Miki Agrawal has never built businesses by playing it safe.
She’s built them by questioning what the rest of the world accepts as normal.
From period underwear with THINX to bidets with TUSHY to her newest venture, HIRO, a diaper company using fungi to help tackle plastic waste, Agrawal has made a career out of confronting the systems people rarely think to challenge.
Her companies have generated over half a billion dollars in revenue to date, but her real currency is deeper than scale. It is cultural disruption, environmental impact, and an unwavering commitment to truth.
In this episode, Miki talks about what it really takes to challenge industries, survive public setbacks, trust uncertainty, and create from a place that is deeply aligned.
Build From the Truth That Wants to Burst Out of You
For Agrawal, one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is trying too hard to sound right instead of telling the truth.
In a world obsessed with optimization, conversion, and polished messaging, she believes the most magnetic brands and leaders are the ones who speak from what is real. Not what is market-tested. Not what sounds strategic. What is true.
Rather than asking, “What do people want me to say?” Agrawal believes the better question is, “What feels so true inside me that it needs to be shared?”
That perspective has shaped everything she has built. Whether she is challenging the absurdity of toilet paper culture or questioning why billions of diapers are sent to landfills, her work begins by listening to the voice underneath the noise.
And that, she says, is what people actually connect to.
A Life Shaped by Contrasts, Cultures, and Challenges
Agrawal’s unconventional mindset did not appear out of nowhere. It was formed early.
Raised by a Japanese mother and Indian father in Montreal, she grew up with multiple perspectives constantly in conversation. She describes family dinner-table debates as a kind of early training ground for seeing that there is never just one way to do things.
That openness became one of her greatest entrepreneurial strengths.
So did sports. As a high-level soccer player, Agrawal learned discipline, resilience, and how to recover quickly when things did not go her way. Every play required a reset. Every loss demanded presence. And after enduring three ACL reconstructions, she also learned what it means to rebuild after your body forces you to change direction.
But one of the most defining moments of her life came at age 22.
She was supposed to be underneath the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. Instead, she overslept. It was the only time she says that had ever happened.
That near miss changed everything.
It made her viscerally aware of life’s fragility and pushed her to stop waiting. It became a wake-up call to pursue what mattered, to make things that meant something, and to not waste time living a life that felt disconnected from her deeper calling.
Success Does Not Protect You From Pain
From the outside, Agrawal’s career might look like a masterclass in fearless entrepreneurship. But this conversation goes far beyond business wins.
She opens up about one of the hardest chapters of her life: the media firestorm and public takedown she experienced during her time at THINX. At the time, she was pregnant with her son, Hero, while navigating deeply painful public scrutiny and what she describes as one of the most traumatic periods of her life.
What followed was not a quick bounce-back story. It was years of healing.
Agrawal shares that she went through four years of trauma therapy and has spent significant time confronting the emotional residue behind her patterns, triggers, and drive.
What she has come to understand is that entrepreneurship can become its own kind of coping mechanism. Achievement can look admirable from the outside while still being fueled by unhealed pain underneath.
That insight has changed the way she sees leadership, purpose, and what it really means to be well.
The Spiritual Work Behind the Strategy
One of the deepest themes in this episode is Agrawal’s growing relationship with surrender.
She shares a powerful reflection from a recent ibogaine journey, an intense plant medicine experience that helped her confront trauma, reset old patterns, and reflect more honestly on the illusions that drive so much of human behavior.
What she came away with was not a neat formula, but a truth she now returns to often: control is an illusion.
Certainty is an illusion. Competition is an illusion. Winning and failure are illusions. The only true certainty, she says, is death.
It is a bold perspective, but for Agrawal, it is not nihilistic. It is freeing.
Instead of trying to force outcomes, she is learning how to sit inside uncertainty with more trust and less grasping. That lesson applies to business as much as it does to motherhood, identity, and the future.
For high achievers, especially, this is where the real work begins.
Not in doing more. In releasing more.
The Next Disruption Starts in the Trash
Agrawal’s latest venture, HIRO, may be her most ambitious yet.
It began not with a pitch deck, but with a question.
After having her son and going through up to 20 diapers a day because of his sensitive skin, she started wondering why diapers, one of the most common household waste items, had remained such an overlooked environmental disaster.
The numbers are staggering.
Babies use thousands of diapers each. Disposable diapers take hundreds of years to break down. Billions are sent to landfills every year.
And yet most people never stop to question the system.
Agrawal did.
During one of her regular “thinking days,” where she intentionally clears space for creativity and reflection, she had an insight: if baby waste is organic, nutrient-rich matter, why are we wrapping it in plastic and throwing it away? What if there were a way for something living to break that waste down?
That led her to fungi.
Why Fungi Might Help Solve a Plastic Crisis
HIRO is built on a fascinating idea: harnessing the power of fungi to help break down plastic-based diaper waste.
Agrawal explains that fungi are among the oldest life forms on Earth and play a critical role in decomposition. Millions of years ago, fungi evolved the ability to break down the carbon structures of dead trees. Because fossil fuels come from ancient organic matter and plastics are derived from fossil fuels, she saw an extraordinary possibility.
What if fungi could help decompose plastic, too?
From there, she assembled a remarkable team of scientists, mycologists, engineers, and product experts, including one of the leading diaper engineers from Procter & Gamble and her co-founder from Four Sigmatic, to bring HIRO to life.
The result is a diaper designed to be high-performing, safer, and less wasteful, paired with fungi pouches that can be placed into the used diaper to begin the decomposition process. It is one of the boldest examples of her entrepreneurial philosophy in action: question the default, listen to nature, and build what does not yet exist.
Spaciousness Is Her Superpower
One of the most practical insights Agrawal shares has nothing to do with fundraising or scaling. It is her commitment to what she calls “thinking days” or “thinking-feeling days.”
These are days with no meetings, no calls, and no packed schedule. Just spaciousness.
She credits these open days with generating some of her best ideas, campaigns, and inventions. In a culture obsessed with output, Agrawal makes a strong case for input from within.
Not all breakthroughs come from doing more. Some come from creating enough silence to actually hear yourself think.
Redefining the Unconventional Life
For Agrawal, living unconventionally means refusing the beaten path in favor of the one that belongs to you.
Not the path that looks smartest. Not the path that sounds safest. The one that feels true.
That is exactly what she has done again and again, across industries, identities, and seasons of life. She has built. She has been broken open. She has healed. She has reinvented.
And through it all, she has continued to ask the question at the heart of every meaningful disruption:
What if there is a better way?
Giveaway
Miki is giving one lucky winner an incredible bundle of products and resources, including:
- A copy of her book Disrupt-Her
- A Hello TUSHY Classic 3.0 Bidet
- A bag of HIRO diapers and fungi pods
Connect with Miki:
- Website: https://mikiagrawal.com/
- Hello Tushy: https://hellotushy.com/
- Thinx: https://www.thinx.com/
- Eat, Drink Wild: https://wildrestaurantnyc.com
- Instagram: @mikiagrawal
- Books: Amazon Books
