Good Life Project - Warby Parker Co-founder, Dave Gilboa: Building a Life and Brand That Matters.

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

Dave Gilboa is the co-founder/CEO of Warby Parker (http://warbyparker.com/).Growing up in San Diego, the son of two doctors, Gilboa was sure he'd become a doctor, too. But, a random moment where he lost his glasses on a plane set in motion a series of awakenings that would change the course of his life.Starting with a simple idea that pretty much everyone said was impossible, Dave, his co-founder and team have now built a socially-conscious global brand valued at over $1-billion that offers designer eyewear at a human price, while giving millions of pairs of glasses to people and families in need.Dave has worked extensively with non-profit organizations and serves as a founding member of the Entrepreneur Board of Venture for America, an organization dedicated to mobilizing graduates as entrepreneurs in low-cost cities. He is a member of the Aspen Institute’s 2014 Henry Crown Fellowship class and the Aspen Global Leadership Network, has received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, and was recognized as part of “The Next Establishment” by Vanity Fair. In 2015, Fast Company named Warby Parker the most innovative company in the world.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So how do you turn a lost pair of glasses, a heart for service, and a brain for business into a billion dollar plus social venture? That is the exploration we dive into with my guest today, Dave Gilboa, who is one of the founders of Warby Parker. If you don't know Warby Parker, they are a company that started with a social mission and also to solve a really big problem by offering super high quality eyeglasses at a human price. And they did this at a time when the economy in the US was kind of collapsing, yet they were committed. They were four friends from school and it all kind of kicked

off when one of them, Dave, was on a flight back from traveling, and he lost a really expensive pair of glasses and couldn't understand why, upon returning, the iPhone that he purchased was a fraction of the cost of the glasses that he lost. That is where our story begins. Really, really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Good Life Project is supported by Simple Habit. It is a beautifully designed five-minute meditation app that is designed to help you kind of busy people stress less, achieve more, and live better through a series of guided programs. They have meditation guides for specific lifestyles or symptoms

designed by the world's best teachers that range from mindfulness experts at Google to former monks. You can actually browse over 1,000 different topics, create customized playlists, set daily reminders, so you can kind of live at ease. You'll know you'll never miss it when you really need it. It's really gorgeously designed, and I mentioned that. Let's you super quickly choose a meditation based on type, teacher, and length, and then dive right in. And it is available on iOS, Android, and length, and then dive right in. And it is available on iOS, Android, and on the web. I have actually been digging the short and sweet work break offerings that let me choose kind of a mid-afternoon meditation break based on how I feel or what I need on any given day. One day it may be about focus, another day it's about de-stressing,

and the super simple visual interface really makes it easy to find what you want and get started with ease. For a free seven-day trial to the premium library, visit simplehabit.com slash goodlife. That's simplehabit.com slash goodlife, or click the link in the show notes. I was taking a look at your Instagram account. Your Instagram account essentially looks like this gorgeous travelogue from around the world. So is that a big part of who you are? Yeah, so I was actually born in Sweden. And when I was six, moved to San Diego.

But I think we would go back to Sweden every summer for a few months and my family loves to travel and kind of I got that travel bug. And so when I graduate college, any opportunity I would have since then, grab a backpack and go to a destination that I'd been to before and just kind of figure things out along the way. And I think it kind of travels had profound impact on my view of the world, both in terms of kind of the beauty that's out there, the diversity that exists across the world, but also sort of the disparity in terms of opportunity that people have across the globe. And I think that also has kind of informed my view about my level of responsibility. I feel super lucky to have been born into my situation. And I feel a lot of responsibility to figure out kind of how I can help make the world better and hopefully leave a positive impact on a lot of people along the way, both in terms of people that I kind of directly know and can impact and then sort of the

broader population. Yeah. How old were you when you became aware of this sense? I mean, is this something that has come to you over the years as more an adult in your exploration of live travel, or was this something that as a kid you had a sense of before? You know, I think I was always excited to go new places as a kid, but it wasn't until sort of kind of college years that I think I became kind of more aware of surroundings and recognized that, you know, travel wasn't just about kind of having fun and going to nice places. And connecting with communities and people in places like rural Guatemala or Cambodia. And just places that were so completely different from my day-to-day life and my experience. And just kind of trying to understand what it would have been like to be born into those situations. And understanding kind of different cultures and different walks of life. Yeah, where was the first place that you went where you,

your eyes were really open to that, where it moved you in a compelling way? It's been about a month kind of traveling through Kenya and Tanzania. This was, let's see, around 2003 and kind of seeing some of the poverty around, you know, some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in a rich, vibrant culture from kind of everyone that we interacted with,

but also the extreme poverty and seeing people that really had nothing and were living on, you know, less than a few dollars a day, but they were still such genuine, good people. They're, you know, just really happy. And just that had kind of a profound impact on kind of comparing that into my own situation, my own lifestyle. Yeah. So you grew up essentially in San Diego, from what I know, the kid of two physicians, always having a sense that that was going to be your path. Yeah. So both my parents are doctors. My older sister is a nurse practitioner. Growing up, I was 100% sure I was going to become a doctor. The only thing I kind of had to decide on was which kind of doctor. Right. What's the specialty? Right. Go follow my parents around. Was it more a sense of legacy or was it something where you genuinely were like, this is interesting to me?

I was genuinely interested in it. I've always just been fascinated by kind of how the human body works was really, you know, I could see that my parents took a lot of pride in, in their work and, you know, would have dinner conversations about, you know, my dad's a pediatrician and where kind of a baby would come in and, and present certain symptoms. And he took, you know, actions that maybe not, you know, maybe not every would have been obvious to everyone that looked at that baby and, and ended up kind of saving that baby's life and just seeing kind of how impactful that was in motivational that was for him. And so I think they, you know, my parents instilled in me the sense that your profession

should not just be a way to earn a paycheck, that you should really be thinking about ways that you can help people. Seeing the two examples of my parents that both seemed really satisfied with their line of work and being interested in science and in the body, it just kind of seemed like the natural path where I didn't have to think about really anything else. And so I went to Berkeley. I was a bioengineering major, took all the pre-med classes, took the MCAT. So you're just like, this is it. I know. I'm doing everything to set myself up for this path. Yeah. So it's kind of fulfilling the prophecy in a lot of ways.

