The Startup Ideas Podcast - Investing in Mental Health & Embracing Vulnerability with Andy Dunn

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Are you being honest with yourself? In today’s episode, we get vulnerable while sharing how upbringing impacts entrepreneurship, unpack why mental health is critical for businesses, and share the importance of embracing vulnerability. Host Sahil Bloom is joined by guest Andy Dunn, the co-founder of Bonobos, and the author of Burn Rate. Together they discuss the five buckets of wealth, share why you need to accept when you're wrong, and finally, they place their bets on the future of Direct-to-consumer brands in the bear market.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR►► This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront, a saving and investing app that can help you earn more on your money and build wealth for your future. The Wealthfront Cash Account grows your savings at 2% APY, and offers unlimited, fee-free transfers to your external accounts — plus, a ton of other features that help you optimize your cash. So, if your money is earning less anywhere else, now might be a good time to make a move.Wealthfront is offering Where it Happens listeners a free $50 bonus with a $500 initial deposit to a new Cash Account. Go to wealthfront.com/Happens to claim your $50 and start growing your savings.Cash account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, Member of FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. We convey funds to partner banks who accept and maintain deposits, provide the interest rate, and provide FDIC insurance. Rate is subject to change. Investment management and advisory services--which are not FDIC insured--are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC (“Wealthfront Advisers”), an SEC-registered investment adviser.THIS EPISODEAndy Dunn: https://twitter.com/dunnBurn Rate: https://www.burnratebook.com/Sahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985SHOW NOTES00:00 Sneak Peek 01:00 Introducing Andy Dunn’s Map of Reality 05:50 Accepting your “Otherness” 12:08 Andy’s Entrepreneurship Journey 16:18 Finding Your True Calling 20:16 Defining Wealth 23:26 Happier but Not Happy 26:19 The Bonobos Story 33:06 Predicting the Future of D2C40:38 A Bear Market Creates Focus 42:45 Burn Rate 43:43 Embracing Vulnerability 49:03 Talking About Mental Health 52:21 High Highs and Low Lows 56:40 Investing in Mental Health 1:00:54 A 2-Step Process to Working On Mental Health 1:03:33 Where to Find Andy Dunn and his new book1:06:38 Thanks for listening

And then there's the whole meaning, meaningfulness. What was it, the three schools of V&E psychology? Man search for pleasure, man search for happiness, man search for meaning. And I think that there's that sort of like, I think about my mom where I'm like, I just want to be like my mom. I want to be as invested in my grandchildren as she is in my son. I want to work out six out of seven days a week without fail. I want to get seven hours

asleep. Like, I want to have this defining your terms, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth. And, like, if you've got three of the five there, it kind of, it does beg the question of, like, what is the goal of financial wealth? And I like your

friend's journey, right? Which is that it is the output of having done something meaningful. What is up, you guys? So excited to share this amazing conversation with Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos, and more recently, the author of Burn Rate, launching a startup and losing my mind. It was an incredible, vulnerable conversation, truly unique, one-of-a-kind conversation that I'm just excited for everyone to listen to and hopefully benefit from. I know there are a lot of people out there who have struggled under the surface with different mental illnesses. A lot of entrepreneurs

wrestle with this that I've talked to, and I think this conversation, with Andy will be truly eye-opening and really benefit a lot of people, both on the building journey and afterwards as you try to improve your own life. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Andy Dunn. Well, Andy, thank you so much for joining the show today. Man, this has been a long time coming. I feel like I have been a big fan of yours from afar for for a long time. And we're just now getting to connect. Thanks to our mutual friend, Jim Coonahiro. Big shout out to him who actually brought us together to have this chat. So super excited to have you and excited to dive into all of the cool stuff that you're working on and inspired by right now.

So thanks for joining. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. So, you know, I generally like to start these conversations with, you know, this idea that I think of or call the map of reality. And, you know, this is like this general idea that we all have our own set of paths, circumstances, experiences, etc. that kind of frame our map of the world and how we view things and pursuits that we've gone after, things were inspired by, et cetera. So I'd love to start there and just like set the stage a little bit before we get into all of your work and career and some of your recent

writing and inspirations by just understanding a little bit about your background and path. Like what established your map of reality? You know, where did you kind of come from, grow up, or you entrepreneurial as a kid? We'd love to just set the stage with that. Totally. Yeah, I think for me, the origin story for me has to tie back to coming from a heterogeneous environment culturally. You know, my mom is a Punjabi, Indian immigrant. My dad's a Scandinavian, Midwestern American, white dude. You know, we have this in common. No, I know. I think this is part of why Jim connected us. Yeah, you know, but I don't think I put that together until just now. I mean, my mom is from Bangalore, you know, an immigrant from Bangalore India.

My dad is a white Jewish guy from the Bronx. So we are both part of the half-Indian clan here. Yeah, there we go. And to make matters even more fun, I'm now married to a Brazilian Jewish immigrant and converted to Judaism right before I got married. Wow. So you're a Hindu then. You're like me.

I'm a Hindu or I'm half Punjabi, depending on how you want to talk about it. That's a good one. I've never heard that one before. You know, I am convinced that the, you know, like mixing of gene pools and, you know, like the genetic strengthening that comes with that is something that I'm convinced by. I don't know if there's any research around that, but everyone that I meet that comes from, like, mixed race backgrounds, I just find have these, like, like, super good looking or, like, really smart, interesting.

Like, I just think that there is some strengthening that happens from the mixing of, from the mixing of gene pools. so you've clearly done a lot of that, which is fantastic. If you're keeping cash anywhere that isn't paying you a high interest rate, listen up. Wealthfront is a saving and investing app that can help you earn more on your money and build wealth for your future. The Wealthfront cash account gives everyone a 2% APY interest rate, which is 20x what traditional banks pay today. So if you kept $10,000 in a wealth front cash account for a year, you'd be on pace to earn an extra $200,000. $100 a year instead of like $10.

