Products You May Like
About five years ago, Miki Agrawal was sitting in her room on one of her “thinking Fridays,” a day the serial entrepreneur gives herself each week, sans calls or meetings, to just exist in the world and “receive downloads from nature,” as she puts it. On that particular Friday, she was thinking about diapers—a subject that’s top of mind for most new parents, but Agrawal, as they say, is not a regular mom.
By that point, she estimated that her toddler son, Hiro, had gone through thousands of disposable diapers, contributing to the roughly 20 billion sent to landfills and incinerators in the United States each year. She also knew that each one took 500 years to break down. “I tried cloth diapers—no fucking way,” says Agrawal, 45. “I tried eco-diapers, but they didn’t perform well.” As a woman who’d offered her own pumped breast milk to fellow Burning Man attendees to make lattes, she was well aware of its health benefits. “I was like, Wait a minute. If breast milk is liquid gold, baby poop must be fertilizer gold,” she says. “Why are we wrapping this potent fertilizer in plastic and not harnessing it for good?”
At that moment, her son appeared and pointed to a book on her nightstand. “He goes, ‘Pacha, mama, Pacha!’ So I pull out this children’s book that has no business being in my room and start reading it to him,” she says. In the book, Pacha’s Pajamas, a girl named Pacha works with animals to save the planet. “By page 3, he was running off again; he was two. But I kept reading, and on page 31, it said that there were certain types of fungi that eat plastic.” All of a sudden, she had her answer: “You can’t make that up. It’s the universe. I was like, ‘I’m listening, I’m listening!’”
Fine-tuning an actual plastic-eating product—a small packet of fungi that caregivers can pop into a poopy diaper before tossing it into the trash—took some time and collaboration with Four Sigmatic founder Tero Isokauppila. (If you have the same algorithms tracking your online activity as I do, then you’re likely familiar with the variety of functional mushroom coffee blends on the market, one of which is his.)
Isokauppila was one of the first friends Agrawal made after moving to Austin, Texas, from New York during the pandemic, and as a new father himself, he was intrigued by her diaper-eating-mushroom concept. Eventually, in a lab, they were able to land on a formula that successfully decomposed a diaper within two months. In landfills, they expect the process to happen within a year. Once the diaper is gone, the idea is that the spores will continue to grow and degrade the carbon chains in the surrounding plastic waste, transforming it into soil and mycelium. Their resulting company, Hiro Technologies (named after Agrawal’s son), launched its Kickstarter December 10 with an event in Austin. “Our aim is to be the global supplier of plastic-eating mushrooms and to support all the plastic manufacturers with their end-of-life challenges,” Agrawal says.
Today, the real-life Hiro is a sweet, bubbly 7-year-old, standing on the staircase of his aunt Radha’s Brooklyn townhouse, where he and his mom are visiting to celebrate Thanksgiving. (Agrawal and Hiro’s dad divorced in May.) “Are you a YouTuber?” he asks, after his mom explains that I’m interviewing her for a story. To lessen his disappointment, I ask whether he’s watched my own 7-year-old son’s favorite Mr. Beast video, in which 100 rescue dogs, including a three-legged mutt named Buffet, are adopted. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Seeing Buffet get a home…it opened my heart.”
Miki Agrawal
Agrawal smiles under the brim of her Hiro Technologies-branded ball cap, a changeup from the extra-tall, wide-brimmed Santa Fe hats she often wears out in public as “a great conversation starter” and also for efficiency’s sake—“I can run out the door and not have to worry about combing my hair,” she explains later of her commitment to the look. She grabs a bowl of grapes from the kitchen, hands them to Hiro, and watches as he carefully climbs back upstairs.
In an Instagram post celebrating Hiro’s seventh birthday this past July, Agrawal shared an anecdote about traveling home with him from a trip to the Arctic. “Hiro took my suitcase and pushed it all the way through four airports and said ‘I got it’ every time I tried to help,” she wrote. “He’s my little man now.” It’s easy to see how, in addition to assisting with air travel and inspiring her most recent start-up, Agrawal’s son has helped her navigate the past seven years, some of the most challenging of her life.
