How I Built This with Guy Raz - Method's Adam Lowry And Eric Ryan At The HIBT Summit

Episode Date: November 22, 2018

This episode from the How I Built This Summit features Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan, co-founders of Method cleaning products. Adam and Eric joined Guy Raz live on stage at the Summit in San Francisco, to talk the highs and lows of their business partnership. Every Thursday until mid-December, we'll be releasing more episodes from the Summit – so keep checking your podcast feed.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, it's Sky here. And today we're going to bring you our second bonus episode from the How I Built the Summit that was held in San Francisco in October. And this episode is from my live interview with Eric Ryan and Adam Lerner,

Lowry. They're the co-founders of Method. And if you haven't heard that episode, we did on Method on the podcast, you should definitely go back and give it a listen. It's the story of two guys in the mid-20s who took on Unilever and Proctor and Gamble by starting a company that makes green cleaning products. Now, Adam and Eric spent 15 years building Method together before they each moved on to found new companies. So when I sat down with them at the summit, I really wanted to dig into just how they made their partnership work so successfully, how they manage their relationship as co-founders, and through it all, how they managed to stay friends. Thank you for coming.

It's for having us. I imagine a lot of people in this room, maybe even in the bathrooms of the Yerba Buena Center for the arts, they will find that iconic bottle of method hand soap. Can you tell me how you got the idea? Can you tell us how the idea came to you guys? Go for it. So Adam and I started this company at Pine and Gough here in San Francisco, which is now referred to as Lower Pacific Heights,

and arguably the dirtiest flat in San Francisco. So this is not the Martha Stewart story by any means. And it took a different approach, which is not necessarily trying to find a problem to solve, or a frustration because we are not known for our cleaning. Especially Eric, yeah. We saw a really big category, which was a sea of sameness, and we started looking at the category and started to see some opportunities.

Yeah, Eric really kind of looked at it from a brand perspective initially, which was his background. And I have very different background, scientific, environmental, and started looking at it from that perspective. And it just was one of those things that just started to grow. We didn't really know what it was. at first, but it grew into something. You were in your, like, mid-20s at the time.

Yeah. How did you know that the other person was going to be the right partner when you, when you start talking about this? I don't know if we did. Yeah, yeah. I don't think we did. What I knew is that Eric thought in a way that was entirely different from the way that I thought, and I learned a lot whenever I spoke to him about business.

I knew that that was a necessary. element for any business and I'm just somebody that believes in just trying lifelong learning. And so I saw that as a huge asset. Yeah, I think we're so different in the way we think and what our skill sets are. In a typical business situation, I don't think we would ever been brought together. Yeah. One of the very lucky things for us is that we were friends and roommates and you, as a founder, you often look to partner with businesses with people who are similar to you, but what you need is someone who's the complete opposite of you to make a business. and successful.

Yeah. So tell me both of you, this question before with you, what skill sets did you bring to the partnership, to the relationship? He can spell and do math. I was 25 when we started the business.

So I can't claim that I had a lot of skills sets. But you had a background in chemistry. Yeah, my background was in chemical engineering. I'd been a climate scientist. You know, I knew how to computer program. I knew how to do sort of technical stuff and could figure out problems. Very simply, Adams inside the bottle.

He understood the chemistry, the chemical engineering, the sustainability behind it, and I was outside of the bottle, which was the design and the branding of it. And one of you, and you may not know who, one of them is an introvert and one's an extrovert. See, we need each other. I've got a joke for you. You know the difference between an introverted engineer and an extroverted engineer? No. The extroverted engineer looks at your shoes while he's talking.

So you guys obviously very different personalities, totally different skill sets. How did you figure out who was going to do what? I think it kind of came pretty naturally. Like, again, there was no way he was going to trust me to do chemical engineering. Yeah, I mean, the skill sets being so different, we kind of had to spread out on the field. But early on in a startup, you're doing everything, right?

So Eric was, didn't have any formal sales training, for example, but he was very much on the sales side of the business, leading customer relationship development and that sort of thing. Was that harder for you to do? You know, yeah, probably a little bit. It also required me to do things like learn finance, right? I have no formal finance training whatsoever, but, you know, that's typical in a startup.

