From Stanford to Founder of a Yogurt Brand: the Story of KIKI
Kiki, co-founder of Sourmilk, on leaving private equity to build a D2C yogurt brand now sold in hundreds of US supermarkets.
Kiki · Co-Founder at Sourmilk · San Francisco · 40 min · 2026-08-04
About this episode
Kiki went from Stanford human biology to two years in private equity at Alpine Investors, and then co-founded Sourmilk — a D2C yogurt brand that started as a kitchen experiment with specific bacterial strains and now sells in hundreds of supermarkets across the US.
The episode is a useful listen if you are weighing a safe, structured career path against building something of your own, and want to hear how that decision actually gets made rather than how it gets told afterwards.
What we cover
- Why time, not money, is the resource worth spending most carefully — and how that mindset moved her from corporate finance to founding a company
- The real difference between building a personal brand and building a physical product
- How the idea started: culturing strains at home because no yogurt on the shelf had them
- What founder life does to your priorities, and how often you have to reset them
Key takeaway
Consumer brands are not built on a perfect plan. They are built on one specific problem the founder cared enough about to keep fixing.