In the mid-2010s, Agrawal was on top of the world, the self-proclaimed She-E-O of the extremely successful period underwear company, Thinx. Back then, Sophia Amoruso’s #Girlboss was on the bestseller list, Hillary Clinton announced she was running for the presidency, and The Wing was “empowering women through community.” When the company that manages the New York City subway system’s advertisements initially banned Thinx’s campaign featuring suggestive images of grapefruit halves and dripping egg yolks, a public outcry ensued, giving Thinx an unexpected marketing boost and Agrawal a seat at the table of corporate feminism.
“It was never the intention,” she says of her company’s association with the movement. “But we were talking about liberating women and eliminating shame around periods, so naturally the people we attracted to work there were feminist AF, vagina necklace-wearing, free-the-nipple-type women.”
The company also attracted a lot of media attention. I have a vivid memory of seeing the larger-than-life, Georgia O’Keeffe-esque grapefruit advertisement one morning on my way to work at a women’s magazine, and then seeing Agrawal herself later that afternoon when she swooped into our offices for a meeting. With her massive hat and boundless enthusiasm, she owned the room—a prototypical girlboss, the kind of bright-eyed, confident rule-breaker so many of us aspired to be. “We kind of became the poster child for the period feminist movement, which I was totally fine with,” Agrawal says. “We received tons of press, and the business was able to scale. I didn’t expect it to turn, but I was really naïve.”
In March of 2017, Agrawal was more than halfway through her pregnancy with Hiro when a former Thinx employee filed a sexual harassment complaint against her. While she denied the allegations, Agrawal entered into a settlement agreement with the former employee and ultimately stepped down from running the company she’d founded. However, the numerous takedowns in the press had already gone viral.
It goes without saying that women bosses should not get a pass simply for being women, but it was also hard not to notice how giddily the public gobbled up stories of Agrawal’s downfall—or that few male CEOs received the same level of scrutiny. Today, it’s hard to ignore the strange synchronicity of both Thinx and Hiro Technologies launching in the wake of failed U.S. presidential campaigns by highly capable women going up against a man who has repeatedly admitted to “getting away with” serious transgressions. At least one story following the backlash against Agrawal attempted to analyze the complex dynamics of gender-driven media, which “eagerly” reported on her, “first as a feminist hero, and now as a hypocrite.”
In the startup world, which embodied a Wild West-style culture, Agrawal’s fall from grace was seen as a cautionary tale and perhaps a miscalculation of the “bring your whole self to work” mantra. She was also one of the first of many female CEOs to step down and scale back in the years leading up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic, ushering in the end of the so-called girlboss era.
“In truth, the ‘downfall’ of the girlboss was more a media trend than reality,” argues Samhita Mukhopadhyay, author of this past summer’s The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, adding that while the term “girlboss” is outdated and few people identify with it as unapologetically as they may have a decade ago, the scale of women’s ambition hasn’t changed. “The same women who were starting businesses then are still starting them now, or they’ve grown their companies or started new ventures,” she says. “That’s true for the original #girlboss, and the rate of women-owned businesses has only grown since the 2010s.”
That certainly was the case with Agrawal, who soldiered on post-Thinx, re-focusing her attention on Tushy, the affordable bidet attachment company she’d started in 2015, and writing Disrupt-Her: A Manifesto for the Modern Woman in the two months after her son was born. “I just had so much I wanted to say and get out of my body,” she says. “I wrote it while Hiro napped, and it was really good for me because I was so used to working all the time.”
On the surface, Agrawal appeared unscathed, but inside, she was miserable. The allegations and subsequent media pile-on was “the most surreal experience” of her life, she says. “I was trying to change women’s periods, and the desire to take a woman down, without any proof, was so frothy,” she says. “No one called me to fact-check. I remember lying in my bed, naked and crying and so pregnant, being like, ‘Why is this happening to me? What is the lesson?’” She describes an out-of-body experience in which she became an observer of herself and thought, “‘Wow, I get to experience the depths of betrayal in this one short, precious life.’ I just had this overwhelming sense of gratitude in that moment and started laugh-crying in my pillow like a psycho.”
Agrawal acknowledges that she could have done some things differently, expressing regret over the way she handled letting employees go. “When you’re starting a company and you’re scaling so quickly and moving so fast, sure, there are going to be moments when you’re intense and all over the place,” she says. “When firing someone, could I have been more thoughtful in those moments? Of course. But when it’s magnified, when you’re caricatured, it’s just not fair.”
