Dominnique Karetsos:
Hi A.J., thanks for having me. It’s wonderful and it’s lovely to be able to see you up front and close given that when we were on stage it was really, really dark and no one knew who was sitting in the room and really big room. Right? So it’s really lovely to have that in the true pre-post in the middle of COVID life to have some FaceTime. It’s probably the one time I do appreciate Zoom.

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s like, oh, I can see your face. That’s nice.

Dominnique Karetsos:
Exactly.

A.J. Lawrence:
As I was just telling the audience, you have such a fascinating background and as we were just chatting a little bit, your life background is even cooler and as interesting, if not more than your professional. But you’ve done so many great things and you’re working with so many great concepts right now and so many companies in such a great field that is starting to become more mainstream. I mean, obviously it’s mainstream because you look at the sales of feminine product, feminine se, tech and all this, it’s growing through the roof.

But like our awareness and sort of the, I’m going to massacre the phrase, just the amount of is decreasing. It’s less, where it used to be like ooh, but twitching 12 year olds would pop up every time you say it. Now it’s like, oh, let’s talk about this. Given all this you’re doing and all the stuff you’re working on now, where do you see yourself as an entrepreneur these days?

Dominnique Karetsos:
Such a fascinating question because we always start with a definition of labels as an entrepreneur. And I think what’s really important is my journey up until this point has been that of entrepreneurship, but also have lived in corporate. But today I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur. I consider myself living a life’s mission. And I’m not alone because I have an incredible team. I’m obviously one of three co-founders, but if we backtrack a little, a lot of my experience in growing up in different countries. So I was born and raised in Africa, South Africa specifically, but also Europe. I have a Greek father, a French Huguenot mom, and so I lived in apartheid, came out of apartheid. I actually studied as a maritime logistician, so one of the few women in shipping and international trade. Totally blame my Greek heritage for that. And then through politics and policy, as a woman and as a white woman, a lot of that changed.And so I accidentally on purpose fell into the beauty industry, having test driving my sort of brand architecture marketing degree. And I loved it because I saw such an incredible transition in the beauty industry with predominantly makeup and skincare was made for classic blond hair, blue eyed, pale skin. But I lived in Africa, right? And so this was the time for brands and products to be inclusive, to say, recognize the rest of the world. And half of the world are women, right? Or associate being a woman. And so when you fast track having moved through corporate, et cetera, working with big brands all over the world, I went through a huge life change, became a mum, which I’m sure many, and as a dad as well, I’m sure many who are listening, it’s a big life transition.No one gives you a manual. There’s no warning in how life is going to change. And certainly as women, as understanding an agency of our bodies came to light, we don’t have any right. No one tells you that body parts are going to move drastically. And so as I became a mum, I also found myself being very vocal as a broadcast on BBC radio, using my voice, my choice and an opinion. Whether it was talking about breastfeeding in public and being asked to leave a room, whether it was about how to bring intimacy after having given birth, a natural birth, these were the topics of conversation I realized that no one was talking about.And you’re very right, you know, we spoke before, like you mentioned that the whole room empties in 30 seconds. It’s a party trick. Maybe someone has a drink and then comes and asks you a question. And on top of that, along the way I went through a crippling divorce and realized that the agency over my body meant I also actually didn’t have agency over my financials. Partly through my own choice and my decision and partly through the policies that surrounded me within the countries that I was living in. And I decided to leave what some would call a successful career and then moved into a significant career. And that significant career was six, seven years ago called sex tech or sexual device or porn, right? Because the only thing about sexuality was the family planning aisle down, you know, Walmart if you’re in the US or booths if you’re in the UK was family planning, the condom aisle and anything else you bought was in a brown paper bag down a dark alley. Right?And today that conversation is very different. But having recognized that and having the lay of the land in commerce and innovation, I went and I started to invest in maverick brands that were popping up in the space. I met one of my co-founders, Dr. Maria. We invented a product together and also worked with brands to reshape the narrative around what we call today sexual health and technology. So you go into Selfridges or Sephora or even go into Holland and Barrett, which are all very UK iconic brands, even Urban Outfitters in the US you can go and have a selection of products for sexual wellness or sexual health. It doesn’t matter who you are, what color you are, what gender you associate, you have more offerings than you did five or six years ago.If you’re on social media, if you’re listening to radio, if you’re watching television, Netflix, the conversation is very, very different. But it’s different for every country because this topic called sexuality and sexual health. You know, pleasure is the most innate experience and it’s the oldest industry in the world. It’s how you got here, right? But the life’s mission was molded and came to light about six years ago. And up until that point I was an entrepreneur because I feel like often an entrepreneur, you are an island, you are on your own, you have your vision, you may have a team, you may not have a team. But as an independent person trying to make a change, that has shifted a lot for me. And so I’m no longer the entrepreneur. I also, when I was 13, had my own non-alcoholic perfume business. I was always trading. I was either cleaning horse stables for extra money or selling perfume at flea markets or craft markets to make money and save, or do things that I love to do while working.I come from an entrepreneurial family. My father left finance and owned beautiful restaurants. My mom is an incredible entrepreneur, owns hotels. So I think I was definitely that filtered down to myself. But today my definition of entrepreneurship is not entrepreneurship. It’s a life mission. And I’m very, very fortunate to be one of three partners that we hold the same life mission, we have the same vision, and it’s because of them that we are a group, we are a team. And that’s a very different mindset because when you’re an entrepreneur or it’s a consultant or a freelancer, or you’re trying to build a vision, there’s a bit of cowgirl or cowboy, you know. You kind of bulldoze your way through a little bit and it’s my way, like, how do I do this? You know, I don’t take no for an answer. And you’re making decisions in isolation just to get to the next point. Then you grow up and you realize, hang on a minute. Any decision I make impacts my team, impacts my partners, impacts my strategy, impacts my investors. Now it’s a totally different situation. I’m not an entrepreneur, I’m a leader. And I have a responsibility to make sure that our life’s mission is fulfilled, but also bring those who’ve lent in to your life’s mission along the way. And it’s a different mindset, in my personal opinion.

