Joe Rogan Podcasts. Headspace. Journaling before bed. Fostering more gratitude. Life hacks. Ketogenic dieting….F*** I’M ANXIOUS I NEED TO MEDITATE MORE. This is the mental conversation many of us live on a daily basis. It’s never-ending. It’s self-critical. And simply put, it’s exhausting. Unsurprisingly, this is what transpires in a world where on average us Millenials get an avg 3.72 hours of screen time every day, and that’s just on our phones. Scrolling through a feed...swiping right...swiping left...endlessly staring at other peoples’ lives on Instagram that we wish we were living, rather than taking the time to figure out how to best live the one and only life we have that is our own. While some would be more willing to admit than others that this is the exact saga they live on a day to day basis, it’s this psychopathic “mind in a million places” dissatisfaction that led me to start my own company, Ponto, back in June of 2018.

For better or for worse, taking on starting a company while working full time in a high-pressure job at Google, my anxiety definitely got much worse before it got better. But had I not listened to my anxiety, I’d be far less professionally satisfied than I am now and still walking around the anxious mess my early in career life quickly coded me to be. And don’t worry, I’m still a mess, just less of a mess. I digress…

Over the past 2.5 years, I’ve learned more about myself in a shorter period of time than ever before. And this has happened while balancing a dual identity life of working full time, deepening my remote co-founder relationship with Joey, and managing a team of 15 or so contractors from Dongguan, China to Latvia to Portugal to Los Angeles. While my life has become increasingly hectic, I weirdly enough have become less anxious. And it was all the result of listening to my anxiety for the first time in my life to understand what it was telling me, rather than forever fighting it and walking around a headcase all day every day. 

My new year’s resolution for 2018 when I started was to get out of my own way, and throughout 2019/2020, I think I accomplished that in many ways. All the while I have noticed common themes in how I hinder myself, that I thought it’d be useful to write down to intermittently remind myself of.
I had always planned to one day share them, so here they are. It’s nothing fancy. But you may find them helpful as you try to get closer to whatever it means to live an increasingly full life for yourself. So without further adieu, here they are:

1) Follow...not your brain: Crudely put, our brains are total f**ks. They don’t shut up. They tell us we want one thing, and then completely flop on a moment's notice to wanting the complete opposite. Brains are a beautiful tool to help us articulate thoughts, come up with new ideas, and stay organized, but our incessant mental chatter is an awful compass in creating any semblance of conviction in working towards what we want. 
A funny way to think about this is, imagine if the voice in your head as a person. They’d be the most deplorable, negative, and unbearable mother f’er you’ve ever encountered. From telling us we’re not good looking enough, we’re not smart enough, to all the other bullying our brains impose on us. It’s crazy that such an obvious concept is so not obvious to the majority of people. 
That negative voice in your head is as powerful as you make it. So heed it less and listen to your gut more. Since founding Ponto, I can say my gut has been right about 90% of the time while my brain probably gets a meager 5-10%...if that.

2) Mental barriers are as big as you make them: At every inflection point and decision I have had to make since starting a company, the difficulty in making a decision is as difficult as I make it. While that’s a very simple concept, we all let our brains build walls and fences around everything it is we wish to achieve.
From asking that girl/guy out to speaking up in that meeting, to simply being honest with yourself about what it is you really want. Be good to yourself and don’t make life harder than it already is. 
From hiring a really high quality but seemingly pricey fashion designer to signing a relatively permanent partnership agreement with partners overseas, I have driven myself up many a wall in making decisions for Ponto. Yet each and every time I finally broke down the wall and trusted myself to make the decision my gut told me was right, there was predominantly relief and enjoyment on the other side. 
Breathe easy. Big decisions typically look small in hindsight.

3) Take every life experience as a gift: Simply put, don’t fight what already happened. Instead, find a way to foster a glass half full mentality and take every life situation as life-giving you a gift. From getting rejected by your dream job, to a personal or professional relationship not working out like you had rehearsed in your head, life’s too short to resist the hard stuff that has already happened. Conversely, if you were to fully assess all the amazing things that have happened in your life, you’d realize very few of them could have taken place without the things that you’d been aspiring for along the way but never came to fruition.

