I’ve interviewed more than 175 entrepreneurs over the past five years. One pattern keeps surfacing that most people miss entirely.
The entrepreneurs who build the most innovative businesses aren’t the ones with the most resources or the best connections.
They’re the ones who’ve lived between worlds.
Whitney Dueñas Richardson, the most recent guest on the En Factor podcast, grew up on the island of Guam with a Chamorro mother and Dutch father. Two completely different cultures under one roof. She’s traveled to 46 countries, collecting perspectives like most people collect souvenirs.
When she started Global Sprouts, a company creating cultural learning kits for young children, she wasn’t just launching a business. She was translating her entire identity into market value.
That translation matters more than most entrepreneurs realize.
When Personal Values Become Business DNA
Whitney told me something that stayed with me. She watched her own daughter growing up and saw a disconnect in how younger generations view other cultures.
She didn’t commission market research or analyze trends.
She looked at her own life and asked: What if other parents want what I want for my kids?
That’s the move most entrepreneurs miss. They search externally for problems to solve when the most powerful business ideas are often sitting in their own experience.
The reason is simple but profound.
When you’ve lived in multiple cultural contexts, you see gaps others can’t see. You spot opportunities that look invisible to people who’ve only known one way of living.
Whitney’s multicultural upbringing wasn’t just background noise. It became the entire signal.
The Mortality Catalyst
At 18, Whitney survived a near-fatal car crash. The kind of experience that rewires how you think about risk.
She calls herself a “cliff jumper” now. Someone who makes decisions and moves forward without overthinking every variable. This mindset came from understanding that life is finite and hesitation has costs.
Many survivors quit their jobs to pursue entrepreneurship instead of corporate advancement.
Whitney’s accident gave her something most entrepreneurs spend years trying to develop: clarity about what matters and willingness to act on it.
Before Global Sprouts, she founded and sold a fitness studio during the pandemic. She’s comfortable with failure because she’s comfortable with the fact that time is limited.
That’s not recklessness. That’s prioritization.
Creative Problem Solving Lives at Intersections
Here’s what I find most interesting about Whitney’s approach. She didn’t just build a product about cultural diversity. She built her entire team around it.
Ten people from different countries serve as cultural ambassadors for Global Sprouts. Each one brings authenticity to the kits they create.
Most entrepreneurs talk about diversity as a checkbox. Whitney made it her competitive advantage. But the real advantage isn’t just performance metrics.
Creative problem solving comes from the intersection of different perspectives, domains, and cultures. Whitney has the ability to solve problems in ways others can’t because she’s spent her entire life translating between worlds.
When you’re building a business, that translation skill becomes invaluable.
You see connections others miss. You understand customer needs across different contexts. You can adapt quickly because you’ve been adapting your whole life.
Culture Reflects Values, Intentionally or Not
I’ve noticed something across hundreds of interviews. Entrepreneurs build company cultures that reflect their personal values whether they mean to or not.
The self-aware ones do it deliberately.
Whitney’s international team structure didn’t happen by accident. It happened because she values cultural authenticity deeply and built systems to protect it.
She coordinates across time zones using project management tools. She hires for cultural fit and trainability over experience.
If you’re starting a business, it’s worth pausing to identify your core values before you make your first hire.
Those values will shape everything. Your hiring decisions. Your product development. Your customer relationships.
The question is whether you’ll shape them consciously or let them emerge by default.
Decision-Making Maturity
Whitney’s advice to entrepreneurs is deceptively simple: “Find your efficiency and make your decision.”
But efficiency in decision-making isn’t about speed alone.
Entrepreneurs make countless decisions daily. From the moment they wake up until they go to sleep, the decision load is magnified compared to most jobs.
The skill isn’t making every decision quickly. It’s knowing which decisions deserve quick action and which ones require deeper reflection.
Some decisions you can test on a small scale, learn from, and move on. Product features. Marketing messages. Pricing experiments.
Other decisions carry more weight. Strategic partnerships. Major pivots. Team structure changes.
Learning the difference between these two categories is a form of entrepreneurial maturity that can be very helpful.
I’ve always been a fairly quick decision-maker myself. But I’ve learned that the biggest decisions benefit from reflection, even when that feels uncomfortable.
Whitney seems to balance this well. She moves fast on product iterations and market tests. She moves more thoughtfully on questions of cultural authenticity and team composition.
That’s not contradiction. That’s sophistication.
The Profit-Purpose Convergence
Something is shifting in entrepreneurship. I see it in interview after interview.
More entrepreneurs want to build businesses that are both profitable and meaningful. Not one or the other.
Whitney’s business model combines subscription boxes with one-off purchases. She’s building revenue while teaching children empathy and cultural understanding.
The business can be profitable in traditional terms. But it also has a powerful service mission.
If we were all a bit more culturally aware, even just a little bit, I think we’d see a lot more peace in the world. That matters right now as we live in a pretty divisive society.
While Whitney’s approach is unique in its execution, it reflects a common theme I’m seeing more frequently.
Entrepreneurs want to make a difference, not just make money.
They want to build strong, profitable businesses for themselves and their investors. And they want to create positive change in the world.
That dual mandate used to feel like a luxury. Now it’s becoming table stakes.
The Lesson of Openness
Whitney’s story teaches something that applies far beyond cultural education products.
Open yourself up. Pay attention. Be willing to explore new things.
Creative problem solving emerges when you allow different perspectives to collide in your mind. When you travel, when you listen, when you step outside your familiar patterns.
Whitney has the ability to creatively solve problems because she’s collected perspectives from 46 countries and two distinct cultural heritages. Most of us won’t travel that extensively. But we can all practice openness.
We can seek out perspectives different from our own. We can hire people who think differently than we do. We can read widely, ask questions, and stay curious.
When we do that, we find better solutions to the problems we’re trying to solve.
We probably get more efficient with decision-making too, because we’ve trained ourselves to see patterns across different contexts.
Your background isn’t a limitation to overcome. It’s fuel for innovation.
The experiences that made you different are the same experiences that give you unique insight into problems others can’t see.
Whitney understood this instinctively. She didn’t try to fit into someone else’s model of entrepreneurship.
She built a business that could only exist because of who she is.
That’s the real lesson. Not that you need to be multicultural or well-traveled to succeed.
But that your specific combination of experiences, values, and perspectives is your unfair advantage in the market.
The question is whether you’re willing to build something that reflects that truth.