A.J. Lawrence:
I love that because one of the cool things about having the show is talking to successful people like yourself who’ve gone on their life mission and been able to. And what is pretty common is there’s usually, not everyone obviously, but in most successful people on these missions, there’s this transition at some point from I want to create X to I want to build to I then help support this team in doing this mission.

Dominnique Karetsos:
One of the toughest things about our space is sexual health and technology or our group, Healthy Pleasure Group, there is no benchmark. There is no, oh, we’d like to be the apple of the world. There is none. So we’re shaping what that looks like. Healthy Pleasure Group is the only ecosystem that is dedicated to sexual health and technology so we have to sometimes get scrappy and actually think about how our mission and our vision and how this is playing out. Not only agility, not only being incredibly open to listening to how the market is moving. Not just the market, not just investment, but also the consumer people. Right? Because it’s people who are creating the social change. It is people who are demanding how their healthcare, how their sexual health, sexual wellness, and how they move through the world with their sexuality cannot no longer be boxed like it was so many years ago.And Covid definitely helped with that because it put a spotlight on the ability, if you were fortunate enough to have a roof over your head and have access to technology for once, you could say, you know what? I want to talk to a doctor about erectile dysfunction. I want to do research on how I can bring intimacy or desire back into a 30 year marriage, or I have a problem with my menstrual cycle and I need help. How we move through the world means that now, with COVID specifically, taking care of our sexual health and wellness is a priority and it’s not going away. So when we build this mission to not only create behavioral change, but also make an impact in the world and also make a purposeful, driven profit.Because we are a company, we’re not just a charity. We have to build that equation ourselves. So when we think about success, one of the success factors from a very corporate perspective would be, you know, we set the model. Hopefully those brands that come into the market look to us in the future and go, we want to make a change, a social impact change, just like HBG did. Whether that’s a mental health brand, whatever it might be, hopefully we’re game changing in the approach in how we build a business and how we make changes. Nothing about our space and our company is traditional because traditional hasn’t worked previously. And then to make things really complicated, you have to appreciate that sexuality is that tapestry of culture, religion, beliefs, policies. And each for every person in every country, it’s different. So how do you build a model that talks to a global scale, that allows an invitation to create a safe space to explore, to discover, to learn, so that our children grow up very differently to maybe how we grew up?I don’t know about you. I had a safe space to explore and discover my sexuality. Said very few people, right? Without shame, without taboo. And so the bottom line is we want that to be different for the next generation. But along the way, we as adults have to raise our souls sexually. We have to challenge our own beliefs right on how we approach our lives. And when you want to put it under an umbrella of easily to digest language, because lexicon is so important in our space, we are moving into a world of self-care. So whether that is a sexual technology product, whether it’s around fertility, whether it’s around the future of intimacy or pleasure, it’s about self-care. And so this is where the industry is going very, very fast. In all the industries I’ve worked, I have with consumer facing, I have never seen an industry move so fast as the sexual health and technology. As soon as we open our mouth and predict something, it happens. It’s incredible.In January, I did a trend piece saying retail would change and literally three weeks later, Sephora has sexual wellness products. Bloomingdale’s has sexual wellness products. Roots has sustainability aisles with tampons and sanitary or period underwear made out of bamboo. The whole world is shifting and shaping and it’s moving in the right direction. Is it moving fast enough for us to say we are successful in what we’re trying to do? No, but I think success as a company and as a mission has so many tick boxes, right? Is it a profit? Is it a change? Is it a shift? Is it a brand recognition? Is it a you know what? We’re attracting talent and building an opportunity for those to work in a company that does things differently. There’s so many tick boxes and I can rest assure you we have not gotten even close to ticking all of them yet. Because they keep adding, we keep adding, right? Like if you don’t, you’re just going to get idle and the market won’t allow it. Humans won’t allow it. And as far as we’re concerned, that doesn’t allow for success in our definition if you just sit on your laurels.