Trauma therapy helped. “I did EMDR, somatic therapy, all kinds of modalities,” she says. “Before then, I was a little too proud to try those things, but I had to get my vessel clean and clear again.” Shifting her attention to Tushy, she prioritized building a team that was diverse with regard to age, race, and gender to avoid the myopic, singular viewpoint that she felt emerged from having a mostly young, female staff at Thinx. She also hired a male CEO. “I’m not one of those people who are like, ‘Ugh, I can’t believe the patriarchy.’ I’m just like, ‘Okay, this is the world we live in. Let’s play ball.’ I’m bringing in what that patriarchy wants and changing things from the inside out.”
Agrawal didn’t change everything, of course. After all, both Thinx and Tushy exist within the personal hygiene space, and both stood to benefit from risqué marketing campaigns. Take, for instance, the similarly rejected Tushy ad that read, “Nothing says I love you like a clean butth*le.” Also worth a watch: Agrawal’s Tushy rap video, in which she spits lines like “No more paper stuck to your behind” while twerking with a group of friends around her Cybertruck.
Those who understand Agrawal best know that she was never going to ride off into the millennial-pink sunset after stepping down from Thinx. Plenty of male founders experience failure, and no one expects them to throw in the towel and not try again. Besides, coming up with big, disruptive ideas is in her DNA. Her identical twin, Radha, who has founded multiple companies of her own—like Daybreaker, which hosts alcohol-free morning dance parties—points to her sister’s undying drive to solve problems. “Our dad used to say, ‘Create, don’t complain.’ So we’re always asking, ‘What are the biggest problems of our time? How can we be creative to solve these problems, and how can we scale those solutions?’”
Radha says that the sisters came up with the idea for Thinx during a family reunion. “Miki and I were doing a three-legged race, and I started my period,” she tells me. “We came in first and then ran up to the bathroom together.” As Radha washed the blood out of her bikini bottom, they started talking about whether a material might exist that could support a menstruating woman when changing a pad or tampon wasn’t an option. She cites their close bond as the secret to the sisters’ entrepreneurial success. “You have a buddy at all times, cheerleading your ideas,” Radha says. “Of course we’re also each other’s harshest critic, but we’ve benefited so much from that level of support. It’s given us the confidence to chart new courses.”
Born in Montreal to a father who’d immigrated from India and a mother from Japan, the twins arrived 11 months after their older sister, Yuri. The three girls would often dress alike. “Our whole family was a spectacle for a long time,” Miki says.
Yuri attended Harvard and now works as a head and neck surgeon, chairing the department of otolaryngology at the University of Colorado. The twins’ older sister “satiated the Asian parent appetite” for having a child enter the medical field, Miki says, which paved the way for their entrepreneurial journey. She sees her father as an entrepreneur at heart who couldn’t pursue such a dream “because he had three kids in one year and had to put food on the table.” Likewise, while their mother spent much of her time raising the children, she also had an inventor’s spirit, starting a company called Tomorrow’s Professionals, which sold electronics kits to children in schools across Canada.
When the daughters began college—Yuri at Harvard and Miki and Radha at Cornell—the entire family relocated to the United States. After graduating with a bachelor of science in business and communication, Miki began financial analyst training in New York, landing a job with Deutsche Bank, located directly across from 2 World Trade Center. The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, she was two weeks into the job and slept through her alarm clock. “I remember waking up, running around, and trying to call a cab,” she says. “Finally, a taxi service answered; they told me to turn on the TV and hung up.” She was 22 years old and decided that going forward, she was going to make every moment count. “I took out a piece of paper and wrote down the three things I most wanted to do with my life. The first was to play soccer professionally, the second was to make movies, and the third was to start a business.”
She convinced her boss at the bank to let her attend tryouts for the New York Magic, a pro-amateur women’s soccer team that met twice a week in Brooklyn, and she made the cut. Two torn ACLs cut her soccer dreams short, but made way for a job at a production company, making commercials and music videos. While on set, she began getting stomachaches from the poor-quality craft services food, which inspired her first business, Wild—New York’s first gluten-free farm-to-table pizza restaurant. To start the business, she cobbled together $250,000 hosting dinner party fundraisers. “From 2005 to 2013, I was at my restaurant 24/7, busting my ass, handing out little pieces of pizza to people who walked by, just grinding and learning the ropes of being a New York businessperson,” Agrawal says.