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start now, you'll get a free $50 bonus with a $500 deposit. There are already nearly half a million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build long-term wealth. So why wait? Earn 2% on your cash today. Visit wealthfront.com slash happens to get started. Again, that's wealthfront.com slash happens. This no-brainer good news has been a paid endorsement from wealth front. Yeah, I mean, maybe there's something to that. I think there's also something for me that I've learned about just communication styles in family traditions around communication. I like to joke, my dad's family, they don't speak about small issues, small issues, small issues become big issues and eventually they don't speak at all. My dad doesn't speak to either of his siblings,

really. My mom's family, who are the big Indian family, you say exactly what you think in real time to everyone except the person that you think it about. So it's like a perfect exchange of information through gossip with minimal, you know, minimal conflict. This is yet another thing, by the way, that we have in common. I feel like we have this eerie set of similarities in our lives now. You know, my dad, I haven't shared this really publicly in the past, but my dad was disowned by his family when he wanted to marry my mom. So my dad has four siblings. I've only met one of them. I have first cousins that I've never met, never met my dad's parents. I think his mom actually lives near me somewhere in the general New York area. I've never met her in a similar vein,

right? Like small issues become big issues when you don't address them. And then there's too much water under the bridge at some point in life where it becomes really challenging to remedy those big issues. So yet another thing that I feel like we have a common thread in that vein. Yeah, 100%. And I want to hear more about that someday or at some point or we can flip chairs or something. Yeah. But it did set the stage for me for a lot of transformation when I met my wife, because in her family, you say exactly what you think in real time to the face of the person that you think about. So like the first time I had dinner with my now wife and mother-in-law, my Scandinavian side was in the bathroom, dry evening, being like, I don't think I can be a part of this family because they got in a quote-unquote fight, which I have turned out, you know, turns out as just a spirited disagreement.

But I came out of this heterogeneous context. Culturally, you know, religiously, it was fascinating because my dad was a Christian but was lapsed, really became agnostic when the Swedish Lutheran church that he belonged to. basically everyone left when black people started moving into the Austin area of Chicago. So he was like, well, this isn't very Christ-like. You know, we have some kind of racial diversity emerging and let's get the hell out of here, right? Which mirrors a lot of the challenges we have in modern day religion, which we could talk about. And then my mom's family were, you know, not openly religious, but pretty, my mom feels pretty connected spiritually. So I came out of this environment where it was a.

amazing because I had so many questions. I had so much stimulation, you know, from, from different places. And everyone I was around was homogenous, right? Like, I was, I was the only quote-unquote person of color in my school, you know, until, until one, you know, young black man showed up from Cabrini Green on like an exchange program, which is at the time where we're projects on the near north side of Chicago. So I had this really amazing mixture of identities, you know, to navigate. Was it amazing growing up or was it a challenge? Like did you did you feel um you know as a kid it's like fitting in is the most important thing in your own mind you're like I want to just fit in a group and it's so you do you want like I remember struggling to just figure out was I a jock or was

I a nerd was I you know brown or was I like what what what was I and how did I define myself like was that a challenge for you or did you feel like it allowed you to kind of toe the line and be in many groups? it was both it was both an asset and a liability as the case with so many things in life i wasn't really that aware of it um until i got to an age where there there was the sense of otherness that i began to process around being half indian or you know being singled out as different um my my real wake-up call on it was almost getting my ass kicked at a bar in ohio for being like a quote unquote sand fill in the blank that was in college and that was the

the first time where I like I actually experienced the threat of physical harm for being brown and I just blew my mind I had never really I'd never really thought about it as someone that could fall into harm's way which by the way is like 101 for skin color in so many other stripes right um was that post 9-11 or what was the like it's just it's surprising to me that I know no it's pre-9-11. Fascinately. So, you know, growing up it was, I think it was both. It was a sense of otherness.

And to be honest, I just avoided the Indian side of the equation. Like, I distanced myself from what made me different. And so I had this contrast where my cousins celebrated Hindu holidays. They spoke Hindi. Maybe they spoke Punjabi. They were really immersed in the culture because both of their parents spoke that language in the home. And my mom was a rebel, right? My mom married a white guy in the late 60s. And my dad was a rebel because he married an Indian immigrant. And so I was raised by people who

didn't subscribe to the importance of cultural norms or homogeneity. And yet I was in an environment where everyone was from one or the other world. And so it took a long time to kind of reembrace what made me different. And I probably didn't want to go there even in college because I went to college in an environment at Northwestern. I was in a fraternity where it was mostly white guys, right? And it was, there actually were Jewish guys, you know, what's called Jewish and not Jewish, because I don't want to describe the rest of folks as Christian. But yeah, I was in a fraternity called Sigma Kai. And there was so many Jewish guys in the house that we used to joke at Sigma Haich, which was sort of a bad. Yeah, that at Stanford, too. Yeah. So, you know, that's a bit on my origin. So I think, I guess,

think I would out is I have an older sister who I'm really tight with. And that was a big part of my upbringing, was having this like protective, overlord female presence. And same thing with my mom's family where she has four, you might know the name like four mossies, which is the endearing term for your mother's sister. And so I was just raised by a strong female environment. And so, you know, at some point it occurred to me, I was building an apparel brand named after a matriarchal great ape. And I was like, okay. And by the way, what makes Bonobos the animals different is they have no violent conflict. And we think part of that is because the women are in charge of their societies. I definitely want to come back to that point. There are two sort of through lines that you mentioned

in talking about your background that I want to, I'm going to keep hammering on. So I want to like call them out here. One is the idea that something is both an asset and a liability. Because I do want to come back to that. I think it's a common thread for a lot of things that we'll talk about. And the other one is this idea of like early on distancing yourself from your differences, like fearing being different, really wanting to, really wanting to kind of embrace being the same as everyone else, but then learning as you kind of go on your own hero's journey, quote unquote, to embrace what makes you different as the unique attributes that create your edge and that make you, you know, the special person that you are. And I want to talk

about both of those because I think a lot of the listeners here will, you know, really hear a lot about your journey and what you're working on today and where you've come from. And it'll resonate with a lot of people. You know, it certainly has with me. So maybe we can transition as, you know, with those two in mind to talking a little bit about your path to entrepreneurship. You got done at Northwestern, I believe, in 2000. And you didn't start bonobos right away. You kind of had a journey from there to Stanford Business School. What was like, were you an entrepreneurial, did you have an entrepreneurial bent right away? Or did you kind of go down a traditional path first. You know, you have the Indian parents. So I know they would have wanted

you to do medical school or become a PhD or something. So what was the path? Yeah, I guess we're continuing your through line because my mom's side of the family, the Indian side, it was all doctors, which was, you know, one of the two ways to get a visa to the U.S. My mom actually worked an ultrasound because she didn't get a chance to go to med school for reasons of her father being ill and she had to send money home and be a more instant source of income because it's a little bit delayed as a doctor. She never got to go back to India for her father's passing, which is very tragic. And then my dad is a U.S. history teacher, but his family, there's lots of physicians as well. So my only role models growing up were doctors.