A.J. Lawrence:
As we say no, I think I’ve had my own agencies and I’ve been a digital consult. You know, I came out as a programmer and then throughout all the other fun I’ve worked over the years from the late 90s through with some early online, a few, you know, women are ones. And what’s interesting, I had some conversations about five, six years ago with some of the founders and as Amazon started moving goods into their initial category was the weirdest thing because it was like if you search for it, you would find the products but if you just were looking for that category, it was like what it was some weird wellness category that was like, yeah, okay, it ends. But what it’s interesting, they were bemoaning the fact that their uniqueness and their value prop was being diluted as mainstream to what they were seeing as Amazon. The store starting to have instead of like a couple variations of condoms, they also started having oils or small pleasure devices. So it was like it was expanding by little babes in toyland had to do retrenching that were these early. And it’s an interesting thing where it’s like, wow, these cool early brands or these cool early approaches to a healthy sexual world, they were impacted as it became mainstream and you feel bad but at the same time it’s like that’s actually a good sign because it means it’s not that they’re failing, but like that overall the world has gotten better for their customer base. The thing is, you guys grow.

Dominnique Karetsos:
You know, we work with brands so in our ecosystem we obviously have our agency part of the business which helps brand launch and scale. And that’s really important because as you’ve said, we live in a digitally censored landscape when it comes to products or education around sexual health or sexual wellness. We have our commerce, which is our demand arm, which is all about talking to retailers and encouraging them how to reshape the shopping experience so that we aren’t carrying a brown paper bag down a dark alley and getting more than just a condom offering. We then have our lab which is all about innovation. And our innovation is obviously led by Dr. Maria and her team. And that innovation is more B2B. So our innovation is available to big CPGs or brands who want to make sure they have honest innovation innovation out there in the market. And traditionally A.J., CPGs. When I say CPGs, it’s like the unilevers of the world, etc, they’ve monopolized the aisles and that’s great. But now they have half a population who are asking for honest innovation or products. And like a little like the banking system. Anyone who’s listening, who is in banking, when we moved into the digital banking, traditional banking had not invested in that sphere. So you couldn’t just knock down the structures of bank and rebuild. They had not invested in their R and D and a little like CPGs had not invested in their R and D and their innovation to serve millions of unmet female anatomy driven needs. So majority of R and D sits within and like the medical space, largely driven through male anatomy. The world is built for the average male. Whether it’s a seatbelt that’s being tested in a car, whether it’s medication that’s being tested. We as women weren’t even allowed to be in clinical trials for our own contraception. And that’s only being released 28 years ago. Only 28 years ago. So the R and D and CPG now realize that in order to support these millions of unmet needs, they need to have innovation. And innovation needs to hear the customer. So it’s where our lab comes in because we obviously understand what needs to be produced in order to solve these problems with the basics. So that’s a really important power for us because the way to change the world is either through language, so branding and agency. For example, most women will tell you they don’t talk about hygiene products when they talk about their menstrual cycle. Product, period product. We’re not dirty, we’re not interested in language like hygiene anymore. Just like men who have to deal with erectile dysfunction, you are not a dysfunction, you are not broken, you don’t want to be spoken to like you’re broken. Right? So language. And that’s where our agency works with brands and obviously within the larger media world and consumers. We obviously have commerce because you’ve got to be able to change the behavior in how we approach engaging with our innovation. And our production just yesterday, Amazon released their telehealth service. Now on Amazon, you can now book to speak to a sex therapist, a urologist, a doctor about your premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction. As a female, painful intercourse, which is often caused through vaginismus. So this is now changing and reshaping how we source solutions to our issues and how we approach them. And then what other better way is to provide innovation that actually works and give it to B2B partners. When I say give it, I mean profitably sell it, let’s be honest, to CPGs or to brands that will have the reach