And then this was kind of the late 90s, early 2000s. And at the time, managed care, HMOs, were kind of starting to take over large parts of the healthcare industry. It's completely, it's almost an entirely different profession. Right. Because of that, yeah. And so, you know, talking to my parents and their friends who are doctors, you know, all of them were kind of complaining about what was happening in the industry,

that they weren't able to spend as much time with patients, that there was too much bureaucracy, talking about the good old days and kind of for the first time start to question, you know, is this kind of the only path that makes sense for me to go on? Yeah. But I mean, what's that like for you though? Because this is something where it sounds like from the earliest age, you're like, this is it.

And then you go to school and in school, you're like, this is it. You're taking all the classes that would set you up for it. And then to see your parents who are held up as the example of what this can be like, start to question in if this was kind of the only option for me. And, you know, my parents are still, even though they were kind of, you know, complaining on the periphery, they were still very supportive of me going to med school. They were, you know, each of them were the first people in their families to go to college and then go to school and they grew up really without any money. And so they also saw this as a path to just their education and becoming doctors had created really great lives for themselves and their family and they were able to help people. And so they were still kind of largely pushing me to go

in that direction, but just some doubts started creeping in. And then I started asking questions. And at the same time, a lot of my friends at Berkeley, they were getting jobs at investment banks and consulting firms. And they told me that they really liked what they were doing. And these firms, they were hiring people that were smart. My first response was, well, I don't know anything about business. I'll take into science classes. And they said, well, they don't really care about that. They're looking for smart people people and they can just train you

to know what you need to know. And so after my junior year of college decided, maybe I'll give this a shot for a summer, see what that feels like, something kind of outside of science. And so I got an internship at the consulting firm Bain & Company and really enjoyed the experience, worked with some incredibly smart people on kind of interesting, challenging business issues, learned a ton. And then I went back to school. I was a senior, still decided to take the MCAT. So you're still in the back of your mind.

You're like, I still need to keep this door open. Yeah. And then, yeah, did well on the MCAT and realized those scores were good for five years. And so kind of still tried to maintain optionality and keep doors open, but ended up getting a full-time offer from Bain and then accepting that. Right. But I mean, it's interesting because in your back pocket, you've still got, okay, so essentially I have a five-year window to play with this. And if I really want, I've got my grades, I got my MCATs. It's almost like I can play this out for up to five years. And then if it's not

working and I feel called back to medicine, I can still do that. That's right. I joke that I think my parents are still hoping I'll go back to med school one day, but I think they've- It's like the five-year window has expired a little bit at this point, right? I think it was partially to maintain kind of my own peace of mind that I did have optionality and I think maybe partly to assuage some of their fears that if things didn't turn out the way that I hoped that I could always go back on the path that they had trailblazed for me. Yeah. No, I totally get that. I actually have a very past life as a lawyer. And when I practiced for about four or five years and when I left, I think it was probably,

even though I had no intention of going back to the practice of law, and I haven't, and it's been over two decades now, I think I probably kept my license as I was a member of the New York State Bar for probably another decade before I was just like, okay. It's time to retire then. Yeah. It's like, I will almost do anything other than that. I'm just not going back. I was like, okay. But it was interesting because I was still like in the back of my mind. I was always like, I'm going to pay my dues and do my continuing ed

just to keep it there. It's weird. Yeah, I've been a couple times in my life where, yeah, kind of knowing that there is a fallback option, I think gives you an opportunity to take a little bit of risk. And, you know, for, I think for most people kind of joining Bain, becoming a consultant doesn't feel that risky, but given sort of the, the mindset that I'd had my entire life growing up that I was going to become a doctor, kind of any deviation from that

path felt, felt a bit risky. And so kind of having that five-year window felt a bit like a safety net. Yeah. Were your folks totally supportive of that decision? They were not totally supportive. I think they were still kind of pushing me to go to med school. And that was kind of a continuing theme over the next few years. Yeah, I would imagine. But I think they were happy that I had a job at a reputable firm and I could kind of support myself. It was funny, too, because when I think of the classic Berkeley grad, I don't think of, okay, so I'm going into one of the top management consulting firms. But I guess maybe there were a lot of people who went in that direction, especially around then, I guess, because the economy was very different. Yeah.

And so a lot of my friends, they were business majors. So there's the high school business, one of the top schools, and they have an undergrad program. And so a lot of my friends, they kind of went to school and that's what they studied. And so it's a natural kind of funnel into banks and consulting firms. And so as I was talking to them and they were, you know, making decent money, having fun, learning a lot, it seemed like that was, they opened my eyes to alternative paths that I could move forward. And really the intention was not to kind of be a consultant for the rest something to help people, but really had the mindset that, well, I think the realization that being a practicing physician wasn't the only way

to help people and make the world better. And that kind of got this idea in my mind that maybe I could learn something about business and one day lead a company or an organization that does something good in the world. I wasn't sure what that would be, but felt like it would be beneficial to learn something about business and management early on in my career. Yeah. Did you think, I mean, if you had a sense for it back then, did you think it would probably be something around medicine or bioengineering or something like that? Yeah, I thought it would be kind of something science related where, yeah, I could, you know, work for a pharmaceutical company or medical device company or help start something kind of in that arena that would be, you know, some scientific solution to a medical problem.

So you end up, how long were you paying for? So I was there for about three years to start off in Stockholm, transferred, started off in San Francisco, transferred to the Stockholm office. And during that time, I also took six months, they have an externship program where you can leave and work for another company for a short period of time. Most people end up going to one of Bain's clients and Bain can kind of help set those things up. I wasn't interested in going to kind of some of the big companies that they were working with. And so I found a company called Genomic Health. They'd just gone public. They had a diagnostic test for women who had just been

diagnosed with breast cancer to determine the best drug treatments for that particular patient, depending on their genetic profile and some of the markers in the tumor itself. And so it was kind of one of the first applications of more personalized medicine as opposed to one size fits all. And so I worked there for six months, really fascinating experience that kind of reinforced this idea that you could use business to help improve people's lives. And I think reaffirmed my desire to kind of combine business and helping people's lives. And I think reaffirmed my, my desire to kind of combine business and, and helping people one day. I mean, it's interesting too, because that, that probably would have been right around the time that first human genome sequencing happened,

right? Yeah. Within a couple of years of that. Right. So there's like this, it's almost like this renaissance of medicine and healthcare around like this new emerging idea, like, okay, so yes, we spent $3 billion on it, but look what we have here. And now this is a potential map to just, for so many people to start to create solutions and ideas. And you used the phrase personalized medicine. It feels like that was right around the window

when that was all just like this little flicker, but it was just starting to explode. Yeah, absolutely. For the first time, there's a possibility of using genetic data to help craft solutions that previously was just kind of one size fits all, where there would be one pill that, regardless of your symptoms, if you had a certain disease state, or regardless of your genetic makeup, everyone kind of get the same treatment. And now for the first time, there was this kind of promise that you could customize solutions.