And then I won somehow the high school yearbook was like the most likely to be a millionaire. I don't know how that happened. Remember being like, this is weird because I wasn't particularly coin operated. I wasn't one of those people with like a side-house. hustle, you know, whatever, mowing lawns or something like that. And so it took a long time to let go of that family sense of success, which in my mind was tied to go into med school. And so I actually went down the whole path in college. I took all the coursework. I was signed up for the MCAT, and I was studying for the MCAT. And I had this moment where I was like, I just don't care.

Like I had all these part-time jobs at a hospital. I'd worked in the dark room and that was the thing developing x-rays, the front desk of the emergency room, got my EMT degree or whatever you call it. And I just didn't want it as bad as my classmates wanted it. I saw how much harder they were working, particularly three friends in mine who are now all surgeons. And when you're bumping up against people who care about something more than you do, that's just a good sign that you haven't really found your swim lane yet. should be swimming in a swim lane where you feel like you can go the fastest and you want to go

the fastest if you don't want to be there then back to your word edge you know you might have the edge and I might have had the edge like intellectually to get there but I didn't spiritually or will or drive wise and so that then invited this crisis of well if not this one thing I've been thinking about for 20 years then what and so I did what a lot of people do who don't know what they're doing, which is I became a consultant. I became an analyst at a consulting firm, which I feel like is a way to delay, you know, it's kind of like a way to delay a decision. Yeah, and that's where you met Jim, I assume, at Bain. Totally. Yeah, Jim, by the way, Jim is, you know, one of the most incredible mentors in my life. I think he was a mentor to you. He's also one of the most fun people I've ever been

around, like, his ability to go out. And he has the most infectious and hilarious-sounding laugh in the world. But it's just someone that is, like, a true joy to be around at any point in time. And so I'm glad that he brought us together in this context. Totally. Funny story about Jim's laugh, by the way. We were at a bar night one night at the Sears Tower's, like outdoor bar that they had back when it was called that.

And Jim was laughing so much. I think mostly because I'm that funny. And we got cut. he got cut off before he had a drink. Because he was laughing that way. Yeah, like they thought he was like so hammered because his laugh was so big that they were like, it's hard to describe other than that. It sort of sounds like a dolphin call if you actually break it down.

I'll leave people with that. But it is a pretty unique and interesting laugh. But an amazing person. You know, one thing you mentioned that I do want to hit on there was like, you know, this idea of like how you do. decided not to be a doctor because you realized you just didn't you weren't really in it you didn't really care i've always had this general framework um that i've been sort of like wrestling with recently of um sort of the idea that there is like a societal um like max net benefit uh to finding the right

thing for you to do and you know i'm kind of uh word gaming this a little bit in real time but basically the idea is like you could have been a doctor and i'm sure you would have made a great doctor you You know, you could have done, you like put your head down, grinded it out, studied, become a, you know, perfectly serviceable doctor. And you probably could have impacted a decent number of lives, right? You would have saved some people. You would have helped people. They would have felt good. You know, you could have changed a few lives that way.

But if that is not what you are like best equipped to do, like, not you're not, you probably weren't going to be because you didn't care enough about it, the top 0.01% of doctors in the world. But there was something out there that you were equipped. Like, you had the toolkit to become the point zero. 1% in the world at and impact way more people and at scale in a very different way. You didn't know what that was yet, but you kind of had an inkling that it wasn't being a doctor because you weren't pulled in the direction becoming like that true obsession and nerd. There are people that are, and that's amazing for them to go and become doctors because they will impact tons of people and they will be so invested in it.

But you should always, my framework for young people has always been that you should find that thing that you are going to have the unique ability to be 0.01%. at. If you're ambitious, don't settle for being a consultant because you can be like a decent consultant and make a good living. Find that thing where your like circles of success or circles of passion come together to make you uniquely qualified to go and truly win that game on a grand scale. That resonates. And I think what you're saying is even more nuanced, which is you may not know what that is, but if you know what it isn't, You may have to walk away from what you know it isn't, even though that feels like a safe and comfortable path to create the space to figure out what it is.

But that might be years later. So for me, it was effectively eight years from when I walked away from the idea of becoming a doctor to the beginning of the entrepreneurial journey. And there's a lot of confusion in that eight years because you've walked away from something, but you don't know what you're walking to. And I think that's one of the hardest. It's like breaking up in a relationship that's not working. Part of what makes it hard isn't the deepening awareness that you might not be with the right person. It's the fear of the unknown on the other side and potentially having to start over. I mean, I had that exact experience.

I mean, Jim, who we talked about, I was working with him at an amazing firm that I had been at for, you know, the first six, seven years of my career. And I knew that I wasn't ever going to be the best at what I was doing there because I wasn't so, invested in it the way that others were. And there was this thing that I had started doing creatively on the side that I started to realize like, oh, maybe there's something there. And it was the inkla, but I didn't know what it was yet. It wasn't a thing. And, you know, over the course of a year or so, and honestly, with the mentorship of some great people, that transition happened for me. But the fear of that, like, oh my God, I'm giving up something that is very secure, very certain, you know, there's a great trajectory to it. There's a path in order to go after this thing that, like, I don't

you know what to call it. I don't know what it is. It's terrifying in the moment when you do it. I mean, there's no other way to describe it. Like the scarcity that we all feel of, oh, my God, I'm going to be broke, which is sort of misguided for 99% of people. You're not going to actually end up broke. You have skills. You'll figure something out. You'll be okay. But that fear is so primal when you're actually making that change. Totally. I think it can be paralyzing. And I think, I wonder what is it about someone where they kind of cultivate the conditions or the courage to do that versus not? Because I do think the paradox is that it all makes sense in retrospect. And some of the happiest and most fulfilled people I know are ones who've taken those kinds of risks in succession.

And so I worry for the idea that you're taking financial risk when the risk is in fact spiritual, which matters so much more, you know. Yeah, spiritual. I mean, happiness, fulfillment. Like, I just, I would say I've generally, and I'm sure you're in a similar boat, like I've generally shifted what it means to me to be wealthy dramatically over the last year and a half. Like, I just define wealth so much more comprehensively than just being about money and financial gain.

And that's made all the difference in my life in terms of my happiness on a daily basis, which is a huge thing. What have you added into that time, I imagine, having time. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, I would say I now, you know, and I've written about this, and I might want to write a book about this at some point. And I'm going to need to pick your brain on the book process at some point offline. You know, I would say today I define wealth in kind of five buckets. I think there's financial wealth.

