Cooking brings people together: My journey building Ladle Cooking and discovering the inflection point between my professional path and personal fulfillment.

entrepreneur, leadership, empowerment, diversity, career, equal, mentorship, success, opportunity, networking, inspiration, ambition, glass ceiling, work-life balance, professional

Wow! Becoming an entrepreneur after 20 years in corporate America. It's been a journey. I'm Sumati Sharan. I'm the founder CEO of Ladle Cooking. I've had a very successful track in corporate America. I've had the pleasure of working for some great technology companies, including Amazon, Intel, HP and others. I've launched and driven growth for solutions in AI, IoT and cloud services that have been adopted by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. I bet you've heard of the term Alexa turned on the lights. I was responsible for building that ecosystem worldwide. A couple years ago, coming through the pandemic after Amazon, I helped a startup successfully exit. I started to consider what was next for me. I was talking to a lot of companies, a lot of big tech companies and startups, but nothing seemed to be very exciting. It was also a time of deep change for me personally. I was going through a divorce. So this promised to be a completely new chapter in my life. I took a trip overseas. I went to a number of countries and talked to a number of people. And what I learned was that cooking is a universal language. People all over the world love to eat and they love to cook. And this resonated deeply with me. Cooking has always been a passion for me. I love to cook to have fun. I love to cook when I want to be creative and let loose. But cooking also has a deeper meaning for me. You see, I have a son, Ryan. Ryan has a lot of food allergies. A few years ago when I was raising him every night after long day at work, after dinner, I would literally be tearing my hair apart, trying to figure out what to give him for lunch the next day. And boy, if you threw in a birthday party or a soccer practice, that made my life even harder. That is a problem I wanted to solve for other folks and other families. Two things happened when I came back to the States. I put together a basic business plan and I sent it to my friend Mike. Now Mike and I went to business school together. We've known each other a while. He's a successful entrepreneur and I have a lot of respect for Mike. Typically, it takes Mike a number of days before he gets back to me. Mike's busy. But interestingly enough this time, within 24 hours, I got a response. And Mike told me, hey, business plan looks good. The other thing we all know about is OpenAI release chat GBT. So the path to building a truly personalized cooking experience became real. Emboldened, I reached out to a number of folks that I had worked with previously, folks in development and product and design and other areas. A number of people decided to come and work with me. And so Little Cooking was born. Little is an AI-driven personal sous chef. We are building a truly user, consumer-focused platform that helps people cook what they want based on their dietary preferences, based on the regions they live in, based on their languages, based on the appliance that they have in their kitchen or they want to have. We're helping people both in terms of providing them cooking guides and education guides, taking out the stress of cooking something they don't know and also building trust in them so they can cook something different or something more than they could ever before. We're taking content from creators and influencers that people already love and we're providing that to our users. At the same time, we're providing our platform and our services to brands, kitchen brands, OEMs, CPGs and other brands who are looking to build deeper engagement with their consumers. We're gaining significant traction in the US and we're getting requests from other countries, including Japan, India and other countries in Europe. This is truly a really exciting time for Little and we are building this ecosystem successfully. I am excited for the last 18 months and the amazing journey it has been. I'm also excited about taking my experience, my passion and the learnings we're getting to keep building Little. No two days are the same, but I wake up every morning really excited to keep moving further and for that I'm to be grateful. Thank you.

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