so that they can put them in the hands of people. And then of course, we work with Amboy Street Ventures fund because we want to support a fund that is only going to invest in sexual health and women’s health technology. So the ecosystem as a whole, it’s not mutually exclusive. Right? It all intertwines. It is the social and economic motors that will drive this industry to rise up and create the change that we need to see. And so you’re very right. The way we have engaged brands before to sell on Amazon and then being hidden has not gone away completely. Because when you look at the big giants, the metas of the world, you can have a social media post about erectile dysfunction, you can show your nipple, A.J. I can’t show my nipple. Right? It’s completely biased. And you will often hear in the press and with brands trying to change that. I think it was a year ago, you could not ask, okay, Google, I’m not going to say the other one because she’ll probably switch on. What sexual device could I buy today? If you ask that, first of all, it’ll ask you that this is an over 18 conversation. Are you okay to go ahead with it? Great. That’s really big for us. Censorship, as in consent. Right? And then the brand like Mystery Vibe will say, these are the products that are available to you. And so education is engaging differently too. But we still are live in a world where we are largely censored digitally and we can either create an allyship with these big giants or think differently on how we want to build brands and actually listen to the now, next and future consumer and realize that there are other ways to own conversations and not just a community. Because many brands go onto social media, especially in our space, they spend hundreds of thousands just trying to own a community. But we as people, the more sophisticated we get, the more demanding we get, the more intelligent we get. And so you can’t just own us as a community. You need to listen to us and then you need to talk to us how we want to be spoken to. Because these are conversations that have never been aired before. So how do I bring back intimacy in a relationship after 30 years of marriage? That’s the conversation your humans, your people, your heartbeat want to talk about. Not necessarily only about a product or a device. So there’s so many ways to be able to build the sphere and your brand in the space. And now with the new regulations that cost meta a whole lot of hundreds of billions of loss. Now brands, any brand, whether you’re a beauty brand or a sexual health and tech brand, you’re going to have to get a little scrappy on how you build that brand for loyalty moving forward. And I’m for one, because we have been raised in the censored landscape. We’ve always, when I say we, I speak collectively for the whole industry. We have had to get and think outside the box in order to survive and thrive in this space. So I’m a little excited about these restrictions are now going to get brands really thinking about how they want to build their brand share and their loyalty, sustainable loyalty. Because it’s sex doesn’t sell anywhere anymore. Sex doesn’t sell. You could put a condom ad or a sex toy ad with like a guy in a Ferrari with a sexy woman’s hand, neck between his legs and it’s a vibrator for a woman that’s not going to sell anymore because she’s buying it. He isn’t always buying it, whereas before it was the opposite. And it’s a little, it’s such a fascinating conversation to have. If we just look at perfume, when perfume first came out and I remember the first billboard, I think it was of Elizabeth Hurley, that gorgeous Liz Hurley billboard with her fragrance. Liz Hurley was not from us. It was for those men who hoped to buy the fragrance and we would just turn into a Liz Hurley. It was definitely not an aspiration for us to look like Liz Hurley because we’ve been dictated to for so long. So there’s a lot of parallels now as the sexual health and wellness industry moves up into mainstream that we can look at.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah and it’s fascinating because it was even the assumption was that men wanted it to see the sex. But I’ve done various products, when you look at lifetime value and repeat purchase and et cetera, that actually you increase initial engagement for men because, oh, we have lovely squirrel like impact in anything sexual but our engagement actually decreases with the type of brand positioning around that. So things that you’re trying to build a lifetime path, if you overemphasize and there’s research that shows that actually decreases. Again, you may break through for that first bit of attention. You’re not going to build a relationship on it. And that’s I think on a lot of things. And this is why I find fascinating that you guys are building it around the women because it’s not about ooh la la, that’s nice and that’s fun and that’s part of what makes us click over. But it’s what goes deeper, that next step that keeps us going. And you’re doing that ongoing, ongoing, ongoing.

