Vanessa Pham’s Recipe for Success in Leadership
You may recognize the name Omsom from having been featured in Epicurious, Thrillist, Food & Wine Mag, Tech Crunch, Vogue and more! The brand has done insane collaborations with boundary-pushing, award winning NYC chefs from Chat and Ohm Suansilphong from Fish Cheeks, NYC, to Nicole Ponseca at Jeepney, NYC, and Jimmy Ly Madame at Madame Vo. Maybe you recognize this name because you recently made Vanessa’s favorite Omsom recipe, Vietnamese Lemongrass BBQ Pork. Maybe you don’t recognize this name or brand yet, but you should, and now you will :)
It was announced last week that Omsom, was acquired by DayDayCook and as such, I thought it would be such a fun opportunity to republish a conversation (see audio track above) that Tasha and I had with Vanessa Pham years ago when we were running the ManifestHer podcast AND share THIS recipe, which I had I asked Vanessa for, so that I could write it down and have it for Charlie.
Vanessa is is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, and she grew up in her family’s kitchen counter, watching her Mẹ cook Vietnamese dinners from scratch every night - because like so many moms, delicious food was her love language to her children.
Vanessa is a Harvard grad and in her past life she and her co-founding sister cut their teeth in startups and management consulting. After some time, she couldn’t refuse the call to return to her roots and finally build the company of her dreams.
“Omsom” is a vietnamese phrase meaning noisy, rambunctious, riotous, most often used by parents to scold unruly, raucous children in the back of the car. Vanessa and her sister lived out this ethos with loud, proud flavors, launches and collabs. IYKYK about their Noodles launch party.
In this conversation with Vanessa, we get into a lot, everything from:
How she originally felt the need to make her parents proud by going to a prestigious university (Harvard) and making good money working for a respectable name brand corporation (BCG), and what she learned about what her parents REALLY wanted for her when she and her sister Kim decided to build Omsom together
How late night walks in the city with her dad inspired her people management style to this day
What it was like knowing that they wanted to have very aligned investors on their cap table (including >50% women and minorities) and how pursuing capital from these individuals required an insane amount of patience, persistence, and most importantly self-belief and self-worth
How her and Kim held the vision of working with tastemakers and ensuring that those chefs and contributors were not just celebrated for their collabs, but PAID in perpetuity for them too
What its like formulating products with chefs — and how not every recipe can be 1-to-1 translated to “shelf-stable” and what they learned in this process
SO MUCH MORE
Of all the takeaways from our conversation with Vanessa there was one recipe for success that was so simple, yet so profound that it really stood out to me in a big way, and it was this: a recipe for success in managing people / leadership.
When Vanessa was a little girl, think 4 years old or so, she and her dad would go on late night adventures around their city and he didn’t hold her hand. WHAT? She was a four year old gallivanting around a big city with no adult hand-holding??? Before you go bananas, here’s the deal though… He walked right alongside her and told her “Vanessa, my hand is right here, and if you need it, just grab onto it.” If you listen to the interview I shared above, you’ll hear Vanessa say, almost in a passing, that this is very much the ethos of her approach to leadership today: “I’m not going to hold your hand, but my hand is right here if you need it.”
When I was early to people management in my career, I will be the first to tell you, I was NOT a good manager. I thought my responsibility as a manager was to manage (ahem, control) my people, ensuring that we had every single metric and the team was achieving 100% to that metric every single week. And you know what happened? I suffocated that team. In fact, I’ve personally gone and apologized to them for the ways that I managed before I knew better. I often wish that I could go back in time and be a better leader. But I think sometimes failing forward is the only way forward, I survived, they survived, and I think we all learned a lot in the process (unfortunately for them, probably a lot about what kind of leader they NEVER want to work for again, but alas! I forgive myself).
Revisiting this conversation with Vanessa, now, as someone who is still very much learning, but probably a much better people leader these days than before… I felt like “Wow, what an insight! and also… Wow, look at how far I’ve come!” because the Stef that interviewed Vanessa back in 2020 for this podcast couldn’t even comprehend the level of insight that was shared in that story; however, the Stef that I am now was like “Oh damn, that’s the good stuff right there.”
So… What is the recipe for success in leadership? people management? I think it’s something like this:
“I trust that you understand where we’re headed and will put in the effort to generate the outcomes you were hired to generate, I’ll look over my shoulder and check in on you from time to time, but most importantly, I trust you. And listen, should you need it, my hand is right here, you can grab onto it any time you like, and hold onto it for as long as you need… We’re in this together.”
Maybe it’s not a perfect recipe… But I think it’s a solid stinking starting place to not suck as a people leader.
Okay, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy this fun, RAW audio (the fully prettied up and published version is somehow gone from my google drive) from the conversation we had with Vanessa.
Xo!