I think there is physical wealth, you know, health, fitness, vitality, mental wealth, which I would kind of bucket, you know, like general mental health, mental fitness, like knowledge, accumulation, you know, ability to learn and retain information. I would bucket like spirituality and faith into that mindfulness. And then time wealth, you know, just the general, you know, freedom, freedom of time. And then I guess the last one, sorry, of five would be social wealth, relationships, people, family, status in that bucket. And so that's kind of how I would think about it more comprehensively, I would say. And my general mental model for this has been, you know, the blind pursuit of financial wealth, often robs you of the other four forms of wealth, and you don't want that to happen. You know, that's a race to the bottom.

It's such a great point. I know someone who recently has become extremely wealthy through a series of events, and I must admit some envy, you know, that I felt less towards like just the sheer amount of money, but more what I feel like I could do with it if I had that kind of money. And then someone I know ran into him and was like, oh man he looks rough and i really hadn't thought about it because i i met him recently for a meal and i was like it definitely has come at the expense of his physical health there's just no doubt about it i had dinner recently with a close friend um who i won't name but um who sold his

company last year for a billion dollars um and uh you know made probably 300 400 million dollars in the transaction owned a big chunk of the company um you know and basically went from like working on a salary on this thing that he was his baby for many, many years to all of a sudden being extraordinarily like mind-blowingly wealthy. Get anything you want the rest of your life. He's pretty young guy still too. He's single. And I asked him, I was having dinner.

I was like, so are you much happier? He's like, well, I'm definitely happier because it was a real grind. But I wouldn't say I'm happy like in an in an absolute sense. I was like, well, why not? He's like, well, you know, I went on the like big, you know, trip after the sale and you got this boat. And, you know, he had all my friends come out. and everyone was so excited to come and celebrate that we did this. And, you know, we're in there and we're getting on the boat.

And there's these two much bigger boats right next to mine. And all the people are going and getting on those. And the whole time, I was just wondering, like, who the hell is that? You know, who got that boat? Like, how is that boat so much bigger than mine? And my friends are all looking at it being like, damn, that boat's sick. My boat's not good enough. And it just made me think, like, wow, there's always going to be a bigger boat, like, to use the metaphor, no matter what.

Like, if financial wealth is your scoreboard, there's all. always going to be a bigger boat. And the reality is, like, we glorify it. You go to a party, and there's 100 people in the room. Generally speaking, financial wealth is the easiest way to, like, stack rank people that are there. And so when there's someone that's extraordinarily wealthy there, there's some billionaire in the room, everyone is attracted. They want to learn about what made that person so great and made so much wealth. Now, if you flip it and you say, like, thought experiment, let's imagine that everyone walks around with a happiness meter on top of their head. And it tells you how happy the person is. If you walked into that same room and you

saw the billionaire and it was like a one on a scale of one to ten and you saw a you know an accountant who has a 10 I probably would go over to the accountant and be like what is your secret you because happiness at the end of the day is sort of what I want like I want fulfillment I want happiness money people think is a means to that end but it's a flawed one for sure yeah and then there's the whole meaning meaningfulness what was it the three schools of v&E psychology um men search for pleasure, man, search for happiness, man search for meaning. Yeah. And I think that there's that sort of like, I think about my mom where I'm like, I just

want to be like my mom. I want to be as invested in my grandchildren as she is in my son. I want to work out six out of seven days a week without fail. I want to get seven hours of sleep. Like I want to have this defining your terms, social wealth, mental wealth. physical wealth. And like if you've got three or the five there, it does beg the question of like, what is the goal of financial wealth? And I like your friend's journey, right, which is that it is the output of having done something meaningful. But once it arrives, it can be a very unhelpful,

you know, barometer in it. Yeah. I mean, realizing that is a huge step. And we'll talk about that in the context of your own journey. But before we get to burn rate, which I do want to talk about your new book, super excited about and loved, can we just talk for a few minutes about the Bonobos story? We referenced it in the context of the gorilla.

What was like the foundational insight behind Bonobos? I mean, what was it? You know, you were at Stanford Business School, I believe. You met a co-founder there. What was like the insight that sparked it? I think there were two colliding insights. One, all credit to my co-founder, Brian Spaley, was men's pants don't fit that well. You know, we were coming off of the 90s in the 2000s where there was a revolution in the fit of men's denim.

Stretch became a thing. Five pocket fit improved. There were lots of different silhouettes. So people just started wearing denim. And I think people in a certain demographic that could afford it started paying over $100 for jeans. I remember the first time my dad was like, I was trying to buy a pair of seven, the original seven for. all mankind jeans. And he was like a hundred dollars, you know, it was just mind blowing. Yeah. And so I feel like the fit of denim and the investment that men made in great denim paved

the way for someone to do something comparable in pants. And my co-founder was a savant and figured out this whole curved waistband thing that enables you to to fit your thighs and your butt in a pair of pants that also fits in the waist. And he was brilliant about fabrication and the right kind of soft pinwell corduroy that was to where we started the company in northern California. It worked for like the 85 degree middle of the day and it worked for like the 60, 55 degree, you know, evening. So that was sort of insight one was there's an opportunity to do a better fitting men's

pant, non-denim, non-five pockets. So chinos and corduroys. And then the other insight was that brands were going to be built on the internet. And back in 2007, this was very much not clear yet. This was, it wasn't obvious. And there was Zappos, which we heard about was selling a lot of shoes, but they were selling other brands. The way they were doing it was category of soft goods was assumed it never go online. Like remember, this is before Amazon had a fashion business.

And I can remember when Amazon went into fashion and the New York fashion industry that I was a part of, like mocking it. Like, oh, they're never going to be able to do that. So we were pre the big e-commerce platforms going into apparel. and here you had, you know, this guy, Tony Shea, selling shoes by offering great return policy, great customer service. And having this highly energetic customer service team on the front lines. And so my thought experiment was, well, if you can sell existing soft goods brands online, meaning, you know, fashion footwear, home, why can't you build one? And the more we pitched the idea, the more we heard, like, who's done this? and the answer was, you know, we didn't have an answer.

And that, that, of course, became, you know, the beginning of the digital direct-to-consumer brand movement, which was very exciting to watch it unfold because I think, you know, we got to be a first mover on that whole movement. You raised a lot of money, which I don't think I had appreciated in just being kind of an outside observer of the story. I was a consumer of the product, you know, from my, trying to think what year you must have, you must have started it. But, you know, when I was at Stanford, I was there from 2000.

