John Mackey

“I'd read this essay that had been written by John Mackey called Conscious Capitalism... It described that, you know, businesses need to have a deeper purpose besides just making money... What Whole Foods did is for their five stakeholders, which is the custome…”

“Farmers aren't going to give you the consistency you want. You need to have consistent rules, and you need to create what I would call like a franchise model. An upside-down franchise, and I had the experience in franchise, like, how would you do it? And I sai…”

“It's sort of like investing and you have to let it compound over many years. Well, you have to let a business compound over many years as well.”

“For them, the fun part is creating the business, and then as you start to staff it up and you build a bureaucracy, they're, they feel trapped by their own creations in a way. They're just, they're not wired to They fit within that kind of corporate structure t…”

“You could always, almost say nobody hardly invents anything, because they're always taking some other ideas and putting them together in interesting new combinations.”

“So many of our team members became millionaires through our stock option program. If you're on a winning team that grows, you can make a lot of money, even if you're not the most senior executives. We gave stock options to everybody that worked there.”

“250 years ago, 94% of everyone alive. 94% lived on less than two dollars a day. 94%, and that's in today's dollars. 88% of the people alive were illiterate. 88%. The average lifespan was 30.”

“And somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. I mean, He's created, he and people like Rockefeller, they're lambasted as the villains when they are the greatest heroes that have ever, ever…”

“The American Dream is alive and well, and it's never been better. It's, in fact, the dream is not only not dead, it's much better than it's ever been before, only The intellectuals in the media cannot see it.”

“He should have written, in my opinion, he should have written a follow-up book, because I think so much of the Nike story takes place after that occurred.”

“I sold it because he advised me to do it, and I trusted my dad, but in retrospect, that was a mistake, and I really believed, and I should have compounded it, and compounded it. Still made a, I'm still really a wealthy guy, but I could have been a lot wealthie…”

“The most difficult thing I ever did was firing my dad from that board.”

“Rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is a hero's journey, and a hero's journey is a spiritual journey. It's a journey of discovery. It's a journey of going deeper into yourself, knowing who you are and what really matters in life.”

“Bad money is worse than no money. Do you remember when I interviewed Whole Foods founder John Mackey? He called bad money hitchhikers. Bad money will pay for the gas. As long as you do what they want and go where they want to go, and slowly you lose yourself a…”

“This is all happening, call it five to eight years before John Mackey starts Whole Foods in Austin, Texas.”

“He had listened to over a hundred episodes before we met, and he told me that if Founders existed when he was younger, that Whole Foods would still be an independent company today.”

“He had listened to over a hundred episodes before we met, and he told me that if founders existed when he was younger, Whole Foods would still be an independent company.”

“John Mackey can do the exact same thing. He could pass a Whole Foods and he could tell you what their revenue number was, what their operating income was, what their margins were.”

“And one of my college roommates, the, my wacky friend, John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods.”

“If you just want to have your ideals, you can have them, but you may not have a business. So you have to engage with the market. You can try to influence the market. You can try to educate the market. But at the end of the day, they vote every day with their p…”

“I count four different coup attempts that occurred over the history of the company that I was able to beat back.”

“I would love to be competing more aggressively with Erewhon if I was still the CEO.”

“The best capital you'll ever have is the capital you make yourself, and if you don't want to lose control of your business, then make sure you're very profitable, don't scale too quickly, grow your business thoughtfully and painfully patiently, keep your costs…”

“So there is an optimum level of growth, and it's not too little that you'll lose people, and not so high that your culture gets diluted down and changes negatively. So at Whole Foods, that sweet spot for us was between about 15 and 25%.”

“We pretty much just left them alone for the first few years and didn't try to integrate them into our company or culture. Just let them operate independently. That was the solution, and it worked.”

“Generally, when something is failing, the people that Are responsible for it. Don't want to admit it's failing, and what they do is that we need more resources. I can make this trick, but you need to give more resources.”

“Whole Foods was not as good at that if we were at other things. And I wasn't as good at that as I should have been.”

“That's the job of the entrepreneur is to see things the professionals would not see, or the professionals are making a more calculated decision on is this good for my career or not? Or if this succeeds, will it really help my career? But if it fails, will I en…”

“When we were going up there to talk about maybe Amazon buying Whole Foods you know, we were meeting at Jeff's Boathouse, which was next to his mansion on Lake Washington, and, but when we, they wouldn't tell us who the meeting place was until we landed, and th…”

“I had my share of disagreements with Amazon. I fought with them many times, and ultimately that led to me to retire.”