4) Life is like a game of Tetris, not a game of chess: From the outside looking in, many people’s lives look like the product of perfectly calculated decisions and risk-taking. We often conclude that life is about making all the right decisions and minimizing the wrong ones. While game theory and playing out a risk/reward analysis of every single possible outcome in a given situation made for a highly interesting college Economics curriculum, how often are the myriad of scenarios that you play out in your head actually what happens?...Well pretty much never.
Instead, life is a sequence of utter bull shit and randomness. Cells crashing into other cells, and really it comes down to a game of reactionary chaos control, quite similar to Tetris. As the pieces fall, be strategic in how you adapt your life around what’s inevitable, but quit faulting yourself for how the pieces fell. 
Life is like a box of chocolates...it’s really f’ing random.

5) The best things happen slow, and the worst things happen fast: Let life happen at the natural rate at which it should, and don’t let your anxiety drive you to think that certain things should be happening quicker than they are. 


If things are progressing nicely with someone you’ve been flirting with, let the good conversations roll and let the laughs keep coming. Don’t let your brain talk you into thinking it’s something you must slap a label on because your insecure of what isn’t yet. If you’re struggling through all the fears that naturally arise in starting your own gig, don’t let your anxieties get the best of you and make impulsive decisions you’ll regret. Fear and our brain’s constant need to try to control for what hasn’t played out yet drive most of us to do some pretty nonsensical stuff. Rest easy knowing you’re on the exact path you’re supposed to be on, and your life is happening at the exact pace that it should be.

Breathe padawan. Patience is everything.

In conclusion, your brain is like that friend you have to spend time with because they’re lifelong next of kin, but you know you can only tolerate them in VERY small doses. They’re abrasive, are always driving you up a wall with every possible scenario that could happen in life, and they don’t shut the hell up when you need them to most. All things considered, they’re pretty exquisite when it comes to planning, not forgetting things, and staying organized. Use your brain tool when you need it, but know when it’s time to huck it in a drawer. 

My 20’s have very much been devoted to figuring out how to navigate the world with this large cranial mass atop my shoulders. In certain situations, it can be a useful tool, but 99% of the time it’s what makes life difficult. I encourage you to monitor how you talk to yourself, as you’ll be very quick to realize how much of a problem our brains really are. That said, get excited by the possibility of what else you could amass for yourself in working towards a better relationship with your noggin. You’ve gotten this far as the psycho you will soon realize you are. Imagine what’s possible if you sort your head out!

Your brain is not your friend: Lessons from Ponto

Dear World,

Over the past 8 months, we experienced The Great Reset, a moment in time that drew us all into our homes to sit with the state of the world and begin to process why certain aspects of life are the way they are. Why do I own so much shit that hasn’t seen the light of day since I last entered an office or went to a client meeting? The world caught up to us these past 8 months. Some people sat idly at home hitting the proverbial coffee mug against the bars of quarantine, while others dug deep, envisioned what they wanted for the future, and starting taking steps to get there. 

The vision behind Ponto started 2.5 years ago out of a desire to no longer feel disempowered in doing my part towards cleaning up the environment and giving consumers better choices in the products they buy, and helping people to foster less superficial relationships with the things they own. While I didn’t think that shoes would necessarily be my answer to that wake up call, I set a deadline on myself to come up with a physical product that we would build a brand around looking to greatly raise the bar of what “truly sustainable” means in the world of consumer goods. Turns out the idea for Ponto came from a ratty ass pair of wool loungers (see picture below) that I owned for about ten years and had the cotton coming out the bottom. After work one day, I hopped on my computer for a routine thoughtless re-purchase of these wool loungers that I had worn to class in college, brunch in San Francisco, and while browsing online discovered they were no longer made. This created sort of an aha moment in my noggin as it intersected with the point in time at which I was pressuring myself to finally come up with an idea, and 2.5 years later this is how it all started. 