And I think there was a lot of hype in the early days. And some of that hype was probably unwarranted. As always happens. Right. And now I think there's a more realistic view that even if you know someone's exact genetic makeup, the body is still such a complex system that it can be really challenging to design the perfect solution for that one individual. But that we are able to create treatments in a much more precise way than previously. Yeah, it's amazing. We recently had Carl Zimmer on, who's a well-known science writer. And his recent book is a 650-page tome on heredity and DNA and everything that's happened.

And he was sharing that even with, started with $3 billion and now it's like $99. But even with the expensive sequencing that you can get done now, only through medicine and know, medicine, and it costs thousands still. Even then, I was really surprised to learn that now, like today, there's still a lot of art in the data.

It's not just here's the exact map. I mean, there's a gazillion data points, but there's still a huge amount of art in, like, piecing them together in a way that makes any kind of sense. And you can get very different results, depending on who's analyzing the data, who's putting the data together, which was kind of surprising to me. Yeah, absolutely. And I've seen that in a couple of recent medical situations

from family members and friends where there's no... I think my perception growing up and studying bioengineering and looking at underlying science, you think that there's kind of one exact solution. Yeah, there's a lot of interpretation. And some of these things are as much art as they are science. Yeah, I feel like we're in the wild, wild west phase of that, but it's pretty exciting, pretty awesome. Anyway, so you go out and you do the six-month stint come back and then end up splitting to go to grad school from what i know right yeah so before that i had one

kind of more stop so i came i came back to bain and i felt like i'd learned a lot from my experience there but was ready to kind of move on to the next thing and wanted to do something to connect business more more to science and healthcare. And I actually explored two opportunities. So I was either going to move to Uganda, to Kampala, Uganda, and work for the Clinton Pediatric HIV AIDS Initiative as a country director there. Or I was going to move to New York and work for Allen & Company, a merchant bank. Two very different options there. Or I was going to move to New York and work for Allen & Company, a merchant bank. Two very different options there. Yeah. And they were so different that I literally flipped a coin.

Oh, no kidding. I first tried to write a list of pros and cons and compare the opportunities. And they were, I mean, diametrically opposed in kind of every... It's like, how do you even make an apples to apples there? It's like, it's not possible. Yeah. So I flipped a coin, ended up in Allen & Company as a small merchant bank. I mean, they were starting a healthcare practice. And so I had kind of this entrepreneurial opportunity to work in finance and invest in companies within an existing firm.

I'd always kind of been intrigued by the idea of living in New York, but the Clinton Foundation opportunity also sounded really interesting. And so I ended up taking the job at Allen & Company, moved to New York. One of my other friends from Bain, I connected him to the Clinton Foundation. He ended up taking the job in Uganda. And so we each worked in those roles for two years and kind of lived vicariously through one another. And then after that two-year stint, we both went to business school, both ended up in the startup world. And so kind of had different paths, but ended up largely in the same place. That's wild. I mean, to think that that entire thing was based

on the flip of a coin. Yeah. Do you ever think of like, what if it came up tails? You know, I think my, I think I ultimately would have in kind of a somewhat similar place. I think it probably would have ended up coming back to the States, probably going back to school, wanting to do something entrepreneurial. But yeah, it certainly would kind of like the choose your own adventure books where you kind of take one step and then sliding doors. Right. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So you come back. What's your intention when you go back to grad school? So I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I wanted to do something kind of healthcare related.

And so you knew you wanted to start something. Either start something or join kind of an early stage team. So I actually enrolled in a dual degree program, getting my MBA at Wharton and a master's of biotech at Penn's engineering school. And so it was kind of a concurrent dual degree program. During that time, I was also working for Penn's Center for Technology Transfer,

kind of the office that is responsible for commercializing scientific discoveries around campus. So if there are grad students or professors that invent something on campus, it's technically the IP of the university. And the Center for Tech Transfer is responsible for figuring out how to make money from those inventions, either by licensing them or starting companies around them. And so I was working there really with the intention of, you know, hopefully finding some scientific discovery that I could help commercialize. And so I could be kind of the business person that brings this to life and creates a company around something that other people had discovered. So I really didn't have any great ideas myself, kind of coming to school. And so I figured I want to hang around a lot of

smart people, be exposed to a lot of smart ideas. And then hopefully I can use some of these things that I've learned about business to help get things off the ground. But in between Allen & Company and business school, I took six months off really for the opportunity to travel and backpack around the world. And I had a company issued BlackB, that I turned in on my last day of work. And then I traveled for six months without a phone. So when would this have been around? This was 2008. So first I started in Panama and went overland up through Central America,

touching on every country there, ended up in Belize. And then I flew over to Southeast Asia and to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos. Traveling alone or with friends? At various points, traveling alone and in various points, friends would meet up with me. Yeah. What was, I mean, was it in your mind, was it hanging out, was it getting to know the world, or were you going there because, was there something that you were looking for? No, I just really wanted to be exposed to places and cultures that I hadn't seen

and wanted to get a bit off the beaten path, kind of not go to any kind of luxury resorts or places where I'd feel too comfortable. A lot of places, I just would buy a one-way ticket and then figure things out along the way and keep things fluid and stay in hostels and try to meet interesting people that had plans to go somewhere the following day. And I just kind of lived spontaneously. And that was so different from my very regimented kind of

structured days working in finance and consulting. And so I just wanted kind of the opportunity to explore the world. Yeah. Do you speak any Spanish? Muy poquito. It's about the only Spanish I probably know. So it's interesting too, because you're going to places where you don't necessarily, you're not easily understood. Like there's not a common language. I mean, it seems like you have made and you continue to make decisions, which puts you in uncomfortable situations or circumstances or in places and environments where it's a challenge and where there's no easy path. And granted, yes, you have a certain amount of opportunity to create that should you choose to, but you're making a choice not to.