You were more comfortable being in the background and letting Eric kind of be the face of this to investors and partners and customers. Yeah. Part of that's around my internal motivation, which is, you know, I am oriented the way that I am introverted, if you want to call it that. But also, I'm much more, and this is not a commentary on Eric, I'm much more just sort of internally motivated about trying to learn new things and get better at something and get a little bit better every day. What are you saying? Yeah. That was the caveat. So, yeah, but I think that that, you know, to kind of bring that around, that's actually really important in a business, is that you have separate roles that you can play. And it actually was very much to our benefit.

I mean, some of our very early sales pitches that we talked about on the show where Eric was out in the front of the customer and I was kind of squirreling away trying to figure out stuff in the meantime and trying to get it all to come together at the right time. Yeah. You know, we've had episodes where the founders, co-founders, split up, and it's bad, you know, and it's actually more common than not. Your case is almost unusual because you're still friends, you see each other, even though you've gone your separate ways and you both have separate companies today, which we'll talk about in a sec, but there must have been tension. I mean, there's still business decisions that have to be made. There's still processes. So how did you deal with that tension? Yeah, and you're under extreme stress and pressure, and you're doing this as a partnership, and I always tell people it's a lot like a marriage, but it's even harder because you can't have makeup sex. So you've got to find alternative ways through it.

There's so much I could say right now. But so much of the tension of the two of us of these very complementary skills, and you can see the tension in our brand, and great brands have tensions, right? So we had to find healthy ways. And I think we understood each other well as friends. And it took a few years, but when we really learned to understand each other well as business partners and what our different work styles were like, and we could respect it and understand it. And then we were able to support each other in a completely different level, which has been amazing.

I would just add to that. And we fought like cats and dogs. We hated each other's guts for. And you lived together. I don't remember hating you. Well, I mean, that was good. That was good. Score one for you. And we actually kind of had to intervene in it. But the key for us was recognizing that it was way more important for the business that we have a constructive relationship than to get our own individual way. And the big learning was because we're so different, learning that when Eric says something, you know, what he really means. And when I say something, you know, what he really means. And when I say something, something, he perceives it differently than what I'm trying to say. Give me an example of that, Eric.

Like you are, I think you mentioned to me, and I don't know if this ended up in the final version of the podcast. You're very communicative. You're kind of an open book. And sometimes you described the way that Adam dealt with challenges or pressures was to kind of internalize it and stay quiet. Yeah. Adam kind of needed the space to then get the energy to go attack the problem.

But you thought that he was angry with you or something like that. Yeah, or withdrawn. like the house is on fire and I was looking at what he was doing and I didn't feel he was having that same sense of urgency where he just needed to approach it from a very different way where when I'm under pressure or under stress I have to attack the problem head on and that's very classic introvert extrovert did you ever get a coach or like a therapist or somebody yeah we did yeah we did therapy together you did therapy together yeah it got us ready for marriage But I'm a big proponent of that because it's what helps you understand this like this situation that we just talked about where when things get stressful, Eric talks a lot and Adam shuts up, right?

And that's two different people responding in different ways that still need to work together in ways that are constructive even though they're stressful. And so having somebody to help you understand that, you know, what Eric, by talking a lot, what he means. Yeah. And by me, you know, not, I'm, you know, trying to think my way through a problem that we kind of got to meet each other in the middle and use the best of each other's skill sets to get through it. I'm just really fascinated how you were so kind of mature about this. You were so young in your mid-20s. I mean, in your mid-20s, you're going through lots of things in general. Like, what I'm going to do with my life is this working out. And yet, you both seem to just have this very single-minded focus on making this thing work. Yeah, and a lot of that is driven by what a lot of us are trying to do, which is to create meaning through our work, right?

