it's a doctor that focuses on neurophysiology, or something of the sort, but I don't think I can just like sit in the lab, I don’t know. The doctor thing is hard for me, I commend everyone who became a doctor. But for me, it was just incredibly hard to go down that path.
Do you mind sharing how you came up with this Neuro idea?
Kent Yoshimura: So when I was training very seriously, I was in judo, Muay Thai and different martial arts like karate and jujitsu, I was mixing supplements in my own room. And since I was training for the Olympics, and with the Olympic team, primarily in Japan, there's an organization called WADA, the world anti-doping agency, that make sure that you don't take tainted supplements. 14 years ago now, the supplement world was just the Wild West. People were launching products, they were pre workouts that you had no idea what was going into your system, but it will at least wake you up. Or people in school were taking Adderall and caffeine pills. So, I went down this path/rabbit hole of researching and using my neuroscience background to find supplements, that would work the best for me, and using myself as a guinea pig. I would know exactly what I would put into my body and find a baseline and be able to test against it. I would be mixing these pills in my room. Then my co founder, who was also an athlete, captain of his cross country and track team in high school, got into a really bad snowboarding accident his sophomore year that led him to be paralyzed from the waist down. While he was recovering, I was giving him the supplements to get him back into school and to get his energy levels back up. After college, we went on a scuba diving trip together because for him, despite the fact that he can't use the bottom half of his body, he had a bunch of things on his bucket list, and scuba diving was one of them. And we're taking these pills in a Ziploc bag. As we're like looking at each other, we're like, oh, yeah, like we got to do a little better than this. So based on our personalities and everything we're like, okay, what's approachable? What's affordable, especially as freshly graduated college students? And what's portable, so we could take it on all of our adventures wherever we go. And the most obvious answer was gum and mints. What's funny is that gum and mints as a category has not been innovated on for the longest time. It either freshens your breath or whitens your teeth, but the idea to put natural ingredients into it, we saw ourselves being like, what if we can make health as easy to access and as much a part of our daily lives as possible. And yeah, now that was like eight years ago.
Lauren Stenger: I mean, that's just such a perfect solution for what you were needing and honestly, what everybody needs.
How do you like to use your own product?
Kent Yoshimura: I have it on my desk, and I'm just taking it whenever I need that extra boost. I have my coffee in the morning, because my girlfriend loves to make her pour overs, and I love that ritual. But I'm not throwing, you know, 300 milligrams of caffeine in my face in the morning. What I'd rather do is microdose my energy levels throughout the day, so that throughout the day, I'm fully energized. And then when night comes, I can go to sleep and get great sleep that I could track with different biometric systems. And for me, having a balanced energy supply is way more effective than how other people take it, which is when they feel tired. They'll shoot themselves in the face with all this caffeine, which of course works but then like 20 minutes later, they're back to this, like, very low baseline again.
Lauren Stenger: I'm impressed you guys were able to make the gum taste good, because I feel like supplements are not tasty.
Kent Yoshimura: Oh my god, that’s a whole podcast episode on its own. A number of disgusting R&D samples that we have tried. It took us forever to get the flavor right.
Lauren Stenger: Yes, that would be a big challenge.
Speaking of challenges, what is a favorite failure in your career or personal life because it taught you a really important lesson?
Kent Yoshimura: I wouldn't call it a failure because failure is a very strong, negative word. But there are so many moments early on in my career that I do feel like I could have done everything myself. I would be pulling all nighters all the time, I would be sacrificing so many elements of my life to give to the business, when in reality, hurting myself was hurting the business. I wasn't practicing what we preach at Neuro which is all about balance and having the right energy and focus. Energy and focus together is what works well. Energy on its own, in my opinion, is drinking Celsius, and you're just high on this energy that you don't know how to control. But being focused without the energy to complete something, is just zoning in on something without getting anything done. So I think, for me, there was a point in my career where I realized attaining that balance became more and more important. And as I started practicing that, everything started going much, much better. Taking that step back, setting our KPIs and goals in a more concrete format versus being distracted. And then just driving full force into any of that goal setting that we have in place. And that applies to everything, whether it's the experiences I built, the murals, the children's books, working with teams on that end all the way to building this company.
Are there any tangible tips you have for recentering or rebalancing when you feel like you're on one side of the pendulum of too much focus or too much energy?
Kent Yoshimura: Yeah, that's a really good question. If you're on this path with PE firms doing internships for them, you'll probably go down this path of working with a consulting agency at some point, like a Bain or McKinsey. All these companies, the reason they're so good at consulting for businesses is because they're able to take a step back as a third party and assess what the core key performance indicators are that people should focus on to maximize revenue, growth, or profit. And I think in business terms, the reason there's KPIs across every single company is because it is a foundation/ rock that you can always tie yourself to. Jeff Bezos has this thing that everyone criticize him for but but he said, “Every single day, I only make three decisions”. And that compounds every single day, when you're at least focused on making three key decisions. And a lot of people are so distracted and feel like they need to get everything done at any given point. As long as you get three clear things done every single day, three things done every single week even, you're on a good path. Don't sway away from what those foundational pillars that you've set yourself up to achieve are.