Yeah, I think I try to intentionally put myself in uncomfortable situations. So what's up with that? You know, I think it's the only way that you can grow and sort of change your perspective on things. And it can become easy to fall into a certain routine and surround yourself by people and environments that you're used to, you're comfortable in. But I've always found that I get the most satisfaction when I put myself in kind of challenging situations. And I think kind of traveling is a great opportunity to do that. Kind of throwing yourself into environments that are uncomfortable where there's some sense of adventure and exploration that goes beyond just being a tourist. Yeah, no, I so agree. And I didn't start to travel until much later in

my life. But I think, you know, when you're when you go to places where it's off the beaten track, where it's uncomfortable, where, where you're the one who's struggling to communicate, but everybody else around you communicates with themselves and with each other just fine. You know, it gives you a different feeling, you know, when to be that person. And I think it also really just, when you leave, you know, New York and the U.S., you realize that we are not the world, you know. And there is a lot that we have here. We just can't take for granted. It's so eye-opening. Yeah. And so I figured this was a rare opportunity where I knew I was going back to school and I could have kind of a big chunk of time to really kind of take off and not have, you know, this

wasn't a one-week vacation where I had to have everything planned out, where, you know, take my time and explore and let spontaneady take me where it may. And so I wanted to take advantage of that. Was there anyone during that six-month window or so, was there any one moment or story or person that stands out as having like really stayed with you? You know, I think in one of my favorite countries is Guatemala. And ended up spending a couple weeks there and ended up in kind of a small village on Lake Atitlan and stayed in kind of a home that a Guatemalan family had kind of opened up. And, you know, we were paying to stay there. I was there with a couple of friends.

And, you know, we couldn't speak their language. They couldn't speak our language. But they were, you could tell just kind of how friendly and genuine they were. We ended up staying there for like four or five days. And even though we couldn't really communicate, we would share meals together and kind of play games and they would kind of teach us some of their local games

using sticks and a ball, left a very positive feeling, just kind of how welcoming they were, how generous they were, even though they really had no means. And yeah, just kind of left just a really positive feeling around that experience. Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting, especially in the days that we're in right now, exploring our relationship to Central American, South American culture and the rest of the world. It's like, we need more moments like that where we just, it's simple and we can see and feel and touch and taste like our shared humanity.

So it comes a time where you actually have to come back. Yeah. So starting school and along the way, when I was kind of the second part of the trip, when I was in Southeast Asia, ended up losing my only pair of glasses. And so I the way, when I was kind of the second part of the trip, when I was in Southeast Asia, I ended up losing my only pair of glasses. And so I'd left them on a plane. We'd been doing a bunch of traveling. I was in northern Thailand and took a small plane. And while we were sitting there, I put in contacts and left my glasses on the plane. And so then I came back to the U.S. I was about to start school, and I needed to buy

two things, a phone, a new pair of glasses. And so I went to the Apple store, the iPhone 3G had just come out. I paid $200 for this magical device that, you know, especially coming from someone who had been using a BlackBerry, kind of my mind was blown around just the capabilities of this device. And I paid $200 for that. And then I realized I was gonna have to pay $700 for a new pair of glasses. And that just didn't make, I mean, nothing about that made sense to me. And so I started complaining to anyone that would listen about why glasses feel expensive, just didn't didn't make any sense. And realized that I wasn't the only one that shared that frustration. So at Wharton, my class was about 800 people. You're divided into learning teams

of six people and you take all your first year classes together. One of my learning team members was Andy Hunt, who ended up becoming one of my co-founders. He had been wondering why no one was selling glasses online. This was 2008, so the world looked very different than it does today. But you were starting to see basically every type of product being sold online, even ones that until a couple of years earlier, people said would never really move to e-commerce. Things like shoes, so Zappos was really in its heyday. Blue Nile was selling engagement rings. Diapers.os was really in its heyday. Blue Nile was selling engagement rings. Diapers.com was really starting to take off. And yet no one was effectively selling glasses online.

And so then we started talking about that pretty loudly in a computer lab during one of the first weeks of school. And other friend, Jeff Rader, he was there. He was wearing his glasses that were five years old. His prescription had changed twice. And he had been kind of so frustrated the glasses were so expensive that he just decided not to buy a new pair. And then- It's like raging against the machine.

Neil, who's a co-founder and co-CEO, he had spent five years running this great organization called Vision Spring. And we knew that he had done something in the glasses world, didn't really know exactly what at that point, but we looped him into the conversation. And he had been, so Vision Spring, it's a great nonprofit where they're focused on increasing access to glasses amongst the world's population, primarily people living on less than $4 a day. So there are close to a billion people around the globe that need glasses that don't have access to them. And Vision Spring trains locals in regions like Bangladesh and El Salvador,

and I think they're set up in 36 different countries. They train locals to become entrepreneurs and go out into their local communities that otherwise don't have access to glasses and administer vision tests and sell subsidized glasses into those communities. And so it creates jobs. It's a market-based solution. They have to create products that people are willing to buy. And through that experience, Neil had been to factories all over the world. He had been producing glasses for people living on less than $4 a day and the kind of same production lines that for glasses that were being sold for hundreds of dollars. And so he knew that there was nothing inherent in the cost of goods or the production of glasses that justified the high prices. So what was keeping the prices up? I mean, it was...

