Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Sharon
Hi Michael, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I was born into a cult. Not one of those weird bad ones that becomes fodder for an HBO series, but a reasonably normal, vegetarian meditation cult. I was mostly born into it because my parents were really into it.
These days, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Taika and, according to my Facebook bio, I am constantly curious, clearly capricious, quietly quantitative and accidentally amusing. At various times in my life I’ve been a technology entrepreneur, angel investor and product leader who has work on teams to create products used by billions of people. Until early 2016 I led the Pages product group at Facebook building out the products, revenue and strategy across the platforms and tools used by more than 60M businesses, celebrities and other organizations. I was the first mobile product hire at Facebook way back in 2008 and subsequently led their mobile product development, strategy and transformation for more than five years. Before that I was an adjunct professor at New York University and the founder of Socialight – a pioneering mobile location platform. I hold a master’s degree in interactive telecommunications from New York University and a bachelor’s in English and Law from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. My products and work have been featured in most major publications including The New York Times, The Economist, Wired and The Guardian, among others. I hold multiple patents for my work in mobile technology, location and social networks.
I got really into coffee by taking sugar out of my coffee. I did an experiment to remove the sugar from my coffee and ended up being able to actually taste the nuance of every single note of this black liquid I was consuming. This happened when I lived in NYC a few years ago and let me tell you now, NYC deli coffee without sugar or any additives is like black, ashy tar water that violently assaults your throat. This led me to the gentle clutches of the third wave coffee world where I was welcomed in by the delightful taste of single origin, lightly roasted beans, sustainably sourced and harvested. I was in love. I became that guy. The one that every circle of friends has – the guy who lectures you on everything related to coffee, beans, water, brewing method, temperature, soil conditions where your beans are grown etc etc.
After a few years of this, my next big a-ha moment was when I was working on an intense project and trying to power through by drinking 7 coffees a day. That was not smart. After a day or two of this, I was a quivering, hyper-caffeinated wreck of a human. This would not do. I didn’t want to give up coffee, but I knew that I couldn’t handle the amount of caffeine I was throwing at my body. I did some research and ended up discovering a number of fascinating compounds which mitigated the effects of coffee and left me feeling focused, calm and super creative. These were amino acids, functional mushrooms and adaptogens that had been consumed by humans for thousands of years, but hadn’t quite found their way to your regular cup of joe. The combination with coffee was phenomenal, I was able to go from 7 coffees to one coffee per day with my stack of adaptogens mixed in. What’s more, I had more sustained energy and focus from that one coffee than I had from all of the ones before. Win-win. This is what eventually led me and my co-founder to create Taika.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Absolutely not! No pain, no gain is definitely something you feel acutely as a beverage founder. There have been so many challenges, small and large along the way, that are really just par for the course as an entrepreneur. You have to be comfortable solving not just high level strategic challenges, but also diving into the bare metal details of your product and sometimes figuring out problems that even “experts” fall short on because they just don’t have the same perspective as you or simply don’t care enough to solve what could be existential – the difference between life or death.
Getting the product right was an early challenge. We started formulating our first few products in my kitchen at home, bottling them by hand in glass bottles, but we quickly outgrew this and started producing at a small bottling plant across the bridge in Oakland. One of our first big issues was that the coffee they were brewing for us and then canning tasted pretty weird – but nobody else seemed to agree on this apart from us. The issue was that they were adding citric acid to the coffee to help with the shelf life, which works fine for the regular, low quality coffee they were brewing. Our coffee at this stage was single origin, custom roasted beans from Ethiopia and Colombia and had an incredible flavor that was absolutely destroyed by the citric acid. Forcing the “experts” to remove this unnecessary additive completely changed the taste of our brews and cemented our early reputation as having the absolute best tasting canned coffee.
We’ve been impressed with Taika, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Taika focuses on creating products to fuel your creativity. Everyone is creative and these days, more and more people rely on their creativity to carry them through their day so working on products that help people feel calm, focused and ready to create is one of the highest leverage things we can do.
We’ve always focused on the feeling that you get after you drink our products – and that’s due to a combination of incredibly quality coffee or matcha blended with our Taika Creative Blend of adaptogens and functional mushrooms. We also care deeply about health, so we do not have sugar in any of our products and make our own proprietary oat and macadamia milks. When we launched, James Hoffman, one of the foremost experts on coffee worldwide, created a video about us called [Taika – Coffee As A Destination](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gUoMAhcTC0). Since then, we’ve expanded to Matcha and our original Matcha Latte won the award for Best New Product from BevNET in 2021 and became our #1 best selling product and one of the best tasting (and selling) canned matchas in the US. Our latest creation – the Strawberry Matcha Latte just won [the award for Best New Product 2024](https://www.bevnet.com/bestof/2024/taika-strawberry-matcha-latte) from BevNET again and is already our #2 product.
How do you think about happiness?
Seeing other people sharing their stories about how much they love our products is a massive endorphin boost. I love seeing pictures of our cans in the wild and stories from people about how they feel after they drink Taika. Apart from that, spending time with my lovely girlfriend, exploring new cities and listening to music is guaranteed to activate happy vibes in my house. Also anything puppy or cute animal related. Send me all the animal memes. 🙂
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.taika.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taika
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drinktaika/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/drinktaika
- Twitter: https://www.x.com/taikacoffee
Image Credits
Maddie Eickhoff