2009 to 13, and I think I started to first hear or wear about maybe in like 2012 or so. And then during my early career years, it was like, you know, the go-to, you know, pants and product. But I didn't realize you would raise a lot of money along the journey. Would you have done that in hindsight? Do you think that was necessary? Did it, you know, hurt or help in any material ways that you'd kind of flag for entrepreneurs that are just starting out today? No, I wouldn't have done it. If I could go back, I think there's so many problems with raising money. I think the first is psychological, which is that entrepreneurs can associate capital raises with success. And I prefer another construct now, which is think of capital raising as a sign of failure. Like, the more money you need, the more open questions there are about the future business potential. and I think we could get nerdy about it, but there's a very small number of businesses out there that are emerging that require over 100 million of capital. And usually those are companies with asymmetric upside where the fundamental product is technology or software.

And I think that leads the second problem that capital can create and try to solve for us was like there was no good technology stack for, for building our brand. And so we had one of those like classic, I had one of those classic delusional moments that you have as an entrepreneur where you're like, well, let's go build that. Like, let's go build that other thing that actually has nothing to do with what we're currently doing.

And so we put a lot of energy and time and capital against trying to write better e-commerce software. And it turns out that it's hard to write software inside of a pants company. And it turns out there was a guy doing that in Canada named Toby and he's now got a company called Shopify. heard of it. And that's what they do, right? And so there's this fine line between fantasy and reality as an entrepreneur, and that line gets pushed out further when you have access to capital. And then thirdly, yeah, and then thirdly, I would say, you know, most retail brands aren't meant to raise a lot of outside capital.

Like retail is meant to be done profitably. And I think the direct consumer world that's been built is a lot of profit losing companies. And I think the irony is that, What could make a lot of those brands great is really opening up their brick and mortar distribution, not through company on brick and mortar, which can work. Bonobos, we have 60 stores. We made it work, but actually through wholesale, which is the relationship commercially that most DDC entrepreneurs frown on. And if, like from my sister's brand and the baby apparel space, we're now live at Target. We're live at Buy Bad Baby. We have a new partnership coming. That actually is where you can raise money from, from wholesale.

operating profit. And I think we've been through a decade-long delusion that I feel like I help spearhead, which is that a standalone direct consumer business is a good business, if not, look at what's happening in the public markets and soon to be coming in the private markets, and that you have to go at a loan pure play when the truth is that 80% plus of retail is still spent in brick and mortar stores. And if you pick the right allies, that can be a massive win. And that was part of my logic of actually selling a company to one of the probably the best brick and mortar company ever, which is Walmart. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the bonobos story, you know, as we walked through it there, that kind of traces the D to C journey and like what has happened in the D to C space. Like the early days of bonobos, I mean, there was a time when you could literally, you know, any keyword in the world on social, on Google, you could put it in.

and like there wasn't anyone competing against you. And you could acquire customers so cheaply. And there was great returns on acquiring customers in the early days on social and on those platforms. Now, you know, if you try to go acquire customers through Instagram, like Toby actually tweeted something. You mentioned Toby. He tweeted something hilarious recently. That was like, I think you could smash your face into the keyboard and have 100 people

competing against you at whatever jumble of words, you know, comes out, jumble of letters comes out. It's just gotten competitive. Everyone started flocking to that. just like in any market. And so it was interesting to me because Bonobos was also early, you know, in addition to being early and thinking about D2C, you were the first ones that I ever saw innovate around what a store looks like. And you had, I think you called them guide shops, you know, look shops. But I remember going into my first one and being like, wait, what do you mean?

This is like, I can't actually buy the clothing here. It was like to experience it, to see it. And then they were sent to me, direct. And now I think you've seen a lot of, of companies following on to that. You know, there was the whole movement around owned retail where, like, you know, rent became the new, the new cac. And there was like that whole meme around, you know, consumer brands opening up all of their D to C stores in Soho, like, you know, the streets were lined with every single direct consumer mattress brand that decided they needed to open a showroom there or whatever it was. Where do you think we are today? So do you think, you know, the D to C brands or the consumer brands of the future are going to be built in this, you know, kind of wholesale or at least

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This no-brainer good news has been a paid endorsement from Wealthfront. Yeah, I think that the direct consumer part of the company, what you said is perfect, which is that it used to be disruptive to bring in customers digitally, and now it's just another form of middle person. So when we launched an enterprising early employee of ours discovered that Facebook's ad platform was about to launch, and we were one of the first 50 brands on Facebook's ad platform. And so there was a period of time for a few years where that was interesting, as large corporations which were suspicious of Facebook weren't on it.

And then as you had larger flows of capital in and people started to realize, wait a second, maybe this is going to be a way to spend ad dollars. Because back then it was not clear that there was a great digital ad spend outside of Google. And what was so interesting about Google was it's hard to advertise the genus Hequa of a pair of pants on Google. It is a more utilitarian thing. Not that many people wake up in the morning and Google pants that make my butt look good, right? But if you're on a Facebook platform and you see a pair of pants that looks attractive and there is the right copy, you have a more ineffable reaction, which we used to think applied to, let's say, magazine advertising and fashion or whatever. And now it turns out like actually you can do that in any medium that has imagery, which is why, partly why Facebook became enormous with ads. Certainly Instagram as they brought that in.

And so you're right. There was a period of time where there was arbitrage and that quickly changed. And yet the venture capital money pouring in to fund digital CPMs basically turned Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin into the landlords of the digital age. Yeah, collecting rent on everybody. Collecting rent. And by the way, with far more market power than your average real estate landlord, right? At least the real estate landlord world is competitive. Here we have, yeah, duopoly, I would argue. And I guess Amazon's getting into that game now. So that's a scary player to have moving into that. So you're right. And I think as we learned that that wasn't going to be the thing, and as I woke up to the fact that I've been imagining that a pants company

and a menswear company was actually a technology company, once I came to grips with the fact that I had been wrong, and I feel like that's one of the strengths of an entrepreneur, is being able to say, like, I was dead wrong about that. That thing I was shouting from the rooftops about two years ago was wrong. That thing I raised my last round on, turns out not to be true. That freed us up to go after not only our own brick and mortar, but also in critically, this relationship with Nordstrom.

And what was cool about that was we got to 100 stores within like 18 months. Yeah, and super cost effectively. Totally. And you don't own the inventory once they bought it. you've got national reach. And so that's kind of my aha is like you don't need your direct consumer business to be the majority of your business. You just need it to be the thing that tells the story that enables you to have a direct relationship with a customer. And then wholesale actually is an amazing way to monetize that if you pick the right partners.