Yeah. So we started kind of digging in and realized that kind of the only thing that, the only answer that we kept coming back to was that there's massive concentration of power in the industry. So I've been wearing glasses since I was 12 years old. I'd never heard of a company called Exotica, but they own most brands that people associate with eyewear. They own Ray-Ban, Oakley, other people's, Persol, Arnett, dozens of other eyewear-only brands. They have the exclusive license to manufacture and distribute all the glasses and sunglasses for brands like Chanel, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Ralph Lauren, DKNY, a number of others. They own LensCrafters,

Sunglass Hut, Pearl Vision, Target Optical, Sears Optical, Macy's Optical. Yeah, and then they also own Eyemed, which is the second largest vision insurance plan's Optical. Yeah, and then they also own IMED, which is the second largest vision insurance plan in the US and Powers, Aetna, and a number of other private insurers. And so they've just done this great job of creating a illusion of choice where if you walk into a Lunds Crafters

or a Sunglass Hut, you see 50 different brands of glasses. As a consumer, you don't realize that all those brands are owned by the same company that owns a store that you're standing in, that owns a vision insurance plan that you're using to pay for of glasses. As a consumer, you don't realize that all those brands are owned by the same company that owns a store that you're standing in, that owns a vision insurance plan that you're using to pay for those glasses. So they can effectively charge whatever they want. Exactly. And so most classes in the US are marked up 10 to 20 times what they cost to manufacture. And so we just looked at that and said, you know, this doesn't make any sense. And there's this

massive industry, over $100 billion globally, over $30 billion in the US that really hadn't had any innovation on the product side or the distribution side, because there was this concentration of power. And so we said, there has to be a different way to approach this to solve kind of our own problems as frustrated consumers. We felt for the first time time you could really leverage e-commerce to create a different business model. So historically, if you wanted to launch a brand of eyewear, you had to sell through Exoticus channels to get in front of customers. You had to be in LensCrafter, Sunglass, Pearl Vision, Target Optical, right? They owned all

the distribution. If you wanted to create an eyewear retail chain, you had to carry their glasses, their brands, to have something that consumers wanted to buy. Ray-Ban, Oakley, Persol, Arnett. We felt like for the first time, the advent of the internet and e-commerce, that we could create a vertically integrated brand. So create our own brand of eyewear, do all the design in-house, use the highest quality materials, highest quality production lines in the world. But then instead of selling them through kind of traditional channels, we could use e-commerce to connect directly with our customers. And that would allow us to operate outside of this artificial construct that the Laxatikas of the world had created and would allow us to dramatically bring down the price of glasses. Instead of selling the prescription glasses for $400 or $500 or more,

we could sell them for less than $100. And so that was really the genesis of the idea that got us all excited. But I think we were equally excited to create an organization that does something good in the world and think about building a for-profit business that does good in the world. And that's something that was super important to all of us as founders. Neil having been the second employee and really running VisionSpring for a few years, seeing the impact of putting glasses on someone's face for the first time and the magnitude of that problem around the world. Jeff and Andy were

super passionate about nonprofits and having a positive social impact. And for me, kind of going back to how I was raised and thinking about kind of values that my parents instilled in me. And that was something that super important to me as well. And, you know, initially, I kind of grappled a bit with, you know, should I be doing something that is more healthcare kind of science related, you know, certainly glasses help have a health component to them, but it was sort of on the periphery of the spectrum of what I imagined I'd be doing. But really building in this, our social mission of our buy a Pair, Give a Pair program and thinking about building a company

that does good in the world kind of ultimately got me as excited or more excited than the actual business opportunity itself. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running swimming or sleeping and it's the fastest charging apple watch getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes the apple watch series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iphone 10s are later required charge time and actual results will vary. So as you guys are developing this plan,

you're like, wow, this is really cool. We've identified this massive inefficiency in the market. There's one player who's dominating everything. And you start sharing this with, I guess, professors, teachers, advisors, and stuff like that. I mean, on the one hand, it's like, well, this is really fascinating. You know, it does seem like. But on the other hand, you've also got, you know, like a player who is so large

and who controls so much. It's almost like, well, the minute you become a blip on a blip on a blip on the radar, they'll just crush you. Or the, well, you know, the minute that you prove the model of sort of like going direct, like, why wouldn't they just do the same thing with 50 times the selection and wipe you out? I mean, did you get resistance like that when you're offering the plan around? Yeah. So we, you know, I'm a big believer that you shouldn't keep kind of ideas a secret. You know, we talked to some people that are kind of in better thinking about starting companies, but don't want to talk to anyone about it because they're afraid that someone's going to steal their idea.

For us, we just wanted to get as much feedback as possible and bounce this off as many people as we could. And most people we talked to, their immediate reaction was to tell us why it won't work. Including a lot of our smartest friends and professors and people with experience in the optical industry. And I think that is because most people are pretty risk-averse, and it's easier to kind of poke holes in something than really believe in a vision, believe that you can do something that's never been done before. And so a lot of people, kind of their first reaction was,

well, if this was a big opportunity, if people are willing to buy glasses online, someone would have done it. There's a reason that it doesn't exist yet. And also it's like, there's a try on that. Like you need to see, you want to touch and feel it and have it and see how it looks. Absolutely. I mean, so, you know, we kind of talked to a lot of people and said, okay, well, what if we offer free shipping and free returns and the price point is so compelling that it's such a big difference between what you'd get in a store. Would you then buy glasses online? And a lot of people, you know, some people said, yes, most people said, eh, you know, I think I'd rather just go to a store. Then we got, we started

developing our first collection, started getting samples in and we're just blown away by the quality of product they were able to produce. And anyone that we, you know, we asked the same question, okay, well, would you buy these glasses for $95? Everyone's like, oh yeah, that's a no brainer. And so then we came up with this idea for a home try on program where we were so confident in the kind of quality of our frames and the quality of our designs that we just wanted to get as many glasses on people's faces as possible. And said, okay, how do we get people over the hurdle of buying glasses online? Let's just send them a bunch of glasses. And so people can go to

our website, pick five frames for free. We'll send them without prescription glasses, include a free return shipping label. So you can try them on, no risk, no obligation. If you find a pair or two that you like, send us your prescription and we'll go ahead and make a custom pair, even with those glasses, free shipping, free return. So we really tried to de-risk the purchase process as much as possible, given that we were trying to change behavior. And at the same time, it's like, okay, so this is a really innovative and cool, sensible solution to the problem. And, you know, like from the outside looking in,

people were sort of like looking at this probably like, that's a whole lot of complexity and cost. You know, you're going to send all this stuff like for free. I mean, and then you're still going to make money doing it. Like, how is this even a viable business model? Yeah. And so, you know, when we kind of built in the home try-on aspect, we started asking people and then, you know, consumer, from a consumer standpoint, people said, oh, yeah, I'll try that. And so we got really excited about the opportunity of including a home try-on.

