Ep 237 – The Co-Founder of Chiyo on Uniting the Past and Present
The Co-Founder of Chiyo on Uniting the Past and Present
It’s unlikely “entrepreneur” was your first job. It probably took you a while to get there: keeping yourself afloat while you honed your passions and direction. But time spent learning isn’t time wasted. When it came time to start her own venture, this week’s guest found she’d already learned the skills she needed along the way.
In this episode of Peers2Peers, powered by Shopify, Irene Liu joins the podcast to discuss the good work of Chiyo: a food delivery service that provides pregnancy and postpartum meals that combine Eastern medicinal practice with Western nutrition.
Irene shares how a messy career narrative gave her the skills she needed to run her company, how COVID was a blessing for a catering service looking to hire out-of-work chefs, and how she found the ultimate fulfilment in following a pursuit that allowed her to directly help people.
Irene Liu:
Being a successful entrepreneur means drawing from a life’s worth of professional experiences. It’s impossible to know what skills you might need when it’s time to develop your own venture. Your time in retail might help you develop your people skills, and your time in hospitality might teach you about system design. Internships, volunteer work, lousy jobs, and learning experiences become the foundation of your entrepreneurial magnum opus, whatever that might be.
Today’s guest, Irene Liu, succeeded in a lot of different fields before co-founding Chiyo: a food delivery service that provides pregnancy and postpartum meals which combine Eastern medicinal practice with Western nutrition. While Irene found success and admiration in the corporate world, it wasn’t enough, and she decided her ultimate pursuit would need to involve helping people.
In this episode of Peers2Peers, powered by Shopify, Irene discusses how her journey taught her not just a diverse range of business skills, but also resilience, how she scaled her catering service from a pilot program to a city-wide offering, and how the marriage of Eastern medicine with Western nutrition finally brought her the professional satisfaction she was seeking.
Street Cred:
Irene Liu is the Co-Founder of Chiyo, a food delivery service focused on Eastern food therapy and nutritional science for each stage of motherhood. By providing traditional Chinese medicinal foods from fertility through to postpartum, Chiyo provides nourishing care for women and mothers.
In 2023 Irene Liu was featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink List. Liu previously worked in venture capital and consulting, and in 2020 was involved in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative focusing on Inclusive Economic Development.
Learn More:
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Check out Chiyo: https://wearechiyo.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wearechiyo/
Connect with Irene: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ireneliu17/
Follow The Peers Project on Instagram: http://bit.ly/3adVmYG