And I think the narrative even five years ago was, well, all those people are going bankrupt, right? like brick and mortar's dying software eats the world and the truth is Walmart Target Sephora Costco you know in every general dick sporting goods dollar general 25 billion dollar market cap company there is a react fundamental reality that the lion's share of retail dollars in the United States are transacted in brick and mortar and you have a small cohort of D to C entrepreneurs who think for some reason that they shouldn't engage with that 8%. And I'm seeing that start to evolve. In entrepreneurs who figure that out earlier, by the way, many of them are raising no money

or very little money. And I feel like that's the new playbook in DTC is get the branded scale in DTC, open up wholesale relationships, thoughtfully, strategically perhaps some brick and mortar, and raise less than $20 million, certainly at the high end. I was talking to a entrepreneur friend recently who started a consumer food business or like spices and foods. And he was actually telling me that they make more money. They make more margin dollars on an Amazon sale than on a website sale through their D2C website. And I just thought that was so interesting because a few years ago, the narrative was the complete opposite.

It was like, man, you got to buy through D2C. That's where I make all my money. And I'm making nothing on Amazon. Amazon's killing me. And they're actually making more money and having. better, you know, actual delivery and customer service on the Amazon sales. 100%. I was just writing a note to two founders where we were talking about the delusion that we have around looking at gross margins rather than margins after marketing.

And so I have this nerdy metric now. I call CPAM contributed profit after marketing, which is like what actually are you making in terms of before your fixed costs? And most people are vaporizing all of their contributed. profit on marketing. So if you're spending 30 or 40 or 50% of your total revenue on marketing, you're basically building a fundamentally worse business than anything you could do in brick and mortar. So I think we're having an awakening there. Yeah. The last realization I have from what you said is, you know, there's this tendency. I think you were at Stanford Business School. You know, you'd gone through Silicon Valley, the tech hub of the world, like techno-optimism, everything.

You were in this environment, and I think now the world is sort of in this environment because we've had this 10-year raging bull market of like, this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm a tech founder. And I went to Sanford Business School. I'm going to start a tech company. And what you do with the tech company is you go and raise money. You go in Sandhill Road and you go raise money from the BCs and then I'm going to go become a unicorn. And that mantra and that story and narrative has permeated so deeply into the like entrepreneurial roots globally that I think it all. only will happen in a bare market, like what we're experiencing right now, that we'll be able

to break that. And that founders will think from first principles about, does it make sense for me to raise money? What is my use of this capital? Does it make sense to take on the dilution? Should I prove product market fit before I raise money? Because now I know what works and what I can actually deploy it into to grow. But I think that'll be a great thing. And I actually think some amazing companies are going to be founded and built. And the founders are actually going to own a bigger chunk of the companies when they, you know, reach maturity because of that shift. Totally. And the other question, can I, can I even raise the money, right? Because the market will help force that answer onto people. Yeah. Because it's, it's quite hard. And we started

bonobos, right? And right before the Great Recession. And so 08, 2009, 2010, we had to raise our first $8 million from 100 plus investors. And so we had that forced capital constraint. And it wasn't until we had venture capital that I could pursue some of these other, you know, ideas. And anyway, we could, we could, I digress a little bit, but I do think there's, to your point, enormous opportunity that gets created by the focus of a bear market in terms of what it means for fundraising. And by the way, the valuations get more realistic too. And I think that's a good thing for entrepreneurs in the long run, although they don't,

they don't view it as such in real time. I know I didn't. Sure. So I want to shift gears a little bit to your book and to really the message and some of what you're sharing and the vulnerability that you've been sharing more recently. You released a book. It's called for people who haven't seen it. It's called Burn Rate, launching a startup and losing my mind. You can find it anywhere today. I'll post the link when we share this and in the show notes you'll be able to find it. It's fantastic. I read it and I read it. I found it to be, you know, both deeply emotional, causing me to reflect a lot along the journey, but also really inspirational.

And I want to sort of dig in a little bit to that story, if you don't mind, to be able to tease and kind of share for other folks, some of what you shared, you know, by writing it. There's so much about the journey and your personal journey, your spiritual, mental, emotional journey that you cover in the book. you embrace a level of vulnerability in the book that I think is basically unprecedented, I would say, from an entrepreneurship standpoint. I've never really read a book where I felt like someone shared that much rawness of their journey and of the ups and downs of that journey. Every now and then you hear it maybe from creatives, from writers, comedians, etc., but I have never seen that from an entrepreneur. And I think it was a beautiful thing that you shared that.

So what inspired you to write this book? What was it? I was tired of being ashamed. I spent 20 years living in secrecy with this illness. And we talked back earlier about belonging and difference. And I think one of the ultimate forms of difference that one wants that I wanted to keep hidden as a severe mental illness. Who would want to present that information?

to others if they didn't know it. And that's the way our culture determines what's shameful, implicitly, is what's unspeakable. And so if you can't talk about something, what I internalize from my inability to talk about bipolar disorder was that there must be something to be profoundly ashamed of, that there was something fundamentally broken in who I was, that I was a disorderly person. because if you have a disorder. And then this horrible thing that we do with mental illness, which is that we say someone is bipolar rather than has it.

Imagine being told you have cancer versus you are cancer. It's like unimaginable to tell someone that they're cancer. And yet that's what we do with bipolar. We basically say your identity and this illness are now one and the same. You actually are that illness. and so that was a that hit me like a sledgehammer when I was diagnosed when I was 20 the the force of the sledgehammer was met by the same level of energy that I put into denying that it existed so I spent a decade where it was really a suppressed memory didn't

deal with it didn't take medication didn't see a doctor a pattern I understand did you have episodes during that period or was it largely not an issue it was It was latent. And that actually was really unhelpful. And our diagnosing, the diagnosing psychiatrist had said, you know, if Andy doesn't have another episode for five years, it could be that this was a one-off event. And I had, I would say I had about 10 years asymptomatic. And that was after the first episode, which was a manic episode, which for people who weren't aware of it, think about delusions of grandeur, messianic seal. coherent speech, rapid cycling of moods, laughing, crying, ranting, raving,

ostracizing. I was in college. I was in college. And so the sheer ingenuity of my family got me to the hospital, came back down to Earth over a week, you know, a week of medication, and then got out and everyone basically pretend like it never had happened. And it was unfortunate timing that I had done mushrooms a few weeks earlier. earlier. And so that was kind of the thing that everyone hung on their hats on. And amongst my friends

at Northwestern, it was like Fight Club. You never talk about Fight Club, right? Like, we all knew it had happened, including me, but we didn't talk about it. And the fact that it wasn't spoken about was, to me, a source of shame. And then it wasn't until a decade later when I fell into, like, fearsome depression as I was navigating co-founder divorce and the trials and tribulations of building a company that I started to experience the other side, which is just catatonic depression, didn't barely get to work, didn't want to live. And you would think at that point that it would start to compute, but it wasn't until, you know, 2016 where I had really the second meaningful manic episode, hospitalization ended up, you know, at Bellevue in New York City for a week and