I'm curious, what the story is with these children's books that you've illustrated?
Kent Yoshimura: This is very interesting, and I guess this was like my first foray into business. So after college, I was working in film, and unfortunately, the producer I was working for and one of my closest friends Najib shooting his documentary was associated with someone named Amy Winehouse, who during that time was going to be one of our biggest supporters, but she died from alcohol toxicity. And that led me down a path where I kind of need to figure out how I was doing with my life. Film was great, but it wasn't yielding me the financial stability that I needed, especially after college. So I started diving really deep into Amazon algorithms during that time, around 10 years ago now. How Amazon's algorithm during that time worked was if you ranked high in a subcategory, you get boosted as a top product within the entire category. In children's books back then, they would break it up into like children's books about farm animals- millions of subcategories that are ready for the taking. So knowing Photoshop and having a Wacom tablet, I started illustrating children's books on my own and started ranking really high in these categories. I only had one or two books, which would push me to the top of that entire category as a whole. I then would link up all the books so that I can upsell people across each of my children's books. Anyways, I was illustrating so much during that time, that the family I was staying with, this is also very serendipitous, but the family I was staying with, my college roommate’s parents’ house, the mom was a children's book author. She was looking for an illustrator to write like a much longer children's book. And I dived in with her and illustrated a few books. And then eventually The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf saw our work somehow. They loved it and reached out to help them create their children's branding. So I made a series of decaffeinated, ironically, decaffeinated tea blends and doing the branding for them alongside a children's book to help build out a market that coffee companies typically aren't able to capture, which is children.
Lauren Stenger: Wow, that’s really cool
Kent: Yeah, that was a crazy time in my life, and a lot of luck. Wherever I landed in all of it, I still don’t get. But also, I was illustrating and drawing every single day for like 10 hours a day, if not more, and I was doing this whole Amazon thing. So like, Right Place Right Time, and I was ready for it.
Lauren Stenger: Yeah, sounds like it.
I saw that you did an NF T with your art. And I was curious, do you have an opinion on this new intersection between art and technology, with NFTs and AI imaging?
Kent Yoshimura: Yeah, I have a lot of opinions on it. When I entered into the NFT space, it was very early on, it was with like some very incredible people. It was so exciting because it was so mission driven in many ways and getting a community together. And it was building that community through what felt like how Kickstarter almost was back in the day and being able to provide them with more and more. It went well. Unfortunately, like all things that are more focused around capital gains than it is on building and cultivating something, the entire NFT space was overridden with scam. People cared more about trading them for money, and it just kind of turned into what it is now, you know, which is just, it's a scam filled space, which is very unfortunate. That being said, I think AI art is absolutely fascinating. I think it's going to force artists to evolve and adapt and shift quicker. If you think AI is going to kill art, then you've already given up on art. I think creativity, especially when it comes from humans, is endless and boundless. Prompt engineering is really interesting now where you can get AI to produce for you. I think there's beauty like especially, you know, whatever 10,000 plus hours of painting on walls now, there's like a beauty in the brushstrokes the way the human anatomy works in putting something down. The depth of art, and anything, you start realizing it has so much more to it than I think what people are seeing, which is just the surface level imagery that things like Midjourney create, which is still amazing and impressive. But yeah, that's my take on it.
“ If you think AI is going to kill art, then you’ve already given up on art.”
Art, in many ways is a service. There's art you create for yourself, obviously. But art when it becomes business is a service. You're creating something that someone likes about the style that you create, and they pay you money for it. As long as you accept that in many ways, a lot of the generic art that AI has been replicating itself on or learning off of rather is, of course, that's going to die out. That's just natural. And unfortunately, it does take out the job of a lot of very talented people like background designers for concept art, or concept art, even in general. But at the same time, those were very service driven jobs for either the video game industry, theatre industry, wherever else. So I think it might be a cool opportunity for those people to explore their own creativity, although it is very unfortunate that it's taking away job opportunities for them.
Lauren Stenger: That's a really good point.
Where do you see Neuro in the next few years?
Kent Yoshimura: I think Neuro could be as big as 5-hour Energy. I think we’ve created a product that's way better than any other energy product that's out there. In what I detailed earlier, which is its portability. Its $4 for an entire tin and you get 10 pieces in it. People pay four bucks for an energy drink that tastes like garbage. It's filled with garbage, you have to drink it chilled, and it's not portable. There's also another component where in retail, those need to be in the refrigerated section. Well, we get to be in the gum and mint section, which is at the cash register, right front and center of the store. Everyone has to pass it and everyone can grab it. So the combination of all those things and now that we're building this incredible team that continues to grow every day. I think we're about to hit 31 people tomorrow. We're in this place where I feel like we're building and cultivating the perfect group of people to get it to be bigger and bigger. And yeah, I think we could be like the next better version of the Red Bulls, 5-hour energies and whatever else there is.
Lauren Stenger: I completely agree. Well, it was so great talking with you about your company and your creativity and just everything that is you and your brand. Thank you!
Kent Yoshimura: Thanks, Lauren. I appreciate it.