Dominnique Karetsos:
You hit a really good point there. I think it’s also important that we at Healthy Pleasure Group, Healthy Pleasure doesn’t discriminate. So when we help build brands, it’s not so much about a woman lens, while women health is really, really important. And a lot of the innovation coming to market is driven by women entrepreneurs because for so long we haven’t had products right or innovation. But it’s about listening to the consumer. And if that consumer associates being a man, if that associates being a woman, trans, whatever they associate with, it’s about listening to how they want to be spoken to, where they want to be spoken to and how they want their solutions to or products to treat them. And that is core to any brand or any piece of work that HPG internally or externally does. It starts with the consumer. And I think we almost in a way we have a thank you to the big giants that have digitally censored us because without it we wouldn’t have the opportunity to engage and listen.

A.J. Lawrence:
I came from a different point. But it’s interesting when you look at the history of the internet, there was this kind of build it and they will come. Well, first it was fun playing around and in the 80s because there wasn’t-there was like thousand people around and a bunch of us kids trying to get in on something we thought we would be able to see, read dirty stories because it weren’t pictures. And then it kept evolving, evolving. But like brands have gone from that build it and then the buy it. Now it’s like, oh wait, you’ve gotten too used to just being able to press the dollars, the buy sign for an audience. Now some corporate back and forth, some Europe, EU privacy laws, the changing of cookie, all of these things are now impacting the ease. You still sophistication levels for how to buy attention are still gazillion times better than even 20 years ago, but not as good as 10 years ago. So it’s like, wow, now you have to actually mix. You have to listen, you have to understand and you have to engage if you’re going to buy. But yeah, I love that approach. Given that you work so much with other entrepreneurs or other people on missions, it’s always hard to get something from 0 to 1. And I’m paraphrasing something you said, you said making something happen. I always call it force as well, to make that there. But then that transition point, because you talked about that earlier, transitioning from I’m going to make this to okay, now and then it’s us and we and it’s you, your mission. What advice do you give to the people on their missions that you work with in that sort of transitioning from okay, you’ve run those sticks hard enough that now the sparks are there. But now how do you turn that into a mission? What advice do you give to them?

Dominnique Karetsos:
There’s a lot. So let me just say the first one, we call it advice, but I can only share that it’s worked for us, right? And the first one is surround yourself with the people that are going to share the vision with you. Because you get to a point where you just cannot grind on your own and make the change that you wanted to see. Whether you are a consultant or whether you are building a company and wanting to make a change, nothing gets done alone. So partners, stakeholders, investors, your husband or wife that’s helping you do something, your kids that are maybe helping you design a website, whatever it is, the people you surround yourself have to have the shared vision. Because any entrepreneur or anyone in business, I think one of the biggest success factors, small or big, is resilience. And resilience, because the world changes so fast and there’s ups and downs. My business partner talks about it like being a swan. You know, you see this gorgeous swan but nobody sees those peddling underneath the water. And when you surround yourself with people that share the vision, your level of resilience is just tenfold. And that allows you the opportunity to be agile, to be flexible. It compounds when you are dealing with the same vision and the same energy and the same attitude to bringing solutions to the table. And then it frees your time up to get creative, to get strategic, to focus. It’s hard to focus when you’re on your own because you’re doing so many things. And even as a business moving from that startup phase to the, and I think we chatted about before, the over the half a million and now we’re scaling. It’s painful. On any given day, we are in the process of scaling. And so aligning yourself with the right people and your partners and maintaining and feeding and nurturing that vision is incredibly important between your partners or leaders because we are still people. People drive people, people drive businesses, businesses don’t drive people. And so when there is a disconnect or discord or dissonance that can come in, and this is I think a lot also about how women do business differently. To mention, we collaborate, we build relationships. And that’s often taboo or scoffed in the world of investment or even the world of senior management. But I truly believe it is the reason why women are so successful in business. And because that’s our approach and the studies have shown it. But it’s less about women and more about the approach that is hugely, hugely important and is the life force for any business to scale. You’re going through growing pains. There’s stress level, there’s charged emotions. So the age old saying that oh, women are emotional or not to be emotional in business is quite frankly, sh*t. Like throw it out along with all the other traditionals, like it’s not even a conversation in our business. Of course we are emotional. We are all driven by emotion and hormones. We are human being, right? And so take that into consideration and deal with that as a priority. Because nurturing those relationships means less incremental gains and huge strides because you have the power and the force to be able to really drive things. And people follow people, people follow passion, people follow missions, people follow people, not just businesses. And I think we apply the same approach as we went to building a brand as we would to our own entrepreneurship or our own scalability. That’s number one. And number two, there’s loads but these are my personal top two. Compassion, not sympathy and empathy. We all have a level of sympathy and empathy, but compassion is those two in action. And I’m not a guru at this. This is just me figuring out that the amount of loss, whether that’s human loss, financial loss, personal loss, the trials and tribulations that I’ve had to go through personally have taught me what compassion and the value of compassion can mean for changing my life. And so adapting that level of compassion in the business and especially when we are dealing with the taboo topic of sexual health and wellness, because we are dealing with the core of how people identify themselves, how they move through the world. Right? So you can’t grow without having that compassion. So if it’s compassion for my partners, for our clients, for our people, for our partners, whatever it might be, and for myself, it’s a non negotiable. And it’s hard sometimes, A.J. It’s not easy. It’s hard, right? We all want to go, I’m going to throttle the next person that tells me no. Why can’t I talk to a journalist? Why are they putting the phone down because I mentioned the word velvet? Why is my team working so hard to build a brand and they don’t want to hear us, et cetera. Everyone has those nuances in business and we never talk about them. We never, we always talk about the outcomes or that it was hard. But we never talk about what hard looks like. And whatever your hard is in business, if you don’t inject compassion, I mean, don’t. But you’re going to suffer more.