![heines wool loungers.png](https://cdn-ponto.websessions.co/heines_wool_loungers_986ddb798b.png)
The pair of heines wool loungers that inspired it all


When initially concepting the idea for Ponto, I very quickly realized there were 8000 interpretations of what sustainability means. Some keyboard warriors only buy under the lens of “vegan”, while other factions buy “quality”. No one definition is better than the other, especially when looked at so rigidly. For example, most vegan leathers are incredibly petroleum intensive, create gross amounts of toxic runoff in surrounding factory areas, and all that toxicity is quite unsanitary for factory workers to inhale. While maybe vegan in textiles has some inherent virtue, vegan used in the “traditional vegan” leather sense is a whole other story. There are a lot of new more truly vegan leather alternatives on the horizon be it Mylo (which is a Mycelium mushroom leather) or Zoa (which is a leather alternative created in petri dishes from collagen), but neither of these solutions are commercially available at this point in time and the ones that are lack durability and quality, which I believe to be one of the most important components of reversing the trend of fast fashion to slow fashion.

This is just one sub-dialogue around the broader conversation of eco-materials and overall sustainable methodologies, but helped lead us to take the approach we do at Ponto. At Ponto, we try to adhere and uphold as many interpretations of “pragmatic sustainable fashion” across our entire value chain, one example being the following:

We chose a very unconventional material for our uppers- a recycled leather composite, most popularly used in airplane seats. It’s constructed using the scrap leather trimmings from leather tanneries that would otherwise be destined for landfill, as much as half to two thirds of leather trimmed ultimately goes to waste. While it’s essentially plywood leather, it’s water repellant, durable as all hell (sheesh I mean it has to survive the chaos of your average Spirit Airlines passenger), and is much more sustainable overall than many other alternatives. Some will cancel us because they’ll say we’re still putting cows in our shoes, but we are not responsible for any net new animal hides in the process of making the material and it’s a phenomenon that has yet to have a proper solution mapped to it. It’s not our forever solution, but we feel it’s the best option available that creates a quality product for the end user and minimizes the impact on the surrounding ecosystem around our factories and the workers putting so much effort into our product. Take that cancel culture.


The list of decisions that add up to us being as comprehensively sustainable as possible go on and on, but we’ll name a few here. We use a wood pulp Tencel fabric in our shoe liner that results in very little foot odor left behind and an algae based foam EVA shoe bottom that also contains recycled EVA foam as well. It has that sexy squishy sensation of a Nike Free runner and looks like a Cole Haan dress shoe up top. In addition, we use no toxic adhesives when bonding our footwear and specifically use water based cement. Our shoes come in a single, shippable, 100% recycled box, avoiding the wasteful and annoying box in a box problem. 

At present, factories in the US are not well equipped enough to handle the new age sustainable materials we use at a cost that will create survivable cash flow, so we are forced to use ocean freight. That said, through our partnership with Flexport we are able to calculate the net emissions from the factory in Dongguan to the door of our warehouse in San Diego, and then pay a self imposed emissions tax that brings us back to carbon neutral. We also do this at quarter’s end keeping track of the carbon emissions from the parcel shipping of sending our goods to a customer’s doorstep, and offset those emissions with a self imposed emissions tax that we track through flexport.org’s emissions tracker. 

To close the loop on our supply chain, we also encourage our consumers to send their Pontos back, through our buyback program, after their useful life in exchange for a $25 store credit. The shoes will then be repurposed and rebuffed by aspiring female entrepreneurs in developing nations to enable micro enterprise around the globe through our official partnership with Soles4Souls. This ensures that no Pontos go back to landfill, rewards our consumers to be forever Pontites, and enables micro enterprise abroad. 

We conclude our sustainable story through officially participating in 1% For The Planet, where we commit and are held accountable to donating the greater of 1% of sales or 10% of profits each year to a non-profit of our choice. We donate to The Ocean Cleanup, arguably the most large scale and technically innovative mass ocean cleanup project to date. Not only are they cleaning up The Great Pacific garbage patch via a non-invasive system of artificial coastlines that extracts microplastics and nanoplastics from previously ignored sites, but they also recently launched their “Interceptor system” which crawls the fresh water waterways of the largest offending nations in terms of plastic dumping that makes its way to the oceans (from Bangalore to Indonesia), and by bottlenecking that plastic flow we now have a feasible solution to cut off ocean plastic at the source and cleaning up the sins of our past.