But yeah, then we had people that were kind of thinking about the business model aspect of it and said, I don't understand how you're ever going to make money. So the whole time, you're basically fighting against everybody telling you, no. Absolutely. And ultimately we decided, let's figure out what makes sense, the most sense for our customers. And then hopefully we can figure out a business model that makes sense and scales behind it. But, you know, if people aren't willing to buy or aren't willing to try these glasses, then, you know, it doesn't matter how high our margins are because it's not going to be a viable business. So let's figure out the customer aspect first. And then hopefully we can optimize and figure out the margin structure after. Yeah. So, I mean, from there, it sounds like you're

drawing on the different partners' expertise. I'm guessing Neil was the one who brought, okay, so I know the production side of this. I know how we can actually get these early things made. And as you start to create the basic variations of this, and you think about what this could be. I mean, you mentioned, let's just focus on the customer. And we feel like we've got to where if we can just give them something extraordinary, there's something in us which is saying we can figure out how to make the business model work. What else was really important about you about this like what we're like because it seems like you're a very values-driven person and it sounds like the organization but even from this very very beginning like concept days that was baked into it to a certain extent absolutely we spend as much

time kind of talking about this social mission for the organization and the company as we did around solving the try-on challenge. And we realized that we wanted to create a stakeholder centric company and wanted to be really thoughtful about kind of every aspect of the business, including our environmental impact. So we were 100% carbon neutral since day one, even though we ended up bootstrapping the business. So we didn't raise any outside capital. We'd each worked for a few years and kind of took our life savings and poured it into this business. We weren't paying ourselves a salary. We didn't have any employees.

We didn't have an office. We were just working out of our apartments. But even in those early days, we wanted to make sure that we were kind of living by our values. And so 100% carbon neutral and buying carbon offsets. But then thinking about how we could have broader impact. And through Neil's work at Vision Spring, I recognize that there are close to a billion people around the globe that need access to glasses. And this was an issue that we didn't think was getting enough attention. Right. It's not sort of dire the way that so many other things seem to be.

Right. But giving someone a pair of glasses is one of the most effective poverty alleviation tools in the world. It allows them to work and provide for their family. It allows people to learn and get an education. The University of Michigan did a study that shows that giving someone a pair of glasses increases their income by 20% and earning potential by 35%. And so we knew that there was kind of a pretty simple solution to a massive problem and talked about ways that we could use our company, which we wanted to make unapologetically for profit, but that could still do good in the world. And so we decided to build our buy a Pair, Give a Pair program into the business from day one. Again, kind of even though we were watching every penny, we wanted to make sure that for every pair of glasses we sold,

we provided donation to organizations like Vision Spring that fully funds the distribution of a pair of glasses and the production and distribution of a pair of glasses. And that was something that was critically important to us. And we spent kind of as much time talking about that aspect of the business as we did solving kind of the customer issues that we were facing. Yeah. So it's like that was a non-negotiable part of all the decision making from day one. Absolutely. Yeah. You mentioned that you bootstrapped the whole thing. This Warby Parker went live kind of officially 2009-ish or 2010? 2010, February 2010.

Where like when, you know, take a look back at where the economy was in the US back then, brutal time to be launching a company, especially sort of like a product heavy company where you need to actually spend a lot of money to create inventory. How do you make that work? Yeah, so we'd started talking about the business in kind of the end of 2008, and then we launched in early 2010, and that was a pretty dismal period in the economy. But I think sometimes a lot of the best businesses are formed during kind of the downturns in the cycle, and it also gave us the opportunity to attract some pretty incredible talent that otherwise might have cost us a lot more and that might not have been available. You know, our first employees, we hired them from Craigslist and we told them to come and work out

of Neil's apartment the next day. And these are incredibly talented people, many of whom are still within the organization that are leading big parts of our team that, you know, if the economy had been booming, they probably would have had a bunch of other options. And so I think we got fortunate in some aspects there. We also, you know, we were able to, when we launched, we only spent money on three things. It was one, getting our initial set of inventory. Second, having someone help build our website since none of us were technical. And third was hiring a fashion PR firm to help get us kind of get the word out. And I think in terms of hiring vendors, whether it was a PR firm or engineering firm that could help get our website up, we were able to take advantage of some of the

negativity in the economy to do those things cheaper than they would have been if things were booming. Because all those things, what you just listed, were all taking a huge hit too. And they lost a ton of their clientele. Absolutely. I know somebody who's had a thriving, booming tech consulting and coding and stuff like that. The company went bust completely. And so many people, friends of mine in advertising and PR,

walked into their office and they're like, eh, no, pack up your office and go home. And it also, I think it forced us to just be really scrappy. Yeah. But also you were offering a product. I mean, this is like talk about sort of like, there's a metric ton of work that goes into this and incredible idea.

And then there's always timing that plays into it, which you can't plan. So at the same time, everybody, millions of people are financially hurting, but they still need, if you need glasses, you need glasses. And all of a sudden you show up and you're like, hey, the $400, $500, $600, $700 glasses that you think you had to pay for, what if you could get, you know, like the same quality product for a fraction of the price from what was happening in the economy? That was like, must've been like a huge direct hit too. Cause you're solving, you're speaking to a huge and current pain point. Yeah. I think the messaging resonated with a lot of people right off the bat.

And, you know, we had talked to a lot of people that had started companies and launched a website before us. And they had really tempered our expectations about what to expect after launch. And said, just because you put up your site, just because you think you have a good idea, doesn't mean anyone's going to come, doesn't mean anyone's going to buy anything. And so I joke that if nothing else, my mom would buy 100 pairs of glasses from us to make us feel okay about the effort that we'd put in here. So what happens when, I mean, the day comes where you literally need to flip the switch

on the website and your business was at that time entirely, it's all based on, will people come to this website? And the day comes where you're like, okay, we got to go live. Yeah. And so our PR firm had secured a feature for us in GQ and Vogue in the March issue of 2010. And we get a call in the middle of February from publicists saying, hey guys, what are you doing? GQ is hitting newsstands tomorrow. And I just went to your website. It says coming soon. Busted. And so naively, I thought that March issues actually come out in March.