While such displays of ambition from those days of heady hustling haven’t disappeared, things have evolved, especially for women who would go on to become mothers. “Back then, it felt like anything was possible if you ‘leaned in’ far enough,” Mukhopadhyay says. “Today, people are rethinking what makes a meaningful and impactful life and are starting to wonder if sacrificing for their career is worth it—whether they want it all, and if ‘having it all’ is even possible.”
In a way, Agrawal’s story serves as a modern-day update to Helen Gurley Brown’s infamous 1982 tome, whose “all” encompassed “love, success, sex, and money,” but which also has come to be associated with the high-wire act of balancing career and family. But the fact that Agrawal was able to pick herself back up after a devastating loss and proceed to thrive in both business and motherhood feels far more inspiring than the late former Cosmopolitan editor’s manifesto or any of the girl-power narratives so many brands (Thinx included) tried to sell to us a decade ago. Today, Agrawal can even appreciate the unlikely gift that came out of her departure from Thinx. “I got to see Hiro crawl and take his first step, and I will never ever regret that,” she says.
As if on cue, Hiro slinks back down the stairs. Our interview has apparently run past the time his mom had promised to take him to a nearby climbing gym. Thankfully, some of Agrawal’s friends have dropped by and are game to take him, hinting at the community she has built around herself, a treasured group of close friends and family who helped lift her up during the dark days after leaving Thinx. “I was not alone for one day that year,” she says. “People came to my house and brought me food, music, cheer. Everyone was so hurt for me, but no one knew what to do publicly, so I just got cocooned with love. They held me so deeply.”
From the very beginning, her goal has been to shift culture forward through disruption. To illustrate her point, Agrawal stretches her arms in front of her, touching her fingertips together to make a circle. “Society is like this big blob that wants to maintain its form. It doesn’t like change. And when people try to move society forward,” she says, poking an elbow to the left but keeping the circle intact, “Society will throw rocks at them, accuse them of wearing tinfoil hats, burn them for witchcraft, or whatever. The job of disruptors and people who are trying to challenge norms is to figure out how to explain that it’s safe to move forward together.”
Rethinking the status quo extends to her personal life. Last spring saw the end of Agrawal’s 11-and-half-year marriage to Hiro’s father, fellow entrepreneur Andrew Horn. To help process her conflicting emotions, she wrote and recorded an album, It All Exists, with her friend Happie Hoffman under the name Soul Gaze this past July. “It’s about how love exists in many forms,” she says. “The love you have for your son, your husband, your friends, your first boyfriend. There’s such a vilification of love, if you love more than one person, but love is the most potent, abundant, beautiful expression ever.”
She now recognizes the beauty of the time she and Horn were together, and that the marriage had simply “run its course.” The couple wore matching tracksuits with tigers printed on them to their divorce court date to demonstrate their enduring love for each other, and they now enjoy a healthy, joyful coparenting relationship. Upon meeting her ex’s new partner, Agrawal told her, “‘You’re now the other mom. And I am counting on you to love Hiro like your own, to make sure he eats healthy food and his teeth are brushed.’ We were both crying, and she said, ‘I promise.’ More love is more love. I figure, the more love he can feel by more people, the better.”
Ultimately, it is Agrawal’s love for her son and her desire to clean up some of the mess previous generations have left for him that drives Hiro Technologies. But environmentalist values have driven each of her ventures, from Wild, which reimagined pizza as a locally-sourced, gluten-free food; to Thinx, which helped divert millions of tampons and pads from landfills; to Tushy, which diminishes the need to cut down trees for toilet paper and funds corporate give-back programs in India and reforestation projects across South America.
For her latest venture, Agrawal’s staunchest advocate is all in. As the lead investor in Hiro Technology’s seed round, Radha is convinced that her sister’s new diaper-eating mushroom company is “the most incredible, billion-dollar idea, and it’s going to save the planet.” But at this particular moment, such lofty ambitions will have to wait. Hiro’s mom is late for a date at the climbing gym.