So there it is folks. That’s how we’re starting out at Ponto and this signifies us challenging the footwear industry to be better. We are a small self funded bootstrapped startup from San Diego California, so it’s time to get our shit together world. This isn’t a declaration of war, it’s a declaration of collaboration. All ships rise together when we challenge one another to be better, so consider this as our challenge to the industry. This party is just getting started. How will you choose to respond?




Dear World, Love Ponto

About a year and a half ago, I quit my Silicon Valley engineering job with a vague intention to “start my own thing” and no real plans. I eventually joined forces with Aaron about 6 months later in Ponto’s infancy and since then, I’ve had pretty much everyone I know ask me questions in some form or another about launching a business. They have varied widely in their topics from “Wait, YOU are starting a fashion brand…?”

**(pic related)**
![Screen_Shot_2020_12_16_at_9_08_51_AM_9b26760cb6.png](https://cdn-ponto.websessions.co/Screen_Shot_2020_12_16_at_9_08_51_AM_9b26760cb6_af73adbd06.png)

To “Hmm how did you pay for everything? How much are you working on it? What do you do?”

These are all super valid questions, because they’re topics that I had no idea about until I actually started doing this for the past year. 

We all have a pretty good idea of what it's like to be a software engineer, or PHD student, a nurse, etc. We know exactly how these jobs can be grueling, difficult, and time consuming. But running a business? What does that mean (outside of the Elon Musk-esque entrepreneurial hero stories)?

The long and the short of it is that my job isn’t *technically* difficult. I mostly email people, ensure communication & workflows between everyone throughout the different aspects of the business (Manufacturing, Product Design, Shipping & Fulfillment, Legal, Website, Accounting,  etc.), manage financial models/ fulfillment spreadsheets, general logistics like paying invoices and managing the company's tons of accounts/software, and make decisions to keep things moving forward. None of it is super conceptually challenging and sometimes (a lot of the time) the work isn’t super fun- just like any other job.  The real hard part is figuring out what needs to be getting done, where to focus your time, and staying emotionally resilient. 
# 
I worked on this company for a *full year*, full time with no salary before I even got to try on a pair- let alone think about generating any revenue. Looking back, it sounds pretty crazy I dedicated most of my life savings and a prime year in my 20s to something I couldn’t even try out. Throughout all that, when the company (founder’s bank accounts) is only bleeding money, it can be hard to convince yourself that you’re working on the right things, that your business is going anywhere, and that you haven’t just been wasting your time trying to randomly sell shoes.

BUT

This thing is mine. I helped bring this into existence, which I find to be truly amazing. 

So we launched last week... People have started getting their shoes. We are taking new orders and actually starting to generate some cash. It's pretty surreal to roll over all these thoughts & projections in my head and worry about everything for over a year, then flip a switch one day to having everything be real. 

People like our shoes. They're super comfortable and as sustainable as realistically possible. And for the first time, I get to breathe a huge sigh of relief. I had forgotten that this is what it’s all about. I set out to make a sustainability company with a physical product. And here we are, creating something that people enjoy to make their lives and the planet better. And while we all love to envision launch as some big majestic single moment in time like the windows 95 launch, it’s more of a slow rollout.

![windows95.gif](https://cdn-ponto.websessions.co/windows95_d6b77c7c4d.gif)

Turns out, there aren’t thousands of people eagerly waiting outside your virtual door to buy shoe’s they’ve never heard of. But every email from a stranger telling you how great your product is, each conversation with a non-profit that's stoked about your business, and every time you see an excited friend post about it on social media carries a much larger weight than I could have ever imagined. And I think that's what really keeps us going. 

This is just the beginning. Our doors are open, our work continues, and we get to find out how we can continue to improve and change ourselves, our business, and the world. And that’s super exciting. 

If you would like to help out in any way, feel free to check out the website and see if you want a pair. You can share any of [our instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ponto_footwear/) posts or stories on social media or reach out to me directly and we can chat more. 