“But the tool shouldn't become the master. Some businesses become slaves to their business plan, and it's like, we're behind the plan now, so what are we going to do differently to get us back on plan? It's like, well, don't do something stupid to try to get yo…”

“Times, I had the, I bought the Amory on, I pushed the dude dot com, we can't let the internet opportunity escape us. A hundred million dollars we lost.”

“I'm on a new one with Love Love. I don't know how it's going to turn. I could fail. I mean, based on probability, it will fail, because most things do fail. Most businesses do fail.”

“What they would do is they'd dumb it down so that a lot of stuff that you think is red now would all of a sudden be green. And the, It's like, because most of the food that we're selling in supermarkets is not good for people. And if you start telling the trut…”

“I think because I experimented with psychedelic drugs back in my, ah, early twenties that, that took me off that path, and I began to see, I became a seeker, I was looking for the meaning of life, and I studied, I went back and forth between two universities, …”

“I thought I'd find a girlfriend there, and I did. The woman that I co-founded Whole Foods with.”

“Renee's family and friends, my family and friends, and yes, my dad, I didn't have any money, my dad loaned me 10,000 dollars for my share of the investment at five percent interest. So, so that's how we got started. We needed 50, but we only had, we only were …”

“The safer way is we lost money the first year. We lost half our money, 23,000 dollars in the first year, and Renee and I were not really taking any money out”

“You have to make a distinction between what you may personally want, and what the market wants. And there, and there's a, If you don't ultimately sell what people want to buy, you're gonna fail.”

“That was the most difficult thing I've ever had to do in business, to be honest. That plus, I'd say the sale to Amazon was also a difficult decision, but I had to do it.”

“We didn't even have a store that failed for like the first 20 years of the history of the company. Every store we opened was a success.”

“If you cheat any of your constituencies, any of your stakeholders, or try to sell them short, you can get away with it in the short term. In the long run, feedback loops are created, and your business sub-optimizes. So, I just realized to create the most value…”

“We were, had protests all around the country, and 350,000 people, and within a couple of weeks signed a Facebook petition to boycott Whole Foods Market. Hundreds of letters were sent to our board of directors demanding that I be fired.”

“So the short answer, Jeff, in a way, is I think you should stay out of politics if you're a CEO. You can obviously have your personal opinions, but you're always going to be seen as speaking for the company, and if you do controversial things, you're going to …”

“Six weeks after that first meeting in Seattle, we'd signed a deal. It was like a whirlwind romance.”

“I didn't want to work as hard, and I wanted to do some other things in life, and I just knew, and I was having some conflict with some of the Amazon executives as well.”

“In other ways, I held it back, and once I was gone, then they could move in the directions that it needed to evolve in. In some cases, that's maybe a little tighter a little closer to Amazon. They're a little more integrated into Amazon. I held them back from …”

“Yeah, we were trying to raise 50, but all we could get was 45. That's all we could beg out our friends and family. And we said, let's give it a go.”

“And so we sold 34% of the company for a, for four and a half million.”

“Well, it's like, you know, while Oates copied Whole Foods and came along after at a far higher valuations than we ever got.”

“Most of the time, business people are fundamentally honest because they understand they're gonna have ongoing relationships.”

“The intellectuals who've always been the class enemy of business. The genie got out of the bottle back in the Industrial Revolution, and there was about a, as Deidre McCloskey points out, another one of the great economists had a big impact on me. As she point…”

“The first Whole Foods we had was, we sold 20% of bulk foods, 30% produce, for example. Maybe 10% were animal foods, and the processed foods were relatively small. And yet that's what grew and grew and grew and grew until bulk now went from 20% of our sales to …”

“The problem is we did evolve in tribes, and there's a tendency to love your own tribe, and you want to kill the other tribe. So we see that. Cancel cultures, like, We used to be able to just, we don't kill the other tribe. Now we cancel it. And so we see that …”

“We thought we needed 50,000 dollars to start the store, and we could only come up with 45, but we decided we could make do with it. And my initial stake was 10,000 dollars. That's the most I ever owned of the company, and 10 of the 45,000, and I borrowed all o…”

“We actually lost half of it in the first year. We lost 23,000 dollars the first year.”

“And we did make a small 5000 dollar profit in our second year.”

“One of the Craig's and Mark's conditions is we have to make this a real store. We have to sell meat, and we have to sell beer and wine, and we have to sell coffee. We can't just be completely a vegetarian idealistic store.”

“There was a benefit held for the store, and the team members, they worked for free. Our bank loaned us money, On my signature, which was worthless. And the investors decided to kick in more cash. So we were able to reopen 30 days later.”

“We sold 34% of the business for an eight and a half million dollar valuation.”