walked out, finally ready to deal with this, and walked out straight into handcuffs and was arrested for felony and misdemeanor assault. And that began, you know, the process of really confronting this and a credit to my wife and a credit to my doctor and credit to a family that rallied around it. I got through it. And so to your question on writing the book, I felt like the normal thing to do, having dodged the bullet of almost anyone knowing about this would be to say nothing. But the thing that I would be condoning if I did that was the fact that this has to be unspeakable. And so I felt it would be a disservice to the community to not share, given that I was lucky to get through some of this stuff. And I felt selfishly, like, I just wanted to expunge the

shame. And so the way to do that is to say, I'm going to actually put the whole story on the record because this wasn't my fault. And if it wasn't my fault, then this is just a story about something that I've been through. And it's been beautiful. It's been beautiful how accepted I feel, I feel like a fully known person for the first time. So there's so much you said there,

and I appreciate you sharing so openly. You know, there's so much you said that I want to dig into a bit. One of the things that I just have this general feeling or realization around is that the way we treat mental illness in this country, really globally, you know, is basically like if we don't have to talk about it, let's just not talk about it. We're just going to like, hey, oh, yeah, maybe that happened, but let's just like push that aside. I don't, you know, it's like very difficult for us to confront. And so our response to that is like, hey, let's just not confront it.

It's fine. You know, Andy, you were fine. You know, it happened in 2000 or whatever year it was. One off episode. And I'm sure your family embraced that, you know, Indian family. I imagine, you know, is challenging for. And that is such a negative thing, you know, broadly speaking, that we do that. And I hope that through sharing, you know, your story, other people who have, you know,

come forward and shared their experiences, the people that your book inspires to come out and share their experiences, I hope that we can start to kind of shift the narrative on that more broadly. 100%. Yeah. And it was this Indian side and the Scandinavian side, too, my dad's side. It was fascinating that my dad's mother actually had profound mental health issues and was institutionalized twice by her husband who had become a psychiatrist. We now thinker.

My dad thinks partly because of his mom's issues. And so here we had this intergenerational family issue that you would think it would open up the convo. But it served to do the opposite. It served to prepare us for the silence. and I think this is what we have to invert in all these situations, families at companies, society, we've got to invert it so that we can have a conversation about things that are hard enough without the silence and the shame. And I think we've seen that happen. Generally, entertainment leads the way, right?

Like with the gay rights movement, you know, we start with our entertainers, right? or even with movement within the black community. They're sort of like entertainment is first, then sports, and I feel like business goes last. And so I felt like if we could pierce the veil of the conversation in the business world, in corporate America, where it's assumed that a steady hand is what's required. shepherding capital hiring talent if we could pierce it there that could start you know a snowball a more meaningful snowball do you think i don't know if you've ever heard this

concept well i think it was jerry seinfeld was on an episode with tim ferris and talked about the idea that um you come with like a kit in life you're kind of born with a kit um and for jerry he was talking about it in the context of creatives, comedians, who have generally in a population experience extreme depression alongside this incredible creativity and intelligence that allows them to be exceptional at what they do. And he calls it part of the kit. He's like, look, I just have this kit,

and I experience these periods of downness and then these incredible periods of flow state and brilliance that I work through. you talk about a little bit in the book, you know, this idea of like hypomania, which are kind of the upstates of bipolar disorder, as I understand it, where you have this amazing creativity and flow and energy. Do you think that, like, to go back to the idea of asset and liability, was this an asset and a liability for you?

Like, did it also uniquely enable you to go and do these things that you accomplished and, you know, create this amazing business and do some of those things? I think we have to be careful. I remember there was a moment in the process of the book where there were some folks that wanted to call it here's to the crazy ones after the Steve Jobs commercial from, I think it was the 80s, or early 90s. And I remember thinking, I don't like that title, partly because let's not celebrate or lionize craziness. we do a disservice to the imminently sane people who are doing very creative and brilliant things. So I wouldn't want to conclude that it's this necessary requisite ingredient in the creative process. But I would say there's clearly a correlation of it over indexing.

And that's in the data. So 3% of the general population has some form of mood disorder, most commonly bipolar disorder. we think that index is 7 to 1 in entrepreneurs. So we'd be talking about 1 in 5. And that definitely resonates with me. So for me, was it an asset and a liability? Absolutely. This hypomanic state that is before you're really going off the rails with mania,

but that is a highly energetic state where you have elevated speech, more vision, more ideas, more, excitable. Everything happens for a reason. Tremendous energy, often, for me anyway, like a lot of extroverted energy. You know, five internal meetings in a day with a group, three one-on-ones, two interviews, a press interview, dinner, maybe dinner was with a candidate, then afterwards out. And New York City was perfect for that. And by the way, it was totally fun. It was dizzying, fun, and then these massive crashes that would come. It wasn't alternating day by day. It would be like three months of hypomania and then like three months of depression. And I'd say, look, depression,

terrible for building a company. You have to act when you're around other people. You don't have positivity or ideas. It's hard to get to work. So I think there's something to aspiring for a more stable place and still allowing, as my doctor calls it, for like peak days. And so I think that becomes the challenge. And, you know, I'd love to talk to Jerry Seinfeld about that because here's someone who he's talking about, you know, the downsides, no doubt. That said, I mean, what, a decade-long series or 12 years. So there was like a prodigious amount of positive mood state there as well. And like for my part, I'd rather trade some of those hypomanic days to trade away the depression. So it's a way of saying yes to your question with an asterisk of like, let's be

careful not to celebrate it or assume that it's a prerequisite. Sure. So we're coming up to the to the end of our time. And there are a few things I wanted to ask you to kind of to wrap this wrap this all up. And, you know, one of them is like, we're not investing enough in this as a society. We're not investing enough in mental health, in supporting people who are experiencing these things in making people feel comfortable sharing in the way that that you did. To your point, it was like it was shame. You know, you wanted to hide it. You didn't want to be different. It was easy to just not talk about it and, you know, and keep it from the limelight rather than embracing that difference to go back to that. What should we, what should companies be doing

to invest in this in resources to, you know, to help kind of change the tune around this massive problem that so many people are experiencing under the covers. Yeah, I think, well, here's the good news. Five years ago, there was like a hundred million of venture capital that went into mental health tech. Last year, I heard that was $5.5 billion. Wow. So the money's coming in, and that could speak also the venture capital glut that we've

been talking a little bit about, but there's been a lot more investment coming upstream. And so I think what companies need to do now is three things. First, create an environment where disclosure is encouraged. I think that starts with leaders. When leaders go first, disclosing their mental illnesses, their mental health issues, and by the way, you don't need a diagnosis to have struggled with your mental health. As you know, you don't get to a certain age in life without having had some things that you've really, that have really almost taken you down.

