Arshiya Kherani

🤖 AI Can Do It...But Can It Make The Case? One of the biggest mistakes I made in my career was while giving a presentation I was genuinely proud of in the moment. I had the full attention of my agency's managers, directors, and executives. My presentation was full of pretty slides and impressive numbers. I thought the data would speak for itself, but the feedback I generally got from the highest-level executives was, "What was the point of your presentation?" For context, I was the Head of...

🕳️ Networking To Nowhere As someone who lives in LA, I often find myself going to a lot of events just because they are "a vibe." Sometimes they end up being genuinely valuable...but other times, the session ends and I walk away having done a lot of networking to nowhere. Not enough people offering real value, just a lot of people there to get something, social climb, or be a part of a scene. Some people are just there to be in community, which sometimes I am too. My job is to develop my...

The Knowledge Gap My mom and I were at the farmers market last weekend and sampling coconut water from a little stand. The woman running it mentioned they import the coconuts from Thailand every week. My mom immediately laughed and said, "you must be getting hit hard with tariffs!" The woman looked at her blankly. "What are tariffs?" My mom and I looked at each other. I immediately wondered...how can she not know what tariffs are?! I wondered if the tariffs actually didn't hit on Thai food...

🗺️ The One Without The Roadmap I was brought in to build a customer experience function from scratch. The role was newly carved out with me in mind, or so I was told... It was a big step up from individual contributor to a managerial function on the strategy team, serving the agency's highest growth clients. My manager seemed excited, so was I. My first assignment: write your own 90-day plan. At first, it sounded exciting, but it turns out this was the red flag I ignored. Nobody reviewed it,...

🧿 My Secret To Taking The Ick Out Of Networking Instead of leading with the usual "so what do you do," at a networking event, I ask: what brought you here today? People tell me something real, and what I've found is that it kicks off a real conversation about what led us to this particular room. It takes the ick out of networking. A few weeks ago I overheard a stranger ask a variation of my question. They asked, what do you want to get out of today?, and then introduced themselves based on...

🧵 A 20 Hour Day My alarm went off at 5:15 am at an annoyingly high pitch; I rolled over to slam snooze to my "alien alarm clock song," as my husband calls it (if you have an iPhone, you might know exactly which sound this is...) I am not an early riser, but I stumbled out of bed fairly quickly, changed, and ran out the door to catch my flight up to the Bay. I was heading up to facilitate a 3-hour session at The Jazba Collective's Fellowship Kickoff weekend. My role was to guide 30+ South...

🧵 The Last Time I Wrote This Newsletter... I was about to get married (!!!). I was fairly confident I had built enough systems as an entrepreneur that my business could survive one to two weeks without me. I was wrong. A little context: I'm 36, South Asian, and Muslim. Getting married "this late in the game" carries weight in my community that some of you might already understand. For all the reasons you might imagine, my engagement was only five months long: family, religion, age, and the...

🧵 Timestamp: Q1 2020 My plan for my clothing startup in 2020 was to scale up. I had just hit 6-figures, had a few production runs under my belt, and my confidence was through the roof. As you can imagine, I was in for quite the surprise. In January 2020, my manufacturing partner in Portugal started hinting at the pandemic. ➡️ By March: my factory partner told me they were operating at <50% capacity. ➡️ By May: they told me they were shutting down work with smaller clients like me. Without a...

🧵 The Unhinged Confidence That Helped Me Build A Globally-Recognized Brand I was 26 years old and had spent about 8 months working on my side hustle, Sukoon Active. I had the naiveté and unhinged confidence of a first-time founder in her 20s: I thought everything was possible — and to some extent, it was. Sukoon consumed most of my nights and weekends. What most people don’t know is: news outlets, podcast hosts, everyone in media is ALWAYS looking for a story. I actually didn’t know that...