Becca Millstein on Scaling Fishwife Through Routine and Run-Time

Millstein’s mornings begin at 6:30 a.m. with a triage of emails and Slack messages, a necessity dictated by the time zone gap between her Los Angeles headquarters and her East Coast staff. She characterizes her management style as hands-on but increasingly focused on delegation, using what she calls "monkey bar" meetings—fast-paced, agenda-driven check-ins—to maintain momentum. To keep operations lean, the company mandates that every meeting includes a linked agenda, a practice she supplements with AI note-takers that save her up to eight hours of administrative work each week.

Afternoons are reserved for back-to-back calls, often extending until 5 or 6 p.m. To process the day’s information, Millstein treats her daily eight-mile run along the Arroyo Seco path as an essential work tool. During these runs, she listens to business podcasts like Acquired and Masters of Scale while mentally working through hiring challenges and company strategy. Her evenings are balanced between "deep focus" work sessions after dinner and intentional downtime with her husband, comedian Pete Martin. By swearing off personal social media and maintaining a strict 11:30 p.m. bedtime, Millstein keeps the unpredictability of startup life contained within a predictable, high-output framework.