Second is community. So having a neurodiversity community group, ERG, whatever you want to call it, where we can trade those stories internally and find a way to identify our common experience. And if you look at the span of it, bipolar disorder is just a tiny part, anxiety, OCD, grief, addiction, the autism spectrum, high-functioning Asperger's, unipolar depression, which affects one in five people. It's hard not to get a checkmark on one of those as a person. And if you assume one degree removed in families, 100% of families have got these stories. So we've got to build community around it and just make it normal to talk about it.

And then thirdly, and the hard part is investment, investing in treatment, investing in care. So that means actually having a relationship with modern health, Lira, one of these mental health providers that becomes a resource to your teams. And then second, reimbursement. So the reimbursement rates, as we all know, on mental health services are abysmal. You know, they're not so great on typical physical medical issues. And yet we have like dental and vision in part because that's not covered. So let's take care of your teeth and your eyes. But as for your brain, best wishes.

And yet that's like the stuff of how we conjure reality. That's how we understand the world. And so the pitch that I'm making to companies is treat this as one of your best investments because it's going to improve the productivity of your teams. And that means we need to do things like what my friend Ariel, Safira, is doing it real, which is she acknowledges that she's a mental health tech company, the reimbursement rates are too low. And so she provides a $2,000 a year per employee stipend for reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses related to mental health.

Wow. And if a company with 50 employees can do that, then we need to call to action our Fortune 500 companies to make the same investment because we know that psychiatrists and therapists are not going to voluntarily reduce their rates. We know they're not going to voluntarily join and affiliate with insurance companies that takes down their after tax. And we know that insurance companies aren't going to pay more money than they currently do for reimbursement. So the only part of the ecosystem that the money can come from are corporations investing more in the productivity of their teams. Yeah, productivity and retention. I mean, I imagine for your friend, that drives a lot of affinity with the employee base that

the company is investing in them and in their brains in that way. So it's brilliant. It's a great pointed out. Last two questions. So one, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs are going to listen to this, aspiring builders, investors, etc. Many of whom I imagine will or have struggled with mental illness in some way, shape, or form. What advice would you give to someone who is going to going through this currently and who is struggling? I think there's a two-step process. The first step is to acknowledge it with yourself, like to be in the conversation with yourself about it.

And I think that's such a remarkable thing to do. Like to even say the word, I am depressed when you've never said it, it's a big journey because we attach a lot of significance to not being the kind of person that has that issue. And so I think step one is, try to cultivate the courage to be honest with yourself about how you're feeling or how you're doing or what's happening to you. And then once you've done that, and maybe someone else helped

you with it, but once you've done that, then the second step is to acknowledge that you're unlikely to be the person that can solve that on your own. Because otherwise you would have. You know what I mean? And that's where the next big step is to go see a mental health professional. And that starts with a simple talk therapist. Just go talk to one person that isn't your boyfriend or mom or coworker, someone whose sole job is to find a way to get you healthy. And that is the best investment that you can make. And I think that's like you're in the top 10 percentile if you've acknowledged a problem

in sought help. And I think for most people, you know, remarkably, they haven't taken both of those steps. Yeah. It's a scary thing to take that first step because, you know, we attach a level of shame to it the way you expressed earlier because we, you know, I think especially for people who are high achievers and you've, you know,

accomplished a lot, you've graduated from some school and you feel like, you know, from an external perspective, your life is supposed to be great and I'm supposed to be happy and, why wouldn't I be happy? I have, you know, a wife or whatever it is that you have in your life and you're supposed to be happy, quote unquote. and yet you're not.

And it's very hard to make that mental flip, as you said. The other thing that I would say to anyone out there is just talk to your friends and ask them how they're doing. Like it's such an easy thing to do to just reach out to someone that you haven't chatted with in a while and just ask like, hey, how are you doing? You know, anything I can help with. We love to chat about, et cetera. Because one of the things about your story that I find so interesting and compelling is

you were on you know from an external view on top of the world like had raised a hundred million dollars from excel all these amazing venture funds you had founded this amazing company you were selling it for all this money um reading the news articles you're like man this guy's crushing it this is the most amazing he must be so happy um you know everything's good good looking guy you know everything right and yet you had you had this internal struggle deep deep struggle that you were wrestling with. And so my whole thing has always been, you never know what's going on behind someone's eyes. So never judge someone because you don't know what type of struggle they are dealing with internally. And always ask, just, you know, reach out to people and say, hey, how are you doing? Because that small

little thing might be the one step that that kind of takes them to get help and to improve their lives. So so much to take away from this conversation. I found it. an absolute joy. I have to admit, this was one of those conversations where I came away feeling like I can't believe I get to do this for a job. So I really, really appreciate your time and super excited to get to do this in person and hopefully over a meal with our common friend, Jim, as well. So Andy Dunn, thank you so much. Where can people find you and where can people buy your book? Yeah, thank you. It's awesome to be here. And I would add one small thing to that checking with people is be honest with other people when they check in with you. We have this beautiful.

thing in the English language anyway, which is how are you? And the typical answer is like, I'm good. How are you? And I would encourage you to experiment with, I'm not great right now. And you'll be stunned. It stops people in their tracks. And it leads to some of the best conversations because people are so surprised that you're actually being honest. And so in addition to checking in with others, role model being honest with them. And sometimes that kind of frees up the convo. In terms of finding me, yeah, I love to, I love to be in happy places. So email is an unhappy place for me because it's just work. So I like to be in happy places. My happy places are Twitter DMs, Twitter banter, Instagram DMs, banter there, playing around with TikTok,

which is addictive and fun. And then I love LinkedIn because LinkedIn, I feel like is a great place to have iterative, you know, it's kind of like Slack for strangers. So I love LinkedIn too, by the way. like where I've been growing the most recently. I love LinkedIn. It's really fun. And then book, yeah, would love you to buy it in an independent bookstore. But if not, Amazon.com, Walmart.com are great places. Amazing. Well, we will post everything in the show notes so that people can find you. And until next time, I'm so, so excited to be able to release this and look forward to all the benefit that people will be able to take from it. So thank you for writing this book. Thank you for all the vulnerability and congratulations on the entire journey.

I look forward to hopefully being a part of the next phase of it. Amazing. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at hi at t rwiH.com. Leave us a review at Apple or Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon. Never let the one.

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