A.J. Lawrence:
As I always say, you may be able to work and look, there’s no one way to do this in any shape or form, but there’s enough statistical support that it’s probably creating a collaborative environment, which means developing compassion. It’s not going to guarantee success, but it is probably going to make it easier to deal with the other issues that come about from this journey, which are the other difficulties of coming around. So, yeah, I think that’s great advice.

Dominnique Karetsos:
Thank you. It’s also joy, right? I think when you’re younger-well, for me, when I was younger and I was an entrepreneur trying to make money or sell perfumes or whatever it might have been, and even in maybe in my career, it was all about the outcome. And not really. It sounds very cliché, but I understand that cliché now more than ever. It really is about the joy. Because happiness is, for me personally, happiness is great. It’s there with unicorns and rainbows. But for me, joy, finding the joy in living my life’s mission and even in the thick of the pain of growing as a business, joy is really important because it feeds and nurtures. And that’s what I mean by nurturing. Compassion is one of them. But with nurturing, you enjoy what you do and you’re able to shake off the hard stuff a lot faster. And so it’s less about just the outcome and more about the journey that we go through. And I don’t know if that’s something that comes with having failed like many times, having succeeded, getting older. I don’t know. I’m sure everyone has an opinion about it. My point is by injecting this type of compassion and resilience and having people with the same mission and the same vision and leaning in that for us is the definition of success, not necessarily the outcome. Of course my investors would like that plus profits and that’s what we’re working towards just a little bit. But for us that’s purpose driven profits and it’s purposeful and it’s driven. It doesn’t just happen overnight for some, maybe it does, but not for us and definitely not in the space.

A.J. Lawrence:
That shapes the focus and it shapes that collaboration to drive it towards a mission. I think that is one thing that if not a secret sauce is something that helps. It’s more difficult in the short term to move towards this effort you’re talking about to kind of look at this and look at this purpose. But in interviewing people like yourself, given that I am a data geek and the research, successful businesses, yes, can happen for crossings. But statistically, this idea that aligning a group of people to go do something that is not of the norm, finding the way to do that and keeping everyone aligned around the mission increases the likelihood of success. Defining as growth and those kind of basic, but what’s nice is you’re doing it in a way that creates better value outside of yourself and other people so it’s like this nice tandem going on together. That’s something I’m working a lot on in my efforts so thank you you for sharing. Given that you’ve talked about moving towards this mission, you’re talking about the advice you give to people and you’re talking now about your own valuation of this journey. The way you look at it, as someone on a mission, how do you go about defining success?