And we spend an awful lot of time working. So if we can make it meaningful, that's something that has been a goal for us all along. And that means, yeah, putting yourself a little bit aside because you're trying to create something that's bigger than you could ever be. Yeah. What do you think the difference between good tension and bad tension is, right? because trust it's trust wow well said yeah i mean because conflict can be good right yeah usually is yeah yeah i mean i say trust maybe that's obvious but conflict is a great thing because it's where

you are able to build an idea into a bigger better idea and you're going to have differences of opinion and trust is what allows you to evaluate that objectively as something that's a better way of solving a problem that your business has or a better idea than the one that Susie or Bobby came up with all by him or herself. Where there isn't trust, that's when, you know, things get weird, you know, authorship becomes more important than quality and all kinds of stuff. For people in this audience who are early stage entrepreneurs and trying to build something and maybe thinking about a co-founder or maybe they have a co-founder, there's a small team, what would you have wanted to know, you know, 20 years ago that would,

have been helpful for you as you've now grown and scaled your own businesses. I mean, I always encourage people to take a partner because it's one thing to let yourself down. It's really hard to let someone else down. And that partner, you keep each other going when things get really hard, which they always will. And then I always encourage people, too, to find somebody who's just the complete opposite of your skill set. So between the two of you, you can cover as much of the business as possible. Yeah, and go into it with an open mind because I think you'll learn more about yourself than anything else in terms of

what you're good at and what you're not good at, how you're perceived, and how ultimately you can be effective and how you can lead people in a way that's true and authentic to the type of person you are. I asked you earlier, both of you, how did you know that the other person was the right person? And your answer was we didn't. So was it, I mean, was it just,

just serendipitous that you just? I think, yeah, a little bit of luck. And, you know, a startup is a journey and you kind of figure out along the way. And if Adam had started method on its own, it probably would have looked like a Birkenstock. It smelled like one. And if I had started on my own, it'd probably look like Hello Kitty. And would have been toxic and didn't work. and because of us coming together in bringing these different points of view and the strengths, we're going to take credit for it because we haven't found anybody who did it first, but really the first eco-shek, a product that was high design and deep sustainability, which is really hard to do.

And we were both insistent that it would have these qualities and brought, it's a lot of our personality coming together. Yeah, a big part of it as well is making the commitment that, hey, I'm going to start this business, right? you start a business that's at least a 10-year commitment sure and i'm going to do it with this person which you know i mean we're using the marriage analogy a lot right you yeah it's something you've got to commit to not just the way it starts but how you're going to develop it over time so that you can make it work to the benefit of the business and then i think a key is always put the business before yourself and if you do that it'll bring you back around to that when you know he says

something it gets on your nerves or you know there's a stressful situation This is great group therapy. It's great, right? Yeah. You are both running your own businesses now. You sold method and you're no longer involved with the company. Eric, you run Ollie, which is vitamins and nutritional supplements. You've probably seen a target and ripple. You've probably seen that all over the place, whole foods as well. It's a plant milk company. What do you most miss about not working with the other person? Eric's creative spelling. No, in all seriousness. I mean, Eric is one of the best people I've ever met in just kind of coming up with, we're really building on ideas, little nuggets that sort of get built into more interesting and creative ideas. That's what I miss about working with me. Yeah, first of all, I just miss our sense of humor.

We always had a lot of fun together in the office, and I miss that daily banter. We're like brothers from a different mother. I loved how Adam would push these really hard initiatives around sustainability or chemical engineering that would scare us all, but we would get behind. I think ocean plastic was one of my more favorite ones as well to launch a line of products that were made from plastic, retrieved from the ocean. And I miss being surrounded by his really kind of big, audacious thoughts on that every day. It's so cool.

Adam Lowry, Eric Ryan, the co-founders of Method, the founders of Ripples, And Ollie, thank you. That's Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, co-founders of Method. Adam and Eric joined me live on stage at the How I Built This Summit, which happened last month at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. More of these short bonus episodes from our summit event will be coming out every Thursday over the next month, so check out your How I Built This Feed for new ones.

Next week, my interview with John Zimmer of Lyft, And thanks to Casey Herman who produced this episode and Reptine Arablewey who wrote the music. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to this special bonus episode of How I Built This from NPR. The news moves fast. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast to keep up. We update stories as they evolve every hour. So no matter when you listen, you get the news as close to live as possible on your schedule. Subscribe to or follow the NPR News Now podcast. podcast.