The Pre-Successful Founder's Journey


Between cancel culture and people that don’t believe in environmentalism, working on anything related to sustainability is really being stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, you have people that will skewer you for everything that you are NOT doing…. 
![pasted_image_0_0af9a534d6_7092ce55df.png](https://cdn-ponto.websessions.co/pasted_image_0_0af9a534d6_7092ce55df_923b99411e.png)
(our newest eco-warrior putting us in our place)

And on the other hand, there are people that fundamentally disagree with your values in believing that focusing on sustainability and the environment is a waste of time. You can’t really win and you are always pissing someone off. 

Quickly putting aside “greenwashing” and people that care about the environment in general but not YOUR interpretation of it, I think there's a deeper underlying issue behind this all: The environment isn’t really accounted for at all within our current economic system. In capitalist western society, we typically have focused on things like revenue, profits, labor, raw materials, cost of goods sold, etc. Nowhere in here does ensuring we aren’t totally destroying the planet enter the equation.

Forever ago, people had some concept of how to look out for their communities' collective future. Native Americans practiced controlled burns, farmers would store seed and food for the winter, etc. Over the past couple centuries, this concept has taken new meaning, such as  securing manufacturing capabilities and financial security to ensure our nation’s future status & comfort. The planet being an expendable resource never really occurred to us. It was an infinite resource waiting to be tapped. 

Now, however, we have learned that Planet Earth is not a bottomless well. We are running out of silicon raw material that goes into creating all of our electronics. Oil can’t be how we power the planet forever.  We must once again change how we manufacture and make pretty much everything. And we need to secure the future for our communities in a new way- a way that will leave a habitable planet behind for our future generations.  

We have to re-learn. Just like how it took decades for us to figure out how to manufacture oil into literally tons of different viable building plastics and materials, we have to learn how to accommodate a 21st century demand for goods and services with new practices.

![greenmanu_97f914dc63.png](https://cdn-ponto.websessions.co/greenmanu_97f914dc63_fca0bc448e.png)
And like with anything else new and still under development, you don't get it right the first try. You make a minor improvement, try some new methods, see what sticks and what works. But part of this process is finding out what doesn’t work and making mistakes.

We tried this with algae. We wanted to use it in our outsoles. It seemed to work in all of the trials and practice, but when it came down to production, things went awry. We had to produce and throw out many extra pairs of outsoles due to defects and complications in the manufacturing process. In the attempt to reduce our overall consumption of non-biological materials, we actually did the opposite. This is precisely why sustainability gets a bad name. 

Does this mean we were wrong? Should we have never tried in the first place? Absolutely not. To say that would be to overshadow all of our other efforts and everything we collectively learn. We make improvements, continue to iterate, and improve upon ourselves. Our next production run is much better and has 4x the biomass by weight of our first production run. But we couldn’t have gotten here without these learnings along the way.

Manufacturing greener goods and a more environmentally friendly economy is a learning process and it shouldn’t be demonized, but it’s so easy to do so. Especially when you have a vested interest in keeping the status quo the same.... (**cough cough** big oil and other industrialists). But that's a bigger bone to pick…

This change won’t happen overnight, but think about how much we can accomplish when we set our collective minds to something. In the 1950’s Space Race, we went from launching the first satellites to having humans walk on the moon in 15 years. This year, the world was hit by a novel new disease causing a global pandemic, and we have created a vaccine in less than one year. Our environmental crisis is daunting, but something we can all work towards improving our collective future.


Photo Cred:
https://www.gep.com/blog/strategy/green-manufacturing-is-helping-companies-create-a-sustainable-future 



Your brain is not your friend: Lessons from Ponto

Dear World, Love Ponto

The Pre-Successful Founder's Journey

Why Its Easy To Attack Sustainability

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Zero waste is chill. Zero items in
your shopping bag is less chill.

Your brain is not your friend: Lessons from Ponto

Dear World, Love Ponto

The Pre-Successful Founder's Journey

Why Its Easy To Attack Sustainability

Zero waste is chill. Zero items in your shopping bag is less chill.

Zero waste is chill. Zero items in
your shopping bag is less chill.