Dominnique Karetsos:
Oh, I’m going to say something very controversial here, or maybe not. I don’t ever look at success as a driving force for doing, I’m hoping that I’m materializing these words. So with our vision, our vision is obviously what drives us to get up every day and the life mission and et cetera. But I never take the time to sit down and consider what success would look like. Because as far as I’m concerned, I am successful. I, as a person, personally have grown. I have done more than survive, I’ve thrived. There’s always room for improvement, so there’s always room for learning. So I know that personally my commitment to the business and being a CEO is I wish to learn continuously. And that can be from reading a book to listening to Hillary Clinton on masterclass, to listening to my team, who teach me a lot on a continuous basis. Not just about technology, I might add. So my commitment to learning and the ability to commit and follow through with that, for me, is successful. So there is no one sentence that describes what I am trying to achieve to define myself as successful. From a personal perspective, I’m extremely grateful and appreciative. I have a very abundant life and it’s taken a long time to realize this. Whether it’s loss, whether it’s having my life threatened, whether it’s going bankrupt through a financial divorce, being a single mom living in different countries, whatever it might be, other people’s stories. Pain is pain no matter what. But pleasure is pleasure. And making joy a priority for me is successful when I manage to do that in my daily life, or whether it’s in work, whether it’s pick yourself up and dust yourself off, whether it’s dump bad energy and kind of move in with solutions, whatever it is. All those pockets of movement define success for me personally. And you share that success if you’re able to trickle or share or bring that into your business or into your personal life. But I do not have a lovely definition of what success looks like because in my mind right now, it is a success.

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s funny because I don’t think for, you know, if this is a good or a bad thing, but almost no one has a definition of what success is other than the ability to do. The one consistent theme is similar to yours is the ability to do what they love. And I like yours because you take it that next step to say it is within this life mission. You’re not just doing what you love. That is part, but you’re creating in this and that is the one consistency because I think it is something very hard. As an entrepreneur, we are so focused, yes, either on our businesses or just like to do more. I know my failures left, right and center. I can tell you them and this. And it’s like my successes literally are not successes in the moment. Looking back, I’m like, oh, okay, that was good. But that’s how it is. I do like how you’ve taken it beyond that doing what you love to doing this mission that you believe is your life’s mission. And that ability to create something that has it, that’s not easy and that is very difficult to create a life that does that. So it is what works for you and I do think that’s a very strong answer.

Dominnique Karetsos:
So thank you, no, thank you for summarizing very beautifully.

A.J. Lawrence:
I was responding.

Dominnique Karetsos:
I mean, as humans we tend to think and we’ve been raised, a lot of us and I speak obviously very generally in a very linear path, to believe that we are very linear in the way that we approach things- the way we live, the way we have relationships, the way we just move through the world. And we are not. We are incredibly dynamic. So my level of feeling or association with success 10 years ago, before I was a mum, was very different to what it is today from a personal perspective, even as an entrepreneur, because a lot of what we do is driven that I want my daughter to have a very different life. Imagine a world where children grew up with sexual empathy, where they knew how to carve a safe space in their own life to explore and discover and not give way to peer pressure. They were educated, they had self confidence. All of these things happen when and as and how we all collectively as an industry move through inclusivity and positivity. Whether it’s through putting a product out there and education out there or just the way you advertise, for example. And so that for me is another huge success. Every day that I get to talk to my daughter about the latest technology that’s going to help her non-hormonally manage her contraception. I get to talk to my young nephew to say that we’ve invested in a brand that is future non-hormonal contraception for boys, for men. And imagine a world where half the population of the world shared the burden of reproduction, responsibility. Okay, let’s talk about that closing of that gender gap. So having those conversations, just the privilege to have that conversation is successful. Like that is success in my mind.

A.J. Lawrence:
I have two teenagers and a tween so you know, these are very important things in my life. As my children explore in various ways their gender identities and their sexuality, some in more expected and then some in more sort of things that I think as growing up in the 80s and 90s, I knew people, it was like, oh okay, it’s everywhere versus. So things are changing and watching it so things like this, seeing this happen and it’s just like it’s easier. And then the advances you’re talking, it’s like oh good. These are things that will make their life better.

Dominnique Karetsos:
Incredible entrepreneurs out there making pioneering innovation again. Another success factor that we get to talk to them, work with them and have a glimpse into this next generation of pioneering technologies. It’s a huge privilege and one I don’t take lightly.

A.J. Lawrence:
Well, I’m jealous because, yeah, it is. I think entrepreneurism is always the way to make a better world. You are really doing some, you know, talking to some great people. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dominnique Karetsos:
Thank you for having me.