Lina Zdruli: Employee To Entrepreneur

 
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In episode #10 of My 2.0, guest Lina Zdruli, Founder and CEO of Dafero, shares her transition from being a consultant at the World Bank to becoming an entrepreneur.  

With her background in international relations and focus diplomacy and small and medium enterprises from a trade perspective, she worked at the UN, merging international relations with environmental conservation. While doing her Masters at Georgetown in transatlantic relations, she learned about forced displacement and refugees. And was interested in how the private sector could support this issue for long term change. She then started working at the World Bank, doing exactly that work. 

She had a very intensive travel schedule and found that she loved eating all sorts of foods all over the world but got a stomach ache every time she returned to the US. She tried to practice the elimination diet to resolve the issue, but to not avail. After one of her trips, she started baking with dates and found they were delicious and healthy. As she tried to find dates spread in the US, she discovered there wasn’t one that didn’t have any additional sugar. The need to stick to natural ingredients and yet maintain taste, gave birth to Dafero. She also tried to solve the forced displacement labor problem by using them as the workforce at Dafero. 

The transition was gradual, and she didn’t realize how much what once was a weekend passion was taking over her life. She started to go deep into learning about food science, and other things about starting and running a food business. She loves combining tradition with trend and loves that her energy is flowing where her attention is. 

Lina talks about feeling stuck all the time. About being covered in date explosions, burning blenders and food processors. Scaling up was hard; getting the manufacturing right for the new production levels was very hard. 

Lina used the following resources to unstick. She tapped into fellow entrepreneurs. She also absorbed ideas about packaging, branding and taste from her travels and conversations around the world. 

She would like to debunk the following transition myths. That one has to be 100% sure else to not do anything new. And that it will be very expensive to start a new venture. 

She is very excited about the Dafero 2.0 rebrand. They are revamping the look and feel of the brand in the labeling and packaging. And making sure it represents a fun, happy, colorful and inclusive brand. They are also celebrating overcoming their manufacturing challenges as a result of scaling up.

Her last words were for us to detach ourselves from our company. Because even if the company fails, we will live on to do bigger and better things!

Resources: 

 
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Lauren Maffeo: Media To Technology

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Liza Rodewald: Solo To Scale