I didn't realize that they come out a few weeks early. And so we were on the phone with, we'd found one developer in Canada using kind of a marketplace site called Odesk, who was building our site. And we were way behind on where we thought we would be. And so we were kind of on the phone with him till four in the morning, just trying to squash as many bugs as we could. And then we said, okay, well, this is definitely not perfect, but it's good enough. Let's flip a switch. And so at 4am, made the website live. It still wasn't anywhere close to where we wanted to be. And so didn't want to tell anyone that it was live. My mom didn't know it was live. Our best friends didn't know it was live.

But then a few hours later, I got a couple hours sleep and then I was sitting in class. We were still full-time students at the time, sitting in class at 2 a.m. or sorry, sitting in class at 10 a.m. I had my phone set up to be notified anytime we got an order. And we got our first order in and I got super excited. And I emailed Jeff, Neil, and Andy. We were all in the same class. We weren't supposed to be using our laptops, but kind of loudly typing away and they were responding. And then 10 minutes later, got another order and then another order and then another order. And then we had an hour and a half long class. And by the end of class, I was looking at our order log and realized we had taken more orders than we had inventory for. And so we had an emergency meeting and we were debating everything from, do we just take the website down?

Do we keep taking orders and figure things out later? What do we do here? We didn't have any waitlist functionality or sold out functionality. This is like the one problem you hadn't planned for. Yeah, that was never a discussion on the roadmap. We never thought that would be an issue. And so we frantically called

Brett, our developer, and he was there and miraculously was able to really quickly build in waitlist functionality. And all of a sudden we had a waitlist of 20,000 people. In how long? How long did you actually do that? In a period of a few weeks. So yeah, in our first month, we had a waitlist of 20,000 people. We were sold out of all our top styles. That's kind of mind-blowing. And we had this home try-on program that we were super excited about. Within the first 48 hours, we were completely stocked out of all our home try-on inventory.

And we had one employee at the time who we told her she'd work for 12 hours a week because that's when all the four founders had overlapping classes. And we'd set up a customer service number, 1-800 number through Google Voice that when someone called it, it would call all four founders' cell phones simultaneously. And whoever picked up, it would stop ringing on the other people's phones. We had 12 hours of class where none of us would be able to pick up our phones. Little do we know that after that, we really didn't go to class much, but we told her she'd be working 12 hours a week. That first week she worked over a hundred hours. Now she's running our whole customer experience team and is over 200 people. But yeah, those first few days were exciting, but hectic and terrifying. And we just wanted to make sure that

we weren't kind of disappointing the early adopters, the people that were giving us a chance, but we were completely overwhelmed by demand. Yeah. I mean, and that can be on the one hand, it can, it can completely destroy what you're trying to do. But on the other hand, the fact that, you know, within 48 hours of opening, like everyone's getting waitlisted and a couple of weeks later, you've got like, you know, 20,000 people on a waitlist. You know, that story also is, is incredibly, it's sort of like focus everyone like, wow, like everyone wants to talk about it at that point. It creates like a whole follow-on wave of attention around the fact that that happened. Absolutely. And, you know, at the time, so GQ and Vogue came out with these great articles about us. GQ called us the Netflix of eyewear, really focused on our home try-on program. And they had like a two-page spread

where they were showing Ford glasses in really high resolution. There were Tom Ford glasses for $450, Bottega Veneta for $400. And I can't remember the, I think it was Robert Mark for $400. And then Mark glasses for $95, including prescription lenses. And so it was just kind of this really powerful brand moment. And at the time, Instagram

didn't even exist yet, but Facebook was a ubiquitous platform. They hadn't really started charging for advertising yet. And so at the time content was really freely shared. And so this got posted by a bunch of people and then turned into kind of this snowball. And then other editors saw it on Facebook or read about us. And then they started writing stories. And so it became kind of this movement that really caught us off guard, but it was super exciting. And then we started getting calls from, we were based in Philadelphia at the time going to school. We started getting calls from people all over Philly that knew we were based there and said, hey, read about you in GQ or read about you in Vogue. I want to try on the glasses, but there's this massive waiting list. Can I come to your store or your office? And we said, the store is my apartment, but come on over. I think Billy had the second highest murder rate in the country at the time. And we were just inviting strangers left and right into our apartments, laid the glasses

out on the dining room table, had our laptops up as kind of checkout where people have to go through the full kind of e-commerce checkout. And initially we were kind of scared that that would be a suboptimal customer experience, but we found customers loved it. They loved getting to meet the people behind the brand. They loved being able to try on the entire collection. So that's kind of like effectively the first Warby Parker store. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We joke that Neil's apartment was our first store and we'd learned so much from those face-to-face interactions that, you know, I think that we realized that e-commerce had a lot of potential, but so did kind of a bricks and mortar environment. And then that

put us on a path to really experiment with a bunch of other kind of store-like experiences before we actually had to commit to a lease, everything from putting what we call a showroom into our first office. When we graduated from school and moved to New York, we were on the sixth floor of a commercial building and had a couple hundred square feet where we had some West Elm tables with some glasses on them and some computers open to our homepage. And all of a sudden, we had hundreds of people a day into that office. And then we tried some pop-up shops. We bought an old yellow school bus that we gutted and turned the interior into a store that toured the country, kind of setting up shop in 18 different cities. And that kind of put us on the trajectory to

really think about physical retail as a real avenue for growth and profitability in addition to our e-commerce business. Yeah. So this is taking off. I mean, from giving people something incredible standpoint, from a social mission standpoint, it's taken off. I'm also kind of fascinated because you guys are, you're known for having built not just a product that is really effective in a social mission around it, but also a culture. So where people who come to you, people who join your family, your team, they're not just raising their hand to say, I'm employee number 1048. It seems like they're raising their hand to be a part of something bigger. Does that resonate? Yeah. The number one reason that people want to work for Orby Parker is that we have a social mission embedded in the business that we generally are trying to focus on all our stakeholders. And that starts with

our customers. But we also think about the environment. We think about our shareholders. We think about the broader community and just about how we can use our organization as a vehicle to make the world better. And we find that a lot of our employees are customers first and tend to be super passionate about the brand and are kind of attracted to work for a mission-driven organization. And so as we think about sort of the financial impact of something like our Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program, it's certainly real dollars that we're investing, but we feel like we're having a lot of impact. We've now distributed over 4 million pairs of glasses to people in need through that program. And I think the biggest benefit from a business perspective is just being able to attract and retain some of the most talented, passionate people in the world that work incredibly hard

to create positive impact. Yeah. So as we sit here today, you and your partners have built this incredible company. Last time I read something financial about you, there's like a billion plus valuation on the company. You've got a thousand something employees. You're doing incredible work and offering a product and a service, and there's a social mission attached to it. What scares you about what you're doing right now? I think my biggest fear is just not capitalizing on the opportunity in front of us. It feels like we have so much white space in terms of growing our business, making customers happy, delivering great value, helping people around the

world, and having a lot of positive impact directly. But more than that, I really hope to be an example for other organizations, for other entrepreneurs, to show that you can build a great for-profit business that does good in the world and you don't have to charge a premium for it. And the world's problems are bigger and more complex than ever. And especially in light of kind of our current situation, can't rely on governments and nonprofits to solve these problems. And a lot of the smartest people in the world want to work for for-profit organizations that can afford to pay them kind of market rates. And I'm a huge believer that there's this massive opportunity for for-profit businesses to help make the world better. And hopefully we can do that ourselves

and have a lot of impact ourselves. But I think we can amplify that and multiply that by being a great, you know, an example of a great business that consumers don't have to sacrifice anything, that employees don't have to sacrifice anything to work for. And so I think my biggest fear is that we're not doing enough. We're not moving fast enough. We're not doing as much good as we could be. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting you brought up the word sacrifice. When you look at the price that a lot of founders pay to build something the size that you've built, very often that the toll it takes on your health, on your state of mind, on your relationships is kind of devastating.

How have you navigated those three areas as you've built this entity at the same time? Yeah, I think founding and scaling a business is a very intense experience and it can become all-consuming. And a lot of people talk about work-life balance. I think that kind of goes out the window when you're starting a company and really need to think about more work-life integration where that there's going to be kind of a constant tone around work in the business that is going to exist 24 hours a day and need to figure out kind of how to manage that while kind of continuing to invest in important relationships in kind of pursuing other interests and maintaining health and getting enough sleep. And I think certainly I was a victim of not having kind of any semblance of balance in the early days. Would fall asleep every night, kind of fully dressed with the laptop on my chest,

responding to customers or trying to do, you know, put in that cross that last item off the to do list that I realized was actually never ending. And now, you know, my role has changed tremendously, we have a team of close to 1500 people that my job is managing managers of managers. And, and I've tried to ensure that I'm less of a bottleneck in kind of certain day-to-day decisions so things can move forward. And my role is more around ensuring that the team has everything that they need to do their jobs and hopefully kind of push down decision-making as far into the organization as possible so that people that are closest to customers, closest to the data are the ones

that are making the decisions as opposed to things kind of bottlenecking up to the top of the organization. And as a result, have also, I think, now have kind of more freedom in terms of kind of how I spend my days, which has allowed me to incorporate kind of other aspects, you know, kind of non-work life into routines. And I've realized kind of how important it is

for me to get exercise and sleep and meditate and spend time with friends and family that those things are critical, not only for kind of my own wellbeing, but it makes me a better CEO. It makes me a better leader of the organization. And so really try to be deliberate about spending time on kind of other non-work areas of my life. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. It's always, I'm always looking for exemplars of people who have built something very substantial and are also seem to be living, quote, a good life. And everyone defines that somewhat differently. And I'm about to ask you how you define it. What I found is that there aren't a lot of examples out there. there it's, it's not in, you know, it, it's one thing to, to build something to a certain level and preserve, you know,

all the other things outside of that thing that you're building, that you hold to your, but to scale something on the level of a genuine enterprise with, you know, global reach and global impact. I found very few people that have been able to move through that process or even emerge or sort of awaken to sort of service that is better, you know, better than any other organization is creating or scaling. pretty drastic steps and be willing to run through walls. And I think kind of any entrepreneur that comes to mind as someone that has built something really massive, you know, they've sort of, they've believed in themselves and they've invested in that vision in, you know, pretty kind of pointed, not a well-rounded way, but in a very pointed way.

Yeah. And I think at some point for you to sustain the vision and to sustain growth, at some point you always have to come back to the awakening that, okay, so I actually, like you just shared, actually my relationships do matter. My health matters critically, like my well-being, because that's the thing that not just makes life better, but also allows me to do this thing that I do at the level that it requires right now. So it's like, you know, I have to circle back to that. It's like, it's almost like if you don't hit the moment where you circle back to that, at some point you will just crash and burn in a big way. And there's a good chance that that's going to, you know, sort of ripple out into this thing that you're really trying to build. Absolutely. And I think it comes back to kind of viewing things under different timeframes.

So if you're trying to kind of push something forward as far as possible within a period of weeks or months, you can just grind that out and cut your sleep and cut other things out of your life and just try to be singularly focused on something in an incredibly intense way. And that's probably how you're going to be the most productive in short time period, but that's not sustainable. And so when you're, at least when we were starting our company, we had no idea if it was going to be successful or not. And so in those first,

you know, few weeks and months, we were just doing everything that we could to kind of create a viable entity. And then once we realized that, oh, this thing has staying power, this started taking a much longer perspective and timeframe and realized that if I want to be doing this, if I want to be effective for years and decades to come in a leadership role of this company, then I need to take care of myself and I need to incorporate kind of those other elements into my life. Yeah. Feels like a good time for us to come full circle. So if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes out for you? For me, living a good life means that you're leaving the world better than it was before

you came and so that you're positively impacting a large group of people while having fun along the way and going on adventures with interesting people and exploring interesting topics, always learning, always challenging yourself, but all under the guise of leaving the world better than it was before you got here. Thank you. Thank you. So if you're still listening, thank you, Thank you. Thank you. So if you're still listening, thank you, thank you, thank you.

I just completely love that you enjoyed this episode so much that you've listened until now. You're an awesome human being. And while we're wrapping things up, might as well share a quick shout out to our super cool brand partners. If you love the show,

and I'm guessing you do because you're still here, please support them. They help make the podcast possible. Check out the links in today's show notes. And don't forget also your spot at this year's Camp GLP. As we recently announced, this will be our final year. We're expecting about 400 amazing humans from all around the world. It's going to be more epic than ever. And if you've been waiting, be sure to register soon. You can find that link at goodlifeproject.com slash camp today, or just click the link in the show notes. See you next week. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday.

We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? I knew you were gonna be fun. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot?